ACROSS the RIVER and INTO the TREES by ERNEST HEMINGWAY

This country meant very much to him, more than he could, or would ever tell anyone and now he sat in the car happy that in another half hour they would be in Venice. He took two mannitol hexanitrate tablets; since he had always been able to spit since 1918, he could take them dry, and asked,

“How are you doing, Jackson?”

“Fine, sir.”

“Take the left outside road when we hit the fork for Mestre and we’ll be able to see the boats along the canal and miss that main traffic.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. “Will you check me on the fork?”

“Of course,” the Colonel said.

They were coming up on Mestre fast, and already it was like going to New York the first time you were ever there in the old days when it was shining, white and beautiful. I stole that, he thought. But that was before the smoke. We are coming into my town, he thought. Christ, what a lovely town.

They made the left turn and came along the canal where the fishing boats tied up, and the Colonel looked at them and his heart was happy because of the brown nets and the wicker fish traps and the clean, beautiful lines of the boats. It’s not that they are picturesque. The hell with picturesque. They are just damned beautiful.

They passed the long line of boats in the slow canal that carried water from the Brenta, and he thought about the long stretch of the Brenta where the great villas were, with their lawns and their gardens and the plane trees and the cypresses. I’d like to be buried out there, he thought. I know the place very well. I don’t believe you could fix it, though. I don’t know. I know some people that might let me be buried on their place. I’ll ask Al­berto. He might think it was morbid, though.

For a long time he had been thinking about all the fine places he would like to be buried and what parts of the earth he would like to be a part of. The stinking, putre­fying part doesn’t last very long, really, he thought, and anyway you are just a sort of mulch, and even the bones will be some use finally. I’d like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees. I don’t think it would be much of a nuisance to them. I could be a part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jump­ing horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of fly.

They were up on the causeway from Mestre to Venice now with the ugly Breda works that might have been Hammond, Indiana.

“What do they make there, sir?” Jackson asked.

“The company makes locomotives in Milan,” the Colonel said. “Here they make a little of everything in the metallurgic line.”

It was a miserable view of Venice now and he always disliked this causeway except that you made such good time and you could see the buoys and the channels.

“This town makes a living on its own,” he said to Jackson. “She used to be the queen of the seas and the people are very tough and they give less of a good God­damn about things than almost anybody you’ll ever meet. It’s a tougher town than Cheyenne when you really know it, and everybody is very polite.”

“I wouldn’t say Cheyenne was a tough town, sir.”

“Well, it’s a tougher town than Casper.”

“Do you think that’s a tough town, sir?”

“It’s an oil town. It’s a nice town.”

“But I don’t think it’s tough, sir. Or ever was.”

“O.K., Jackson. Maybe we move in different circles. Or maybe we have a differing definition for the word. But this town of Venice, with everybody being polite and having good manners, is as tough as Cooke City, Mon­tana, on the day they have the Old Timers’ Fish Fry.”

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