Hemingway's Short Stories: Two Generations of Father and Son (Part I)

In the center of the city's main street, there was a sign that ordered vehicles to take a detour, but the vehicles all openly crossed through here. Adams thought that the road was probably finished, so he drove down the empty brick street; on Sunday there were so few traffic that the traffic lights were changing so that he often stopped, and next year if the public could not afford to pay the electricity bill, the traffic lights would not be lit; and further on, under the two rows of shady trees of this little town, if you were a local, and often walked under the trees, you would love these trees from the bottom of your heart, but in the eyes of the strangers you would think that the foliage was too dense to block the sunlight and make the house too damp, and after the last house, drive up the ups and downsThe road is straight ahead, the red clay embankment is well-built, and the second generation of new young trees are lined on both sides. It's not his hometown, but it's mid-autumn, and it's really pleasing to drive around and see the scenery near and far. The cotton bolls had long been picked, the fields had been replanted with patches of corn, and in some places there were rows of red sorghum, and the car was easy to drive all the way, and his son had already fallen asleep in the seat beside him, and the day's journey had been over, and the city where he had spent the night was familiar to him, so Nick was now full of thoughts to see where there were soybeans and peas in the cornfields, and how many woods separated him from the reclaimed land, and noticed the lay of the huts and the houses, and the fields and the woods; he went all the way, wondering in his heart how to start hunting in this area, and estimating where the prey would feed in every clearing, where to find a nest, secretly to find a big nest, in which direction they will fly when they jump up.

If you hunt quails, once the hounds find the quails, you must not go and block their escape back to the nest, otherwise they will jump up and pounce on you, some of them will fly straight into the sky, some of them will pass by your ears, and when they pass in front of you, the figure is so big that you have never seen it, and there is only one good way, which is to turn your back, wait for them to fly over your shoulder, and when they stop their wings and are about to sweep into the forest, aim and shoot.

His father had taught him the trick of quailing, and Nicholas Adams couldn't help but miss him. When I think of my father, the first thing that comes to mind is always those eyes. The burly body, the quick movements, the broad shoulders, the crooked hooked nose, the mustache under the old good-man chin, these were still secondary—the eyes were always the first thing that came to his mind. The two eyebrows were arranged in a position to form a barrier on them, and the eyes were deeply embedded in the skull, as if they had been designed as some incomparably precious instrument for this special protection. My father's eyes are sharp and he can see far, which is much better than ordinary people, which is what my father is blessed with. The father's vision is no less than that of a giant horned wild sheep or an eagle.

He used to stand by the lake with his father (when he was still very eye-catching), and his father would sometimes say to him, "The flag has been raised on the other side." "Nick couldn't see the flag, he couldn't see the flagpole. Then the father would say, "Look, that's your sister Dorothy." She hoisted the flag and was on her way to the docks. ”

Nick looked across the lake, and saw the long wooded shore of the lake on the opposite side, the big trees rising behind it, the sharp corner of the land protruding from the mouth of the lake, the smooth hills around the pasture, and the little white house of their family under the shade of the green trees, but there was no flagpole or pier, only a white sand beach and a bend of the lakeshore.

"Can you see a flock of sheep on the hillside near the Sharp Corner?"

"See. ”

They are just a faint white spot on a blue-gray hill.

"I can count them," said my father.

My father was very neurotic, and as long as a person has a certain function that exceeds the needs of ordinary people, he will have this problem. Besides, he is very emotional, and like most emotional people, although he is ruthless, he is often bullied. In addition, he has a lot of bad luck, and it is not all caused by himself. They made a trap, and he went to help a little, but instead fell into this trap and died, in fact, he was betrayed by these people in all kinds of ways before his death. All emotional people are inevitably framed again and again. Nick can't write about his father now, so he can only wait for the future, but this good place to hunt quails reminds him of his father when he was a child, and he is very grateful that his father taught him two things:　

Fishing and hunting. His father's views on these two things are quite sophisticated, but his views on gender issues, for example, are not, and Nick feels fortunate that this is the case; because someone has to give you your first shotgun, or give you a chance to use it, and besides, to learn to hunt and fish, you always have to live in a place where there are prey and swimming fish, and he is Chinese New Year's Eve and eighteen years old, and his love of fishing and hunting is no less than when he first went out hunting with his father. His enthusiasm had never waned in the slightest, and he was grateful to his father for nurturing it.

As for the other problem, which is the problem of your father's absence, it is true that all the conditions you need are born, and everyone is self-taught, and where you live is the same. He remembered very well that there were only two pieces of knowledge that his father had given him on this subject. Once they went out hunting together, and Nick hit a red squirrel on a hemlock tree. The squirrel was injured and fell, and Nick picked it up, and the little thing bit his thumb ball in half.

"What nasty puppy!" Nick said, slamming the squirrel's head into the tree with a thud. "I choked on the bite. ”

My father looked at it and said, "Suck all the blood out of your mouth, and go back to the house and apply some iodine tincture." ”

"It's puppy day," Nick said.

"Do you know what dog days mean?" asked his father.

"That's what we always say when we scold," Nick said.

"Dog days refer to promiscuity between humans and animals. ”

"Why do people do that?" said Nick.

"I don't know," said my father. "Anyway, this kind of bad thing hurts nature. ”

This caused Nick to be cranky, and it made his hairs stand on end, and he thought that he was a breeder, and he thought that it was not likable, as if it didn't work. There is another thing about the direct and understandable knowledge of sex that his father passed on to him. One morning he saw in the newspaper that Enrico Caroso [1] had been arrested for seduction [2].

"What's the deal with seduction?"

"It's the worst thing that can ever be done," replied the father. Nick imagined that the tenor was doing something strange and unreasonable to a lady with a painting of Anna Held[3] in a cigar box. Although Nick was quite scared, he secretly made up his mind that when he was grown, he would at least try it out.

My father summed it up by saying that masturbation would cause blindness, insanity, and even life-threatening, and that prostitutes would be infected with unsightly willow disease, so they should not have contact with others. But then again, the good eyes of his father are indeed something that Nick has never seen, and Nick loves him very much and has loved him very much since he was a child. But now, knowing what had happened, he just remembered the early years before the decline of his family's fortunes, and he couldn't be happy. If you can write it, you can get rid of it. He wrote many things, and they were all dismissed. But it's too early to write about it. A lot of people are still alive. So he decided to think about something else. Father's affairs are irreparable, and he has already thought about it many times. He still vividly remembers how the funeral parlor owner put on his father's face, and all the other scenes are still fresh in his memory, and he has not even forgotten how many debts he left behind. He complimented the funeral home owner a few words. The boss was quite proud, looking complacent. In fact, the last appearance of the father is not determined by the craftsmanship of the funeral home owner. The owner of the funeral parlor has just done some tinkering work with the stroke of a pen, and its artistry is questionable. My father's appearance has been formed for a long time under the influence of both internal and external factors. Especially in the last three years, it was set very quickly. It's interesting to say, but there are so many people alive that it's inconvenient to write about it at the moment.

As for the young man, Nick was enlightened in the hemlock forest behind the Indian camp. Behind their little house there was a path through the woods to the pasture, and then a winding road through the glade to the Indian camp. He wished he could walk on the forest path again with his bare feet now. First of all, the rotting pine needles that ran through the hemlock forest behind the house, the old trees that had fallen to the ground had broken into piles of sawdust, and the long branches split by lightning struck hung like javelins in the treetops. You cross the creek from the canoe bridge, and if you step on an empty one, all that awaits you under the bridge is black mud. Climb over a fence and out of the woods, where the sunny field path is hard, with only stubble left, small sorrel grass and celestial flowers growing in some places, and a wriggling muddy pond on the left, formed by the flooding of the stream, where noisy street birds feed. And the water refrigeration was in this brook. There was some fresh manure under the barn, and there was also a pile of old manure, which had dried up on the top. Then you climb over a fence, and walk the hard and hot path from the barn to the pasture house, which is a hot sandy road that leads to the edge of the woods, and then crosses the creek on the way, and this time there is a bridge over the stream, and there are cattails growing under the bridge, and you go fishing with a harpoon at night, and you use this cattail to soak it in oil and light it to make a bonlight.

When the road reaches the edge of the woods, turn left and go around the woods up the hill, then you have to take a wide clay gravel path into the woods. There was shade on the trees, and the road was cool to step on, and it was particularly open, so that the bark of the hemlock trees that the Indians had peeled off was hauled out. The bark of the hemlock trees was neatly folded, piled up in long rows, and covered with some bark on top, so that it really looked like a house. The thick, yellow trees that had been stripped of their bark were thrown in their place, and they were left to rot in the woods, not even the branches and leaves of the treetops were cut off or burned. All they wanted was bark to supply the tanning mills of the city of Boyne, and when the lake froze in winter, it was pulled to the ice and dragged to the opposite shore, so that the woods were scarce from year to year, and the glade, which was bare, scorching, and full of weeds, grew larger and larger.

But at that time the woods there were quite dense, and they were all primeval forests, and the trunks of the trees grew to the old height before branching out, and when you walked in the forest, there were a lot of brown and fluffy pine needles under your feet, which were clean and clean, and there were no clumps of trees, and no matter how hot the weather was outside, it was also a shade there. The three of them leaned against the trunk of a hemlock tree that was thicker than two beds. The breeze shuffled high above the treetops, dappling the shaded skylight. Billy said:

"You want Trudy again?"

"Trudy. What do you say?"

"Uh-huh. ”

"Let's go. ”

"No, it's good here. ”

"Cobili in ......"

"What's that. Billy is my brother. ”

Then the three of them sat there again, trying to hear the cry of a black squirrel high in the branch, but they could not see it. They were waiting for the little thing to bark again, because as soon as it barked, as soon as it raised its tail, Nick could shoot wherever he saw movement. He hunted for a day, and his father only gave him three rounds, and his shotgun was a twenty-caliber single-barrel gun with a long barrel.

"The puppy doesn't move," Billy said.

"You take a shot, Nicky [4] . Scare it. As soon as it escapes, another shot will be fired," Mr. Trudy said. It was rare for her to be able to say such a few coherent sentences.

"I only have two bullets left," Nick said.

"This bitch," Billy said.

They sat there with their backs to the tree, silent. Nick felt empty, but his heart was quite happy.

"Eddie said he was going to come and sleep with your sister Dorothy one night. ”

"What?"

That's what he said. ”

Trudy nodded.

"That's just what he wants," she said. Eddie is their half-brother. He was seventeen years old.