The Ancient Minstrel Read online

  His wife held him and they sat there an hour vomiting up their souls, saying everything that was possible to say about their multiple faults that had kept them apart. Finally they made love to the obnoxious music of mosquitoes on the wooden floor of the porch.

  Chapter 8

  Long months of writing can pop your skull with strain. It’s the tediousness of exhaustion he went through, the ache of a period wherein he wrote a novel quickly followed by a novella. It was a life of compulsion. He missed the variety of pigs and wandering around France. He still had Marjorie but Mary had a bad paw and couldn’t walk. Marjorie had developed the illusion that she must look after Mary on walks rather than the natural vice versa. He figured that it was because she was conscious of her great size, probably about three hundred pounds he guessed.

  One day he was walking Marjorie alone when the neighbor girl came past with her young German shepherd. The dog had likely never seen a pig before and scrambled under the fence in curiosity. The girl called out that her dog was “mean” and he yelled back, “So is my pig.” Marjorie attacked the dog which snarled and barked. Marjorie pinned the dog in a corner with three fence posts. The dog was being strangled and crushed at the same time while its jaws were ripping at the pig’s ears which she ignored. He tugged at Marjorie’s neck but couldn’t budge her. The girl tried to help but her skirt was caught in the barbed wire. He cautioned himself not to look up her lovely legs but to help her save her dog’s life. He managed to wriggle and wedge a hand down between the dog and Marjorie and rip up whereupon he was able to toss the dog over the fence getting nipped badly in the shoulder in the process. The girl cringed in horror because his shoulder was bleeding though not as badly as the pig’s ear. Meanwhile the dog headed home down the road at top speed. She embraced him. “Don’t tell my father.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m fine.” He errantly let a hand slide down brushing her firm butt in the summer skirt. She trembled and so did his hand. She backed away, flushed.

  “Why are we kissing?” she asked.

  “Because we wanted to.” He kissed her again even more passionately and clutching her rump. She wriggled and his fingers inched into the cloth-covered crevices. Marjorie made an alarming noise and they turned to her. She was clearly glaring at the girl. “Marjorie sit.” Marjorie sat like a bird dog looking off as if embarrassed.

  “I didn’t know you could train a pig like a dog.”

  “It’s one of my specialties,” he said smugly.

  “Maybe you could help me train my dog?”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “I better get home. They’ll worry if I don’t come back with the dog.”

  “One more kiss?” he said, pushing her a bit into the thicket that surrounded the big rocks down in the corner of the pasture. He began to lift her skirt.

  She was frantic. “I don’t take the pill yet.” She squirmed loose and ran down the fence line.

  He sighed and wondered how unlikely the whole thing was. She reminded him of a ripe peach.

  His exhaustion made him feel inert. The one doctor was testing him for sleep apnea saying he wasn’t getting enough oxygen when he slept. He didn’t care what it was, he just wanted to be over it. He was inert with self-absorption, a detestable emotion where you only sat there thinking about your meaningless fatigue. He had been sleeping pleasantly with his wife since the death of his neighbor and the evening on the porch. She didn’t feel up to making love but neither did he. He slept most of the day on his studio sofa, meaning a short nap that always elongated itself. The incident with the girl, her dog, and the pig was the only true lust he had felt for months.

  Earlier in his career he had easily presumed that many of his problems were clinical and could best be handled by a battery of psychiatrists. Of late the exhaustion problem seemed insuperable. He read widely, as always, in the area of his problem which brought on the usual frustration of knowing what precisely was wrong and still being unable to do anything about it. After the doctors he slept most of a month. Quite suddenly he couldn’t write a sentence but then he didn’t want to. It was all he could do to sign a credit card receipt. When up he drifted as if sleepwalking mostly watching the multiple species of birds coming north from Mexico.

  Fifteen years before, bored with northern winters, they had rented a house on a creek on the Mexican border. He hadn’t realized that it was one of the prime bird areas of the United States but he happily assumed the childhood delight of identifying birds. He saw the rare Mexican blue mockingbird the first time it arrived there. The word got around and promptly there were literally hundreds of bird-watchers lining the fence crossing the creek on the property line. He was furious about the privacy invasion and told some of them that he was going to shoot the bird. A few women wept. He hung a sign saying, “Beware American Champ Pit Bull Black Savage.” That definitely helped but not all that much. He drove to Nogales and went to Walmart and bought a boom box stereo and some CDs of the Mexican border featuring the music of love, violence, and death. That helped the most and seemed to frighten everyone. People would quickly come and go. He was amused that the Mexican blue mockingbird would prance up and down dancing on the boom box.

  The whole area was gorgeous, mostly forested mountains and some desert all with both flora and fauna. A mother and daughter mountain lion had killed and eaten a deer in their brushy front yard. A jaguar was seen within a few miles of their house. Rattlesnakes were a bit of a worry. He had to shoot one in their bedroom one day. His wife had left the French doors open and the snake had come in to cool off. This was nothing compared with their warm weather place in Montana where a professional snake catcher had to remove a thousand rattlers in a cliffside den after he had lost his favorite English setter Rose. She had been bitten in the face with a fang protruding from her eye.

  Earlier in his career when his writing had him well up a scrawny tree he was bright enough to take a break. He had been forced to admit that you can become stupider as you get older. During his Guggenheim year in his thirties he fished a hundred times but still managed to write a novel and a book of poems as the weather was bad frequently in northern Michigan.

  Now, when his talent had etiolated, he often sat there suppurating, or worse yet simply dozed. He had always been a championship sleeper. Once he had taken two friends fishing and had fallen asleep in the act of rowing. When he had landed at de Gaulle in Paris a stewardess had to shake him awake. He was scarcely raring to go into a new life. Five cups of coffee and he could sleep immediately. He prided himself on being a good thinker whatever that meant. Not much most of the time. Luckily his memory had held out against attrition. He could see clearly backward into his waxing and waning. To wane was easy. Just come to a dead stop and you’ll fall off the rails asleep.

  Fishing, bird hunting, and cooking for years had been his central obsessions. Stop one and they all stopped. It was a mystery of sorts but more caused more. When he had become interested in cooking in those teaching years his wife was thrilled. There is scarcely a housewife who doesn’t tire of coming up with something new every night for dinner. With him oddly it had begun somewhere between recipes and poems. In his usual state of hubris he decided to create original recipes that would amount to the size of a book of poems. Of course he quickly fell flat on his face. When questioned his wife would point out that his original recipe wasn’t original. She had a huge repertoire of recipes and a library of cookbooks that impressed all visitors. Not having thought the problem through he was humiliated that he wasn’t a great creative chef instantly. She, meanwhile, was highly amused to the point that he easily became quarrelsome. And to his despair he discovered that cooking and drinking didn’t go together, certainly not beyond a single glass of wine.

  His first victory was absurd. A young couple from the French department had stopped by for a drink and to advise him on his next trip to France. The young woman seemed to know everything about food and wine. He di
d note how quickly the young quiet and deferential man opened a bottle of wine. It was enviable when he had seen it done in the bistros and he thought it required big talent and an amateur could never pull it off. His wife had warned him against cooking from the books of Paula Wolfert as the recipes were currently well “above his head.” He had started a recipe the afternoon before but it wouldn’t be done until midnight. His wife had made it once saying that he probably wasn’t worth all the effort. It was a stew made of duck legs and thighs, garlic, thyme, Armagnac, and red wine. His wife was tired, made an omelet with cheese, and went to bed, and he gave up on the recipe.

  Now they were all hungry sitting there eating olives and drinking cheapish Côtes du Rhône, and the Frenchwoman suggested they drive to their place across town and she could whip up a little supper. He dramatically yelled stop and got his half-finished casserole in its big blue Le Creuset from the fridge. His wife said to her, “We’ll heat it up. You’ll probably have to correct it.” He improvised finishing the Cassoulet de Canard and the Frenchwoman shrieked with delight, pronouncing it beautifully on her sibilant tongue. After that he would arrogantly try anything within or beyond his talents, usually French but quite a bit from northern Italy and the books of Mario Batali. He preferred the French but only because they were more versatile. This food obsession had lasted throughout his life, waxing and waning. A month of intense activity might be followed by a month of laziness with a few very simple Chinese meals thrown in. He loved the way cooking took over his mind and resolved the usual mental miseries which it always did. He suspected that it was the root of his sanity if there was one which was doubtful.

  The clearest mystery of his childhood was water which led him to fishing. It was emotionally enriching like cooking later became. You started by hearing from a teacher that water was H2O which never meant a thing. High on the list of the loves in his life were rivers, the dozens he had fished and others he’d simply seen on road trips. The good fortune of his water obsession was growing up in northern Michigan which abounded in wild waters, lakes, ponds, creeks, rivers, and the Great Lakes. They visited the Great Lakes on an occasional excursion where you couldn’t see the other side, and there was the feeling that there might not be another side. His love of water became haunted from one of the many fibs his older brother, currently a university dean, had told him. His brother insisted that even puddles could be bottomless leading down to China where you would be beheaded with long swords like the Japanese did to GIs during World War II, photos of which his mother had saved from old Life magazines. Falling all the way through earth only to get your head chopped off was frightening indeed, the stuff of nightmares, but he realized his brother was just trying to scare him. His brother had also insisted that he had dreamed he would die in a river in South America strangled by an anaconda. This enormous snake captured his imagination at the Saturday afternoon serials at the movie theater in Reed City, in which a man named Frank Buck apparently had been attacked by every sizable creature on earth.

  His lifetime of fishing began when he was about five and intensified considerably after his eye accident at the age of seven. His father had figured out that the only way to lift the melancholy of his little son was to take him fishing. They fished for trout on weekends on rivers when his dad was off work and during the week fished in the late afternoons and evenings at the cabin they lived at all summer long on a remote lake. His father and uncles built the cabin when the uncles returned from a very hard time in World War II in the South Pacific. He was impressed that they had built the lovely cabin for only a thousand bucks. The sound of rain on the tin roof was soothing to his eye which hurt a lot and after that he always identified a remote cabin with good feelings. A day never passed at the cabin without him fishing. Even when it was cold and windy he was bundled up and would let the wind carry him across the lake in heavy waters. Then he would have to strenuously row into the wind all the way home for dinner. Fishing was ordinarily not very pleasant in the high winds but he would screw up his eyes and imagine he was way up in Canada surrounded by polar bears.

  He felt that rivers, birds, and forests had kept him alive and would continue doing so. His wife was far better than him at identifying birds but then she had far better eyesight. None of his friends were bird-watchers. They would try to tease him about the “sissy” sport. He would only answer obliquely that birds were the grandest facts of nature and life. When he was doing sports journalism fishing in Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico it was altogether as pleasant as he thought it might be. He wanted to fish not write about fishing. It is often our conclusions that exhaust us. It also slowed him down that he had to hire guides for trout fishing because his vision was insufficient to tie on the tiny flies. Often, having a guide in the boat compromised the fishing. Guides want to talk about marriage and financial problems. He didn’t.

  He had also been impassioned with bird hunting for several years, especially for the grouse and woodcock, less so the quail and doves of the South. He never cared for deer hunting and had shot a deer only once which proved to be sufficient. It was unpleasant to gut and skin them, a moral exercise. They were wonderful to eat but he discovered that when he quit deer hunting plenty of friends shared their own kill including the antelope and elk of Montana.

  He had trained half a dozen dogs which was more enjoyable than actual hunting. There was a mutual joy between them when the dog totally caught on to pointing the scent and then retrieving the bird. A momentary thrill, the total comprehension between dog and man over what precisely they were doing. His English setter Tess, a truly elegant creature, would often do a prancing dance after retrieving a bird. And when they began hunting she would often take off at a very formal gait similar to what you see in American Saddlebred horses. He loved poems that gave him goose bumps, and the same thing could happen hunting over a fine dog.

  Obviously so much of the pleasure of hunting and fishing came from where you were. You were utterly enveloped in the natural world. Sometimes when he was trout fishing his mind played the cello. And sometimes when he would bird hunt for eight hours the exhaustion and also the taste of the French red wine when he got back to the cabin would be exquisite. He usually had two friends at the cabin and they would prep for dinner at midday break then slowly cook it when they got back to the cabin. They all cooked elaborately but sometimes they only grilled birds and would have them with a cheese polenta and lots of wine.

  Passacaglia for Staying Lost,

  an Epilogue

  Often we are utterly inert before the mysteries of our lives, why we are where we are, and the precise nature of the journey that brought us to the present. This is not surprising as most lives are too uneventful to be clearly recalled or they are embellished with events that are fibs to the one who owns the life. A few weeks ago I found a quote in my bedside journal, obviously tinged with night herself, saying, “We all live on death row in cells of our own devising.” Some would object, blaming the world for their pathetic condition. “We are born free but everywhere man is in chains.” I don’t believe I ever felt like a victim and so prefer the idea that we write our own screenplays. The form or genre of the screenplay is too severely compromised for honest results. You are obligated to write scenes that people will want to see, and “Jim, head in hands, spent an entire three days thinking” won’t work. It’s on the order of the oft-repeated slogan of the stupid, “I don’t know much but I know what I think.” Many years ago when I flunked out of graduate school, it occurred to me that the cause of this outrageous pratfall was the personality I had built. It all started when I decided at age fourteen to spend my life as a poet. There weren’t any living examples in northern Michigan so I gathered what information I could, mostly fictional, and usually painters. Painters’ lives can be fascinating, poets’ less so. But both were at the top of the arts list. If I was tempestuous and living in a garret in New York or Paris I would look better with smears of paint on my rugged clothing than lint
and dandruff. So I read dozens of books on poets and painters to give me hints on what kind of personality I should have. I even painted for nearly a year to add to the verisimilitude. I was a terrible painter, totally without talent, but I was arrogant, captious, and crazy so I convinced friends I was indeed an artist. This was just before the beatnik craze began, the motto being “If you can’t be an artist, you can at least look like one.” I tried to copy the paintings of old masters but on El Greco’s View of Toledo I ran out of canvas halfway across Toledo. This was poor planning not poor art. What embarrassment though no one knew but my younger sister Judy who was into my art fever and burned red candles and played Berlioz while I worked. The model of course is the romantic artist, possibly the curse of my life in the way it tripped me and made me fall flat on my face over and over. Luckily my genetic mix of generations of farmers also gave me a desire for hard work so I was rarely unemployed. My dad said, “You’ll always get by if you’re a good shovel man.”

  The “everything is permitted” confusion has pretty much lasted my entire life. Of course it’s nonsense but then the ego is beleaguered without its invented fuel and ammunition. You can’t squeak out like a mouse that you’re a poet, or walk in the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute. Part of the trouble is that you are liable to think of yourself as a poet long before you write anything worth reading and you have to keep this ego balloon up in the air with your imagination. I survived on both good and very bad advice. Doubtless the best is Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and possibly the worst, which I religiously adhered to, was that of Arthur Rimbaud who advised you to imagine your vowels had colors and for you to go through the complete disordering of all your senses, which is to say you should become crazy. I managed quite easily. This was mostly to advise young poets not to become bourgeois. Even conservative old Yeats said that the hearth is more dangerous than alcohol. I feel recalcitrant about this having had a number of friends that are dead alcoholics. We’ve always lived rurally where it is much easier to avoid being bourgeois. The natural world draws you to herself with such power that you can easily ignore the rest of the culture and social obligations. When I was eighteen I found an Italian poet I liked, Giuseppe Ungaretti. He wrote, Vorremmo una certezza (give us a certainty), which is bad advice but understandable if you just lived through World War II. He admitted, Ho popolato di nomi il silenzio (I have peopled the silence with names). Also, Ho fatto a pezzi cuore e mente per cadere in servitu di parole (I have fragmented heart and mind to fall into the servitude of words). Of course. That’s what you do. You might still be gibbering in your casket.