“Shit,” Bill Sweet said. “I'll be fucked.”
The banker's wife, Quint, snorted and rolled her eyes. “No doubt,” she said.
Nito smiled at Margie. “He will be indeed fucked if he plays cards with people like me. Entirely fucked.”
“By God, I'll shake your hand,” Bill Sweet said to Nito, “if old Rossie comes out of your house.”
“Gamblers never shake hands. But just now, for Rossie's sake.”
“Here's the man who owns the place,” Rossie told Bill Sweet once that ritual was done with. “This is Mr. Bernard Stevenson. And Mr. Davidson, who runs the dairy barns.”
“You a ranch hand?” Davidson asked Bill Sweet.
“Not any sort of working hand. Just a buckaroo.”
As Davidson frowned at this, Lemma and Katrina entered the room, both in high-shouldered gray dresses of almost identical make, but Katrina wore a single string of pearls. “The women,” Bernard said. “With Rossie's compadres from Charlo we had thirteen,” Lemma said, once the introductions had been run. “So Mr. Davidson was a fortunate addition.”
“Do you believe in that?” Mattie asked her. “Thirteen?”
“Not for a minute, but there's Bernard to think about.”
“I'm scientific,” Bernard explained. “But why tempt demons?”
“You could tempt me,” Arnold said, “with a drink.”
“Compadres? What do you think of that?” Bill Sweet patted Rossie's back.
Bernard had crossed the room toward the bottles. “Your people are Scotch?”
“Way back, seventy, eighty years ago they come to Carolina.”
“I saw it in you. So the first toast is to you. My grandfather came to Carolina in those years.”
“Runaways,” Bill Sweet said. “Runaways for hundreds of years. That's where I get it. They run to Arkansas, and here I am in Montana.”
“The Scottish soul loves independence. Scots flock to Montana because they despise restriction.”
“They don't listen to nobody's sheriff,” Bill Sweet said. Arnold interrupted this exchange to announce that he was going back to Europe, “where they're listening to too many sheriffs.” Italy had been fascist for more than a decade, and in Spain the liberal government was in collapse. “Mr. Hitler plays on fury like a violin. He's backed with cash from Krupp and Ford and has convinced the Germans that his leadership is the solution to their problems. A European war is inevitable.”
Resting back on the couch, Mr. Davidson cleared his throat. “Good, clean work,” he said, “that's the solution.” He folded his huge hands and smiled.
“You think it's that serious?” the banker asked Arnold. “I'm a city man,” Arnold replied, “off to photograph the end of cities.”
“How to help anyone?” the banker muttered.
“Trainload of canned goods?” Slivers offered. “Or cashier's checks?” Quint gave off a laugh that echoed like a bark. “Lemma,” she said, “I like your people.”
Slivers ignored that. “You think it's war?”
Arnold nodded. “To end wars.”
“Last war,” Slivers said, “there was men like me thought they were pissing their lives away. Lot of us boys in France.”
“Would you say,” Bernard asked of Slivers, “that it's never simply a matter of honor?”
“That's talk for the newspapers. The real thing is staying upright. I was one of them boys in France. We knew who'd been tricked. It was us. We were scared shitless.”
“Do you worry that American politics are so countrified and isolated?” Arnold asked incredulously. “Six months ago Hitler assassinated his opposition and established himself as dictator. And here we are, in this forgotten valley, walled in by mountains. This house is a castle. It seems to be in the world, but it's not. Bernard must feel like an anthropologist at the edge of things.”
“Basques are going back to Spain,” Nito said. “Men who have never seen Spain. They say war is coming, for Basque independence. I say I'm no warrior, and they say what of pride? I say forget pride. I'm too old.”
“In San Francisco,” Eliza said, “I thought pride might kill me.”
Margie interrupted, loud and flushed. “People saying somebody like me shouldn't have babies.”
“You should have all the babies you can cook up,” Slivers said.
“Malinda Cahill told me to be my own daddy,” Rossie said, looking across to Slivers. “Bobby Cahill's wife.”
“Malinda.” Slivers chuckled. “Around Malinda, in my day, you would sure as hell want to be your own daddy.”
“So much for the topic of international power,” Lemma observed. “Women's work lies in making men behave.”
Quint snorted again.
“It's true,” Bernard said. “A man with a good, hardheaded woman lives longer.”
“If she don't always piss him off,” Slivers said. “I might of married Malinda if she wasn't running the bars. But you couldn't get me back to war with a shotgun at my head, and Malinda looked like war.” He shook his head as if he'd been transported elsewhere. “You sit in one of their trenches trying to eat what they give you, and there's a hand with maggots buried in the mud next to where you're sitting. That's what breakfast you get. War is tricking yourself.” He turned to Arnold. “That Indian fellow over in the penitentiary has tricked himself.”
“We don't want to be criminals,” the banker said. “We want to be successful. There's not much difference, but there's some.”
“Once they got you, they sure as hell got you.” Slivers looked at Rossie. “There's a hard time coming home from mistreatment like that fellow will see in prison.”
“Mistreatment,” Rossie repeated. It wasn't the kind of word Slivers ever said.
“ ‘Never glad confident morning again,’ “ Lemma said. “That's Browning. Robert Browning.”
“Robert Browning, lost in Montana,” Arnold said.
Margie had her own take. “Niceness won't get nobody across the street.”
“All this deploring, while we wait to have our dinner served by hired ladies in this house in Montana.” Lemma shook her head as if to accept defeat, while the urologist and his wife went on smiling and smiling.
Nito lifted his drink. “A toast to facing up. To my son Rossie and Eliza and her new boy, Mr. Teddy Blue, and to good fortune for everyone of us here, forever.”
After dinner, Bernard played slow jazz and they all but Mr. Davidson danced. As the guests were gathering their coats and buckling their galoshes, preparing to leave, the telephone rang and Lemma called them upstairs to crowd transfixed before Bernard's great expanse of window overlooking the valley. Far off in the darkness out there, on other properties, a barn was burning, the brief, enormous torch of it reflecting off the snow and lighting the undersides of clouds.
“Worst thing there is,” Slivers said.
“For our party,” Lemma said. “Melodrama.” Already those flames were dying.
“Jesus, Lady!”
“What?” she said. “Jesus what?”
“Jesus or somebody,” Slivers said, “should light your ass afire if you thinks that's make-believe.” Then he smiled like what he'd said might be a joke, like it might have been the whiskey talking, it could be taken that way, and they all, exclaiming and semidrunk, trooped back downstairs to their leavetaking.
At breakfast Betty announced that six horses in that barn had died screaming, and that the blaze was rumored to be arson.
The Presbyterian minister from Missoula, the good Scottish Dr. MacLean, called to say he was in bed with influenza and could not perform the wedding on the day before Christmas.
“Very sad,” Bernard said. “A defeat. But you'll meet him next summer. His eldest son stands fire lookout out of Missoula. They're legendary walkers and fishermen, two brothers and the father.”
“Fishers of souls,” Arnold said.
“Never mind the scoffing, I'm talking about American Scots, extraordinary individuals. But in any event we've found another P
resbyterian, this one from Hamilton.”
Hothouse flowers arrived from Missoula just after a late breakfast, among them white chrysanthemums bundled with green ferns for the living room and corsages of orchids for the women, each to wear a color that matched her dress. Once these had been distributed and arranged, Rossie and Bill Sweet, who was to be the best man, were sent off to the bunkhouse.
“Your father will come for you,” Katrina said. “He will knot your necktie. Mr. Sweet will keep you company.”
When Nito came, Rossie was in his Brooks Brothers coat from Chicago. Nito expertly flipped through the perfect tying of his necktie. “The final mile,” he said. “Look around.” He led Rossie and Bill Sweet up through the snow toward the big house. “Your last sight of the free world.”
Bill Sweet was smirking. “You could make a break for it. We could say you got away in the timber.”
Slivers Flynn and Arnold, both in brown tweed jackets, were lurking in the depths of the living room, amid the flowers. “Wore this when I got married,” Slivers said to Rossie. “Hope it brings you more luck than it did me.” Pastor Durant, a small man with octagonal eyeglasses, arrived precisely at noon. Nito opened the door and stood back.
“Mr. Benison?” the minister said.
“He means you,” Nito said to Rossie. “Tell him your name is Benasco. Shake his hand.”
Wooden folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and Lemma swept in wearing a dark-velvet dress cut on the bias, followed by Ka-trina in crimson brocade. Talking, laughing, they ignored the men. Mattie, in a rose dress with a slit up one side that showed her legs, looked at no one and sat at the end of the row with the older women. Once everyone was present, the minister summoned Rossie and Bill Sweet, who was carrying Great-Grandmother Gertrude's ring. Eliza appeared at the far end of the room, her black hair stacked on her head and held in place by pins that matched her silvery dress. Betty, in her blue suit and a white blouse with a man's necktie, played a recording of “The Wedding March” on Bernard's Victrola.
Eliza took Bernard's arm, and on they came. The minister smiled and said words about Christian charity that Rossie, then Eliza, repeated after him. Bill Sweet passed Rossie the ring, which he slipped onto Eliza's slim finger.
“Children,” the minister said. “You are man and wife. God cherish you.”
Eliza's lips were cold, and Rossie wondered if she could be frightened. He felt Nito grip his shoulder. He kissed his weeping mother's cheek and ducked his eyes away from Mattie, who watched from across the room. Margie offered her cheek but not Betty. She stood back, eyes alert as if daring him.
As the skies lowered to a late, cloudy afternoon, Lemma called for attention. “We're adjourning to the Tailfeather Field,” she announced, and she sent Bernard and Leonard to warm up the Buick and the Model A. “Get into your boots,” she said. “Attendance is mandatory.” They made the trip easy enough with women sitting on laps and hooting with laughter. Mattie had gone down ahead of them to swing open the hardwood doors to the brickwork barn.
“Inside,” she said, “we got a surprise present.”
Sure enough, in the first cork-floored stall stood a four-year-old bay mare, one of those strong-necked Morgan crossbreds with delicate legs and a diamond-shaped splash of white on her forehead. She eyed Rossie and Eliza in an appraising way as they moved into the stall to touch her.
“Got a horse,” Rossie said. “If that ain't something.”
“And a wife,” Katrina said, “and a child.”
“I come down just to sit with her,” Mattie said.
Slivers had gone to Bobby Cahill, picked the mare, negotiated the purchase price, and arranged railroad transportation to Montana.
“She's quick as a big cat,” he said. “I rode her into that herd of steers Bobby keeps. Cut ‘em apart like hot butter. She's the real thing.”
“We brought her down from Missoula in a padded trailer towed by a creamery truck,” Bernard explained.
Slivers brushed his hard right hand on the mare's withers. “Malinda wanted to know if you'd been up to the old Railroad Tavern. She's dead sure that she can get Bobby up here for a visit, now that you got one of his mares in the Bitterroot.”
“Why not?” Bernard said. “Railroads run.”
“That's more horse than I ever owned,” Slivers said.
Bill Sweet was standing back between Margie and Mattie. “You going to breed her?” he asked. “You going to be selling horses?”
“Sure am,” Rossie said.
“I'm wide-eyed,” Sweet said. “You need a man, you call on me.” Mattie faked a little punch at Bill Sweet's shoulder. “You and me.”
“Don't you touch him,” Margie said, but she was smiling.
Rossie led the mare out into the snow, improvised a set of reins with a halter rope, and swung up to ride her bareback. She stood for it until Rossie nudged her with his heels, then stepped off into a canter, throwing dry snow behind her as he took her through a long figure eight across the meadow, turning her with a touch on the neck. Back to the barn, he slid down to stand with his hand on her withers.
“Horses,” Slivers said, “they like doing things, learning a trick like those loops in the snow. Go to horses with no rush but no fucking around, that's the deal.”
“Sanity in motion,” Bernard said. “What will you name her?”
“Well,” Rossie said, “I can't call her Bernard. What I need to do is say thanks.” Rossie had the urge to stay with that mare until she got used to him and he said so. “I feel like moving in with her and seeing her sleep.”
“Never mind,” Eliza said. “You can watch me sleep.”
“She's probably got a name, but I'm going to call her Katrina.” He'd surprised himself for ancient and unknown reasons. He lifted his hand. “This makes me think to cry. So that's thank you. These horses, them and Eliza are my hill to climb. There it is.”
“You take care of this luck,” Slivers said. “It would make us feel good to see it.”
Up in the big house, Nito proposed the first toast. “My son and our new daughter, enjoy what you are, not what you ought to be.”
Bernard put a jazzy drift of Beiderbecke on his Victrola, and Rossie danced two-step with Eliza until Bernard cut in. Lemma brought Rossie a martini mixed by Nito, who in turn asked Mattie to dance. Bill Sweet and Margie awkwardly tried it while Slivers looped in waltzing circles with Katrina. Lemma announced she was jealous, that she'd had her eye on Slivers, and asked Rossie to dance. Nito led Mattie to them, laid his hands on their shoulders, and all together they swept around the room in long turns.
Rossie offered a toast to the country girl beside the Snake River and her uncle Jamsie playing “The Cowboy's Lament” on his banjo, and to the blind Hawaiian guitarist who had shut up the raggedy men idling away beside the Clark Fork River. “Such musics,” he said. Eliza said this was the start of an answer, though she didn't know what the question was, and Nito said they should get back to dancing.
In Eliza's room, on a bedside table at his side of the bed, Rossie found two new books inscribed to “My Husband”: Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains and a trail drive book about going to Montana called Log of a Cowboy, by a man named Andy Adams. His wife looked up from the baby, whom she was tucking away. “These will start your schooling.”
“I can think of something else.”
“We got away with it, didn't we?”
Eventually Rossie lay back on his side of the bed and peered out the windows. His bedroll, brought all this way from Nevada, was rolled up and stored, his shirts were hung on a special pole in her closet, his underclothes folded into one of her dresser drawers. “Guess you got me,” he said.
“You got yourself. You did the getting.”
Mattie was there before him, up bareback on the mare with a snaffle-bit bridle, easing off into the snowy Tailfeather Field. Daylight came bluish and faint in the shadows of willow and cottonwood beyond the far fence. When she saw Rossie coming, Mattie nudged the
mare with her heels and they were gone, her brush of red braid flying out in tandem with a haze of snow behind hooves as they plunged off into another galloping circumference. Rossie stood a long moment, watching, then walked slowly out toward the snowy center of the field and stood quiet until Mattie, laughing and crazy-eyed, slid the mare up to an icy stop.
“Me and her,” she said, sliding down, “we're pals. We know the score on you.”
“Give me them bridle reins.” Rossie's voice was level, like he was speaking to a child.
“Sure, any time. She's yours. But I can still get your goat and I'll stick with Nevada. These people got you bought. You'll get enough and you'll come home. See you there.”
After dinner, Lemma insisted on sharing a passage with them. There is a coherence in things, she said, reading from a book, a stability; something is immune from change, and shines out. Of such moments the thing is made that endures. She looked up from the page. “Virginia Woolf” She had been rereading To the Lighthouse after being reminded of it when she saw their party reflected in windows while dancing the night before. So she claimed.
“The lighthouse,” Bernard said, “was built by the Stevenson family.”
“Reflected in our windows, the thing that endures.”
Leonard Three Boy told a story of a wife vanishing from an encampment on the grassland Plains only to be found years later running with a herd of wild horses led by a black stallion. Captured, the woman said the stallion was her husband, that she was a horse, and her children horses. After they were released, the wild horses ran to freedom in a dust cloud of their own making, with the woman in the lead. “Eliza, running with horses.”
“Aristophanes,” Arnold said. “The women run away.”
Lemma hooted. “Aristophanes?” She pointed a finger at Arnold like a pistol and pulled a make-believe trigger. “Bang.”
Arnold turned to Rossie. “You could come away with me. Long ago, the French siege at Saragossa failed and they went for home. The Basque ambushed them in a pass through the Pyrenees. So began the Song of Roland, the song of great deeds.” He went on about traditions of heroism that began with the tale of that battle. “Basques! The Chanson de Rossie.”
The Willow Field Page 25