Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

With the answers known his father had said, “You and I will go back to get the packs where we dropped them. Juma can get wood and have the fire ready. The medical kit is in my pack. We have to get the packs before it’s dark. He won’t infect. It’s not like claw wounds. Let’s go.”

That evening as David had sat by the fire he had looked at Juma with his stitched-up face and his broken ribs and wondered if the elephant had recognized him when he had tried to kill him. He hoped he had. The elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time and he had thought, I didn’t believe he could do it when he was so old and tired. He would have killed Juma, too. But he didn’t look at me as though he wanted to kill me. He only looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on the day he died.

David remembered how the elephant lost all dignity as soon as his eye had ceased to be alive and how when his father and he had returned with the packs the elephant had already started to swell, even in the cool evening. There was no more true elephant; only the gray wrinkled swelling dead body and the huge mottled brown and yellow tusks that they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with dried blood and he scraped some off with his thumbnail like a dried piece of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness.

After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the fire.

“He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says nobody knows how many people he has killed.”

“They were all trying to kill him, weren’t they?”

“Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”

“How could he be a murderer then?”

“Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him.”

“I wish he’d killed Juma,” David said.

“I think that’s carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s your friend, you know.”

“Not any more.”

“No need to tell him so.”

“He knows it,” David had said.

“I think you misjudge him,” his father said and they had left it there.

Then when they were finally back safely with the tusks after all the things that had happened and the tusks were propped against the wall of the stick and mud house, leaning there with their points touching, the tusks so tall and thick that no one could believe them even when they touched them and no one, not even his father, could reach to the top of the bend where they curved in for the points to meet, there when Juma and his father and he were heroes and Kibo was a hero’s dog and the men who had carried the tusks were heroes, already slightly drunk heroes and to be drunker, his father had said, “Do you want to make peace, Davey?”

“All right,” he said because he knew this was the start of the never telling that he had decided on.

“I’m so glad,” his father said. “It’s so much simpler and better.”

Then they sat on old men’s stools under the shade of the fig tree with the tusks against the wall of the hut and drank beer from gourd cups that were brought by a young girl and her younger brother, the servant of heroes, sitting in the dust by the heroic dog of a hero who held an old cockerel, newly promoted to the standing of the heroes’ favorite rooster. They sat there and drank beer while the big drum started and the ngoma began to build.

“A Train Trip” represents the first four chapters of an unfinished and untitled Lardneresque novel. These scenes form a fine short story in the vein of “The Battler” and “Fifty Grand.”

MY FATHER TOUCHED ME AND I WAS awake. He stood by the bed in the dark. I felt his hand on me and I was wide awake in my head and saw and felt things but all the rest of me was asleep.

“Jimmy,” he said, “are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Get dressed then.”

“All right.”

He stood there and I wanted to move but I was really still asleep.

“Get dressed, Jimmy.”

“All right,” I said but I lay there. Then the sleep was gone and I moved out of bed.

“Good boy,” my father said. I stood on the rug and felt for my clothes at the foot of the bed.

“They’re on the chair,” my father said. “Put on your shoes and stockings too.” He went out of the room. It was cold and complicated getting dressed; I had not worn shoes and stockings all summer and it was not pleasant putting them on. My father came back in the room and sat on the bed.

“Do the shoes hurt?”

“They pinch.”

“If the shoe pinches put it on.”

“I’m putting it on.”

“We’ll get some other shoes,” he said. “It’s not even a principle, Jimmy. It’s a proverb.”

“I see.”

“Like two against one is nigger fun. That’s a proverb too.”

“I like that one better than about the shoe,” I said.

“It’s not so true,” he said. “That’s why you like it. The pleasanter proverbs aren’t so true.” It was cold and I tied my other shoe and was finished dressing.

“Would you like button shoes?” my father asked.

“I don’t care.”

“You can have them if you like,” he said. “Everybody ought to have button shoes if they like.”

“I’m all ready.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going a long way.”

“Where to?”

“Canada.”

“We’ll go there too,” he said. We went out to the kitchen. All the shutters were closed and there was a lamp on the table. In the middle of the room was a suitcase, a duffel bag, and two rucksacks. “Sit down at the table,” my father said. He brought the frying pan and the coffee pot from the stove and sat down beside me and we ate ham and eggs and drank coffee with condensed cream in it.

“Eat all you can.”

“I’m full.”

“Eat that other egg.” He lifted the egg that was left in the pan with the pancake turner and put it on my plate. The edges were crisped from the bacon fat. I ate it and looked around the kitchen. If I was going away I wanted to remember it and say good-bye. In the corner the stove was rusty and half the lid was broken off the hot water reservoir. Above the stove there was a wooden-handled dish mop stuck in the edge of one of the rafters. My father threw it at a bat one evening. He left it there to remind him to get a new one and afterwards I think to remind him of the bat. I caught the bat in the landing net and kept him in a box with screen over it for a while. He had tiny eyes and tiny teeth and he kept himself folded in the box. We let him loose down on the shore of the lake in the dark and he flew out over the lake, flying very lightly and with flutters and flew down close over the water and then high and turned and flew over us and back into the trees in the dark. There were two kitchen tables, one that we ate on and one we did dishes on. They were both covered with oilcloth. There was a tin bucket for carrying lake water to fill the reservoir and a granite bucket for well water. There was a roller towel on the pantry door and dish towels on a rack over the stove. The broom was in the corner. The wood box was half full and all the pans were hanging against the wall.

I looked all around the kitchen to remember it and I was awfully fond of it.

“Well,” said my father. “Do you think you’ll remember it?”

“I think so.”

“And what will you remember?”

“All the fun we’ve had.”

“Not just filling the wood box and hauling water?”

“That’s not hard.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not hard. Aren’t you sorry to go away?”