The Ancient Minstrel

Chapter 1

He went in a door and out another one ten feet away. It had been an old railroad flat he had remodeled, tearing down walls and painting. He liked the two doors close together. It gave him a sense of choice otherwise missing in his aging life.

Others who had remodeled railroad flats had stupidly closed off the extra door pretending it had never existed. He drove his neighbor in a prim bungalow quite crazy when he had a whim and circled in and out of his two doors. The neighbor was a retired academic, a delightfully bright codger who loved to speak vulgarly after a lifetime of propriety. The neighbor would open a fine wine he could afford on his generous retirement and wave him over to share it. He always went, even after he joined AA to preserve his marriage. He found out that fine wine encouraged a taste for fine wine and never precipitated a binge. If you drank half a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou you wanted more of it and nothing else, certainly not the rawness of whiskey or bilious beer.

He was what they called an “award winning poet,” at least that was what his publisher called him on book jackets, though in fact he had never heard of any of the awards before he received them. So much for the immortality of poetry. He had even looked up the Pulitzer in the World Almanac at a doctor’s office and been quite startled to see how many twentieth-century names had been forgotten. Meanwhile over a good Bordeaux his academic geezer neighbor would say, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” as if it were an obesity joke over which he chortled deeply. He himself could remember saying it in a coffee house before he flunked out of graduate school. His failure was due to “arrogance,” the department chairman said. Young poets, even before they wrote a poem, tended to be prideful rather than properly self-effacing graduate students. Anyway, the department managed to grant him his master’s after he published his first book of poems with an honored New York publisher. No one from the department had ever done that before. They were proud of him but not to the point where they would allow him to enroll in their Ph.D. program. Years more of him strutting the halls was an idea none of these fustian gentlemen could bear.

He and his wife weren’t divorced but she lived a dozen miles out in the country outside Livingston, Montana, on a small farm with a big house. It had been her idea to get a house in town for becoming older and she was tired of taking care of such a large farmhouse of 3,800 square feet. He had also slipped on drinking which he had been able to manage in his early sixties.

He would take a chance and drive out at least twice a week and play with the dogs, often a disappointing experience because it had been quite warm and he would get there and be met wildly by the dogs but after a few minutes of play they’d settle back to sleeping on the thick grass of the lawn. He wanted them to play like they did as pups. The fact of the matter was that they were no longer pups. At ten they were about the same age in dog years as his own seventy. He slept in his studio when he came out to the farm, in a small cabin where he did his writing on the property near the big house. It wasn’t elegant but simply workable.

He was taking a chance driving because he no longer had a driver’s license. He had thought many times that the end of his rational marriage had come when they took his driver’s license away. He was furious because it had been a mistake. He had stupidly admitted to the state cop that he had recently had spinal surgery. The cop asked if he was on narcotic pain medication and he clearly said, “No,” but wasn’t believed. As a matter of fact the first weeks after his surgery he had taken OxyContin but stopped despite the pain in his spine because the drug made his writing slurred and goofy. He couldn’t write that way, not even in his journal which was frequently goofy all by itself.

He had also suffered from shingles for nearly three years though when the big sores subsided it was called postherpetic neuralgia. Whatever it was called it was plainly a double whammy about which nothing could be done medically. He had learned that doctors ignored shingles as an unprofitable disease until they had it themselves. There were no big fund-raisers for shingles. At the Department of Motor Vehicles office he gave a bravura performance and they kept his license when he handed it over. “Give it back,” he yelled.

Anyway, he had sent the governor an imprudent letter saying that he had written Legends of the Fall, his best-known book, and he needed to drive and explore new places in order to write and make a living. He couldn’t very well sit home and write “Legends of the Yard.” The letter didn’t do any good although eventually he proved himself deserving and was able to drive again.

He had expected the trail into aging to be uneventful. On the contrary, who had ever heard of a white, Christian gentleman like himself losing his driver’s license and sitting under a pine tree rather than driving to a friendly bar in town? Which of course is what he didn’t need, a bar with old friends. He hated to think of the time and energy he had spent in a long life thinking about quitting smoking and drinking for the obvious health reasons. He had intermittently, briefly of course, been a health nut in his life. Once when they still lived in Michigan he lost twenty-five pounds in two months by walking four hours every morning, stopping for a rare cigarette, counting birds he liked, walking places in the Upper Peninsula where he had never walked before. The unknown always beckons. Early settlers always wondered what was over the next hill other than other hills. The vaunted reputation of Daniel Boone came from how thoroughly he had covered the landscape. He saved a village of starving people by going out and shooting a combination of ten deer and bears in one day, enough to feed everyone for a week.

When he was growing up in Michigan, his own father had been a good woodsman and had instructed him well. When you think you’re lost just sit and calm down. When you’re frantic you lose your energy. Notice how the trees tend to lean a bit to the southeast. That’s because of the prevailing winds and the immense storms from the northwest off Lake Superior. The day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down it had blown over ninety miles per hour for a couple of days. He had been at his remote cabin then and did not stray from the protection of its sturdy logs. He read and listened to trees crashing down in the landscape. “Widow makers,” they were called. He finally left the cabin for a much needed drink at the tavern. He drove down to the lakefront and watched as giant waves smothered the pier. Even in his car he shuddered in fear. The waves actually thundered.

By far the biggest jolt of aging was the disappearance, coming up on seventy, of his sexuality. The doctor improperly joked when he explained the problem. He was angry and the doctor said that it happens to everyone. In fact there was a bench in front of the town hall on which the same five old men sat every day called “the dead pecker bench.” There were medications available now, and there was a joke at the tavern that if you had an erection more than three hours just visit the Starlite Alleys on women’s bowling night and announce your problem. You’ll get plenty of exercise. But the idea of taking a pill to get a hard-on left a bad taste.

He couldn’t help trying it once the year before at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., a city he loathed for political reasons but tolerated when it was full of old writer friends. The target was a graduate student girl he had made love to years before when she was a sophomore. The price was that he had to write her a glowing recommendation to the Hunter College writing program in New York City. He readily agreed. She was a bit dumpy but used to have a nice body. They went to his room at the Mayflower after dinner and drank. She was in a hurry because she had to see an old boyfriend, also a writing professor. Unfortunately, the pill gave his gray room a deep green aura which irked him and then he came off in a minute. He apologized and then she quickly left to visit her friend without working up a sweat. To his surprise he noticed while watching CNN that he still had a hard-on, evidently a peculiarity of the pill. He went out in the street on the odds he might meet an acceptable pro, which he did a few blocks from the White House. They strolled along chatting amicably about music, which raised a warning flag in his head. A doctor friend had warned him never to sleep with a prostitute who also hung out with musicians as there was a higher incidence of AIDS in such women. Once again he apologized, gave her twenty bucks for the chat, and turned back to the hotel and the torpor of a thousand English professors at their evening meetings through which many dozed.

Years before when he was teaching at a university he had helped out the chairman who had hired him to do preliminary interviews with a half dozen creative writers applying for the vacancy. He had already tossed out about fifty résumés. The university was only a couple of hours from New York, a magic city, at least for writers. It was all in all very unpleasant, especially the air of pleading in their eyes, and interviewing the half dozen candidates was grueling. The most obnoxious and smug man, also the best dressed with probably a rich wife, had gone so far as to write a good review of his own first book of poems and presumed that it gave him an inside track. He could barely wait to get him out of the room and pretended to make a phone call saying, “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” though ten minutes was far too long. He ended up giving the highest recommendation to the writer with the most kids.

The whole economics of work depressed him. He made a good salary, doubtless more than he deserved, but the candidate with the most children admitted that the night before he had missed the last bus back to the area of Virginia where he was staying with a relative. He had mostly walked the streets until about 4:00 a.m. and then went back to the hotel and took the elevator to the fifth floor where he recalled that there was a sofa near the elevator entrance. He had barely gotten to sleep when a bellhop woke him and offered to help him to his room. He deftly said that his roommate was sleeping with a very noisy woman. The bellhop laughed and continued on his way. He was then awakened at 7:00 a.m. by the first room service cart.

The award-winning poet asked the man why his college wouldn’t pay for a room. He said it was because he had taken this last year off to write a comic novel. His wife and two daughters had all worked at McDonald’s and they made it through okay. But he was not tenured and the department was replacing him with a young hotshot from Iowa. “That’s why I’m here. I haven’t sold the novel yet.” It turned out the candidate had been cutting Christmas trees for four bucks an hour which was admittedly “chilly” in Michigan. He told the man to go into the bedroom of his suite and gave him a shooter, a two-ounce bottle of Canadian whiskey. He had one himself and the man wobbled off to sleep.

It was a good story, he thought. They hired the man, whose novel was published and did well. He wanted to quit his new job and just write but his wife was fearful and told him she would shoot him if she ever had to go back to work at McDonald’s. The family was overwhelmingly pleasant. The award-winning poet reminded himself to keep his hands off the man’s two pretty teenage daughters.

He could date the moment desire had fled or when he had truly noticed it. It was a late August afternoon in 2013. It was warm and he sat at a table in the tavern. He was alone because he always arrived at 4:00 p.m. and his friends showed up at the more proper time of 5:00. There were two girls at the bar and one of them was in a very short summer skirt twirling on her bar stool. It was electrifying or would have been in the past. He felt nothing and pinched himself lightly to make sure he was actually alive. No, a curtain had dropped and he wondered if it was a recent bad cold. He certainly didn’t feel the iron bite of lust which should have been automatic. Not very far in the past, minutes to be exact, he would have been up at the bar buying the girls drinks, cajoling, letting drop a few credentials like “I was just in New York seeing my publisher,” looking down at the smooth legs of the twirler and imagining her resplendent pubis on his not so lonely pillow. Her friends came in and the girls left but not before the twirler winked at him. The display had been for his own frozen body. He couldn’t even manage to return the wink because his heart had abruptly darkened.

He had been distressed a long time by this nominal experience which wasn’t nominal to him. It was more like a resounding crack of doom. So much of his life since youth had been consumed thinking about women.

One late afternoon when he and his neighbor John had sipped two bottles of good wine rather than one he had impulsively confessed that sex had “fled” his life.

“Sic semper tyrannis,” the man said.

“I forgot what that means.”

“It means your tyrant is dead. Sex is the most powerful bully in our lives. Last year I saw an extraordinary number of young women going in and coming out of your place. They rarely lasted more than an hour. It all was an amusing diversion while I was cooking dinner. I certainly questioned your timing.”

“I had to get at those before I got drunk which would render me unworkable. The minute they left I was free to have a big drink of whiskey or whatever.”

“I assumed you were feeding them also.”

“Not so, except some good cheese and Spanish olives I get Fed Exed from New York. It’s my only food habit.”

“You might not have figured out that I’m gay though I have a daughter from an early unfortunate marriage I made to please my parents. They had figured out that I was gay so I married to show them otherwise. You met my daughter two years ago.”

“Yes, a lovely woman.”

“It was mannerly of you not to make a run at her.”

“When you had gone inside and I said something flirtatious to her she said she preferred boys from the car wash to academic men.”

He had made a great deal when his novellas sold to Warner Bros. He wanted to quit teaching but his wife wanted him to hold on. She had her own money but was a maniac on the subject of saving for retirement. He had noted that she got this from her father who had saved a fair amount but then promptly died within a year of retiring. Her mother also had her own money but with the death of her husband she speedily went off to live in a nunnery for older women in Kentucky, an escape she had long planned. Since retirement was at least twenty years away he could not quite imagine that condition.

A dour confusion took hold of him. It slowly became apparent that it was caused by the quadri-schizoid nature of writing his own poems and novels, teaching, and now writing screenplays for what to him was lots of money. Starting out he received, he learned, the minimum fee of $50,000, which exceeded his academic salary for the entire year. Early the next year his agent got him $150,000 for a screenplay that was needed right away. He wrote it in three weeks. They said they “loved” it but never made the movie. Contrary to what he expected success had made him angry and unhappy. The reasons were elusive except that he had been thoroughly out of balance. He loaned a lot of money to friends and never got paid back except a thousand dollars apiece from two Native American couples who lived near his cabin and needed to pay off trapping fines. Both couples visited in the following years with their debt contained in a cigar box and counted it out slowly. He didn’t learn anything from being stiffed but kept stupidly waiting for people to repay. It occurred to him that times had changed. His father had taught him that a personal loan was like a gambling debt, a first priority.

The first signs of his wife wanting them to separate into different residences were at a time when he was drinking a great deal. Her point was well taken. He was no longer the man she had married who was calm, intelligent, mannerly, and slender. She used to love his body but his total weight gain since their marriage was seventy pounds. In his periods of walking mania he’d sometimes drop twenty-five pounds, and one year by dint of pure will he knocked off forty but wrote poorly. His very best work had come during a period when he was utterly indulgent at the table. How could he write well if he was thinking about food all the time? It didn’t work to try to write about sex, doom, death, time, and the cosmos when you were thinking about a massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Of course all the extra weight had a bad effect on their sex life. He was too heavy for the orthodox missionary position plus his breath was bad from his gorging. She could only make love to him with her back turned. Also he was chronically fatigued. There was little left of him after a full day of writing. All that he wanted at the completion of the workday was a big drink, at least a triple. The tavern named a drink after him which was a quintuple tequila with a dash of Rose’s lime juice. He quit drinking it when the price of his favorite tequila, Herradura, skyrocketed due to an agave disease in Mexico and the fact that fine tequila had become fashionable in Japan. He could afford it but resented it like the poor boy he once was. He had become a free spender with his habitual table always full with friends and acquaintances, some of the latter hanging in there for free drinks.

In a peacemaking ceremony with his wife he agreed to have no more hard liquor in the home, just wine. He played it honest for about a month, then began to feel like a deprived artist. When he shopped for wine at the liquor store he would buy a half dozen shooters. He continued buying and hiding them, mostly in his studio, until he had fifty. Such were his alcohol needs that he made a clumsy map of the hiding places knowing his own forgetfulness. Now that he had devised this stupid rule to please his wife he could sneak a shooter with the glass of red wine he had late in the afternoon. To his credit he never drank while writing except for a sip as he drew his work to a close for the day. He and a friend had a game while they were reading Faulkner, finding passages where it was easy to see that the great man was deep in the bag. Faulkner would fall off his horse and then get drunk to alleviate the pain. Anything could make him go on a comatose bender, even getting the Nobel Prize. A horrid photo of his face after shock treatment was fortunately blocked from publication, though it later surfaced. Seeing it actually made the award-winning poet think about quitting drinking, a very rare and insincere impulse. His own father drank sparingly, not much beyond a cold beer when he was grilling on a hot summer day. He explained that when you had five children and a small salary it was one of the things you cut out. He himself tended to overdrink both when he was broke and when he had extra money. One excuse was that drinking too much guaranteed marital fidelity. He had never told his wife this because he didn’t want to be closely observed during sober periods, but it is a well-known fact among drinkers that too much and you won’t get the necessary hard-on. He never met anyone accessible anyway except the tavern tarts. He had tried one the year before but she puked within a minute of entering the motel and the smell made his tender organ instantly wilt. She rinsed her face and then finally said, “What’s wrong with you?” He was too well mannered to say that the smell of vomit turned him off.

Students were strictly off-limits these days, in no small part due to feminism, but in the old days when he was teaching everything was possible and ignored by all. He clearly recalled some domestic horror caused by professors and their student lovers. Once he had taken a lovely girl on a ride to a big woodlot outside of town not knowing that his wife was following with his pistol at a distance in her car. She had become suspicious when she found a note in his jacket that said, “I just love it when you go down on me.”

His wife crept cautiously down the log trail and through the woods. She knew the area well from bird-watching. She had seen many spring warblers in the carapace of hardwood trees, also morel mushrooms to pick whose season was the same time as the warblers arrived from the south.

She was now close enough to hear the sound of their coupling and the habitual overloud shout of her husband’s orgasm. She pulled the.38-caliber pistol from her shoulder holster and fired the pistol near the open window of their car. It was immensely loud.

“I’m shot. I’m dead,” he yelled, dramatically.

The girl bailed out the far side of the car and sprinted down the log road deeper into the woods. She was nude from the waist down which would be a problem with mosquitoes. She ran amazingly fast and another shot was fired in the air to encourage her and perhaps discourage fucking another married man. His wife leveled the pistol at him who had recovered enough to swig from a pint of Canadian whiskey.

“I can legally shoot you,” she said.

“Tell someone who gives a shit,” he replied jauntily with whiskey courage.

She tilted the gun and shot out the far window. He cringed and yelled “No” beginning to sob. She looked down at his guilty peter thinking of shooting him there but it had retreated like a turtle’s head. She threw the pistol into the woods after he said, “Don’t kill me before I finish the screenplay or you’ll be out a hundred grand,” his whisper choking him.

She walked back to her car feeling rather light-headed after performing a comic marital scene. “Finishing a screenplay” became a family joke whenever she wanted to torment him or truncate one of his prepared marital speeches.

Later on when he thought about this event his heart gave an extra thump and he felt lucky that he hadn’t shit his pants. A few days later, after his class on the modern novel, the girl said that her ass was covered with mosquito bites. This turned him on and he wanted to see the bites but she said, “Nothing doing. I better get an A or I’m telling your chairman that you’re a sexual deviant.” She knew her power and didn’t bother writing a term paper. She merely doodled on her finals. He couldn’t blame her, wondering how she had made it home half nude. Later he found the pistol with difficulty in the woods. It was a keepsake to him. It had been his father’s and grandfather’s, an old-fashioned Colt revolver. The story was that his grandfather had shot at a neighbor he suspected of setting fire to his barn. The neighbor moved away with a hole in his leg which ended the argument.

He grew quite tired of the early beliefs that he felt were forced upon him. His mother had pounded into him certain children’s books of a semireligious nature. One of them maintained that above all he must be “strong, brave, and true.” To his usual questioning his mother was hasty in her explanations. To her all of his questions had become maddening because she frequently could see that he didn’t believe her answers. “How do birds fly?” was a killer that she left to her husband. They went to the town library and checked out many helpful texts. He recalled from walking in the woods that when you picked up a dead bird it was startling how light it was, even a comparatively large crow. Strong, brave, and true wasn’t so hard except for “true” which remained something of a mystery. “Strong” had always been the easiest because at his father’s insistence even as a boy he exercised relentlessly so as not to become “puny,” an ugly word his father used. He also worked and would weed gardens and mow lawns for fifteen cents an hour. He disliked washing cars so he charged a full quarter for that. He became by far the strongest boy in his class at school and well into his forties he could beat the workingmen at arm wrestling contests at the tavern.

Of course he knew that strength of this sort was quite irrelevant in today’s world. Nothing beyond the ability to depress a computer key was wanted, except if you worked in construction or needed a cement block layer which he had been after he flunked out of graduate school. They lived a threadbare existence because back then out of pride he had refused to let his wife take any money from her well-off parents. It was utterly brutal work, especially in cold weather. You added a little salt to the mortar if it was below freezing though this was illegal or dishonorable as it weakened the bind between blocks. Once he was shivering so hard holding up an eighty-five-pound corner block that he dropped it, crushing several toes. At emergency they had to cut off his heavy Red Wing boot. During his recuperation, brief because they were broke, he made the understandable decision to return to graduate school to get a master’s degree. The department was pleased to accept him back because he had published a first book of poems with W. W. Norton and a novel with Simon and Schuster. Later on he frequently regretted what a heartless prick he had been. Success didn’t help that much because it couldn’t wipe away the years of bad behavior. In one shabby rental house he kept the thermostat at fifty-five degrees because they couldn’t afford much fuel. Why suffer from cold due to pride?

Their first child Robert died almost immediately from a bad heart. They had two daughters, one ten years after the other, who were the joy in their life. But when they married and left home he was saddened thinking, “What now?” There was always alcohol. What saved his sorry neck was buying a fairly remote cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a place to escape to. Typical of him, he didn’t even go inside the cabin before he bought it. Since he obviously didn’t care for the human race to speak of he kept happy with the profusion of birds and the more than occasional bear that entered the yard to rob the bird feeder. A bear would take a big mouthful of sunflower seeds then become ruminative as he chewed. He got to know one old male so well that when he came home from the tavern late at night quite polluted he’d stop on his two-track driveway, the bear would approach and put his chin on the windowsill, and he’d scratch his ears. This was admittedly stupid and when he learned more about bears from his friend Mike he stopped doing it. He’d leave out any surplus of fish on a stump at least a hundred yards from the cabin. Finally, the old male no longer visited and he deduced that it had died of old age or had been shot by the oversupply of bear hunters who visited the area each fall with their hounds.

Both of their daughters moved to Montana and after a few years of loneliness and longish late-summer trips he and his wife gave up on the beauties of ever more crowded northern Michigan, sold the farm, and moved to Montana. It was harder for his wife than for him. She made all of the moving arrangements and could only find an unpleasant rental to stay in for the few weeks of searching for a house. She found a big farmhouse on about thirty acres and she made extensive remodeling plans with carpenters and then returned to their little casita near the Mexican border for the fall, winter, and cold rainy early spring.

Eventually despite his wife’s caution he was sprung forever from teaching by screenwriting which gradually became its own hell because out of pure greed he took on too much work. He couldn’t quite believe he was making so much money but there was absolutely no positive emotional quotient to the money. It largely depressed him. A morning phone call from Hollywood could ruin a day’s work. During these years in Montana he fished constantly, a boyhood obsession, but occasionally missed the morbid routine of teaching. Years before he had been hired at Stony Brook out on Long Island through the graces of an ex-professor who had become powerful. The work was very easy. He taught only one course and also assisted the chairman. He had a corner office into which he moved an easy chair. No straight back chairs were in the office. The easy chair was awkward for the countless professors who came in to complain about the injustices of teaching. The chairman allowed him to decide who taught what and he was widely disliked for his arrogance. He taught one very popular course in twentieth-century poetics, which was the real reason for the easy chair. At the time miniskirts were obligatory and attractive girls from his class would come in and plop in the deep chair. The visuals were wonderful.

With his students he was sometimes coarse and abusive when they asked him for writing advice. He had been hired to teach recent American literature not creative writing. He had gotten off on the wrong foot with his colleagues over and over by maintaining Gabriel García Márquez was an American writer in the larger sense. Both north and south of the United States were the “Americas” including Canada. Objections surrounded him but he didn’t care because his work was doing very well. It was up to Margaret Atwood if she wanted to be American or Canadian not the English professors of the world.

He would act in the manner of Leo Tolstoy who, when Rilke told him he must write, said, “Then write for God’s sake.” Even nastier was Faulkner who in answer to the question of what a writer needs said, “Paper and pencil.” In other words, figure it out for yourself, there are no shortcuts. You have to give your entire life to it.

He looked forward to his seventieth birthday and it finally arrived as it must. On this birthday he planned on becoming a free-floating geezer, above criticism from both others and himself. He drank when he chose and after a couple of notorious sexual failures he was deterred and stopped trying. He finally asked a doctor friend who told him that the nine pills he took daily since his spinal surgery would kill sex for an elephant or a whale. He thought of discarding his pills but then he didn’t want to die quite yet. As a beginning writer he had planned on publishing books until the moment of death, hopefully twenty of them at least, a nineteenth-century program but as a young writer he fashioned himself a nineteenth-century man, vigorous, athletic, hardworking, bold. Unfortunately he was ten books behind schedule. In recent months he had completed both a novel and a book of novellas but now at seventy he was utterly exhausted. Once again he consulted his doctor drinking friend who diagnosed complete exhaustion and that he had blown out his adrenals. Since he didn’t know what adrenals were and wasn’t curious he settled for the fact that they were blown out. He quit work of any sort except for an occasional poem and the journal he kept and took to sleeping a great deal of the day plus the night. The shingles and neuralgia left him without REM sleep at night because his salves and pills didn’t last for long, but in the day he could apply a lot of salve and nap for an hour in comfort. He recovered from the overexertion of writing two books at once but the exhaustion would never completely go away.

At the bar since his seventieth birthday his friends had taken to calling him “old man.” This amused rather than troubled him. Most were in their fifties. A couple in their twenties were permitted at the hallowed table because he judged them to be good writers. Three of the men at the table were old friends, and artists, who were always more vivid than writers. They also cooked much better than poets and novelists, he had no idea why. He was the putative master of ceremonies of the table and had the errant talent of keeping the conversation going whenever everyone flagged. Occasionally Dolly, a poet, would join them. She was brave enough to withstand the vulgarity of their dialogue and answer them in kind, sometimes going over the edge and embarrassing them. It was comic to him that several of his friends refused to acknowledge the advent of aging. Maybe subconsciously they realized it because they often acted afflicted with a false heartiness, telling stories of totally fictional seductions without realizing that no one believed them. He thought long and hard about male vanity and the need to prolong these manly delusions past the point of any possible credibility, similar to wanting to go to war until you actually got there. He remembered the old quote he had read somewhere, “There is no God but reality. To seek him elsewhere is the action of the fall.” What was the point in pretending you were any age but the one you were?

One hot afternoon at the tavern he dropped a modest bomb he had written in his journal. “We all are on death row living in cells of our own devising.” This started a loud quarrel between the two who took full responsibility for what they were and the four others who blamed a panoply of circumstances. His own father had liked to say, “Why blame anybody else because you’re a fuckup?” He favored this one, admitting that everything that had gone radically wrong in his life could be traced to causes that sat in his own lap. He had also been taught that it was unmanly to be forever blaming someone else for one’s problems. Dolly, the poet, piped up to say she had been painfully raped by three boys when she was eleven. There was dead silence, until a stupid drunk said, “The exception proves the rule,” and he was roundly booed. Everyone else apologized to Dolly for this horrible thing. He had always thought this “exception” statement to be obtuse.

Of late his spirits had taken an upturn from his habitually dour attitude toward life. He continued to use his studio despite separating from his wife, and one afternoon he was in there listening to Schubert on NPR when a house wren appeared at the screened window and began aggressively singing back at the radio. This went on for quite a while and he recalled from his boyhood as a nature obsessive that a marsh wren has a more involved language than a house wren. He was troubled he could come up with no further memory about wrens. This one nested in a blocked stovepipe on the roof and perhaps thought that the Schubert was a competitive bird, although it then seemed to be excitedly singing along with the Schubert bird. He tried to recall something from the Internet his wife had passed along, how at the University of Chicago researchers were scientifically monitoring the dream life of finches. They found that finches have dream songs they never sing otherwise. Just like us, he thought. The gifts of childhood were the trees, rivers, birds, flowers. He wondered where his little guidebooks from that era were. He went down in the studio basement looking for old stray book boxes. He found the field guide to trees, not his favorite. He recalled asking in Sunday school why God was so messy in creating so many kinds of trees. The teacher became angry at him for questioning God. He cried on the long walk home feeling like a sure-thing sinner though deep within himself he couldn’t stop questioning the immense variety of species on earth. It was confusing for a boy.

The night before he had experienced a repeat of the most disconcerting nightmare of his life. Sometimes when he had it he awoke vomiting on the floor, bending out of bed and letting go. It had all started soon after he lost his left eye in an accident. A girl, a playmate, had shoved a broken beaker into his eye that she’d picked up from the trash pile at the edge of the woods behind the hospital. He walked next door to the doctor’s wife Mrs. Kilmer’s and she cleaned him up and called her husband and his parents. He ended up in a hospital down in Grand Rapids for a month. When he got home finally, the left side of his face was covered with bandages. The doctor had saved the life of his eye but not his vision. About a week later the flu swept through the town of Reed City and he got a severe case. Another week later the annual town minstrel show was scheduled. No one in town ever missed it but a few drunks and a smattering of the very poor like the dump picker, his wife, and their daughter for whom they took up a class collection every year to buy her socks for the winter or she’d go without. He lied to his parents and said he was feeling better when in fact he was still nauseous and shivering with fever. They couldn’t find a sitter and his parents very much wanted to see the minstrel show. They wrapped him in his father’s deer hunting coat to protect him from the cold November evening and the small auditorium which was always too cool. They sat down in the front row and the show made them dizzy, and a fat man sitting next to them kept farting. Ordinarily, he would have found this funny but in his current condition it amplified his living nightmare. He was deeply embarrassed. All the people onstage were in blackface, including a chorus of women who also danced. The men were recognizable as town leaders despite their heavy makeup. Everyone sang very loudly and poorly, he thought. No one for sure was a Bing Crosby. He dozed for a few minutes and when he looked out again he was sweating with fever and the stage was whirling as if time were passing in an old movie. He vomited in his father’s hunting coat and partly on the floor. It was very loud and the stage action paused. “We’ve had a reaction to our performance,” a minstrel yelled and everyone laughed. His father whisked him out with his mother in tow. It was early November and there was some fresh fallen powdery snow. When his father put him down near the car he took a handful of the snow and wiped it across his face and mouth. It felt delicious.

“We never should have taken him to that piece of shit,” his father said angrily.

“I agree,” said his mother.

“We’re sorry son,” they said in unison.

When they got home he sat down at the kitchen table with his mother and weakly tried to help her clean the coat with kitchen washcloths and a brush. Instead he fell off his chair and knocked himself out. His father carried him to his bedroom and tucked him in. He vomited again and then slept, not awakening until the following morning.

This experience shaped itself into a nightmare that followed him the rest of his life. It disheartened him to the point that in his forties he went to a mind doctor. That helped for a year or so but then he was revisited. He never again was able to attend a stage performance of any kind. Eventually he also had to opt out of the habitual routine for poets, that of reading their poems out loud before an audience. Either the day before or late the night of the reading he would be revisited by the nightmare until the night whirled around him. And the feeling of nausea would return, certainly one of the most unpleasant feelings of the human animal. So he was high and dry, shorn of the renown, if not fame and extra money. He wasn’t really able to entertain an audience and had little interest in trying. The minstrel ogre would arise before a reading and he imagined that he had smeared himself in blackface.

It was darkly comic to think of one’s life as haunted by minstrels. They were ultimately fake humans, derisive not to speak of dishonest. And nearly all poets were liars in his opinion too. They couldn’t possibly be the men they were reading about with the usual catalog of fine qualities. After attending and giving at least a hundred poetry readings he could remember only one that struck him as a hundred percent genuine and honest. A poet named, simply enough, Red Pine read from an ancient Chinese poet he had translated, called Stonehouse. Red Pine read with quiet integrity just what he’d translated. Usually after a reading he was in a private snit and needed a drink, but now he walked down and looked at the harbor, his spine still tingling. The other true exception was Gary Snyder. He never wanted Snyder’s readings to end.

Early in the spring he took a ride thirty miles or so into the country, a weekly pilgrimage. In a village there was a small corner restaurant operated by a large old lady. She slow cooked a very large chunk of meat, at least a dozen pounds, all night long. It was the best ever in his memory. He had come late once at noon and gone without so he tried to get there at ten-thirty before the main rush. She served it as a hot roast beef sandwich with a scoop of mashed potatoes, homemade bread and a marvelous gravy, and a side of her own peppery corn relish. This dish is everywhere served at diners and truck stops as the way to get the most for your money, truly filled up. He had eaten the dish a lot as a woebegone young beatnik hitchhiking senselessly back and forth between San Francisco and New York City.

The ride over that day had been fine and warm with the first tinges of pastel green in the pastures. Even the cows looked happy, optimistic now that another wretched winter had passed. The old woman, Edna by name, started serving at 10:30 a.m. because many of her farmer customers had had their breakfasts at 5:00 a.m. before feeding and milking chores. Edna said, “I don’t sleep good since Frank died.” Frank, her husband, was known for raising good beef cattle and had died the year before from a heart attack while branding.

The poet pulled in early beside a single pickup and had time for a final cigarette before entering. Through his open passenger-side window he smelled something bad and heard scuffling. Within the caged back of the pickup there was a massive Hampshire sow. He was startled because the sow looked just like Old Dolly, his grandfather’s prime sow, but that was over fifty years ago and pigs rarely live beyond twelve years, so it couldn’t be her. Besides, if he remembered right, she was butchered when she went dry, her meat frozen and given to a social worker to distribute to the poor.

He went inside and said hello to the only occupant, an old farmer with trembling hands.

“Fine sow you got out there. A Hampshire I think?”

“Mostly Hampshire. Something else I haven’t figured out. The man I bought her from as a piglet years ago was moving back east. Maybe Duroc.”

“We had one that looked just like her way back when.”

“Good time to get back in the business if you grow corn. Pork is high. Hard to grow corn in Montana. Lucky for me my younger brother grows good corn over near Billings. She’s for sale.”

“How much?” He felt inspired. Why not?

“Three hundred bucks. Cash on the barrelhead. I’m retiring, selling out after sixty years of farming. Moving to town right here. We live too far in the country for my wife. In a weak moment I promised to take her to Hawaii when I retired. The sow’s going to farrow in two weeks. You can make your money back on her farrow. She’s always had at least ten piglets.”

“Sold,” he said and drew this man, Fred by name, a map to get to his place. “Give me three days. I’ve got to build a pen.” He counted out three C-notes from the secret corner in his wallet for emergencies. It was never safe enough from his wife and two daughters, both long gone and married to hardworking young men in this troubled economy.

On the way home he kept thinking it’s now or never and how he would tell his wife.

She had three horses, two of which didn’t like him one bit, and a pasture of ten acres with a white board fence. They had first boarded horses in a small stable with fencing they built themselves in the young, salad days of their marriage when they had bought a little farm for nineteen grand. Nothing cost that much those days, even a car. Now she had her own horses.

He stopped for a drink at a roadhouse. He only wanted one for courage but had a double and a beer chaser to make sure it worked. After all he didn’t need to tell her right away. Luckily he had enough lumber from an old chicken coop he had torn down when they moved in. In the beginning they had chickens for a couple of years but found them too irritating. Over the years, though, he had wanted pigs, especially when he was a little depressed over his mediocre writing career. During the truly melancholy period of his childhood after he lost his left eye he would sit outside his grandpa’s pigpen on a piece of stump and watch the creatures. Once after the sow had farrowed ten piglets Grandpa had moved her into an adjoining pen and let him sit in the pen with the piglets, in a dry corner away from the muck and shit. It was pure joy for his bewildered spirit. The piglets swarmed over him and loved having their ears and tummies scratched. He especially liked the little runt of the litter and on his request he was given the runt for his special care. He named her Shirley after a girl he liked in the second grade.

He was still in his pig trance when he stopped at a farm equipment and feed store. He cautioned himself to remain alert to signs of his bipolar problem without admitting to himself it was manic to buy a five-hundred-pound sow over lunch. He made a note on his car tablet to buy six cedar fence posts, a trough for eating, and a tank for water. He would build the pen against the wall and around the back door of his studio. He remembered to buy five bushels of feed, recalling that a healthy sow would eat a ton of feed in a year. He could hear the cash register singing when it occurred to him if she farrowed eight or ten or whatever he would also be feeding them after she weaned them. His dad had told him that after mating a sow would give birth in three months, three weeks, and three days or a total of 116 days. It was all so scientific. Or so he thought being largely ignorant of science except astronomy.

He didn’t write for two and a half days because he was thinking fondly of pigs. Not a word. His old friend Cyrus Pentwater had quit both writing and drinking when he began raising both llamas and ostriches. He had read that raising ostriches had turned into a scam of sorts. You paid thirty grand for a breeding pair and the only way of getting your money back was to breed more breeding pairs and sell them to someone eager and thick skulled. They said the meat was good and tasted like beef. Then why not buy beef which was considerably cheaper? And who could butcher an ostrich that had been somewhat of a pet for years? In the tavern where men talk about many things they know nothing about, there was a rumor that ostriches had kicked several owners to death. Some checked their computers and could find no proof but they all wanted to believe it like stories of vipers that could kill you in five seconds.

The first evening he was singing a little song of pig breed names from all over the world while watching CNN about the horrors of Syria. His kind neighbor next to the railroad flat had brought up a list on his computer. “Hampshire, Arapawa Island, Mukota, Lacombe, Mulefoot, Iberian, Chester White, Dutch Landrace, Guinea Hog, Swabian-Hall swine.” He didn’t see his wife right behind him. She tousled his hair.

“Your hair is getting thin with age.”

“So I’ve noticed. Isn’t yours?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. What were those gibberish names you were singing?”

“The names of llama breeds,” he said thinking quickly.

“I thought a llama was just a llama.”

“No more than a horse is just a horse.”

“What are you going to do with this llama?”

“They can carry your gear into the mountains.”

“You never hiked into the mountains except in your fiction.”

“I never had a llama to carry the gear.”

“Your turn to do the dishes, baby doll.” They dreaded chores now that they were semi-separated.

This llama thing was getting out of hand and he was setting himself up for a mudbath when his giant sow arrived.

He slept quite early that night after seeing a National Geographic special on hyenas. It made him want a hyena pet though he’d heard a hyena could bite off your arm clean as a whistle. A hyena doubtless would look at his pig like a fifty-course meal. Hemingway shot hyenas in the gut to make them suffer. He thought they were lesser creatures than the lordly lions which he also shot, presumably not in the gut. A friend had met a Masai in Kenya with one side of his body feathered by scar tissue got from spearing a lion at close quarters while it was charging, which entitled him to carry the heroic lion shield. His friend said that this was courageous compared with hunters who shot lions at two hundred yards.

He gave his wife a perfunctory kiss goodnight on the neck, a habit they had continued. On the way out the back door he noticed he had forgotten to wash the dishes and quickly did so. Fair is fair. One cooks a nice veal roast and the other washes the dishes.

He gingerly touched the blisters on his right hand from the rough-handled post hole digger. His hands were no longer trained for manual labor. His friendly butcher neighbor had come over early that morning. Zack, in his late thirties, would test a cedar post and say, “A little deeper, friend.” It had been a cool morning but he dripped with sweat over the holes. Zack nailed the pen boards on the inside of the posts so that the heavy hog wouldn’t pop the nails leaning on the boards. Thanks to Zack they rigged up the pen in an hour, then laid out the trough and water tank.

“You can’t make no money on pigs without growing your own corn,” Zack said.

“I know that. I’m looking for companionship.”

“That’s what dogs and wives are for,” Zack laughed. He had a pit bull, Charley, that was less friendly than a scorpion.

He very much needed a drink though his skin prickled with thrills when he saw the finished pen with separate enclosures for the sow and her piglets. Zack had said you had to be careful that the sow didn’t roll over and crush members of her own litter. Something else to worry about on questionable planet earth. When they first split up his wife had destroyed all vestiges of alcohol in the household including the studio. He had seen it coming and taped two airline shooters up under the lowest shelf of the bookshelf with ever-useful duct tape. Now he swallowed both of the little bottles without mixing them, coughed violently, and felt the warm glow rising. He felt like writing but his rule was never to write while drinking. He was a puritan about his work, never keeping food in the studio because food drew in flies and he didn’t want to interrupt his work by trying to swat flies. He certainly wasn’t this careful about anything else in life. His wife had visited while they worked and had commented that it was an awfully strong fence for a llama when a little wire would have sufficed.

“Maybe the llama will have babies,” he said weakly. Maybe he was a fiction writer and poet because he couldn’t stand to tell the simple truth.

“You better work on your fence, farmer boy,” she replied.

The immediate ten acres was fenced but it was in modest disrepair. “I’ll take care of it,” Zack kindly said.

“You spoil him but then everyone does except me,” she said and wandered back to the house with Zack watching her butt sway in her khaki shorts.

“She’s a looker, that’s for sure. If you’re creating great art you don’t have time to fence.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll want sheep fence so the little piglets don’t escape. I’ll pay you fifteen bucks an hour to put up the fence.” He felt dreamy at the idea of watching piglets roam around out the windows while he wrote. Maybe he could get a novel out of the idea of a poor artist raising pigs to support his art.

Early in the morning the day after they finished the pen he got a call from the farmer to say he was loading the pig. He asked for fifteen more minutes and fled his railroad flat with a cold cup of coffee from the night before, leaving behind a graduate student’s wife in his bed. Her husband had been on a fishing trip. He had been trying the night before and had done poorly at love. He had hoped to make up for it this morning and had said so. She’d looked at him sleepily. “I got to take delivery of a pig out at my farm,” he said.

When he got there the farmer was backed up to the pen and leading the pig down a double wide plank. He saw his wife who was watching. He parked and walked down the new path to the pen. His wife was helping the old farmer shove the heavy planks back into his pickup. She turned glaring at him.

“You asshole,” she said simply.

“I thought my llama would need company,” he said quickly.

“You’re a natural born liar,” she said.

The old farmer laughed. “I know someone else who wants her. You’ll have to decide fast as you don’t want to move her too close to her farrowing. She’ll feed you all year. A llama can’t do that.”

He leaned over the pen and scratched her ear which pleased her. He deeply felt she was beautiful. This is called pride of ownership.

“I’m thinking of shooting her in the head,” his wife said, and walked back to the house.

“Is she serious?” the farmer asked.

“I doubt it,” he said and gave the pig two shovelfuls of the ground feed in the trough about which she was very happy.

“Call me if you need advice,” the farmer said. They shook hands and the farmer left.

He went into his studio thinking he might write a few paragraphs on his new sow but he was far too excited. They had delivered him a supersized dog house, now a pig house, and he had spread out three bales of straw for her comfort. He gazed at her out the window while playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, his last. He dozed with pleasure as the pig was dozing after lunch. He asked himself why he had waited so long to fulfill his childhood dream of owning his own pig.

He had always been irritated by Wordsworth’s line about the child being father of the man. He didn’t doubt its basic truth but it was the deterministic aspect that bothered him. Of late he had been perplexed by religious threads that entered his thinking, originating as they did from a devout period he went through between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Jesus had been his boyhood hero rather than Superman or any of the other comic book heroes his friends favored. A neighbor friend was obsessed with growing up to be Dick Tracy and having a wrist radio to communicate. This friend died in Vietnam and so far as he knew had never owned a cell phone. This all had come to a head when he was a senior in college in a philosophy seminar. He had brought up the idea that in youth it was easy to acquire beliefs that were difficult later to disbelieve. For instance he still believed in the Resurrection and felt eerie about it at Easter time. He was roundly derided except by the professor who thought it was an interesting question. There was a lot of condescension and ridicule and general raw spirits. A lit student pointed out that the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire had written that Jesus held the world’s high altitude record. There was laughter and he recalled that at the minstrel show he had been enraged when those onstage sang what was then called a Negro spiritual in their mock black voices. This was clearly sacrilege as his minister would certainly have said. The professor interrupted to point out that what he had brought up was particularly true of young people with hateful beliefs such as antiblack racism or anti-Semitism that seemed to continue to follow them throughout their lives. He jumped in and agreed, then added in his own level of derision that those in the class only believed in beer, golf, and pussy. The professor chided him for vulgarity but with a slight smile of agreement.

Now all of these years later he was again burdened by those hidden beliefs. He could not tell you why he believed in the Resurrection but it had never occurred to him to disbelieve it. He took to saying little prayers well under his breath. His main problem was alcohol which was easy to acknowledge. He prayed and then didn’t go to the bar for a whole week. He had his shooters at home but no full bottle. One evening he drank seven shooters but didn’t get all that far. He felt he should have been drunker. Now his friends called, really just tavern friends, and asked if he was sick. “Yes, we all are,” he said cryptically. He didn’t necessarily mean alcoholism. He rarely exceeded two drinks a day, he told himself. It was the regularity of the tavern habit that had begun to drive him crazy.

And then there were his fears that something might happen to his piglets in his absence. The sow was safe from stray dogs — her enormous jaws would make mincemeat out of any hapless mutt. But the piglets were vulnerable. Now he could tend them after a long day’s writing. To be frank the pigs were now far more interesting to him than his tavern friends.

As a child he had read a great deal including the forbidden so-called adult books. His father had saved his own youthful library that included travel adventure books by Richard Halliburton, all of Zane Grey, and a peculiar series about a young man named Tom Swift. His reading was aided by childhood illnesses like a severe case of pneumonia that kept him in bed for a month of reading as did his severe eye injury. He began to think of school as being quite boring compared with the pleasures of reading. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle had been far ahead of its time back in the teens and twenties, and those books encouraged him to think about the world in a more organized way and develop his own theories. For instance, because he first got religion in the summer, it occurred to him that God must have come up from the ground and entered him through his bare feet. Why not? His feet were bare all summer long and he thought at times that he felt messages in his feet, his telephone to the spirit world. At age nine he dropped this theory on his Sunday school class and it was unpopular. Everyone else insisted that God was in the sky. The teacher was sympathetic remembering the goofiness of her own conversion which was when she was out in nature and the trees were speaking to her. He persisted in trying to figure out life, keeping track in a diary, so it was not surprising when he became a writer. Once when they were trout fishing he mentioned his God in the ground theory to his father who responded that he always thought God was a trout stream. Hearing this he began to worry about Godless deserts with no rivers and said so. His father replied that deserts were full of arroyos and dry riverbeds, the rivers of the past, and God didn’t need active water present because he didn’t drink water. He brooded about his father’s words for months and became excited about the future and going west to sense God in dry riverbeds. His father also advised that there was no money in theology. This fell upon deaf ears as he never thought much about money.

He got two dollars a week as an allowance, plus what he could earn mowing lawns, washing cars, weeding gardens. He saved as much as he could to follow the path of the great Halliburton when he got old enough. He wanted to crisscross the world and have many perilous, but not too perilous, adventures. He would doubtless save a beautiful native girl from a giant anaconda, whacking off its head with his trusty machete. Just recently an awareness of women had entered his life strongly. The culture was looking for an extra four years for college which would needlessly delay adventure. The world gave one so many reasons to be pissed off at it. The age factor was a matter of great impatience. The young want time to hurry, the old usually want it to slow down.

He had found out he was bright completely by accident. A man from the university in a nearby city needed a guinea pig to take tests as part of a course. He got two bucks an hour, a real windfall, to take five different IQ tests and late in the process he had snooped through the man’s papers when he went out to pee and noted his scores for the first four tests ranged from 163 to 171. He didn’t know what this meant, if anything of consequence. Religion had loosened some screws in his head and at this point in life he didn’t want to be brilliant, he just wanted to be ordinary.

At fourteen he didn’t want to fear for his sanity. One of his few literate friends, albeit goofy, had lent him a volume of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and he had carelessly experimented with “out of body” trances wherein he could do such things as visit other planets and walk on the ocean floor. He had chosen the Mindanao bays, the deepest part of the ocean, but hadn’t imagined the bottom would be pitch black other than for a few phosphorescent creatures. The problem was that once he got there he couldn’t get back in his body back home. He had started in the evening and struggled to return to normality most of the night. This frightened him terribly and in the light of a summer dawn he was very happy to recognize objects in his room, especially a print of a Modigliani portrait and another of The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. Evidently Venus was born full grown and certainly the sexiest person in humankind. At his age she gave him a frequent hard-on. Once liberated back to the ordinary he vowed never again to errantly play with his mind. The imagination was too large to play with.

He spent a few weeks of forlorn boredom in the very early spring and then began running every day after school at the suggestion of the coach who one day timed him while his large boys’ phys ed class ran the half mile. The coach was cagey noting that he had won by a couple hundred yards and his time was certainly good enough for the school track team. By working out relentlessly he was able by May to take second place by only a few seconds in the county championship meet. For a few years it was wonderful. However, he stupidly ruined it all the following summer when he gained thirty pounds of muscle on the advice of another coach. He gained the weight to play football. At present he viewed this as a lifelong mistake thinking that though the muscle was pleasant it did him no good, and he could pointillistically trace all of his various aches and pains in middle age back to the injuries he had sustained in high school football. He was a running guard on offense and a middle linebacker on defense. In one game he was called and the team penalized for unnecessary roughness. He was ashamed when later he learned he had needlessly injured a boy on a team from a neighboring town. At heart he was a secret Quaker and football was pure violence. The coach was always telling him to “hit them harder.” The coach wanted him to put opposing players “out of commission.” He kept it to himself but wondered what the point of the “game” was if your intention was to hurt people badly. His girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders and a bit dim-witted though lovely.

Track had been freedom but football just a dumb brutal game. He had felt one concussion for years afterward.

Chapter 2

He had begun calling the sow Darling or D, elongated to Dee in his midwestern drone which, earlier in life when the comedian was current, people said reminded them of Herb Shriner. This was meant as ridicule but he didn’t mind because he liked Herb Shriner. Darling farrowed and gave him nine piglets. He watched it all leaning on the pen. He said to himself ironically, “The miracle of birth,” but in truth he felt it deeply. It was a lot to ask of a female. Tragically the third day he lost his favorite, the runt of the litter he had called Alice. The sow had rolled over and crushed one of her children. He carried the little body into the studio and put her on the desk. He sobbed. He had intended her to be his best friend. They would take walks together every day and if she got tired he would carry her home like he had done with one of his dogs. He wrapped her carefully in a big red bandanna thinking that she was yet another of the deep injustices of life. He dug a hole near the pen and decorated it with a circle of rocks. He put her wrapped body down in the hole, dropped a handful of earth on it, and said an actual prayer for the deliverance of her soul. He had crisscrossed two yellow pencils in the shape of a cross, glued them together, and stuck them in Alice’s grave.

He was pleased that he didn’t separate his own life from that of Alice, or a crow or a dog. Over the years when one of his dogs died he thought that maybe he should go along for the ride, affection causing a sympathetic suicide. Of course he held back though Alice’s death struck deep. What held him back was how could he die with an unfinished novel or sequence of poems in the files? This was vanity again as if the world were waiting for his books. Perhaps it was also the influence of religion. Why think you are more important than other creatures? Where is the evidence? If you study the universe and history long enough you are bound to see we’re all up for grabs including writers and their noteworthy lack of humility. He had long known that humility was the most valuable characteristic you could have. Otherwise you would be a victim of the vain dreams and ambitions of youth. Whoever told writers they were so important in the destiny of man? Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound. It reminded him, oddly enough, of the day he interrupted his work for a while to try to help a trapped wasp behind a light window shade in his studio. The wasp drove him batty in its fruitless struggle to get through the glass back to its nest in the apple tree twenty feet from the window. He was finally successful though the wasp was furious at being caught and wagged its lethal tail trying to sting him. When he released it out the door it flew straight toward the apple tree. Despite being a lifelong hunter he wasn’t up to killing the wasp but then there were days he couldn’t swat an ordinary, irritating housefly. Who was to say they were less important than a writer struggling for fame? He filed this in his head under reverence for life, then was embarrassed as the phrase seemed pretentious. He paid the farmer to come over and file down the teeth of the piglets so they wouldn’t injure their mom when sucking. His wife was pleased with the gesture but he said it was pro forma.

Because he wasn’t visiting the bar he had bought a dozen shooters for his studio. However with the decline of his drinking his tolerance had diminished as well and a shooter was too much a hammer to the temple. At the wine store he bought several bottles of Brouilly, a light French red he had drunk in bistros on his several trips to Paris. He ordered a case as a reward for quitting the bar in favor of his piglets. He stopped to see his friend and neighbor in town and brought along a bottle of Brouilly. His friend said, “Too cool today. That’s a warm weather red.” He felt a bit rejected but respected his friend’s greater knowledge. He was quizzical about how he could afford an expensive wine every day.

Back at the studio, after he had fed the sow, he struggled again with names for his piglets, ignoring the adage that farmers don’t name animals they’re going to have to kill one day. In his current good mood every creature on earth was going to live forever which signaled a manic plunge. He thought of naming the largest male Aristo after Aristophanes’s statement “Whirl is king” because the male whirled at top speed when he wrestled the other pigs. The shortest, fattest male he named Chuck simply because he looked like a Chuck. He named one of the females Shirley after the piglet his grandfather had let him name, then labored over other possible names and failed. This was a case where he had to be precise.

He called his wife’s cell and said he was tired and would sleep on the cot in the studio. He drank a modest twelve-ounce glass of red wine to aid sleep. He turned on his night-light and flopped on the cot with a twenty-year-old sleeping bag like a child’s favorite blanket.

At 3:00 a.m. he awoke with a jolt and yelled. The minstrels had invaded his dreams again. He hadn’t had a recurrence of the dream in years and now this was twice in a few months. He was horrified. They were singing loudly a few feet from his face and he couldn’t move. He yelled, “Stop it!” as loudly as he could and they slowly withdrew into darkness. He turned on the lights and sat down at the safety of his desk and doodled a drawing of the layout of the farm he wanted to buy. There would be sixty acres of field corn for the pigs to eat and forty acres of well-fenced pasture with a small woodlot for them to frolic in and vastly increase their flavor. The bland-tasting pork at the supermarket comes from confined pigs in the big factory farms. He saw himself clearly in the future as the prince of free-range pork. He cautioned himself unsuccessfully against this obvious mania. The unlocked front door of the studio opened. It was his wife holding the cocked revolver.

“I got up to pee and heard you yelling. I thought you might need help.”

“How touching,” he said sincerely and took the proffered pistol, carefully easing the hammer down so she couldn’t kill him by mistake.

They made love for the first time in nearly a year. He remembered again how wonderful it used to be, so much better than stray lovers because you don’t know each other’s bodies. You can’t truly cozy up to a stranger except mechanically. She wanted something to drink and he had a small can of V8 which he poured into a plastic glass with some ice and a shooter. He drank a shooter straight from the little bottle.

“How can you do that?”

“I’ve had plenty of practice.” He turned on the outside light so she could look down at the pigs. They were nursing for a middle of the night snack.

“I don’t like them but I admit the little ones are cute. I have to leave. I’m getting up at four a.m. to go to a horse show over in Whitefish.”

“Buy one on me.”

“Thanks but I have enough horses. When I was a kid I heard about a farmer who died of a heart attack in a pigpen and his pigs ate him.”

“That’s a lie. I researched that story which everyone’s heard and there’s no truth to it.”

“Defend those you love.” She kissed him goodnight and was off into the dark which she feared less than he did. His life was full of imagined monsters.

He tried hard to sleep, always a failure when you try too hard, then got up and made instant coffee and had another shooter. He wanted to be conscious but not too much so. He looked down at his clumsy drawing of the farm and his mind began to whirl. Enough of this farm that doesn’t exist!

His most irksome item of late was and continued to be his fifty-year slavery to language. He had read Keats at fourteen and the guillotine fell. He was no longer free but an addict of poetry. He recalled sitting on the roof looking at the stars and a new moon the night of his birthday, December 11. Poetry requires vows and he made them. Much later, seven years to be exact, his father and sister died in a car accident. After this the vows became harder than marble. If this can happen to those you love any other work is unworthy. When he started writing prose too, at first it felt like he was committing adultery, but he soon recognized that if he was working on a novel he also wrote more poems. Poetry started the workday. Pasternak told us, “Revise your souls to frenzy.” No matter how his life was compromised he kept at it, even on visits to Hollywood he was a servant of poetry. Los Angeles isn’t a city of early risers so his habitual morning walks were unpopulated. Across from the hotel where he always stayed, the Westwood Marquis, was the splendid UCLA botanical garden which he loved to daily distraction. There he would often meet a Chinese surgeon who sat quite motionless beside the pretty carp pool to prepare himself for six hours of brain surgery. He himself was prepping for a day of meetings that would help no one but a few who needed money, including himself. The irony was he was getting $350,000 for his next screenplay, a first draft and a set of changes, enough to buy the small farm he had been imagining.

When they first moved out of town his wife had criticized him for peeing outside. He had responded, “Farmers pee outside.” He had lived on his grandpa’s farm when he was young and his father couldn’t find work in the late years of the Depression. “I thought you were a writer,” she had responded, meanly he thought. The irony was that that was a great deal of money for something he could write in a month. He knew he would shut off the water if he wrote too fast and a bit clumsily but it was fun to make that kind of money quickly when in his teens he had done a number of jobs for anything from sixty cents to a dollar an hour which he still resented years later. If you unload a fertilizer truck in a hot shed for eighty cents an hour you remember it. He worked alone. There were four tons of fertilizer in bags and even his trousers became soaked with sweat. He drank a quart of cold water afterward and collapsed on his ass in a faint. Now he thought it might have been good for his writing. He had known another reality. At some point he slept again.

A few mornings later he got up at the first bright sun shining through the studio window. He turned on his little electric water pot and made a cup of instant coffee. It was wretched, though in general better than it used to be. Some progress on earth. He went outside, peed, and bowed deeply to the grave of Alice.

He was excited because this was the first morning he was going to try to take a piglet for a walk. He had no idea what would happen, cautioning himself that they were scarcely puppies.

He reached over the side of the pen and grabbed Walter, a medium-sized male, who always seemed a little dim-witted and slow. Walter walked ten feet from the pen then turned and looked back into the pen at his mother who was watching and cried piteously. Walter wouldn’t work out. At this point he was still a mama’s boy. He looked at Shirley whom he thought of as queen of the litter. She was alert, independent, a little fierce and feral. She would drive others into a corner in order to nap in peace. Sometimes she would punish them with bites. She was always scrappy and would gratuitously bother the others. She always hogged the best teat. He dropped the limp Walter into the pen and Darling nuzzled him in consolation. He grabbed Shirley who seemed to have a “choose me” attitude. The moment he put her down she was off and running like a bat out of hell. She headed for a boulder in a thicket in the far corner of the pasture as if she had been studying the location from the vantage of the pen for a long time. He trotted after her, tripping on a rock, and painfully knocked out his wind. His wife was watching from her flower garden.

“Are you okay?” she yelled.

“No, bring Mary.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Bring Mary. Shirley is loose.”

He was sitting up now, coughing from his last hundred cigarettes. Mary was a well-trained black English cocker spaniel who would go out and herd a horse back to his wife when she wanted to ride. Mary would visit the pen and growl and all the pigs would back up except Shirley who would stand nose to nose with her at the fence ignoring the growling as if she could tear the dog apart.

When his wife arrived with Mary he was still sitting on the ground struggling to get his air back. He wasn’t used to moving quickly. While other men ran he walked, thinking a couple of hours of walking every day made up for the difference in immediate exertion.

Mary spotted Shirley rooting in the far bushes near his sitting rock and seemed to understand her mission. She headed toward Shirley at a dead run with his wife in chase. His wife could run doing so every morning. Shirley turned around and faced the oncoming yipping dog. They were immediately a ball of fur, pink fat, and muscle. His wife grabbed Mary’s collar and Shirley ran for the other far corner. Mary twisted away and gave chase. Mary was running between the fence and Shirley, crouching her body and trying to herd her up toward the pen. He guessed Shirley would get tired, not being used to running. At that point Shirley suddenly stopped and sat down. Mary with her tongue way out sat down about five yards away from Shirley. He and his wife got there at about the same time.

“My poor baby is bleeding.” A little blood dripped from Mary’s ear.

“You could tell they weren’t kissing,” he said.

“You asshole.”

He threw her a kiss then leaned and picked up Shirley setting her in his arms on her back which makes piglets passive. He carried her to the nearby pen and leaned over dropping her a short distance. She immediately returned to glaring out of the pen at Mary who had come over to growl.

A week later he was still ignoring his life’s work in favor of tending to the pigs though it seemed that they had no need for him except food. Mealtime is a time of great excitement for pigs. There was an absurd misadventure when their water tank overflowed while he was on the phone with a New York editor. He returned to find the pen a mud hole which was aesthetically displeasing. He got a tub from the work shed near the house and filled it with warm soapy water. The piglets were fairly cooperative when he washed them off except Aristo and also Walter, who had become more animated with Aristo’s influence. He scrubbed the mud off Aristo who faked placidity, then suddenly jumped out of the tub and ran for it. When he lunged for Aristo, Walter also jumped out and chased after his mentor. He hollered at his wife who was planting her vegetable plot’s early lettuce and peas. He added, “Bring Mary” in a shout. She came a little slowly and Mary immediately saw the piglets trying to hide in the bushes near the big rock. There was no violence this time though Shirley jumped straight up and down in the pen in excitement. Mary expertly herded Aristo and Walter back to the pen. They were sparkling clean and air dried.

“They’re just going to muddy themselves again,” his wife said.

And so they did with evident pleasure. His effort had been futile.

“There’s a chemical I put in the tub that prevents a pernicious skin rash, sometimes fatal.” He was lying.

She suspected as much but humored him. “I’m not eating any dirty pig. They look better clean.”

“Pigs have a right to get muddy. It’s the main pleasure of their lives.” He asked himself why he was arguing with her when he had just spent the afternoon washing piglets.

“How do you know? Maybe it’s sex.”

“They don’t think about sex in advance like us. They just do it,” he said with a bit too much authority.

“Now you’re a swine psychiatrist?” she said with a withering touch. She left for her garden.

Walter and Aristo had returned to the mud hole with gusto, their eyes blinking out below muddy brows. He picked up Marjorie who was pretty clean thanks to some still dry straw in a corner. Of all the piglets she liked most to be touched. He picked her up in his arms and she collapsed against his body as if they were lovers. He bathed her gently and put some fresh straw in her corner. She curled up in pleasure to dry off. She fluttered her eyes at him and he couldn’t help but wink. He took a little stroll with Marjorie and scratched her tummy.

Later he sat at his desk wanting very much to write a poem about piglets, not a comic poem. It would have to be a private poem for his eyes only because you need only to utter the word “pig” and some people would begin chuckling in their superiority. Pigs were of course edible but contemptible. He seethed in resentment in defense of pigs. The human race shits in its pants for at least the first year. Who else laughs in ridicule of fellow creatures? How could he write a poem if he was angry? Historians said that pork fueled the western movement. Without pigs there would be no west coast. Pigs would follow the wagon trains, their minds on a little corn for dinner. They would root for edible vegetables while cattle would wander off with their eyes on greener pastures.

He made a number of false starts on his pig poem then was so exhausted he drove to the saloon in town. Poetry does this to us. You can quickly either soar or drown in depression. You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem. Some are lost forever. Sometimes you walk around with versions of a poem in your head that won’t come clean. You are enslaved to this language of disorder and can brood upon it for days and weeks. When the poem finally does work, your spirit soars and you forget the difficulty, like you forget pain afterward. Some of the extreme behavior you see in the poet species is likely attributable to these struggles. When the brain spends this much time enfevered it is liable to affect the behavior which for a long period was a common joke around academia.

In down times of near clinical depression he wondered why he’d chosen this calling. Back at age fourteen when he was obsessed with Keats it seemed glorious despite the bad reviews Keats received during his short life. And Lord Byron had an enviable career of adventure and women, travel and women, poetry and women. And there was his beautiful rage when the Church of England wouldn’t allow him to be laid to rest with his dog. If the minstrel couldn’t be buried with his dog, he thought, he’d refuse to be buried. Just stick his body up in a tree and let him dry out in the wind. Pour out some good wine for the tree’s thirsty roots. The nobility of dogs is unquestionable compared with men. He meant at some point to write a novella called “The Dogs of Jesus.” Maybe it would be in the voice of the dog who was with him for his forty days in the wilderness.

Ralph, another wine-drinking neighbor in town, over a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape had described rather too eloquently how writers make up their lives with language and then are obligated to live them. They are absurdly autonomous. He felt resentment over this easygoing indictment and reacted with a brisk, “How do you know?” But Ralph did know and said he had published two novels and a book of poetry in his twenties and then quit in a state of boredom with himself. This seemed unlikely but Ralph admitted he should have held on because writers had the advantage of surprise in life. They got to discover what they were going to write next. Ralph’s father as a hard-ass business executive wouldn’t support him as a writer but the money would keep coming if he took a Ph.D. which back then would ensure future employment. His father had come to maturity in the Depression and was a maniac worrying about money. And so Ralph took a Ph.D. which required years of semi-indolence. He studied the medieval literature of Europe for which he had no real passion but its distance from his emotional life made it safe. Only it wasn’t. He became fascinated with the jongleurs, the medieval French poet minstrels who worked outside the Church and became a symbol of ultimate freedom in an authoritarian society. In a way they were bums living by their wits with an Indian trickster’s ability. He stayed in Montpellier for years, learned the difficult language of the poets, and lived down the street from the university where the great Rabelais had been educated in the sixteenth century. He was enamored with southern France in the 1950s with so many of the remains of the war visible. People were happy just to be alive. His professors were a bawdy and good-humored group of ex-officers with totally laissez-faire attitudes toward him as an academic. When millions die around you who gives a shit? Ralph himself became his own kind of jongleur and always carried himself lightly. When he married a French girl it was a very good marriage but she died giving birth to their only daughter. To the disappointment of her parents he raised the daughter in the countryside of North Carolina. They tried to get a legal injunction against him taking the daughter out of France but it wasn’t possible. They visited America every year to see their only grandchild. He had inherited a generous amount of money from his obnoxious father. He would take them all to a resort on vacation after doing research to make sure the food was good. The elderly French couple liked a dude ranch near Livingston, Montana, which was how Ralph had ended up there, and once when he screwed up dates for summer flights they came in December and they all stayed at a dude ranch near Patagonia, Arizona, where winter was sunny and passably warm.

During his early pig obsession he had missed the wine and company of his neighbors.

Chapter 3

He sat in front of the studio in his cheap white plastic chair and stared as he always did at his wife’s vegetable and flower garden. She grew the two together. A simple plot of vegetables but the mixture of flowers made it lovely.

His problems were immense. It was May and the piglets were all over forty pounds. Zack came over and they enlarged the pen. None of the piglets were glad to see them anymore unless they were bringing food. He was distressed and he said to Zack, “What do I do now?” and Zack replied, “Lots of parties now at the end of the university semester. Sell them for pig roasts on the hoof.” He made Zack a fine deal that if he sold the pigs he could keep half the money. He decided to keep Marjorie and of course the old sow no one would want. The next day he saw the ad Zack had called in to the university newspaper that began with, “The best pork you will ever put in your mouth. Perfect size for roasting.” Two days later Zack came over with his pickup the back of which was covered with a truck cap. He was a big strong former farm kid and loaded the piglets except for Shirley who he had to half strangle to get into the back of the truck. She nipped his hand pretty hard. “Got ’em all sold except for one. I’ll cook that one myself. You’ll be invited.” He said, “No thanks,” with a ghastly lump in his throat. How could he eat one of his pets? He was truly an amateur as a farmer.

Now that he had raised pigs the only consequential fantasy of his youth left to him was to live in France. He had saved all his earnings from age thirteen to eighteen to live in France, thirteen hundred dollars in all. A scoundrel eye doctor checking his sight said that he might be able to restore some sight in his blind left eye. His parents had no insurance that would cover this previous injury and no money what with a modest salary and five children. Being able to see out of the left eye was a more immediate temptation than France so when the surgeon asked what kind of money he could raise he stupidly said thirteen hundred. The surgeon said he would do the operation at that discounted price plus throw in a contact lens to help it work. It didn’t work at all and the lens also was worthless and painful. He threw it out in the swamp behind the house. He was destined to always see a dense fog bank, unconsoled when he discovered that holding the lids open he could see a small light in the sky. He had spent his life savings for France on an utter failure. Later on another eye doctor said the surgery was “criminal.”

Not surprisingly he entered a depression. His girlfriend abandoned him because she wanted to get married right after high school graduation. He was an ace debater but couldn’t talk her into sex without marriage. The loss of this girl and France at the same time prolonged the depression. In fact on his senior trip by train from Michigan to New York City they had stopped in Niagara Falls and on a very high bridge across the river for the first time he thought deeply of suicide. What prevented him from the fatal act is that he didn’t want to upset his parents or brothers and sisters who apparently loved him as he did them.

He never quite escaped this darkness but it was a small problem that his poetic thoughts about death were often disturbed by the fact that he was hungry. Maybe he should eat something first and then commit suicide. He had always kept this a secret only and inevitably thinking of it when he had a minstrel dream. The only good thing about the minstrel dreams is that they detoxified the suicidal mind-set by inspiring such hatred. The other and more long-ranging effect of the minstrel nightmare was of course that he forever quit doing poetry readings. He didn’t unlike so many others see the connection between performance and poetry. Some poets seemed to take to it quite naturally, grinning and chuckling over their own dark witticisms. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.

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?”

“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.”

This deflated him a bit though he knew very well writers in weak moments have always historically looked for philosophical underpinnings for their work. There were none that were not nearly laughable. Such campaigns were almost always led by the weakest writer in a group who had the most to gain, a fragile snippet of immortality as part of a “movement.” The Beats were a different matter, he thought, with quite a bit of substance, especially in contrast to the academic poets they were departing from who reminded one of a corn patch in a drought year. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing” worked if you were a good writer, otherwise it was gibberish. When he had tried it he came up with multiple pages about sex and food which was not surprising to him.

Despite the setback he could not shake his feelings about “glimpses.” Maybe he could write such a book of vignettes if first he wrote a best seller and was back in her favor. Or when he went to France in a couple of weeks he would keep a journal of vignettes if they came to him in a foreign country, but why wouldn’t they? It seemed like art blasphemy to wait, especially until you were old and rich, and the unlikelihood of them happening together struck his mood momentarily dumb. Writers are victims of their own goofy flights of the imagination. To have an imagination doesn’t mean you have control of it. In his teens the mere thought of Ava Gardner’s body made him erect. Why in God’s name was she married to the loathsome shrimp Mickey Rooney when she could have him, he thought? Of course how could he afford her when he only made sixty cents an hour as a night janitor at the local college? What if she wanted a new Buick convertible and he couldn’t afford a hubcap? Maybe he could win a lottery if he could find one. Michigan did not yet have a lottery. She would want a mansion if she didn’t already have one with Mickey. Maybe she would be unfaithful to him with Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power or, more likely, Cary Grant. To become sodden and disarmed over the complications of getting Ava in his arms. Or Deborah Kerr tied to the stake in a nightie in Quo Vadis, or was it The Robe? Local girls were more reachable but were they suitable for a fifteen-year-old potential great artist? He was sweeping backstage one night when he saw a college girl actress just standing there on the stage in her undies looking out at the dark theater seats. He could think of nothing to say to her. She waved at him and he waved at her, and then she walked through one of those theater set doors that when you close the door the whole wall shudders. He swept more quickly. If he couldn’t say anything to this girl with her beauteous butt what could he possibly say to Ava Gardner? After he entered college the single most irritating thing people said was, “It’s all in the mind.” Of course it was. Where else would it be? But they said it with insipid incomprehension. What if he had followed the girl through the fake door? She might start running for the police. He couldn’t permit himself the fantasy line she would perform, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.” But this was reality so neither of them said anything. This experience caused him a great deal of unrest for weeks. The problem was that it was an actual event and seemed to show him that he was unprepared for a life of high romance. What would Lord Byron have said but then it was unlikely Byron would be sweeping auditorium floors. When he finally found a girl willing to take his virginity he discovered he didn’t know how to go about it. She had whispered “go ahead” and they continued necking and wrestling on a sofa. She finally took charge and they were able to proceed. In novels couples usually flopped back on waves of nothingness and the particulars weren’t mentioned. He thought, with some help I have solved the puzzle. It was more like the sensation of melting than anything else. He expected dramatic changes in his life afterward but nothing of significance happened.

Chapter 6

The toughest thing about his pig adventures coming mostly to an end was that he felt more obligated to be strictly a writer again. He searched through his messy desk ceaselessly looking for some notes for the presold novel. He was usually uncanny at remembering details but his idea had come along strangely in a troublesome dream at three thirty in the morning and retained a dreamy elusiveness. He had awoken with a jolt, had a drink from a pint on his desk, coughed convulsively, then dreamed of three cantankerous families that were neighbors down an imagined but very vivid gravel road. Their parked cars and pickups in the landscape were muddy and junky with evidence of many minor collisions. There was one very large barn between them and across the road a very large hay crop recently baled. In the dream all the people in the three narrow houses had a passing resemblance which indicated to him that the families were all related. The dream came with the conviction that they were all evil people except the children who continued being children in the malevolent atmosphere. All of them, especially the men, were profound boozeheads fueled by endless gallons of cheap vodka.

He liked the idea of evil rural families because the whole rural literary tradition in America had become buried in honeysuckle and lilacs, hardworking and noble yokels. He had lived all of his life in the country and knew that this was hopeless bullshit. It wasn’t even fair to the rural people because it denied them their humanity making them comic book cutouts. It was the clear interface of ideology with fiction. Anyway, the whole idea had now dissipated.

He could always call his editor and ask for a copy of his original proposal but the idea was far too embarrassing because he had lied in his sales pitch and claimed to have written “a hundred pages” of notes for this new idea. The trouble with lying was how frequently you had to cover up for it. Sometimes you had to live the lie to prevent discovery that you had told it in the first place. What saved him was late that night he had yet another brief minstrel nightmare. His parents were holding him tightly because he was ill and shivering, but he had a miniature gun in his coat and was carefully shooting all the performers who would howl and drop to their knees with this acute form of a bee sting in the face. This image saved him because he dimly recalled his three farm families were severely alcoholic gun nuts imperiling his hero who lived downriver from them in his trout fishing cabin. Eureka! With guns and booze how could he fail? He had pretty much canceled the idea of France so harsh was the idea of writing the novel after having lost the story, so he was thrilled when his dream success revived it. The idea of him going to France to write had been much talked about for decades. He couldn’t recall who had done the talking but the idea was that looking back at America from France you would see the home place much more lucidly. He could put it off no longer and booked the tickets. Of course the girl who brought him coffee every morning in his inexpensive hotel would be seduced by him within a day or two. How could she resist? A bold American artist getting older but still in the arena.

In the past if he suffered a literary slight he reminded himself that Melville had been forgotten for more than thirty years. Writing like nature was full of unfairness. Hail killed the baby warblers in their nest. Wars were obviously part of nature and killed millions. What struck him about reading Anne Frank was not what everyone knew, that she had died like millions of her relatives, but that she was obviously destined to become a grand writer. The mortality of songbirds hitting windows drove him crazy. You had a lovely life ahead of you and then you struck a window and it was over. The death of his sister at nineteen in an auto crash with his father was still unacceptable fifty years later. It had created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness. It was ultimately the cause of his becoming a writer. If this can happen to those you love you may as well follow your heart’s wishes in your time on earth. He found it quite comic when he realized that he had never won an award that he had ever heard of before winning it. “Here today, gone tomorrow,” as people said. Ambition grated while humility soothed. This was quite different from ambition for the work itself. All he would allow himself was the wish that his books stay in print. The aim was that when he was walking Mary and Marjorie in the morning he was simply walking a dog and a pig on a lovely morning not brooding about what a reviewer in New York had done to him. Once when he was washing popcorn butter off his hands in a movie theater bathroom there was a dapper young man next to him who was combing his complicated hair with amazing wrist flicks. He had dozens of waves and curls and smiled at himself in the mirror as he did it. He remembered thinking at the time that the guy was fucked for life. He might have a girlfriend who liked or loved his hair but not as much as he himself did. After the movie he saw the guy with a rather homely girl which made sense in that he wouldn’t want to suffer by comparison.

Chapter 7

His month in France was a joy to the point that he later wondered why he came home. In every respect it was a feast for his senses and his naturally quizzical impulses. He had had a year of the French language but remembered next to nothing though a little seeped in from the past. It didn’t seem to matter because all the French, at least in Paris, seemed to have enough English to bail him out of his minimal difficulties. An artist friend had told him about a wonderful room in a little hotel on Rue Vaneau which was near Rue de Sèvres and Rue de Babylone and only a couple of blocks from the Invalides, a handy landmark. There were small city maps free at the hotel desk and he was never without one. He got it out so frequently that it only lasted a few days before it would turn into soft pulp. He got into navigational trouble one day when he forgot his reading glasses and the map became a blur. He finally asked an old lady in a small park who gave him directions in clear English. They spoke a few moments and out came that she had been married to a soldier from Chicago. She lived with him there until the 1960s when he died and she moved home. She said she was tough because her parents were Basques. He didn’t know what that meant but asked around and later found out. She took his shoulders and aimed him north toward the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper on Montparnasse. From then on he would use the building as a beacon when he was confused. It was easy to take the proper right turn well before he reached the skyscraper.

Paris seemed to agree with his notion of glimpses. He walked hundreds of streets in the first two weeks until he got bad shin splints from walking on cement which his legs were unused to. He had to take a few days off, mostly made up of hot baths. He bought a pair of thick soft-soled shoes at Bon Marché and consequently discovered the immense food court on that floor. That helped. He skipped restaurants for a while. In the morning he’d buy the Tribune, have coffee, and then go into the food court, buy bread, a few cheeses out of the hundred they had, some pâté, salmon, and several kinds of herring. He vowed he would someday live nearby and cook in his own apartment out of this marvelous and expensive store. They had a big wine department but he preferred the small wine store across the street where he had gotten to know a friendly clerk. One day he bought on impulse a large double magnum of Mouton Rothschild but couldn’t figure out what to do with such a large bottle so he took it to a dinner at his publisher’s home who doubtless thought “Crazy American” and hid it from his current guests with glee. “A wine for the proper occasion,” he said.

France brought back glimpses of his life of travel in the years when he was ever so slowly writing his most ambitious novel, screenplays, and also informal outdoor essays for Sports Illustrated. He went to Russia with a friend but their KGB guide didn’t want him to write anything about Russian horse racing. He went to one race and saw Iron Jaw win. On the way home he stopped in France and wrote a piece about a stag hunt near a friend’s family château. Of course he had never stayed in a château before but was comfortable as had been Richard III who had stayed there during the invasion of France. One evening he and his friend ate a wild piglet stuffed with truffles.

The same year, he and his wife went to Africa with the same friend and his wife, a grand trip. His biggest thrill was not the mammals, which he had seen so much of on television and in the movies, but the birds. Every bird in Africa was a bird he had never seen before including the large martial eagle who occasionally feeds on hyenas that weigh 150 pounds, just like Mongolian golden eagles can kill wolves. You imagine them dropping out of the sky the weight of a frozen turkey with huge talons. Bang. About anything is dead. He dreamed of returning to Africa simply to bird-watch by himself. He also traveled to Ecuador for a sporting magazine to catch a striped marlin on a fly rod. He succeeded finally on a later trip to Costa Rica.

Perhaps the most momentous trip in terms of long-range effect was a month in Brazil to research a screenplay for a producer. The constant presence of the music of Brazil seeped into the soul and could be recalled anytime. The thousands of beach girls were also memorable, their shapely bodies maintained by the endless physical beach games they play. One day he joined the tail end of an anti — nuclear weapons march led by a hot samba band. Everyone was dancing and he did the best he could. Finally one austere older woman, the soul of dignity, joined him and helped with dance steps. Afterward he asked if she would like to have a drink. She answered that if she had a drink with a strange man her husband would cut his throat. He found out later that many husbands in Brazil have the nasty habit of killing their wives. Farther north he loved the big former slave port of Bahia which was even more, if that was possible, musically saturated than Rio. It was intoxication without alcohol or drugs. Every kid sitting on a park bench strumming seemed better than any quartet he’d ever heard in the United States. In Bahia music was their life. There was no other. Maybe music was the only way to subdue the smothering poverty. You kept thinking of the music, the Atlantic Ocean in front of you, the night sky that opened people up rather than closing them. The dancing was ceaseless and he suddenly envied these people who danced every day rather than occasionally. More than once during his month he thought he might move there.

One grotesquely snowy December morning in Paris years before he had sat at his studio desk staring at an assortment of poems written since the last book of poetry three years before. This was when it was thirty rather than fifty years since he wrote his first poem while reading John Keats. Of course the poem was doggerel and he had known it immediately. He thought of the thousands and thousands of hours he had spent on poems since that calling at age fourteen. “Calling” is sort of a theological term, as people feel called to the ministry, and is less true of writing, but he knew he had made a lifetime commitment. He was standing on the roof of the house in the middle of the night at fourteen, staring at the Milky Way which seemed to stare back with its fabulous plenitude. Now staring at the snow thirty years later, he thought that his prose fiction seemed more of an afterthought though he read a great deal of it. He had to write and there were long periods of time when he didn’t have a poem ready to arrive. René Char, a French poet he worshipped, had said about writing poetry, “You have to be there when bread comes fresh from the oven.” You had to live your life in a state of readiness for the poem even though it could very well be a month or two between poems. Another pet obsession of his though not much believed in the cramped world of poetry was that every poet is obligated to read everything published in poetry through time, no matter from what country or time period. He spent years and years doing so. How could you write if you weren’t familiar with what was best in the history of the world? He went fishing and camping with friends at the cabin on the lake where they brought piles of sex magazines to read while he had only anthologies of Chinese and Russian poetry. He didn’t mind being teased about it because he was the biggest and strongest of the group and they went only so far in their teasing for fear of getting their asses kicked. He was an utterly nonviolent farm kid and just looked threatening because of his musculature from a life of hard work whether bucking hay bales in tall stacks, unloading fertilizer trucks, or laying out irrigation pipe in the fields.

Recently while sitting in his studio watching his wife, a shapely woman indeed, work in the garden he had a few minutes of absolute happiness. He couldn’t remember his last one, other than catching a five-pound brown trout in a local river. But this one was more solid and overwhelming. What happened was that he had a rapprochement with her after several years of growing distance.

It all started with smoking. She had had a severe asthma attack and spent a week at a hospital in Tucson. Her asthma was bad enough that she could no longer be in the company of anyone smoking cigarettes. Whenever he spent time in the house he was sequestered in his office, taping black plastic sheeting across the louver over the door. He was already claustrophobic and his dismal space considerably upped the ante. He couldn’t face it, in fact. Maybe he would quit smoking. But then his singular success had been the seven weeks around spinal surgery. The surgeon told him for the sake of his healing bones he shouldn’t drink or smoke for those seven weeks. He played the role of the hero and somehow managed without cheating.

They merged again one evening sitting on the porch swing watching fireflies and the thousands of stars above them, idly moving the swing back and forth with their feet. The night was unbearably beautiful with the constellations speaking their own strange language to each other. He told her he thought it might be the uninvented language used by Jesus and the Buddha to speak to each other.

“What a wonderful thought. I have to tell you something unpleasant. Your friend Ralph in town died this afternoon. I waited because I didn’t want to tell you while you were enjoying your favorite lasagna dinner. His daughter is there on a visit. You should call her now.”

He broke down weeping. He sobbed, in fact, thinking that his friend might have died of a heart attack while trying to pull the cork from a recalcitrant bottle of wine. He wasn’t very strong. The two of them had recently been corresponding about Chinese poetry and he had begun to think of Ralph as his only true friend.

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 did 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.