The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  A taxi delivered them back to the Drake at four-thirty in the morning. Rossie woke alone at nine to sunlight in on him through the window. He drank water, took four aspirin, got out of his clothes, and slept again. Much later, Eliza was at the door.

  “Dinnertime,” she said once he'd gotten the lock to work. “Oysters are calling. You can hear their little voices echoing in the hallways.”

  The next afternoon, while Bernard stayed and Lemma was settled down to rereading Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Eliza and Rossie ventured out to see Metropolis at a movie house decorated in an ancient-Egyptian style.

  Rossie hated it. “Nothing was ever like that.” He was dismayed at the robotic people who labored in dark catacombs, operating steam-run power plants beneath gardens where the rich played tennis. “That was idiotic.” He hesitated. “I don't know I ever said that word before. Idiotic. I'm learning, saying words I never said because you say them wrong and people laugh. Now, I might say words like ridiculous. I'm getting educated.”

  “You are,” Eliza said. “But ridiculous?” Her smile was tentative and anxious for a hesitant second before she launched into her own tirade. “You can't mean it. Fascism isn't ridiculous. It's evil. Try thinking. What you're saying is ridiculous. You ought to be ashamed.”

  “What I think about ashamed, is fuck you.”

  Eliza flagged down a taxicab. “This was a mistake.”

  Near Lake Michigan, north of the Loop, she kept the taxi parked before a row of four-story, brickwork buildings and a reconstructed mansion connected to the coach house by covered walkways. A sign inside a white picket fence read Pliny School.

  “We never came in this way,” Eliza said. “We came through the back, across the tennis courts. There was a whole life. Boys and girls lived in the school. We wore Greek masks and staged Sophocles, and some of us played in string quartets. I spent my third winter memorizing Whitman. ‘Free and make free.’ That's Emerson. Whitman heard him say that in a lecture and was inspired.”

  “Where'd you live memorizing this Whitman?”

  “Up there on the third floor. But we can't go in. I'm pregnant and unmarried. Louise Bryce, if you were one of her prize girls, would hate it if you showed up pregnant and unmarried. She doesn't want to see me right now. She wrote a letter, said I had ruined myself unless I came back to sanity. Next year we'll invite her to come west. She could bring a summer tour of students to the ranch. She'll see sanity. She was the first one to encourage me toward Alberta, in her way, and she knows it. She took me to Hull House, and said I could be just like Jane Addams. We'll show her.”

  Later, they walked streets lined with dirty buildings, where men rested their backs against rock walls and the windows were open in the overcast September heat. Soon it would rain. Eliza dropped a quarter into a cup held by a woman with long fingernails curled into claws, who sat with her back against a fire hydrant.

  “You figure that's help?” Rossie said. “Two bits?”

  Eliza's eyes went flat and shadowed as she studied him.

  “You know what I'm thinking?” he said, still feeling insulted. “I'm thinking about hitching my way back to Montana, catching my horses. I'm thinking this party is over.”

  “Party?” Eliza shook her head. A drizzle of misting rain began, tapping the awning above them, and she led him off into the drizzle to walk through what she claimed was a famous public market, where men and women shouted and haggled over skinned lambs and pickled pig's feet, bundles of spinach, prayer shawls, dolls without arms. “It's been going on since before history, buying and trading. Do you think it's a party? Miss Bryce showed us photographs of festivals that have endured for centuries, people surviving because they could laugh at the joke of life. This is what's left.”

  “Which joke?”

  “All of us.” She led Rossie out of the rain, into a doorway across the street from a nondescript brick building.

  “You and me?” Rossie's grin was bitter. “Our mommas and daddies? We're the joke, folks?”

  “There, over there, Hull House. It's a refuge. Jane Addams won the Nobel Prize. She's ancient but alive, and I plan on being like her. The long-time thing, like Jane Addams. Who is entirely to admire.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Rossie said. “I got no idea but that I'm tired of pissant hobby-farm cowboys and Indians. You got me walking down these streets a thousand miles from anywhere, and you're telling me I don't know anything.”

  “Nobody cares what you're tired of. What I'm saying is grow up and see what we could be.”

  “Yeah, we could be Jane whoever she is.”

  “You son of a bitch.” For the second time in Rossie's nineteenth year, a young woman slugged him, this time an utterly unsuspected sucker punch in the gut. He took to his knees, gasping.

  Once he caught his breath, he saw that his flannel pants were ripped, his right kneecap faintly abraded beneath. He wetted a fingertip, touched it and tasted the finger, looked up to find her turning to the street and waving down another taxi.

  “The Drake,” she told the driver. “Get in,” she told Rossie, when the door was open and she was inside.

  “Fuck off.” He walked away, and when he looked back, she was gone. In filmy light, the sidewalk at his feet seemed far below as he dodged in the light traffic and crossed unfamiliar streets. He touched the wallet in his hip pocket and stopped on an empty run of the sidewalk to count his money, twenty in the billfold and add that to the thirty in a stocking. But there were no taxicabs on this block and half and the people around him were talking in languages he didn't know. He pushed into a tavern where three aged black men sat at the rail, idly talking with a white-shirted, deeply black bartender who looked to be Rossie's age.

  “You lost?”

  Rossie grinned, the old trick. “Lost my girlfriend,” he said. “She rode off in a taxicab.”

  “Fucked up! You want a drink?”

  Rossie eased onto a stool. “A martini.”

  “That's something, a martini. Don't see too many martini drinkers around here.”

  One of the old men turned to Rossie. “Now, you know, you could buy everybody a martini.”

  “Sure as hell. Martinis for everybody.”

  The bartender got started with his martini shaking. “You know what I'm going to say? I'm going to ask any asshole who comes in tomorrow if he was here when the white fellow stopped by and started buying martinis all around. I'm going to raise prices and tell people we're a white-man martini joint.”

  Rossie took his down in three swallows. “One more all around,” the bartender said. “Then we got to get you out of here. Where do you go?”

  “I'm home,” Rossie said.

  “No,” the bartender said, “you are not home. Right now you're walking on water. Somebody is going to knock your head off. I'll telephone a cab. Where do you go?”

  “The Drake Hotel.”

  “See what I say? Couple of hours it'll be dark, and you'll be on your knees. Come midnight you might be dead.”

  Rossie's taxicab pulled up to the Drake as darkness feathered down over Chicago. There was a note at the desk, in Eliza's quick script: “We were going to be each other's child.” He went down a long hallway and banged on the door to her room. She faced him, cool-eyed in her nightdress, and said, “What? Drunk? At least you aren't dead.”

  “Could have been. They said I could have been.”

  She stepped back, relenting that bit. “You better feed yourself. Then you won't be so crazy.” Rossie didn't respond. “Am I your mother? Eat whatever you eat. From downstairs, a big old, fat rib steak with chanterelle mushrooms. They could bring ice cream, scoops and scoops of vanilla ice cream. We're getting up early.”

  “Me, I'm going home.”

  “One step at a time. I'll order the food. Go take a bath. The food will come. Eat it and sleep. They're calling us at four-thirty. Bring your gloves. It's going to be cold. I'll meet you at the taxi stand. Your telephone will ring. Now, get out of here.”

 
Inside his room, Rossie studied her note again. “Each other's child.” Or, he thought, be your own daddy. By the time he was out of the bath, a waiter had arrived with the rib steak and ice dream on a wheeled cart. A single rose in a crystal vase adorned the setting. Rossie ate, thinking somebody had to be right. After the vanilla ice cream he curled up into sleep.

  The next morning, after a long taxicab ride at the edge of daylight, Eliza led Rossie out onto a slatted walkway overlooking the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. Men moved clumsily across slippery concrete, their feet bound in bloody rags, as steam clouded the building and froze into blackish ice on the walls. Fat steers were goaded one by one into chutes and met their end with the knocker, a man so pale he looked albino, who swung a steel-headed sledge and struck blows to the center forehead—a dull thump and instant collapse, a dead creature every minute. Rossie heard the clank of chains as a gate tripped. Undone animals tumbled sideways onto the concrete floor, where a chain was fastened around their twitching hind legs and wound onto a metal drum to hoist the bodies aloft one at a time. The bleeder, first of the butchers, sliced into the jugular with his long slippery knife. Blood blossomed, then flowed along gutters in a clotting stream that was kept in motion by a man with a square-toed shovel. The carcasses drained while butchers whetted their knives on sharpening steels that dangled from their belts. Heavy bleeding done, the carcass was lowered, and another man severed the head, cracking apart the vertebra, while another man undid the chain at the feet. Skinning began with the draw of a blade down the belly, through the bag between the teats and around the pricks to end at the anus. The hide was attached to another chain and torn from the flesh with a great sucking noise as the fats separated. Split, gutted, and washed, the glistening bodies were dragged by yet another chain down a metal-topped table and sectioned into quarters and cut into back-strap steaks and the like.

  “Pliny School was worth something,” Eliza said. “Miss Bryce brought me here. She knew about this, and so did Henry Ford. He reinvented this for his automotive assembly lines.”

  “Sure as hell this isn't church.” They climbed into the back of the taxi that, in exchange for five dollars, had waited for them. “What I want,” Rossie said, “is you and horses and nobody ordering me around. That's all.”

  “You don't have to believe what I believe. But don't laugh at me.”

  “So that's the deal? My mother told me it was a chance I might not amount to anything. She said you could break your heart on it. I run away from Mattie Flynn and you got some Indian baby on the way but I don't run.”

  “Boy,” the driver said, “your momma had it right.”

  Eliza ignored him. “His baby.” She gazed out the window. “Is it going to be the killer with us?”

  “Don't think so. How am I going to think when I see it? The worst that could happen is I'll be back where I am anyway.”

  Bernard was on the couch in late afternoon, still in his pajamas, watching as a gray-faced Howard, having shown up with another armload of flowers, shook martinis. Or, rather, a martini for himself.

  Eliza announced that she and Rossie had solved their equation.

  “What does this mean?” Lemma asked. “Marriage? Or further disgrace?”

  “Thought your equation had long since been solved,” Howard said. This was not his first martini of the afternoon. “Let's see if we can solve mine.” He explained that his latest love affair was kaput. “So I'm here with these understanding people, picking up the pieces, being careful. Things can go ridiculously wrong.”

  “Why not marriage?” Bernard said, ignoring Howard. “It could work out.” He gestured to Lemma. “Until I found this woman I was frantic. My parents were dead. I was increasingly disoriented. I credit myself with the wit to acknowledge it.”

  Bernard went into the bedroom and returned with a snub-nosed revolver, the sight of which made Rossie wonder what this marriage talk had become.

  “I carried this weapon. Like a fool, I brought it on this trip. Terrible things do happen.” He was talking directly and earnestly to Rossie. “Living here in the old days I imagined someone picking at the lock to my door. I lay in the dark and thought of a man silhouetted by the light from the hallway, and his surprise when he was shot, the flare of gunfire. I dreamed of shooting without hesitation. There is a Balzac novel in which a lawyer, frightened by the violence of Paris, moves to the country. Chicago frightened me, and Lemma was willing to humor me.”

  “You took us away,” Lemma said, affecting surprise. “Eliza's childhood, my life.” Then she smiled. “You bad old man. You stole us.”

  “My friends thought going to Montana was an insane thing,” Bernard said. “Even more dangerous than Chicago. But I dreamed about killing a man, so I went west in self-defense. I've always thought of that move as having saved me. What you need, Rossie, is a plan, a scenario leading to long-term results, where the other shoe drops. I can help you. Natural progression is my agenda. You could do any number of things. You could go to law school.”

  “School?” Rossie walked to a dark window looking out to a scatter of lighted windows across the street.

  “Take my word for it,” Bernard said. “You'll want more than horses. You'll want to be taken seriously.” He waited, fondling the pistol, but Rossie didn't turn away from the window. “Can you tell me which women, do you think, turn out smart? I'll tell you. Women like Eliza, who taste tragedy and understand balance.”

  “On the teeter-totter,” Lemma said. Bernard joined Rossie at the window. “You and Eliza, we're thinking about your lives. Lemma and I never imagined you'd give up horses. We'd be saddened if you did. We'll pay your way forward. If you aren't in luck, who is?”

  Howard was shaking himself another martini. “Where I'd go is to Spain, for the bullfights. We could go together. Ronda. Andalusia on the cliffs. Great bullfight town.”

  “Howard,” Lemma said. “Shut up.”

  “Horses, and good work yet to be defined,” Bernard said. “There you have it. We honor your ambitions and ours.”

  “Rossie,” Lemma said. “You picked us.”

  In 1956, running for county commissioner in the Bitterroot, Rossie would tell the story of that evening in the Drake Hotel. “Nineteen thirty-four, in Chicago,” he'd say. “Those people, they turned me.”

  The buzz among the men and women at the Elks Club in Hamilton would drop to quiet. They knew Rossie Benasco: he trained horses used by calf ropers and bulldoggers in the National Finals Rodeo in Denver. He was known as a talker, and this would be one of his stories about ironies.

  “That Bernard, he let me convince myself—nineteen, no education, listening to talk about ‘scenarios,’ whatever that was—and all the while he was holding a short-barreled pistol. He should have been the politician. A toast to Bernard.”

  THE LARCH TURNED. GOLDEN NEEDLES SHOWERED OVER THE mountain trails. Snow fell in the night and melted by noon. Eliza grew thicker, sleepy, and slower in the late days of pregnancy.

  “Good food, clear air, and sleep,” Lemma said. “That's the routine. Hot rooms and excitement of all kinds are to be strictly avoided.” She frowned at Rossie. “So you, I hope there's been an end to you in the midnight hours.”

  Arnold Meisner and Leonard returned from the tribes in the north with crates of undeveloped glass negatives, and Leonard went off to Missoula for classes at the university. Life settled toward winter, the days bright and quiet, until Arnold declared that he wanted a chance at the female grizzly and twin cubs that had been seen feeding on fallen apples sixty miles to the north at the foot of the Mission Mountains.

  “Carnivores,” he said over coffee, “grazing on fruit like horses. No one has photographed them from near proximity. I have ambitions. Static images of the disenfranchised begin to seem like foolishness. What's real are energies. Theorists like Ezra Pound say that verbs and not nouns are real. Sounds like the theory of a man too long cooped up in England, but nevertheless…. I want to photograph the bears as they act.”

/>   “Do you believe that, really?” Lemma said. “Photographs incite the imagination, which operates entirely in terms of energies.”

  “The bears may in any event photograph as energies.” No one answered so he turned the subject. “Grizzlies are insanely dangerous. One hundred yards in three and a half seconds. Once they start after you, it's too late to run. Vivid energies. Verbs.”

  “I've no idea what you're trying to talk about.” Something angry tinged Lemma's voice. “Your affliction sounds physical rather than philosophic. You've overtired yourself.”

  “No, I haven't.” In the Flathead Valley he'd heard of a rancher who'd constructed a bunker specifically for viewing the grizzlies that came down in fall to feed on apples. It was constructed of discarded railroad ties, with viewing ports at eye level. Orchard trees were strung with lights that operated off a power plant. “The creatures are used to the lights and go on feeding,” he explained. “The haven stinks of creosote but it's indestructible and utterly safe. Once there, with the creatures prowling, we're in for the night. There's no safe way out.”

  “You can bring your rifle,” Bernard said to Rossie. “You might want to think about slaying one of the monsters.”

  “Don't sound like the point.”

  “You could at least sight them in,” Lemma said, “and see them as something you might assassinate. Isn't that part of it?” She studied him a long moment, then dropped the matter. “So,” she said. “Away we go.”

  Late on the sunny, windless afternoon of their excursion, the orchard in the Flathead Valley was littered with the husks of rotting apples abuzz with yellow jackets and huge black flies. A tattered buffalo robe lay across the floor of the bunker, which was otherwise furnished with army cots covered by Hudson Bay blankets, three cracked leather chairs that looked as if they had been rescued from the lobby of a defunct hotel, and a battered hardwood table, along with two crystal ashtrays from the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and German binoculars. There was even a home-built stove and dry, split larch stacked along the back wall.