Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

He shut his eyes, and in place of the man with the beard who looked at him over the sights of the rifle, quite calmly before squeezing off, the white flash and clublike impact, on his knees, hot-sweet choking, coughing it onto the rock while they went past him, he saw a long, yellow house with a low stable and the river much wider than it was and stiller. “Christ,” he said, “I might as well go.”

He stood up.

“I’m going. Para,” he said. “I’ll ride back now in the afternoon. If any supplies have come I’ll bring them down tonight. If not I’ll come at night when I have something to bring.”

“It is still hot to ride,” Captain Paravicini said.

“You don’t need to worry,” Nick said. “I’m all right now for quite a while. I had one then but it was easy. They’re getting much better. I can tell when I’m going to have one because I talk so much.”

“I’ll send a runner with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I know the way.”

“You’ll be back soon?”

“Absolutely.”

“Let me send—”

“No,” said Nick. “As a mark of confidence.”

“Well, ciao then.”

“Ciao,” said Nick. He started back along the sunken road toward where he had left the bicycle. In the afternoon the road would be shady once he had passed the canal. Beyond that there were trees on both sides that had not been shelled at all. It was on that stretch that, marching, they had once passed the Terza Savoia cavalry regiment riding in the snow with their lances. The horses’ breath made plumes in the cold air. No, that was somewhere else. Where was that?

“I’d better get to that damned bicycle,” Nick said to himself. “I don’t want to lose the way to Fornaci.”

The Mother of a Queen

WHEN HIS FATHER DIED HE WAS ONLY A kid and his manager buried him perpetually. That is, so he would have the plot permanently. But when his mother died his manager thought they might not always be so hot on each other. They were sweethearts; sure he’s a queen, didn’t you know that, of course he is. So he just buried her for five years.

Well, when he came back to Mexico from Spain he got the first notice. It said it was the first notice that the five years were up and would he make arrangements for the continuing of his mother’s grave. It was only twenty dollars for perpetual. I had the cash box then and I said let me attend to it, Paco. But he said no, he would look after it. He’d look after it right away. It was his mother and he wanted to do it himself.

Then in a week he got the second notice. I read it to him and I said I thought he had looked after it.

No, he said, he hadn’t.

“Let me do it,” I said. “It’s right here in the cash box.”

No, he said. Nobody could tell him what to do. He’d do it himself when he got around to it. “What’s the sense in spending money sooner than necessary?”

“All right,” I said, “but see you look after it.” At this time he had a contract for six fights at four thousand pesos a fight besides his benefit fight. He made over fifteen thousand dollars there in the capital alone. He was just tight, that’s all.

The third notice came in another week and I read it to him. It said that if he did not make the payment by the following Saturday his mother’s grave would be opened and her remains dumped on the common boneheap. He said he would go attend to it that afternoon when he went to town.

“Why not have me do it?” I asked him.

“Keep out of my business,” he said. “It’s my business and I’m going to do it.”

“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it,” I said. “Do your own business.”

He got the money out of the cash box, although then he always carried a hundred or more pesos with him all the time, and he said he would look after it. He went out with the money and so of course I thought he had attended to it.

A week later the notice came that they had no response to the final warning and so his mother’s body had been dumped on the boneheap; on the public boneheap.

“Jesus Christ,” I said to him, “you said you’d pay that and you took money out of the cash box to do it and now what’s happened to your mother? My God, think of it! The public boneheap and your own mother. Why didn’t you let me look after it? I would have sent it when the first notice came.”

“It’s none of your business. It’s my mother.”

“It’s none of my business, yes, but it was your business. What kind of blood is it in a man that will let that be done to his mother? You don’t deserve to have a mother.”

“It is my mother,” he said. “Now she is so much dearer to me. Now I don’t have to think of her buried in one place and be sad. Now she is all about me in the air, like the birds and the flowers. Now she will always be with me.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what kind of blood have you anyway? I don’t want you to even speak to me.”

“She is all around me,” he said. “Now I will never be sad.”