Hemingway's Boat (19 page)

Late in that same summer, 1936, having been back and forth across the country twice since leaving Key West, he wrote: “The hell of it is you can't write or even try to when you've got a ten hour a day job in this goddamned heat.… My brother has made a respectable, hardworking fellow out of me; I have got a job now, a 1931 ford coupe that looks like new and a redheaded mistress with a pretty face and broad hips.” He said he had just
read “the gangrene story” in
Esquire
. He meant “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In August, when the letter caught up to Hemingway, the headlines in the world's papers were about Franco and his fascist troops launching war against Republican Spain.

Arnold got married. Her name was Vivian Stettler. She came up to his shoulder blades and had rolls of curly dark hair and a sense of adventure nearly to match his own. The two took off to see the continent again on a rebuilt Indian motorcycle. He liked going with his shirt off, head low, his beloved clinging to his belt loops with the wind rushing past their ears. Sometimes he rode with a ridiculous-looking Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat pulled down tight. Sometimes he worked all night at his writing notes by campfire light.

There was a temporary job down in Texas, breaking wild broncos. Arnold had been around horses for most of his life. He took the job and then came back to the Midwest, where he helped his physician-brother, who didn't want to be beholden to other people's rules, build his own hospital. When that was over, there were other construction projects. These always got in the way of the writing intentions. “Dear Maestro,” Hemingway wrote on April 24, 1942. “It was good to get a letter from you and to know that you are okay. After all, the building trade is quite a lot like writing, when you boil it all down, and I know you will get back to the other too.”

With world war on, the Samuelsons went to Alaska, up near the Arctic Circle, where they found work as civil servants on a government construction project. After the war, yearning for warmer weather and what he thought of as a Thoreau-like existence, Arnold convinced his spouse to go back down to Texas. Robert Lee, the place where they settled, was the seat of Coke County, named for the man who'd led the South against the North in the Civil War. It was on the remote edge of the great Sonoran Desert, at the confluence of Mountain Creek and the Colorado River, in the valley of what is called the Edwards Plateau. The whole of Coke County had a population of barely three thousand people, making it one of the most sparsely populated counties in America. Robert Lee was its tumbleweed metropolis. A wealthy and ex-Olympic polo player named Fred Roe, native of those West Texas parts, gave Arnold a job of retraining his polo ponies for ranch work.

He fell in love with his new home—the bluebonnets in the spring, the sun going cloudlessly toward noon for seven or eight months of the year. Things black as the ocean at night and a red sky at morning. Husband and wife scrounged savings and bought property on the outskirts of town,
at the south end, in what was thought of as Mexican Town. They built a small, tin-roofed, cinder-block house back in the brush, off a dirt road, a house that for the next four decades would be a kind of Rube Goldberg work ever in progress. In their front yard, they began Mesquite Lumber Company, constructing inexpensive, well-made, ready-built houses at the rate of about one every six months. It was a little hard to run a lumber company without a telephone, but the head of the household vowed he'd never have one.

After the move to Robert Lee, Arnold rarely traveled again. When he did venture out after 1946, it was for temporary construction jobs on bridges in other parts of the state. Those damp fields blurring by in moonlight from the rackety doorway of boxcars were history, and so was that kid dancing on a boat over a porpoise sighting, crying “Yi! Yi! Yi! Oh, boy! Oh boy! Wow! Eeeeyi! Yi!” That had been only little more than a decade ago.

A daughter was born in 1947, a son three years later. Correspondence with Ernest Hemingway grew sparser.

In 1955, his mother died. “Dear Arnold,” his closest sibling wrote on May 5 of that year.

That same year, an ex-hobo, who must still have been carrying somewhere inside dreams of becoming a recognized writer, sold a second story to
Esquire
. It was called “One Too Many,” and it picked up some of the old Mexico adventures. He wrote about its acceptance to his mentor, and from Cuba came a wire of congratulation, care of Mesquite Lumber Company:
HAPPIEST YOUR SALE ESQUIRE VERY PROUD SURE YOULL SELL OTHERS IF STORES AS GOOD AS YOUR LETTERS BEST LUCK ERNEST
. That December, in his Christmas card, Hemingway wrote: “Dear Maestro: Love to you and your family and congratulations on all the good work this year. Best always. Ernest.” But for whatever reason, “One Too Many” didn't get published.

The “abused share cropper of the high seas”—as Hemingway had once
mocked him in a letter to a mutual acquaintance—was in his mid-forties by now, still fit, with a goatee. Late at night, he'd sit with his shoes and socks off in his favorite corner, next to the immense fireplace that he'd set into mortar, rock by rock. He'd be reading, or playing his violin, or studying Russian, or recording things onto cassette tapes, or making journal entries, or just puffing on a homemade pipe. His family was aware of a long-ago manuscript he'd drafted in the company of Ernest Hemingway—that's about all they knew. He'd grown increasingly reticent around them, especially his children.

But in other ways, his eccentricities raged. He enjoyed dressing like the rag-picker's son. He carved his sandals from rubber tires. He wore his belt over top of the loops—he'd learned to do that on
Pilar
. He'd show up in Robert Lee on a Saturday wearing three and four hats stacked on top of one another. He'd drive through town in his beat-up pickup with his beloved horse Bozo in the rear and then let the nag out to graze on the courthouse lawn—where was the city ordinance that prohibited it? He walked through the streets sawing away on his violin, acknowledging no one. He'd sit in the back of the Baptist church and sing loudly and off-key and out of synch with the rest of the congregation—and stay afterward to offer a point-by-point critique of the pastor's sermon. He'd start arguments with the Ford dealer or the guy who had the hardware store, and then quote to them arcane points of tort law, for he'd become something of a self-taught lawyer, having scrounged out-of-date Texas law books at garage sales. Still, most of it seemed harmless enough, the various actings-out of a Coke County crank.

Harmless? There's a cartoon of him that his daughter drew—she might have been perhaps seven or eight at the time, so this would have meant the early fifties. It's of a figure with horns and huge teeth and menacing eyes and a pointy tail and freakish-looking ears and an ugly stubble of whiskers. The caption bubbles surrounding the monster: “Ears that hear everything.” “I am boss.” “Fool.” “Take your bath.”

If that was the scary father, there was the good one, too, only you never quite knew when
he
would show. Sometimes in the summer, Arnold would tell his daughter to fetch her playmate Lois Eubanks (the Eubankses were the Samuelsons' closest neighbors), and Arnold would spend the afternoon towing the two, squealing, on an old rubber raft through the floatable parts of the Colorado.

In 1956, he made the papers again when he stole his own horse from
the town pound. He said that Bozo, who was fourteen years old and fairly broken down, had been taken from him illegally and wasn't being properly fed and watered and so he had every moral right to take him back without permission. About one hundred spectators crowded into city hall for the comic horse-opera trial. Even out-of-town reporters showed. “I'm appearing,” he announced, “as an attorney for the defendant and not as the defendant.” The county prosecutor wouldn't let him operate a popcorn stand during recess. He was found guilty of the theft and fined one hundred dollars. “They think I'm crazy,” he told a reporter. Vivian Samuelson and the two children had stayed home.

Could such behavior have been masking something else? Could it have represented some form of redirected rage and plowed-under bitterness? “A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said.

“My father kept a journal and wrote constantly, but he was never satisfied with his efforts,” Arnold's daughter would write, many years hence, in the quiet introduction to the book her father wouldn't live to see published.

Another telegram arrived, with another family shock:
PLANE CRASH SAM AND BOYS BILLED
. It was August 26, 1957. “Billed” was supposed to be “killed.” Dr. Sam Samuelson and his young sons had gone down in a light plane that the physician was piloting. I wonder how long Dr. Sam's brother might have stared at the crazy word “billed.”

In the early summer of 1961, after getting the news on the radio of another death (not yet termed a suicide), Arnold wrote to Arnold Gingrich. Gingrich had published him once in almost three decades, but the two had kept in sporadic touch because of the Hemingway connection, just as Hemingway and Samuelson had kept sporadically in touch. Gingrich's Publisher's Page column of that October, addressing the suicide and the magazine's long association with Hemingway, was titled “E.H. A Coda from the Maestro.” He wrote: “We'll let the Maestro end this. His name is Arnold Samuelson and we heard from him, right after the event, from Texas. ‘Ernest lived as long as he could. His last act was the most deliberate of his life. He had never written about his own suffering. He said it all without words in the language any man can understand.' ” In a handwritten note to Samuelson, Gingrich said: “I was more moved by your letter, written on those sheets of that same old yellow paper from Whitehead Street, than I was by any other single thing connected with Ernest's death.”

Every now and then, a librarian or Hemingway scholar from some
far place would send a letter to Robert Lee, making inquiries about the long-ago, chance relationship. Arnold wasn't interested.

Years later, the town fathers wouldn't let him have a part in a historical pageant called “Old Coke County.” It was held at Mountain Creek Amphitheater. In the middle of the performance, the local agitator came up through the audience, playing his violin, halting things onstage.

After the local paper stopped publishing his rants to the editor, Arnold began taking out his own paid announcements. You can read them now and envision rage disguised as humor: “Vote for Cheap at Half Price Samuelson. Community Candidate for County Judge.… If elected, I will be available at all times to commissioners desirous of voting themselves another raise. I'll show 'em how to get both front feet in the trough and make room for me, too.” Even the ads for his lumber-and-housing business were a hoot: “Mesquite Lumber Company. Arnold Samuelson, Janitor in Charge. Special Notice: I'm not setting any price on the two bedroom house now under construction. When it's finished the highest bidder gets it. The main thing is to get it out of here. If we can't do anything else we might at least be able to clean up the yard.”

In 1973, a book about the long-ago trunk murders and Winnie Ruth Judd (who was still alive, in California) was published. In Minnesota, one of the grown daughters of the late Dr. Sam Samuelson reviewed
Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders
for her book club. Hearing about this, her uncle in West Texas became outraged. He sent a cassette tape to his niece filled with ramblings, labeling her activities bloodthirsty, shameful.

Joan Davis, justice of the peace, lifelong Robert Lee–ite, was something of a Samuelson family friend:

Joan Burns, Robert Lee–ite for most of her life: