The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  But the main house, the Stevenson house, was a hundred yards up the road on higher ground, its chimneys built of river stones and its walls of twenty-foot, straight-grained redwood planks interrupted by floor-to-roof panels of window. Rossie tied his horse to the split-rail fence and headed up across the rise of lawn, then stopped abruptly in front of a totem pole carved from cedar.

  A massive, unpainted frog perched on the top while six more frogs, not so small themselves, angled headfirst down the line of the pole to the ground, where a bed of white and yellow tulips surrounded them.

  Beyond, at a table surfaced with blue-and-yellow ceramic tile, sat a dark-eyed woman of middle years sipping wine from a long-stemmed glass. A pale, unshaven fellow in rubber boots stood beside her.

  After a hint of surprise, the woman stood. “Lemma Stevenson,” she said to Rossie. “My husband is not here. You should know he will not be home until evening.”

  “I wasn't looking for him,” Rossie said.

  This woman was barefoot, her long feet suntanned and streaked with mud. She smiled uncertainly. “This gentleman is Nelson,” she said. “Nelson is Irish, from County Cork. But inexplicably he's named for the British admiral. Which is a dreadful shame. These grounds are his responsibility. We're toasting our success with marigolds. Would you like to join us in a glass of pinot gris?”

  “Pleased,” Rossie said. “They are men in the Oregon desert valleys from County Cork. They come and settle with their families. I would sure like a glass.”

  Nelson's upper lips collapsed inward as he smiled. He had no front teeth. “Cork,” he said, rolling the word. “We'll pull another cork.”

  “Cork, indeed,” the woman said. “We pull the cork, don't we Nelson?”

  “Bet you do,” Rossie said. “My name is Benasco. Rossie Benasco.”

  “That would be Basque,” she said. “Nelson, would you bring out another glass for this Basque gentleman?”

  “Big frogs on that pole,” Rossie said.

  “Aren't they?” she said. “It's a Haida pole, the rather famous All Frogs Pole, stolen from the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1911 by thieving Germans. They took it down with a crosscut saw, roped it onto the deck of a yacht, and carried it to Bavaria. An art dealer brought it to Chicago in nineteen twenty-seven. Before the economy failed. My husband bought it at auction and shipped it out here on the railroad.” She studied the pale sky. “Native peoples on the edge of a stormy sea, carving their vision into wood. There's no accounting.”

  “Sort of a Indian daydream,” Rossie said. He sat his glass on the table. “I come looking for Eliza.”

  “Eliza is in San Francisco. So, when you finish with your wine, you might be going. Eliza won't be back for some while.”

  “Well,” Rossie said, “I have to thank you.”

  On his ride back down into the valley, Rossie puzzled on whether he was altogether a fool.

  The next morning, over breakfast at the café in Victor, Rossie thought about riding on out of Montana.

  “Heard you went up to the Chicago house,” the waitress said, leaning on the counter, lighting another Camel cigarette. “Bernard Stevenson wasn't the first fellow out of that town to settle here, you know. An entire flock of professors from the University of Chicago was tricked into buying farms in the Bitterroot, that was advertised to them as an orchard paradise. They put them Chicago houses up by the dozen, thinking they were going to pay for them with apples. But the apples failed. Too far to markets. Good lot of the houses were burned down for insurance.” She ashed her cigarette. “Then Stevenson came twenty years later. His house was built on those famous designs, only bigger.”

  “Well, I seen that one house. She's a strange world,” Rossie said.

  “I got a surprise for you. I know about some work. The real thing. You'd be working for my cousin, Samuel Burton.” She paused, and shook her head. “He's always been pure asshole, but he's got an outfit stacking hay for the dairies. You're lucky, it's work. You won't like him, they say it's a killer, stacking for Samuel, but it's work.”

  “When is this coming up?”

  “It's up right now. My sister's husband fell off the stack this morning. Twisted his back. Samuel is stacking while you're eating breakfast, waiting for somebody to send a man from Hamilton. He's sweating and he don't like sweating, so you get down to Three Mile Creek, where you'll see them out in the field by the willows, stacking with a beaver slide. Be there before the fellow from Hamilton, and Samuel will hire you—strong boy like you, count on it—so he can get off that stack himself.”

  “What if I don't like stacking hay?”

  “It's more than you got.”

  “What about the man from Hamilton?”

  “Guess he'll be sucking hind tit. If he ever shows up.”

  At eleven-thirty in the morning, Samuel Burton stopped the stacking operation for about ten minutes, climbed off the stack, and hired Rossie on the spot. “Two dollars a day, roof over your bed, and all you can eat, three meals. You can turn them horses in the pasture and wrango for us. Guess you got work gloves, don't you? You'll sure as hell need ‘em. You won't like the work but you'll like the food. Good cook this year. We work fast, load a minute, hundred ton in every stack, two a day if we don't have to move the slide more than a quarter mile.”

  Rossie hobbled his horses in a corner of the stack yard, buttoned the neck of his shirt, and tied some short twine around the cuffs of his pants to keep out the chaff. Pitchfork in hand, he climbed the slick planks of the slanting beaver slide and floundered off into loose hay where a dusty broken-toothed Swede named Lootie was leaning on his pitchfork and sucking hard candy. “You done this?” he asked.

  Rossie shook his head no. “Son of a bitch,” Lootie said. “Well, stand with me a few loads. I'll do your work this morning and mine. You'll learn.”

  Rossie had always avoided the stacking crew at the Neversweat, but he knew the dynamics. Four men drove buck rakes, each with a team of plodding geldings that pushed half-ton loads of cured hay before them across the meadow and onto a rope-work net spread before the beaver slide. The net setters were pale, blond brothers named Leverton. They cinched the net around the load and hooked it onto the cable that ran up the slide and along the length of the stack to the rear, where a steel trigger hook linked that far end to a two-wheeled pull-up cart drawn by a four-horse team. Soon as the net setters called out, the pull-up driver, a bowlegged man named McWhorter, urged his team forward, and another buck load of hay was drawn up the beaver slide and over onto the stack. Once the load had been drawn roughly into place, the stackers shouted and the pull-up driver kicked at his trigger, releasing the hook. The taut cable rebounded with a snap and fell loose, and the pull-back boy, on a patient saddle horse, dallied the long rope attached to the net, kicked his horse, and dragged the net and trailing cable back down the beaver slide and into position. Then the pink-eyed, net-setting Leverton brothers could hop to the awkward job of laying it out for the next load of hay. A load every sixty seconds, sixty loads every hour, all day long.

  What Rossie didn't understand was the actual art of stacking, building with hay, load by load. One load went left, the next to the right, and the grasses were layered into a woven, hundred-ton edifice that would be essentially watertight in the snowy winter, so as to prevent interior rot.

  By midafternoon, as they were topping out, Samuel Burton had disappeared. Rossie was struggling, sweating and exhausted, floundering hip-deep in the hay but anyway getting into the rhythm, when Lootie yipped, wiped his forehead, and shouted, “Fini.”

  Raising his pitchfork over his head, Lootie plunged down the face of the beaver slide like a skater on slick-soled boots. Rossie, meanwhile, sat on the boards and scooted like a child, thankful that no one laughed. In the shade under the slide, Lootie pried the top off a five-gallon steel can wrapped in damp burlap and handed Rossie a tin cup. The water tasted of metal. The net setters rolled the net and hooked the pull-up cart to the front of the beaver slide, and t
hen they were moving on, like phantoms in the brightness.

  “I got to bring my horses,” Rossie said.

  By quitting time the beaver slide had been towed a quarter mile to the next stack yard and set up again. Rossie chomped Lootie's hard candy, recovering.

  “Great life, huh?” Lootie said. “No quitting.”

  There was no quitting, not even with his shoulders aching and money in his pocket. Collapsing toward sleep, Rossie wondered why he was sticking around for a daydream about a girl who was pregnant and gone to San Francisco. Could be her mother had lied, and she was at this minute in an unimaginable rich-girl bed, and had wrote him off altogether. She might be the kind to write people off.

  The next sunup Rossie dragged himself from his bedroll, went out to a corral to catch and saddle Pinky, and rode the meadows to wrango the work teams. Mists folded over the sloughs. Driving those big horses at a canter toward the hay camp, their hooves echoing on dry meadows, Rossie recalled the waitress—he didn't know her name— and what she'd said about the old-time Indians running horses and the pride they took in this valley. So this was it.

  The crew ran their hundred tons of meadow hay over the beaver slide every day, as one week turned into two. Bunkhouse philosophizing drifted to growing up poor, dynamiting whitefish and giant trout in the river and rowing out to gather them, eating pickled fish canned in glass jars through the winter, cutting timber for fuel with nobody to guard it but the men who were doing the stealing, and going out with a spotlight to kill and butcher somebody's heifers in a far field while wives out along the road watched for headlights.

  “Girls I grew up with,” Virgil Leverton said, “Momma's cousins from Phillipsburg, they wouldn't be shy about shooting. Women are liable to shoot. They act like cats, they don't give a shit.”

  The pull-up driver, McWhorter, grunted. “One of them Alabama women is worth a dozen of you boys.”

  “They's mean.”

  “They are supposed to be mean. Otherwise they'd be letting their daughters marry some fucking net setter like you.” McWhorter turned to Rossie. “They say you went over to Stevenson's house, rode right up and talked to the old lady. Heard that from the Irish gardener. Nelson. He says you talked to the old lady, said you was looking for the girl.”

  “Momma put me on the run,” Rossie said.

  “You can hate them people and steal what they got, or you can join em. You give up on the Stevenson girl?”

  “Not altogether, or I'd be halfway home to Nevada by now.”

  “How come you don't go back up there?”

  “Waiting for a rainy day.”

  “Might be a while,” McWhorter said.

  But six days later it came, thunder and jittering bolts of lightning over the Bitterroots in late afternoon and soft rain all night long. There was no stacking the wet hay, so the next day, with the fields steaming, dry in the hot sun, Rossie caught his pinto.

  “You might come back disappointed, with a good reason to quit,” McWhorter said. “Riding to Nevada has got to beat stacking in the Bitterroot.”

  Rossie rapped on the main door, an oversized slab of redwood with a big S for Stevenson carved into it. Eliza's mother answered.

  “I'm here again,” Rossie said, “looking for Eliza.”

  “There's no accounting for desire.” The woman adjusted the straying bun behind her head, studying him a long moment. “What a thing for me to say. Desire. Isn't it romantic?”

  Lemma stepped back into a hall floored with stone. Stained-glass windows shone in the alcoves with hardwood benches built into the redwood walls. In the rooms beyond, expanses of oak and maple flooring were inlaid into zigzag patterns.

  “Bernard,” she called. Then she turned back to Rossie. “What was your name?”

  “Rossie Benasco.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Bernard, it's a Basque gentleman, Mr. Benasco.” She smiled at Rossie, a formal, welcoming smile. “Eliza has returned.”

  “Glad of that,” Rossie said.

  “I suppose you are. We were.”

  Bernard Stevenson shuffled toward them in house slippers. He was a small, quick man with reddish hair and a beard tightly trimmed and turning to gray. His blue-gray shirt looked to be made of silk. “Pleased,” he said, as he shook Rossie's hand.

  “This explains Eliza,” Lemma said.

  Bernard turned to his wife. “What does this explain?” He gave Rossie a tight little smile. “Nothing explains Eliza. Nothing in the known universe.”

  “A young man,” Lemma said, “as we know, can explain Eliza.”

  “What needs explaining?” Rossie asked.

  “Restlessness,” she said. “Discord.”

  “‘In my cosmos,’” Bernard proclaimed in an elevated voice, “ ‘there will be no feeva of discord.’ That's cosmos spelled with a capital K, as in capital K crazy and capital K cat. Eliza acts like a Krazy Kat. It's a perplexing thing.”

  “I don't even know what you're talking about,” Rossie said.

  Bernard stared at him before drifting into a slight smile. “You two are made for each other. Uninformed and humorless.”

  “Bernard, this young man is a friend of your daughter's and thus a friend of the family's,” Lemma said. “He can't be left standing at the doorway while you go on with your bewildering nonsense.”

  “We'll find Eliza,” Bernard said, “but let me show you Krazy Kat.” Up the wide curve of main stairway, Rossie was led into a room with a tattered buffalo robe on the floor and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over hayfields and fence lines overgrown with wild roses and beyond that over the far-off barns and cottonwoods beside the river.

  “My hideout,” Bernard said. “Here, I can watch the world rotate.” He gestured toward a wall lined with books. “Lemma wants to call this a library but it isn't. It's for denning up and keeping an eye on things.” He stroked a hand along the backs of an entire shelf of books. “These are Robert Louis Stevenson, my great-uncle. We haven't been a literary family except for Robert Louis. My people were engineers. They built Scottish lighthouses on rocks in the sea.” He patted the books. “First editions.”

  “This Robert Louis.” Rossie said. “He's dead?”

  “The great ones are dead. Greatness, then clerks, that's the way of families.”

  “You don't live like no clerk.”

  “It's hard to evaluate the self,” Bernard said. “I've not felt like a clerk. But we came to see Krazy Kat.” He gestured toward a large cartoon in a silver frame, a group of hand-colored humanized animals with speech in balloons over their heads—a cat, an ostrich-like bird, a crow, and a dog, thick-bodied and badge-wearing. All of them, except for a rat picking up a brick were gazing at reddish spires in a desert.

  “Tell you what,” Rossie said. “I'd say that's the craziest-looking thing I ever saw.”

  “Krazy Kat, “ Stevenson said, moving in close to the framed drawing. “It may be actually one of the sanest. You see what it is? Praising wildness.”

  Smoke rose above round-roofed houses in the cartoon desert.

  “Somebody live there?” Rossie said.

  “Natives,” Bernard said. “Navajo.”

  “Must be thin going.”

  As he spoke, Rossie felt it: Eliza was in the doorway, the tails of a washed-out calico shirt hanging out over baggy, tan trousers. Her sleeves were rolled up, her black hair in a tight bun. “Men in the study talking wisdom. I was at the barns.” She was speaking to Rossie. “Waiting got tiresome. But now you're here.”

  She lifted the tails of her calico shirt, and there was her belly, the top button on her pants tied across into the buttonhole with a little string.

  “Eliza,” her father said, “for Christ's sake.”

  “Come here,” she said to Rossie. “Kiss my cheek.”

  Rossie did. He slipped along on the slick soles of his boots as if walking on ice, leaned forward, and kissed the cheek she offered.

  “Nice,” she said. “Like a gentleman.”

&nb
sp; “Does he not be nice?” her father asked.

  “Nicer than nice, nicer than you.”

  “Of course,” Bernard said, grinning at his daughter. “He be as nice as pie.”

  “Out front!” It was the mother, Lemma, calling from partway up the stairs. “Betty is setting up for tea!”

  Bernard led them down another flight of stairs, along a hallway, and through a darkish room with a huge fireplace made of river stones. Double doors led to what was called the “out front,” a sunporch floored with huge black and white ceramic tiles. Plants in red Mexican pots bloomed in the corners, yellow and purple and white and red, and giant ferns reached near to the white-painted tinwork ceiling.

  A woman who could have been anything from thirty-five to fifty was setting porcelain plates and saucers and cups on a sparkling, glass-topped table—the blue willow pattern, Rossie knew the pattern from his mother's house—on lilac placemats.

  “This,” Lemma said, “is our invaluable Betty. Betty, this is Mr. Benasco. From Nevada.”

  Betty turned to smile at Rossie. “So I've heard.” Her grip, when she shook his hand, was carelessly strong as a man's.

  “My mother would do tea for her ladies, on dishes like these, the blue willow,” Rossie said once they were seated, after Betty had poured and gone off for what she called “the cakes.”

  “Her ladies?” Bernard said, raising his eyebrows. Lemma shot Bernard a scornful glance. “Actual prostitutes?” Bernard said.

  “Divorcées,” Rossie said.

  “It was Nevada,” Bernard said to his wife. “Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and it can be after all a form of commonality.”

  “Bernard,” Lemma said, “prostitution is each and every time, in all cases, however jolly it may seem to you, a form of hideous exploitation.”

  “It's not legal in Reno,” Rossie protested. “People just act like it's legal. They act like anything is legal.”

  “Bernard,” Lemma said. “There are prostitutes in Missoula. There are prostitutes in Hamilton.”

  Eliza's father looked away, playing an ironic moment of sadness before saying, “Women don't want to understand.”