Dead Letters: "The Second Plane"

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
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I want to be clear about something: I was not on the first plane.

The first plane was a Cessna 180 that clipped a telegraph wire over Murchison Falls on January 23, 1954, and dropped Ernest Hemingway, his wife Mary, and their pilot Roy Marsh into crocodile country along the Nile. That was a private charter. A Christmas present from Hemingway to Mary. I was not invited, and given what happened, I consider this not a professional disappointment but a personal mercy.

I was on the second plane.

The de Havilland Rapide, piloted by a man named Reginald Cartwright, was supposed to fly the Hemingway party from Butiaba to Entebbe on the morning of January 24th. I had been in Entebbe covering a completely unrelated story about a coffee export dispute when word came over the wire that Hemingway was dead. I sat in a cane chair in the lobby of the Lake Victoria Hotel and read the dispatch twice. Then I hitched a ride to Butiaba — it involved a Land Rover and a ferry — and by the time I arrived, the man was very much not dead. He was sitting on a petrol drum near the airstrip with a bandaged shoulder, a Tusker beer, and an expression that discouraged conversation.

I introduced myself. I told him I was a correspondent and asked if he'd care to comment on his experience.

"No," he said.

I asked if his wife might be willing to speak with me.

"She would not," he said.

I asked if I might at least ride along to Entebbe, as I no longer had a way back.

He looked at me for what felt like a very long time. "Sit in the back," he said. "Don't talk to me."

I sat in the back. Cartwright started the engine. The de Havilland began to move down the runway, which was not so much a runway as a strip of cleared dirt with ambitions. We were perhaps halfway to takeoff speed when the right wheel hit what I was later told was an anthill, though at the time I would have described it as the end of the world.

The plane lurched, struck a thornbush, and came down hard on its nose. I remember the sound of metal bending — a sound I can tell you is nothing like what the films suggest. It is quieter and worse. Then there was fire.

I will not dramatise what happened next because I don't need to. The cabin door was jammed. Cartwright and Mary and Roy Marsh got out through the front. I got out through a window that I do not remember opening and cannot imagine fitting through, though the evidence suggests I did. Hemingway was the last one out. He forced the door open with his head and shoulder — he later said he used them "like a battering ram," though he did not say this to me — and emerged with his hair on fire.

A teenage boy from the village, whose name I later learned was Abdul, ran toward Hemingway with a blanket. The rest of us stood in the grass and watched the de Havilland burn. It burned completely. It took the Hemingways' passports, thirty rolls of film, three pairs of Ernest's reading glasses, all their money, and my one good notebook.

I had a cut above my left eye that was bleeding into my collar and a ringing in my ears that would persist for three weeks. Hemingway had a crushed vertebra, a ruptured kidney, a damaged liver and spleen, third-degree burns on his scalp and right arm, double vision, and hearing loss in one ear. He was also, I would argue, in a considerably worse mood than before.

We were driven to Entebbe by road. The drive took hours. I sat in the back of a police vehicle. Hemingway sat in a separate car. At one point our vehicles were stopped side by side at a checkpoint, and I could see him through the window. He was staring straight ahead. I thought about asking for a quote. I did not ask for a quote.

In Entebbe, journalists from around the world were gathered — not to cover his rescue, but to cover his death, which had been reported internationally the day before. When Hemingway appeared, bandaged and limping, he spoke to every single one of them. He joked. He smiled. He told the press, "My luck, she is running good."

He did not introduce me. He did not acknowledge that I had been on the plane. When a reporter from the Associated Press asked him to name the other passengers, he listed Cartwright, Marsh, and Mary. I was standing eight feet away. He looked directly at me while he said it.

I do not hold this against him. A man who has survived two plane crashes in twelve hours and is about to read his own obituaries over gin at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi has earned the right to decide who exists and who doesn't.

He won the Nobel that October — too injured to collect it. Seven years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, he killed himself. This time the obituaries were correct.

I still have the scar above my left eye. I never got the quote.
 

— F.M.  
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.