Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

Her night on the cot in the chicken coop was very pleasant. Of course it smelled of chickens and chicken shit but she was used to that and had missed it. She brought out a book to read but didn’t touch it. She just wanted to be in the dark hearing the soft murmur of clucking hens. Were it not for the beauty of the ocean and the fishing she certainly wouldn’t think of Florida again. She had long been curious about France and also Mexico. If she went to France she could stop in London and see her grandparents, also drive up to see Harold and Winnie and of course Tim. But for now it was so nice to be home she doubted she’d want to leave again.

She petted a couple of chickens that came close out of curiosity about their guest. She dropped off into the deepest of sleep and when she woke at dawn two were roosting down by her feet on the cot. She was utterly charmed and laughed at which point they stared at her. It was so pleasant to be totally accepted by other creatures. Once she had met a man who had raised an Alaskan brown bear since infancy. Even when the bear was in its late teens it still had to be hugged at least twice a day. It had died recently at the weight of fifteen hundred pounds. She had a photo on her bulletin board of them hugging, the bear’s massive head at least five times the size of the man’s. The bear seemed to be smiling. She went inside and prepared to drive to Livingston to see Robert. There was a note from Clara, a message from the family doctor that her father was in the hospital and was quite ill. She called in and discovered he had had another stroke and was not expected to survive. She felt a bit of relief as his life depressed her. He did nothing but walk his dogs a short distance and drink a quart of gin every day. He was kind to her now but they had no real conversations. She called her mother in Palm Beach who said she was not coming back to Montana at “gunpoint” to see her dead ex-husband.

“He’s not dead yet,” Catherine said.

“He is to me,” she said, hanging up. She called back immediately. “I’m so sorry but it’s been wonderful being rid of that pompous wanker. It was only good when you and I were out on the farm without him. Meanwhile I want to go to France and Jerry doesn’t want to. Will you go with me? It would be free for you.”

“I’ll think about it. I have a farm to run.” Catherine had always wanted to go to Paris but her first impulse was that traveling there with her mother would be insufferable. Catherine didn’t want to go but then she didn’t have much in the way of spare money. The money her father should have left her had all been spent or drunk away.

The trip to see Robert in jail didn’t go well. It was a forlorn and ugly place. She was escorted by a deputy and when the prisoners made smutty remarks as they passed he would smack on their bars with a nightstick. She sat on a folding chair and watched Robert doze on his cot. He awoke slowly glancing at her as if in disbelief.

“When you get out of jail you’re welcome out at the farm,” she said.

“You’re the farmer not me. I’m a city-billy.”

“I got you a good lawyer.”

“Don’t bother. I already saw the jerk. Don’t spend your money. I’ll get a public defender.”

“They’re talking about a three-to-five-year sentence.”

“I’ll commit suicide before I go to prison.” He didn’t seem unhappy announcing this.

“Don’t say that Bobby.”

“It’s true. It seems like we were okay until all of that yelling and boozing started.”

“Our father is on his deathbed right now.”

“Good. It’s too bad he didn’t die when we were kids. What an asshole. I’m sorry I burned your house down.”

“I don’t care. I never liked that house. I think my marble collection is still in my room in the basement.”

“They might be okay. I don’t think marbles burn. I want to go to South America.”

“Why?”

“I want to go to the pampas where there are no people and kick this drug thing. Maybe chase cows on horseback.”

“I’ll loan you the fare,” she said, her heart wrung with despair. He seemed small and pathetic in the jail cell. “You burned up your books in the house. That’s too bad.”

“I don’t want to read anymore. I’m going to write a book called O Mein Papa .” He laughed.

When she left the jail she wanted to vomit over what fathers and mothers did to their children. How had she escaped? Her chickens helped.

One afternoon a few months later she got home and heard a cow bellowing in distress in the far pasture near the woodlot. She trotted way out there as quickly as possible noting near the horse trough that all that was left of her precious dead hen was a clump of feathers. A present to the ubiquitous coyotes. She made a mental note to call about getting an Airedale from a farmer who raised them. A big male would keep the coyotes out of the barnyard before they got bold enough to start picking off chickens in the daylight.

She reached the bellowing cow along the creek and saw that her calf was stuck in the mud in an eddy of the creek and on the verge of drowning. She jumped in without a thought and wrestled the little calf up onto the bank. The calf licked her face then started nursing from its mother who had trotted over. Catherine had trouble getting out of the mud herself and lost a tennis shoe. She walked all the way home with one foot bare and quite sore by the time she reached the pump house attached to the back door. She remembered that early every summer it took a few weeks for bare feet to toughen up before they were comfortable, and she supposed she was getting an early start.

She impulsively called an ob-gyn doctor she knew quite well in Livingston. She kept thinking about pregnancy but maybe she was fallow and incapable of being a mother. Was this why it hadn’t worked before? There was a cancellation early the next morning and she promised to be there. If she could be fertile all she needed was the right man or at least an acceptable man. She knew above all else it was wounded Tim over in Cornwall but then his sensitivities prevented him from being counted on. They corresponded now and then in letters that were decidedly nonromantic. He felt good that he had lost his left hand rather than his right so he could still write a letter. He never mentioned that he was using the prosthetic devices that her grandmother had spoken of in her note. When she made the mistake of mentioning Tim to her father once, he judged that losing a limb would always be an embarrassment. He said that it “unmanned” him. This concept missed her as a woman but then so-called male pride had been one of her father’s most obnoxious shortcomings.

She had a difficult night full of baby dreams and woke asking herself was she daft? Something in her answered no. It was an inexplicable urge. At the doctor’s office she was roundly teased by her ob-gyn friend for bringing her a dozen eggs. She explained that she wanted a baby but no husband. She could afford it.

“What if it’s a little boy who needs a daddy to teach him baseball?”

“I can play baseball. I’ll teach him.” In fact Catherine was a good athlete. “I can also teach him to hunt.”

“Have you chosen your rooster yet?”

“No, that’s the problem. Finding a father.”

“So I noticed.” Liz the obstetrician was perpetually in search of a new man in her life. She was more than a bit stocky which didn’t seem to help. She kept a fireman and a carpenter on a sexual string by cooking grand meals for them. She knew very well that dieting might help but she was a fine cook and looked at food as the only compensation for her wretched life far from her homeland of Chicago. The town was a bit scandalized by her behavior but she was the best obstetrician around, and one of the few women in the field in the entire country.