Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

Catherine disliked her neighbor who owned a big ranch to the east. It was the early 1960s and her grandfather had died three years before. Running the farm without him was lonely sometimes but she enjoyed it. The neighbor was a lawyer from Dallas and when he drove into her yard he laughed at the chickens she was raising. That embedded him in the mud forever as far as she was concerned. What a motormouth big shot, she thought. When they were raising money for the library he donated a thousand dollars, more by far than anyone else, so Catherine donated two thousand that she couldn’t afford just to bust his balls. He had built a pointlessly large house with pillars in front, an imitation of a television program. His wife disliked Montana, and his son and daughter preferred to stay in Texas. His loutish friends and business associates came up to fish for trout and to hunt birds and elk. One of them had paid five thousand to a relatively poor kid for a giant bull elk to take back to Texas pretending he had shot it himself. She had once run into the whole group, the Dallas lawyer and his friends, in the grocery store buying a case of liquor and whining about the lack of fine brands. She was wearing a pair of cotton bib overalls which were admittedly tight across her striking butt. Out in front in the parking lot when she leaned over to put her groceries in the car one of the lawyer’s friends whistled and she turned and yelled, “Go to hell, you old creep.” The man blushed and his friends laughed.

In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean. She felt an odd sexual tingle which she attributed to the intensity of the sunlight in the tropics. She thought how chickens needed light to urge them to lay eggs though any kind of light would do. She had made contact with a Barnard friend who was living in Key West with a writer. Jerry had told her that writers came to Key West to misbehave in peace and without criticism. On the way to the hotel Jerry asked the guide to drive them past Hemingway’s house which meant little to her. She liked the stories about Michigan and A Farewell to Arms but his reputation as a bully and alcoholic reminded her uncomfortably of her father when she learned of it. Young men she had known in college who loved Hemingway had taken absurd steps to act manly. All of which was beyond her own comprehension. Farmers were manly without thinking about it. In fact she had never heard one mention the idea. College itself was so mechanistic that maybe the young men were only seeking a release.

She dozed at the window for a while and then Jerry came in dressed spiffily and said he was having dinner with a friend. She was amused later when walking downtown to a bar to see him on the patio of a restaurant with a hand on the hand of an attractive woman. Evidently deceit was part of being a man. Her friends had a nice little local house, called a conch house, near the Key West cemetery, a charming old place. Her hosts had a party with a half dozen writers from thirty to sixty, very busy drinking and talking about themselves. She had noticed this quality of writers who visited Barnard, the relentless struggle to get the conversation back to them. She never figured out the why of this problem. Of course, it wasn’t a problem for them, only their listeners.

She liked one of the writers at the party better than the others. He was half French but currently lived in the United States. He wrote mostly about sport, hunting, and fishing, but there was also a novel about growing up in the Normandy countryside that had done well. She was feeling faintly dizzy from too much wine and the thick cigarette smoke in the room. She decided to take a walk and the French writer offered to go with her. This put the others in a snit as she was evidently the prize of the evening.

They walked slowly in the cemetery in the light of the half-moon which made it hard to see and walk without stumbling. It was wonderfully eerie and when she did stumble he caught her and didn’t let go. They necked for a while and since her desire had never felt so strong she encouraged him. They tried to make love against a monument to a rich dead man but it didn’t work so they ended up with her bent awkwardly over an ordinary gravestone. She tried to read the name upside down while making love but there wasn’t quite the light. She lightly traced the engraving with her fingers and came up with “Burke” or “Bruce,” probably Bruce. They went on for a fairly long time and she thought it quite wonderful. Afterward they talked a little when they could catch their breath.

“Are you going to put this in a novel?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” he laughed. “I’ll call you Mildred not Catherine.”

“I don’t like Mildred. Make me Italian, call me Lucina.”

“Write your own novel,” he said seriously.

“I can’t. I’m just a farmer. You know, cattle and chickens, a few pigs, wheat and corn, hay.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Suit yourself.” She went back into the party and was teased a little for her messy hair and crumpled skirt. She wanted to go back to her hotel room.

“That guy you walked with is married.”

“I don’t care,” said Catherine. Then he came in and part of his shirttail was sticking out of his fly. The men laughed. He took her home and they arranged to have dinner the following evening.

She got up very early and Jerry looked bleary and tired but was cheerful. They were running late and after a hasty breakfast they met their guide at the marina. From that point on the fishing day was totally unlike anything she had known or expected. She had thought in terms of rowboats on quiet northern lakes and catching bluegills and perch with her grandfather for dinner. Early on when her father was still trying to make her into a boy he had taken her trout fishing on a big river but it frightened her. She didn’t know how to swim yet and feared drowning. If she died, who would feed the chickens? Later on when she had become a good swimmer she swam in the same turbulent river with aplomb, feeling the glory of the rushing current.

That day they fished out of a speedboat-type craft and traveled northwest very quickly to a place Jerry called the “backcountry.” They only saw one other boat, a sponger harvesting sponges with a long pole. Jerry had lost his fatigue and was now excited. He told her the ride out here had filled him with “good ole oxygen” as if it were comparable to booze. Jerry cast his big fly rod to several schools of permit but they wouldn’t bite. He was nevertheless very happy and Catherine was quite transfixed by the beauty of the turquoise water fading to the brown of sand in the shallows. There were many small mangrove keys breaking up the scenery to the east. They were plainly uninhabited and looked like floating thickets. The two men were looking the other way and Catherine yelled, “Fish!” to alert them as they had taught her. Jerry quickly cast and hooked a big bonefish which they had to chase in the boat so it wouldn’t reach a channel and be nailed by a shark. The fish was landed and then released, a lovely act. It was thrilling but not as much as when Mark the guide saw an osprey struggling with a fish it had caught near the mangroves. The fish was too large for the osprey to fly away with it and she feared the bird might drown with its talons stuck in the fish. Mark used his push pole and glided the boat slowly toward the bird. Jerry acted frightened so Catherine made ready to help. Mark put on a pair of gloves but still received a nasty peck in the arm that bled. She managed to hold the bird’s wings tight to its body while Mark detached the fish from the talons and threw it into the mangroves. He took over holding the wings and tossed the bird high in the air. It flew off with a backward glare as if they had ruined its meal rather than saving it from drowning. Jerry clapped and laughed which startled her. She felt good that they had managed to save the bird and that she had been a part of it without really knowing how.