Free Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway Page B

just before they shut the gardens. There’s a high iron fence all around the gardens and they shut the gates at dark and everyone has to go out. Guards go through warning people and locking up the gates. After the guards went ahead I used to kill the pigeons with a slingshot when they were on the ground by the fountain. They make wonderful slingshots in France.”
    “Didn’t you make your own if you were poor?” Andrew asked.
    “Sure. First I had one I made from a forked branch of a sapling I cut down in the Forest of Rambouillet when Tommy’s mother and I were on a walking trip there. I whittled it out and we bought the big rubber bands for it at a stationery store on the Place Saint-Michel and made the leather pouch out of leather from an old glove of Tommy’s mother.”
    “What did you shoot in it?”
    “Pebbles.”
    “How close would you have to get?”
    “As close as you could so you could pick them up and get them under the blanket as quick as you could.”
    “I remember the time one came alive,” young Tom said. “And I held him quiet and didn’t say anything about it all the way home because I wanted to keep him. He was a very big pigeon, almost purple color with a high neck and a wonderful head and white on his wings, and you let me keep him in the kitchen until we could get a cage for him. You tied him by one leg. But that night the big cat killed him and brought him in to my bed. The big cat was so proud and he carried him just as though he were a tiger carrying a native and he jumped up to the bed with him. That was when I had a square bed after the basket. I can’t remember the basket. You and mother were gone to the café and the big cat and I were alone and I remember the windows were open and there was a big moon over the sawmill and it was winter and I could smell the sawdust. I remember seeing the big cat coming across the floor with his head high up so the pigeon barely dragged on the floor and then he made one jump and just sailed right up and into the bed with him. I felt awfully that he had killed my pigeon but he was so proud and so happy and he was such a good friend of mine I felt proud and happy, too. I remember he played with the pigeon and then he would push his paws up and down on my chest and purr and then play with the pigeon again. Finally I remember he and I and the pigeon all went to sleep together. I had one hand on the pigeon and he had one paw on the pigeon and then in the night I woke up and he was eating him and purring loud like a tiger.”
    “That’s a lot better than names of streets,” Andrew said. “Were you scared, Tommy, when he was eating him?”
    “No. The big cat was the best friend I had then. I mean the closest friend. I think he would have liked me to eat the pigeon too.”
    “You ought to have tried it,” Andrew said. “Tel some more about slingshots.”
    “Mother gave you the other slingshot for Christmas,” young Tom said. “She saw it in a gun store and she wanted to buy you a shotgun but she never had enough money. She used to look at the shotguns in the window every day when she went past the store to the Epicene and one day she saw the slingshot and she bought it because she was afraid they would sell it to somebody else and she kept it hid until Christmas. She had to falsify the accounts so you wouldn’t know about it. She’s told me about it lots of times. I can remember when you got it for Christmas and you gave me the old one. But I wasn’t strong enough to pull it then.”
    “Papa, weren’t we ever poor?” Andrew asked.
    “No. I’d gotten over being poor by the time you guys were born. We were broke lots of times but never really poor the way we were with Tom and his mother.”
    “Tell us some more about in Paris,” David said. “What else did you and Tommy do?”
    “What did we do, Schatz?”
    “In the fall? We used to buy roasted chestnuts from a roast chestnut man and I used to keep my hands warm on them too. We went to