The Ancient Minstrel

  “You’re here! Now I can quit, your grandfather is an ass.”

  Catherine merely nodded. She put on her coat and swiftly walked out.

  She made the obligatory drive to town to say hello to her father. She was dreading it. Mother had said in a letter that he had been in a bad way since the divorce. She noticed that the bank was closed early in the afternoon and the shades were drawn but then remembered it was Saturday.

  The front door was open at their house and her father sat at the dining room table with a glass and half a quart of gin and his journal in front of him. When he saw her he broke into tears. She didn’t remember ever seeing him weep before except tears of rage over her mother or Bobby. It all must have been terribly hard on him, she thought. He had spent his life studying and playing with money and now his wife had run off with a man of ponderous inherited wealth. He had found no way to counter these thoughts except with the emotion of jealousy, gin, and occasional weeping.

  “Bobby stopped by while driving someone’s car to Chicago. He looked good but wouldn’t talk to me. I said you were in England and his mother had left and filed for divorce. He only said, ‘Good’ and walked out with some of his wretched books.”

  When she left soon after, the divorcée was coming up the walk with a paper sack, likely another quart of gin. She nodded and Catherine nodded back. At least he had someone but sometimes someone can be less than nothing. A few years later when she discovered her father’s poems she thought the better ones were written after her mother left. They were less flowery.

  The farm was her home, simply enough. All through high school Catherine helped her grandfather feed and water the cattle and exercise the horses, and the chickens were her special domain. When he saw her off to college Grandpa said to her, “Don’t stay too long. This farm is yours now.”

  After she got home from Barnard, her grandpa was nearly ninety and facing the prospect of selling his cows which was a blow to his morale. He couldn’t bear the idea of selling the horses for fear they wouldn’t be taken care of. Occasionally, for reasons of sentiment, Catherine would help him harness the team of horses and ride the stone boat while they dragged him through the far pasture. The horses would automatically stop when they saw a big stone. This very old man would get off the boat and wrestle the stone on, to be unloaded later into a pile behind the barn. A friend of his was the local stonemason and would come out to pick up a load now and then and he and Grandpa would share a pint of whiskey.

  Later, in the fifties, the farm behind them to the west came up for sale at $25,000 for 120 acres, a price that Catherine was largely considered a fool for paying at the time, but she never regretted it. She installed a hired man, Clyde, and his young wife in the farmhouse on the new acreage. The wife Clara wept uncontrollably. She had been raised in a trailer and they now lived in a small trailer down the road and despaired of ever living in their own house. Catherine was overwhelmed and had her young lawyer in town cut out the house and five acres and deed it to Clara personally so she would stop worrying that her husband could get fired and she’d be homeless again. Catherine had borrowed the money from her mother to buy the additional farm and she had said to consider it a gift, but Catherine intended to pay it back. Beef prices were fairly high and the pasturage was good on the new place so she would get a lot more feeders in the spring. Clara worked for her two days a week and would bring her little girl Laurel who truly enjoyed the chickens. She would sit on a milk stool in a daze watching them with one of the bird dogs, Belle, who belonged to Catherine’s father, sitting beside her. Catherine borrowed the dog because it didn’t look like it was being fed enough, but told her father that she was thinking of taking up bird hunting. Grandpa had an old shotgun which her father described as a menace and lent her one of his, a pretty little English gun she knew was worth a lot so she vowed to be careful. He wanted to give her lessons but she demurred for the time being, not wanting to hunt with someone full of gin. Meanwhile Clara would always make something for dinner. She was a good cook and after a successful deer season for her husband she made an old-fashioned venison mincemeat pie which was delicious.

  Chapter 3

  Catherine disliked her neighbor who owned a big ranch to the east. It was the early 1960s and her grandfather had died three years before. Running the farm without him was lonely sometimes but she enjoyed it. The neighbor was a lawyer from Dallas and when he drove into her yard he laughed at the chickens she was raising. That embedded him in the mud forever as far as she was concerned. What a motormouth big shot, she thought. When they were raising money for the library he donated a thousand dollars, more by far than anyone else, so Catherine donated two thousand that she couldn’t afford just to bust his balls. He had built a pointlessly large house with pillars in front, an imitation of a television program. His wife disliked Montana, and his son and daughter preferred to stay in Texas. His loutish friends and business associates came up to fish for trout and to hunt birds and elk. One of them had paid five thousand to a relatively poor kid for a giant bull elk to take back to Texas pretending he had shot it himself. She had once run into the whole group, the Dallas lawyer and his friends, in the grocery store buying a case of liquor and whining about the lack of fine brands. She was wearing a pair of cotton bib overalls which were admittedly tight across her striking butt. Out in front in the parking lot when she leaned over to put her groceries in the car one of the lawyer’s friends whistled and she turned and yelled, “Go to hell, you old creep.” The man blushed and his friends laughed.

  In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean. She felt an odd sexual tingle which she attributed to the intensity of the sunlight in the tropics. She thought how chickens needed light to urge them to lay eggs though any kind of light would do. She had made contact with a Barnard friend who was living in Key West with a writer. Jerry had told her that writers came to Key West to misbehave in peace and without criticism. On the way to the hotel Jerry asked the guide to drive them past Hemingway’s house which meant little to her. She liked the stories about Michigan and A Farewell to Arms but his reputation as a bully and alcoholic reminded her uncomfortably of her father when she learned of it. Young men she had known in college who loved Hemingway had taken absurd steps to act manly. All of which was beyond her own comprehension. Farmers were manly without thinking about it. In fact she had never heard one mention the idea. College itself was so mechanistic that maybe the young men were only seeking a release.

  She dozed at the window for a while and then Jerry came in dressed spiffily and said he was having dinner with a friend. She was amused later when walking downtown to a bar to see him on the patio of a restaurant with a hand on the hand of an attractive woman. Evidently deceit was part of being a man. Her friends had a nice little local house, called a conch house, near the Key West cemetery, a charming old place. Her hosts had a party with a half d
ozen writers from thirty to sixty, very busy drinking and talking about themselves. She had noticed this quality of writers who visited Barnard, the relentless struggle to get the conversation back to them. She never figured out the why of this problem. Of course, it wasn’t a problem for them, only their listeners.

  She liked one of the writers at the party better than the others. He was half French but currently lived in the United States. He wrote mostly about sport, hunting, and fishing, but there was also a novel about growing up in the Normandy countryside that had done well. She was feeling faintly dizzy from too much wine and the thick cigarette smoke in the room. She decided to take a walk and the French writer offered to go with her. This put the others in a snit as she was evidently the prize of the evening.

  They walked slowly in the cemetery in the light of the half-moon which made it hard to see and walk without stumbling. It was wonderfully eerie and when she did stumble he caught her and didn’t let go. They necked for a while and since her desire had never felt so strong she encouraged him. They tried to make love against a monument to a rich dead man but it didn’t work so they ended up with her bent awkwardly over an ordinary gravestone. She tried to read the name upside down while making love but there wasn’t quite the light. She lightly traced the engraving with her fingers and came up with “Burke” or “Bruce,” probably Bruce. They went on for a fairly long time and she thought it quite wonderful. Afterward they talked a little when they could catch their breath.

  “Are you going to put this in a novel?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” he laughed. “I’ll call you Mildred not Catherine.”

  “I don’t like Mildred. Make me Italian, call me Lucina.”

  “Write your own novel,” he said seriously.

  “I can’t. I’m just a farmer. You know, cattle and chickens, a few pigs, wheat and corn, hay.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Suit yourself.” She went back into the party and was teased a little for her messy hair and crumpled skirt. She wanted to go back to her hotel room.

  “That guy you walked with is married.”

  “I don’t care,” said Catherine. Then he came in and part of his shirttail was sticking out of his fly. The men laughed. He took her home and they arranged to have dinner the following evening.

  She got up very early and Jerry looked bleary and tired but was cheerful. They were running late and after a hasty breakfast they met their guide at the marina. From that point on the fishing day was totally unlike anything she had known or expected. She had thought in terms of rowboats on quiet northern lakes and catching bluegills and perch with her grandfather for dinner. Early on when her father was still trying to make her into a boy he had taken her trout fishing on a big river but it frightened her. She didn’t know how to swim yet and feared drowning. If she died, who would feed the chickens? Later on when she had become a good swimmer she swam in the same turbulent river with aplomb, feeling the glory of the rushing current.

  That day they fished out of a speedboat-type craft and traveled northwest very quickly to a place Jerry called the “backcountry.” They only saw one other boat, a sponger harvesting sponges with a long pole. Jerry had lost his fatigue and was now excited. He told her the ride out here had filled him with “good ole oxygen” as if it were comparable to booze. Jerry cast his big fly rod to several schools of permit but they wouldn’t bite. He was nevertheless very happy and Catherine was quite transfixed by the beauty of the turquoise water fading to the brown of sand in the shallows. There were many small mangrove keys breaking up the scenery to the east. They were plainly uninhabited and looked like floating thickets. The two men were looking the other way and Catherine yelled, “Fish!” to alert them as they had taught her. Jerry quickly cast and hooked a big bonefish which they had to chase in the boat so it wouldn’t reach a channel and be nailed by a shark. The fish was landed and then released, a lovely act. It was thrilling but not as much as when Mark the guide saw an osprey struggling with a fish it had caught near the mangroves. The fish was too large for the osprey to fly away with it and she feared the bird might drown with its talons stuck in the fish. Mark used his push pole and glided the boat slowly toward the bird. Jerry acted frightened so Catherine made ready to help. Mark put on a pair of gloves but still received a nasty peck in the arm that bled. She managed to hold the bird’s wings tight to its body while Mark detached the fish from the talons and threw it into the mangroves. He took over holding the wings and tossed the bird high in the air. It flew off with a backward glare as if they had ruined its meal rather than saving it from drowning. Jerry clapped and laughed which startled her. She felt good that they had managed to save the bird and that she had been a part of it without really knowing how.

  It was time to make the long drive back to Key West. First they each had a small rum and Coca-Cola, a drink she’d never cared for but that day it tasted fine and she semi-dozed on the way back.

  Chapter 4

  That evening they ended up having a room service dinner on the patio of Jerry’s suite. Catherine’s new friend François joined them and didn’t object that they stayed in as she was tired from the sun and heat. They had several drinks including a bottle of good champagne, and she fell asleep in an easy chair after dinner. Jerry and François helped her into her bedroom. She later remembered that Jerry left and François helped her out of her clothes until she was nude, saying, “A wonderful body,” and then leaving.

  She woke after midnight angry with herself. How was she going to get pregnant if she slept through a splendid love opportunity? She wasn’t used to a daylong boat ride in the hot sun. In the morning she called François to apologize and they arranged to meet at the marina when she got back in. François said that he was a friend of the guide and would have him bring them in before five. He would meet her at the marina while she was still awake, he teased, and they could have dinner at his place.

  The next day they fished out near Boca Grande Key from which she could see the Marquesas. It looked so lovely in the distance that she wanted to go there but Mark said the channel was too rough today and they would have miles of the choppy water “beating the living shit out of us.” Jerry caught a few small tarpon on the edge of the channel, lovely silver acrobatic fish, and then he hooked one that was large. This fish weighed at least a hundred pounds and it jumped half a dozen times with its gill plates rattling, dragging the line in a wide circle with Jerry shouting and his reel screeching. He fought the fish for a half hour and he was soaked with sweat. It traveled south a mile or so out toward the Gulf Stream when Mark suddenly cut the leader when it was close to the boat. He pointed at a very large hammerhead shark coming toward them, drawn into a meal by the struggling tarpon. The tarpon surged off with the hammerhead giving close chase but the tarpon was well ahead in shallow water and the hammerhead turned around. Jerry and Mark were wound up with the fish and chatted about a past experience when they hadn’t cut off a tarpon soon enough and a bull shark had made a “bloody mess.” All of Catherine’s limited fishing experience had been about catching supper. This was something else entirely—the men called it “pure sport” but she wasn’t sure. To be pure why not leave the fish alone and just look at it rather than make it fight for its life? she thought, then chided herself for casting judgment. If people wanted to box, let them box and live with their concussions.

  François was waiting at the marina and she walked off with him without comment. He had talked with Mark but Jerry kept interrupting with one of his incessant dirty jokes which embarrassed her, not because it was dirty but because he was imbecilic.

  She had a good evening and night with François. His rental had a small pool and she immediately shed her clothes and took a dip. François quickly followed with a primitive hard-on. He tried to put his mouth on her underwater but it was awkward. They made love at the shallow end of the pool which was also awkward but more than passable. They made
love again on the sofa while waiting for a chicken to roast—butter, garlic, fresh tarragon. She found out that François lived in Palm Beach with a rich wife only two blocks away from Jerry on Sea Breeze Avenue. She said nothing, certainly not that it was the silliest place she had ever seen on earth. All of those rich people jammed together in one place. Why not a farm or ranch?

  After dinner and too much fine wine they made love once more desultorily in bed. She fell asleep by ten, utterly fatigued and a little sore all over by the sweet battering. She awoke close after dawn and there were high winds and a tremendous thunderstorm coming in from Cuba, a scant ninety miles to the south of Key West. François drove her to the hotel so she could make a polite appearance for Jerry. He was wandering around in his usual expensive robe talking on the phone. He winked at her and hung up the phone.

  “You look rode hard and put away wet,” he laughed.

  “Some morons say that every day in Montana.” Even saying “Montana” made her homesick. What in God’s name was she doing in this so-called tropical paradise? She was sick of all things Floridian and wanted to be home feeding her chickens. It was also time to buy a dog not that she was confident she was settled in her life. The only thing that could justify this absurd trip was if she was pregnant. If so there was no way she’d ever tell François. She didn’t want a husband or a steady lover, just her farm and chickens, cattle and pigs, a horse or two. She certainly no longer wanted a mother, or father for that matter.

  She went into her room to dress and heard Jerry back on the phone and then there was silence. Her door was open a crack and she saw the shadow of Jerry obviously peeking through the crack to see her dress. She poured it on and mooned the door, thinking, what a pathetic fool. She felt a vacuum in her soul where the love of men should have been but the only two she could think of with true fondness were her grandfathers. Had everything gone wrong in the world or was it her? Was it something odd in her strange upbringing that made men uniformly suspect? François was fine but she didn’t actually know him very well and there might be something rotten in his heart. She remembered with grief an episode several weeks before when she told the school’s young handsome soccer coach to stop by and pick up some eggs. She had thought of seducing him but told him if she was way out back she’d leave two dozen in the mailbox. But she was in the kitchen watching out the window while he wandered around the barnyard and quizzically Sally, a fat hen, was following him. Sally had this irritating practice of pecking at the back of your leg in hopes it would bring food. It was only slightly painful like a quick pinch. Suddenly the soccer coach turned and kicked Sally far in the air. She lay prostrate on her back. Catherine was out of the kitchen in a second, screaming as she came out the back door. The man turned in alarm.