Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

Track had been freedom but football just a dumb brutal game. He had felt one concussion for years afterward.

He had begun calling the sow Darling or D, elongated to Dee in his midwestern drone which, earlier in life when the comedian was current, people said reminded them of Herb Shriner. This was meant as ridicule but he didn’t mind because he liked Herb Shriner. Darling farrowed and gave him nine piglets. He watched it all leaning on the pen. He said to himself ironically, “The miracle of birth,” but in truth he felt it deeply. It was a lot to ask of a female. Tragically the third day he lost his favorite, the runt of the litter he had called Alice. The sow had rolled over and crushed one of her children. He carried the little body into the studio and put her on the desk. He sobbed. He had intended her to be his best friend. They would take walks together every day and if she got tired he would carry her home like he had done with one of his dogs. He wrapped her carefully in a big red bandanna thinking that she was yet another of the deep injustices of life. He dug a hole near the pen and decorated it with a circle of rocks. He put her wrapped body down in the hole, dropped a handful of earth on it, and said an actual prayer for the deliverance of her soul. He had crisscrossed two yellow pencils in the shape of a cross, glued them together, and stuck them in Alice’s grave.

He was pleased that he didn’t separate his own life from that of Alice, or a crow or a dog. Over the years when one of his dogs died he thought that maybe he should go along for the ride, affection causing a sympathetic suicide. Of course he held back though Alice’s death struck deep. What held him back was how could he die with an unfinished novel or sequence of poems in the files? This was vanity again as if the world were waiting for his books. Perhaps it was also the influence of religion. Why think you are more important than other creatures? Where is the evidence? If you study the universe and history long enough you are bound to see we’re all up for grabs including writers and their noteworthy lack of humility. He had long known that humility was the most valuable characteristic you could have. Otherwise you would be a victim of the vain dreams and ambitions of youth. Whoever told writers they were so important in the destiny of man? Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound. It reminded him, oddly enough, of the day he interrupted his work for a while to try to help a trapped wasp behind a light window shade in his studio. The wasp drove him batty in its fruitless struggle to get through the glass back to its nest in the apple tree twenty feet from the window. He was finally successful though the wasp was furious at being caught and wagged its lethal tail trying to sting him. When he released it out the door it flew straight toward the apple tree. Despite being a lifelong hunter he wasn’t up to killing the wasp but then there were days he couldn’t swat an ordinary, irritating housefly. Who was to say they were less important than a writer struggling for fame? He filed this in his head under reverence for life , then was embarrassed as the phrase seemed pretentious. He paid the farmer to come over and file down the teeth of the piglets so they wouldn’t injure their mom when sucking. His wife was pleased with the gesture but he said it was pro forma.

Because he wasn’t visiting the bar he had bought a dozen shooters for his studio. However with the decline of his drinking his tolerance had diminished as well and a shooter was too much a hammer to the temple. At the wine store he bought several bottles of Brouilly, a light French red he had drunk in bistros on his several trips to Paris. He ordered a case as a reward for quitting the bar in favor of his piglets. He stopped to see his friend and neighbor in town and brought along a bottle of Brouilly. His friend said, “Too cool today. That’s a warm weather red.” He felt a bit rejected but respected his friend’s greater knowledge. He was quizzical about how he could afford an expensive wine every day.

Back at the studio, after he had fed the sow, he struggled again with names for his piglets, ignoring the adage that farmers don’t name animals they’re going to have to kill one day. In his current good mood every creature on earth was going to live forever which signaled a manic plunge. He thought of naming the largest male Aristo after Aristophanes’s statement “Whirl is king” because the male whirled at top speed when he wrestled the other pigs. The shortest, fattest male he named Chuck simply because he looked like a Chuck. He named one of the females Shirley after the piglet his grandfather had let him name, then labored over other possible names and failed. This was a case where he had to be precise.

He called his wife’s cell and said he was tired and would sleep on the cot in the studio. He drank a modest twelve-ounce glass of red wine to aid sleep. He turned on his night-light and flopped on the cot with a twenty-year-old sleeping bag like a child’s favorite blanket.

At 3:00 a.m. he awoke with a jolt and yelled. The minstrels had invaded his dreams again. He hadn’t had a recurrence of the dream in years and now this was twice in a few months. He was horrified. They were singing loudly a few feet from his face and he couldn’t move. He yelled, “Stop it!” as loudly as he could and they slowly withdrew into darkness. He turned on the lights and sat down at the safety of his desk and doodled a drawing of the layout of the farm he wanted to buy. There would be sixty acres of field corn for the pigs to eat and forty acres of well-fenced pasture with a small woodlot for them to frolic in and vastly increase their flavor. The bland-tasting pork at the supermarket comes from confined pigs in the big factory farms. He saw himself clearly in the future as the prince of free-range pork. He cautioned himself unsuccessfully against this obvious mania. The unlocked front door of the studio opened. It was his wife holding the cocked revolver.

“I got up to pee and heard you yelling. I thought you might need help.”

“How touching,” he said sincerely and took the proffered pistol, carefully easing the hammer down so she couldn’t kill him by mistake.

They made love for the first time in nearly a year. He remembered again how wonderful it used to be, so much better than stray lovers because you don’t know each other’s bodies. You can’t truly cozy up to a stranger except mechanically. She wanted something to drink and he had a small can of V8 which he poured into a plastic glass with some ice and a shooter. He drank a shooter straight from the little bottle.

“How can you do that?”

“I’ve had plenty of practice.” He turned on the outside light so she could look down at the pigs. They were nursing for a middle of the night snack.

“I don’t like them but I admit the little ones are cute. I have to leave. I’m getting up at four a.m. to go to a horse show over in Whitefish.”

“Buy one on me.”

“Thanks but I have enough horses. When I was a kid I heard about a farmer who died of a heart attack in a pigpen and his pigs ate him.”

“That’s a lie. I researched that story which everyone’s heard and there’s no truth to it.”

“Defend those you love.” She kissed him goodnight and was off into the dark which she feared less than he did. His life was full of imagined monsters.

He tried hard to sleep, always a failure when you try too hard, then got up and made instant coffee and had another shooter. He wanted to be conscious but not too much so. He looked down at his clumsy drawing of the farm and his mind began to whirl. Enough of this farm that doesn’t exist!