Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

“This was what I always wanted and didn’t get.” Her voice was muted and without its usual hardness.

“It’s not too late. You’re only in your fifties,” Catherine replied.

Her mother gave her the look of one who had driven into a deep gully and never considered any alternatives for getting out. Like many women growing older she was an utter fatalist.

“I wrote many times to Robert in person apologizing and he finally answered saying he forgave me. But I’m unsure about forgiveness. Look what we did to him.”

“I’m unsure of why I survived and Robert didn’t. Dad picked on him and ignored me until Robert ran away. Then it was too late. When a child learns mistrust it’s hard to overcome it.” Catherine felt tears form in her eyes.

Her mother took a vodka shooter out of her purse and finished it in one swallow. “I still haven’t quit though the doctors said I must,” she said.

“Why do they want you to?”

“My liver is a mess among other things.”

“You better quit. It’s hard for a liver to recover.” Her mother actually looked very good for her age.

“I keep myself slim but what else can I do? We have servants for everything. Jerry hates it when I do dishes.”

“That’s absurd.”

“I know it. He grew up with a critical mother. He’s so worried that I might complain about something. I told him I was coming out here to help with the baby and buy a farm to fulfill my girlhood ambition. He said, ‘Go ahead.’ You of course know that your father broke his promise to me that we would live on a farm. He wanted to wear a tie and work in a bank. He said that he was belittled in school for being a farm kid.”

“I doubt that. What else is there around here but farm kids? A few army brats. Gas station owners. Grocery store owners and clerks.”

“I learned never to believe anything he said. Your grandfather despised him, said he was a chiseler. His own son. How could it be that his own son could redefine ineptitude?”

“Well, he wasn’t about a great hero, but. .” Catherine was uncomfortable speaking ill of the dead.

“When you two kids were little I should have grabbed you and run for it. It was cowardly I didn’t.”

Later that evening when Catherine went up to bed she wondered if her mother might be ill and had come on this visit to Montana as a last chance to ask for forgiveness. Catherine didn’t know what to think. She saw life as more of a constant whirl in which people often behaved horribly. What was the point of forgiving the early whirls? She knew she would forgive her if her mother asked, however, thinking there was nothing else to do. The past lives on in all of us. No matter how wronged we were the offenses were only the beaten-up junk of memory, pawed over until they were without color if still somehow alive. Late that evening her mother began weeping, she said over Robert in prison, but Catherine doubted it, thinking that it must be the entirety of life.

“We had such fun when I brought you out here as a little girl. At the time you treated the chickens as if they were the biggest mystery in life.”

“Maybe they are, along with humans. I liked going out to the dark barn with Grandpa at five a.m. Then when it got fully light I’d feed the chickens. I guess at heart we all like to be useful. Even now Hudley likes his breakfast early. If I don’t feed him by seven he starts barking like crazy.”

After her cereal next morning Mother took Hud for a walk to his beloved bone pile out behind the barn. Hud already adored her and they settled into a routine where she’d take him for his early morning walk. In the evenings he slept at the end of Alicia’s bed and warmed it up which meant she didn’t have to carry the warm stones up the steep stairs, but Hud would bark if she didn’t. It also meant that he no longer expected to sleep with Catherine which was a relief. He would trot up and down the stairs with her under the illusion that he was helping. She wouldn’t allow Catherine to give her a hand, saying her legs needed the exercise.

One morning while they were out Catherine called Jerry. He was appalled that her mother hadn’t told her yet that she had ovarian cancer and he hoped she would last long enough to help Catherine with the baby. After the baby was born they would meet at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to try and prolong her life. Jerry had hoped to help nurse her too but she said she was overrun with help. He hinted he would like to be invited out for a visit. Catherine said, “Come ahead,” and he was there in a few days. He came by private jet and they picked him up at the Texan’s landing strip next door. She still disliked the neighbor but money knew how to talk to money apparently.

Jerry was an immediate pain in the ass insisting that he have a new house built for Catherine and the baby. Catherine simply enough didn’t want it. She liked the old one but settled on Jerry having a master bedroom wing built with an adjoining room for the baby. The contractor was there in the morning. By the looks of Catherine’s belly time was of the essence so Jerry offered the contractor extra money for speed. The contractor broke into an easy smile seeing Christmas come early.

Jerry was so overbearing in looking after her mother that it drove both women batty. Luckily he became quite bored with the farm and said at the second dinner that he needed to fly to Key West. Catherine assumed it was to see his girlfriend. Jerry had drunk most of a bottle of Scotch that late afternoon and his slurred speech grated on her nerves. They were both enormously relieved in the morning when the Texan’s hired hand picked him up for his plane with its twelve seats and leather sofa. He was gaining a lot of weight and Catherine watched from the window as he waddled to the car. Catherine knew that he never read and wondered what he and her mother talked about. Recent purchases? She could see that age would eventually make him disgusting but with ovarian cancer her mother wouldn’t see it. She had obviously had bad luck with men when you overlooked Jerry’s wealth. Money was nearly meaningless to Catherine even though she knew she would enjoy a big bedroom and a baby room attached to the house. The door would be off the kitchen, her favorite room. She used to play cribbage at the kitchen table with a maiden great-aunt who lived her last year with the grandparents. She worked in Chicago as a young woman and when they played cards the radio in the evening was tuned to a station there. She nattered constantly about the beauty of Chicago and made Catherine promise to go there when she grew up. Catherine was even now embarrassed that when she had visited Chicago she stayed in the Drake where her maiden aunt had worked.

Of late Catherine who was not of a religious bent wondered what became of Tim after suicide. Christians would say that suicides went directly to hell, wherever that was. It was left over from Sunday school she supposed. Catherine was unsure of hell or an afterlife but thought his lifelong pain should count for something. She had watched a local man limping on the sidewalk. He had lost his toes to the cold in Korea. It could have been worse and local lazy people envied his disability payments. Something for nothing was the ultimate good as far as they were concerned. War was hardly nothing. She regretted not being able to help Clyde load the hay bales onto the wagon and then into the barn because of her pregnancy.

Mother wept for a couple of days and then in a torrent of garbled language apologized to Catherine for the abuses in her raising. The first duty, she said, of a mother is to protect her children, even from her husband. Her own husband had never gotten out of himself for even a moment. Once assured of Catherine’s forgiveness her mother declined dramatically as if this forgiveness had been her life’s work. Catherine called Jerry in Key West saying that the situation was serious. Jerry said he’d try to get away. She thought, From your fishing and adulterous fucking. Meanwhile, she had to get her mother several appointments with a psychiatrist in the county seat because she was plainly becoming daft. She would sit on the front porch talking to Robert who was obviously not there. She drove her mother the two hours to the prison to visit Robert but her mother couldn’t complete the mission. She vomited in the parking lot seeing the walls and razor wire fencing. She was catatonically angry. “Why put him here just because he burned that piece of shit house?” Catherine had tried to explain Robert’s refusal to fight for himself. By the time of the fire her ex-husband’s illusions had plainly gotten out of hand. He was pretending he was “old money” living in a grand home though he was borrowing gin money from hunting acquaintances. Catherine figured that his delusions came from a lifetime of hard drinking.