The Ancient Minstrel

by Jim Harrison

  All over America young people are going to bad writers for good advice. There are so many MFA programs in the colleges and there are not enough good writers around to teach in them. As opposed to what you might think, teaching is brutally hard work if you insist on doing a good job. And your own work is liable to suffer.

  Money is the vicious whirl, a trap you are unlikely to live through in a healthy way. If you subtract screenplays I didn’t make a living as a writer until my sixties. When I quit screenwriting to save my life my French rights moved in to save me.

  In a lifetime of walking in the woods, plains, gullies, mountains I have found that the body has no more vulnerable sense than being lost. I don’t mean dangerously lost where my life was in peril but totally misdirected knowing there was a lifesaving log nine miles to the north. If you’re already tired you don’t want to walk nine miles, much of it in the dark. If you run into a tree it doesn’t move. I usually have a compass, also the sun or moon or stars. It’s happened often enough that I don’t feel panic. I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio. Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas. You have acquired humility by accident.

  Feeling bright-eyed, confident, and arrogant doesn’t do this job unless you’re writing the memoir of a narcissist. You are far better off being lost in your work and writing over your head. You don’t know where you are as a point of view unless you go beyond yourself. It has been said that there is an intense similarity in people’s biographies. It’s our dreams and visions that separate us. You don’t want to be writing unless you’re giving your life to it. You should make a practice of avoiding all affiliations that might distract you. After fifty-five years of marriage it might occur to you it was the best idea of a lifetime. The sanity of a good marriage will enable you to get your work done.

  Eggs

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Only later in life did she learn that chickens are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. She found it hard to accept thinking we certainly aren’t obligated to believe everything science tells us. It was anyway hard to imagine a dinosaur while watching a chicken eating scratch in the barnyard.

  However, not quite as deep into the well of the past a small girl named Catherine was sitting on a milk stool in her grandparents’ barnyard in Montana studiously watching chickens. She was in the second grade and had volunteered to write a report on the bird. Her classmates thought this was ludicrous. Why not report on horses or cows? Anything is more dramatic and interesting than an ordinary chicken. Families even kept chickens in the small village where Catherine lived only a half dozen miles from her grandparents’ farm. Sometimes Catherine walked the six miles, mostly cross-country, to study the chickens. A seven-year-old girl wouldn’t be allowed such a journey nowadays but back then it wasn’t extraordinary. Boys played baseball all summer long into the evenings without organized teams or cute little uniforms. Girls went camping and fishing which they liked as much as boys, or rode their nags for long miles cross-country to go swimming. Parents didn’t micromanage their children.

  Catherine had three horses partly because of their need to keep one another company and partly because when it came to Catherine her father was a soft touch. They were kept at her grandparents’ and to her disappointment the horses didn’t care for chickens. They especially disliked the rooster Bob, who was arrogant and charged them crowing. He also charged Grandpa who kicked at him but rarely made contact because Bob was so deft. He was generally pleasant to Catherine seemingly thinking she was part of his brood.

  Her grandmother was a bit capricious ordering chicks the post office delivered in a big box. Grandmother liked colorful feathers in her barnyard though she would get ordinary leghorns for reliability. The eggs were always white which Catherine’s aunts favored. Her daffy older brother wouldn’t eat eggs, odd for a farm kid but then he was a problem in every respect. That’s why her father treated her like a son. Her grandpa’s farm dog, a collie, used to retrieve the cows every day but thoroughly ignored the chickens though he would growl at the rooster if he approached which frightened the rooster. Grandpa only liked to eat brown eggs thinking they were healthier but then he was full of errant theories. Her father who was the banker in town said that this was because Grandpa was a Swede, and Swedes are known for their eccentricities. There were Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks for brown eggs, a few Golden Comets, a scattering of Anconas, and French Marans for variety and color. If you’re a farm woman you struggle for anything different from the farm routines.

  Catherine’s father was American and grew up on the farm, while her mother was English. After he graduated from college he got a job with a big New York City bank with an office in London. He met her mother at a dance hall and he said that it was “love at first sight.” Her mother was younger and impulsive and desperately wanted to live on a farm and he lied saying that that was where he lived though he had no intention of returning to farm life. So they married in England and came back home to Montana. She was plainly furious when they reached Montana and moved into a grand nineteenth-century home in the village. She simply asked, “Where’s the farm you promised?” and he ignored her. She was already pregnant and knew she had to take his lie calmly.

  When her parents quarreled which was frequently her mother would go out to his parents’ and sleep in the small quarters she had organized for herself up in the cold attic in winter. She’d take Catherine along when she was small. In the winter she’d carry a large stone she had heated on the stove up to the attic, wrapped in a blanket to keep their feet warm. Everyone knew that if your feet were warm the rest of the body was easy with enough blankets. Of course by 5:00 a.m. their feet were cold but that’s when her grandparents got up for breakfast to start the day. Catherine liked being with Grandpa at the kitchen table when he would sit waiting for it to get light outside, a very long wait in the winter but then the kitchen was warm from the wood-burning stove. Grandpa would invariably eat a half dozen brown eggs, ham or bacon or pork chops, and fried potatoes, also a bowl of Wheaties with pure cream. It doesn’t sound healthy but he worked on the farm until he was ninety. He wouldn’t have a tractor, believing that motor exhaust poisoned the ground, but plowed and cultivated with two large Belgian draft horses. Once when Grandpa had pneumonia her dad plowed the thirty-acre plot and was a physical wreck for a week. He was so proud that he had done it and her mother had to take many photos of the banker behind the plow yelling “gee” and “haw” so the horses would turn at the end of the row.

  Catherine was a dutiful daughter, if generally ignored as her parents hopelessly tried to manage her brother. She went to Sunday school voluntarily. Her parents were members of the Methodist Church in Livingston but never attended except at Christmas and Easter. She had a good teacher who had told her to pick the same place to pray each morning. She couldn’t quite manage it. At home in town she’d go out to a thicket of Russian olive and aspen trees or, if the weather was too bad, down to her secret place in the basement where she had an altar covered with her favorite stones, arrowheads, a pretty white coyote skull, and her first teddy bear. She loved the Gospels and read them often and still did. At the farm she’d say her prayers in the henhouse. She prayed that her parents would stop yelling at each other and her father would stop drinking so much. Nothing happened and the teacher said it must be God’s will which puzzled her about the effectiveness of prayers like it does many.

  Although she didn’t want to, Catherine’s mother helped her shovel snow off a big patch of ground outside the henhouse so the chickens could go outside on sunny winter days. Bob the rooster seemed infuriated by his confinement and attacked her mother chasing her across the yard. She was embarrassed to run from a chicken. Catherine rescued her by shouting and waving her arms for Bob who ran back to the comfort of a crowd of hens.

  “I’m going to kill that bloody rooster,” Mother screamed.
Catherine had never heard her mother use that dread word. She had tears of fury in her eyes while Bob was quite happy back annoying the hens.

  Catherine had a friend, Laura. They would ride horses together. Laura was slow, or so everyone thought. Then one day when they were feeding the chickens Laura said calmly in a voice different from her usual one that she could actually read and write and that she only acted retarded because it made life easier. Both of her parents were severe alcoholics and were nicer to her under the assumption that she was “out to lunch.” Catherine understood because drinking was behind many of her parents’ quarrels too. The only one that knew Laura’s secret was their cranky family doctor who not oddly approved of her behavior.

  The small town had three churches, Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist. All of the Norwegian farmers and ranchers were Lutherans. If you had a big place it was a ranch, and a smaller one was a farm, often originally part of an early homestead that had been carved up and sold off because it was too much land for a single farmer just trying to get by. It was muttered that the Catholics did well as they had so many children, hence free labor. The Norwegians usually had smaller places and the largest spreads of all were owned by the white Anglo-Saxon Methodists who had moved in with money in banks in the mid-nineteenth century in hopes of getting rich raising cattle. It didn’t happen though there had been boom years around the First World War and would be after the Second.

  Catherine’s brother Robert ran away when he was fifteen and she was nine, still fascinated by her grandparents’ chickens. Robert sent a number of postcards from Los Angeles where he said he worked in a Standard Oil station and had started taking drugs. Their father flew out once to look for him but failed. Robert told her years later that he had seen Father from a distance and hid in a car behind the gas station. Father had relentlessly bullied Robert to make him into his own image.

  Meanwhile, her parents went through a period when they were sure they had failed as parents and were especially nice to her. They diminished their late afternoon cocktails to a single martini. When they had had several they used to yell at Robert who was brilliant but made poor grades. Their father thought Robert’s downfall was his reading. In his early teens Robert had read Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, and many French poets which his father felt had altered his behavior in negative ways. It later occurred to Catherine that if great literature changed your behavior then so what? Their father was unable to see that his bullying led to Robert’s rebellious nature. He did not spare the rod. It was also hard on Mother, which was why she would retreat to the farm so often. She was painfully homesick for London, altogether logical since she’d moved to raw Montana on the basis of the lie that she was going to be a farmer’s wife. She had a housekeeper named Gert who worked for the family and became a confidante. Later on when Catherine was eleven Gert explained to her that the fundamental problem of her parents’ marriage was this lie about the farm. Since childhood her mother had fantasized about being a farmer’s wife and perhaps taking the farm over when her husband died. Gert advised Catherine, “A man will tell a hundred lies to get into your pants.” Catherine was a late starter and didn’t quite understand why a man would want to get in her pants. What would he do there? Soon afterward her mother gave her her first sex lecture which she found stupid and embarrassing. Later on in the spring a boy in the field behind the school took out his hard penis, pointed it at her, and yelled, “Bang.” It was the silliest thing she had ever seen, even sillier than Grandpa’s pigs screwing, or Bob mounting a hen for a few seconds. Catherine knew that her friend Laura would pick up change from boys for lifting up her dress and showing herself bare. Laura had told her that boys were dumb as male dogs for anything sexual and she needed a little money because her parents never gave her any. They spent every spare penny on drink.

  At the farm Catherine would ride on the horse-drawn stone boat, jump off, and gather rocks. Grandpa would stop the team when a rock was too heavy for her and pick it up in his massive hands. Her hands and arms grew strong from the early farmwork so that in the fifth grade when a boy pushed her down she was able to slam him against the wall and choke him. The teacher had to rescue the boy. He warned Catherine about “farm girls” misusing their strength.

  One morning in Catherine’s eleventh year Mother announced the good news. Her father in London was sending her and Catherine tickets on the Queen Mary to visit in England for a year. It was a troublesome time in the world, a scant month before World War II broke out as it turned out, though they didn’t expect it when they went. Her father looked happy to see them go. Catherine knew that her father frequently visited a divorcée across town who lived next to Laura’s family, which Laura had told her, but her mother didn’t know. Of late her mother had been drinking nearly as much as her father which worried her but Catherine thought if she and her mother could just go to the farm, or stay away from town, everything would remain as it was. And she was ecstatic about visiting England on a great boat, said to be the largest in the world that carried passengers.

  In early August Catherine said goodbye to her chickens, the only things she regretted leaving behind except her grandparents and Laura. They took a long three-day train journey to New York, stopping for a night in Chicago where her mother had English friends she said were “posh.” They certainly were, living in a brownstone downtown near Lake Michigan. Catherine had never seen such furniture and when they arrived from the train station a uniformed man was polishing the doorknob that looked golden though her mother said it was brass. Her mother and the woman of the house were old school friends and laughed a lot. The husband was what was widely known as a “pain in the ass.” He had too much to drink at dinner and railed loudly that bankers had gotten a “bum rap” for the Depression. It was obviously a performance for the benefit of a new audience, Catherine’s mother Alicia. It became unpleasant though the roast beef was the best she had ever had. The man lurched to his feet before dessert and they heard him crash to the floor with a roar in the den. Servants came running but his wife merely shrugged and smiled and said, “It would be very nice for me if he would break his fucking neck.” Catherine’s mother and the wife laughed loudly although Catherine worried that the man might be injured.

  Breakfast next morning before their noon train was pleasant as the man had long gone off to work.

  “You’re going to be very lovely. Take care in your choices. You can’t be too cautious about who you marry. I’ll probably see you in London for a visit,” the woman said to Catherine as they said goodbye.

  To Catherine the three days in New York City were fine, especially the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hard part was her mother’s interminable shopping. Catherine wasn’t fascinated by clothes the way some girls her age were, in fact she simply didn’t care much about them. Her favorite thing to wear was her overalls out on the farm, just like Grandpa’s. Her mother, however, had inherited some money from a maiden aunt in Hereford, England. Her father thought that they should buy a new Ford roadster with the money, but her mother had brought the money along in traveler’s checks to keep him away from it.

  The voyage was utterly grand to Catherine. They had middling tickets, not first class but certainly not steerage. She didn’t really know the difference and didn’t care. She was completely untraveled and New York City had been stunning in terms of the people she saw. The ship was the same but because it was confined she was able to wander around and study the variety of people as if she were studying her chickens.

  The only thing irritating to Catherine was that there was a certain kind of older man who would stare and wink at her. In truth despite her ignorance of sexuality she was a little early in her pubescence and had begun to have breasts. She was five-foot-nine and graceful with big eyes and certain men have a taste for the too young. To Catherine these men were no different from the boy behind the school who had aimed his hard dick at her and yelled, “Bang.” She wanted to continue b
eing a girl and had no interest in becoming a woman which she could see was a disadvantage, in Montana and maybe everywhere else. In school even the teachers fawned over the boys who were star athletes. A mere perfect student like herself was largely ignored except by one or two. Luckily her Sunday school teacher Mrs. Semmes had taught her the value of humility which allowed her not to become angry about those conditions she couldn’t change. Several years later some girls she knew asked her to join them on the cheerleading squad but frankly she hated the idea of yelling, maybe because of her father who did so much though never at her.

  She immediately loved London and her grandparents though she grew quite tired of accompanying her mother on her visits to old friends. Mother treated her as if she were a trophy which she disliked and Catherine was at a loss for anything to say to her mother’s schoolmates. Finally she relented and let Catherine take walks with either of her grandparents. They lived about a block off Cheyne Walk in a house that came to them through her grandmother’s parents, otherwise it would have been too expensive for them in that lovely neighborhood. They would walk along the Thames and Catherine thought there was no substitute on earth for a big river. London was simply a fabulous walking town and they strayed far in the short time before the war started. It was pretty much all that anyone talked about.