The Ancient Minstrel

by Jim Harrison

  “Why are you kicking my chicken? I think she’s dead.” She stopped next to Sally and turned her over. The chicken’s eyes were sightless. “You killed her you miserable fucker.”

  “It’s just a chicken. I’ll pay you for it,” he said lamely.

  She stood, holding Sally by the feet and slapping the man’s face with the chicken. “Get out of here! Now! Go away!” She was sobbing.

  He slumped off carrying his presumed innocence like a boy. She was still wild with heart-thumping anger and was glad she wasn’t holding a pistol or she would have shot him.

  Now in the Key West hotel her stomach soured with homesickness. The weather was clearing and they drove to the airport before noon to catch Jerry’s plane home. They met Mark for a quick lunch. She was famished and ate both a grouper sandwich and an order of fresh shrimp while staring east at the ocean.

  Back in Palm Beach her mother was happy they were home a day early because there was an “important” ball that evening. Jerry gasped and Catherine only wanted a nap, mostly because she had had a huge Bloody Mary for lunch while Jerry drank two martinis. First she called home and Clyde told her there had been a big snow although it was late April. She was irked because she was missing the fresh snow on the Crazy Mountains east of the farm. She imagined the creamy white mountains in the moonlight.

  Who am I and what am I doing? She wasn’t used to asking herself such questions. The memory of a depression during her freshman year of college horrified her. The problem, or so she thought, was that New York City had no “outdoors,” no snowcapped Crazy Mountains or endless plains. She needed to see a bear that was not in a zoo, or a moose eating water weeds. She escaped this depression by interminable walking, at least four hours a day. She would walk the length of Central Park and back and in every botanical garden in the New York City area. She’d walk along the Hudson and also the East River. When her depression lifted in a couple of months she had lost fifteen pounds she didn’t need to lose. Her short and plump Jewish roommate taught her the pleasures of herring and she couldn’t get enough. Because she intended to live in Montana she would have to learn how to make her own. The girl also took her downtown to Katz’s which immediately became her favorite restaurant in the city.

  She had to take a photo of her mother and Jerry before they went to the ball. Her mother, she had to admit, looked lovely in her absurd Pierre Balmain dress. Jerry had all the spark of a dog turd in his tailored tux. He rolled his eyes for the picture which later made Alicia angry when she saw it. She always called him darling which made him beam even if she was angry.

  What she had learned about Jerry on their fishing trip raised questions in Catherine’s mind about the whole reality of inherited wealth and so did Palm Beach itself. Jerry’s father and grandfather had made a great deal of money in the early electronics field. Jerry’s father had been a terminal alcoholic and syphilitic giving Jerry zero instruction or guidance in life. His father and grandfather were pure unadulterated spenders who were so drunk and disorganized that his family freed him of the money and put it in a trust at J.P. Morgan. Only the interest could be spent. Jerry showed good signs early on and graduated from Yale with honors. But then he discovered the ocean which required boats and he ended up with a fleet and many employees including one who did nothing but help him with his travels. He would go to Europe with twenty pieces of luggage and this required someone to oversee it. He had a great fear of leaving something unspecified behind. He was a grand sucker for luxury hotels. Before Catherine’s mother he had had an apartment way up in the Carlyle Hotel because he liked the room service. The expensive secret power it had was to give him lots of bacon on his order.

  Jerry was an expert in the fields of anthropology and ornithology. No place was too far to go see a bird. In his Rhode Island house he kept drawers full of thousands of dead birds, bought from a European collector and smuggled in on the yacht including a unique specimen that he shared with no one but willed to Harvard on his death. What’s the hurry? he thought. A few years before Catherine’s mother showed up he had been married to a French actress for a scant five months. He had taken her down to Cannes to the movie festival and this seemed to make her less popular. He had been married a total of four times and his ironclad rule was no children. He considered himself to have greatly suffered in childhood and would wish it on no one else. His family fortune was aimed at a not very significant college in Ohio. On one of his early, random cross-country drives he had stopped in the college town for the night and liked its aura and the fresh, hardworking people. The college as of yet didn’t know he existed and he didn’t realize that his money would destroy the charm of the place. He was almost a nitwit but not quite.

  Chapter 5

  Catherine left Palm Beach several days later and didn’t get home until midmorning a day late. The plane had had a long delay in Denver with a driving rain that turned into driving snow. She got to Billings late, picked up her car, and drove up to Roundup because she wanted to head home on Route 212 which to her was the ultimate Montana road because it reminded her of the old Montana of her childhood before so many rich people moved west. “All hat and no cows,” as people said. She stayed in a scummy little motel where perhaps drunk truckers had pissed on the rug. She was famished having skipped the loathsome airline snacks. There was an open bar and she hoped for a single hamburger. It turned out that they had passable small rib steaks of which she wolfed two. Two polite cowboys at the bar made equally polite passes at her. “If you don’t got a place to stay I have a clean bunkhouse.” She danced with one who smelled slightly of manure and horses but not offensively. She could ­really cut a rug but held back from showing off. As a senior at Barnard she had a little apartment down in the Village with a Puerto Rican girl Josita who loved dancing. They danced together insatiably with Josita in drag. They won a number of dance contests with the judges perceiving that Josita was also a woman—her ass was too shapely to be male. One night when drunk they slept together but Catherine didn’t care for it. As stupid looking as they were she still preferred dicks.

  She couldn’t hold back and the cowboy was breathing hard. There was applause and then drinks from a table of old ranchers. They slow danced to Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” and he blushed deeply.

  She bought a pint and went to her motel, pouring a big one because she was still jangled from Florida. In bed watching the late news she recalled there was one other man she actually liked aside from her grandfathers. That was wounded Tim who lived next door to Great-Uncle Harold and Great-Aunt Winnie just near the Cornwall border. Her grandmother had written that he was finally making some progress with prosthetic devices which he had refused to try for a couple of years but then his goofy grandmother had taken to praying on their stone driveway on her knees in all weather so he caved in. He could now shuffle along passably with his big walking stick and when he fell he was strong enough to shimmy up the stick with his good hand and the artificial one. Anyway he was the third man she admired and she very much wanted to make love to him and hopefully become pregnant. She was past thirty and felt time slipping away. He was so bitter about the severity of his injuries she doubted he would ever let her close.

  She awoke early and figured out the room coffeepot. She felt slow-witted and wondered if she was losing her mind, a concept she had always disagreed with. How could you lose your mind? It was always there though it could be in severe disrepair. She felt mired in random thoughts such as realizing she shouldn’t have fired the lawyer who when working on her will had laughed when she insisted her cremated ashes should be strewn on the floor of the chicken coop.

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  When she got home and took in her luggage there was a note stuck on the door from her father which she put off reading because she was moving her camping cot out to the chicken coop. She meant to spend her first night home in the company of her beloved chickens, a somewhat eccentric means of returning to normal.


  She read her father’s note with a luncheon tuna fish sandwich mostly because he hated tuna. The note was a shock and written on Best Western stationery because he was staying there until he found a place. Her brother Robert had stopped for a visit while hitchhiking from Los Angeles to New York City. The visit was “highly wretched” and “insulting.” Robert warned him that he was going to burn the house down. “I said but you left a whole room of your precious books here. That seemed to give him pause so I didn’t call the police about it. We drank a whole bottle of gin together and things further degenerated. That night he did burn the house right to the ground. I barely got out alive but was awakened by the heavy odor of gasoline. I got both dogs out but lost my precious collection of shotguns and antique maps. The police found Robert asleep in a ditch about ten miles east of town. He is now incarcerated in the county jail. I asked the prosecutor to press all charges. He should be locked up for life. Sad to say this grand home would have been yours when I am deceased.”

  She called the jail in the county seat about twenty miles distant in Livingston. Yes, she could visit Robert until five that afternoon. She had actually always disliked the house. It had been owned by a minor railroad baron. There’s nothing new, she thought, about “conspicuous consumption,” as Thorstein Veblen called it. Her friends thought it was haunted. It was dour, gloomy, and even smelled ancient. When young she had found a small secret room in the basement which was a fine place to hide her pathetic secret belongings though no one was looking.

  Her night on the cot in the chicken coop was very pleasant. Of course it smelled of chickens and chicken shit but she was used to that and had missed it. She brought out a book to read but didn’t touch it. She just wanted to be in the dark hearing the soft murmur of clucking hens. Were it not for the beauty of the ocean and the fishing she certainly wouldn’t think of Florida again. She had long been curious about France and also Mexico. If she went to France she could stop in London and see her grandparents, also drive up to see Harold and Winnie and of course Tim. But for now it was so nice to be home she doubted she’d want to leave again.

  She petted a couple of chickens that came close out of curiosity about their guest. She dropped off into the deepest of sleep and when she woke at dawn two were roosting down by her feet on the cot. She was utterly charmed and laughed at which point they stared at her. It was so pleasant to be totally accepted by other creatures. Once she had met a man who had raised an Alaskan brown bear since infancy. Even when the bear was in its late teens it still had to be hugged at least twice a day. It had died recently at the weight of fifteen hundred pounds. She had a photo on her bulletin board of them hugging, the bear’s massive head at least five times the size of the man’s. The bear seemed to be smiling. She went inside and prepared to drive to Livingston to see Robert. There was a note from Clara, a message from the family doctor that her father was in the hospital and was quite ill. She called in and discovered he had had another stroke and was not expected to survive. She felt a bit of relief as his life depressed her. He did nothing but walk his dogs a short distance and drink a quart of gin every day. He was kind to her now but they had no real conversations. She called her mother in Palm Beach who said she was not coming back to Montana at “gunpoint” to see her dead ex-husband.

  “He’s not dead yet,” Catherine said.

  “He is to me,” she said, hanging up. She called back immediately. “I’m so sorry but it’s been wonderful being rid of that pompous wanker. It was only good when you and I were out on the farm without him. Meanwhile I want to go to France and Jerry doesn’t want to. Will you go with me? It would be free for you.”

  “I’ll think about it. I have a farm to run.” Catherine had always wanted to go to Paris but her first impulse was that traveling there with her mother would be insufferable. Catherine didn’t want to go but then she didn’t have much in the way of spare money. The money her father should have left her had all been spent or drunk away.

  Chapter 7

  The trip to see Robert in jail didn’t go well. It was a forlorn and ugly place. She was escorted by a deputy and when the prisoners made smutty remarks as they passed he would smack on their bars with a nightstick. She sat on a folding chair and watched Robert doze on his cot. He awoke slowly glancing at her as if in disbelief.

  “When you get out of jail you’re welcome out at the farm,” she said.

  “You’re the farmer not me. I’m a city-billy.”

  “I got you a good lawyer.”

  “Don’t bother. I already saw the jerk. Don’t spend your money. I’ll get a public defender.”

  “They’re talking about a three-to-five-year sentence.”

  “I’ll commit suicide before I go to prison.” He didn’t seem unhappy announcing this.

  “Don’t say that Bobby.”

  “It’s true. It seems like we were okay until all of that yelling and boozing started.”

  “Our father is on his deathbed right now.”

  “Good. It’s too bad he didn’t die when we were kids. What an asshole. I’m sorry I burned your house down.”

  “I don’t care. I never liked that house. I think my marble collection is still in my room in the basement.”

  “They might be okay. I don’t think marbles burn. I want to go to South America.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to go to the pampas where there are no people and kick this drug thing. Maybe chase cows on horseback.”

  “I’ll loan you the fare,” she said, her heart wrung with despair. He seemed small and pathetic in the jail cell. “You burned up your books in the house. That’s too bad.”

  “I don’t want to read anymore. I’m going to write a book called O Mein Papa.” He laughed.

  When she left the jail she wanted to vomit over what fathers and mothers did to their children. How had she escaped? Her chickens helped.

  Chapter 8

  One afternoon a few months later she got home and heard a cow bellowing in distress in the far pasture near the woodlot. She trotted way out there as quickly as possible noting near the horse trough that all that was left of her precious dead hen was a clump of feathers. A present to the ubiquitous coyotes. She made a mental note to call about getting an Airedale from a farmer who raised them. A big male would keep the coyotes out of the barnyard before they got bold enough to start picking off chickens in the daylight.

  She reached the bellowing cow along the creek and saw that her calf was stuck in the mud in an eddy of the creek and on the verge of drowning. She jumped in without a thought and wrestled the little calf up onto the bank. The calf licked her face then started nursing from its mother who had trotted over. Catherine had trouble getting out of the mud herself and lost a tennis shoe. She walked all the way home with one foot bare and quite sore by the time she reached the pump house attached to the back door. She remembered that early every summer it took a few weeks for bare feet to toughen up before they were comfortable, and she supposed she was getting an early start.

  She impulsively called an ob-gyn doctor she knew quite well in Livingston. She kept thinking about pregnancy but maybe she was fallow and incapable of being a mother. Was this why it hadn’t worked before? There was a cancellation early the next morning and she promised to be there. If she could be fertile all she needed was the right man or at least an acceptable man. She knew above all else it was wounded Tim over in Cornwall but then his sensitivities prevented him from being counted on. They corresponded now and then in letters that were decidedly nonromantic. He felt good that he had lost his left hand rather than his right so he could still write a letter. He never mentioned that he was using the prosthetic devices that her grandmother had spoken of in her note. When she made the mistake of mentioning Tim to her father once, he judged that losing a limb would always be an embarrassment. He said that it “unmanned” him. This concept missed her as a woman but then so-called male pride
had been one of her father’s most obnoxious shortcomings.

  She had a difficult night full of baby dreams and woke asking herself was she daft? Something in her answered no. It was an inexplicable urge. At the doctor’s office she was roundly teased by her ob-gyn friend for bringing her a dozen eggs. She explained that she wanted a baby but no husband. She could afford it.

  “What if it’s a little boy who needs a daddy to teach him baseball?”

  “I can play baseball. I’ll teach him.” In fact Catherine was a good athlete. “I can also teach him to hunt.”