Twenty years pass. Jim has had little contact with Ántonia. While traveling through Europe, he sent her pictures from Bohemia, and she wrote and thanked him, telling him the names and ages of her children. He heard from Tiny that Ántonia’s husband “was not a man of much force, and she had had a hard life.” Jim has been afraid to see Ántonia again because he wants to remember her as she was—he doesn’t want to be disappointed. Finally, Lena persuades him to go see Ántonia.
When Jim arrives by open buggy at the Cuzak farm, Ántonia’s husband and eldest son are away. At first Ántonia doesn’t recognize Jim. He looks at her and sees that she is “battered but not diminished”; her identity is intact. Ántonia is delighted when she recognizes him, then becomes suddenly fearful, asking if someone has died. Jim reassures her that he didn’t come for a funeral. She introduces him to her children, and then she and Jim walk in the orchard and talk about the days when they were young.
After supper, Leo and Yulka furnish music. Leo, who has inherited Mr. Shimerda’s violin, plays the instrument very well for a self-taught boy. Yulka plays the organ, but not quite as well as Leo plays the violin. Ántonia brings out a box of photographs, and as they look at the photos, Jim senses a harmony among the members of the family. He finds that Ántonia’s children know all about the people whom she and Jim grew up with.
At bedtime, Jim chooses to sleep in the haymow with two of the boys. He lies awake for a long time, thinking about how Ántonia turned out, how her fire did not diminish.
The next day, Ántonia’s husband and son Rudolph return. Jim learns that long ago Cuzak came to Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to consider settling here. He noticed Ántonia, realized that she was exactly the kind of girl he’d always hoped to meet, and they were married. Rudolph tells the story of how Wick Cutter killed his wife, then himself, making sure that he survived her long enough so that her family, whom he detested, wouldn’t inherit his money.
Cuzak was born and raised in a Bohemian city, and at first he was very lonely on the plains. Because of Ántonia’s strength, however, and because she was able to help in the fields, he stayed. He would like to visit the Old Country again, someday when the boys are old enough to take care of the farm themselves, but he has no regrets about putting down roots here.
Jim says good-bye to the Cuzak family and promises to go hunting with Ambrosch and Rudolph the following summer. His mind is full of trips he plans to take with the boys, and, even after they are grown up, he wants to “tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak himself.”
Jim takes the train to Black Hawk, and, walking down its streets, he realizes that most of his old friends have either died or moved away. He becomes bored and finally ends up wandering around a nearby pasture, where he stumbles upon the road that he and Ántonia followed when they arrived on the prairie thirty years ago. He remembers the feeling of isolation that he had that night. Now, as he once again walks along the familiar road, he has “the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is.” This road launched him and Ántonia on a journey, their paths parted, and now it has brought them together again. He feels at peace at last because “whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
