The Ancient Minstrel Read online

  Chapter 4

  Raising the pigs had given him the courage to plan an extensive trip to France. He had by now been there several times but always for overplanned trips for his French publisher Christian Bourgois. They were full to the hilt with interviews and bookstore signings with very little time for the general wandering around that he valued so highly. He later reflected that these were exactly like American book tours except the food was wonderful and Paris itself was more fascinating than any American city. For reasons completely unclear to him the French had taken kindly to his work and soon his French sales exceeded those in the United States which had never been all that good. He was reviewed widely and well but that had never translated directly to the cash register. It had always amused him that publishers like movie companies would never know sales in advance.

  He wanted to be aimless in France. A month might do it and he would stay longer if he wished. He wanted to go to Toulouse and eat as much as he could of the bean stew cassoulet, which would be a lot, and to the seaport Marseille, and to Arles which he knew of by having read about the lives of van Gogh and Gauguin. Of course they had lived together but it hadn’t worked out because van Gogh’s instability exceeded Gauguin’s. He cut off his own ear which made some biographers sympathetic saying that he did it for love, in itself incomprehensible. No one cuts off his nose for love.

  Thinking over his short trip to Paris he mostly recalled lunches and dinners and getting over them. He would rise early, usually because of jet lag, and walk for an hour or so until a café opened where he could get an omelet with lardons (pork morsels) after which he would rest, then walk another hour to stimulate his appetite for lunch, then a long nap, and another longish walk and a couple of glasses of red wine. Hard liquor was too expensive. He had been hungry the afternoon before and had stopped at the Ritz for a fifty-dollar chunk of foie gras and two forty-dollar glasses of burgundy. It was just what he needed after crossing the bridge and walking in the Tuileries. The tab was a hundred and thirty dollars to which he added a twenty-dollar tip. While walking back across the river he thought it over and once again decided that he had no meaningful comprehension of money. He had stayed in the Ritz once for several days in the early 1990s. It was the anniversary of Le Nouvel Observateur and everything was billed to the magazine. Allen Ginsberg was also a guest and called one morning to complain that two eggs were forty dollars on the room service breakfast menu. He told Allen that it was on the house and Allen had said, “I don’t like the idea,” and he agreed. “Me neither. Back home farm eggs are two bucks a dozen. I could be eating twenty dozen eggs at this price.” You simply ate the hotel eggs and regretted it in the name of the poor.

  He was brought up in modest circumstances but his wife’s parents were well off if not wealthy. His wife kept a sharp eye on their budget. She said she didn’t “connect” with his newfound wealth when the screenplay money started rolling in. She continued on in her usual modest way though he paid fifteen grand for a horse she had been wanting that reminded her of Black Beauty. He had no particular interest in horses but this one was gorgeous and would follow him and the dog as they walked in the pasture. Now he often walked Marjorie, the only piglet left. She was slow because she sniffed at everything like a bird dog. One day she flushed a covey of Hungarian grouse and he liked the idea that Marjorie would work as a bird dog.

  His wife kept warning him that his newfound prosperity couldn’t last forever and that he should save more of it. He ignored her. In truth spending a lot of money put him off balance though it didn’t quite sound an alarm. He was transparently a financial nitwit. He spent way more than sensible redecorating the house, spent lavishly on meals in New York and LA, spent on cars, hotels, pointless travel, fishing in Mexico and Costa Rica. When the air cleared, though it was still fuzzy, he figured he had loaned out more than $250,000 and had got only the two thousand back from the Indians. This only served to make him sensitive to the fact that he was stupider than he thought.

  The real hurt, though, came when he understood that he was overlooking his true work, poems and novels, to make more money writing screenplays. This happened only twice after he quit teaching for good, and he immediately wrote harder, ten hours a day, seven days a week. Naturally he got tired and the only thing that saved him was taking his bird dog and some groceries up to a reasonably remote cabin he had bought on his splurge near the harbor town of Grand Marais in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The cabin drew him back to his youth when he was seven and his father and two uncles built a cabin on a lake for a thousand dollars in used lumber, a wonderful cabin only twenty miles from Reed City where his father worked as a county agricultural agent. His family lived there all summer long. Sometimes he rode to work with his father in order to make a little money weeding gardens, mowing lawns, washing cars. On a good day he could make two or three dollars. He would come home and swim, eat some dinner, and go fishing for bass in the evening. On good days when he didn’t work in town he would catch a pile of bluegills his family loved to eat. This was how he was slowly led to his life as a passionate fly fisherman. It’s not just catching fish but the delicacy and grace with which you catch them. Not big hooks, hurtful to the fish, but tiny flies with tiny hooks.

  He wondered now if there was a short course on money. The economics course he’d taken in college was now a burned-out lightbulb and all that he could recall was the course made actual money seem abstract. It wasn’t. It was either in your pocket or not in your pocket. Years ago when he first started getting bigger money he got some local accountants and lawyers involved in his problems including taxes. They were very smart men but overly admired his earning power. This was comic. He traveled frequently to LA and New York to work on screenplays and stayed in high-rent hotels. In the mornings outside his door there were always copies of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The latter was new to him and could have been in Latin. He kept at it and memorized enough financial gibberish that the hometown accountants presumed he was money smart not understanding that there was no background of knowledge to what he said or noting that the balance sheet made it clear he was guilty of slippery malfeasance. For instance, he hadn’t filed a tax return for a decade and when they got him out of that one the fines were several thousand dollars. He went merrily on trying to ignore his leaden heart and feet. He could now afford all of the cocaine and best booze extant, a surefire combination for causing depression. The depressions were horrid indeed and the only way he could handle them was poetry and walking them off in the uninhabited paths of the Upper Peninsula. He could walk days on end without seeing a single person until he returned to Grand Marais and the saloon. His bird dogs Sand, Tess, and Rose loved it and so did he except for the exhaustion.

  One very warm July day he got up at dawn to take advantage of the cool air that wasn’t there. He swore to finally put an AC unit in his studio. He had an odd sense of foreboding having experienced a few minutes of minstrels in his dreams. He went out to feed Darling and Marjorie and discovered Darling to be dead and Marjorie quite ill. His wife was having coffee in her robe on the front porch. He hollered strongly and she came halfway down with Mary in alarm.

  “Call the county agent. Darling’s dead and Marjorie’s sick.”

  She ran to the house while Mary entered the pen, sniffed, and shied away from Darling, then licked Marjorie’s ears. They had lately become ardent playmates. Marjorie’s eyes fluttered and he was relieved she wasn’t dead. Naturally he wept, the mother of good things was dead.

  The county agent, Winfield, got there in an hour. He knew him fairly well and at first he misunderstood his gruff, laconic nature though there was always a twinkle in his eye. He asked to see the feed, ran it through a hand, staring at it closely.

  “It’s mycotoxins, badly moldy grain. It’s my fifth case with fatalities. I warned the grain elevator to alert their customers. They must have forgotten you.”

  “Why didn’t Marjorie die?”
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  “I don’t know. She probably didn’t eat much or she’d be gone too.”

  A small lightbulb went off and he said that on their morning walks Marjorie dug and rooted a lot in an old garden spot. Recently she had demolished a whole row of turnips and several rutabagas and now was working on horseradish root. He said he’d tried to stop her, thinking that horseradish root would be too hot and spicy.

  “Pigs don’t give a shit,” Winfield said. “You could pour a whole bottle of horseradish on a ham from their mother and they’d eat it.”

  He was mystified when Winfield knelt and closely examined Marjorie. “She’s sick but she’ll pull through. Give her a couple of quarts of milk.” Mary growled at Winfield as if he might be hurting Marjorie.

  “They think they’re in love,” he explained, a little embarrassed by Mary’s behavior.

  “I know an old baloney bull who made friends with a barn cat. They hung out together all day. The cat sleeps on the bull’s back and sometimes just rides around. If we got close to this bull or his cat friend we’d get our asses kicked.”

  He called Zack who brought over his big backhoe and buried Darling fairly close to her daughter Alice. His heart ached when Zack dragged her over the lip of the hole and she made a mighty thump when she landed at the bottom. Zack had a few dairy cows and brought over a half gallon of milk for Marjorie. She drank hungrily sharing some with Mary. He was charmed watching the lovers drink together, their heads touching.

  Zack had a pint of whiskey in his coat and they sat on the studio steps looking at the raw grave drinking the whiskey straight from the bottle. It was cheap and made them cough but then some think raw booze is a pleasure. His old Finnish friend in the Upper Peninsula thought that any sort of mixer was a waste of time.

  Chapter 5

  Breathing in and out is problematic in marriage. The early surge of ardent love wanes and flags. They had had a fairly low period after he taught at Stony Brook on Long Island. His wife didn’t care for it there, lonesome for a couple of horses she had stashed in Michigan. She had recurrent nightmares of sheep in burning boxcars. There was also the idea that on Long Island they would be trapped in case of nuclear attack. This was at the height of the Cold War and Long Island also began to further his claustrophobia, a lifelong infirmity. The screenplay work was thin, but a boon happened when he received a grant of a year’s living expenses from the National Endowment for the Arts. When they’d spent the last of that money in Key West, they returned home to a letter at the post office saying he had won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He had been promoted in his absence at Stony Brook but his wife didn’t want to return to Long Island which she saw as unspeakably dense and overdeveloped. And he was fatigued with being a college poet and living up to the cliché of being a drunk and a womanizer. He did a good job at it but it was relentlessly phony.

  So they stayed in northern Michigan at the time on their little farm for which a friend had loaned them the down payment. The farm was nineteen thousand and the mortgage was only $99 a month. Still it was a struggle. At the time he received only five thousand dollars for a novel which didn’t work. He did some informal sports and outdoor pieces for Sports Illustrated and other magazines. It was hard to get enough money together to get a drink. They went insecurely from month to month in a very nearly squalid condition. He did eventually have to return to teaching but the objective was to put it off as long as possible, preferably forever. The good parts were a fine garden spot and a big barn on the property. He loved the barn because it reminded him of his not so idyllic youth. They boarded three huge draft horses and two saddle quarter horses for some extra income. One of the draft horses was the Midwest’s largest, a mare named Sally who weighed twenty-six hundred pounds. She was like having a grand painting out the kitchen window in the back pasture. He took to wearing bib overalls like an actual farmer. Later they began referring to their penury at the time as “the macaroni years.” He had forbidden her to accept any money from her parents though they were ready and willing to help.

  In his writing downtime fooling with the pigs he had evolved a theory, not ready for release, he called a “glimpse.” The word was not quite right but would have to serve for the time being. In short it was typified by the way reality can break open and reveal its essence like bending linoleum until it broke and then you saw the black fiber underlying it. Standing on the bridge at Niagara Falls tempted by suicide was such a moment. Or holding Alice’s little dead body before burial. In both he had seen altogether too poignantly the sweep of life. Death gets your attention. He felt a little of it riding in a friend’s Ferrari going 160 miles per hour on a freeway. That however didn’t make his definition. It was too contrived and foolish. Once in a bar in Key West he was sitting at the end of the bar when two quarreling Cubans pulled pistols. He dropped to his knees silently, crawling through the kitchen and out the back door where he hid in a hedge smoking for a half hour. He would always remember what the bartender said when he went back in: “Ramon was pissed. He said he would kill him and by golly I bet he will.”

  His father had some Mennonite second cousins he liked and his family stopped to visit them now and then when they drove south in Michigan. This group of Mennonites lived on big farms near Ithaca. He was fascinated with these people knowing that they didn’t drink, smoke, dance, listen to radio, or have a TV. They almost never showed any sexuality except in sort of an underneath way. He was about twelve at the time and was just beginning to feel his first strong hormones. Every time they stopped by he felt sweet on a girl named Ruth about his age. She was so demure and shy it was next to impossible to get her to say anything. She wore a long gray dress and her little black skullcap which was obligatory. One afternoon she approached the driver’s side of their parked car where he was sitting and listening to the Detroit Tigers play the Yankees on the radio. She drew quite close considering it was against the rules for her to listen to a radio. In an act of uncommon bravery he reached out the window and took her hand. She was startled but she didn’t withdraw her hand which felt oddly strong for a girl’s. She let her hand go limp.

  “Will you marry me?” he said as if acting in a play.

  “I can’t marry outside the church,” she said softly.

  “Then I’ll become a Mennonite,” he insisted.

  They both laughed at his absurd earnestness.

  “Let’s take a walk,” she suggested.

  He turned off the radio and followed her into the barn where she showed him a very young draft horse filly. “My dad called her Ruth after me.”

  He felt the filly’s feminine soft nose and scratched an ear. She was beautiful. He followed Ruth out into the main barn away from the stables. She began to climb the ladder up to the mow.

  He nodded and climbed after her. They were violating a farm kid joke about the boy always trying to get a girl to go up the ladder first so he could see her legs. He wondered if she knew the joke. Her black socks went above her knees and then there were the two bare thighs. In the dim light of the barn he couldn’t see between the thighs. He felt a weakness in his shoulders as if he might not be able to climb the ladder. At the top she flopped back on some loose hay blushing furiously.

  “You were supposed to go first.”

  “I know it,” he said boldly. So she did know the joke. Her face was close to his so he kissed her on the lips. She held the kiss a few moments then pushed him away.

  “I never kissed a boy who was outside the church.” She seemed utterly jangled, the way he felt when he accidentally bit his cheek.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Don’t say that you goof.”

  He never forgot this brief incident. It had followed him for over forty years like the minstrels only it was a good memory.

  She pointed out a large hole in the floor telling him that every day at 5:00 a.m. she threw hay down to her father to give to the milk cows adding that her brother used
to do it but he had run away the year before he became eighteen to join the navy and to see what she called the “seven seas.” She stepped toward the ladder.

  “No,” he said. “I’m the man. I’m supposed to go first to catch you if you fall.” She stopped unsure what to do in the face of his deviousness. He quickly stepped to the ladder and started down. She paused overlong so he stopped. He said, “Get started.” She said, “Who cares?” and headed down. The view was clearer and lighter this time and he felt his poor body roaring. She stumbled slightly on the next to last step. He grabbed her and she slid the last few feet down through his arms. He hoped she didn’t feel his trembling.

  Outside her mother called from the back door of the house reminding her to feed the chickens. He helped, casting the cracked corn in a wide circle to avoid quarrels. Inside the cage she took a dozen eggs from the nest. He tried to kiss her again but she said, “No, please,” looking at her feet. She ran to the house and he followed slowly carrying the basket of eggs.

  That was that. The end of the story. When he explained his theory of glimpses he felt this was a good example. When his editor read it she wasn’t all that impressed. “Where’s the narrative? What’s the story about? You promised when you sold the novel in advance that it would be a big sprawling story about love, lust, quarrels, and murder between three farm families, sort of a magnum version of A Thousand Acres.” He couldn’t very well admit that all of his ideas for a new novel had disappeared into raising a litter of pigs. Naturally he had been excited when he first mentioned the new novel and his editor was enthusiastic. He was very broke at the time and was getting that way again because of a very late Hollywood royalty check. His editor wrote him a quick note after their unpleasant phone confab. “For twenty-five bucks a reader doesn’t want one of your glimpses but a big story right in the face.”