I pushed it a bit further. “Have you ever laid hands on any of the daemons that you’ve written about. I mean, actually put your hands upon them?”
His face furrowed. “Yes,” he said. “I have done violence with a few of them.”
I wondered about this; wondered if he were kidding me. A couple days later, however, I was talking with Roger’s son, Trent, who had asked me what my favorite movie was, and I had told him, without hesitation, Black Orpheus. No sooner had I said this than I looked up, and, about one hundred yards away, we both saw Roger’s van pull into the parking lot. He got out and stood for a moment in the bright sun, leaning against the van.
I said to Trent, “One would almost think, even at this distance, that Roger could hear us talking.”
Trent laughed. “He probably can.”
We walked to where Roger was, and he greeted us warmly. Then he whispered two words in my ear. “Black Orpheus,” he said, his face lit with a grin that quickly faded as he got into the van. I think that was the precise moment when I knew that I was going to visit the Hemingway house in Ketchum and see what was there. And now, as fate, or will, or writer’s madness, would have it, I was there, or at least I was on my way. Actually, I was sitting in front of a vast woodpile in the Sun Valley sun, watching the darting eyes of a magpie, feeling quite foolish. Here I was a thousand miles from home on a crazy quest-—to see if a writer whose face resembled my father’s had left any part of his spirit behind when thirty years ago he had taken his life. I wanted, perhaps, to see if that shotgun blast was trapped in the walls of the house; I wanted to touch Amber Castle, too, but the Hemingway house was a tangible place, and if a spirit resided within it, I felt that somehow I would know it.
Later that afternoon I drove over to the big house on the Big Wood River, and saw it for the first time, sitting like a grayish bunker against the snow. A two-story cinderblock structure built above the river about a mile north of Ketchum. Aspen, cottonwood, and spruce hemmed the house, sheltered it, and the river ran below. All round the house were great white breadloaf hills. As I looked upon it, I realized this house was as far as one might get from the Cuban farm called Finca Vigia where Hemingway had spent the latter part of his life. And yet there was something fitting in the gray building’s shape, so square and blocky, against the northern sky of Idaho. Its lonely massivity against the steely winter landscape was like the old man himself. I drew an odd sigh of relief when I first beheld the sight, for it was, somehow, just what I expected.
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 collection 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 inadequate—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 beyond the islands, beyond Bimini blue, beyond the Caribbean 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 circumstances, the message traveled straight to the heart. I had really found something, I imagined, and my host, astonished 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 happened, 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 daemon 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 nibbling on Scottish scones that Roger had bought that morning 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 within the power of his birth name: Zelazny. Spark-maker, smithy of words.
“There is something I haven’t told you,” I recalled. “Something that someone said to me just before I left Idaho. It was weird, too. There was this old man at the airport, who came up to me and asked what I did for a living, and I mumbled, half-heartedly, that I was a teacher. And do you know what he said, that old man? He asked if I were a storyteller. And I told him that, being a teacher, I had to be. Then, while we waited for the plane, he told me a story. It was about a mountain man named John Colter, who ran half-naked across three hundred miles of wilderness while being pursued by half the Blackfeet nation.”