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Inside, it was a hunter s house. It had all the requisite hides and
heads and trophy items from Hemingway s life with his gun. However, there
were also paintings from the Paris days, bookshelves laden with faded
hardcovers, a writing desk with green-globed desk lamp on top of which
hung a slightly soiled duckbill hunting cap. I was drawn, of course, to the
bookshelves. Touching them with my fingers, I heard my host, who was the
caretaker of the estate, remark, I m sorry but you won t find anything of
literary value here. All of the limited editions of the Hemingway household
have been sold off or donated to the Kennedy Library.
Is that so? I said. And I remembered that Roger told me that when
he entered Amber Castle, he had placed his hand upon a tapestry and felt
of the cloth with his fingers to be assured that he was really there. I reached
for a book, any book, and withdrew it from the shelf. The cover was black
cloth, the book was small and quite old. I opened it to the flyleaf,
discovering that this was a collec-tion of poems by Archibald MacLeish.
There was a poem written in MacLeish s hand and dedicated to Hemingway
and it was dated 1926. The poem went thus:
At the very bottom of the yellowed page, MacLeish had penned a
personal message: Dear Ernest, I don t want to make it awkward: and
anything else would be inade-quate wherefore the rest is silence.
My host came over to where I was standing and peeked over my
shoulder. Here s one the literary vultures seem to have overlooked, I said,
chuckling.
Good grief, the man said. You ve really found something there,
haven t you?
A message, I thought, from that good undiscovered country that
Hemingway always wrote about, the land be-yond the islands, beyond
Bimini blue, beyond the Carib-bean archipelago, beyond books, beyond
time, beyond Bradbury s Kilimanjaro Machine, beyond the resemblance of
the great author to an incidental father whom he had never met. Beyond all
coincidences and fateful circum-stances, the message traveled straight to
the heart. I had really found something, I imagined, and my host,
aston-ished and pleased, announced that my find was going to create a few
ripples at the Kennedy Library. There are scholars who will be all over
this, he said, holding the book reverently.
Back home in Santa Fe, I told Roger what had hap-pened, and he
listened eagerly, becoming very interested in the poem. He asked that I
write it down for him, and, when a copy turned up in the mail from the
caretaker of the Hemingway estate, I took it over to Roger and gave it to
him. He read it over and over, and then smiled. There s a key in this, he
said approvingly.
A key?
Yes. The key to Hemingway s passing is in this poem.
I felt so myself, but I said nothing, waiting for him to go on. But he
said no more about it, content that he had recognized the key. Now you
can go on, Roger said, with whatever it is you are going to write, for the
dae-mon is gone, burned away by that poem.
Do you think Hemingway s ghost gave me that book? I asked.
Roger laughed. Nothing so one-dimensional as that, I wouldn t think.
However, I d say his spirit is still moving through the work that he did in this
life. Still moving, still very much alive.
Why do you think no one else ever saw it before? I mean, from what
I was told, they d picked the place clean.
Roger pondered for a moment, looking down at the floor. Hmm.
That s a question for you to answer and I suppose you already know the
answer. After all, you went up there looking for something, didn t you?
Then, he asked, So what is it that you are going to write yourself?
To tell you the truth, I don t know. But I am going to write something.
And did anything else happen up there in Ketchum? he wanted to
know. Anything you haven t told me?
I thought about this for a while. We were sipping strong black coffee
from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and nib-bling on Scottish scones that
Roger had bought that morn-ing at the bakery, and I watched the steam rise
off his cup. His eyes were agleam, and I remembered that he had once told
me the derivation of his name: it came from Poland, as did his family.
Sparks thrown off by the hot iron of the blacksmith s hammer. Roger s
eyes, sparkling with blue fire, reminded me that he himself was forged
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