Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

One day he was walking Marjorie alone when the neighbor girl came past with her young German shepherd. The dog had likely never seen a pig before and scrambled under the fence in curiosity. The girl called out that her dog was “mean” and he yelled back, “So is my pig.” Marjorie attacked the dog which snarled and barked. Marjorie pinned the dog in a corner with three fence posts. The dog was being strangled and crushed at the same time while its jaws were ripping at the pig’s ears which she ignored. He tugged at Marjorie’s neck but couldn’t budge her. The girl tried to help but her skirt was caught in the barbed wire. He cautioned himself not to look up her lovely legs but to help her save her dog’s life. He managed to wriggle and wedge a hand down between the dog and Marjorie and rip up whereupon he was able to toss the dog over the fence getting nipped badly in the shoulder in the process. The girl cringed in horror because his shoulder was bleeding though not as badly as the pig’s ear. Meanwhile the dog headed home down the road at top speed. She embraced him. “Don’t tell my father.”

“Don’t worry. I’m fine.” He errantly let a hand slide down brushing her firm butt in the summer skirt. She trembled and so did his hand. She backed away, flushed.

“Why are we kissing?” she asked.

“Because we wanted to.” He kissed her again even more passionately and clutching her rump. She wriggled and his fingers inched into the cloth-covered crevices. Marjorie made an alarming noise and they turned to her. She was clearly glaring at the girl. “Marjorie sit.” Marjorie sat like a bird dog looking off as if embarrassed.

“I didn’t know you could train a pig like a dog.”

“It’s one of my specialties,” he said smugly.

“Maybe you could help me train my dog?”

“I’d be glad to.”

“I better get home. They’ll worry if I don’t come back with the dog.”

“One more kiss?” he said, pushing her a bit into the thicket that surrounded the big rocks down in the corner of the pasture. He began to lift her skirt.

She was frantic. “I don’t take the pill yet.” She squirmed loose and ran down the fence line.

He sighed and wondered how unlikely the whole thing was. She reminded him of a ripe peach.

His exhaustion made him feel inert. The one doctor was testing him for sleep apnea saying he wasn’t getting enough oxygen when he slept. He didn’t care what it was, he just wanted to be over it. He was inert with self-absorption, a detestable emotion where you only sat there thinking about your meaningless fatigue. He had been sleeping pleasantly with his wife since the death of his neighbor and the evening on the porch. She didn’t feel up to making love but neither did he. He slept most of the day on his studio sofa, meaning a short nap that always elongated itself. The incident with the girl, her dog, and the pig was the only true lust he had felt for months.

Earlier in his career he had easily presumed that many of his problems were clinical and could best be handled by a battery of psychiatrists. Of late the exhaustion problem seemed insuperable. He read widely, as always, in the area of his problem which brought on the usual frustration of knowing what precisely was wrong and still being unable to do anything about it. After the doctors he slept most of a month. Quite suddenly he couldn’t write a sentence but then he didn’t want to. It was all he could do to sign a credit card receipt. When up he drifted as if sleepwalking mostly watching the multiple species of birds coming north from Mexico.

Fifteen years before, bored with northern winters, they had rented a house on a creek on the Mexican border. He hadn’t realized that it was one of the prime bird areas of the United States but he happily assumed the childhood delight of identifying birds. He saw the rare Mexican blue mockingbird the first time it arrived there. The word got around and promptly there were literally hundreds of bird-watchers lining the fence crossing the creek on the property line. He was furious about the privacy invasion and told some of them that he was going to shoot the bird. A few women wept. He hung a sign saying, “Beware American Champ Pit Bull Black Savage.” That definitely helped but not all that much. He drove to Nogales and went to Walmart and bought a boom box stereo and some CDs of the Mexican border featuring the music of love, violence, and death. That helped the most and seemed to frighten everyone. People would quickly come and go. He was amused that the Mexican blue mockingbird would prance up and down dancing on the boom box.

The whole area was gorgeous, mostly forested mountains and some desert all with both flora and fauna. A mother and daughter mountain lion had killed and eaten a deer in their brushy front yard. A jaguar was seen within a few miles of their house. Rattlesnakes were a bit of a worry. He had to shoot one in their bedroom one day. His wife had left the French doors open and the snake had come in to cool off. This was nothing compared with their warm weather place in Montana where a professional snake catcher had to remove a thousand rattlers in a cliffside den after he had lost his favorite English setter Rose. She had been bitten in the face with a fang protruding from her eye.

Earlier in his career when his writing had him well up a scrawny tree he was bright enough to take a break. He had been forced to admit that you can become stupider as you get older. During his Guggenheim year in his thirties he fished a hundred times but still managed to write a novel and a book of poems as the weather was bad frequently in northern Michigan.

Now, when his talent had etiolated, he often sat there suppurating, or worse yet simply dozed. He had always been a championship sleeper. Once he had taken two friends fishing and had fallen asleep in the act of rowing. When he had landed at de Gaulle in Paris a stewardess had to shake him awake. He was scarcely raring to go into a new life. Five cups of coffee and he could sleep immediately. He prided himself on being a good thinker whatever that meant. Not much most of the time. Luckily his memory had held out against attrition. He could see clearly backward into his waxing and waning. To wane was easy. Just come to a dead stop and you’ll fall off the rails asleep.

Fishing, bird hunting, and cooking for years had been his central obsessions. Stop one and they all stopped. It was a mystery of sorts but more caused more. When he had become interested in cooking in those teaching years his wife was thrilled. There is scarcely a housewife who doesn’t tire of coming up with something new every night for dinner. With him oddly it had begun somewhere between recipes and poems. In his usual state of hubris he decided to create original recipes that would amount to the size of a book of poems. Of course he quickly fell flat on his face. When questioned his wife would point out that his original recipe wasn’t original. She had a huge repertoire of recipes and a library of cookbooks that impressed all visitors. Not having thought the problem through he was humiliated that he wasn’t a great creative chef instantly. She, meanwhile, was highly amused to the point that he easily became quarrelsome. And to his despair he discovered that cooking and drinking didn’t go together, certainly not beyond a single glass of wine.

His first victory was absurd. A young couple from the French department had stopped by for a drink and to advise him on his next trip to France. The young woman seemed to know everything about food and wine. He did note how quickly the young quiet and deferential man opened a bottle of wine. It was enviable when he had seen it done in the bistros and he thought it required big talent and an amateur could never pull it off. His wife had warned him against cooking from the books of Paula Wolfert as the recipes were currently well “above his head.” He had started a recipe the afternoon before but it wouldn’t be done until midnight. His wife had made it once saying that he probably wasn’t worth all the effort. It was a stew made of duck legs and thighs, garlic, thyme, Armagnac, and red wine. His wife was tired, made an omelet with cheese, and went to bed, and he gave up on the recipe.