Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

“Will you marry me?” he said as if acting in a play.

“I can’t marry outside the church,” she said softly.

“Then I’ll become a Mennonite,” he insisted.

They both laughed at his absurd earnestness.

“Let’s take a walk,” she suggested.

He turned off the radio and followed her into the barn where she showed him a very young draft horse filly. “My dad called her Ruth after me.”

He felt the filly’s feminine soft nose and scratched an ear. She was beautiful. He followed Ruth out into the main barn away from the stables. She began to climb the ladder up to the mow.

He nodded and climbed after her. They were violating a farm kid joke about the boy always trying to get a girl to go up the ladder first so he could see her legs. He wondered if she knew the joke. Her black socks went above her knees and then there were the two bare thighs. In the dim light of the barn he couldn’t see between the thighs. He felt a weakness in his shoulders as if he might not be able to climb the ladder. At the top she flopped back on some loose hay blushing furiously.

“You were supposed to go first.”

“I know it,” he said boldly. So she did know the joke. Her face was close to his so he kissed her on the lips. She held the kiss a few moments then pushed him away.

“I never kissed a boy who was outside the church.” She seemed utterly jangled, the way he felt when he accidentally bit his cheek.

“I love you,” he said.

“Don’t say that you goof.”

He never forgot this brief incident. It had followed him for over forty years like the minstrels only it was a good memory.

She pointed out a large hole in the floor telling him that every day at 5:00 a.m. she threw hay down to her father to give to the milk cows adding that her brother used to do it but he had run away the year before he became eighteen to join the navy and to see what she called the “seven seas.” She stepped toward the ladder.

“No,” he said. “I’m the man. I’m supposed to go first to catch you if you fall.” She stopped unsure what to do in the face of his deviousness. He quickly stepped to the ladder and started down. She paused overlong so he stopped. He said, “Get started.” She said, “Who cares?” and headed down. The view was clearer and lighter this time and he felt his poor body roaring. She stumbled slightly on the next to last step. He grabbed her and she slid the last few feet down through his arms. He hoped she didn’t feel his trembling.

Outside her mother called from the back door of the house reminding her to feed the chickens. He helped, casting the cracked corn in a wide circle to avoid quarrels. Inside the cage she took a dozen eggs from the nest. He tried to kiss her again but she said, “No, please,” looking at her feet. She ran to the house and he followed slowly carrying the basket of eggs.

That was that. The end of the story. When he explained his theory of glimpses he felt this was a good example. When his editor read it she wasn’t all that impressed. “Where’s the narrative? What’s the story about? You promised when you sold the novel in advance that it would be a big sprawling story about love, lust, quarrels, and murder between three farm families, sort of a magnum version of A Thousand Acres .” He couldn’t very well admit that all of his ideas for a new novel had disappeared into raising a litter of pigs. Naturally he had been excited when he first mentioned the new novel and his editor was enthusiastic. He was very broke at the time and was getting that way again because of a very late Hollywood royalty check. His editor wrote him a quick note after their unpleasant phone confab. “For twenty-five bucks a reader doesn’t want one of your glimpses but a big story right in the face.”

This deflated him a bit though he knew very well writers in weak moments have always historically looked for philosophical underpinnings for their work. There were none that were not nearly laughable. Such campaigns were almost always led by the weakest writer in a group who had the most to gain, a fragile snippet of immortality as part of a “movement.” The Beats were a different matter, he thought, with quite a bit of substance, especially in contrast to the academic poets they were departing from who reminded one of a corn patch in a drought year. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing” worked if you were a good writer, otherwise it was gibberish. When he had tried it he came up with multiple pages about sex and food which was not surprising to him.

Despite the setback he could not shake his feelings about “glimpses.” Maybe he could write such a book of vignettes if first he wrote a best seller and was back in her favor. Or when he went to France in a couple of weeks he would keep a journal of vignettes if they came to him in a foreign country, but why wouldn’t they? It seemed like art blasphemy to wait, especially until you were old and rich, and the unlikelihood of them happening together struck his mood momentarily dumb. Writers are victims of their own goofy flights of the imagination. To have an imagination doesn’t mean you have control of it. In his teens the mere thought of Ava Gardner’s body made him erect. Why in God’s name was she married to the loathsome shrimp Mickey Rooney when she could have him, he thought? Of course how could he afford her when he only made sixty cents an hour as a night janitor at the local college? What if she wanted a new Buick convertible and he couldn’t afford a hubcap? Maybe he could win a lottery if he could find one. Michigan did not yet have a lottery. She would want a mansion if she didn’t already have one with Mickey. Maybe she would be unfaithful to him with Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power or, more likely, Cary Grant. To become sodden and disarmed over the complications of getting Ava in his arms. Or Deborah Kerr tied to the stake in a nightie in Quo Vadis, or was it The Robe ? Local girls were more reachable but were they suitable for a fifteen-year-old potential great artist? He was sweeping backstage one night when he saw a college girl actress just standing there on the stage in her undies looking out at the dark theater seats. He could think of nothing to say to her. She waved at him and he waved at her, and then she walked through one of those theater set doors that when you close the door the whole wall shudders. He swept more quickly. If he couldn’t say anything to this girl with her beauteous butt what could he possibly say to Ava Gardner? After he entered college the single most irritating thing people said was, “It’s all in the mind.” Of course it was. Where else would it be? But they said it with insipid incomprehension. What if he had followed the girl through the fake door? She might start running for the police. He couldn’t permit himself the fantasy line she would perform, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.” But this was reality so neither of them said anything. This experience caused him a great deal of unrest for weeks. The problem was that it was an actual event and seemed to show him that he was unprepared for a life of high romance. What would Lord Byron have said but then it was unlikely Byron would be sweeping auditorium floors. When he finally found a girl willing to take his virginity he discovered he didn’t know how to go about it. She had whispered “go ahead” and they continued necking and wrestling on a sofa. She finally took charge and they were able to proceed. In novels couples usually flopped back on waves of nothingness and the particulars weren’t mentioned. He thought, with some help I have solved the puzzle. It was more like the sensation of melting than anything else. He expected dramatic changes in his life afterward but nothing of significance happened.