The Hemingway Files

by H. K. Bush

  By lunchtime, I was back at the Sanko. Hideko greeted me, and once I described to her what I had achieved so far, I asked her about the boxes. I needed to get them to the airport at Narita, then all the way back home to Indiana, I said. She thought this over, then smiled broadly, saying, “Kuro Neko! Kuro Neko!”

  “Kuro Neko?”

  She understood my confusion. “It means … black cat … they are very reliable, and can deliver these … packages to Narita!” Initially I was nervous about this proposition, but she assured me that they were the best option, so I agreed, recalling that the boxes had been buried safely within a mountaintop temple for over fifteen years. It seemed that my mission must have some good karma, thus I released my treasures with an almost irresponsible carelessness.

  Many hours later, back in the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo, it was already the evening of July 8, and my return ticket was for the 10th. I lounged around the hotel that evening and got up early the next day, hoping to visit Asakusa Temple since Jack had praised its tranquilities. I hailed a cab and took a long, meandering ride to the other side of Tokyo, through kaleidoscopic curves and windblown, chaotic urbanscapes. Once there, I sat for a very long time in the temple’s grand presence, trying to discern whatever lingering spirits might be nearby. Kannon, goddess of mercy, superintended my visit, and I watched the clouds of incense rise up slowly into the sky. There were many casual tourists, appearing much like myself, out seeing the sights, snapping photos on their digital cameras. I smiled, feeling at home in this strange place, and somehow understood that in just a few days I had been transformed from a casual, frightened tourist into another kind of pilgrim, perhaps even a citizen of the world. I felt different, transformed by the journey, and enjoyed a strong sense of victory.

  The next morning, I arrived back at Narita Airport several hours before my flight. Kuro Neko had my precious packages, and with their courteous help, I transferred them to an international express rate, to be shipped home. For customs purposes, I informed the agent that the boxes were filled with books and papers, which was vaguely the truth, and assumed that the professional customs agents of an international shipping company could most easily handle any potential entanglements. But I did carry onboard the most precious items—file folders of manuscripts, first editions of Fanshawe, Huckleberry Finn, and Lyrical Ballads, Jack’s personal copy of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan by Lafcadio Hearn, and the original signed edition of Old Man and the Sea, among other valuables—all stored snugly in a valise purchased for this task. Just a few “old books” and as such, I did not feel the need to report them to US Customs.

  The flight back was easy. I slept for much of it, and read from my old books for the balance. Driving back down the highway toward Bloomington and home, I tried to comprehend the implications of the commodities I would soon be receiving. Then, as if magically, I was home, after almost twenty straight hours of travel. It was still July 10, 2011, in Indiana, though by then, the calendar had already turned a day ahead in Japan. As such, it truly was the longest day of my life. Once more, I felt the ghost of Jack Springs toying with me. It was another test, or set of tests, and suddenly I realized I had no real plan for the documents, my booty. I fell asleep in my favorite reading chair, Leaves of Grass resting on my chest, while still contemplating what I should do with these fascinating, and troubling, new treasures. And I’m still working that out.

  In many ways, how to conduct myself in view of this trove of literary treasures, and what to do with all of these items, have become the defining ethical dilemmas of my life. But they are pleasant dilemmas, something I surely never saw coming. A surprise ending to a rather humdrum life of teaching and research. I write these final words in summer of 2012, as I complete the endgame of sending this manuscript off to my agent, and thus releasing to the world a truly fascinating tale, including my own rather minor adventure tacked on for good measure. Our plan is to publish within the next year or so.

  Always, I remember Jack’s haunting words. He keeps reminding me that I was enlisted by him to carry out certain tasks that he never found the courage or wherewithal to accomplish before his own demise. “I needed to put some things in order,” he wrote. So my ethical dilemma has something to do with this heady idea of order, and his tragic death has transformed all my efforts into a kind of sacred discipline in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

  It remains my earnest desire to be able to say with a clean conscience, that I have acted nobly with the materials so far. I began by going through it all, piece by piece, and cataloguing one more time the contents—but this time, in much more detail than I was able to carry out at Ryoan-ji. As it happens, I have an old friend who deals in rare books and collectibles, and I soon discovered that there was enough of real monetary value to create several small fortunes, at least for an old academic like me, whose needs are modest and few, and whose appetites are generally manageable. Yes, there have been significant temptations involved, though relatively small ones—I love aged mahogany, for instance, and fine wines: California Cabs, French Burgundy, and Tuscan Chianti, above all. And I love fly-fishing in the Adirondacks or Montana. And old books, I might add. One must have a few hidden preoccupations, to make all the hard work worthwhile.

  For the record, the large majority of the items I’ve released so far have all gone into the special collections of my home university and thus are held in the public trust of a major state institution, safe behind heavy security and surveillance. Specifically, I have made a special arrangement with the Lilly Library of Rare Books here at Indiana, one of the top collections of its kind in the world, housed in an impressive limestone building in the middle of campus, and past which hundreds of students walk daily, hardly imagining the assets held within. The Lilly represents a marvel of familial philanthropy, all made possible by the prodigious wealth produced by the pharmaceutical giant, the Lilly Corporation, headquartered up in Indianapolis. The Lilly Library already owns, for example, a Gutenberg Bible, the four Shakespeare folios, and Audubon’s Birds of America, as well as a first edition (not mine) of Leaves of Grass—all thanks to the burgeoning sales of insulin products, Prozac, Cialis, and other modern wonder drugs.

  Slowly but surely, my scholarly plan is to edit and present to the world most of the treasures that Jack saved from the firestorm at Sensei’s house in Japan. I believe these tasks are precisely the ones Jack would have assigned to me. And so those six boxes are now the centerpieces of my daily life. The recovery, analysis, and publication of the hundreds of heretofore unknown documents I brought back with me will now become the focus of the remaining years of work that God sees fit to bequeath to me. As I publish various items, I plan to turn them over to the Lilly Library here in Bloomington, where they can be viewed and enjoyed by scholars. The Lilly has been gracious enough, as part of my exclusive arrangement with them, to provide a modest honorarium for each of the gifts I have so far bequeathed, and I expect that generous arrangement to continue. These honoraria, along with the boon of my now rather considerable retirement contributions over forty years, and managed by the sanguine accountants at TIAA-CREF, have allowed me the financial means to devote myself full-time to the recovery, and then the publication of the rest of my cache of goods.

  And so, as a result, I will give Indiana University my official letter of resignation, as of Jan. 1, 2013, at which time I will retire, becoming a free man during the week of Twelfth Night. Although, in keeping with academic decorum, I will dutifully teach one semester after my sabbatical ends, and then I will announce my resignation. I maintain a few of my favorite relics in a handy place, here in the house, hidden away in case some snoopy thief decides that my enticing tale warrants further investigation. I have now purchased a trained German shepherd, by the way, so I don’t worry too much about keeping precious documents and volumes with me here at home. The hound is thoroughly terrifying, if you don’t know him, and I call him Strider, a small token of my boyhood esteem for J.R.R. Tolkien. He prowls around the h
ouse like a secret service agent, ready to die for me, I believe—his coat black and silver, his bark able to wake the dead, as perhaps it does, now and then. But just in case, I keep my valuables locked up in a newly purchased safe.

  Sometimes, I open up that safe, and carefully handle my most cherished possessions. Probably my favorite is that tall, yet thin, volume of rambling poems, bound in a musty, green cover. It was typeset by hand before the Civil War, much of it by the author himself. I enjoy sitting in my bed, often late at night, cradling the volume lovingly, knowing that its author once cradled it in his own calloused hands. Occasionally I open the book, and speak its hypnotic contents into the evening air.

  Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,

  The earth recedes from me into the night,

  I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.

  Yes, I admit I’m still hoarding that first edition of Leaves of Grass. Though perhaps one day I will release it, which at auction might bring me as much as a million dollars or more, due to its many inscriptions by the author throughout. For now I’m holding on to it. I don’t need the money and the Lilly Library already has one of its own.

  It comforts me late at night to read aloud the words of the old prophetic misfit. Old Walt’s lyrics sound better somehow, when read from the actual first edition. And then, satisfied and sleepy, I gingerly place it back in the safe, protected in a bright green zippered pouch designed for a laptop. I twirl the combination dial, and go back to bed, Strider right beside me on the floor, snoring away, a protector of Hobbits.

  You may well ask, what of all the ethical entanglements surrounding your claim to these treasures? Doesn’t it bother you even slightly, the manner in which these precious items ended up in your possession? Perhaps I could be more bothered by these circumstances, but most days, I’m not. Personally, I sleep just fine, mostly. On good nights, the words of my old friends—Jack Springer, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, and even Professor Goto—come flooding back to me, from some primeval place, underneath shelves of granite or limestone. But other times, the nightmares of my old student come back, also seeking me out. One night, it was a bloody Miyamoto, head wrapped in a towel, shrieking like a demon into the chill night air: “Help!” Another night, it was a burning house, with disembodied voices pouring forth, unidentified but filled with terror: “Blood money. Blood!” Both times, I awoke with a start. Strider stirred on the floor beside me, fully cognizant of the corrupting powers of the one ring. Yes, I remember the terrible circumstances under which these many items arrived in my home, twenty feet from my bedside. It’s a shadowy moral territory, at times overwhelming, though not nearly as traumatic for me as it must have been for Jack.

  Writing these sentences, I can almost hear other words being whispered in the chill night air, siren-like. And I am haunted by the words, once again. Ultimately, I choose to overlook these skeletons—always surging forward, like the good Emersonian soul that I wish to be.

  And so the story ends here—almost. I did receive one last letter from Jack, postmarked December 7, 2011, the one-year anniversary of Jack’s death, as per his own meticulous instructions to his bereaved father, a faithful servant to the last. Receiving a letter from the dead can provoke a certain eeriness, but by then I was used to it, and a buoyant comfort possessed me, as if the bonds with the dead somehow mysteriously continued—and perhaps they do. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1), a noble line from another old letter.

  And so, after all that’s been said and done, I must give Jack Springs the final word in all of this, without any of my own thoughts or commentary appended. May his farewell letter grant my readers the same degree of comfort and peace it has granted me.

  Thanksgiving Friday, 2010

  Dear Marty,

  If the timing has worked out the way I’ve planned it, you should be getting this final letter during the holiday season of 2011, about a year from the day I’m writing it. In recent weeks, I’ve had a spell of very fine weather, a temporary reprieve, so to speak, like C.S. Lewis’s wife Joy, in Shadowlands.

  The pain has let up so much that I’ve been taking walks with my dog, Caliban, a small terrier who believes he’s much bigger than he really is. For a few weeks now, it’s been like my very own Indian Summer. I went by car with a friend of my sister, by the name of Emily, down to Brown County one fine, blustery Saturday in mid-October, to look at the fall colors. It was my first “date” in many years. The yellows, scarlets, and purples—all still stunning to me, jaw-dropping, in fact, even after all I’ve been through. I’ve gazed with romantic yearning at the spectacle of the trees, and inhaled deeply the damp, aromatic autumn air. I’ve even felt the old thrill of believing that it is great to be alive. Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world, wrote good old Uncle Walt Whitman.

  By the time you get this, a year from now when my father sends it, your life should be looking a lot differently. Maybe old Professor Martin Dean has successfully completed a pilgrimage to the Land of the Rising Sun, and discovered an array of valuable commodities, the ones I left on deposit there back in the cold winter of 1995. You did climb the mountain, yes? Because it is the correct way to approach the gods.

  I could have called you on the telephone, to ask you these many favors, but I couldn’t justify it. Yes, it would have been the most direct way to do all this. But we got this far through the writing of letters, and so I’ve always felt it was important that we finish the way we started. I feel some shame in how it has turned out, despite all the years that have passed. And I do apologize, for never finding the courage to call you. I hope you can forgive me for that—and, in fact, I think you will because ours has been a friendship built on written words.

  By now perhaps you’ve had interesting conversations with dealers and rare books aficionados in an attempt to discover what some of those items might be worth. And I don’t think it wrong that you find some benefit in all this. So why not keep a few select items for yourself? It’s only fitting. Even Indiana Jones got an honorarium sometimes. But also, perhaps, the treasures have caused you some difficult moments, wrestling with the moral dilemma of how they came into your possession.

  I trust you will find a solution. But I can’t really see any of this changing you, to be honest. I envision you patiently staining a freshly milled molding for a bookcase in your garage workroom in southern Indiana, or fishing in a stream in the Adirondacks up in northern New York state. I see you being pleased with your lot in life as it already is, without that Ivy League polish, or panache, or whatever it is. And I hope the goods will remain in the Great Midwest, where the likes of Twain and Howells and Hemingway were born and raised. That seems proper to my old-fashioned Hoosier sensibility.

  Meanwhile, my time is running thin. It was wonderful, though, sitting at the table with my family yesterday, one of the very good days. Thanksgiving dinner: a truly American invention, established by Lincoln himself, in the midst of a great civil war.

  As always, Mom wheeled out a fifteen-pound turkey, roasted brown and dripping with butter and just the right amount of garlic. My dad sat at the head of table, a prince of the earth, a man of clarity, morals, and perfect punctuation, with a proper tool in each hand for carving the bird. My sister, Sue, brought along her new boyfriend Ted, all smiles, a quietly humorous corporate attorney, wearing a suit coat and a bow tie. They held hands occasionally as they picked at their green beans, or sipped their wine, smiling shyly like teenagers. We offered up a long, solemn prayer together, for health and fellowship, giving thanks for our bounteous blessings, of which there are many. Yes, I still think so.

  As always, we watched some football, and Mom brought out her traditional pumpkin pie, made from scratch, of course. She whipped up some real cream, and placed hefty dollops on the wedges of pie. Some neighbors and friends dropped by later in the afternoon, as is our custom, and we played cards and carried on. Mom sang some hymns, the good old ones,
accompanying herself on the piano. “How Great Thou Art,” “Blessed Assurance,” things like that. “This is my story, this is my song …”

  It was a perfect holiday, a truly holy day, and my last one on God’s green earth, I suspect. Of course, my family and I are hoping for one more Christmas together. But last night I couldn’t sleep for the pain. Finally, I did get some sleep, fitfully, until very late in the day. I think I feel the old horror rising up with renewed strength inside me, doing something evil to my internal organs. The bad stuff has spread into various areas of my body, according to the physicians, including my bones. It’s harder to walk almost every single day now, and my back aches constantly, a dull and nauseating ache. But here I am, composing one last letter to an old friend, between the jagged edges of pain. Right now, as I work the keyboard, a steady rain beats against the shutters outside my window.

  Tonight I’m thinking of Sensei’s last moments. He had only a few seconds left on Earth, but he wanted to make sure to remind me about the words. “Without words, the people remain powerless,” he told me. “Without beauty, the people become ugly, and life is unlivable.”

  That’s why most of us become teachers of literature, don’t you think, Marty? For the words, words, words. I remember one clear, October afternoon, when you thundered through a lecture on the Romantics, about how words were our chance to express the Mind of God, fit for human ears, about something pulsating in us. I always hung on to that one. Remember the words, you commanded us that fine day. The sky was a shiny, cobalt blue, pouring in through the windows. You quoted Wordsworth from memory, spoke of a power rolling through us. I recall walking out into the primordial woods that day, believing I had heard a prophet. And perhaps I had.