Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

When she went into labor Clyde drove her to the new little hospital in Livingston (her mother had insisted she go to the big hospital in Bozeman but as usual she ignored her). The pains were still far apart and she noticed that it was December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. If it was a daughter maybe she should name it “Pearl” but then she never had cared for the name. Catherine had been so consumed by the Blitz she never thought about Pearl Harbor except once she had seen a photo of a big ship the Japanese had sunk and couldn’t imagine it on the ocean floor.

It was a long delirious day until early in the evening when she gave birth, a difficult breech birth, to a boy. She held the homely little runt for a few minutes and thought of the William Blake line, “Little lamb, who made thee.” She was still possessed with some of the horrifying aspects of giving birth, hallucinating herself as a huge, opening tropical flower with a fatally injured core. She wondered if that meant she was dying and she would see Tim in the afterlife but was quite relieved when it didn’t happen and they brought her the cottage cheese she had requested. Birth was hard work and she was hungry. She recalled when she finally reached Greenwich Village one day on a particularly long hike for Lorca she went to a little Italian place she knew and had pasta with marinara and one big meatball. She relished it. Typical of her obstinacy she turned around and walked all the way back, the last hour in a steady chilly rain so she returned to the apartment with aching legs in the guise of a wet dog. Her roommate was appalled and put her to bed after a bowl of chicken soup. She woke the next morning with shin splints, unable to walk to class. There’s something in cement that doesn’t love a foot, she thought, but New Yorkers must get used to it. You certainly don’t get shin splints walking in a pasture.

She called her mother. Alicia wasn’t doing well at all according to Jerry who answered the phone. She told him she had named the baby Tim. He congratulated her and her mother came on the line for a few minutes and in a weak voice said, “I wish I were there to help you.”

It was a tough winter with the baby who had colic. Only dancing would slow his crying. She questioned her indomitable will to reproduce deciding its origins were too far beneath the skin to comprehend. Clyde’s wife Clara and her two daughters came over and stayed a couple of weeks to help out. The older daughter Laurel said she didn’t like babies but she turned out to be the most helpful with little Tim. He had lost the red face of a newborn and now was pale with black hair like his father. Catherine had given the baby all that she was and then some. As she had with Tim. She felt unbearably depressed, the so-called “baby blues,” so she took a lot of vitamins and made sure she at least walked out to the pond and back every morning. It seemed to improve slightly with the solstice and on sunny winter days, of which there are many in Montana, she clocked the ever so slight increase of light with the specific shadows of the barn. She remembered from her childhood that after the hard work of autumn, harvest and butchering, everyone became happier after the solstice and the long, sure trek toward spring. Her solstice reverie was interrupted by a big blizzard at Christmas and she was relieved she was well stocked with groceries and didn’t have to drive anywhere. She felt especially sorry for those who felt compelled to make long driving trips for Christmas.

Nursing was a great pleasure. She was becoming too thin and devised ways to make up for it. She mentioned aloud that she so missed the sausages of her grandparents who were fine sausage makers, burying their product in a huge crock of pig fat to preserve it like the French do their confit. Clyde told her there was a new, cranky young butcher in Livingston. The roads were still bad but she had bought a big diesel pickup for the farm and he returned with five pounds of sausage and a big beef roast for Christmas dinner. It was a happy occasion and Catherine made Yorkshire pudding as her mother had done. Her mother had been a deeply mediocre and hasty cook, and her ability further declined the more she drank. Catherine had noticed that the good cooks she knew saved their drinks for after the dishes were prepared except men at the barbecue, a great deal easier than any of them were prone to admit. Following a few principles they managed even when half drunk.

Jerry called to say Mother had died Christmas Day at Mayo. This was three days later but he said he hadn’t wanted to ruin her Christmas. They might have been able to prolong things a little longer but she had a horror of oxygen and feeding tubes and had asked them when it reached that point to “pull the plug.” Jerry also said she had written a note asking that her ashes be strewn on the pond behind the barn, and that she wanted Catherine to do it.

Unlike with her father Catherine wept for a while. When she was a little girl she and her mother would have picnics on the pond, squinting their eyes and pretending it was a big lake. On the especially hot days of summer they would bathe in the pond which was sandy around the edges. Only when not around her husband could her mother be utterly pleasant. Catherine mourned what might have been. She was convinced now that her mother should have taken her and Robert back to England and raised them in London. Her parents had offered to take them in, she later told Catherine, which was what led to their visit before war broke out.

Her obstetrician had sent her an antique Lakota papoose for Christmas and she packed Tim warmly inside for morning walks. Her neighbor had cleared her driveway with his tractor and plow and she had him scrape out an area to throw feed to the chickens. She had a small stroller for Tim and shoveled a path from the house for the stroller. By March Tim’s first laughter had been at the chickens. Hud, who was getting much larger, would sit beside the stroller as if he were a guard, typical of the breed, and growl deeply at approaching chickens who feared him.

In April on a warmish day the snow seemed to be melting. Catherine was out in the barnyard with Tim having a sandwich and feeding him a jar of pureed peaches, watching the nearly mature hatchlings driving each other batty. Tim watched them closely and didn’t stop smiling. She held him up at the fence so he could touch the soft noses of the horses and a single very docile calf. Clyde had come by with three piglets to raise good pork for the two households. She had long figured out that supermarket pork wasn’t nearly as tasty as what her grandfather had home raised and butchered. It would cost money to feed them as you couldn’t grow corn easily in this high, dry climate. Hud growled and the piglets shrank back in the pen. Tim reached out for them but Catherine held him back thinking they might mistake his little hand for food. Three days later one of the piglets got out but only trotted over to nibble corn scratch with the chickens. Tim was gleeful and Hud furious. She said, “Hud, no,” to his growling. She was able to pet the piglet and scratch its ears, both of which it liked. Tim was so delighted to touch its ears and the piglet sniffed his hand.

In grade school the boys who all dressed like junior cowboys had called her a “wimp” for her tenderhearted view of the lowliest creatures. Her mother had given her Charles Roberts’s The Naturalist’s Diary for her birthday. Her concern was widespread and it seemed that every boy craved to shoot a deer, elk, moose, bear, anything would do in the local ethic. Only one mannerly boy was interested in bird dogs and hunting for Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse with his father. She had a crush on him but he ignored girls. Catherine’s mother was also softhearted about animals. She convinced her to let go a turtle she had caught in the cattails at the edge of the pond. Her mother’s point was “Why should the turtle’s only life be to amuse you?” Her mother had studied biology in England but was largely unaware of American wildlife. On an early trip south to Yellowstone her parents had seen a sow grizzly kill an elk. Her father thought they were lucky to see it but her mother was totally repelled and had grizzly nightmares. The junior cowboys loved to scare each other and the girls with stories about rattlesnakes and grizzlies. A boy in her sixth-grade class was bitten in the arm by a baby rattler in the school woodlot. His arm had become horribly swollen but they got him to the hospital in time for the antivenom to be effective. She was shocked and told her father about it at dinner. He laughed saying that boys get bitten because they’re always fooling with snakes to show their daring, same as when he was young. This was why she was trying to aversion train Hud to rattlers. She had used a choke collar for a few weeks whenever they saw snakes and now on the rare occasion when they saw one on a walk he would shrink back and whine. There were no grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains nearby but there were some in the Absaroka Mountains less than fifty miles to the south. There was a written record of Lewis and Clark killing one locally when they passed through. Catherine had hiked with friends in the Absarokas but had never seen a grizzly and hadn’t wanted to see one.