The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  MORNING ROSE ACROSS THE PRAIRIES WITH SURGING WINDS and spitting rain. Louis Clair and Angus were up and wearing slickers before sunrise, working around the fire, coffee already made. Jap Hardy stood with a steaming cup, his back to the fire, while Rossie pulled on his boots and went out to stand beside him.

  “Miserable son of a bitch,” Jap Hardy said. “Always is, if the outfit breaks up. Rained the day they auctioned the Seven-T horses in North Warner. September and it damned near snowed. Never seen it to fail.” Then he eyed Rossie. “You been good help. We'll see you in Nevada, around them buckaroo camps.”

  Rossie heard Jap Hardy calling him a man.

  By midmorning Dufferena was gone with Jap Hardy in his buggy, tug chains rattling behind the Standard-bred geldings. Tarz Witzell and Dickie Wilson rode in the Model A truck loaded with their bedrolls and saddles in gunny sacks for the last stretch to the railroad in Calgary.

  That quick, Rossie was on his own. The Rock horse was loaded with his gear and roped down on a packsaddle bummed off Alexander Beets, and there was nobody he owed any answers. He would cash his one-hundred-dollar paycheck in Calgary, then move on to Montana with greenbacks in his possession. He didn't know a soul within a thousand miles but for Bill Sweet in Charlo in the Flathead Valley, if he was still there. And that gray-eyed girl.

  The rain drizzled and quit, but the cold wind went on singing of isolations as the cook fire burned down to coals. Rossie considered building it up and watching as it burned down again, and building it up another time, stalling with his mind on that Stevenson girl. Beside the dying fire, Rossie flinched at the thought of Alexander Beets coming along to find him jacking off—at how that would look—as finally the wind fell away altogether.

  The night before, working to fathom what to do next, Rossie had decided to be simple and smart with work and his money, and maybe he would just naturally turn out like Nito, able to deal with a slippery new deck of cards every time. But this was at the end of boyhood, and he was playing without plans. He'd drifted off to dream of slipperiness and fucking with Mattie, and he'd awakened with his mind on Eliza Stevenson.

  Now, with the fire burned to embers, Rossie got up horseback and headed out onto the lane that ran up and down above the Bow River. From the low hills, soon enough, he could see down into a camp clustered among the riverbank willows just as Jap Hardy had described it—tepees scattered around shake-roofed cabins built of rotting cot-tonwood logs, surrounded by a straggling garden. Nothing moved until a pack of yellowish dogs came out barking. The horses were used to this and held their own, giving the mutts little attention as Rossie climbed off Pinky, scaled a flat rock into the midst of the hounds, and hollered, “Shit eaters!” The dogs shut down the racket and came slinking toward him, sniffing and wagging, as if they might be fed. Hounds at his heels, horses tethered, Rossie made his way toward the houses.

  A tiny, ancient woman in buckskins appeared, her face seemed collapsed though she was smiling. “Nevada,” she said, her tone high and lilting, as if she were singing. “Son of a bitch.”

  A sharp-featured young Indian man wearing metal-rimmed eyeglasses came out from the building that was sending smoke into the cold sky. His shirt was striped red, white, and blue, and his long, tight, black braids, interwoven with red and white ribbons, dangled yellow feathers from their ends.

  “Nevada,” the old woman said again in that singing voice.

  “Ross Benasco?” The young man in the lurid shirt closed the door behind him, as to hiding whatever was in there, and held up his left hand, palm out.

  “You got me,” Rossie said.

  “Not for long,” the man said. “For tonight, you got us. If you come inside, we'll open a beer, then take care of your horses.” He spoke precisely, as if trained to speak, and Rossie wondered if he actually was an Indian.

  “How'd you know my name?”

  “Eliza,” the old woman said, her smile so insistent Rossie wondered if her mind was haywire. Her hands, folded together before her, were swollen and gnarled. Rossie saw that her hair had once been blond, that her eyes were gray. She clearly was not an Indian. “You meet everyone,” she said. “Eliza said you were half-Basque. That was enough to make you welcome with Eliza.”

  “How's that?”

  “She is inclined that way,” the man said. “She and I are the strangers here. She's the white girl who showed up with Charlie Cooper. I've been to schools in British Columbia and in Missoula, the college.”

  “Hell of a thing for an Indian,” Rossie said, thinking here's an Indian with eyeglasses, he's been to college and says words like inclined.

  “Indeed,” the man said. “Two years. My degree will be in forestry, the care of forests. I owe it to Eliza's father, my employer. Part of my work involves looking after her.”

  “What's the other part of your work?”

  “Pity,” the man said, and that seemed to finish the topic. “I should introduce myself. My name is Leonard Three Boy. There's a joke in there, but I don't know what it is. The names the whites put on Indians were usually jokes. This woman is Barbara. She used to be British, or that's what she tells us. Isn't that true?” he said to the woman.

  “True as you'll ever know.” Her smile didn't waver.

  On the porch, Rossie had thought he was alone with the old woman and Leonard Three Boy, but the room inside, when they entered, was thronging. There were no young people, no sign of children, nothing but old faces. A dozen, four at each of three tables, sat silent, playing dominoes. Others were intent at card games. Two men, boots beside them, slept on folded blankets along the back wall. A cluster of women—the grandmothers, Rossie thought—had claimed a circle of broken-down chairs. With hair braided in tight-to-the-skull styles, they were got up in shawls in patterns of red and blue and yellow.

  “Here we are,” Leonard Three Boy said. “Raise your right hand. Smile and say hello.”

  Some nodded, but most looked away to their cards and dominoes.

  “They disdain you,” Leonard Three Boy said. “But they will be polite until they know you. Then we'll see.”

  “What they got against me?”

  Leonard Three Boy smiled. “Fifty years on dole food.”

  A battered sink with a pitcher pump was set in a counter lined with wooden cases of home-brewed beer. A cast-iron cookstove and a stack of split firewood took up the far wall.

  “One rule is no whiskey,” Leonard said. “Nothing but beer. Which would be illegal if this was a reserve. Hope you can drink it warm.” He opened a dark bottle. “Warm is what we got.”

  “If this isn't some reservation what is it?” Rossie asked. “You got rules? Like a school?”

  “This is nowhere. Mormon missionaries abandoned these buildings. The blond daughter died and they left. They said missionaries would return but it's been seven years. Even the Mormons have forgotten us. So we treat the place like it's ours.” The abandoned Mormon school, onetime classrooms and dormitories where the teachers had lived, now made up the shelters that the Indians occupied.

  “These people wait in a web of dreams, as if the old days might return. They're waiting like spiders. The galloping and war—that they remember like it was a dream. They live a mystic life, full of stories about guardian animals and spirits that are as real as anything. The sun and earth are alive, and spirits from dreams will care for them if they live right. But they are actually as alone in the world as anyone, as deep into their need for assurances. It doesn't matter how they live. The dreamers are dead. The survivors are helpless. Their world died, and they don't know how much it had to do with you. They don't hate you yet. But they will if you act like someone who might have killed the world. So you be careful.”

  “You believe any of that?” Rossie asked. “You're not talking like a man who believes it.”

  “I was born in it, but I don't believe it. Mormon schooling took with me. I was the smart one, and I went to British Columbia and trained to translate for Franz Boas, in case he ever came to t
he Rockies. It was a mistake. I wanted to believe in dreams but Boas taught me to believe in facts and theories. Then Eliza's father, Bernard, found me and sent me to the university in Missoula, saying he'd pay for me to look after these people and I could be a hero. All he wanted was someone to look after Eliza. I think of myself as her guardian animal, but an animal who is on his way through university. I'm an educated savage, pimping for whites. I could be going dumb though. I think about coming back here.” He smiled like he was sharing a joke. “You're looking for Eliza. She's sleeping. There's too much sleeping. But Eliza has her reasons. Tonight we'll be awake.”

  Rossie and Leonard Three Boy went outside again through the main room, the old people paying them no attention. The dogs followed them as they led Pinky and Rock to the barn, where Rossie unsaddled, pulled the pack off Rock, brushed the horses and left them in empty stalls.

  “It must be that you trust us,” Leonard Three Boy said, “or else you're a damned fool. Blood Indians are famous for stealing horses, and you're leaving yours for the taking.”

  “You call yourself Bloods?”

  “In truth, I'm Salish, from the Flathead. But these are the Bloods. In Canada the Blackfoot are called Bloods.”

  “Could be I'm a fool, then.”

  “No stealing tonight. That would be like picking cherries. There'll be plenty of horses this evening. Young men bring their women, and the women bring their children. They come here to sing with the old men who care for the medicine bundles.”

  Later, they sat sipping their beer on the edge of the veranda of the main house, dangling their legs, while the dogs lay in the dirt at their feet.

  Leonard Three Boy stretched his arms over his head. “Where you could go is to Eliza's tepee, the one with the magpie feathers. A girl with feathers, wishing she was Indian. She thinks being Indian would make her life significant. I'm wishing I was rich. Don't want to be white, but rich would be elegant.” Leonard spoke long words slowly, parsing out their syllables in parts. “I earned my feathers. I was born in a tepee.”

  When Rossie called Eliza's name, she ducked out from under a dirty orange blanket over her doorway. Her black hair was tied up in a braid, and she looked scrubbed in a long-sleeved bluish dress that hung to her ankles. She seemed to be happy that he was there even if she would not meet his eyes. “You came,” she said.

  Rossie saw that her feet, when she sat across from him on the layered blankets, were bare and callused.

  “Tell me,” she said. “This is what girls want to know. Why did you come?”

  Rossie shrugged as if it wasn't anything he'd had to ponder over. “A party is a party. And you're a handsome outfit.”

  “Even pregnant with another man's child?”

  “How'd you get so pregnant?”

  “There's only so much pregnant. One way or the other is how it works.” She turned her smile away from him. “Charlie Cooper, he's the one. We came to live with his people but Charlie went batshit— that's what his mother says, batshit, meaning crazed but not crazy. He went down to Montana to hold up a bank, but he never got to the bank. Instead he met Chevrolet White Tribe, who wanted to be a warrior, and together they beat a farmer almost utterly to death outside a bar in Great Falls.”

  “Chevrolet White Tribe,” Rossie said. “That's some name!”

  “A pink-eyed idiot. He ruined my life.” She studied her long hands. “My father told me to stay away from Charlie, that he would be famous for his anger and nothing else. But my father was wrong. Charlie will be famous for my child. They gave him seven years. But he'll do something else. Prison forever is Charlie's fate.” This sounded like words she had polished.

  “You should cut off a finger,” Rossie said. “Isn't that what they do? Or shave your head.”

  “You should talk like a grown-up,” she scoffed. “Charlie was meant to be a warrior but the Blood Reserve doesn't have any use for that kind any more. He's also half-French, so his heart can break. Seeing the old men die drove him broken. His mother, on the other hand, is like me.”

  Charlie Cooper's mother had grown up in a family from the south of France that raised vegetables for Paris. Every night they loaded boxes onto the train, and the next morning their vegetables were sold in a market in Paris, Les Halles. Then her French father heard about free land in Alberta.

  “She was like me,” Eliza said. “She ran off with a Blood warrior. Nowadays, Charlie lives in a sad room where the door is closed. I don't hear Charlie's voice any more. I'm looking for a sensible fellow.”

  “That would be me,” Rossie muttered. “I'm sensible to the point of chickenshit.”

  “I knew I was pregnant,” she said, ignoring him, “by early March. It would have happened about Valentine's Day. That's what my mother said. Since I wouldn't come home, my father sent Leonard to look after me, saying I needed looking after before I made an entire whore of myself.”

  “People make whores of themselves,” Rossie said. “It gets them where they got to go. That's what it seems.”

  “Sometimes they fall off the world for a while. Leonard tells me to find a new man. My father says I'm ruined for serious men.”

  “Leonard says you want to think you're an Indian,” Rossie said.

  “Not an Indian.” She turned her gaze. “Like an Indian. It must be plain that I love no one but warriors, and I don't want to believe you're chickenshit. Why not think we're an Indian? It beats dying of boredom, watching horseflies swarm in the Bitterroot. My father says that's nonsense. He asked me if I wanted to be a defeated, starving creature. He says not anybody gets anywhere stealing from the rich, that you need to be rich. But he's down there in the Bitterroot dying of his cancer, stewing in his juices. Because of me, he sends money each month in the mail to a woman here I call Auntie Red. She manages the spending. He believes in charity, but not too much. What I believe in is give everything away. But that's ridiculous. It's suicidal, my father says …”

  “You want a straight answer, as to what I'm doing here?” Rossie went on without waiting for her to reply. “I'm chasing your ass.”

  “A lost girl, that's what I am.” She looked up, clear-eyed. “I'm glad you came. A girl likes to know she's admired. But there are things to do. I'll come for you.”

  She left him to lie back on her blankets, wondering where he'd got himself as he kicked off his boots, curled up, and tucked his left arm under his head. The blankets stank faintly but warmly of her, and he slept even though he wasn't tired. In his dream a woman carried green branches thick with yellow flowers as she crossed a meadow. Lost in sleep, he knew this was his brain talking, making excuses and saying goodbye.

  When Eliza woke him it was evening. She tied a beaded belt around her waist. “Simple,” she said. “That's the thing if you're showing.” And she was, the curve of her belly faintly distended.

  Children populated the old schoolhouse yard, some batting a ball made of twine wrapped tightly around rags, while others played kick-the-can. Down by the horse barn, wood smoke rose from an antique buffalo-hide tepee, huge and mended with stitched patches. The blue trim around its base bore yellow circles that represented moons in the night; paintings of long-bodied otters undulated above them, each following the next, forever. The crown was a night sky, painted black with yellow stars.

  Eliza, with Leonard following, led Rossie inside the tepee to confront old men in grease-slicked, beaded buckskins, eagle feathers dangling from their braided hair. A bundle wrapped in buffalo and elk skin lay before them, and a fire burned on a platform of sand inside a circle of river stones, smoke drifting upward.

  “Those are the chiefs,” Eliza whispered. “No one expects you to do anything but nod. They don't want anything to do with you but they want you to acknowledge that you see them.” One of the chiefs was named Gone to the Wolves, and Eliza said she called the other one Bright Red. “That's not his name. It's what I call him. Bright Red representing pride.” Eliza gestured to a heavy, broad-faced woman. “His daughter, Auntie Red—also
my honorific name—is the one who manages the money. Nobody will tell me their real names. Leonard says I'm a joke and jokes don't get to know your name.”

  The crowded interior of the tepee quieted as Rossie and Eliza approached the old men, who fell into whispering and signs and looked beyond Rossie and Eliza as if they were invisible. One of the old chiefs finally grinned and spoke in a quick, soft way.

  “They're saying you're a ghost,” Leonard Three Boy said. “A phantom. But they didn't say phantom.”

  “They say they should kill you but won't because the women like you. It's a joke,” Leonard Three Boy explained. “They know they can't kill you so they say you're a spook and a joke, but they don't laugh.”

  Eliza seated Rossie by the back wall and sat herself directly before the chiefs on a ragged buffalo-skin robe, with Leonard beside her. The ancient man Eliza called Bright Red lifted a coal from the fire with a forked willow stick and set it on a twist of sweet grass. He and Gone to the Wolves scrubbed their hands together as if washing them in smoke, and chanted. As the group joined in like a chorus, a carved, reddish stone pipe was lighted and passed from the chiefs to the men and the oldest women and eventually even to Rossie. The women lifted their left hands, and the old chief chanted again, then spoke in harsh but articulate English.

  “For you, Eliza, I say this. The earth will give you food. Prayers rise for you along with this smoke.”

  The others repeated this as Eliza stood, stepped across to Rossie, and held out her hand. “Now they open the bundle. We'll wait outside.”

  The soft beating of drums and rattles, the blowing of whistles, and the singing went on while Rossie and Eliza sat on the veranda and the sun went down.

  “What they do when I'm there never makes much sense to me,” Eliza said. “Leonard tells me their true rituals and intentions are none of my business. I call it praying. But they won't do it with me there, and I don't know what they think beyond sadness.”

  Auntie Red came to stand before Rossie with hands clasped before her. “We are poor,” she said in immaculate British tones. “Do you have money? I am not above seeking money. Eliza will tell you that I am responsible.” She lifted her chin and looked away. “Five dollars?”