The Ancient Minstrel

  They were there six months when there was a wire saying her mother had to go home because Catherine’s grandmother on the farm had died and her father was ill from a possible stroke. Catherine didn’t think her mother cared about her father but there were many things to be sorted out that required her at home. She had trouble booking passage as there were so many people trying to get out of England in fear of the possibility of a German attack. Finally Grandfather got her aboard a big yacht returning to Newport, Rhode Island, in exchange for his wangling enough gas for them to reach port. Grandfather had been very high in the civil service, basically looking after all transportation in the London area. Catherine deduced later that this must have been how he wangled gas for the yacht. Her grandfather was called in for many civil defense–type meetings during the war, some at their home during which she had to go up to her room. Secrets were being told and she shouldn’t know them. She liked this air of intrigue having read mystery books.

  Alicia pretended that she wanted to take Catherine back home with her but Catherine doubted her sincerity. She was still angry about losing her brother and was quite critical as a young woman can be. Catherine’s grandmother was dead and her grandfather was ill and she was afraid he’d die and she’d never see him again. Her English grandfather assured her that the Germans would never dare attack “mighty England” as he called it. Then scarcely ten days after they said goodbye to her mother the London Blitz started.

  All the nights of the Blitz were spent down in the local subway stop, called the Tube over there. Because of her grandfather’s importance he had a little office toward the end of the stop as he needed safe access to a phone. MI5 also gave him two very large guards which consoled her grandmother who lived out the Blitz in a state of relentless fear. They stood right outside the door all night long. Catherine often worried about their families but they had been sent to relatives in the country early on. They were also visited once a day before dinner by grandmother’s French cook and his wife Nina. They had a hot plate in the office and Patrice would cook whatever he could scavenge that day from the markets. Grandfather refused to use his importance to get better food than the rest of the city could get because of rationing, but sometimes when Patrice got something particularly good and nondemocratic Grandfather would pretend he hadn’t noticed while eating his sacred lamb chop or whatever it was. There was also an open toilet bowl and sink in the office and an electric transformer against the wall which kept them warm on cool nights. They slept with blankets on thin mattresses that would be rolled up and stuffed under the desk during the daytime. So Catherine couldn’t complain that her family suffered like thousands of others in the Blitz. At first it embarrassed her to go potty in front of others but when you are hearing the thunder of bombs and the walls are shaking you learn to adapt.

  The barrage called the London Blitz continued for fifty-seven nights in a row. Even if you didn’t hate Hitler at the beginning you would be insane with rage by the end. Catherine read later that it had killed forty thousand innocent civilians and severely injured about that number. Her birthday fell in October and Patrice managed to make her a cake on the hot plate which made her quite happy, a nice chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

  Catherine felt cheated of the night. She had always loved to walk at twilight and see nightfall, hear the nighthawks and whippoorwills, then stumble home in the dark. Mother would make her take a flashlight but she never used it. The flashlight seemed vulgar in the beauty of the night. She missed most seeing the moon. Grandpa knew this and the evening of the full moon he daringly took her to the top of the stairs to see it. Frederick, one of the guards and a huge Jamaican, escorted them. The moon was distorted by all of the smoke in the air but still beautiful. There were fires all over London from the bombs. They stared at it but suddenly the Luftwaffe dropped the first bombs of the evening not a quarter mile away. Frederick put himself in front of them but Catherine saw the moon turn bright orange from the firestorm. She was both awed and horrified.

  Grandpa took her for a walk in the station every afternoon so she could get some exercise. That was when there were the least people in the station. Many left during this time to scavenge for food and to go to the toilet on the streets, as the public toilet in the station was in disrepair. The Red Cross began bringing food which was much appreciated but never enough. Then Patrice was shot trying to steal meat. Nina was bereft but brave and stayed on with Catherine’s grandparents until they died. Way into the time of the Blitz one day MI5 sent a small truck that picked up Grandma and Catherine. Grandmother was very ill at the time and the war effort couldn’t afford to let Grandfather go with them. The truck, manned by a nice American from Missouri, drove them through the rubble of London. There was a special insignia on the side of the truck and no one tried to stop them. The man from Missouri, named Ted, drove them way out a couple of hours from London to Truro, in Cornwall, to Grandma’s brother’s small farm. Grandma wept when she saw the farm because she had been raised and given birth to Catherine’s mother there. Catherine’s heart soared when she saw a big gaggle of chickens in the yard. As soon as she got out of the truck she walked among them crying and speaking soft loving words. A rooster pecked her leg before she could push him away with a foot. It was a solid peck and hurt but she didn’t care. Her great-aunt Winifred, called Winnie, made them an early supper because Ted had to drive the truck back to London before nightfall. Catherine would always recall it as the best supper of her life. Great-Aunt Winnie made an enormous omelet with her homemade cheese and served it with a big plate of very red garden tomatoes. Despite what Patrice came up with Catherine hadn’t seen an egg in a month and a half because eggs were very precious and she thought she had never tasted anything as utterly delicious in her life. Winnie gave her an Easter basket and it was her job to feed the chickens and gather the eggs as she had done back home in Montana. Most people don’t care for chickens, looking at them as food-bearing pests, so everyone was happy when Catherine took over the job. She knew what grand creatures they were and she was pleased to do it. At eighty-five Catherine would still be taking care of her own chickens. When they ate a stewing hen Catherine knew her private name for her. It didn’t bother her. It was just part of life.

  Chapter 2

  Catherine graduated from Barnard in New York City, the female adjunct of Columbia, in 1952. Her mother had a New York apartment (lavish at that) at the same time and relentlessly stuck her nose in Catherine’s business whenever possible, which was a problem. She spent an entire winter in New York not calling her mother a single time. Alicia pretended to be bereft.

  Mother divorced Father after the war and married the man who owned the yacht that had taken her from England to Newport during the war. Catherine came to suspect it didn’t take her mother long to seduce him. She had also discovered another secret about her father aside from his affair with the divorcée, whom she’d seen and didn’t think very attractive. Maybe she was nicer to him than her mother, who was rarely acidic with her children but could be merciless toward her husband, particularly when they were drinking. On pleasant summer mornings Father would have his coffee out on a picnic table in the backyard under an oak near the hedge. He always took along his red journal or notebook and didn’t want to be disturbed. One morning when Catherine was in her last year at Barnard he rushed off and forgot the journal on the table and she noticed it when she went out to the hedge to check a yellow warbler nest. It was wrong but she couldn’t help snooping. To her shock the journal was full of poems he had written. What an unlikely poet this small town banker and bullying father was, she thought. She saw that most of the poems were imitations, not very good, of the English Romantic period of Wordsworth and Shelley but a few terse short ones were fair to good. In general, however, he was too flowery and should read Wallace Stevens, she thought, or William Carlos Williams, a personal favorite of hers.

  She wondered how often people had secret obsessions that never saw public daylig
ht. Who acted less “poetic” than her father? Did anyone know besides him? She doubted it. She later read a writer who said, “There must be freedom before there can be freedom.” It sounded like nonsense but she thought she understood that we must be ready for our obsessions when they arrive. Like her own interest in chickens. Mother once told her that when she was about two she put her down in the yard while she was hanging wet clothes on the clothesline. She turned to check on Catherine and a hen was sleeping on her lap and she was petting the cozy hen with her tiny hand. She dated this as the beginning of Catherine’s chicken obsession but Catherine herself viewed it as far more gradual. And her first move in the barnyard when she first learned to walk was to follow the chickens, getting their poop on her baby shoes. Grandmother tried to stop her but she became distraught so they bought tiny rubber boots they could wash off with the hose. In her eighties she still enjoyed tottering out to feed her hens. They pretended they were interested in her until she threw their food, the scratch, and then they only chased their meal. It was the same when she fed the pigs or calves skim milk, which was left over after the cream when they put milk through the hand-cranked separator. The pigs would watch her approach with eager pig smiles and then she’d pour the skim milk into their trough and they’d be all business. The calves in their pen would mooch up to her like long-lost friends, licking her arms with their rough tongues, and then she’d pour the milk and they’d be at it though not nearly as sloppily as the pigs. Calves would at least look up and around during their meal but not pigs. Compared with both, the chickens were methodical but diffident eaters with more faith apparently in future eating.

  Her clue to Father’s poetry writing was books. When she and her brother Bobby were quite young her father had given them a set of the twelve-volume My Book House saying rather obliquely that books had meant a lot to him as a child. She knew his own childhood library was still in his room in a glass-fronted bookcase so she wondered why he just didn’t give them his books, but stayed shy of asking the question guessing there was some kind of emotional involvement as we have for our few precious things.

  The twelve volumes of My Book House were geared to gradually ascending age beginning with nursery rhymes like “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old.” Catherine ignored the logic of this progression and read them straight through at age ten, though the late volumes were a little difficult at the time, full of involved folklore and world mythology. The set also fueled her interest in American Indians and one of her own precious things was the small collection of arrowheads and three spear points she had found on the farm. Catherine felt sure reading had fed her father’s early interest in poetry. What schizophrenia must have been involved in his later career in economics and banking, but then he had always seemed a man whose character was composed of carefully separated slices. His children and wife never received the tenderness he showed to his English setter bitches Lisa and Clare. Only once had he owned a male bird dog, named Bozo, a rambunctious nitwit who hurled himself over a line of bushes out near the quarry, plummeting downward more than a hundred feet. Father said that only a male dog would jump over something without knowing what was on the other side. After Bozo he owned only females.

  But what ultimately carried a man who spent a lifetime writing poetry in secret? We are a mystery. At Barnard and enmeshed in the speedy life of New York Catherine found that around Easter she still believed in the Resurrection as if she could still see the contrail of Jesus rising from death to the heavens. And on spring vacation rather than go to a seaside rental with her wealthy friends she went home to work on her term paper on Kierkegaard and to feed chickens.

  It was sheer paradise in England to be out of the Tube station and on a farm. At Grandma’s request she’d go next door nearly a mile and read to a farm couple’s son who as a Francophile had signed up early in the war and lost a hand and a leg and had his vision impaired in the defense of Paris. Catherine would read to him for an hour or so and then have a cup of tea or a glass of beer and chat for a while with him. He didn’t want to hear English classics which he knew but French and some American novels when she could find them. Luckily a rich nobleman near the local village heard about their book plight and gave them access to his library. Her wounded neighbor didn’t care for Hemingway but loved Faulkner’s Light in August or the sonorities of Absalom, Absalom which made her breathless to read. The young man Tim was understandably embittered, a farmer’s son who would never be able to effectively farm himself. One day when his parents were gone he asked to see Catherine in the nude. She was nearly fourteen at the time and had been in England for several years now. She considered his request and thought there was no reason not to so she quickly stripped but then he started crying. Later, when he had calmed down with a large whiskey he tried to explain himself, saying that he felt “dismembered” and that sexual love was forever out of his range. Catherine was a young innocent and disagreed saying, “I thought you just needed that one thing to make love, a penis,” and he laughed at her matter-of-factness. He said that losing a hand and leg meant that he could never be a real farmer, or a real lover. That was that. She could see that it was a matter of shame more than anything else.

  After the bombings ended Grandma had returned to London to be with Grandfather and the years rolled on slowly with the entire world at war. It was consoling to live on the farm. Her mother would have preferred she come home, but transatlantic travel was now impossible and Catherine was enrolled in a British school and thriving. As an American she was also worried about the Japanese while the local English were obsessed with the possibility of a German invasion. At their dawn breakfast each day her great-uncle Harold, Winnie’s husband, was glued to the radio listening to war news. One morning he beamed at her and yelled, “Thank God for the Yanks.” The American forces had managed to make a German invasion of England unlikely indeed. Catherine was in love with Winston Churchill’s resonant voice whether he was saying something important or not.

  One day Catherine got some mail from her grandparents in London who were so pleased to be home and out of the accursed underground. When they had reached home some squatters were in there but it was only a young teacher, his wife, and their baby. Their apartment two blocks away had been utterly destroyed so her grandparents ­allowed them to make their quarters in a couple of back rooms for the duration of the war. They all liked each other a lot and the young man was skilled enough to replace some windows on the east side of the house that had been broken by the blasts of bombs. The young wife was good in the kitchen, never Grandma’s strength, and Grandma loved the little baby boy. Her grandparents were able to visit the farm once in an MI5 vehicle driven by the huge Jamaican, Fred. They ate eggs for three days and returned to London with several dozen, some cleaned chickens, and a few rabbits Harold had raised. The scales finally tipped a bit with the Normandy invasion but it wasn’t until the liberation of Paris that many people felt any confidence. Catherine heard later that Hitler had demanded that his officers engineer the burning of Paris but they had refused to do it. This was a late in the game relief for her because she had wanted to go to Paris ever since she had known it existed.

  Finally the war was over and it was time for her to go home. With her parents separated and divorcing there was no real home for her to go to but she intended all along to live out on the farm. Still she was reluctant to leave England and stayed an extra month in London. She liked the young couple very much and their little boy made her want to have a baby. She was only sixteen but it seemed logical, if you wanted a baby, to go ahead and have one. For that reason she made one more trip after the war out to see Harold and Winnie. She went directly to Tim’s house next door while his father was haying and his mother was in town grocery shopping. She took off her clothes in his bedroom, flopped on the bed bare-assed, and demanded sex. He was utterly surprised because she hadn’t called to say she was coming, but he didn’t seem surprised by her capric
ious behavior. He took a condom from the desk and came to the bed with his crutches. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. With only one hand he couldn’t put on the condom by himself so Catherine hurriedly helped, doing a sloppy job so it would leak and she might have a baby. His member was large and she wondered if it would hurt. It did a little but she didn’t care because this was her heart’s desire. It was over quickly. They lay around for a while and then she raised his interest with her mouth, not something she especially looked forward to but it worked. She got on him again before he could ask for a condom.

  She didn’t get pregnant. She was aggrieved. She was in tears for a month.

  Seventy years later Catherine found it all comically absurd. She had been willful indeed. She had truly been a sexual person only periodically. It had been grotesquely hard in her life to find a good man. Besides, she had never wanted to be married.

  She returned from England on the boat and then a train to Billings, Montana, and another home. She arrived early the next morning and Catherine impulsively went straight to the farm and unloaded all of her luggage. Her grandpa was still alive, if barely, and she wanted to take care of him and help him with work. When she arrived he was having an early afternoon snooze on the couch with the Detroit Tigers ball game on the radio. He opened one eye and said to her, “You’re home,” and went back to sleep. He looked very old but then she had been gone for five years. In the kitchen the cook Bertha was cleaning green beans. She looked at Catherine and smiled broadly.