Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

His most irksome item of late was and continued to be his fifty-year slavery to language. He had read Keats at fourteen and the guillotine fell. He was no longer free but an addict of poetry. He recalled sitting on the roof looking at the stars and a new moon the night of his birthday, December 11. Poetry requires vows and he made them. Much later, seven years to be exact, his father and sister died in a car accident. After this the vows became harder than marble. If this can happen to those you love any other work is unworthy. When he started writing prose too, at first it felt like he was committing adultery, but he soon recognized that if he was working on a novel he also wrote more poems. Poetry started the workday. Pasternak told us, “Revise your souls to frenzy.” No matter how his life was compromised he kept at it, even on visits to Hollywood he was a servant of poetry. Los Angeles isn’t a city of early risers so his habitual morning walks were unpopulated. Across from the hotel where he always stayed, the Westwood Marquis, was the splendid UCLA botanical garden which he loved to daily distraction. There he would often meet a Chinese surgeon who sat quite motionless beside the pretty carp pool to prepare himself for six hours of brain surgery. He himself was prepping for a day of meetings that would help no one but a few who needed money, including himself. The irony was he was getting $350,000 for his next screenplay, a first draft and a set of changes, enough to buy the small farm he had been imagining.

When they first moved out of town his wife had criticized him for peeing outside. He had responded, “Farmers pee outside.” He had lived on his grandpa’s farm when he was young and his father couldn’t find work in the late years of the Depression. “I thought you were a writer,” she had responded, meanly he thought. The irony was that that was a great deal of money for something he could write in a month. He knew he would shut off the water if he wrote too fast and a bit clumsily but it was fun to make that kind of money quickly when in his teens he had done a number of jobs for anything from sixty cents to a dollar an hour which he still resented years later. If you unload a fertilizer truck in a hot shed for eighty cents an hour you remember it. He worked alone. There were four tons of fertilizer in bags and even his trousers became soaked with sweat. He drank a quart of cold water afterward and collapsed on his ass in a faint. Now he thought it might have been good for his writing. He had known another reality. At some point he slept again.

A few mornings later he got up at the first bright sun shining through the studio window. He turned on his little electric water pot and made a cup of instant coffee. It was wretched, though in general better than it used to be. Some progress on earth. He went outside, peed, and bowed deeply to the grave of Alice.

He was excited because this was the first morning he was going to try to take a piglet for a walk. He had no idea what would happen, cautioning himself that they were scarcely puppies.

He reached over the side of the pen and grabbed Walter, a medium-sized male, who always seemed a little dim-witted and slow. Walter walked ten feet from the pen then turned and looked back into the pen at his mother who was watching and cried piteously. Walter wouldn’t work out. At this point he was still a mama’s boy. He looked at Shirley whom he thought of as queen of the litter. She was alert, independent, a little fierce and feral. She would drive others into a corner in order to nap in peace. Sometimes she would punish them with bites. She was always scrappy and would gratuitously bother the others. She always hogged the best teat. He dropped the limp Walter into the pen and Darling nuzzled him in consolation. He grabbed Shirley who seemed to have a “choose me” attitude. The moment he put her down she was off and running like a bat out of hell. She headed for a boulder in a thicket in the far corner of the pasture as if she had been studying the location from the vantage of the pen for a long time. He trotted after her, tripping on a rock, and painfully knocked out his wind. His wife was watching from her flower garden.

“Are you okay?” she yelled.

“No, bring Mary.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Bring Mary. Shirley is loose.”

He was sitting up now, coughing from his last hundred cigarettes. Mary was a well-trained black English cocker spaniel who would go out and herd a horse back to his wife when she wanted to ride. Mary would visit the pen and growl and all the pigs would back up except Shirley who would stand nose to nose with her at the fence ignoring the growling as if she could tear the dog apart.

When his wife arrived with Mary he was still sitting on the ground struggling to get his air back. He wasn’t used to moving quickly. While other men ran he walked, thinking a couple of hours of walking every day made up for the difference in immediate exertion.

Mary spotted Shirley rooting in the far bushes near his sitting rock and seemed to understand her mission. She headed toward Shirley at a dead run with his wife in chase. His wife could run doing so every morning. Shirley turned around and faced the oncoming yipping dog. They were immediately a ball of fur, pink fat, and muscle. His wife grabbed Mary’s collar and Shirley ran for the other far corner. Mary twisted away and gave chase. Mary was running between the fence and Shirley, crouching her body and trying to herd her up toward the pen. He guessed Shirley would get tired, not being used to running. At that point Shirley suddenly stopped and sat down. Mary with her tongue way out sat down about five yards away from Shirley. He and his wife got there at about the same time.

“My poor baby is bleeding.” A little blood dripped from Mary’s ear.

“You could tell they weren’t kissing,” he said.

“You asshole.”

He threw her a kiss then leaned and picked up Shirley setting her in his arms on her back which makes piglets passive. He carried her to the nearby pen and leaned over dropping her a short distance. She immediately returned to glaring out of the pen at Mary who had come over to growl.

A week later he was still ignoring his life’s work in favor of tending to the pigs though it seemed that they had no need for him except food. Mealtime is a time of great excitement for pigs. There was an absurd misadventure when their water tank overflowed while he was on the phone with a New York editor. He returned to find the pen a mud hole which was aesthetically displeasing. He got a tub from the work shed near the house and filled it with warm soapy water. The piglets were fairly cooperative when he washed them off except Aristo and also Walter, who had become more animated with Aristo’s influence. He scrubbed the mud off Aristo who faked placidity, then suddenly jumped out of the tub and ran for it. When he lunged for Aristo, Walter also jumped out and chased after his mentor. He hollered at his wife who was planting her vegetable plot’s early lettuce and peas. He added, “Bring Mary” in a shout. She came a little slowly and Mary immediately saw the piglets trying to hide in the bushes near the big rock. There was no violence this time though Shirley jumped straight up and down in the pen in excitement. Mary expertly herded Aristo and Walter back to the pen. They were sparkling clean and air dried.

“They’re just going to muddy themselves again,” his wife said.

And so they did with evident pleasure. His effort had been futile.

“There’s a chemical I put in the tub that prevents a pernicious skin rash, sometimes fatal.” He was lying.

She suspected as much but humored him. “I’m not eating any dirty pig. They look better clean.”

“Pigs have a right to get muddy. It’s the main pleasure of their lives.” He asked himself why he was arguing with her when he had just spent the afternoon washing piglets.