The Ancient Minstrel

by Jim Harrison

  Jerry was an immediate pain in the ass insisting that he have a new house built for Catherine and the baby. Catherine simply enough didn’t want it. She liked the old one but settled on Jerry having a master bedroom wing built with an adjoining room for the baby. The contractor was there in the morning. By the looks of Catherine’s belly time was of the essence so Jerry offered the contractor extra money for speed. The contractor broke into an easy smile seeing Christmas come early.

  Jerry was so overbearing in looking after her mother that it drove both women batty. Luckily he became quite bored with the farm and said at the second dinner that he needed to fly to Key West. Catherine assumed it was to see his girlfriend. Jerry had drunk most of a bottle of Scotch that late afternoon and his slurred speech grated on her nerves. They were both enormously relieved in the morning when the Texan’s hired hand picked him up for his plane with its twelve seats and leather sofa. He was gaining a lot of weight and Catherine watched from the window as he waddled to the car. Catherine knew that he never read and wondered what he and her mother talked about. Recent purchases? She could see that age would eventually make him disgusting but with ovarian cancer her mother wouldn’t see it. She had obviously had bad luck with men when you overlooked Jerry’s wealth. Money was nearly meaningless to Catherine even though she knew she would enjoy a big bedroom and a baby room attached to the house. The door would be off the kitchen, her favorite room. She used to play cribbage at the kitchen table with a maiden great-aunt who lived her last year with the grandparents. She worked in Chicago as a young woman and when they played cards the radio in the evening was tuned to a station there. She nattered constantly about the beauty of Chicago and made Catherine promise to go there when she grew up. Catherine was even now embarrassed that when she had visited Chicago she stayed in the Drake where her maiden aunt had worked.

  Of late Catherine who was not of a religious bent wondered what became of Tim after suicide. Christians would say that suicides went directly to hell, wherever that was. It was left over from Sunday school she supposed. Catherine was unsure of hell or an afterlife but thought his lifelong pain should count for something. She had watched a local man limping on the sidewalk. He had lost his toes to the cold in Korea. It could have been worse and local lazy people envied his disability payments. Something for nothing was the ultimate good as far as they were concerned. War was hardly nothing. She regretted not being able to help Clyde load the hay bales onto the wagon and then into the barn because of her pregnancy.

  Mother wept for a couple of days and then in a torrent of garbled language apologized to Catherine for the abuses in her raising. The first duty, she said, of a mother is to protect her children, even from her husband. Her own husband had never gotten out of himself for even a moment. Once assured of Catherine’s forgiveness her mother declined dramatically as if this forgiveness had been her life’s work. Catherine called Jerry in Key West saying that the situation was serious. Jerry said he’d try to get away. She thought, From your fishing and adulterous fucking. Meanwhile, she had to get her mother several appointments with a psychiatrist in the county seat because she was plainly becoming daft. She would sit on the front porch talking to Robert who was obviously not there. She drove her mother the two hours to the prison to visit Robert but her mother couldn’t complete the mission. She vomited in the parking lot seeing the walls and razor wire fencing. She was catatonically angry. “Why put him here just because he burned that piece of shit house?” Catherine had tried to explain Robert’s refusal to fight for himself. By the time of the fire her ex-husband’s illusions had plainly gotten out of hand. He was pretending he was “old money” living in a grand home though he was borrowing gin money from hunting acquaintances. Catherine figured that his delusions came from a lifetime of hard drinking.

  Chapter 13

  Catherine drove Jerry and her mother to the Texan’s landing strip. The Texan had only dropped Jerry off the day before in his new Jeep Wagoneer. No one local would use a six-thousand-dollar vehicle to roam his ranch. Catherine was glad to see them leave, flying east to Rochester, Minnesota, to get her mother admitted to Mayo. Her mother sobbed piteously while boarding the plane because she couldn’t stay to help with the oncoming baby. Help by being a relentless pain in the ass? Catherine thought wryly. You couldn’t miss Jerry’s self-importance in boarding a private jet.

  She daily felt heavier and more awkward but was pleased when the baby kicked in her womb. She could barely make her morning stroll with Hud out to the pond and boneyard behind the barn. One day it was cool and rainy and she refused to go and he actually wept until she relented, bundled in a sweater and raincoat. She reminded herself of the perils of starting habits with dogs. In the big pasture they had to go back every time to the rock pile where he had once almost but not quite caught a big black snake. He was obviously goaded by his failure.

  Near the pond she sat on a big rock with a peculiar resemblance to a monster stone egg. It had been Catherine’s “magic” place since early childhood. When she frequently visited the farm with her mother she’d walk out to her stone egg when she was disturbed by anything and the stillness of the scene pacified her. How can you draw pure energy from a stone? It was possible for her. Later in life it occurred to her that in the serenity of the place she had arrived at a point of child meditation where her mind emptied itself of its enervating trash and she could identify with the pond and big pile of white cow bones. Now it amused her when Hud tried to pick up the pelvis of a cow skeleton. His jaws weren’t strong enough yet to pick it up but he had slowly dragged it about halfway to his trophy hideout in the front yard lilac grove. Such extreme effort for his own private reasons. Like a child he had his own collection of “stuff” whose importance was clear only to the owner.

  She sat there on the stone egg and was flooded with rare sympathy for her mother. Her father’s promise of a farm in Montana was an outrageous lie and it was obvious that he’d never had any intention of keeping that promise. Her grandfather in England told her that her father was a “scoundrel.” Who in his right mind would rather run a tiny bank than be a farmer? This was during a long conversation during the Blitz. Her grandparents had urged their daughter early on to leave the bastard but along came Robert and her. Even his own parents were not that fond of him, preferring the company of Catherine’s mother. She was always absolutely welcome at the farm but it would have been a small town scandal had she moved out there permanently. Now Catherine believed that she should have. What did it really matter if her mother had embraced her singular desire? It was a brutal lesson indeed to both mother and daughter. To live at a distance of a half dozen miles from where your heart was.

  As she sat there scratching Hud’s ears which he loved the worry about Tim was nagging at her, this idea that suicides must go to hell. It was maddening to worry about a person already dead and she couldn’t quite believe that God would add to the suffering of someone who had already suffered so much. To her the suicide had been an act of courage. To deny the self further existence when the self had been so rended. War waits to kill some.

  She wanted to examine her religious beliefs and discard the ones that no longer made sense but it seemed difficult when she was this pregnant. She also perceived that to discard them wouldn’t be all that easy or simple. They were ingrained. When she was passionately religious as a young girl she read the Gospels over and over. By contrast the Old Testament was mean and foreboding. Why did King David so desire Bathsheba and send her husband away to be killed in battle? That seemed very mean-minded to her and Laura had agreed. And why did this great man peek at Bathsheba while she was bathing? This was definitely a sin she supposed. Even now she said her prayers before bed in the evening though they were quite abbreviated. She kept recalling her disappointment as a girl when she prayed that her parents would quit getting drunk and it hadn’t happened. She still believed devoutly in the Resurrection partly because it was such a glorious, magical idea to rise
from the dead with the spike scars in your hands and feet. She knew that a belief in magic was quite common among her friends, even her Sunday school teacher who claimed to have seen several ghosts.

  Now to Catherine the magic of life was in the spectacular assortment of species. Even at this moment she saw the nose of a muskrat rise above the surface of the pond. Hud also saw it and sitting beside her quivered with excitement but then he was thinking of a wild meal. She had read that some people ate muskrats from the river in Detroit, Michigan, but then she had also read that poor people in the Southwest ate donkeys during the Depression. Why God had decided not to stop her parents’ drinking was the early question that stuck with her. It seemed a simple request but then that was long before she knew anything about addiction. She herself had been truly drunk only once on her college graduation night and felt badly for three days which prevented her from doing it again. It had competed with the preposterous discomfort of being nearly nine months pregnant. She had read once about a woman who bore eighteen children which now seemed thoroughly incomprehensible even if she had been a cow.

  Chapter 14

  Catherine summoned Clyde one Sunday morning for a somewhat formal meeting on the farm after her walk. She needed him to spend more time around her place in case she fell and delivered the baby on the ground. The obstetrician had warned her to be more cautious about her walking for the time being.

  In fact Catherine was finding walking difficult now. Her legs and feet hurt from the extra weight. She thought now that one baby would certainly be enough. She kept recalling how she had ruined walking for a while way back when she was doing the Lorca project in college. The poet had obviously spent a great deal of time walking around the city for Poet in New York and her plan was to imitate the tactic. One morning she started out on 112th Street and walked all the way to Washington Square in the Village where she felt lucky to hear a very good violinist play a Paganini piece that was a little beyond him but not by far. He smiled as spectators filled his open violin case with money. A dapper old man dropped in a twenty and the musician broke into a grin.

  Now back at the farm Clyde seemed nervous like all of the poor about a good job. He finally blurted out that when Jerry was here he had stopped by and asked Clyde if he thought he could handle managing the Texan’s ranch in addition to Catherine’s farm. Clyde thought it over briefly and said yes because the Texan’s ranch was a basic cow operation where you turned bulls loose every year and then waited to see how many new calves you got. Of course there were a thousand somewhat complicated details but none that Clyde couldn’t handle.

  Catherine felt up in the air about the whole business though she knew it would be good for Clyde making him a big shot manager of a large ranch. The poor are always saying, “I’d like a break that is not my neck.” So she told Clyde she was pleased for him. She couldn’t add that she could barely stand the sight of Jerry. But then she predicted to herself that he wouldn’t be out that often. His sport was buying, not maintaining what he bought. He might go to one Cattlemen’s meeting to strut a bit and that would largely be it. She told Clyde to make sure he kept a good set of books because the rich thrive on the suspicion that they are being swindled.

  Chapter 15

  When she went into labor Clyde drove her to the new little hospital in Livingston (her mother had insisted she go to the big hospital in Bozeman but as usual she ignored her). The pains were still far apart and she noticed that it was December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. If it was a daughter maybe she should name it “Pearl” but then she never had cared for the name. Catherine had been so consumed by the Blitz she never thought about Pearl Harbor except once she had seen a photo of a big ship the Japanese had sunk and couldn’t imagine it on the ocean floor.

  It was a long delirious day until early in the evening when she gave birth, a difficult breech birth, to a boy. She held the homely little runt for a few minutes and thought of the William Blake line, “Little lamb, who made thee.” She was still possessed with some of the horrifying aspects of giving birth, hallucinating herself as a huge, opening tropical flower with a fatally injured core. She wondered if that meant she was dying and she would see Tim in the afterlife but was quite relieved when it didn’t happen and they brought her the cottage cheese she had requested. Birth was hard work and she was hungry. She recalled when she finally reached Greenwich Village one day on a particularly long hike for Lorca she went to a little Italian place she knew and had pasta with marinara and one big meatball. She relished it. Typical of her obstinacy she turned around and walked all the way back, the last hour in a steady chilly rain so she returned to the apartment with aching legs in the guise of a wet dog. Her roommate was appalled and put her to bed after a bowl of chicken soup. She woke the next morning with shin splints, unable to walk to class. There’s something in cement that doesn’t love a foot, she thought, but New Yorkers must get used to it. You certainly don’t get shin splints walking in a pasture.

  She called her mother. Alicia wasn’t doing well at all according to Jerry who answered the phone. She told him she had named the baby Tim. He congratulated her and her mother came on the line for a few minutes and in a weak voice said, “I wish I were there to help you.”

  Chapter 16

  It was a tough winter with the baby who had colic. Only dancing would slow his crying. She questioned her indomitable will to reproduce deciding its origins were too far beneath the skin to comprehend. Clyde’s wife Clara and her two daughters came over and stayed a couple of weeks to help out. The older daughter Laurel said she didn’t like babies but she turned out to be the most helpful with little Tim. He had lost the red face of a newborn and now was pale with black hair like his father. Catherine had given the baby all that she was and then some. As she had with Tim. She felt unbearably depressed, the so-called “baby blues,” so she took a lot of vitamins and made sure she at least walked out to the pond and back every morning. It seemed to improve slightly with the solstice and on sunny winter days, of which there are many in Montana, she clocked the ever so slight increase of light with the specific shadows of the barn. She remembered from her childhood that after the hard work of autumn, harvest and butchering, everyone became happier after the solstice and the long, sure trek toward spring. Her solstice reverie was interrupted by a big blizzard at Christmas and she was relieved she was well stocked with groceries and didn’t have to drive anywhere. She felt especially sorry for those who felt compelled to make long driving trips for Christmas.

  Nursing was a great pleasure. She was becoming too thin and devised ways to make up for it. She mentioned aloud that she so missed the sausages of her grandparents who were fine sausage makers, burying their product in a huge crock of pig fat to preserve it like the French do their confit. Clyde told her there was a new, cranky young butcher in Livingston. The roads were still bad but she had bought a big diesel pickup for the farm and he returned with five pounds of sausage and a big beef roast for Christmas dinner. It was a happy occasion and Catherine made Yorkshire pudding as her mother had done. Her mother had been a deeply mediocre and hasty cook, and her ability further declined the more she drank. Catherine had noticed that the good cooks she knew saved their drinks for after the dishes were prepared except men at the barbecue, a great deal easier than any of them were prone to admit. Following a few principles they managed even when half drunk.

  Jerry called to say Mother had died Christmas Day at Mayo. This was three days later but he said he hadn’t wanted to ruin her Christmas. They might have been able to prolong things a little longer but she had a horror of oxygen and feeding tubes and had asked them when it reached that point to “pull the plug.” Jerry also said she had written a note asking that her ashes be strewn on the pond behind the barn, and that she wanted Catherine to do it.

  Unlike with her father Catherine wept for a while. When she was a little girl she and her mother would have picnics on the pond, squinting their eyes and pretending it was a
big lake. On the especially hot days of summer they would bathe in the pond which was sandy around the edges. Only when not around her husband could her mother be utterly pleasant. Catherine mourned what might have been. She was convinced now that her mother should have taken her and Robert back to England and raised them in London. Her parents had offered to take them in, she later told Catherine, which was what led to their visit before war broke out.

  Her obstetrician had sent her an antique Lakota papoose for Christmas and she packed Tim warmly inside for morning walks. Her neighbor had cleared her driveway with his tractor and plow and she had him scrape out an area to throw feed to the chickens. She had a small stroller for Tim and shoveled a path from the house for the stroller. By March Tim’s first laughter had been at the chickens. Hud, who was getting much larger, would sit beside the stroller as if he were a guard, typical of the breed, and growl deeply at approaching chickens who feared him.

  In April on a warmish day the snow seemed to be melting. Catherine was out in the barnyard with Tim having a sandwich and feeding him a jar of pureed peaches, watching the nearly mature hatchlings driving each other batty. Tim watched them closely and didn’t stop smiling. She held him up at the fence so he could touch the soft noses of the horses and a single very docile calf. Clyde had come by with three piglets to raise good pork for the two households. She had long figured out that supermarket pork wasn’t nearly as tasty as what her grandfather had home raised and butchered. It would cost money to feed them as you couldn’t grow corn easily in this high, dry climate. Hud growled and the piglets shrank back in the pen. Tim reached out for them but Catherine held him back thinking they might mistake his little hand for food. Three days later one of the piglets got out but only trotted over to nibble corn scratch with the chickens. Tim was gleeful and Hud furious. She said, “Hud, no,” to his growling. She was able to pet the piglet and scratch its ears, both of which it liked. Tim was so delighted to touch its ears and the piglet sniffed his hand.