The Tradesman’s Return, Ernest Hemingway

The Tradesman’s Return

THEY CAME ON ACROSS IN THE NIGHT AND it blew a big breeze from the northwest. When the sun was up he sighted a tanker coming down the gulf and she stood up so high and white with the sun on her in that cold air that it looked like tall buildings rising out of the sea and he said to the nigger, “Where the hell are we?”
The nigger raised himself up to look.

“Ain’t nothing like that this side of Miami.”
“You know damn well we ain’t been carried up to no Miami,” he told the nigger.
“All I say ain’t no buildings like that on no Florida keys.”
“We’ve been steering for Sand Key.”

“We’ve got to see it then. It or American shoals.”
Then in a little while he saw it was a tanker and not buildings and then in less than an hour he saw Sand Key light, straight, thin and brown, rising out of the sea right where it ought to be.
“You got to have confidence steering,” he told the nigger.

“I got confidence,” the nigger said. “But the way this trip gone I ain’t got confidence no more.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It hurts me all the time.”

“It ain’t nothing,” the man said. “You keep it clean and wrapped up and it’ll heal by itself.”
He was steering to the westward now to go in to lay up for the day in the mangroves by Woman Key where he would not see anybody and where the boat was to come out to meet them.
“You’re going to be all right,” he told the Negro.

“I don’t know,” the nigger said. “I hurt bad.”
“I’m going to fix you up good when we get in to the place,” he told him. “You aren’t shot bad. Quit worrying.”
“I’m shot,” he said. “I ain’t never been shot before. Anyway I’m shot is bad.”
“You’re just scared.”

“No sir. I’m shot. And I’m hurting bad. I’ve been throbbing all night.”
The nigger went on grumbling like that and he could not keep from taking the bandage off to look at it.

“Leave it alone,” the man who was steering told him. The nigger lay on the floor of the cockpit and there were sacks of liquor, shaped like hams, piled everywhere. He had made himself a place in them to lie down in. Every time he moved there was the noise of broken glass in the sacks and there was the odor of spilled liquor. The liquor had run all over everything. The man was steering in for Woman Key now. He could see it now plainly.

“I hurt,” the nigger said. “I hurt worse all the time.”
“I’m sorry, Wesley,” the man said. “But I got to steer.”
“You treat a man no better than a dog,” the nigger said. He was getting ugly now, but the man was still sorry for him.

“I’m going to make you comfortable, Wesley,” he said. “You lay quiet now.”
“You don’t care what happens to a man,” the nigger said. “You ain’t hardly human.”
“I’m going to fix you up good,” the man said. “You just lay quiet.”

“You ain’t going to fix me up,” the nigger said. The man, whose name was Harry, said nothing then because he liked the nigger and there was nothing to do now but hit him, and he couldn’t hit him. The nigger kept on talking.
“Why we didn’t stop when they started shooting?”
The man did not answer.
“Ain’t a man’s life worth more than a load of liquor?”
The man was intent on his steering.

“All we have to do is stop and let them take the liquor.”
“No,” the man said. “They take the liquor and the boat and you go to jail.”
“I don’t mind jail,” the nigger said. “But I never wanted to get shot.”
He was getting on the man’s nerves now and the man was becoming tired of hearing him talk.
“Who the hell’s shot worse?” he asked him. “You or me?”

“You’re shot worse,” the nigger said. “But I ain’t never been shot. I didn’t figure to get shot. I ain’t paid to get shot. I don’t want to be shot.”
“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him. “It don’t do you any good to talk like that.”

They were coming up on the key now. They were inside the shoals and as he headed her into the channel it was hard to see with the sun on the water. The nigger was going out of his head, or becoming religious because he was hurt; anyway he was talking all the time.

“Why they ran liquor now?” he said. “Prohibition’s over. Why they keep up a traffic like that? Whyn’t they bring the liquor in on the ferry?”
The man steering was watching the channel closely.

“Why don’t people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?”
The man saw where the water was rippling smooth off the bank even when he could not see the bank in the sun and he named her off. He swung her around, spinning the wheel with one arm, and then the channel opened out and he took her slowly right up to the edge of the mangroves. He came astern on the engines and threw out the two clutches.

“I can put a anchor down,” he said. “But I can’t get no anchor up.”
“I can’t even move,” the nigger said.
“You’re certainly in a hell of a shape,” the man told him.

He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting and dropping the small anchor but he got it over, and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.

All night after he had dressed the nigger’s wound and the nigger had bandaged his arm he had been watching the compass, steering, and when it came daylight he had seen the nigger lying there in the sacks in the middle of the cockpit, but then he was watching the seas and the compass and looking for the Sand Key light and he had never observed carefully how things were. Things were bad.

The nigger was lying in the middle of the load of sacked liquor with his leg up. There were eight bullet holes through the cockpit splintered wide. The glass was broken in the windshield. He did not know how much stuff was smashed and wherever the nigger had not bled he himself had bled. But the worst thing, the way he felt at the moment, was the smell of booze. Everything was soaked in it. Now the boat was lying quietly against the mangroves but he could not stop feeling the motion of the big sea they had been in all night in the gulf.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” he told the nigger. “Then I’ll fix you up again.”
“I don’t want no coffee.”
“I do,” the man told him. But down below he began to feel dizzy so he came out on deck again.
“I guess we won’t have coffee,” he said.
“I want some water.”
“All right.”

He gave the Negro a cup of water out of a demijohn.
“Why you want to keep on running for when they started to shoot?”
“Why they want to shoot?” the man answered.

“I want a doctor,” the nigger told him.
“What’s a doctor going to do that I ain’t done for you?”
“Doctor going to cure me.”
“You’ll have a doctor tonight when the boat comes out.”
“I don’t want to wait for no boat.”
“All right,” the man said. “We’re going to dump this liquor now.”

He started to dump it and it was hard work one-handed. A sack of liquor only weighs about forty pounds but he had not dumped very many of them before he became dizzy again. He sat down in the cockpit and then he lay down.
“You going to kill yourself,” the nigger said.
The man lay quietly in the cockpit with his head against one of the sacks.

The branches of the mangroves had come into the cockpit and they made a shadow over him where he lay. He could hear the wind above the mangroves and looking out at the high, cold sky see the thin brown clouds of the norther.
“Nobody going to come out with this breeze,” he thought. “They won’t look for us to have started with this blowing.”
“You think they’ll come out?” the nigger asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Why not?”
“It’s blowing too hard.”
“They’re looking for us.”
“Not with it like this. What you want to lie to me for?” The nigger was talking with his mouth almost against a sack.
“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him.

“Take it easy, the man says,” the nigger went on. “Take it easy. Take what easy? Take dyin’ like a dog easy? You got me here. Get me out.”
“Take it easy,” the man said, kindly.

“They ain’t coming,” the nigger said. “I know they ain’t coming. I’m cold I tell you. I can’t stand this pain and cold I tell you.”
The man sat up feeling hollow and unsteady. The nigger’s eyes watched him as he rose on one knee, his right arm dangling, took the hand of his right arm in his left hand and placed it between his knees and then pulled himself up by the plank nailed above the gunwale until he stood, looking down at the nigger, his right hand still held between his thighs. He was thinking that he had never really felt pain before.

“If I keep it out straight, pulled out straight, it don’t hurt so bad,” he said.
“Let me tie it up in a sling,” the nigger said.
“I can’t make a bend in the elbow,”