The Ancient Minstrel Page 3

  One hot afternoon at the tavern he dropped a modest bomb he had written in his journal. “We all are on death row living in cells of our own devising.” This started a loud quarrel between the two who took full responsibility for what they were and the four others who blamed a panoply of circumstances. His own father had liked to say, “Why blame anybody else because you’re a fuckup?” He favored this one, admitting that everything that had gone radically wrong in his life could be traced to causes that sat in his own lap. He had also been taught that it was unmanly to be forever blaming someone else for one’s problems. Dolly, the poet, piped up to say she had been painfully raped by three boys when she was eleven. There was dead silence, until a stupid drunk said, “The exception proves the rule,” and he was roundly booed. Everyone else apologized to Dolly for this horrible thing. He had always thought this “exception” statement to be obtuse.

  Of late his spirits had taken an upturn from his habitually dour attitude toward life. He continued to use his studio despite separating from his wife, and one afternoon he was in there listening to Schubert on NPR when a house wren appeared at the screened window and began aggressively singing back at the radio. This went on for quite a while and he recalled from his boyhood as a nature obsessive that a marsh wren has a more involved language than a house wren. He was troubled he could come up with no further memory about wrens. This one nested in a blocked stovepipe on the roof and perhaps thought that the Schubert was a competitive bird, although it then seemed to be excitedly singing along with the Schubert bird. He tried to recall something from the Internet his wife had passed along, how at the University of Chicago researchers were scientifically monitoring the dream life of finches. They found that finches have dream songs they never sing otherwise. Just like us, he thought. The gifts of childhood were the trees, rivers, birds, flowers. He wondered where his little guidebooks from that era were. He went down in the studio basement looking for old stray book boxes. He found the field guide to trees, not his favorite. He recalled asking in Sunday school why God was so messy in creating so many kinds of trees. The teacher became angry at him for questioning God. He cried on the long walk home feeling like a sure-thing sinner though deep within himself he couldn’t stop questioning the immense variety of species on earth. It was confusing for a boy.

  The night before he had experienced a repeat of the most disconcerting nightmare of his life. Sometimes when he had it he awoke vomiting on the floor, bending out of bed and letting go. It had all started soon after he lost his left eye in an accident. A girl, a playmate, had shoved a broken beaker into his eye that she’d picked up from the trash pile at the edge of the woods behind the hospital. He walked next door to the doctor’s wife Mrs. Kilmer’s and she cleaned him up and called her husband and his parents. He ended up in a hospital down in Grand Rapids for a month. When he got home finally, the left side of his face was covered with bandages. The doctor had saved the life of his eye but not his vision. About a week later the flu swept through the town of Reed City and he got a severe case. Another week later the annual town minstrel show was scheduled. No one in town ever missed it but a few drunks and a smattering of the very poor like the dump picker, his wife, and their daughter for whom they took up a class collection every year to buy her socks for the winter or she’d go without. He lied to his parents and said he was feeling better when in fact he was still nauseous and shivering with fever. They couldn’t find a sitter and his parents very much wanted to see the minstrel show. They wrapped him in his father’s deer hunting coat to protect him from the cold November evening and the small auditorium which was always too cool. They sat down in the front row and the show made them dizzy, and a fat man sitting next to them kept farting. Ordinarily, he would have found this funny but in his current condition it amplified his living nightmare. He was deeply embarrassed. All the people onstage were in blackface, including a chorus of women who also danced. The men were recognizable as town leaders despite their heavy makeup. Everyone sang very loudly and poorly, he thought. No one for sure was a Bing Crosby. He dozed for a few minutes and when he looked out again he was sweating with fever and the stage was whirling as if time were passing in an old movie. He vomited in his father’s hunting coat and partly on the floor. It was very loud and the stage action paused. “We’ve had a reaction to our performance,” a minstrel yelled and everyone laughed. His father whisked him out with his mother in tow. It was early November and there was some fresh fallen powdery snow. When his father put him down near the car he took a handful of the snow and wiped it across his face and mouth. It felt delicious.

  “We never should have taken him to that piece of shit,” his father said angrily.

  “I agree,” said his mother.

  “We’re sorry son,” they said in unison.

  When they got home he sat down at the kitchen table with his mother and weakly tried to help her clean the coat with kitchen washcloths and a brush. Instead he fell off his chair and knocked himself out. His father carried him to his bedroom and tucked him in. He vomited again and then slept, not awakening until the following morning.

  This experience shaped itself into a nightmare that followed him the rest of his life. It disheartened him to the point that in his forties he went to a mind doctor. That helped for a year or so but then he was revisited. He never again was able to attend a stage performance of any kind. Eventually he also had to opt out of the habitual routine for poets, that of reading their poems out loud before an audience. Either the day before or late the night of the reading he would be revisited by the nightmare until the night whirled around him. And the feeling of nausea would return, certainly one of the most unpleasant feelings of the human animal. So he was high and dry, shorn of the renown, if not fame and extra money. He wasn’t really able to entertain an audience and had little interest in trying. The minstrel ogre would arise before a reading and he imagined that he had smeared himself in blackface.

  It was darkly comic to think of one’s life as haunted by minstrels. They were ultimately fake humans, derisive not to speak of dishonest. And nearly all poets were liars in his opinion too. They couldn’t possibly be the men they were reading about with the usual catalog of fine qualities. After attending and giving at least a hundred poetry readings he could remember only one that struck him as a hundred percent genuine and honest. A poet named, simply enough, Red Pine read from an ancient Chinese poet he had translated, called Stonehouse. Red Pine read with quiet integrity just what he’d translated. Usually after a reading he was in a private snit and needed a drink, but now he walked down and looked at the harbor, his spine still tingling. The other true exception was Gary Snyder. He never wanted Snyder’s readings to end.

  Early in the spring he took a ride thirty miles or so into the country, a weekly pilgrimage. In a village there was a small corner restaurant operated by a large old lady. She slow cooked a very large chunk of meat, at least a dozen pounds, all night long. It was the best ever in his memory. He had come late once at noon and gone without so he tried to get there at ten-thirty before the main rush. She served it as a hot roast beef sandwich with a scoop of mashed potatoes, homemade bread and a marvelous gravy, and a side of her own peppery corn relish. This dish is everywhere served at diners and truck stops as the way to get the most for your money, truly filled up. He had eaten the dish a lot as a woebegone young beatnik hitchhiking senselessly back and forth between San Francisco and New York City.

  The ride over that day had been fine and warm with the first tinges of pastel green in the pastures. Even the cows looked happy, optimistic now that another wretched winter had passed. The old woman, Edna by name, started serving at 10:30 a.m. because many of her farmer customers had had their breakfasts at 5:00 a.m. before feeding and milking chores. Edna said, “I don’t sleep good since Frank died.” Frank, her husband, was known for raising good beef cattle and had died the year before from a heart attack while branding.

  The poet pulled
in early beside a single pickup and had time for a final cigarette before entering. Through his open ­passenger-side window he smelled something bad and heard scuffling. Within the caged back of the pickup there was a massive Hampshire sow. He was startled because the sow looked just like Old Dolly, his grandfather’s prime sow, but that was over fifty years ago and pigs rarely live beyond twelve years, so it couldn’t be her. Besides, if he remembered right, she was butchered when she went dry, her meat frozen and given to a social worker to distribute to the poor.

  He went inside and said hello to the only occupant, an old farmer with trembling hands.

  “Fine sow you got out there. A Hampshire I think?”

  “Mostly Hampshire. Something else I haven’t figured out. The man I bought her from as a piglet years ago was moving back east. Maybe Duroc.”

  “We had one that looked just like her way back when.”

  “Good time to get back in the business if you grow corn. Pork is high. Hard to grow corn in Montana. Lucky for me my younger brother grows good corn over near Billings. She’s for sale.”

  “How much?” He felt inspired. Why not?

  “Three hundred bucks. Cash on the barrelhead. I’m retiring, selling out after sixty years of farming. Moving to town right here. We live too far in the country for my wife. In a weak moment I promised to take her to Hawaii when I retired. The sow’s going to farrow in two weeks. You can make your money back on her farrow. She’s always had at least ten piglets.”

  “Sold,” he said and drew this man, Fred by name, a map to get to his place. “Give me three days. I’ve got to build a pen.” He counted out three C-notes from the secret corner in his wallet for emergencies. It was never safe enough from his wife and two daughters, both long gone and married to hardworking young men in this troubled economy.

  On the way home he kept thinking it’s now or never and how he would tell his wife.

  She had three horses, two of which didn’t like him one bit, and a pasture of ten acres with a white board fence. They had first boarded horses in a small stable with fencing they built themselves in the young, salad days of their marriage when they had bought a little farm for nineteen grand. Nothing cost that much those days, even a car. Now she had her own horses.

  He stopped for a drink at a roadhouse. He only wanted one for courage but had a double and a beer chaser to make sure it worked. After all he didn’t need to tell her right away. Luckily he had enough lumber from an old chicken coop he had torn down when they moved in. In the beginning they had chickens for a couple of years but found them too irritating. Over the years, though, he had wanted pigs, especially when he was a little depressed over his mediocre writing career. During the truly melancholy period of his childhood after he lost his left eye he would sit outside his grandpa’s pigpen on a piece of stump and watch the creatures. Once after the sow had farrowed ten piglets Grandpa had moved her into an adjoining pen and let him sit in the pen with the piglets, in a dry corner away from the muck and shit. It was pure joy for his bewildered spirit. The piglets swarmed over him and loved having their ears and tummies scratched. He especially liked the little runt of the litter and on his request he was given the runt for his special care. He named her Shirley after a girl he liked in the second grade.

  He was still in his pig trance when he stopped at a farm equipment and feed store. He cautioned himself to remain alert to signs of his bipolar problem without admitting to himself it was manic to buy a five-hundred-pound sow over lunch. He made a note on his car tablet to buy six cedar fence posts, a trough for eating, and a tank for water. He would build the pen against the wall and around the back door of his studio. He remembered to buy five bushels of feed, recalling that a healthy sow would eat a ton of feed in a year. He could hear the cash register singing when it occurred to him if she farrowed eight or ten or whatever he would also be feeding them after she weaned them. His dad had told him that after mating a sow would give birth in three months, three weeks, and three days or a total of 116 days. It was all so scientific. Or so he thought being largely ignorant of science except astronomy.

  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.