The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “Down where?”

  “Where I got them camped, at them barns this side of the creek. Where the hell did you think? You think I'm paying for horseback hands to live in a hotel?”

  Built of cottonwood logs, the low-roofed barns were holdouts from the livery stable days that ended in the 1920s. Beyond the barns were the corrals, one of them round and willow-walled, with a heavy deep-set juniper post in the center.

  Food and bedrolls would be transported on the cook's truck. An old-fashioned chuck wagon box was built into the tail end. The bins and drawers were already filled with roasting pans and tin plates, a scramble of knives and forks, and flour and onions and beans. There were two gray canvas tents, one to shelter the cooking and another for sleeping and only to be set up if it rained.

  Two of Rossie's traveling companions, a short, dark man who was rolling a cigarette and a raw-skinned, blond fellow who looked to be Rossie's age, were lounging on rounds of sawlog set up as stools around a fire pit.

  The youngster didn't look at Rossie, but the bowlegged man rolling a cigarette said, “Hell of a automobile.” Then he finished his rolling and lit his smoke. “Jap Hardy,” he said. “But I got nothing to do with Japan. I'm what's called a Port. My people came on the boat from Portugal though I been horseback all my life. You ever heard of Portugal?”

  “In school,” Rossie said.

  Jap Hardy gave Rossie a tight little smile.

  “So how come they call you Jap?”

  “My daddy started that. No telling why. He was a shithead.”

  “First time you been out of Nevada?” the blond kid asked. “Bet you don't know where you are. You're in California. This Surprise Valley is up in the corner of California. You ever been in California before?”

  “This boy is Bill Sweet,” Jap Hardy said. “You'll hear him talking all the time. If he don't shut up somebody is going to kick his ass. It might be me.”

  Bill Sweet was studying the distance like he hadn't said a thing.

  “These horses was shod down in the Sacramento Valley,” Jap Hardy said. “Those boys did it right. Otherwise you'd be looking at rasping hooves and shaping shoes—a week of aching backs, if you ask me. So I told Dufferena no horseshoeing. Except a few on the road.”

  “Don't have no horse to shoe,” Rossie said. “The old man said I should be picking a string.”

  “You're the geek who don't have no horse,” Jap Hardy said. “I cut one out for you. Big, good-natured, traveling fellow. Anybody can ride him. Don't want you in much of a rodeo right away. I got him in the wrango pasture. You pick the others after we get going on the road tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Jap Hardy smiled that tight smile again. “Not too early. The old man is buying us dinner up in the hotel. Going to be a late start. But after that we're out at daylight. It's six or seven weeks to Calgary. There won't be much sleeping. I was three weeks figuring roads and renting fenced pasture for the nights, so there won't be no night herding, either. You want to lose horses, try night herding. We're getting there with all our horses. And we're sleeping down here alongside the barn tonight, but you can throw your bedroll anywhere out of sight from the road. You got that woman with you.”

  “That woman don't have anything to do with me.”

  “Damn shame if it's true.”

  “How about if I sleep up in the hotel?”

  “You can sleep anywhere you want, if you can pay for it. I'm not your daddy.”

  This wasn't going right. “Maybe you ought to show me that horse,” Rossie said. But just then two men—they looked to be in their midforties, same as Jap Hardy—came easing from the bedroll tent, one of them heavy-shouldered with a thick, graying mustache draped over his upper lip. The other, gray-faced and clean-shaven, was busy sharpening his pocketknife and didn't even look at Rossie. They must have been trying to sleep, since they were standing around in their stocking feet.

  “Ahead of the horses, anyway, you ought to meet these fellows.” Jap Hardy gestured toward the heavy-shouldered bowlegged man with the stained mustache over his mouth. “This here is Tarz Witzell.”

  Rossie had heard of Tarz Witzell, a man with a reputation. His grip, when Rossie shook his hand, was soft as a child's on the surface. Underneath, it was otherwise. There were drunkman stories about Tarz Witzell battering his way through the taverns in Elko. But then he turned crazy for horses and gave up on whiskey and women. “Cute as pie,” Slivers Flynn had said about him.

  The gray-faced fellow sharpening his pocketknife turned out to be Dickie Wilson, who'd been cowboss for the Flying Cross, out of Battle Mountain, before the owners sold off all their livestock and settled in to cultivate a kitchen garden and wait out the Depression. So. Even these men had been reduced to trailing horses toward Calgary.

  “This is how it sets up,” Jap Hardy said. “Two old hands, two kids. And me. A cook and some goddamned wrango boy.”

  “Tell you what. I don't hire out to play kid.”

  “The cook and chore boy,” Jap Hardy said, “ride in the truck. You're horseback. You roll your bed every morning and then you don't worry about nothing before dinner but what's going on horseback. Turn out to be a kid and you won't last long. Slivers told me you'd be fine soon as you settle down. I figure that's about right. I figure you'll learn.”

  “Show you something.” Rossie pulled out the white-bone-handled knife Mattie had stolen from Slivers Flynn.

  He knew this was a mistake even as he opened the thin blade. “Slivers gave me this. He said to earn it.”

  “That sounds like bullshit. Slivers Flynn never said anything like that. You just got a worn-out knife. Let's go see your bay horse.”

  Five horses were prowling the fences in the wrango pasture, flaring their nostrils and eyeing the lightning flashing across the oncoming storm. “Bay with the star on his face,” Jap Hardy said, “I picked him for you. Fine, strong fellow.”

  “Rock, “ Rossie said. “I'm going to call him Rock. Had a horse looked just like him called Banjo. But he got away from under me, and damned near knocked my brains out. I was bleeding from the ears.”

  “Call him whatever you want. You might be bleeding from the asshole before this is over, but that horse will stand the traveling.” Then he smiled. “Hope that Banjo didn't knock your brains out. You come along in that big car like a movie actor. There's a chance you didn't have any brains to start with.” Huge, single drops of rain began striking in the dust around them. “We're going to get wet. We better run for them tents.”

  A thin, graying man had a fire blazing through the rain in a fire pit, and coffee steaming.

  “This is Louis Clair,” Jap Hardy said. “He cooks. We treat him nice. He don't pick up your shit. Leave something behind and it's never going to be his fault. It's your fault and you shut up about it. Fuck with Louis and you're fucking with me.”

  “Drowned rat,” Oscar said, eyeing Rossie. A shot glass of whiskey shimmered by his elbow.

  Rossie was soaked with rain running a stream off the brim of his straw hat before he hung it carefully on a wooden peg. “Don't worry about that hat. We got rooms. One for you. Altogether they cost me nine dollars. My treat. You ought to sleep indoors one more night.”

  Lightning illuminated the common world in shades and shadows. Heavy wind brought a great limb thunking down from the poplars before the storm passed and the rain settled into a steady downpour.

  Rossie ducked out to the Packard, dragged his tarp-covered bedroll into the lobby, unbuckled the leather straps, and rolled it open to dig out one of the dry shirts tucked inside. In the men's room off the lobby, he ran his comb through his hair, laying it slick and damp and black along his skull. Oscar found him there and handed him a glass of whiskey and water. The Eagleville drinking was under way.

  A heavy lady in a black cookhouse dress and matching apron came into the kitchen through a back door and began chopping spuds and banging on steak cuts with a tenderizing hammer. Malinda carried a ladder-backed
chair onto the veranda and sat out of the rain, watching the storm. Rossie got a chair and joined her, listening to the thunder and the softening fall of rain as the rumbling diminished, until Oscar followed them. “A couple of rainfall lovers,” he said.

  “Beats cowhands,” Malinda said. “Soothes the nerves and shows up once in a while, every six months or so.”

  Oscar stepped to the edge of the porch and stood facing them. Rossie wondered if Oscar was drunk enough to step backward off the veranda. “Fucking women,” Oscar said.

  “You got us right,” Malinda said. “We're the shits. There's too many women who won't act right. So the crybaby assholes they married go to beating on horses, who have to put up with it.” Rossie wondered if this line of talk had anything to do with Bobby Cahill. But he didn't wonder for long. Pissiness was about to brew over the top in Oscar, and here it came, as Oscar tossed the remnants of his whiskey and water off into the grass.

  “What I'll be doing,” he said, “is any shitting thing I please. When old Rossie gets home I'll be moved in with Mattie Flynn, down the hall from Slivers. I'll be a happy boy. Rossie thinks I'm telling a joke, but he'll see.” Oscar was eyeing Rossie in a glassy way. This was right to the edge of fighting talk. There was no answer to it other than fighting, or ducking your head and walking away.

  Malinda glared at Oscar “What you should do, you tiresome asshole, is leave this kid alone and go fuck yourself.”

  Oscar drew back, and Rossie thought he might swing on her. But a thought flickered across his eyes.

  “If you're worried about Bobby Cahill,” Malinda said, “that's a good idea. You want to think about Bobby Cahill before you swing on me.”

  Rossie took a long pull on his whiskey and water, then went into the lobby of the hotel. Dufferena was limping down the stairs as Rossie hoisted his bedroll onto his shoulder. “I'll be sleeping down by the barns,” Rossie said. The old man nodded like this made a lot of sense, carrying your bed off into the rain when you had a paid-up room in the hotel. Rossie went past Oscar and Malinda out on the veranda without looking at them. He thought of his hat on that peg in the lobby and felt like a fool but kept walking, out to the shelter of a cottonwood tree. The rain was down to a mist, and the wind and lightning had died. He turned to see Oscar and Malinda trailing after him, carrying drinks.

  “For shit's sake,” Oscar said. “We'd leave you out here sucking your thumb like a baby if you wasn't so pitiful.” He was down off his high horse. “Mattie's around, and I think about her. But I'm just bullshitting. That's what it is.”

  “Yeah,” Rossie said, “you're a beauty.” He took a sip from Malinda's bourbon and water. “Goddamn it, I feel like I better drink this whole son of a bitch and a couple more if I'm going to catch up.”

  Tarz Witzell, up from camp, appeared wearing a yellow slicker like a seaman. Oscar snorted. “Like to see that boy get on a horse with that slicker.”

  “That's Tarz Witzell,” Rossie said. “He can probably get on his horse.”

  Oscar stalked off toward the hotel. “We got to take it easy on him,” Malinda said. “Oscar's crippled for good and he knows it.”

  “You think he'd go after Mattie?” Rossie asked, and Malinda considered a moment, like a theorist.

  “He might. He might look pretty good to her. Oscar was winning saddle bronc when she was a girl. She might think he'd quit running if he liked her hot enough. Wet pussy has changed a lot of minds. She don't know what a son of a bitch he can be and maybe she wouldn't care. Oscar's not dumb. He's just looking for a place to lay his head down—and he could, working for Slivers. Who knows?”

  “Mattie is not any chickenshit girl. We're talking about her like she don't have a brain of her own.”

  “Well, she's not here to defend herself,” Malinda smiled. “If it was me, I'd count that girl gone and wouldn't hold no grudge against Oscar, whichever way it goes. I'd figure I left her and made my trouble. You ought to carry your bedroll back over to the hotel. This is foolishness.” She took hold of his arm, and dug in her fingernails. “But you know he means to go after that girl. She may have gave up on you already. That's the point of this, him trying to tell you.”

  Somebody from the hotel cranked up the power plant out behind, and the dinner was served under electric lights that flickered occasionally. “Get it or I'm throwing it out,” the cook announced. The meal was silent as platters of breaded steak and bowls of string beans and mashed potatoes with white milk gravy shuffled up and down the long table.

  Dufferena sat at the head like a king of wisdom.

  Oscar was off into a sullen drunk until, as the cook distributed three deep apple pies, he stood and held his drink up to the ceiling. “Damn,” he said, “I didn't come up here for pie. I come looking for a send-off.”

  “You going somewhere?” Dufferena grinned like the idea of Oscar going anywhere was a joke. “You drove your ducks to a mighty poor pond. That's the big trouble with drunk all the time. You don't know what's going on. That's why these are my horses and you fellows will be hoping I show up in Canada with the wages.”

  “You know what you are?” Oscar said. He took a long pull on his drink and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “What in hell do you know about work? You're just a goddamned thieving old fool.”

  Malinda lifted a hand to hide her eyes. Rossie was staring at the precise line of scalp where her hair was parted.

  Tarz Witzell cleared his throat and tapped his thick fingers on the tabletop. “What you sound like is some jackass about to get his other leg broke.”

  Rossie realized why Malinda was hiding her eyes. She was working to keep from laughing.

  Oscar was watching her. “You'll get your deal,” he said. Just what deal wasn't clear.

  Malinda looked up and shook her head. “Oscar, you talk like a crazy man. You need a nap.”

  “He's the crazy one.” Oscar didn't seem to be looking at anybody in particular.

  “Oh, Christ!” Malinda scolded. “Sit down.”

  But Oscar wasn't having any of that. He looked up toward a corner of the ceiling, staggered into the doorjamb on his way out, slammed the door, and stomped across the veranda. Eventually they heard the Packard crank up. “Guess he's leaving,” Clifford Dufferena said.

  Thinking he could get Oscar headed off, Rossie was getting out of his chair when a gunshot blew through the screen door and took out one of the lights over the table, shattering glass down over them. The second shot hit the ceiling. Rossie sat back down in his chair and they stayed put, waiting to get shot.

  “Me,” Dufferena said, “I'm not going out there.” Then it wasn't a question.

  The Packard roared and spit gravel. From the veranda Rossie saw taillights growing fainter down the gravel road. In moonlight he spotted the saddle and the burlap sack of his horse gear out in the parking lot where Oscar had dumped them. The moon hung over glowing meadows and the horses moved like shadows among the dark reefs of willow.

  It had been settled that Dufferena, on his way to Reno the next day, would drive Malinda to her Model T touring car. The electric plant had been shut down and the lights were out, the men had gone to the bed tent and Dufferena up to his room. Rossie and Malinda, just the two of them, sat out on the veranda in a glaze of moonlight.

  “He said I was going to be in your bedroll,” Malinda said, “that he could see it coming and that I was going to make you a going away present. I told him I wasn't planning anything like that, bedding down with anybody. I don't do that anymore, even if I might think it would be a hot idea.” She told him about the stonework Bobby Cahill had set in place over the years at Shoshone Meadows, house walls and barn walls built of black lava, a stone-walled chicken house with chickens in the yard and roosters crowing over the sound of the little creek just outside the kitchen. “Shoshone Meadows is where you don't try to forget where you are. I mean to live there all my life, sprinkled with some running like this, so long as Bobby don't kick me out. He says horses will make him famous and he's got t
o do what he's doing. He thinks people will come to see his horses. But nobody would come to Shoshone Meadows unless it were his own kids and he's not going to have any kids—he tells me, no kids—so he's going to be alone except for me and his damned old horses.” She walked to the edge of the veranda. “Tonight you got a room of your own. Lock that door so I don't get any drunk-girl ideas. I want to wake up believing I'm my own momma.”

  THIRTY OR FORTY MILES EVERY DAY TOTALED UP TO A THOUSAND miles to Calgary—wagon-track roads across sagebrush distances in eastern Oregon and clattering along two-lane macadam highways in the Snake River plow grounds of southern Idaho, then a long arc to the east before turning north to the grassy plains of Montana—that was the plan, so they wouldn't have to attempt driving horses through tim-berlands. The Chinese Wall country, where the rich men from Reno went for elk hunting in the fall, deep in the high Rockies, would loom to the west as they progressed north toward Alberta.