Hemingway's Boat (44 page)

Only occasionally does Walloon Lake appear as a place-name in Hemingway's Michigan writing. The point is that down at the shoreline is where the world opened up. Down at the water, boundaries and limits and, in a way, even horizons appeared to fall away. You lived in your cottage set back in the trees, amid beautiful cedars and beeches and maples and big-toothed aspens. But fifty yards off was a wholly different perspective. The water gave recreation, transportation, after-dark bathing, food for the table. Walloon was rich in northern pike and black crappies and pumpkinseed sunfish and bluegills and walleyes and yellow perch and smallmouth bass. Not so many trout, though. They darted in the nearby streams. They craved colder water. The boy would find them.

Down at the water on the night of the Fourth of July, Doctor Hemingway would set off skyrockets and Roman candles. He'd nail pinwheels to the flagpole at the end of the dock and let his children light them. The rickety dock fingered out into the dark lake, and suddenly the darkness was ablaze.

Down at the water, after dark, Ernest Miller, as his mother so often called him, liked to spear fish with his sisters. He'd take long cattails that he'd gotten from the woods and soak them in kerosene and use them for jacklights.

If Walloon doesn't often appear by name, lakes are nonetheless present in some of Hemingway's finest Michigan stories. Sometimes their presence is ghostly, and at other times you can smell the dried fish guts and smeared night crawlers wedged down into the floorboards of a rowboat making its way across the unnamed water. The first four words of “Indian Camp” are “At the lake shore.” The water is a kind of proscenium to the storytelling tension. The oars are creaking and groaning in their oarlocks. “Nick went back from the edge of the lake through the woods to the camp. He could hear the oars of the boat in the dark. His father was rowing and his uncle was sitting in the stern trolling. He had taken his seat with his rod ready when his father shoved the boat out. Nick listened to them on the lake until he could no longer hear the oars.”

Actually, those lines are from an eight-page handwritten fragment Hemingway decided to
cut
as an opening, or maybe a precede, to “Indian Camp,” which is one of his best and tautest Michigan stories. “Indian
Camp” is about a squaw having a baby. Nick's father, who's a doctor, has taken his son across the lake with him in the middle of the night, allowing him to be present during the delivery. The doctor's brother is also along. The operation is performed with a jackknife, and the incision is sewn up with a nine-foot tapered gut leader from a fishing line. The mother has screamed during her successful breech birth, and afterward it's discovered that her husband, lying in an upper bunk, has slit his throat from ear to ear. On the way home, the child asks, “Why did he kill himself, Daddy?” And the father answers, “I don't know, Nick. He couldn't stand things, I guess.” The child asks, “Is dying hard, Daddy?” And the doctor answers, “No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.” Hemingway first published “Indian Camp” in 1924, in Ford Madox Ford's
transatlantic review
.

In 1972, eleven years after Hemingway's suicide, that discarded but not destroyed fragment appeared in a somewhat controversial book titled
The Nick Adams Stories
, assembled by a Hemingway scholar at Pennsylvania State University named Philip Young, who, two decades earlier, had published a landmark—and far more controversial—Hemingway study. Young arranged the Nick Adams stories in their chronological sequence, which is to say he put them in an order conforming to the seeming age of the protagonist, as he went from boyhood to adolescent to soldier to veteran to writer and parent, as opposed to the way Hemingway had written and published the pieces in his own lifetime. Young postulated that the cut fragment represented the earliest known Nick “story,” and because it was the earliest, it deserved to see the light of print, no matter Hemingway's discarding of it. Young placed it just ahead of “Indian Camp” and made it a separate piece, titled “Three Shots.” Hemingway would have doubtless loathed him for it.
^†

The first boat, of about half a dozen ultimately, to come into the family at Walloon as their own possession was
Marcelline of Windemere
. She was a lowly rowboat, around for decades, much loved, with her name handsomely lettered in black on both sides of her white bow. She arrived in the summer of 1900, taking her name from the family's firstborn, with whom Hemingway was to get famously “twinned” by his mother in dress and haircut and other ways for the first several years of his life. There are many photographs from Hemingway's first birthday at the lake, July 21, 1900, and
Marcelline of Windemere
is in them. The birthday boy clambers in and out of the new boat, which is pulled up on shore, its rope anchor tied to a rock. He sits in the bow, two tiny arms holding on to both sides. He's got on bib overalls and a frilly blouse, and his older sister is dressed identically. He's the captain of this ship, the name on the boat be damned. Thirty-four years later, there he is, in Key West, the real captain, waving from the cockpit of his own newly arrived motor cruiser, with her name lettered handsomely just below the window out of which he's leaning.

(
Twinning
. If one were trying to make something of something, there would be an entirely different way to think about the word “antecedent,” as it is being employed here. There are photos aplenty, in Oak Park, of Ernest the he-man toddler, kept by his mother in gingham gowns, black patent Mary Janes, girly hats with flowers on them. As for the laden idea of getting “twinned” with his sister, Grace held Marcelline back for a year from entering first grade, so she and her little brother could start together and go side by side up through their senior year of high school.)

After
Marcelline of Windemere
came
Ursula of Windemere
, another rowboat, much loved and long-lasting, named for the second girl (and third-born) in the family. Then came
Sunny
, named for the fourth-born girl (whose christened name was Madelaine), and after that
Carol
, named for the last daughter in the family. These second-generation boats were motor launches. Because they were more costly craft, they got stored in the winter months at Ernie Culbertson's boathouse in the west arm of the lake. (The Hemingways had a small boathouse of their own, although not in the early years.)
Sunny
arrived in the summer of 1910, when Hemingway turned eleven. She was an eighteen-footer in a dory style, meaning that she had a flat bottom and fairly high sides and a sharp bow. She was powered by a sputtery Gray Marine inboard motor that was perpetually hard to start and leaked rainbows of oil on the surface of the lake, which made the head of the family sputter mild oaths—like “Oh, rats.”
Sunny
had cushioned seats in her stern and a kind of small cockpit in her middle.
She flew a pennant with her name at the bow. She's
Pilar
in miniature. When the doctor was piloting her, he sometimes wore what looks in the photographs to be a canvas pith helmet.

There were usually canoes around, borrowed or owned. When the shiny mail-order red canvas canoe arrived from Old Town, Maine—this was in the summer of 1917—the family nicknamed it
Bonita Pescada
, their version of the Spanish for “beautiful fish.” That winter the family stored the beautiful fish in Windemere's living room, protecting it with a bed quilt.

No sailboats—the Hemingways were rowboaters and canoeists and stinkpotters. Sailing was a different culture. This fits with the link between Hemingway and
Pilar
and Hemingway and fishing. You could formulate it like this: a sailboat will always be to a motor launch as fly-fishing is to night crawlers.

It was probably
Marcelline of Windemere
or
Ursula of Windemere
that Hemingway was referring to in 1937 when he wrote a bilious letter to his older sister from Bimini. By then, Windemere belonged to him—Grace had deeded him the house and property, which included the family boats. Even though he hadn't gone to Windemere in years, he wasn't keen on Marce or her family using the place. Some of his other siblings, okay. Marcelline and her husband and children had their own cottage at Walloon Lake in 1937. We don't have the precipitating letter from Marcelline that set Hemingway off, only his reply.

Something bitter got said between brother and sister at Ed Hemingway's funeral in December 1928, but what it was isn't clear. (It may have centered
on the breakup of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley.) This is: after 1928, Hemingway and Marcelline never saw each other again, although they did communicate, and sometimes warmly, or at least with a surface warmth.

A year and a half later, in December 1938, Hemingway wrote to his sister and said, “Much love and Merry Christmas. Am awfully sorry I wrote you such a rude and boorish letter about Windemere that time.” The usual pattern of remorse and self-recrimination, which must have set in long before that.

In 1962, a year after Hemingway's suicide, Marcelline, just as her kid brother Les, published a book about her family. Like Les, Marcelline had been working on her manuscript in not-quite secret for several years.
At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait
is a mostly sanitized view of the family epic. On the other hand, it's more reliable in its chronologies and facts and timelines than
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway
, even though Les's book is the far better read. According to Gregory Hemingway, in
Papa
, his aunt Marcelline, whom he barely knew, was intensely taking notes on the small plane that ferried family members and friends into Sun Valley for Hemingway's funeral. Gigi, sitting on the plane next to his aunt, had been hoping for some conversation. “She had a serious look on her face, almost evangelical, as if she finally believed that [Ernest] might amount to something,” Gigi wrote. Within two years of her book, Marcelline Hemingway Sanford herself was dead. The doctors said natural causes, but several in the family suspected otherwise. She wasn't quite sixty-six. Three years later, in the fall of 1966, the third-born Hemingway child, Ursula, whom Hemingway called Ura, and who was probably his favorite sibling, and who was suffering from cancer and depression, took an overdose of drugs at her Hawaii home and stopped her life at age sixty-four. So, formulate it like this. In a Christian midwestern nuclear unit of eight—mother, father, six children—four (and possibly five) of the members would end up dying by their own hand: Clarence, Ernest, Ura, Les, maybe Marce. What flows from the father …

Antecedents. In time, a child's watery field of vision widened out from Walloon, and nowhere did it widen for the better, in terms of fishing and fiction, than at the crossroads of Horton Bay. Horton Bay, and more specifically Horton's Creek, which lies just outside the town, and which is a tiny thing, quite beautiful, quite cold, quite alive with trout, is where Hemingway first learned the thrill of horsing a rainbow trout out of the
water and flying it over his head and into the cool green ferns somewhere behind him, with the lovely thing quivering and throbbing and gasping for its breath. Listen:

That's from a fragment, unpublished in his lifetime, that Hemingway probably wrote in Paris in the mid-twenties. In this same journalistic piece, he says: