The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “The world is real.”

  Lemma lifted her hands and looked away, to indicate that she was giving up.

  Rossie kept quiet. There was no making sense of it. “They talk some other language,” he told Eliza.

  Two days later Bernard led Rossie upstairs to his “hideout” and poured them shots of a single-malt whiskey. Sitting under Krazy Kat and looking out to the Bitterroot under its summer twilight, he began explaining “our thoughts.” This talk will be, he said, “informing, a way of enhancing your liberties and our future.”

  Rossie didn't answer. “Do you think about liberties?” Bernard said.

  “Some,” Rossie said. “Traveling with horses was liberties.”

  Bernard was smiling ironically. “Scots revere freedom and individualism, and we specialize in pride and achievement. My people battled Atlantic storms to build their lighthouses, defeating the oppressions of nature. Thus we decorate our days.” He laid out a sheaf of photographs full of bearded men and lighthouses on outcroppings in dramatic seas.

  Rossie could see in those men and their stonework the basis for Bernard's pride, and he thought of his father and the proud men studying their drinks at the counter in Madariaga's.

  “Them Basques,” he said. But Bernard wouldn't be interrupted. “The Stevensons are to me like a dream,” he said. “Talk of Scottish exploits is a pleasure I don't often get. Their courage was almost unthinkable. But the lighthouses are real, invaluable, and the stories are true. My grandfather came to the Carolinas and managed crops. His son, my father, made his way to Harvard Law School—the redheaded prodigy, as they called him. He practiced in Chicago until he died in nineteen fifteen—an automobile accident—my junior year at Northwestern University. My mother also died. There are times, still, after all these years, when I speak to her, and I tell her stories. But she's dead.”

  Rossie looked away and thought of his own mother's voice. “In devastation,” Bernard said, “I was able to relocate myself by reading in the Scottish intellectual tradition. Having inherited funds my father put by in stocks, I rode the market, importing Scottish woolens on the side. Which led to merchandising trips. The glorious Canadian Pacific, Winnipeg, the Plains, Banff and the mountains, Vancouver Island and Victoria, a most British city. But I was often idle in hotel rooms, gazing on the empty streets from high windows at three in the morning, and beginning to imagine that my personality was dissolving. You've been a traveler, in strange places, grasping at straws?”

  “Calgary,” Rossie said, and Bernard smiled.

  “Women, they're the cure,” he said. “I decided to marry Lemma, if she'd do it, and she took me in, had me, and saved me.” He hesitated. “So tell me, is Eliza the straw you're grasping at?”

  “Wouldn't call it that,” Rossie said.

  “Anything that floats. That's the essence. After Eliza was born, I determined to escape cities and persuaded Lemma to join me on this frontier, though she still believes that a paradise can be found in cities. By good fortune I'd pulled my father's funds out of the markets long before the crash and bought these Montana properties.”

  “Living with this money is kind of like cities, ain't it?”

  Bernard ignored him. “My persuasions indeed restricted both Lemma's and Eliza's liberties. I feel guilty but it is mitigated by the fact that I acted to ensure their futures. My health, soon enough, will fail seriously, and they will appreciate what I've done. My holdings will pass to Lemma, who will manage them with the advice of her brother, a banker in Chicago. Upon Lemma's death whatever is left passes to Eliza. And then to this coming child, God spare him. I stipulated such progressions with my written will.”

  Twilight was fading to darkness. Bernard labored to his feet and poured two more shots of the single malt.

  “I've come to prefer the highland Scotches,” he said. “I hope they pass with you. Eliza has made it clear that your feelings are important to her. As a consequence your inclinations and feelings are important to Lemma and myself. I suppose it means you've gotten to her heart. But you should understand that there will be no room in my will for anyone like you, not ever. Not financially. These properties are a locked room, open only to the ownership of Stevensons.” He smiled faintly. “Eliza is a mystery, her own creature. She so often gets what she wants because she is so ruthlessly and utterly resolved to have her way with matters she considers important. She underlined this by going off with the man responsible for her pregnancy. There's steel inside that girl. It flexes and springs but does not break.”

  “Never thought about breaking anybody,” Rossie said. “I'm not a bad man, trying to steal your girl. I run away from a redheaded beauty in Nevada to get gone on my own. Which is where I plan on staying. On my own.”

  “What about Eliza?”

  “Eliza is all I see right now, but there is no way I'm milking cows. That's what I know.” Rossie sat flexing his fingers. “My father does card tricks. He's a gambler. Follow your luck, is what he says. I was following horses, I met Eliza, and that's what I'm doing here, following my luck.”

  “What about your parents? If you never went back to Nevada?”

  “They're fine. Me and my people are not after what you got.”

  “Wouldn't they miss you?”

  “I might miss them. But hell, even here, I could go back and forth.”

  “You've been thinking about it?”

  “What's that?”

  “Staying.”

  “It crosses my mind.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “There's trains. She could come and go on trains if she needed to visit.”

  “So there we are,” Bernard said. “I'm progressing toward nothing but death. The question is how to live correctly at this minute, this day. How to bless and honor the days? If your drink is finished, time to crank the Delco.”

  Downstairs, Eliza's eyes were glowing with good humor. “You're in for it,” she whispered after dinner. “The son he never had. It's sweet. Did he talk of a thing besides himself and his family and Scottish history? It's his insecurity topped off with egomania. We forgive him, but you don't need to. Did he tell you about the lighthouse builders? There's no known connection between the Lighthouse Stevensons, as he puts it, and his field-boss grandfather in South Carolina. A lot of the time he's just talking to himself, reassuring himself. We all do it, but you should call him on it. You should talk about your family.”

  “Don't think I'll call him out on anything,” Rossie said. “Not right away. Around here, for the time being, I'm walking with a light step.” Easing his way into this strange dream of family and power was a thought that, strangely, made him feel like his own man. “Maybe I got Scottish blood in me,”

  “What you've got in you,” she whispered, “is fucker-faster blood.”

  After the peach ice cream Betty made in the kitchen, Bernard would crank his Victrola and lift fragile recordings from the box where he stored them. Rossie had never heard this gentle music in his life, not even in his mother's house. “Clarinets and Mozart,” Lemma called it, as if Mozart might be somebody she knew. Rossie loved this music. That he did was his secret, and one more reason to stay.

  But his main incentive was the continued prospect of making his way across the lawn on nights gone from starry to moonlit and letting himself in through Eliza's outside door to her rooms and her bed and then back into the bunkhouse before daylight. At lunchtime Eliza would meander slowly out on horseback, bringing a thermos of coffee and sandwiches to where Rossie was fencing in the fields with his team and wagon. They'd eat by the creek and spread a blanket and ease down into the tall grass where they went in their ways into each other another time. Eliza called all this “ceremonies and rituals.” Days in the fields, fencing, and nights with Eliza, one after another.

  Not long after Rossie got beyond worrying about what might come next in his life, Lemma walked out alone across a weedy, yellowing field to perch herself on the tailgate of his wagon. “I do so hope you aren'
t going to pick up and go,” she said.

  Rossie wondered how Eliza and her mother were talking when he wasn't around.

  “I hear you, in the night, as you go to Eliza. She'll soon be too pregnant for such nights. Charlie Cooper, he nearly ruined our lives. Ruining yourself can be an attractive idea, but it can be outgrown, and I think Eliza has managed that. You could be the reason. Or it could simply be because she's with child. In any event, I want you to stay.”

  Rossie told Eliza about this encounter. She laughed. “She loves men and hinting around about fucking. She's a little hot for you, and I think she envies me. Poor Daddy. It's over for him. You watch, she'll be showing you her parts, sort of by accident but not. You wait.”

  “You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking you're not such an easy girl. I don't think Mrs. Lemma is worrying about me at all. I think she's worrying about you.”

  “You and me,” Eliza said. “She's worrying about us. And she's worrying about wishing she was in my bed.”

  Two or three evenings a week, Bernard read aloud from leather-bound volumes of David Hume and Adam Smith, full of marginalia in his tiny, spidery script. “In Scottish masters you see the idea of America being invented. Democracy, liberty, and capitalism. Listen to Hume, writing on capitalism. ‘It rouses men from their indolence; and, presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury which they never before dreamed of raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed.’” He closed the book by way of a thought. “You and I, Rossie, are fortunate to be located where extraordinary ideas, from Europe, took root. America is the gayer and more opulent part of Hume's nation. Freedom to accumulate is creative. But accumulation can constitute fascism if it is not tempered by compassion. Hume and Adam Smith foresaw this. They argued that selfishness must be countered by a willingness to imagine the condition of others, by deep fellow feeling.” Sipping his glass of Bernard's whiskey, Rossie found this making sense, and enjoyed the fact that he understood. “I'm listening,” he said. “I should have stayed in school.”

  “Imagination is the key,” Bernard said. “To Low Scots, of course, nothing is more important to them than self-interest—and that they take no shit.” He smiled as if he'd tasted nastiness. “Which is a form of idiocy. Do not disturb the happiness of others. That's the first rule. The second is play. Have another Scotch to generate the illusion of meaning. Start the Delco. Anticipate dinner.”

  Then came an August afternoon when Bernard asked Rossie to ride with him in the Buick once more. They drove two-lane asphalt into Missoula to meet a passenger train from the east. “You should have time with men,” Bernard said. They were to meet his long-time friend from Chicago, a socialist photographer named Arnold Meisner, who would spend a month or so recording the effects of poverty on life in the mountain west. “Arnold speaks a radical game,” Bernard said, “but he's well paid. Don't take his egalitarian theories too seriously.”

  They rode the first miles in silence. “First, you can't piss,” Bernard said abruptly. “When I was diagnosed, I thought my malady had been caused by too much jerking away as a young man, leading to a swollen and eventually cancerous prostate. There has to be some reason for what happens to you. My doctor says the idea of overexercising the glands is nonsense.”

  “Hope so,” Rossie said.

  Stevenson surprised him by an outburst of laughing. “Don't let Lemma hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “She'd lock up her daughter. Understand me, I know you can't wear it out. I was a rabbit, or thought I was.” He rubbed his jaw. “Not that I'm a threat any more. Lemma, what a girl she was, you should have seen her.”

  Rossie stared out the window. It was just talk.

  After crossing a long bridge over the Clark Fork River, they went banging along on the cobbled paving on Higgins Avenue between brick-and-stonework buildings. Bernard parked behind St. Patrick's Hospital. “You'll have to give me a few minutes,” he said. After half an hour, during which Rossie scrupulously trimmed his fingernails with his white-handled knife, Bernard came across the lot whistling, strangely agitated. “The prostate,” he said to Rossie. “First you can't urinate. Imagine the horror of a greased rubber tube draining your bladder. I'm not to that point. But inevitably the pain begins.”

  “What's the chances of cutting it out?”

  Bernard grimaced. “There are drawbacks. The possibility of death during the cutting.” He hesitated a long moment. “This is awkward…. Union with women, after the operation, is a thing of the past. So, another loss, another death. But sweet as pie, that's how I am at the moment.” He went back to whistling a quick downtown-sounding tune.

  Arnold Meisner came off the Pullman sleeper wearing brown tweed with a vest and a brown fedora. A French citizen with a German name, he had learned his photography in Paris, then emigrated to Chicago after World War I. His suitcase and trunks full of cameras and lighting equipment were set off the train by a lanky black man in a Pullman porter's uniform.

  Arnold introduced him. “My newfound friend and keeper, Jack Greenway, has looked after me since Chicago.”

  Once the luggage was fitted into the Buick, Jack Greenway stretched and looked around to the brown hills. “Sweet little town,” he said. “Might be my town.”

  “Don't believe it,” Bernard said, and he slipped him a crisp five-dollar bill. “This town would be worse than Chicago.”

  “Mainly joking. Black man don't want nothing to do with these towns. I know that much. I'll be riding off toward Seattle.” He touched his cap in a mock salute.

  “Jack,” Arnold Meisner said. “You could stay in Montana a month or two and work for me.”

  “Can't think so,” Jack Greenway said.

  On the slow drive up the Bitterroot, Bernard and Arnold talked about friends who'd been fired by the University of Chicago, reduced to the soup lines, and other men killed in the strikes.

  “Catastrophes,” Arnold said. “And here we are in your wilderness, got away untouched.”

  Except, Rossie thought, for Bernard with cancer riding shotgun every trip. Still, these were men to think about, who had cut themselves off from whatever home they had in order to go after what they wanted. In that, Rossie was surprised to see, he was like them. Listening to these men was better than listening to a bunkhouse full of tired old fellows who'd spent their lives in a circle of ranch-hand jobs and mostly stared out the windows. “Must have been a long while,” he said to Bernard, “since you saw anybody who understood what you're thinking.”

  “What is it?” Arnold asked. “What do we understand?”

  “Liberties,” Rossie said, proud to offer the right answer.

  “Arnold and I,” Bernard said, “we've been down the road.” He turned to Arnold. “Of course, so has Rossie. He was all the early summer on the road, trailing horses from California to Calgary.”

  Arnold came up with a tiny zinc flask. “I'll drink to that. Good Scotch, a single malt from the Highlands.”

  Rossie felt welcomed into their conspiracy.

  Near noontime, Bernard pulled off and parked in front of the elegant red-and-yellow brickwork barn.

  “A fellow told me empty was the main thing about that barn,” Rossie said.

  “Not entirely,” Bernard said. “A few weeks ago I had the loft filled with timothy hay. “

  “That's the fellow I talked to.”

  “I built this barn in a flurry, a rush of enthusiasm. The stalls have two-inch cork floors.” He looked to Rossie. “We used to take the train down to the Kentucky Derby,” he said. “Bloody Marys in the morning, all day long. I fell in love with the idea of blooded horses, but I didn't buy, not in that economy. Anyone could see the bubble in the market. Thus I was saved from Thoroughbreds. Ridiculous to imagine your own horse in the winner's circle at Santa Anita.”

  “Your own sleek beast,” Arnold said.

  “Cork floors,” Rossie said.

  Bernard smirked at them both. “We'll go to l
unch. They'll be waiting.”

  Rossie unloaded Arnold's baggage into a back bedroom he had never seen before, then returned outside to find them all at the table on the grass beside that All Frogs totem pole. A cotton tablecloth printed with purple grapes was set with white china dishes.

  “At last,” Lemma said. “Betty can bring the salad. How was your morning?”

  “That frog pole?” Arnold asked.

  Bernard nodded. “One of my mementos.”

  “We talked, dreams of the Kentucky Derby,” Arnold said to Lemma once their wine was poured. “That's a French pole. I mean, the frogs.” Bernard smiled.

  “Betty got out a tablecloth from Provence,” Lemma said, then turned to Rossie, as if he might know what she was talking about. “My degree is in French literature, nineteenth century. Stendhal was my primary man.”

  “Back from her year in Paris when I met her,” Bernard said. “What a girl.”

  “I got to thank you all,” Rossie said. When they turned to him, paying him particular attention, he bridged his fingers, as Old Man Dufferena had, and tried a faint smile. “I come looking for Eliza. Now you got Betty bringing me lunch.”

  Bernard lifted his right fist. “Well, then. Bravo!”

  “Daddy,” Eliza said, “you are such a condescending asshole.”

  That evening, after Rossie had cranked up the Delco, they dined under electric lights strung around the All Frogs Pole, feasting on trout from the river, vegetables out of the garden, wines from France.

  “All natural,” Betty said. “Good for what aches in you.”

  “But there is no absolute cure,” Arnold said, lifting his wineglass. Without the brown fedora his hair was steel-gray and cropped tight to a dark skull. “A toast to the cook, and all attempts at curing.”

  “Betty has a healing idea,” Lemma said. “Community gardens, irrigated acres, open to all, tended by all, free to all. Bernard is thinking of funding it.”

  “That's pretty,” Arnold Meisner said.

  “Just the ditching,” Bernard said. “I'd pay for the ditching. Nothing more. It's possible.”