“We call him Teddy,” Eliza said. “Rossie wanted to call him Blue but we put a stop to that. Take him.” Eliza held the bundled-up baby out to Mattie.
“Wish he was mine,’ Mattie said.
Eliza turned the blanket over the baby's face to keep away the snow. “You'll have yours. While you're here, we can play like he's yours.”
“You might never lose me,” Mattie whispered.
Nito and Katrina—Lemma called them “the family”—were in a bedroom suite off the back hallway, sharing a blue-tiled bathroom with Mattie. Slivers and Leonard would sleep in the bunkhouse, and Arnold had the bedroom where he'd lived during the summer—”with private facilities,” he attested, “as older men require them.”
“I'll be down in the bunkhouse with you,” Rossie told Slivers.
“Not for long,” Lemma said. “Not that you've ever been, really?” She smiled to clear away any misapprehension. “Another drink for everyone,” she said to the silence that followed. “Then we take a rest. There will be chaos soon enough.”
“When we're done with resting, dinner at eight,” Bernard said. “Promptly,” Lemma added, “or Betty will kill us.”
“What I'm looking for is my bed,” Slivers said. “Spent my night looking out the window on that train.”
Katrina caught Rossie by the arm. “Before you lead Mr. Flynn away, your father and I want to see you for a moment. Privately.” She didn't smile.
“You and us,” Nito said.
Rossie led them to the bedroom that was to be theirs, and Katrina took a tiny box from her purse. “The ring,” she said. “Gertrude's, your great-grandmother's wedding ring, from Sweden.”
Katrina had always kept it in a box in her bedroom, one of her treasures, plain gold, his great-grandmother's worn name etched inside.
“You sure about this?” Rossie asked. They had talked about the ring on the telephone.
“You're the only child we'll have,” she said. “What do you mean, are we sure? Of course we're sure.” She studied him, eyes glowing, then opened the tiny box, and held it out to him. “It's yours,” she said, blinking away tears, “for ever, for Eliza.”
Rossie had to look away. This was so important to her and meant so little to him. “Let's hope for sweet, holy times.” Nito, too, was looking away.
Back in the living room, Slivers had a tall drink in his hand. “You want to finish that?” Rossie asked.
“The world's made of drinks,” Slivers said. “Let's find that bunkhouse.”
“There was a fellow called himself a cowhand but he's gone,” Rossie explained as they walked down through the snow. “An Irish gardener they've got cleaning stalls in the milking barns this winter, and a cook, sorry old bastard, and me. Crowd of pensioners, nobody you'd hire.”
“Never know who you'll hire,” Slivers said. “I hired you. Get me up for dinner.”
When Rossie knocked, he found Slivers sharpening a long-bladed cowman knife in the light of a kerosene lantern. “Staying quiet.” He pocketed the knife and his whetstone. “They got hot water? I got to shave.” He hung his shirt on the back of a battered ladder-back chair and carried his worn leather pouch of gear to the washroom. Rossie sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him lather up before the only mirror and strop his straight razor on the leather strap that hung there. His body was knobby, with knots of muscle and bone under the milk-white flesh.
“I got a knife that belongs to you,” Rossie said. “Mattie stole it and give it to me when I was leaving.”
“She told me that, said it was foolishness. But it was fine so far as I was concerned, if somebody would want an old knife of mine.”
“I still got it, if you ever want it back.”
“Don't think so,” Slivers said, and he got down to his shaving.
For dinner there were the linen napkins in silver rings; fluted crystal glasses; white candles; heavy plain china; and two kinds of chicken, baked and southern fried; an oyster soufflé; wine from bottles with French labels; canned spinach with shredded almonds; Italian pasta salad; hearty bread; bowls of mashed yellow potatoes; and a sauce of morel mushrooms that had been gathered from the creek banks in late spring and dried.
“Betty, you're our genius,” Arnold said, confronted with huckleberry and strawberry-rhubarb pies and vanilla ice cream with various sauces. When the sweets were gone, as they sat over cups of European coffee, Mattie tilted her head to the side to study Rossie from across the table. “So, Mr. Buckaroo,” she said in a voice that was abruptly loud and outgoing, “what did you learn with your horse chasing? I'd like to try it myself.”
Rossie sipped his coffee. “She's a big country,” he said, trying a grin before looking up directly at her. “Thought you was never going to need another pair of gloves.”
Mattie regarded him with long hesitation. “I got over that idea. Guess I'll always be a big old woman with gloves.”
Nito, posed at the far end of the table from Bernard, tapped his wine glass with a spoon. “There was more to it than country,” he said.
“I met people who show up in my dreams,” Rossie said. “Fellow named Bob Waters got me to buy the rifle. Clear as hell, I see him gutting a mule deer, in a deer I shot, teaching me to butcher. He baked meat pie in a Dutch oven, though he never showed me how to do that. I dream about a fellow name of Bill Sweet, who busted his leg bone out through the skin trying to ride a bucking horse. White bone showing in the blood. It's like dreaming right now, getting married, sitting around with you, here at this table in Montana.”
“No more martinis,” Arnold said.
“See there,” Mattie said, looking down the table to Slivers. “If he can make it, I could move to Reno, or come to Montana, or do anything he can do.”
“You dream about people and they know tricks,” Rossie said. “Like Nito.”
His father lifted his hands in a protest of innocence.
“And now,” Arnold said, “we'll move to the ridiculous. I'll take over as the fool. Rossie and Leonard could bring my crates to the living room. I'll need a claw hammer.”
Bernard produced the hammer and Arnold began taking apart his home-built wooden boxes, each of which held framed photographs wrapped in newspaper.
“But first,” he said, “where's Eliza?”
“She'll be along when the baby is down,” Lemma said just as Eliza came from the back of the house in a dark-reddish dress, her hair up to show the back of her neck. “Eliza, milky and maternal, wishing she felt handsome.”
Arnold began stripping the newsprint from around his “very magic” photograph of Eliza and Rossie in sharp focus and the sow grizzly with her cubs superimposed dimly behind them. She was rearing, her jaws open like the mouth of a phantom before a feather of forest in the distance.
“Spectacular,” Lemma said.
“About to get ate up,” Rossie said.
“Dazzling,” Lemma cooed.
“Arnold?” Bernard finally asked. “The other crate?”
“This is for Lemma.” Arnold peeled back newsprint to reveal a framed photo of Bernard sleeping on his leather couch—in his study—an aging man curled like a baby and a book splayed open on the floor.
“And this,” Arnold said, tearing newsprint from another photograph, “is for Eliza.”
Lemma coughed when it was entirely there before them. “Do you despise us so entirely?” she said softly. “But never mind. Keep quiet. I understand but nevertheless feel betrayed. Bernard will oversee the rest of your evening.” She turned to leave, pausing in front of Arnold. “Don't you say a thing.”
“Well,” Bernard said, smiling when she was gone. “Our hostess has retired. Isn't this the real item?”
The photograph was framed in scratched, rusting steel. It was Charlie Cooper with long hair woven into a braid that hung over his shoulder. His powerful hands grasped at the black prison bars and his features stood sharp and hard in silvery light. He was looking beyond the camera, half-smiling.
“How did you g
et him to pose?” Bernard asked.
“I got off the train on my way to Chicago and went to Deer Lodge Prison. He said he'd let me take his picture if I cut off a finger. I told him no, I won't cut off a finger, it's for Eliza. He laughed and asked for thirty dollars. It seemed a reasonable fee.”
“He's like a ghost,” Eliza said.
“For those who don't understand Lemma's consternation, this man is the father of Eliza's child. He's in Deer Lodge Penitentiary. He didn't,” Bernard said, sighing, playing at regret, “go by the rules.”
Slivers Flynn eased away from the table and was shrugging into his coat, getting ready to make the walk down to the bunkhouse. “What I forgot,” he said, “is a night's sleep.”
“One more drink?” Arnold offered.
“Feel like I'm drunk already,” Slivers said.
When Rossie carried the steel-framed photo to Eliza's room, she lifted her sleeping baby from the crib. “There, Mister Teddy,” she whispered. “The man in that picture is your father. Don't you forget.”
“You're early,” Betty said when Rossie, Leonard, and Slivers trooped up from the bunkhouse for breakfast. The snowfall had blown by and the morning sky shone with thin, frigid brightness. The kitchen table was set, and Betty was pouring pancake batter on the hot grill, cracking eggs by the time they were out of their coats.
“We're not going to eat that bunkhouse cooking,” Slivers said. “Not if you're feeding us up here.”
Mattie came out in woolly sheepskin slippers and a rose-colored housedress, her red hair in a swirling knot at the back of her head.
“Damn,” Slivers said. “You're a beauty for breakfast.”
“Eliza loaned me this dress and did my hair for me, just now.” She smiled in her old green-eyed, unclouded way, and shrugged. “You and me,” she said to Rossie, “we might as well make it up. That's why I come, to swallow my pride. But I don't eat any shit.”
“Tell you what, kid,” Slivers said to Rossie. “Might as well give up. They got you surrounded.”
“There, that's settled,” Betty said after a moment, splattering more eggs on the grill. “While you're waiting on me, have a look at Arnold's photograph of Eliza and Rossie in its place on the living room wall. After midnight I could hear them, Bernard and Arnold and Lemma. They were laughing and drunk.”
“You know everything that goes on in this house?” Slivers asked. “Most of it,” she said, leaving Rossie to wonder how often she'd heard him making his midnight way to Eliza's rooms from the bunkhouse.
They stood before the lighted photograph. Slivers put a hand on Rossie's shoulder as he always had. “The bear buckaroo. Wonder where they hung up that other fellow?”
“In Eliza's room, under the bed.”
Mattie studied Rossie with distant good humor. “Isn't that something? Your rival's under your own bed.”
As if a signal had passed, and it had, Slivers turned back to the kitchen, leaving Mattie and Rossie with the picture.
“You wait a minute,” Mattie said. “I won't bite.”
“You might knock me out,” Rossie said. “You done being pissed off?”
“Heart broke, not all the way healed but curing. No use staying heartbroke. Slivers told me that when my mother died. Oscar was trying to get under my bed, you know. He come home saying you were took up with Bobby Cahill's wife. Who'd believe that crock of shit from Oscar?”
“Malinda? What do you call it? We was friends. That's what you'd call it.” Rossie shrugged as Mattie rolled her eyes. “But Oscar, he's working for Slivers?”
“He sold that Packard and might be drunk in town right now,” Mattie said. “That's part of why I come up here, to get away from him.”
“What's the other part?”
“See you walk the plank, selling your ass. That girl is going to eat you alive, balls and all.”
“I saw some things, I paid attention to what it means to be your own man with nobody around but other men. It feels like living in a cardboard box with no way out until a woman shows up. There was my mother and there was you and now there's Eliza and even her mother.”
“Sweet thing for you. So long as you got a woman waiting someplace, you can just ride away. But it can work the other way, too. Wouldn't a woman feel happy on the road if some man was waiting? Women can ride. And her mother? She's hot for you. She'll be humped up under you in some hiding-hole if you don't watch out.”
“Shit,” Rossie said. “Cut it out.” He glared at her, took a long breath, and licked his lips. “What I want is not fighting you before it gets started. These people like to have their own way. They're spoiled by being rich, but I won't ride away. There's damned few people trying to be bad. Don't know I ever saw one. Did you ever think you were trying to be bad?”
“You're believing your own bullshit. But you're right. Most people just want somebody to kiss their ass. That's your job.”
“Goddammit, why don't you kiss my ass?”
Mattie smiled. “I had enough of that. So you might as well get off your high horse.”
“The two of you,” Betty called from the kitchen, “get in here or forget breakfast.” Slivers was finished with his easy-over eggs on top of pancakes with maple syrup but had stayed on to talk cow prices with Bernard, who himself looked the worse for wear and hungover as he waited for his own breakfast.
“Jap Hardy said you could work for him anywhere,” Slivers said to Rossie. “Tarz spent three months in San Francisco, trying to get work on the docks to earn pocket money for moving to Australia. Don't know where them boys get their ideas.” This was Slivers, gossiping to Rossie like he was a man.
“Tarz is another one I dream about,” Rossie said. “Hear you had Oscar working.”
“Oscar can't stop talking some bullshit or another. Makes you want to skip dinner if he's going to be there.” He changed the topic to Duf-ferena. “Did you get paid up?”
“Right in Calgary.”
“Lucky thing. The old man died in September. Hotel outside Sacramento. His relatives never yet found where he kept most of his money. One too many secrets.” Slivers smiled as Betty refilled his coffee cup and set poached eggs on toast in front of Bernard. “But Bernard, here, is going to show us dairy-cow secrets. Nito and me and you are going to take a ride with him. We're going to walk through cow barns.”
Eventually the men piled into the Buick, and Bernard negotiated the roads. Unlike the dry cold outside, the milking barns were warm and rank as they walked the long cement aisles.
“It's like the crap tables at the Riverside,” Nito said. “Cows in their stalls.”
“Them fellows come down here every morning?” Slivers asked, gesturing at one of the men sweeping up. “Before daylight? For milking?” He shook his head as if there was no explaining the docility of some men.
Back in the Buick, a half mile up the road, they came up on horseback travelers, a man and woman with ice hanging from their eyebrows despite silk stockings tied over their ears and towels wrapped around their chins for warmth. They were breathing out clouds like spooks, and Rossie nearly missed seeing who it was as Bernard eased the Buick past them. “Christ almighty,” he said. “Hold it.” He lurched out of the Buick to stand in the snow, and shouted to them, “Where are you going? You come down off that horse!”
The man swung his right leg high, spun out of his saddle and landed running and staggering. He dived and tackled Rossie like some raggedy football player, and both of them tumbled down in the snow, wrestling before escaping each other to sit there grinning.
“Should have bit your nose off,” Rossie said.
“Why not?” the other fellow said. “You been in that Buick, warm as toast. We been out here toughing the cold.”
When the two of them were on their feet, Rossie hobbled over to the men in the Buick. “This here is trouble.”
It was Bill Sweet and Margie. They'd been three days coming south from Charlo, melting snow for drinking water, eating alongside camp-fires and sleeping in the bed
roll strapped to the back of Bill Sweet's saddle. “Talk in the Flathead,” he said, “is that you're marrying a rich girl. Didn't figure you'd want us to miss out.”
“Couldn't stand it if you missed anything,” Rossie said. “Keep on up the road, I'll be waiting for you. Plenty of room in the bunkhouse. The old man there can cook you some food. Big table up the hill for dinner tonight.”
“We'll eat,” Bill Sweet said, “and thaw out. You come get us up for that dinner.”
“There's more for supper,” Rossie said when he was back in the Buick.
“Quite startling,” Bernard said. “This fellow, how do you explain him?”
“Don't think I have to explain him. He just came riding in. He's got his girlfriend with him. Can't run them off in this snow. They're wandering Arkies out of the Ozarks. She's a fine girl, that's what she is.” He tried a grin on Bernard. “See what you got yourself into with me. Running with riffraff.”
“Bernard, they sound like renegade Scots,” Lemma said, after finding there would be two more for dinner. “Your people.”
“Not quite the right tribe,” Bernard said. “But close. Lowland Scots, the Lord's fearless avengers.”
The outdoor temperature was near zero and falling in the twilight, sending Lemma into a fuss over icy roads that could foil the night's dress-up dinner party. But her special guests, a banker driving up from Hamilton and Bernard's urologist coming all the way from Missoula, arrived on time with their wives. The smooth-faced banker introduced himself as Lefty, and his wife, whose steel-colored hair was cut short as a man's, went by Quint. As Bernard introduced his doctor, Steven Fullerman, and his lean, quiet wife, Sara, to the other guests, Rossie led Bill Sweet and Margie in from the bunkhouse, both of them raggedy but scrubbed.
“You mean sweetheart?” Nito said when Bill Sweet referred to Margie as his pal. “She's your sweetheart?” He was dressed in a double-breasted black jacket with brass buttons, and had commenced demonstrating trick shuffles for Bernard and a bearded, shockingly blue-eyed fellow named Mr. Davidson, the manager of Bernard's milking barns. “Pick a card, any card,” he commanded Bill Sweet. “Put it in the deck, cut the deck.” After riffling the deck twice in a careless way, he cut it himself. “Is this your card, buried between two aces?”
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