Short Stories

by Ernest Hemingway

“Not even lightning?” Nick asked.

  “No, not even lightning. If there is a thunder storm get out into the open. Or get under a beech tree. They’re never struck.”

  “Never?” Nick asked.

  “I never heard of one,” said his father.

  “Gee, I’m glad to know that about beech trees,” Nick said.

  Now he was undressing again in the tent. He was conscious of the two shadows on the wall although he was not watching them. Then he heard a boat being pulled up on the beach and the two shadows were gone. He heard his father talking with someone.

  Then his father shouted, “Get your clothes on, Nick.”

  He dressed as fast as he could. His father came in and rummaged through the duffel bags.

  “Put your coat on, Nick,” his father said.

  The Indians Moved Away

  [Ed. Note: this story originally published in italics]

  The Petoskey road ran straight uphill from Grandpa Bacon’s farm. His farm was at the end of the road. It always seemed, though, that the road started at his farm and ran to Petoskey, going along the edge of the trees up the long hill, steep and sandy, to disappear into the woods where the long slope of fields stopped short against the hardwood timber.

  After the road went into the woods it was cool and the sand firm underfoot from the moisture. It went up and down hills through the woods with berry bushes and beech saplings on either side that had to be periodically cut back to keep them from effacing the road altogether. In the summer the Indians picked the berries along the road and brought them down to the cottage to sell them, packed in the buckets, wild red raspberries crushing with their own weight, covered with basswood leaves to keep them cool; later blackberries, firm and fresh shining, pails of them. The Indians brought them, coming through the woods to the cottage by the lake. You never heard them come but there they were, standing by the kitchen door with the tin buckets full of berries. Sometimes Nick, lying reading in the hammock, smelt the Indians coming through the gate past the woodpile and around the house. Indians all smelled alike. It was a sweetish smell that all Indians had. He had smelled it first when Grandpa Bacon rented the shack by the point to Indians and after they had left he went inside the shack and it all smelled that way. Grandpa Bacon could never rent the shack to white people after that and no more Indians rented it because the Indian who had lived there had gone into Petoskey to get drunk on the Fourth of July and, coming back, had lain down to go to sleep on the Pere Marquette railway tracks and been run over by the midnight train. He was a very tall Indian and had made Nick an ash canoe paddle. He had lived alone in the shack and drank pain killer and walked through the woods alone at night. Many Indians were that way.

  There were no successful Indians. Formerly there had been—old Indians who owned farms and worked them and grew old and fat with many children and grandchildren. Indians like Simon Green who lived on Hortons Creek and had a big farm. Simon Green was dead, though, and his children had sold the farm to divide the money and gone off somewhere.

  Nick remembered Simon Green sitting in a chair in front of the blacksmith shop at Hortons Bay, perspiring in the sun while his horses were being shod inside. Nick spading up the cool moist dirt under the eaves of the shed for worms dug with his fingers in the dirt and heard the quick clang of the iron being hammered. He sifted dirt into his can of worms and filled back the earth he had spaded, patting it smooth with the spade. Outside in the sun Simon Green sat in the chair.

  “Hello, Nick,” he said as Nick came out.

  “Hello, Mr. Green.”

  “Going fishing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty hot day,” Simon smiled. “Tell your dad we’re going to have lots of birds this fall.”

  Nick went on across the field back of the shop to the house to get his cane pole and creel. On his way down to the creek Simon Green passed along the road in his buggy. Nick was just going into the brush and Simon did not see him. That was the last he had seen of Simon Green. He died that winter and the next summer his farm was sold. He left nothing besides his farm. Everything had been put back into the farm. One of the boys wanted to go on farming but the others overruled him and the farm was sold. It did not bring one half as much as everyone expected.

  The Green boy, Eddy, who had wanted to go on farming, bought a piece of land over back of Spring Brook. The other two boys bought a poolroom in Pellston. They lost money and were sold out. That was the way the Indians went.

  The Last Good Country

  [Ed. Note: this story originally published in italics]

  “Nickie,” his sister said to him. “Listen to me, Nickie.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  He was watching the bottom of the spring where the sand rose in small spurts with the bubbling water. There was a tin cup on a forked stick that was stuck in the gravel by the spring and Nick Adams looked at it and at the water rising and then flowing clear in its gravel bed beside the road.

  He could see both ways on the road and he looked up the hill and then down to the dock and the lake, the wooded point across the bay and the open lake beyond where there were white caps running. His back was against a big cedar tree and behind him there was a thick cedar swamp. His sister was sitting on the moss beside him and she had her arm around his shoulders.

  “They’re waiting for you to come home to supper,” his sister said. “There’s two of them. They came in a buggy and they asked where you were.”

  “Did anybody tell them?”

  “Nobody knew where you were but me. Did you get many, Nickie?”

  “I got twenty-six.”

  “Are they good ones?”

  “Just the size they want for the dinners.”

  “Oh, Nickie, I wish you wouldn’t sell them.”

  “She gives me a dollar a pound,” Nick Adams said.

  His sister was tanned brown and she had dark brown eyes and dark brown hair with yellow streaks in it from the sun. She and Nick loved each other and they did not love the others. They always thought of everyone else in the family as the others.

  “They know about everything, Nickie” his sister said hopelessly. “They said they were going to make an example of you and send you to the reform school.”

  “They’ve only got proof on one thing,” Nick told her. “But I guess I have to go away for a while.”

  “Can I go?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Littless. How much money have we got?”

  “Fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents. I brought it.”

  “Did they say anything else?”

  “No. Only that they were going to stay till you came home.”

  “Our mother will get tired of feeding them.”

  “She gave them lunch already.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Just sitting around on the screen porch. They asked our mother for your rifle but I’d hid it in the woodshed when I saw them by the fence.”

  “Were you expecting them?”

  “Yes. Weren’t you?”

  “I guess so. Goddamn them.”

  “Goddamn them for me, too,” his sister said. “Aren’t I old enough to go now? I hid the rifle. I brought the money.”

  “I’d worry about you,” Nick Adams told her. “I don’t even know where I’m going.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “If there’s two of us they’d look harder. A boy and a girl show up.”

  ‘T d go like a boy,” she said. “I always wanted to be a boy anyway. They couldn’t tell anything about me if my hair was cut.”

  “No,” Nick Adams said. “That’s true.”

  “Let’s think something out good,” she said. “Please, Nick, please. I could be lots of use and you’d be lonely without me. Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I’m lone
ly now thinking about going away from you.”

  “See? And we may have to be away for years. Who can tell? Take me, Nickie. Please take me.” She kissed him and held onto him with both her arms. Nick Adams looked at her and tried to think straight. It was difficult. But there was no choice.

  “I shouldn’t take you. But then I shouldn’t have done any of it,” he said. “I’ll take you. Maybe only for a couple of days, though.”

  “That’s all right,” she told him. “When you don’t want me I’ll go straight home. I’ll go home anyway if I’m a bother or a nuisance or an expense.”

  “Let’s think it out,” Nick Adams told her. He looked up and down the road and up at the sky where the big high afternoon clouds were riding and at the white caps on the lake out beyond the point.

  “I’ll go through the woods down to the inn beyond the point and sell her the trout,” he told his sister. “She ordered them for dinners tonight. Right now they want more trout dinners than chicken dinners. I don’t know why. The trout are in good shape. I gutted them and they’re wrapped in cheesecloth and they’ll be cool and fresh. I’ll tell her I’m in some trouble with the game wardens and that they’re looking for me and I have to get out of the country for a while. I’ll get her to give me a small skillet and some salt and pepper and some bacon and some shortening and some corn meal. I’ll get her to give me a sack to put everything in and I’ll get some dried apricots and some prunes and some tea and plenty of matches and a hatchet. But I can only get one blanket. She’ll help me because buying trout is just as bad as selling them.”

  “I can get a blanket,” his sister said. “I’ll wrap it around the rifle and I’ll bring your moccasins and my moccasins and I’ll change to different overalls and a shirt and hide these so they’ll think I’m wearing them and I’ll bring soap and a comb and a pair of scissors and something to sew with and Lorna Doone and Swiss Family Robinson.”

  “Bring all the .22s you can find,” Nick Adams said. Then quickly, “Come on back. Get out of sight.” He had seen a buggy coming down the road.

  Behind the cedars they lay flat against the springy moss with their faces down and heard the soft noise of the horses’ hooves in the sand and the small noise of the wheels. Neither of the men in the buggy was talking but Nick Adams smelled them as they went past and he smelled the sweated horses. He sweated himself until they were well past on their way to the dock because he thought they might stop to water at the spring or to get a drink.

  “Is that them, Littless?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Crawl way back in,” Nick Adams said. He crawled back into the swamp, pulling his sack of fish. The swamp was mossy and not muddy there. Then he stood up and hid the sack behind the trunk of a cedar and motioned the girl to come further in. They went into the cedar swamp, moving as softly as deer.

  “I know the one,” Nick Adams said. “He’s a no good son of a bitch.”

  “He said he’d been after you for four years.”

  “I know.”

  “The other one, the big one with the spit tobacco face and the blue suit, is the one from down-state.”

  “Good,” Nick said. “Now we’ve had a look at them I better get going. Can you get home all right?”

  “Sure. I’ll cut up to the top of the hill and keep off the road. Where will I meet you tonight, Nickie?”

  “I don’t think you ought to come, Littless.”

  “I’ve got to come. You don’t know how it is. I can leave a note for our mother and say I went with you and you’ll take good care of me.”

  “All right,” Nick Adams said. “I’ll be where the big hemlock is that was struck by lightning. The one that’s down. Straight up from the cove. Do you know the one? On the short cut to the road.”

  “That’s awfully close to the house.”

  “I don’t want you to have to carry the stuff too far.”

  “I’ll do what you say. But don’t take chances, Nickie.”

  “I’d like to have the rifle and go down now to the edge of the timber and kill both of those bastards while they’re on the dock and wire a piece of iron on them from the old mill and sink them in the channel.”

  “And then what would you do?” his sister asked. “Somebody sent them.”

  “Nobody sent that first son of a bitch.”

  “But you killed the moose and you sold the trout and you killed what they took from your boat.”

  “That was all right to kill that.”

  He did not like to mention what that was, because that was the proof they had.

  “I know. But you’re not going to kill people and that’s why I’m going with you.”

  “Let’s stop talking about it. But I’d like to kill those two sons of bitches.”

  “I know,” she said. “So would I. But we’re not going to kill people, Nickie. Will you promise me?”

  “No. Now I don’t know whether it’s safe to take her the trout.”

  “I’ll take them to her.”

  “No. They’re too heavy. I’ll take them through the swamp and to the woods in back of the hotel. You go straight to the hotel and see if she’s there and if everything’s all right. And if it is you’ll find me there by the big basswood tree.”

  “It’s a long way there through the swamp, Nickie.”

  “It’s a long way back from reform school, too.”

  “Can’t I come with you through the swamp? I’ll go in then and see her while you stay out and come back out with you and take them in.”

  “All right,” Nick said. “But I wish you’d do it the other way.”

  “Why, Nickie?”

  “Because you’ll see them maybe on the road and you can tell me where they’ve gone. I’ll see you in the second growth wood lot in back of the hotel where the big basswood is.”

  Nick waited more than an hour in the second growth timber and his sister had not come. When she came she was excited and he knew she was tired.

  “They’re at our house,” she said. “They’re sitting out on the screen porch and drinking whiskey and ginger ale and they’ve unhitched and put their horses up. They say they’re going to wait till you come back. It was our mother told them you’d gone fishing at the creek. I don’t think she meant to. Anyway I hope not.”

  “What about Mrs. Packard?”

  “I saw her in the kitchen of the hotel and she asked me if I’d seen you and I said no. She said she was waiting for you to bring her some fish for tonight. She was worried. You might as well take them in.”

  “Good,” he said. “They’re nice and fresh. I repacked them in ferns.”

  “Can I come in with you?”

  “Sure,” Nick said.

  The hotel was a long wooden building with a porch that fronted on the lake. There were wide wooden steps that led down to the pier that ran far out into the water and there were natural cedar railings alongside the steps and natural cedar railings around the porch. There were chairs made of natural cedar on the porch and in them sat middle-aged people wearing white clothes. There were three pipes set on the lawn with spring water bubbling out of them, and little paths led to them. The water tasted like rotten eggs because these were mineral springs and Nick and his sister used to drink from them as a matter of discipline. Now coming toward the rear of the hotel, where the kitchen was, they crossed a plank bridge over a small brook running into the lake beside the hotel, and slipped into the back door of the kitchen.

  “Wash them and put them in the ice box, Nickie,” Mrs. Packard said. “I’ll weigh them later.”

  “Mrs. Packard,” Nick said. “Could I speak to you a minute?”

  “Speak up,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “If I could have the money now.”

  Mrs. Packard was a handsome
woman in a gingham apron. She had a beautiful complexion and she was very busy and her kitchen help were there as well.

  “You don’t mean you want to sell trout. Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

  “I know,” Nick said. “I brought you the fish for a present. I mean my time for the wood I split and corded.”

  “I’ll get it,” she said. “I have to go to the annex.”

  Nick and his sister followed her outside. On the board sidewalk that led to the icehouse from the kitchen she stopped and put her hands in her apron pocket and took out a pocketbook.