The Ancient Minstrel

by Jim Harrison

  “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!

  His most irksome item of late was and continued to be his fifty-year slavery to language. He had read Keats at fourteen and the guillotine fell. He was no longer free but an addict of poetry. He recalled sitting on the roof looking at the stars and a new moon the night of his birthday, December 11. Poetry requires vows and he made them. Much later, seven years to be exact, his father and sister died in a car accident. After this the vows became harder than marble. If this can happen to those you love any other work is unworthy. When he started writing prose too, at first it felt like he was committing adultery, but he soon recognized that if he was working on a novel he also wrote more poems. Poetry started the workday. Pasternak told us, “Revise your souls to frenzy.” No matter how his life was compromised he kept at it, even on visits to Hollywood he was a servant of poetry. Los Angeles isn’t a city of early risers so his habitual morning walks were unpopulated. Across from the hotel where he always stayed, the Westwood Marquis, was the splendid UCLA botanical garden which he loved to daily distraction. There he would often meet a Chinese surgeon who sat quite motionless beside the pretty carp pool to prepare himself for six hours of brain surgery. He himself was prepping for a day of meetings that would help no one but a few who needed money, including himself. The irony was he was getting $350,000 for his next screenplay, a first draft and a set of changes, enough to buy the small farm he had been imagining.

  When they first moved out of town his wife had criticized him for peeing outside. He had responded, “Farmers pee outside.” He had lived on his grandpa’s farm when he was young and his father couldn’t find work in the late years of the Depression. “I thought you were a writer,” she had responded, meanly he thought. The irony was that that was a great deal of money for something he could write in a month. He knew he would shut off the water if he wrote too fast and a bit clumsily but it was fun to make that kind of money quickly when in his teens he had done a number of jobs for anything from sixty cents to a dollar an hour which he still resented years later. If you unload a fertilizer truck in a hot shed for eighty cents an hour you remember it. He worked alone. There were four tons of fertilizer in bags and even his trousers became soaked with sweat. He drank a quart of cold water afterward and collapsed on his ass in a faint. Now he thought it might have been good for his writing. He had known another reality. At some point he slept again.

  A few mornings later he got up at the first bright sun shining through the studio window. He turned on his little electric water pot and made a cup of instant coffee. It was wretched, though in general better than it used to be. Some progress on earth. He went outside, peed, and bowed deeply to the grave of Alice.

  He was excited because this was the first morning he was going to try to take a piglet for a walk. He had no idea what would happen, cautioning himself that they were scarcely puppies.

  He reached over the side of the pen and grabbed Walter, a medium-sized male, who always seemed a little dim-witted and slow. Walter walked ten feet from the pen then turned and looked back into the pen at his mother who was watching and cried piteously. Walter wouldn’t work out. At this point he was still a mama’s boy. He looked at Shirley whom he thought of as queen of the litter. She was alert, independent, a little fierce and feral. She would drive others into a corner in order to nap in peace. Sometimes she would punish them with bites. She was always scrappy and would gratuitously bother the others. She always hogged the best teat. He dropped the limp Walter into the pen and Darling nuzzled him in consolation. He grabbed Shirley who seemed to have a “choose me” attitude. The moment he put her down she was off and running like a bat out of hell. She headed for a boulder in a thicket in the far corner of the pasture as if she had been studying the location from the vantage of the pen for a long time. He trotted after her, tripping on a rock, and painfully knocked out his wind. His wife was watching from her flower garden.

  “Are you okay?” she yelled.

  “No, bring Mary.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Bring Mary. Shirley is loose.”

  He was sitting up now, coughing from his last hundred cigarettes. Mary was a well-trained black English cocker spaniel who would go out and herd a horse back to his wife when she wanted to ride. Mary would visit the pen and growl and all the pigs would back up except Shirley who would stand nose to nose with her at the fence ignoring the growling as if she could tear the dog apart.

  When his wife arrived with Mary he was still sitting on the ground struggling to get his air back. He wasn’t used to moving quickly. While other men ran he walked, thinking a couple of hours of walking every day made up for the difference in immediate exertion.

  Mary spotted Shirley rooting in the far bushes near his sitting rock and seemed to understand her mission. She headed toward Shirley at a dead run with his wife in chase. His wife could run doing so every morning. Shirley turned around and faced the oncoming yipping dog. They were immediately a ball of fur, pink fat, and muscle. His wife grabbed Mary’s collar and Shirley ran for the other far corner. Mary twisted away and gave chase. Mary was running between the fence and Shirley, crouching her body and trying to herd her up toward the pen. He guessed Shirley would get tired, not being used to running. At that point Shirley suddenly stopped and sat down. Mary with her tongue way out sat down about five yards away from Shirley. He and his wife got there at about the same time.

  “My poor baby is bleeding.” A little blood dripped from Mary’s ear.

  “You could tell they weren’t kissing,” he said.

  “You asshole.”

  He threw her a kiss then leaned and picked up Shirley setting her in his arms on her back which makes piglets passive. He carried her to the nearby pen and leaned over dropping her a short distance. She immediately returned to glaring out of the pen at Mary who had come over to growl.

  A week later he was still ignoring his life’s work in favor of tending to the pigs though it seemed that they had no need for him except food. Mealtime is a time of great excitement for pigs. There was an absurd misadventure when their water tank overflowed while he was on the phone with a New York editor. He returned to find the pen a mud hole which was aesthetically displeasing. He got a tub from the work shed near the house and filled it with warm soapy water. The piglets were fairly cooperative when he washed them off except Aristo and also Walter, who had become more animated with Aristo’s influence. He scrubbed the mud off Aristo who faked placidity, then suddenly jumped out of the tub and ran for it. When he lunged for Aristo, Walter also jumped out and chased after his mentor. He hollered at his wife who was planting her vegetable plot’s early lettuce and peas. He added, “Bring Mary” in a shout. She came a little slowly and Mary immediately saw the piglets trying to hide in the bushes near the big rock. There was no violence this time though Shirley jumped straight up and down in the pen in excitement. Mary expertly herded Aristo and Walter back to the pen. They were sparkling clean and air dried.

  “They’re just going to muddy themselves again,” his wife said.

  And so they did with evident pleasure. His effort had been futile.

  “There’s a chemical I put in the tub that prevents a pernicious skin rash, sometimes fatal.” He was lying.
r />   She suspected as much but humored him. “I’m not eating any dirty pig. They look better clean.”

  “Pigs have a right to get muddy. It’s the main pleasure of their lives.” He asked himself why he was arguing with her when he had just spent the afternoon washing piglets.

  “How do you know? Maybe it’s sex.”

  “They don’t think about sex in advance like us. They just do it,” he said with a bit too much authority.

  “Now you’re a swine psychiatrist?” she said with a withering touch. She left for her garden.

  Walter and Aristo had returned to the mud hole with gusto, their eyes blinking out below muddy brows. He picked up Marjorie who was pretty clean thanks to some still dry straw in a corner. Of all the piglets she liked most to be touched. He picked her up in his arms and she collapsed against his body as if they were lovers. He bathed her ­gently and put some fresh straw in her corner. She curled up in pleasure to dry off. She fluttered her eyes at him and he couldn’t help but wink. He took a little stroll with Marjorie and scratched her tummy.

  Later he sat at his desk wanting very much to write a poem about piglets, not a comic poem. It would have to be a private poem for his eyes only because you need only to utter the word “pig” and some people would begin chuckling in their superiority. Pigs were of course edible but contemptible. He seethed in resentment in defense of pigs. The human race shits in its pants for at least the first year. Who else laughs in ridicule of fellow creatures? How could he write a poem if he was angry? Historians said that pork fueled the western movement. Without pigs there would be no west coast. Pigs would follow the wagon trains, their minds on a little corn for dinner. They would root for edible vegetables while cattle would wander off with their eyes on greener pastures.

  He made a number of false starts on his pig poem then was so exhausted he drove to the saloon in town. Poetry does this to us. You can quickly either soar or drown in depression. You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem. Some are lost forever. Sometimes you walk around with versions of a poem in your head that won’t come clean. You are enslaved to this language of disorder and can brood upon it for days and weeks. When the poem finally does work, your spirit soars and you forget the difficulty, like you forget pain afterward. Some of the extreme behavior you see in the poet species is likely attributable to these struggles. When the brain spends this much time enfevered it is liable to affect the behavior which for a long period was a common joke around academia.

  In down times of near clinical depression he wondered why he’d chosen this calling. Back at age fourteen when he was obsessed with Keats it seemed glorious despite the bad reviews Keats received during his short life. And Lord Byron had an enviable career of adventure and women, travel and women, poetry and women. And there was his beautiful rage when the Church of England wouldn’t allow him to be laid to rest with his dog. If the minstrel couldn’t be buried with his dog, he thought, he’d refuse to be buried. Just stick his body up in a tree and let him dry out in the wind. Pour out some good wine for the tree’s thirsty roots. The nobility of dogs is unquestionable compared with men. He meant at some point to write a novella called “The Dogs of Jesus.” Maybe it would be in the voice of the dog who was with him for his forty days in the wilderness.

  Ralph, another wine-drinking neighbor in town, over a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape had described rather too eloquently how writers make up their lives with language and then are obligated to live them. They are absurdly autonomous. He felt resentment over this easygoing indictment and reacted with a brisk, “How do you know?” But Ralph did know and said he had published two novels and a book of poetry in his twenties and then quit in a state of boredom with himself. This seemed unlikely but Ralph admitted he should have held on because writers had the advantage of surprise in life. They got to discover what they were going to write next. Ralph’s father as a hard-ass business executive wouldn’t support him as a writer but the money would keep coming if he took a Ph.D. which back then would ensure future employment. His father had come to maturity in the Depression and was a maniac worrying about money. And so Ralph took a Ph.D. which required years of semi-indolence. He studied the medieval literature of Europe for which he had no real passion but its distance from his emotional life made it safe. Only it wasn’t. He became fascinated with the jongleurs, the medieval French poet minstrels who worked outside the Church and became a symbol of ultimate freedom in an authoritarian society. In a way they were bums living by their wits with an Indian trickster’s ability. He stayed in Montpellier for years, learned the difficult language of the poets, and lived down the street from the university where the great Rabelais had been educated in the sixteenth century. He was enamored with southern France in the 1950s with so many of the remains of the war visible. People were happy just to be alive. His professors were a bawdy and good-humored group of ex-officers with totally laissez-faire attitudes toward him as an academic. When millions die around you who gives a shit? Ralph himself became his own kind of jongleur and always carried himself lightly. When he married a French girl it was a very good marriage but she died giving birth to their only daughter. To the disappointment of her parents he raised the daughter in the countryside of North Carolina. They tried to get a legal injunction against him taking the daughter out of France but it wasn’t possible. They visited America every year to see their only grandchild. He had inherited a generous amount of money from his obnoxious father. He would take them all to a resort on vacation after doing research to make sure the food was good. The elderly French couple liked a dude ranch near Livingston, Montana, which was how Ralph had ended up there, and once when he screwed up dates for summer flights they came in December and they all stayed at a dude ranch near Patagonia, Arizona, where winter was sunny and passably warm.

  During his early pig obsession he had missed the wine and company of his neighbors.

  Chapter 3

  He sat in front of the studio in his cheap white plastic chair and stared as he always did at his wife’s vegetable and flower garden. She grew the two together. A simple plot of vegetables but the mixture of flowers made it lovely.

  His problems were immense. It was May and the piglets were all over forty pounds. Zack came over and they enlarged the pen. None of the piglets were glad to see them anymore unless they were bringing food. He was distressed and he said to Zack, “What do I do now?” and Zack replied, “Lots of parties now at the end of the university semester. Sell them for pig roasts on the hoof.” He made Zack a fine deal that if he sold the pigs he could keep half the money. He decided to keep Marjorie and of course the old sow no one would want. The next day he saw the ad Zack had called in to the university newspaper that began with, “The best pork you will ever put in your mouth. Perfect size for roasting.” Two days later Zack came over with his pickup the back of which was covered with a truck cap. He was a big strong former farm kid and loaded the piglets except for Shirley who he had to half strangle to get into the back of the truck. She nipped his hand pretty hard. “Got ’em all sold except for one. I’ll cook that one myself. You’ll be invited.” He said, “No thanks,” with a ghastly lump in his throat. How could he eat one of his pets? He was truly an amateur as a farmer.

  Now that he had raised pigs the only consequential fantasy of his youth left to him was to live in France. He had saved all his earnings from age thirteen to eighteen to live in France, thirteen hundred dollars in all. A scoundrel eye doctor checking his sight said that he might be able to restore some sight in his blind left eye. His parents had no insurance that would cover this previous injury and no money what with a modest salary and five children. Being able to see out of the left eye was a more immediate temptation than
France so when the surgeon asked what kind of money he could raise he stupidly said thirteen hundred. The surgeon said he would do the operation at that discounted price plus throw in a contact lens to help it work. It didn’t work at all and the lens also was worthless and painful. He threw it out in the swamp behind the house. He was destined to always see a dense fog bank, unconsoled when he discovered that holding the lids open he could see a small light in the sky. He had spent his life savings for France on an utter failure. Later on another eye doctor said the surgery was “criminal.”

  Not surprisingly he entered a depression. His girlfriend abandoned him because she wanted to get married right after high school graduation. He was an ace debater but couldn’t talk her into sex without marriage. The loss of this girl and France at the same time prolonged the depression. In fact on his senior trip by train from Michigan to New York City they had stopped in Niagara Falls and on a very high bridge across the river for the first time he thought deeply of suicide. What prevented him from the fatal act is that he didn’t want to upset his parents or brothers and sisters who apparently loved him as he did them.

  He never quite escaped this darkness but it was a small problem that his poetic thoughts about death were often disturbed by the fact that he was hungry. Maybe he should eat something first and then commit suicide. He had always kept this a secret only and inevitably thinking of it when he had a minstrel dream. The only good thing about the minstrel dreams is that they detoxified the suicidal mind-set by inspiring such hatred. The other and more long-ranging effect of the minstrel nightmare was of course that he forever quit doing poetry readings. He didn’t unlike so many others see the connection between performance and poetry. Some poets seemed to take to it quite naturally, grinning and chuckling over their own dark witticisms. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.