Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

One day Catherine got some mail from her grandparents in London who were so pleased to be home and out of the accursed underground. When they had reached home some squatters were in there but it was only a young teacher, his wife, and their baby. Their apartment two blocks away had been utterly destroyed so her grandparents allowed them to make their quarters in a couple of back rooms for the duration of the war. They all liked each other a lot and the young man was skilled enough to replace some windows on the east side of the house that had been broken by the blasts of bombs. The young wife was good in the kitchen, never Grandma’s strength, and Grandma loved the little baby boy. Her grandparents were able to visit the farm once in an MI5 vehicle driven by the huge Jamaican, Fred. They ate eggs for three days and returned to London with several dozen, some cleaned chickens, and a few rabbits Harold had raised. The scales finally tipped a bit with the Normandy invasion but it wasn’t until the liberation of Paris that many people felt any confidence. Catherine heard later that Hitler had demanded that his officers engineer the burning of Paris but they had refused to do it. This was a late in the game relief for her because she had wanted to go to Paris ever since she had known it existed.

Finally the war was over and it was time for her to go home. With her parents separated and divorcing there was no real home for her to go to but she intended all along to live out on the farm. Still she was reluctant to leave England and stayed an extra month in London. She liked the young couple very much and their little boy made her want to have a baby. She was only sixteen but it seemed logical, if you wanted a baby, to go ahead and have one. For that reason she made one more trip after the war out to see Harold and Winnie. She went directly to Tim’s house next door while his father was haying and his mother was in town grocery shopping. She took off her clothes in his bedroom, flopped on the bed bare-assed, and demanded sex. He was utterly surprised because she hadn’t called to say she was coming, but he didn’t seem surprised by her capricious behavior. He took a condom from the desk and came to the bed with his crutches. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. With only one hand he couldn’t put on the condom by himself so Catherine hurriedly helped, doing a sloppy job so it would leak and she might have a baby. His member was large and she wondered if it would hurt. It did a little but she didn’t care because this was her heart’s desire. It was over quickly. They lay around for a while and then she raised his interest with her mouth, not something she especially looked forward to but it worked. She got on him again before he could ask for a condom.

She didn’t get pregnant. She was aggrieved. She was in tears for a month.

Seventy years later Catherine found it all comically absurd. She had been willful indeed. She had truly been a sexual person only periodically. It had been grotesquely hard in her life to find a good man. Besides, she had never wanted to be married.

She returned from England on the boat and then a train to Billings, Montana, and another home. She arrived early the next morning and Catherine impulsively went straight to the farm and unloaded all of her luggage. Her grandpa was still alive, if barely, and she wanted to take care of him and help him with work. When she arrived he was having an early afternoon snooze on the couch with the Detroit Tigers ball game on the radio. He opened one eye and said to her, “You’re home,” and went back to sleep. He looked very old but then she had been gone for five years. In the kitchen the cook Bertha was cleaning green beans. She looked at Catherine and smiled broadly.

“You’re here! Now I can quit, your grandfather is an ass.”

Catherine merely nodded. She put on her coat and swiftly walked out.

She made the obligatory drive to town to say hello to her father. She was dreading it. Mother had said in a letter that he had been in a bad way since the divorce. She noticed that the bank was closed early in the afternoon and the shades were drawn but then remembered it was Saturday.

The front door was open at their house and her father sat at the dining room table with a glass and half a quart of gin and his journal in front of him. When he saw her he broke into tears. She didn’t remember ever seeing him weep before except tears of rage over her mother or Bobby. It all must have been terribly hard on him, she thought. He had spent his life studying and playing with money and now his wife had run off with a man of ponderous inherited wealth. He had found no way to counter these thoughts except with the emotion of jealousy, gin, and occasional weeping.

“Bobby stopped by while driving someone’s car to Chicago. He looked good but wouldn’t talk to me. I said you were in England and his mother had left and filed for divorce. He only said, ‘Good’ and walked out with some of his wretched books.”

When she left soon after, the divorcée was coming up the walk with a paper sack, likely another quart of gin. She nodded and Catherine nodded back. At least he had someone but sometimes someone can be less than nothing. A few years later when she discovered her father’s poems she thought the better ones were written after her mother left. They were less flowery.

The farm was her home, simply enough. All through high school Catherine helped her grandfather feed and water the cattle and exercise the horses, and the chickens were her special domain. When he saw her off to college Grandpa said to her, “Don’t stay too long. This farm is yours now.”

After she got home from Barnard, her grandpa was nearly ninety and facing the prospect of selling his cows which was a blow to his morale. He couldn’t bear the idea of selling the horses for fear they wouldn’t be taken care of. Occasionally, for reasons of sentiment, Catherine would help him harness the team of horses and ride the stone boat while they dragged him through the far pasture. The horses would automatically stop when they saw a big stone. This very old man would get off the boat and wrestle the stone on, to be unloaded later into a pile behind the barn. A friend of his was the local stonemason and would come out to pick up a load now and then and he and Grandpa would share a pint of whiskey.

Later, in the fifties, the farm behind them to the west came up for sale at $25,000 for 120 acres, a price that Catherine was largely considered a fool for paying at the time, but she never regretted it. She installed a hired man, Clyde, and his young wife in the farmhouse on the new acreage. The wife Clara wept uncontrollably. She had been raised in a trailer and they now lived in a small trailer down the road and despaired of ever living in their own house. Catherine was overwhelmed and had her young lawyer in town cut out the house and five acres and deed it to Clara personally so she would stop worrying that her husband could get fired and she’d be homeless again. Catherine had borrowed the money from her mother to buy the additional farm and she had said to consider it a gift, but Catherine intended to pay it back. Beef prices were fairly high and the pasturage was good on the new place so she would get a lot more feeders in the spring. Clara worked for her two days a week and would bring her little girl Laurel who truly enjoyed the chickens. She would sit on a milk stool in a daze watching them with one of the bird dogs, Belle, who belonged to Catherine’s father, sitting beside her. Catherine borrowed the dog because it didn’t look like it was being fed enough, but told her father that she was thinking of taking up bird hunting. Grandpa had an old shotgun which her father described as a menace and lent her one of his, a pretty little English gun she knew was worth a lot so she vowed to be careful. He wanted to give her lessons but she demurred for the time being, not wanting to hunt with someone full of gin. Meanwhile Clara would always make something for dinner. She was a good cook and after a successful deer season for her husband she made an old-fashioned venison mincemeat pie which was delicious.