The Decision

                                                                              THE DECISION

         Night was the worst time for Ernest.  Bad things happened in the night.  He remembered driving an ambulance for the Red Cross in Italy during the first world war.  In the night the enemy began  artillery bombardments.  You heard the whooshing sound of the big shells as they were spit out by  the  big guns,  and when  the shells screamed into the night you didn't know where they would land.  You prayed, whether you were religious or not, that the shells wouldn't land near you.
         You felt the rocking shuddering impact of the blasts and you heard the shrieks of dying men.
         In the dim moonlight you saw the barbed wire emplacements.  The barbed wire tore your flesh or trapped you long enough for the enemy to impale you on a bayonet or shoot you at will.
         You heard the scurrying and the chattering of rats in the trenches and you saw the fiery buzzing of machine gun tracers stitching the dark.  It was when he was wounded that Ernest felt his soul leave his body.  It felt like a handkerchief being pulled out of his pocket. 
         It was then that Ernest learned the reality of insomnia.  He had written about insomnia.  The best story, he thought, was about the bartender in Spain  who felt empathy for the man who sought comfort in a clean, well-lighted bar.  The man would drink slowly and carefully out on the terrace in the quiet place where the shadows of the leaves on the trees were on the tables.
         He knew insomnia in Michigan, where he grew up, and in Kansas City, where he first learned something about journalism.  He knew it during the war in Italy and when he was wounded.  He knew it in Paris when he first learned seriously about writing and on a boat in the Gulf Stream when he heard sea creatures beating up against the boat.  He knew insomnia in Africa when he heard the laughing  of hyenas or lions chuffing when they were on the prowl.  Insomnia was a companion in Spain when the war was against the fascists and then later on in the second world war.
         But perhaps it was the close encounters with death that made life so grand.  There was nothing quite like the shimmering splash of sunrise while you waited in the duck blind.  The copper-colored light painted the water and you waited for the great flapping and explosion of wings as the birds took flight.  You led the bird you selected just a little and squeezed  the trigger.  You shivered from the early morning cold and the anticipation.
         Sunrise on the trout stream was a good time.  The sun peeked over the tops of the pine trees and you hoped the trout would be hungry.  You cast out your line and it lifted into the air, making a singing sound,  like something alive.  There was a  tiny plop  as the lure landed in the water.  The current tugged at you as you waded into deeper water and you finally felt the strike of the first big trout.  You played the fish as skillfully and artfully as you could, bringing it into you.  When you lifted the fish out of the water the light on the trout would break into its prism of colors.
         Time stood still back then.  You stayed in the trout stream until your legs were numb from the cold and the sun was hot on your back.  After your creel was full, heavy around your shoulder,  you waded back to shore and started a fire.  As the fire grew you cleaned the trout and started bacon cooking in a skillet over the fire.  The earthy and warm scent of coffee floated out over the stream, and beams of light danced off the water like jewels.
         He fried  the trout until the skin was golden and the meat flaked off white and tender,  and downed it with the hot coffee.  He couldn't think of any meal he'd ever had, even in the best restaurants in Paris, that was better.
         He once wrote that hunger was good discipline.  He was writing about Paris and about being young and in love and trying as hard as he knew how to learn to write.  He was inspired by the painter Cezanne and he tried to do landscape painting with sharp, pointed sentences.  He wanted a minimum of ornamentation in his work.  He wanted the reader to feel the emotion that the character in the story was feeling.
         He remembered walking through the quarter close to where he lived and breathing deeply of  the crusty yeasty  fresh smell of baking bread.  He sometimes  killed pigeons because pigeons were abundant and they filled a hungry belly.  But some hunger was good, he thought, because it sharpened his perceptions.  It was like the freshness in the air after a summer rain.  The trees looked greener and the scent of flowers was sweeter.  The streets shone with new light from the street lamps and he liked the sound of water flowing into the rain gutters.
         He discovered Shakespeare and Company, the book store run by Sylvia Beach.  Sylvia Beach stood up for James Joyce when there was much controversy over Joyce's work.  Back then Ernest was as hungry for books as he was for food.
         Gertrude Stein, he thought.  He liked her for a time.  Gertrude had fierce opinions.  Some of her opinions made sense, and some were truly absurd.  He learned the art of repetition from Gertrude.  Repetition in his prose established a rhythm that resonated with the reader, but too much repetition became tedious, he thought.  Gertrude had her pet theories about writing, but she never seemed able to move beyond those theories into anything new.
         He thought of Faulkner.  Faulkner  accused him of not taking chances.  But it was more a difference in philosophy, he thought.  He didn't like to use the endless stream of description and the big words that Faulkner used.  It was like the difference in a Cezanne painting and something by Michelangelo.  Michelangelo painted the wide expanse of the Sistine Chapel, which had its grandeur, but Ernest liked the more basic colors and strokes of a Cezanne.
         Pictures of people he loved, hated, and maybe loved again came to him now.  He remembered Sherwood Anderson, who gave him his introduction to the expatriates in Paris.  He thought of Scott Fitzgerald, that immensely talented man who was so self-destructive, and John Dos Passos, who was more political than Ernest liked sometimes.  He remembered the loving face of Hadley, his first wife, and how her red hair shone in the light.  He didn't know if he would have gone to Paris if not for Hadley and the confidence she gave him.
         Three other wives followed.  There was Pauline, who was there when he started achieving real success.  Martha came along when he was a world celebrity.  And Miss Mary, who was sleeping in another room now, had been with him for the past several years.  The happiest moments of his life were  loving these women, and the lowest moments when things didn't go well.
         He thought of critics.  He tried to dismiss critics throughout his career, but you couldn't totally ignore critics, he thought.  He once compared them to angleworms in a bottle, which didn't endear him to them. 
         There were always critics who knew what he should write about better than he.  Many critics thought he wrote too much about bullfighting or hunting or fishing or war.  He didn't write enough about politics, they said, or he didn't write about the United States.  There were other writers to write about the United States, he thought.  There was Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos or others.  Domestic life bored him.  The real excitement and the real lifeblood of his work came from Paris and Spain and Italy and the Gulf Stream.
         He realized now that much of his work took a strong stand with no room for compromise.  In his novel about Spain he wrote about Robert Jordan's father killing himself.  Robert Jordan called his father a coward.  Ernest still couldn't deal with his own father's suicide.  For a long time he thought it was a cowardly act, but now he thought he understood.  His father reached a point where living was worse than dying and he took what he thought was the most honorable way out.
         Ernest was 61 now, which wasn't that old, but his body was far older than 61, he thought.  As his body began breaking down he was having to give up all the things he loved.  He couldn't drink anymore.  He had to watch his diet closely.  But the worst thing was that he couldn't write anymore.  Writing had never been easy.  When he was in Paris and learning to write there were countless false starts and countless revisions.  A few hundred words a day was a good day.
         There was  a time even back then when he wasn't certain he could ever write again.  Some of his early manuscripts were stolen when Hadley was traveling to meet him and there was a fear as strong as any he'd ever known that he couldn't write again.
         He decided to stop work every day when he knew what would happen next.  He said the best way to start every day was to write the truest sentence you knew.  By using that method his creative well was able to refill every night.  He made every effort when he stopped working not to think about the story until the next day.
         It was easier when he lived in good country.  When he was in Key West he could take out the Pilar iin search of the big marlin.  In Cuba there was fishing and cock fighting and sometimes boxing.  Here  in Idaho there were birds and big game to hunt.  In Africa there were the great herds of kudu.  And in Paris, he thought, there were museums and book stores and restaurants.  In Spain he followed the bullfights and tried the best he could to explain bullfighting to people who thought it cruel and inhumane. In Venice there was the romance and the wonderful art.
         He was  very lucky, he thought, in having three good boys.  He always wanted a daughter and the lack of a daughter  was a disappointment, but the three boys made him proud.  Thinking of the boys and of Miss Mary in the other room made this all the harder, he thought.
         A few years ago he thought he was going to die.  There was a plane crash and then another plane crash.  The second crash was bad.  He forced himself out of a burning airplane and  fractured his skull.  He had experienced pain from that event ever since.
          He was a fighter, he thought.  He stood in the literary ring with the best of his generation and perhaps of other generations too.  Mr. Tolstoy had a hard right hook, but Ernest had countered.  Mr. Stendhal had been bested and Mr. Proust and Mr. Flaubert.  He had stood toe to toe with Faulkner.  Just when they thought Papa was down for the count he roared back.  Who else had an entire novel published like The Old Man and the Sea  in Life  magazine?
         It was easier when you were young, he thought.  You didn't have the reputation for one thing. Once you had the reputation younger challengers were always out for you.  It was like an aging fighter.  He had to use his experience and his skill because his younger opponents were stronger and had more stamina.  Ernest didn't have the stamina now. 
         He never felt more helpless or more depressed than his recent time in the Mayo Clinic.  He got electric shock treatments. They put something in his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue.  They put something on his head to conduct electricity and then the electrodes. He wasn't crazy, he thought.  But you had to be crazy, they said, if you tried to kill yourself. Maybe it was crazier, he thought then, to just wither away, losing your mind, losing your memories, losing all ability to function.  He felt the tears welling, and he wiped the tears away. He just wanted to lie back in this comfortable bed and hear the sounds of the Idaho night.
         There weren't many people who could  read their own obituaries, he thought.  After the first Africa crash someone saw the plane and concluded he was dead.  Newspapers around the world were plastered with front-page stories and photos of Hemingway.  When he came back he spent hours reading through stacks of newspapers.
         In his best story about Africa he described the frozen carcass of a leopard found at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  He wrote that no one knew what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.  Now he thought he knew.
         He wondered what the obituaries would say this time around.  He could almost write the story in his head.  The Nobel Prize winning author, it would say.  The writer, who had four troubled marriages.  The adventurer, who also wrote sometimes.  The brawny man shown in Africa photographs with his kills or alongside the big marlin he had caught.  The two-fisted drinker. 
The boy from Oak Park, Illinois, who went to Italy, France, Spain, and Cuba.  He was tired now and his head hurt and he could feel the presence of that old whore Death.
         The old whore had been close so many times, and he had denied her.  But she had taken so many of his friends.  He wondered if they would be waiting for him on the other side.  Was there a place for writers in heaven?
         The soft light of dawn was breaking through his bedroom window now.  This was it, he thought.  He had written much about courage and now it was time for him to demonstrate courage of his own.  It was the best and truest course, he thought. 
         He got up from the bed and went as quietly as he could past Mary's room and downstairs.  He found the keys to the gun rack and opened the gun rack.  He took out one of his favorite shot guns and found two shells.  He inserted the shells and locked the breech closed.
         He took a deep breath and took a long look at the morning light.  It was the truest light of the day, he thought.  The gun felt familiar and right when he put it into his mouth.
          It was time.