“Heard you was coming, from Nevada. The Mister told me. The only place I ever worked in that country was the Circle Square out of Battle Mountain, up toward the South Fork of the Owyhee.”
“Where I come from is the Neversweat.”
“Well, then, you'll do. Throw your gear in the saddle shed there. I'll see you for dinner.” He turned back again before walking away. “Slivers Flynn, he laughed like I was crazy when I told him all I knew was tying hard and fast.”
Rossie nodded and grinned. “Too much Texas.”
Eliza listened like they were speaking in tongues.
“Hard and fast is Texas style and crazy,” Rossie told her, after this Larry had gone back to his room. “Rope a fence post and you're tied down on your saddle horn. Horse keeps going and the post stays still. You are in a wreck. Then again, I never worked anywhere but the Neversweat. I don't know any other way but California dallying.”
“Now you work here.”
She started to leave, then turned back. “There are dreams,” she said, “where I think I'm my father and can know what he dreams. He wants to see me content and old when he's been dead for years. Other times he's a dragon. I've got to go talk to my dragons.”
“Old and happy,” Rossie said. “Think about that. I'll be sweeping up my room.”
“Guess you will. You've got a new place to live. Have a nice dinner with the boys.” After sweeping the worn flooring Rossie drifted to the barn, where harnesses hung off wooden pegs in the log walls, but nobody was there beyond the spooks left by men and horses from other times. He returned to his bed and napped until the dinner bell was clanging his aching head. Albert, the tiny cook, who claimed he was Mexican, was beating it with a steel chisel and smiling a toothless smile. “Thought I'd ring, else you thought you was going to sleep through.”
Albert and Rossie and the Irish gardener named Nelson sat down to eat. The cowhand named Larry was at the head of the table, which was long enough for twenty. They had roast beef under wild mushrooms, green beans, lumpy mashed potatoes, and dark gravy spiced with very hot peppers.
“I'm eating like a pig, and it's making me sweat like a dog,” Rossie said.
No one answered.
So he gathered his plate and utensils, making ready to carry them to the kitchen.
“You ought to hold on,” Larry said. “‘Less you don't like pie with rhubarb and strawberries mixed.”
As Rossie sat down to breakfast the next morning, Larry shooed him away. “They want you up to the big house,” he said.
So Rossie made his way uphill to the kitchen door. Betty answered when he knocked.
“Breakfast,” she said, “with the Mister.”
Bernard Stevenson was alone at a table in the kitchen, ignoring hash browns but halfway into an omelet smothered in catsup. “Sit here,” he said, gesturing in his quick way.
“What would you like?” Betty asked Rossie.
“What you're cooking. Same as him. Maybe some sausage.”
“Sausage, indeed,” Bernard said. “You should know I am dying. Having you here is one of Eliza's prerogatives, as the daughter of a man who took care of what money he had.” He smiled faintly. “Sausage. I envy you. Betty will feed me sausage only on Sunday. She says it's to preserve my health although why anyone would bother no one knows.” He dribbled more catsup on his omelet. “Despite what you may hear,” he said, “I am not wealthy. In nineteen twenty-six I had the luck to take my money out of the markets and bring it to Montana. I wanted another life, so I bought in cheap on these properties. I got a last dance.”
Rossie sat on that. “Makes me wonder what you and me think we're doing,” he said. “If it was me, I wouldn't spend much time on a fellow in off the road. Them properties of yours don't make nothing to me.”
“A remarkably Western notion. But I wonder.” Bernard sat a moment poised with a forkload of omelet. “Don't mistake me. I'm not in the habit of charity.”
“You think I'm a bloodsucker? Come to leech on you?”
Bernard wiped his mouth with his white linen napkin and tucked it into a silver ring. “You think I never seen people like you?” Rossie asked. “We got linens where I come from.”
“You might be crazy for an idle life,” Bernard said. “Betty will get you fed. She'll call me when you're finished.”
“I may not be here,” Betty said, standing over Bernard with a spatula in her hand. “I work in civil households. This boy has done nothing to warrant this display.” She turned to Rossie. “Are you mending? This is simply hideous behavior.”
“Feeling better than yesterday.”
“Betty,” Bernard said, “my apologies if I've offended you.”
“It's this boy you owe an apology. For God's sake!”
Bernard stood. “Betty,” he said, “you're never weak.” He poured coffee from the pot on the stove, then sat back down facing Rossie. “Young man, none of us enjoys eating crow. But I'm in the act. Accept my apologies. Let's try to enjoy one another.”
Out on the front lawn, in a luminous morning, before getting into the Buick, Bernard stood a moment surveying his properties. “At this location,” he said, “with fingers of acreage reaching into three canyons, we have eleven hundred acres. Overgrazed for decades, they are now devoted to amenities—this house, a few horses. There is no income generated here.”
Down the valley, after crossing a long, rickety, two-track bridge over the Bitterroot River, they came onto a narrow gravel road between irrigated fields where black-and-white Holstein dairy cows grazed, udders swaying as they moved.
“What they are, the lovely beasts, are decorations that also pay the bills. My herds and the creamery down at Florence are required to support my family. Which they do, if tightly managed. On this property there are one hundred and twenty-three animals milking fresh at the moment. The barns are nearly full, with room for just two more. I have fee-simple title to five hundred and sixty acres in these pastures, which are grazed in strict rotation. Up the valley, in the riverbank meadows near Florence, we graze another two hundred and fifty, which are milked in barns adjacent to the creamery. Those meadows also sustain the cows that are dry at the moment. Six men milk the morning shift in each set of barns, twenty cows each day, four hours a day, mostly before sunup. By noon they are finished and go home. Another crew does the evening milking.”
Milking was long since over on this morning. Sloping concrete floors in the two milking barns—fifty stalls in one, seventy-five in the other—were being hosed off and swept down by men in white coveralls. Two boys were clanging five-gallon steel cans of milk one against another as they loaded a flatbed. The milk would be hauled to the creamery in Florence.
“Absolute cleanliness,” Bernard said. “There's my secret. Every day I'm down here watching.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. “What did they pay you,” he asked, “for driving those horses to Calgary?”
“One hundred dollars. All you could eat. Two head of horses at the end.”
Bernard grimaced. “How much when you were stacking hay?”
“Two dollars a day, board and room. Free grazing for my horses.”
“In the San Joaquin Valley, it's twenty-five cents an hour for picking cotton.” Bernard said. “Two dollars a day. They feed themselves. Here, we pay forty cents an hour, which averages to three dollars and fifty cents a day. They feed themselves. So we're paying reasonable wages in Montana.”
“Unless you're a married man, with babies and a woman.”
“The women can work.”
The creamery was a set of white brick buildings that housed stainless-steel vats in cold rooms with heavy, insulated doors. It stank sweetly of milk and what Rossie estimated were the sourish odors that went with churning butter and making cheese.
“Profits,” Bernard said, “lie primarily with cheeses. Milk pays the rent. Butter and cheeses pay for excess.”
“Don't see those creamery women.”
Bernard ignored him. “So
what do you think about going to work? Three dollars and fifty cents a day, milking in the barns. I'm offering you a job, decent work. That's what this morning is about.”
“Don't think so,” Rossie said. “There's not going to be any milking while I got traveling money in my pocket. There's nothing I want to know about milking cows.”
“Do you expect to be traveling? In that event this morning has been a waste of our time.”
The next morning at breakfast, Nelson said Rossie was to come up to the ridge behind the house. “You'd be helping with the vegetables, that's what they said.”
Albert and Larry suspended their eating, and watched Rossie's response.
“Might be,” Rossie said.
“Strawberries. We could begin hoeing the strawberries,” Nelson said. He narrowed his eyes at Rossie. “Nobody knows what you're doing around here except for that Eliza. She told her mother you were feeling your way. I heard them shouting. Women got no mercy with one another.”
“I don't do no hoeing,” Rossie said.
“Fine with me.”
Rossie once more considered catching his horses. Fuck these asshole idiots. He couldn't look around to Albert and Larry.
The garden, up the hill and out of sight beyond the big house, was a sunny, precisely kept irrigated acre of plantings in perfect rows with flowers in blossom around the uphill edge. Bright water flowed from the creek along clean, sod-banked ditches, diverted from one row to the other by tiny redwood head gates. Rossie had pulled off his boots and socks and gone to step barefoot into the warm, loamy soil when Betty came by, carrying a straw basket, along the sodded bank of the irrigation ditch.
“Barefoot boy,” she said. “Cheeks of tan.”
“Don't know what I'm doing,” Rossie said. “But I didn't come here with the idea of picking strawberries and most sure not carrots. I don't hoe in gardens, not before I'm starving.”
“We know what you had in mind,” she said. “Nelson can hoe. But you'll like those baby carrots at dinner, braised in butter.”
“Braised in butter,” Rossie said. “That's me. What's there to like about hoeing?”
“Vegetables. Kale and beets and scallions, lettuce and peas and carrots and green beans just coming. All of which I've seen you eat.” She hesitated. “Hoeing and whoring. Is that your problem?”
“You are a tough woman,” Rossie said. There was nothing to do but duck his head like any spoiled jackass trying to get off the hook.
After pouting through the morning, Rossie caught his pinto and rode down to Hamilton to buy a pair of heavy, horsehide gloves. The next day he took a team and wagon loaded with barbed wire and a stretcher out to mend fences around the home fields. Chopping wild roses from the fence lines along the edges of the timber—a mix of white-barked aspen, larch, and pine—he could see dust rising from roads in the valley and hear the hawks calling as they soared. Here he could work himself into a sweat or not as he pleased.
“You've invented your own work,” Bernard said, a few nights later. “That's admirable. What wages do you expect?”
“Dinner,” Rossie said.
“That's foolish,” Bernard smiled in his brittle way. “But isn't Eliza part of the reward? Since you're part of the family now?”
He asked Rossie to take on the nightly task of cranking the Delco generator that charged glass batteries ranged along the walls of an insulated building the Stevensons called the “engine room.” These kept the electric lights burning in the house. Rossie came to relish this day's-end ritual of washing up at twilight to put on a fresh shirt, cranking the Delco, then sharing the evening meal Betty served to Eliza and her parents.
“Here's to us and linen napkins,” he said one night, before his first sip of the red wine.
“What do your people think of your continued presence in Montana?” Lemma asked. “When do they expect you home?”
“No way of knowing.”
“You must telephone. Let them know you're with us and safe.”
“Safe?” Eliza said to her mother.
Bernard smiled. “You should be a field marshal,” he said to his daughter, “never neglecting an advantage.”
“My people figure I'm all right,” Rossie said. “They're not worrying. We don't spend much time hanging onto one another.”
“Nevertheless, you should call your mother,” Lemma said. “I speak from experience, as the mother of a wandering girl.”
Bernard snorted.
“You can use my telephone,” Eliza said.
“In your room?” Lemma was incredulous. “Do you think that's such a good idea?”
“Mother, leave it alone, it's hopeless. I'm already pregnant.”
Lemma shook her head, mimicking sadness. “Eliza is afraid thus arrogant and always reassuring herself. She's afraid of besmirching herself.”
“Besmirching? Mother, I'm big-bellied and besmirched. Goodbye. We're going now.”
“Good Lord, wait for the meal,” Lemma said.
Betty brought the bacon and spinach salad and they ate with no more talk.
Then Eliza led Rossie to her rooms, her separate apartment at the back of the house.
“You,” she said to Rossie, rolling her gray eyes, “don't get them worked up.”
Her rooms were right out of a hotel lobby—a leather couch under windows looking to the mountains, heavy leather chairs, hardwood floors, metal tables, lamps with silvery metallic shades, and Navajo rugs on the walls. These furnishings had been handpicked in Chicago. Nothing girlish for this girl, as Eliza herself said.
She rang up the operator in Missoula, who rang the operator in Reno, who plugged the four longs and four shorts into the line. Kat-rina, when she answered, sounded as distant as she was from him.
“I'm with these people in Montana,” Rossie shouted.
“Is that you? Good God! When are you coming home?”
“Not right away. End of the summer.”
“Why not right away?”
“There's a woman, I'm visiting her, she's pregnant, and I'm staying around, helping out.”
“Jesus Christ! Pregnant?”
“Hell,” he said, “it wasn't me.”
“Well, be careful. Who is this woman?”
“She's living with her folks. They're well-off.”
“What's she want with you?”
“She likes me. There's people that do.”
“Well,” Katrina said, “you should know that Oscar is done chasing Mattie Flynn.” Then she caught her breath. “Your father is back in this house. You never know how things will turn out.”
“See, everybody is doing fine.”
“Is there a number? One I can call?”
“Victor, Montana. People called Stevenson. One long, one short.”
“Do you have money? Enough to get you home? You call me if you don't. You call me anyway.”
“Sure enough. These people have worlds of money.” Then, abruptly, he hung up.
Eliza stared at him. “You hung up without saying goodbye to your mother. I wonder who you are. I do. I just realized. Tell me, what do you think you're doing?”
“Chasing you. That's what I can figure.”
“Why don't you talk to your mother? You should tell your mother anything. You should tell me anything. There aren't supposed to be secrets. Otherwise we're alone. That's what my father says.”
“Looks to me like you people say anything and you got nothing but secrets.”
Eliza smiled. “That's our sadness that I'm trying to cure.”
“Right now,” Rossie said, “I'll tell you one secret. We're sitting around here next to your bedroom, and I want to get after you. That's true.”
“After me?” she said.
“Well, you know what I'm talking about. But you might hammer me one.”
She stood and lifted her dress. There, barelegged in lavender underpants, her white belly extended, she smiled and her gray eyes softened while Rossie touched her navel with his fingertips.
&nbs
p; “Feel it?” she asked. “Charlie Cooper's baby. This is his baby. Feel it trembling?”
Rossie did feel the trembling. He wondered if he should be staying away but she didn't move when his fingers circled to her hips. Stroking her slowly, he listened to the quickness of her breathing.
“Dammit,” she whispered, and she hooked her fingers inside her underpants to slide them down.
Rossie slid his touch to the insides of her thighs, and she rested her hands on his shoulders, then stepped out to open herself. He slipped his fingers inside, where she was entirely wet. Smiling directly into his eyes, Eliza eased herself onto his hand. As he stroked, she staggered, her knees collapsing before she stepped back, pulling away.
“Shit,” she said, grinning, and gasping slightly, “this time I was going to stay true to motherhood.”
Rossie got up and followed as she went off through the door into her bedroom, a gauzy place where she was already on the bed, her dress on the floor. He undid the buttons on his fly and let her take hold as he moved over her with his pants around his knees. Her legs came up around him, and she guided him in, and they were gone into fucking.
“Your mother was right,” he said, after they fell apart. “We is not to be trusted.”
They got out of the rest of their clothing, and Rossie slipped back into her, slowly thrusting, so that they were looking into themselves at the end.
“So,” Eliza said. “The first times were rebellion. Now it's an affirmation.”
“Better than that.”
She showed him to the door that opened outside behind the house onto the lawn that ran away to a grove of yellow pine. “The secret passage,” she said. “You should slip away.”
Rossie grinned. “I'm thinking pussy is the secret passage.”
Bernard would talk about the creamery and deplore the dry weather, worrying about drought and fires in the upland timber, but his talk was often nothing Rossie understood, particularly when it careened into the vagaries of literature and philosophy. Over roast beef he complained to Lemma about trying to read Immanuel Kant, taking weeks to “recover his balance.”
“What's dangerous about Kant?” she asked.
The Willow Field Page 16