Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

He didn’t write for two and a half days because he was thinking fondly of pigs. Not a word. His old friend Cyrus Pentwater had quit both writing and drinking when he began raising both llamas and ostriches. He had read that raising ostriches had turned into a scam of sorts. You paid thirty grand for a breeding pair and the only way of getting your money back was to breed more breeding pairs and sell them to someone eager and thick skulled. They said the meat was good and tasted like beef. Then why not buy beef which was considerably cheaper? And who could butcher an ostrich that had been somewhat of a pet for years? In the tavern where men talk about many things they know nothing about, there was a rumor that ostriches had kicked several owners to death. Some checked their computers and could find no proof but they all wanted to believe it like stories of vipers that could kill you in five seconds.

The first evening he was singing a little song of pig breed names from all over the world while watching CNN about the horrors of Syria. His kind neighbor next to the railroad flat had brought up a list on his computer. “Hampshire, Arapawa Island, Mukota, Lacombe, Mulefoot, Iberian, Chester White, Dutch Landrace, Guinea Hog, Swabian-Hall swine.” He didn’t see his wife right behind him. She tousled his hair.

“Your hair is getting thin with age.”

“So I’ve noticed. Isn’t yours?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. What were those gibberish names you were singing?”

“The names of llama breeds,” he said thinking quickly.

“I thought a llama was just a llama.”

“No more than a horse is just a horse.”

“What are you going to do with this llama?”

“They can carry your gear into the mountains.”

“You never hiked into the mountains except in your fiction.”

“I never had a llama to carry the gear.”

“Your turn to do the dishes, baby doll.” They dreaded chores now that they were semi-separated.

This llama thing was getting out of hand and he was setting himself up for a mudbath when his giant sow arrived.

He slept quite early that night after seeing a National Geographic special on hyenas. It made him want a hyena pet though he’d heard a hyena could bite off your arm clean as a whistle. A hyena doubtless would look at his pig like a fifty-course meal. Hemingway shot hyenas in the gut to make them suffer. He thought they were lesser creatures than the lordly lions which he also shot, presumably not in the gut. A friend had met a Masai in Kenya with one side of his body feathered by scar tissue got from spearing a lion at close quarters while it was charging, which entitled him to carry the heroic lion shield. His friend said that this was courageous compared with hunters who shot lions at two hundred yards.

He gave his wife a perfunctory kiss goodnight on the neck, a habit they had continued. On the way out the back door he noticed he had forgotten to wash the dishes and quickly did so. Fair is fair. One cooks a nice veal roast and the other washes the dishes.

He gingerly touched the blisters on his right hand from the rough-handled post hole digger. His hands were no longer trained for manual labor. His friendly butcher neighbor had come over early that morning. Zack, in his late thirties, would test a cedar post and say, “A little deeper, friend.” It had been a cool morning but he dripped with sweat over the holes. Zack nailed the pen boards on the inside of the posts so that the heavy hog wouldn’t pop the nails leaning on the boards. Thanks to Zack they rigged up the pen in an hour, then laid out the trough and water tank.

“You can’t make no money on pigs without growing your own corn,” Zack said.

“I know that. I’m looking for companionship.”

“That’s what dogs and wives are for,” Zack laughed. He had a pit bull, Charley, that was less friendly than a scorpion.

He very much needed a drink though his skin prickled with thrills when he saw the finished pen with separate enclosures for the sow and her piglets. Zack had said you had to be careful that the sow didn’t roll over and crush members of her own litter. Something else to worry about on questionable planet earth. When they first split up his wife had destroyed all vestiges of alcohol in the household including the studio. He had seen it coming and taped two airline shooters up under the lowest shelf of the bookshelf with ever-useful duct tape. Now he swallowed both of the little bottles without mixing them, coughed violently, and felt the warm glow rising. He felt like writing but his rule was never to write while drinking. He was a puritan about his work, never keeping food in the studio because food drew in flies and he didn’t want to interrupt his work by trying to swat flies. He certainly wasn’t this careful about anything else in life. His wife had visited while they worked and had commented that it was an awfully strong fence for a llama when a little wire would have sufficed.

“Maybe the llama will have babies,” he said weakly. Maybe he was a fiction writer and poet because he couldn’t stand to tell the simple truth.

“You better work on your fence, farmer boy,” she replied.

The immediate ten acres was fenced but it was in modest disrepair. “I’ll take care of it,” Zack kindly said.

“You spoil him but then everyone does except me,” she said and wandered back to the house with Zack watching her butt sway in her khaki shorts.

“She’s a looker, that’s for sure. If you’re creating great art you don’t have time to fence.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll want sheep fence so the little piglets don’t escape. I’ll pay you fifteen bucks an hour to put up the fence.” He felt dreamy at the idea of watching piglets roam around out the windows while he wrote. Maybe he could get a novel out of the idea of a poor artist raising pigs to support his art.

Early in the morning the day after they finished the pen he got a call from the farmer to say he was loading the pig. He asked for fifteen more minutes and fled his railroad flat with a cold cup of coffee from the night before, leaving behind a graduate student’s wife in his bed. Her husband had been on a fishing trip. He had been trying the night before and had done poorly at love. He had hoped to make up for it this morning and had said so. She’d looked at him sleepily. “I got to take delivery of a pig out at my farm,” he said.

When he got there the farmer was backed up to the pen and leading the pig down a double wide plank. He saw his wife who was watching. He parked and walked down the new path to the pen. His wife was helping the old farmer shove the heavy planks back into his pickup. She turned glaring at him.

“You asshole,” she said simply.

“I thought my llama would need company,” he said quickly.

“You’re a natural born liar,” she said.

The old farmer laughed. “I know someone else who wants her. You’ll have to decide fast as you don’t want to move her too close to her farrowing. She’ll feed you all year. A llama can’t do that.”

He leaned over the pen and scratched her ear which pleased her. He deeply felt she was beautiful. This is called pride of ownership.

“I’m thinking of shooting her in the head,” his wife said, and walked back to the house.

“Is she serious?” the farmer asked.

“I doubt it,” he said and gave the pig two shovelfuls of the ground feed in the trough about which she was very happy.

“Call me if you need advice,” the farmer said. They shook hands and the farmer left.

He went into his studio thinking he might write a few paragraphs on his new sow but he was far too excited. They had delivered him a supersized dog house, now a pig house, and he had spread out three bales of straw for her comfort. He gazed at her out the window while playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, his last. He dozed with pleasure as the pig was dozing after lunch. He asked himself why he had waited so long to fulfill his childhood dream of owning his own pig.