The Campaign

I was studying the Gallipoli Campaign last night, choked with anguish, fear and dread burning an anthracite flame in my breast – that those men, as young as they were, could have the strength in their limbs to climb out of a trench into machinegun fire, could rise willfully to their own deaths for a cause they may or may not have believed in.

Since I was a boy I’ve wondered would I have the mettle to rise and die for my country if necessary. As I grew older and buried friends and family, death became more real than life. For the spirit is eternal in theory, but the mortal body with certitude is temporary, the dead forever. And then I wondered not only would I have the courage to die for my country, but how would I face death when the time came? Could I with anything less than hysteria, with fear and trembling?

After my studies I dreamt of Hemingway. There were several of us there, at a ranch house or cabin in Florida somewhere. I was nervous heading there with my companions, apprehensive to have a writer of his prominence as our fishing guide. But that nervousness was outmatched by the excitement of meeting a great writer and perhaps discussing writing and literature and I thought there was no better way to spend a week’s vacation.

We were approaching his little cabin speculating and laughing what the week would be like and then at once we were sitting around his table. The table was cluttered with books and papers and fishing tackle, and we started talking about fishing. He told us about fishing in the area and of several pranks he and his friends had played on each other down at the docks, and that, of course, they were all dead now.

We’d gone out, most of us, except him and when we came back, he was still at the cluttered table and I sensed he didn’t have the energy to go fishing with us, though he’d have liked to.

Another young man came in, walked through the room with the rest of us and Hemingway watched him. He was taller and more athletic than I but resembled me in general appearance. He carried a large pair of cross-country skis on his shoulder. I wondered if he was the young man I could have been, was supposed to be, or am, for only I noticed how focused he was though he was carrying skis in Florida.

I went to where this athletic young man had dropped off his pack and skis. There were several chairs about and many pairs of beautifully crafted leather shoes, military issue. There were various army supplies all in green canvas. There was a tin of shoe polish. He’d been polishing his shoes, his skis leaning up in the corner. I suspected Hemingway admired this young man, his soldierly way of maintaining his gear. Then I wondered if this young man was the deluxe model of me or whether I was the imperfect prototype as he seemed so strong and sure and focused and what had my focus become? Veering if not altogether astray.

We were all of us at the table again and Hemingway got up to go to the bathroom. He did not close the door and we could see his shadow on the wall. He’d been telling us stories of the fights he’d been in and when he left I leaned to one of my buddies.

“He isn’t telling us about the one that cleaned his clocks, you notice,” I whispered to him.

Hemingway heard me from the bathroom and called back to me, not embarrassed, ego undamaged, and in no other way offended, as I expected he would be had he heard me.

“Yeah, there’s that one, too,” he said, shaking the dew off the lily, “but there’s another one that no one knows about. He was a tremendous man and I had no business fighting him—” and he began to tell us the secret story of the worst beating he ever took in a fight.

The others were gone again, out on the deck smoking Macanudos and drinking brandy. He told me a story about a trip he was on in the Mediterranean. It was during or just after the war, the dream had fogged some details. There were many people on a boat and he was getting close to a particular British woman. They would stop at various places along the north shores of the Aegean Sea.

There was a set of cliffs and the boat stopped. For a fee you could climb the face of the sheer cliffs by rope with a local man belaying from the top. I saw all this clearly as he told me the story, so clearly, it was not as if I was watching the footage of an old newsreel, but I was seeing his story on a newsreel. When I saw the footage, I figured it must have been just after the war, in the early 1920’s.

There were groups of four and five and six grooves running up the steep overlook in various locations, grooves dug from all the feet that had climbed up and torn against the earth. In the newsreel there were thin wire hairs stretched tight and straight down many of the grooves as the people from the boat began climbing.

I was with Hemingway, somehow at one point, half way up the cliff and I was filming him. The woman he liked was climbing to his right and he was making small-talk with her, consoling her regarding the difficulty of the climb, and advising her how to climb. She was very pleasant.

They were about half way up the escarpment and then she dropped something. The camera zoomed down the hill and saw half-buried in soft dirt a lamé clutch. She’d managed to pinch it between her elbow and ribs up to that point as she pulled up along the rope.

An old woman dressed in the black crepe shawl and head dress of the Greek Orthodox was now on a small plateau and picked it up and reached it toward her. The British woman was dangling from the rope now, no longer touching the ground and arching backward till she was nearly inverted, reaching back for her clutch. Hemingway went back down and tried to take hold of her waist to help hoist her back to the cliff to regain her footing.

Suddenly I was watching the newsreel from the top of the cliff and saw that her rope had been wound in a come-along and that the anchor was really this machine and not the man walking along the cliff, who was merely inspecting each come-along. With the two dangling from their ropes and struggling for footing, I wondered whether Hemingway had ever worn a crucifix at any point in his life, maybe when he was driving the ambulance.

As she lowered herself the rope illogically threaded through the come-along until there was only a foot left. If she went another foot down the cliff, the anchor would be lost and she would fall to her death. She was still reaching downward for her clutch and the rope unwinding. The man inspecting the come-alongs hurried and threw a lever and the great wheel of the machine locked the last foot of rope in place. From a side view again I could see her dangling from the rope, quite a way from the wall of the cliff, holding her purse and Hemingway trying to reach her to pull her back. He could not reach her and felt helpless and hoped she wouldn’t fall.

Then we were back at his place in Florida and he was still talking to me and now showing old black and white home movies. These were filmed much later than the Mediterranean film, though they all looked about the same age, which is to say, long ago. There was a scene from the den of one of his homes. He was younger and in one hand he was holding and lifted toward the camera a baby that was squirming and crying. He looked at me and wanted me to compliment him regarding his child, his fathering.

An old girlfriend of mine suddenly appeared and stood in front of me and began talking about some plans we had made. She was no woman in particular and I understood her to mean the accumulation of time I’d wasted on romance. I had to look around her and gently push her to the side, without offending her, to continue my conversation with Hemingway. Even in my dream, my heart was softened with tenderness at his fatherly pride and love.

“Now that’s quite a little fish you caught,” I said to him smiling. He smiled back.

We were all around the table again. I had a stack of books and was studying. He was seated to my left and working on a jitterbug.

“Can I see your book?” he said. My heart leapt that he wanted to read my writing.

“But I…I don’t have it with me. Well, part of it I do. A story that was only supposed to take a few weeks but that I’ve been working on for most of the year.”

It wasn’t until then did I admit to myself that I didn’t consider this writing I’d been working on even a cohesive novel, let alone one that I would show to others, that I couldn’t pull it all together and have it be a work of substance, profound, moving, and that I hadn’t really done that even in my mind. I admitted that all I really had was a scattering of very long, tedious stories.

“That one, there,” he said pointing at the Bible at the bottom of my stack.
He noticed my excitement and what would now be my disappointment and he was again sensitive and patient toward me.

“And you’re writing a book, too. Aren’t you?” he asked.

We were interrupted at that point. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and pomaded his hair and put his things back in a train case, his hair very wet and slicked back, as in the Man Ray portrait.

An elderly woman who’d had an appointment had come in and was talking to him. He was being very polite and formal and I remember observing, How funny it is, how formal and polite he is with her. She has no idea how loose and carefree his talk was just before she came, when it was just the fishing guys.

One of my buddies asked what was in his hair, observing that it was very waxy looking when he dabbed it from its tin but now looked wet. I said pomade. He’d never heard of it and I said I’d show him. I went to the far side of the table and there was a bookshelf there and on top of it he’d put the train case. I began lifting it down and saw him over the top of the shelf and pointed to it, my facial expression inquiring if it were all right to open it and look for something. He nodded very subtly over the talking woman’s head, so that she did not know about our secret exchange.

The case was full of packages colored mint green and pink, the colors of an old, genteel woman. Bottles and tubes of liniments and ointments, of many and varied medicines. I knew then he was very sick, sick enough to humor us. I found the pomade and took it to the one who’d asked about it.

In a while the elderly lady left and the others got up and cleared away the dishes as we’d eaten and had our brandy.

“Do you ever talk about writing or literature?” I asked him. I did not know if that was a forbidden question to ask of a famous writer. I suppose I feared more that by asking it I could no longer consider myself a writer such as he, but a beginner, an amateur. Even dreaming my heart was racing.

He didn’t answer at first, rather pressed his lips together as if ordinarily he would just ignore the pestering question, avoiding the dull dialog that was sure to ensue. But he looked at me and decided to be kind because his time was limited and he saw that I was sensitive.

He had both of his elbows on the table. It was then that I noticed that the head of his left pinkie was slightly larger than all his other fingers, that there was a scar like a stretch mark that began there and went down the blade of his hand. It was then, too, I noticed that his pinkie twitched occasionally.

“Sometimes the worst thing about a spider bite,” he began telling me, “especially on one of the extremities—” he had turned his left hand to look at his pinkie, “is that all of the poison accumulates in one precise location.”

Here I interrupted him.

“Yes and the pressure from all the swelling can be excruciating.”

He was not offended that I’d interrupted him. He nodded.

“When I got this bite,” he said, “even when it ballooned out, for days it didn’t hurt. It’s not that it hurt only a little. I felt nothing when it was swollen. My buddies even used to make fun of it and poke it, and I’d laugh with them. That is what happened here.” He lay his left forearm on the table, his pinkie twitching sporadically. “It still does this every once in a while. Every once in a while, this many years later, although the nerves are dead at the bite itself, it hurts around the bite, though it did not at the time.”

We were quiet a few seconds and I buried my face in my hands breathing heavily, for I realized he was talking about writing, that he was talking about experiences that are so potent they affect you for the rest of your life and that they are the source of great writing, that it is only this source combined with the rare mind and spirit of the true writer that can turn those experiences into literature.

At that moment, in my dream, I realized I was the pathetic fantasy of those who dream of being a great writer but simply don’t have what it takes because they are not willing to be a writer. That I’m a product of the times. No, strike that. I’m a product of what I’ve done with these soft and easy times, of what I’ve sought – security, comfort.

He’d taken some of his remaining time to act as a guide and was being chivalrous as he led to the realism that you either are or you are not and that anything in between was just pretending. And he was able to do so with that grace which is rooted in an extreme but deserved confidence, that grace whose greater aspect is the courage – not only to do, but to be – true to yourself under fire, without regard to success or failure, paying no heed to becoming famous or forgotten.

That was the end of the discussion. He continued into the night telling stories about his exploits and I listened attentively, wondering if it would be enough to be only a fishing buddy.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]

© 2013 KS Culbreth.
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