Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“Not if we’re going to Canada.”

“We won’t stay there.”

“Won’t we stay there a while?”

“Not very long.”

“Where do we go then?”

“We’ll see.”

“I don’t care where we go,” I said.

“Try and keep that way,” my father said. He lit a cigarette and offered me the package. “You don’t smoke?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Now you go outdoors and climb up on the ladder and put the bucket on the chimney and I’ll lock up.”

I went outside. It was still dark but along the edge of the hills it was lightening. The ladder was leaning against the roof and I found the old berry pail beside the woodshed and climbed the ladder. The leather soles of my shoes felt insecure and slippery on the rungs. I put the bucket over the top of the stove pipe to keep out the rain and to keep squirrels and chipmunks from climbing in. From the roof I looked down through the trees to the lake. Looking down on the other side was the woodshed roof, the fence and the hills. It was lighter than when I started to climb the ladder and it was cold and very early in the morning. I looked at the trees and the lake again to remember them and all around; at the hills in back and the woods off on the other side of the house and down again at the woodshed roof and I loved them all very much, the woodshed and the fence and the hills and the woods and I wished we were just going on a fishing trip and not going away. I heard the door shut and my father put all the bags out on the ground. Then he locked the door. I started down the ladder.

“Jimmy,” my father said.

“Yes.”

“How is it up there on the roof?”

“I’m coming down.”

“Go on up. I’m coming up a minute,” he said and climbed up very slowly and carefully. He looked all around the way I had done. “I don’t want to go either,” he said.

“Why do we have to go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we do.”

We climbed down the ladder and my father put it in the woodshed. We carried the things down to the dock. The motor boat was tied beside the dock. There was dew on the oilcloth cover, the engine, and the seats were wet with dew. I took off the cover and wiped the seats dry with a piece of waste. My father lifted down the bags from the dock and put them in the stem of the boat. Then I untied the bow line and the stern line and got back in the boat and held onto the dock. My father primed the engine through a petcock, rocking the wheel twice to suck the gasoline into the cylinder, then he cranked the flywheel over and the engine started. I held the boat to the dock with a twist of the line around a spile. The propeller churned up the water and the boat pulled against the dock making the water swirl through the spiles.

“Let her go, Jimmy,” my father said and I cast off the line and we started away from the dock. I saw the cottage through the trees with the windows shuttered. We were going straight out from the dock and the dock became shorter and the shoreline opened out.

“You take her,” my father said and I took the wheel and turned her out toward the point. I looked back and saw the beach and the dock and the boat house and the clump of balm of Gilead trees and then we were past the clearing and there was the cove with the mouth of the little stream coming into the lake and the bank high with hemlock trees and then the wooded shoreline of the point and then I had to watch for the sand bar that came way out beyond the point. There was deep water right up to the edge of the bar and I went along the edge of the channel and then out around the end seeing the channel bank slope off underwater and the pickerel weed growing underwater and sucked toward us by the propeller and then we were past the point and when I looked back the dock and the boat house were out of sight and there was only the point with three crows walking on the sand and an old log half covered in the sand and ahead the open lake.

I heard the train and then saw it coming, first in a long curve looking very small and hurried and cut into little connected sections; moving with the hills and the hills moving with the trees behind it. I saw a puff of white from the engine and heard the whistle then another puff and heard the whistle again. It was still early in the morning and the train was on the other side of a tamarack swamp. There was running water on each side of the tracks, clear spring water with a brown swamp bottom and there was a mist over the center of the swamp. The trees that had been killed in the forest fires were grey and thin and dead in the mist but the mist was not foggy. It was cold and white and early morning. The train was coming straight down the tracks now getting closer and closer and bigger and bigger. I stepped back from the tracks and looked back at the lake with the two grocery stores and the boat houses, the long docks going out into the water and close by the station the gravelled patch around the artesian well where the water came straight up in the sunlight out of a brown water-film covered pipe. The water was splashing in the fountain basin, in back was the lake with a breeze coming up, there were woods along the shore and the boat we had come in was tied to the dock.

The train stopped, the conductor and the brakeman got down and my father said good-bye to Fred Cuthbert who was going to take care of the boat in his boat house.

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know, Fred,” my father said. “Give her a coat of paint in the spring.”

“Good-bye, Jimmy,” Fred said. “Take good care of yourself.”

“Good-bye, Fred.”

We shook hands with Fred and got on the train. The conductor got on in the car ahead and the brakeman picked up the little box we had stepped up on and swung aboard the train as it started. Fred stood there on the station platform and I watched the station, Fred standing there, then walking away, the water splashing up out of the pipe in the sun and then ties and the swamp and the station very small and the lake looking different and from a new angle and then we were out of sight and crossed the Bear River and went through a cut and there were only the ties and the rails running back and fireweed growing beside the track and nothing more to look at to remember. It was all new now looking out from the platform and the woods had that new look of woods you do not know and if you passed a lake it was the same way. It was just a lake and new and not like a lake you had lived on.

“You’ll get all cinders out here,” my father said.

“I guess we’d better go in,” I said. I felt funny with so much new country. I suppose it really looked just the same as the country where we lived but it did not feel the same. I suppose every patch of hardwood with the leaves turning looks alike but when you see a beech woods from the train it does not make you happy; it only makes you want the woods where you live. But I did not know that then. I thought it would all be like where we lived only more of it and that it would be just the same and give you the same feeling, but it didn’t. We did not have anything to do with it. The hills were worse than the woods. Perhaps all the hills in Michigan look the same but up in the car I looked out of the window and I would see woods and swamps and we would cross a stream and it was very interesting and then we would pass hills with a farmhouse and the woods behind them and they were the same hills but they were different and everything was a little different. I suppose, of course, that hills that a railroad runs by can not be the same. But it was not the way I had thought it was going to be. But it was a fine day early in the fall. The air was fine with the window open and in a little while I was hungry. We had been up since before it was light and now it was almost half past eight. My father came back down the car to our seat.