The Ancient Minstrel Page 4

  “You better work on your fence, farmer boy,” she replied.

  The immediate ten acres was fenced but it was in modest disrepair. “I’ll take care of it,” Zack kindly said.

  “You spoil him but then everyone does except me,” she said and wandered back to the house with Zack watching her butt sway in her khaki shorts.

  “She’s a looker, that’s for sure. If you’re creating great art you don’t have time to fence.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “We’ll want sheep fence so the little piglets don’t escape. I’ll pay you fifteen bucks an hour to put up the fence.” He felt dreamy at the idea of watching piglets roam around out the windows while he wrote. Maybe he could get a novel out of the idea of a poor artist raising pigs to support his art.

  Early in the morning the day after they finished the pen he got a call from the farmer to say he was loading the pig. He asked for fifteen more minutes and fled his railroad flat with a cold cup of coffee from the night before, leaving behind a graduate student’s wife in his bed. Her husband had been on a fishing trip. He had been trying the night before and had done poorly at love. He had hoped to make up for it this morning and had said so. She’d looked at him sleepily. “I got to take delivery of a pig out at my farm,” he said.

  When he got there the farmer was backed up to the pen and leading the pig down a double wide plank. He saw his wife who was watching. He parked and walked down the new path to the pen. His wife was helping the old farmer shove the heavy planks back into his pickup. She turned glaring at him.

  “You asshole,” she said simply.

  “I thought my llama would need company,” he said quickly.

  “You’re a natural born liar,” she said.

  The old farmer laughed. “I know someone else who wants her. You’ll have to decide fast as you don’t want to move her too close to her farrowing. She’ll feed you all year. A llama can’t do that.”

  He leaned over the pen and scratched her ear which pleased her. He deeply felt she was beautiful. This is called pride of ownership.

  “I’m thinking of shooting her in the head,” his wife said, and walked back to the house.

  “Is she serious?” the farmer asked.

  “I doubt it,” he said and gave the pig two shovelfuls of the ground feed in the trough about which she was very happy.

  “Call me if you need advice,” the farmer said. They shook hands and the farmer left.

  He went into his studio thinking he might write a few paragraphs on his new sow but he was far too excited. They had delivered him a supersized dog house, now a pig house, and he had spread out three bales of straw for her comfort. He gazed at her out the window while playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, his last. He dozed with pleasure as the pig was dozing after lunch. He asked himself why he had waited so long to fulfill his childhood dream of owning his own pig.

  He had always been irritated by Wordsworth’s line about the child being father of the man. He didn’t doubt its basic truth but it was the deterministic aspect that bothered him. Of late he had been perplexed by religious threads that entered his thinking, originating as they did from a devout period he went through between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Jesus had been his boyhood hero rather than Superman or any of the other comic book heroes his friends favored. A neighbor friend was obsessed with growing up to be Dick Tracy and having a wrist radio to communicate. This friend died in Vietnam and so far as he knew had never owned a cell phone. This all had come to a head when he was a senior in college in a philosophy seminar. He had brought up the idea that in youth it was easy to acquire beliefs that were difficult later to disbelieve. For instance he still believed in the Resurrection and felt eerie about it at Easter time. He was roundly derided except by the professor who thought it was an interesting question. There was a lot of condescension and ridicule and general raw spirits. A lit student pointed out that the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire had written that Jesus held the world’s high altitude record. There was laughter and he recalled that at the minstrel show he had been enraged when those onstage sang what was then called a Negro spiritual in their mock black voices. This was clearly sacrilege as his minister would certainly have said. The professor interrupted to point out that what he had brought up was particularly true of young people with hateful beliefs such as antiblack racism or anti-Semitism that seemed to continue to follow them throughout their lives. He jumped in and agreed, then added in his own level of derision that those in the class only believed in beer, golf, and pussy. The professor chided him for vulgarity but with a slight smile of agreement.

  Now all of these years later he was again burdened by those hidden beliefs. He could not tell you why he believed in the Resurrection but it had never occurred to him to disbelieve it. He took to saying little prayers well under his breath. His main problem was alcohol which was easy to acknowledge. He prayed and then didn’t go to the bar for a whole week. He had his shooters at home but no full bottle. One evening he drank seven shooters but didn’t get all that far. He felt he should have been drunker. Now his friends called, really just tavern friends, and asked if he was sick. “Yes, we all are,” he said cryptically. He didn’t necessarily mean alcoholism. He rarely exceeded two drinks a day, he told himself. It was the regularity of the tavern habit that had begun to drive him crazy.

  And then there were his fears that something might happen to his piglets in his absence. The sow was safe from stray dogs—her enormous jaws would make mincemeat out of any hapless mutt. But the piglets were vulnerable. Now he could tend them after a long day’s writing. To be frank the pigs were now far more interesting to him than his tavern friends.

  As a child he had read a great deal including the forbidden so-called adult books. His father had saved his own youthful library that included travel adventure books by Richard Halliburton, all of Zane Grey, and a peculiar series about a young man named Tom Swift. His reading was aided by childhood illnesses like a severe case of pneumonia that kept him in bed for a month of reading as did his severe eye injury. He began to think of school as being quite boring compared with the pleasures of reading. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle had been far ahead of its time back in the teens and twenties, and those books encouraged him to think about the world in a more organized way and develop his own theories. For instance, because he first got religion in the summer, it occurred to him that God must have come up from the ground and entered him through his bare feet. Why not? His feet were bare all summer long and he thought at times that he felt messages in his feet, his telephone to the spirit world. At age nine he dropped this theory on his Sunday school class and it was unpopular. Everyone else insisted that God was in the sky. The teacher was sympathetic remembering the goofiness of her own conversion which was when she was out in nature and the trees were speaking to her. He persisted in trying to figure out life, keeping track in a diary, so it was not surprising when he became a writer. Once when they were trout fishing he mentioned his God in the ground theory to his father who responded that he always thought God was a trout stream. Hearing this he began to worry about Godless deserts with no rivers and said so. His father replied that deserts were full of arroyos and dry riverbeds, the rivers of the past, and God didn’t need active water present because he didn’t drink water. He brooded about his father’s words for months and became excited about the future and going west to sense God in dry riverbeds. His father also advised that there was no money in theology. This fell upon deaf ears as he never thought much about money.

  He got two dollars a week as an allowance, plus what he could earn mowing lawns, washing cars, weeding gardens. He saved as much as he could to follow the path of the great Halliburton when he got old enough. He wanted to crisscross the world and have many perilous, but not too perilous, adventures. He would doubtless save a beautiful native girl from a giant anaconda, whacking off its head with his trusty machete. Just recently an awareness of w
omen had entered his life strongly. The culture was looking for an extra four years for college which would needlessly delay adventure. The world gave one so many reasons to be pissed off at it. The age factor was a matter of great impatience. The young want time to hurry, the old usually want it to slow down.

  He had found out he was bright completely by accident. A man from the university in a nearby city needed a guinea pig to take tests as part of a course. He got two bucks an hour, a real windfall, to take five different IQ tests and late in the process he had snooped through the man’s papers when he went out to pee and noted his scores for the first four tests ranged from 163 to 171. He didn’t know what this meant, if anything of consequence. Religion had loosened some screws in his head and at this point in life he didn’t want to be brilliant, he just wanted to be ordinary.

  At fourteen he didn’t want to fear for his sanity. One of his few literate friends, albeit goofy, had lent him a volume of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and he had carelessly experimented with “out of body” trances wherein he could do such things as visit other planets and walk on the ocean floor. He had chosen the Mindanao bays, the deepest part of the ocean, but hadn’t imagined the bottom would be pitch black other than for a few phosphorescent creatures. The problem was that once he got there he couldn’t get back in his body back home. He had started in the evening and struggled to return to normality most of the night. This frightened him terribly and in the light of a summer dawn he was very happy to recognize objects in his room, especially a print of a Modigliani portrait and another of The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. Evidently Venus was born full grown and certainly the sexiest person in humankind. At his age she gave him a frequent hard-on. Once liberated back to the ordinary he vowed never again to errantly play with his mind. The imagination was too large to play with.

  He spent a few weeks of forlorn boredom in the very early spring and then began running every day after school at the suggestion of the coach who one day timed him while his large boys’ phys ed class ran the half mile. The coach was cagey noting that he had won by a couple hundred yards and his time was certainly good enough for the school track team. By working out relentlessly he was able by May to take second place by only a few seconds in the county championship meet. For a few years it was wonderful. However, he stupidly ruined it all the following summer when he gained thirty pounds of muscle on the advice of another coach. He gained the weight to play football. At present he viewed this as a lifelong mistake thinking that though the muscle was pleasant it did him no good, and he could pointillistically trace all of his various aches and pains in middle age back to the injuries he had sustained in high school football. He was a running guard on offense and a middle linebacker on defense. In one game he was called and the team penalized for unnecessary roughness. He was ashamed when later he learned he had needlessly injured a boy on a team from a neighboring town. At heart he was a secret Quaker and football was pure violence. The coach was always telling him to “hit them harder.” The coach wanted him to put opposing players “out of commission.” He kept it to himself but wondered what the point of the “game” was if your intention was to hurt people badly. His girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders and a bit dim-witted though lovely.

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

  Chapter 2

  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.”