Ancient Minstrel, The by Harrison Jim

Author:Harrison, Jim [Harrison, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novellas, Fiction
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-02-01T18:00:44+00:00

Chapter 3

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

In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.