The Ancient Minstrel

  “You look a little smug.”

  “I’m trying to get pregnant by you.” And then she confirmed everything.

  “But why me? Find yourself a husband.”

  “I don’t want a husband except you. I just want a baby to raise.”

  He was overwhelmed and began weeping, and barely uttered, “I don’t want you to spend your life taking care of me.”

  “But why, if I love you? I want to marry you this afternoon.” Her voice quivered never having said “I love you” before.

  “Everybody’s sympathy wears out,” he choked.

  She kissed him and walked home where she had a stiff drink of Harold’s whiskey. God damn the world and its wars, she thought. Those who start the wars never die in them. She packed hastily, had supper with Winnie and Harold, read, and went to sleep, getting up early for the drive to London. Winnie got up and made her breakfast and a sandwich for the trip. Country people everywhere were suspicious of restaurants with many stories of a fly in the soup.

  When she reached London her grandmother was off shopping for dinner and her grandfather looked at her quizzically, saying, “You look blue.” It came out in a rush from her sexual abuse in the subway to Tim’s refusal to marry her. Her grandfather did the best he could to soothe her. Way back then her abuser had been a braggart and Frederick the Jamaican found out and had pushed the man in front of a train. She was stunned, wondering if the man deserved to die for his sins. She was not a vindictive person but maybe it would save other girls. She and Frederick agreed not to tell anyone else. About Tim her grandfather said, “One of the ironies of war is that it makes the severely wounded feel worthless. There is no reward for them.”

  Catherine took a long walk. There was still stray rubble here and there from the Blitz but in general the city was in good shape. She loved walking along the Thames, however dirty. She noted that many of the mansions along Cheyne Walk had been totally reconditioned by the magic of lots of money. She chided herself for her hopeless guilt about war and history and being a woman not called to help or protect Tim in battle. Now they could have nothing.

  Chapter 10

  Catherine was home on the farm for a month before the momentous discovery that she was pregnant. She danced and shrieked in the obstetrician’s office. The doctor was amazed and happy for Catherine.

  At home although it was a cool day she danced herself into a sweat while feeding the chickens. Hud ran around barking and snapping at her heels. He clearly disapproved of this behavior that had nothing to do with him. Dogs prefer that we behave the same way every day. If we don’t, maybe we’ll forget to feed them! Even the hens scattered in alarm. She had to acknowledge it was pleasanter without the rooster.

  When finished with her dancing Catherine knelt and comforted Hud and then threw the hens extra scratch for putting up with her. She took Hud for a little walk about a hundred yards behind the barn to a small pond and a bone pit where her grandfather had dragged the carcasses of dead animals, cows and pigs. Hud loved the pile of ancient bleached bones still with their scent of meat. He had also eaten a muskrat from the pond. Catherine couldn’t catch him and he wasn’t about to give up a trophy merely because she said, “Drop it.”

  She had some worries about pregnancy and child care despite the stack of books she had accumulated. It was easy to recall that books and classes hadn’t helped with Hud. He would heel when they walked the gravel road and a vehicle was coming but then there was a real urgency in her voice. He greeted “come, sit, stay” with a yawn. Dogs are good judges of intention in the voice. Also he had a terrier’s bad temper and sometimes a “come” would cause him to glare at her and back into the shrubbery. Yelling didn’t help. It seemed to him to mean that he had won the round. He was a free radical, pure and simple. He was wildly appreciative when she returned from the store or wherever as if he might have been abandoned. The most effective command was “cheese” because he loved a piece of cheddar.

  The idea of eggs had followed her ever since her ­second-grade report on chickens and not always pleasantly. Eggs were the fundamental fact among all females in the mammalian and most other species. One of hers was currently fertilized for better or worse though it was what her heart wanted. Her old school friend Laura now had three children. She had once admitted in high school to Catherine that her cousins were always screwing her. But she was rather homely and was still faking mental problems so the high school boys ignored her. The point was that cousins were better than nothing, or so she said. This appalled Catherine who was a virgin at the time. When she even touched a boy’s penis he was always shooting all over the front seat and making a mess. Laura seemed to have turned out okay, or perhaps Catherine just wanted the children her friend and her husband had, seemingly without effort.

  Catherine had figured out early on that people were primitive right below the surface. She remembered Gert telling her at eleven, A man will tell any kind of lie to make love to you. She couldn’t quite figure out her mother. When Catherine was a little girl they would drive out to the farm singing songs all the way. They were truly happy which made the decline more upsetting when her mother began drinking right along with her father in the late afternoons and early evenings. While Catherine was living in England Winnie told her how happy her mother had been when they became engaged. She would finally move from crowded London to an actual farm. Winnie said Alicia had spent most of every summer with her and Harold and worked like a man. She was born to be a farm girl and when she found out that he was lying the disappointment was fatal. And now she was in Palm Beach and Oyster Bay, the least farmlike places imaginable except the heart of Calcutta. The message to Catherine had been to go it alone as much as possible. Jerry’s lavish gifts had been very helpful but he didn’t know how helpful they were. Once when passing through by chartered jet, for he refused to fly commercial except to Europe, Jerry had stopped by for lunch and suggested to Catherine that he try to buy out her blowhard Texas neighbor. She asked him to wait as she wasn’t sure she could run such a large ranch.

  Catherine took Hud for a little walk to shake off her dark mood and was amused when he hopelessly chased a jackrabbit that was much faster than he was. He finally slumped to the ground and looked like he was feeling sorry for himself after his failed game of catch, kill, and eat. It seemed that her life was accelerating in a direction she had chosen but at a speed she couldn’t quite emotionally encompass. Her mind felt quivery but tentatively sane. It reminded her of her junior year in college when she thought she was going nuts. Since she passably read Spanish she had agreed for a poetry class to write an essay on Lorca’s Poet in New York which was still fairly new at the time, maybe ten years since its publication shortly after the poet’s murder which had dumbfounded her. The project was unwise as the book drove her batty. She had loved Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads but had in error assumed this was the same kind of book, far indeed from the truth of the matter. What was a girl from Montana to make of a section named “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude”? She tried to back out of the essay but the professor wouldn’t allow it because he was interested in what she had to say about the surrealism of the book. He was in his late sixties but was obviously sweet on her and said she must write the paper as he was curious about what she thought. In his office she sat in a low easy chair which she figured he had in order to look up the legs of girls, so she showed a lot of leg to tease the wicked old lecher.

  What saved her on this project whose horrors had been exacerbated was the essay on duende that Lorca had written, which her professor encouraged her to read alongside. The essay made clear for the first time why she loved the kind of music and poetry she did. The art she loved had cante jondo, a ghostliness that drew out one’s most deep-seated emotions. It didn’t matter if it was Beethoven or Carlos Montoya simply playing the guitar which at one point had made her sob. Stan Getz would later touch her the same way. Perhaps it was strange in retrospect how utterly infatuated
she had become with the poet after reading Gypsy Ballads. She had fantasies of making love to him on the bank of a river in Andalucía, then she discovered that he had been born gay and now was dead at the murderous hands of Franco’s men in Granada. She felt foolish for her heartbreak but then there are no limits to the emotional life.

  Chapter 11

  Her pregnancy was difficult. She had interminable bouts of morning sickness and after two months there was a horrifying letter from Winnie in England beginning with the ominous, “Tim’s parents asked me to write this letter.” Tim had committed suicide. What had happened was that Tim had taken a long walk and fallen half in the creek and couldn’t get up out of the mire.

  A search party looked for him all night and only found him in the morning. He contracted severe pneumonia and was hospitalized. I visited him and he was proud to have made you pregnant. I helped him get a lawyer so he could provide for you and leave his armed services pension to the child. The pension is small but better than nothing. It helps that we have one from Harold’s perilous service in World War I. He still has difficulties from the mustard gas. Anyway, Tim was getting better but then he got a severe case of flu from the hospital air. He shrank to nothing. He saved up his pills in secret, took them all at once, and committed suicide. It was too much to ask him to stay alive. He was suffering horribly. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. He gave me this little note for you.

  Winnie had enclosed the note which read, “I’m so happy that you are pregnant. I am sorry I won’t see the child. Maybe in the afterlife if there is one. I could no longer bear life as it is given me. I love you. Tim.”

  She sat in the barnyard on the milk stool and wept for an hour or so which also made Hud moan and wail. She finally stopped and took him for a walk out in the pasture where he touched noses with the calves. They both seemed to enjoy this. Then he reverted to his true character and killed a harmless garter snake and ate it with evident relish. She would have to redouble her efforts to train him away from snakes.

  She hoped to have twins and get childbearing over with in one effort. Two was the perfect number of children. François came out from Florida in the early fall. He was mortally disappointed that there would be no lovemaking for the time being. He said that he had driven two thousand miles for nothing to which she answered, “You might have called first.” She told him the whole story and broke down again at Tim’s suicide. He was consoling. He had brought along two female English setters, both spayed, and Hud was frantically interested but they both bit him, their “keep away” signal, and he seemed puzzled and hurt to have his affection painfully rejected. François had fine hunting for Hungarian partridge, sharp-tailed grouse, and a few ruffed grouse. They ate very well though she couldn’t drink any of the case of wine he brought aside from a sip or two because it made her queasy. He was a fine cook and she acted as sous-chef playing Mozart as always as she cooked. He stayed five days and she knew that she could make love but she had a terrifying fear of miscarriage. When he left he promised to visit every fall which made her happy.

  She entered a long period of lassitude caused by the constant morning illness. She did nothing but read, and of late she reread the novels of Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry, two of her current favorites, and she continued with her many anthologies of Chinese poetry. She liked the Chinese notion that the most fortunate life was one in which nothing much happened. She liked to sit at the kitchen window and watch dawn arrive in the barnyard, pleased that the baby was making her fatter. She had been moderately slender and it was interesting to develop large breasts. She looked at them in the mirror and thought it would be nice to keep them around after the baby but such wasn’t possible. Jerry had offered to send her to any graduate school she wished if she wanted to become a lawyer or doctor. When she said she only wanted to be a farmer, he couldn’t quite believe this lack of ambition though all he himself had ever done was spend money. Ambition didn’t really trouble Catherine. Since earliest childhood she just wanted to be on a farm, like her mother except that Catherine had succeeded. Jerry every year was written up in socialite magazines as a high-net-worth individual but in Catherine’s mind that didn’t seem to do her mother any good, at least not as much as feeding the chickens did for Catherine. It was an antique question at best but the significant thing in life was whether or not your soul was at peace. Catherine felt hers was and now it looked like she was going to get to raise the child she so much wanted.

  Chapter 12

  In late fall Catherine’s mother showed up on only a few days’ notice, she said to “help with the baby” though it wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. Catherine was appalled at the presumption but prepared the upstairs bedroom her mother favored. Catherine had a very early memory of loving sleeping upstairs with her mother, how the stones she would heat up in cold weather would warm the bed. They would get up at 5:00 a.m., do chores with Grandpa, and then eat a big breakfast in the warm kitchen beside the wood range her grandparents cooked on. Catherine liked it best when Grandpa would squirt milk directly from the cow’s udder into the open mouths of the barn cats. She wanted to learn this trick as a little girl but her hands only became strong enough to milk a cow when she was older.

  That first evening was enervating. She could see her mother’s depression through her face tight from plastic surgery. Earlier she had watched the sun go down through the kitchen window.

  “This was what I always wanted and didn’t get.” Her voice was muted and without its usual hardness.

  “It’s not too late. You’re only in your fifties,” Catherine replied.

  Her mother gave her the look of one who had driven into a deep gully and never considered any alternatives for getting out. Like many women growing older she was an utter fatalist.

  “I wrote many times to Robert in person apologizing and he finally answered saying he forgave me. But I’m unsure about forgiveness. Look what we did to him.”

  “I’m unsure of why I survived and Robert didn’t. Dad picked on him and ignored me until Robert ran away. Then it was too late. When a child learns mistrust it’s hard to overcome it.” Catherine felt tears form in her eyes.

  Her mother took a vodka shooter out of her purse and finished it in one swallow. “I still haven’t quit though the doctors said I must,” she said.

  “Why do they want you to?”

  “My liver is a mess among other things.”

  “You better quit. It’s hard for a liver to recover.” Her mother actually looked very good for her age.

  “I keep myself slim but what else can I do? We have servants for everything. Jerry hates it when I do dishes.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “I know it. He grew up with a critical mother. He’s so worried that I might complain about something. I told him I was coming out here to help with the baby and buy a farm to fulfill my girlhood ambition. He said, ‘Go ahead.’ You of course know that your father broke his promise to me that we would live on a farm. He wanted to wear a tie and work in a bank. He said that he was belittled in school for being a farm kid.”

  “I doubt that. What else is there around here but farm kids? A few army brats. Gas station owners. Grocery store owners and clerks.”

  “I learned never to believe anything he said. Your grandfather despised him, said he was a chiseler. His own son. How could it be that his own son could redefine ineptitude?”

  “Well, he wasn’t about a great hero, but . . .” Catherine was uncomfortable speaking ill of the dead.

  “When you two kids were little I should have grabbed you and run for it. It was cowardly I didn’t.”

  Later that evening when Catherine went up to bed she wondered if her mother might be ill and had come on this visit to Montana as a last chance to ask for forgiveness. Catherine didn’t know what to think. She saw life as more of a constant whirl in which people often behaved horribly. What was the point of forgiving the early whi
rls? She knew she would forgive her if her mother asked, however, thinking there was nothing else to do. The past lives on in all of us. No matter how wronged we were the offenses were only the beaten-up junk of memory, pawed over until they were without color if still somehow alive. Late that evening her mother began weeping, she said over Robert in prison, but Catherine doubted it, thinking that it must be the entirety of life.

  “We had such fun when I brought you out here as a little girl. At the time you treated the chickens as if they were the biggest mystery in life.”

  “Maybe they are, along with humans. I liked going out to the dark barn with Grandpa at five a.m. Then when it got fully light I’d feed the chickens. I guess at heart we all like to be useful. Even now Hudley likes his breakfast early. If I don’t feed him by seven he starts barking like crazy.”

  After her cereal next morning Mother took Hud for a walk to his beloved bone pile out behind the barn. Hud already adored her and they settled into a routine where she’d take him for his early morning walk. In the evenings he slept at the end of Alicia’s bed and warmed it up which meant she didn’t have to carry the warm stones up the steep stairs, but Hud would bark if she didn’t. It also meant that he no longer expected to sleep with Catherine which was a relief. He would trot up and down the stairs with her under the illusion that he was helping. She wouldn’t allow Catherine to give her a hand, saying her legs needed the exercise.

  One morning while they were out Catherine called Jerry. He was appalled that her mother hadn’t told her yet that she had ovarian cancer and he hoped she would last long enough to help Catherine with the baby. After the baby was born they would meet at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to try and prolong her life. Jerry had hoped to help nurse her too but she said she was overrun with help. He hinted he would like to be invited out for a visit. Catherine said, “Come ahead,” and he was there in a few days. He came by private jet and they picked him up at the Texan’s landing strip next door. She still disliked the neighbor but money knew how to talk to money apparently.