The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Rossie fished out his thin wallet, and handed over four folded dollar bills. “That'll have to do,” he said. “Where'd you learn your English?”

  The woman smiled, then turned away. “She did school with the Mormons in Cardston,” Eliza said. “They stole her from her family. But it took. She writes a beautiful hand and keeps immaculate books. Your four dollars will be precisely recorded.”

  “There's a first for me, giving up money. Don't think I like it.”

  Eliza cocked her head sideways. “My father says it's an acquired taste.”

  When the twilight had settled and the ceremonies were finished, the people came to the cookhouse. Women with babies sat on benches at tables covered with worn, white oilcloth that showed faint, floral patterns. Lean men in cowhand boots or moccasins and ragged shirts stood with their arms folded. The cases of beer, thus far untouched, sat on a table. Old women struggled from their chairs, came to Eliza, and patted and stroked her stomach. “This boy,” one said, “can he keep it happy?” At this they cut their eyes toward Rossie, lifted their hands, and waved their fingers, laughing. Eliza did a two-step shuffle, girl on the run, and they laughed again.

  “If them women don't know ghosts,” Rossie said, “who does?” But he'd lost her.

  Eliza was looking past him. Two young Blackfeet men had come in from the veranda, each with a washbasin heaped with steaks. “Yearling elk,” she said.

  Women ladled cold soup into blue tin bowls, which older girls then distributed along the tables, while other women tended the fire in the cookstove. Another came from a back room with cast-iron frying pans.

  “So this,” Eliza said, “is my going-away-forever party.” She was trying to look ironic but not bringing it off. Rossie thought she looked about to cry.

  A woman with her hair bound into a graying knot brought pitchers of creamy milk from a burlap-covered cooler. She began filling tumblers for other women to place at the tables. Tin plates were set out in piles, and forks and a handful of knives were aligned with the bowls of cold soup. Children came in from their games, the little ones hanging on the skirts of their mothers, who lighted kerosene lanterns and hung them from nails above the table, casting shadows across the board walls.

  Eliza led Rossie to a table and sat him beside an old man who had his elbows on his knees and was staring at the toes of his ankle-high shoes, leather cracked at the seams but immaculately polished. “This is William But Not. You'll be all right with William. He's our genius.”

  Rossie wondered what he was doing hiding in a corner—if there was some chance he'd not be all right. How could this man with woolen underwear bagged around the tops of his shoes be a genius? Wings of black hair along with some strands of gray hung around the man's face. His hands, gripping the edge of the table, were so huge and lean that brownish-white bone shone through his skin.

  He tipped his head and studied Rossie. “Dusty son of a bitch,” William But Not said. “Lovelock. Dusty son of a bitch. Nevada, time for a beer.”

  He gestured imperiously to a young woman. “Beer,” he said, “for this Nevada, and for me.” The woman brought the beer, and after one long swallow from his bottle, William But Not settled back to staring at his shoes, holding the bottle between his knees in those huge hands. “Dusty son of a bitch in Nevada.” The whites of his eyes were yellowish, their pupils dark and intense. Abruptly, as if a decision had been made, he began a story. “My father went down there to Walker Lake, to Wovoka, after the massacre. Wovoka wouldn't come out of the house. His wife said the messiah was tired and we should go away.”

  “Massacre?” Rossie had only the vaguest notion what this man, who was studying him intently, was talking about. Wovoka had been a ranch hand on the Walker Lake Reserve, south of Carson City. He'd told the tribes they wouldn't be touched by gunfire if they wore “ghost shirts”—Rossie had learned that much in a Nevada history class in high school—and that the Indians, wearing their ghost shirts, had been slaughtered by bullets. But he had no idea which massacre this old man was talking about.

  “With the Gatling gun,” William But Not said, his voice soft.

  Rossie nodded like it all made sense.

  William But Not sighed as if giving up on Rossie, and went back to studying his shoes.

  Leonard Three Boy was standing with three cowhands, their thumbs hooked into belts with silver buckles. As Eliza went to join them, one of the men uncapped a pint of booze. When Leonard shook his head and put his right hand on the open bottle the man smiled a hard smile but tucked the pint into his hip pocket. Leonard Three Boy took off his eyeglasses and studied them for smudges, looked to Eliza, and followed the men out the door.

  William But Not looked up at Rossie. “Eat,” he said. “I got nothing to say.”

  Eliza came from across the room. “Eat,” she said, too. The cold soup was faintly bluish and sweet. “Service berries. Gathered yesterday.”

  Lard sizzled in the frying pans when the sliced potatoes were dumped in to be crisped and salted, and an aroma of frying meat rose, warm and heavy.

  The old woman named Barbara, who claimed to be British, jerked at Rossie's sleeve. “Nevada,” she said, “it's okay.” Her wattle chins shook as she laughed, her joke playing out perfectly. “It's okay!”

  Rossie wondered if this was craziness.

  A cadaverous man with hair hanging in threads from under a high-crowned, black cowman's hat cut his steak, thrust chunks into his gap-toothed mouth, and chewed with great deliberation. Rossie met the man's eyes, then quickly cut his glance away to the side of the room where the broken, taped-up windows reflected the lights but were otherwise gone entirely dark.

  As he made his way to the stack of plates, and to join the line for a steak and spuds, Eliza came up abruptly beside him, her breast firm against his arm. “Give me that plate,” she said, and she stepped in front of him.

  Rossie put his hands on her hips, and she didn't move away but leaned back against him as if there was nothing on her mind but fried potatoes and steak.

  “What do you think?” she said, once they'd reached the far end of the long table where Gone to the Wolves and Bright Red had settled over their own steaks.

  “I think you've got me so hard up I could cry,” Rossie said.

  Gone to the Wolves looked up at Rossie, eyes glinting. “Me too,” he said, then turned back to whisper to Bright Red.

  “If I were a Blood woman,” Eliza said, “they wouldn't laugh. They wouldn't want to see you with me. But what we do doesn't matter. They expect anything from us. So let's eat.” She speared a choice steak. “For you, backstrap.” This wild meat was richer than beef, not fatty but tender. After the steaks, she put a hand on Rossie's shoulder and whispered, “Outside.”

  The young men had their pint of whiskey uncapped in lantern light flickering from the windows. A heavy-bellied fellow with a wispy beard passed the pint to Rossie. “You don't need nothing more than a shot of this.”

  Rossie sipped the hot whiskey.

  “Don't mistake it,” Leonard Three Boy said. “This isn't the old life. That other life wasn't anything we can imagine.”

  After they'd gone to her tent, Eliza told Rossie to unroll his bed outside her door. “You sleep out here. I sleep in there. People should see that. Besides, I don't hump up for men who don't love me.”

  Inside his blankets, Rossie heard people drift down from the schoolhouse to their tepees. When the lights were shut down, he slept, and then he was awake under starlight. She was crouching above him, looking up into the moonlight and then down at him.

  “Did you hear it?” she whispered. “The howling?” She touched his bare shoulder and kept her hand there. “I think it was in my dream. I'm coming in with you.”

  There had never been any woman, any fucking, but Mattie. Rossie wondered what to do until she was inside under his blanket.

  “Hold me,” she said, and Rossie moved to do what she said, and put his arm over her.

  Then she had his hard cock in
her fingers and was stroking so softly. Her cool thighs, flesh so full and swelling, were clamped tight together as he kissed her, tongue in her mouth until her legs eased apart. He lowered his lips to her nipples, and rubbed the dampness of her pussy until her knees lifted and he eased over her. He took her hand and put it on his cock again so she could help him into her, where she was wet and slick, and she did it.

  Weight on his elbows, Rossie slipped in, and she raised her thighs over his shoulders to enclose him. He moved without a sense of anything but good fortune and then he was driving at her with no thought of anything at all but coming off into her. They fell away, gasping, and he was after her again. She lifted herself, gasped, and locked her legs around him.

  Come daylight, Rossie woke and saw her eyes were closed. But he couldn't leave her alone and touched her breasts and kissed her and he was surprised as she opened herself under him again. He kissed her eyelids, and she was muttering without saying anything he could make sense of, and then her eyes opened and they were looking into each other as he slid into her another time. He rocked slowly in her until she closed her eyes and bit at her tongue and clasped at him, drawing him in deeper as he came, and thrusting up against him, raking at his back with her fingernails. Her interior was tense and then soft. As she stroked his back with her fingertips, Rossie let his head fall into the hollow of her shoulder and neck, her hair all around him.

  “Everybody knows,” she whispered. “See how easy it is. I was frightened and alone, and I couldn't stay away. You see how easy I can be. You could come with me. We could be it, entirely it.”

  “Entirely it,” he whispered. “That's me.”

  “Don't be too proud of yourself. This was a way of telling everybody goodbye.” Her expression was almost amused. “Aren't I,” she said, “a pissant? Adiós to Charlie.”

  Even though she was playing it like a joke, and it was clear she wasn't altogether easy, Rossie knew that “come with me” talk was an actual offer.

  “I'll pay your way on the railroad,” she said. “You could work for my father.”

  “You're scared shitless, that's the truth.” He thought of this as a sympathetic thing to say.

  “What would shitless be?” she asked, trying a severe look. “You befoul everything you say.”

  “Befoul? Anyway, your father doesn't want a horseback bum in his house. Bet on it. I got these horses to take care of. Your father would think I was some boy who chased his daughter for a living.”

  She was abruptly angry. “You might as well fuck me for a living. Why not, for a while? Then you could learn another trick.” She folded the blankets back, and got to her feet, angry and naked, luminous and pale in the morning. “What I want is for us to just shut up. You could stay with me. My showing baby doesn't mean you couldn't.” Her eyes softened. “If you vanished,” she said, “I would be abashed.” She smiled, girlish. “Abashed,” she said again.

  Rossie thought it was a fine act, and he was happy with her, that she liked him this much.

  “I don't know,” he told her. “Your daddy might say I was after a sugar tit. It would be hard to blame him. Slivers Flynn run me off. He was the boss in Nevada. He said I'd been overfucking his daughter. Another mousetrap is what you get with me.”

  Eliza wasn't having any. “The overfucker,” she said, and her gaze was ferocious. “Remember, a pregnant woman can't be much over-fucked.”

  He tried another tune. “I could work for your father. What's he pay?”

  “Privilege. You get to bang away on his ruined daughter.” She started to duck under the blanket that hung over the door to her tent, then turned back. “I didn't come into your bed just to get at you and get you to come after me. I enjoyed it. What I like most is the fucking, if you can't tell. I'm a victim of my love for fucking and I'll say things like that, the truth. What you better do is think this over. You better get out of here.”

  “Right now?” Rossie asked.

  “The fucking is over for now.” With that she was gone into her tepee. With the saddle on Pinky, his pack roped down on Rock, Rossie rode off toward Calgary, wondering in what ways this was different from Mattie, because it sure as hell was.

  PART TWO

  WITH THE HORSES PUT UP IN A LIVERY STABLE ON THE OUT skirts of Calgary and his gear stowed in a padlocked room, Rossie took a yellow Chevrolet taxicab to the bank where Clifford Dufferena did business. He claimed his one hundred in five-dollar U.S. bills, counting the little wad twice and tucking it into a wallet he'd bought for ten cents. At the post office he found one letter in general delivery— though his mother had promised more—composed of nine sentences typed on her fine stationery. He read it there in the post office, wadded it into a ball, threw it into the trash, fished it out, spread it flat to read again, refolded it, and tucked it into his new wallet with the hundred dollars.

  Mattie, his mother wrote, had taken up with Oscar Dodson, which she hoped was only a temporary thing. And she, Katrina, was going to divorce his father. She was “broken-hearted but firm about it. We always made it up in bed but I've had enough of his chasing and you haven't been home for a long time. Another sad woman in my house for sad women. No need to worry about Nito. I've changed the locks but he'll survive.”

  So would he, Rossie thought. But he was shaking in his innards, his heart was jittering, and he felt like his scaffoldings were coming apart and might leave him to fall down onto the floor in the Calgary Post Office. A plain, Hutterite woman was staring at him, and Rossie wondered if he had said things, and so went on with motions that he hoped looked sensible. Breathing deep, he rode another taxicab back to the livery stable, wanting to be horseback and not stuck in thoughts about Nito and his mother, “making it up in bed.” Humped up, as Eliza had said. He wanted to see his mother watering plants in her quiet house, and Nito's hands riffling the cards.

  “What would you think,” he asked a big-whiskered man at the livery stable, “if your mother kicked your father out?” He tried to make this sound like it was leading toward a joke.

  “I'd think your daddy was goddamned lucky,” the man said, and he spat his snoose. “You drunk?”

  “They got a telephone office around here?” Rossie asked.

  The man turned abruptly solicitous. “You going to call your momma?” he said.

  “Yeah, I'm going to give it a shot.”

  “Might be a good idea. You're looking like you might cry. Don't want no crying.”

  So Rossie took the walk to the west-side Calgary offices of the Alberta Telephone Exchange, leaned his elbows on the counter, and eyed the short-haired blond woman seated at her elaborate switchboard.

  “I got to call Reno,” he said.

  “That's international,” she said. “Cost you a fortune. Five, six dollars.”

  “You plug it through. I got the money.”

  “You rich?”

  “Rich enough for this one.”

  “You know the number?”

  “In Reno, when I call in town, it's four longs and four shorts.”

  The young woman shook her head, trying to look exasperated. “What's the people's names?”

  “Benasco, same as me.”

  “You calling home?”

  “Sure am.”

  “That's sweet. You sit in one of those chairs and look at the newspaper while I do my magic. We'll call Reno. I never did it before. I called Seattle, but never Reno.”

  It must have taken her a quarter of an hour, plugging and replugging, and talking to other operators, but then she got through.

  “Got your party.”

  And she was right. Simple as that, Katrina was calling his name, sounding far away, but it was her with no doubt. “Rossie,” she was calling.

  “How you doing?” he shouted.

  “Did you get my letter? Then you know how I'm doing.”

  “Where's Nito?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? Where are you?”

  “Alberta. Calgary, Alberta.”

  “Are you all
right? Are you coming home? Why else are you calling?”

  “Just wanted to hear you talking.”

  “You come home,” she said. “You just make it home. Don't cook up any stories for yourself. The only story you need is right here.”

  “I'm fine. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I know you,” she said, “and I hear your voice. Like me, you get scared and tell yourself some story about who you are, about how you'll go to sea in a sailboat. Don't do that. Keep telling yourself that you're having a fine time and going home. You do that and one day you'll be home.”

  “What it is, I met a girl.”

  “There'll be one more and one more.”

  “I'll hang tough. I'll see you Labor Day.”

  “You be here. I love you,” she said, and she hung up. Without warning, her voice was gone.

  The young blond woman in the telephone office was smiling. “Does she love you?”

  “Like a blanket,” Rossie said.

  Sure enough, he felt better just from hearing his mother's voice. But his feeling better was troubled and perplexed by what Katrina had said, by what he kept hearing her say: “Like me, you get scared.”

  And he had been. Too scared to think. Katrina had been telling him to remember that the world was no different than it always was, and that all he needed to do was find a sure route home. Walking back to the livery stable he thought over his options. He could have rode home on the Canadian Pacific but now the train was gone on its route west along the valley of the Bow River—the main doorway through the Rockies, as Dufferena had told him. And he was looking for a doorway, all right. So that would be his route: up the Bow, through the Rockies, south to Montana, then to Reno. Simple enough, it was a plan, he had figured it out. Saddle on Pinky, pack on old Rock, keep moving and he'd be home for Labor Day.

  By evening he'd made camp upstream on the Bow and suppered on creek water and cold biscuits and bacon. Late in the night, and again as the sky lightened toward morning, he was awakened by trains racketing along south of the river.