“He might come home unmarried,” Eliza said.
“Or dead,” Nito said, careful to speak slowly and precisely. “Pride, I'm thinking, is another thing from war and revenge. My wife takes pride in gardening and her house. I cheat no one at cards although I could. That's my pride.”
“When word comes,” Lemma said to Arnold, “that you died in Spain, I'll walk out in the garden and moan, and think I should cut off a finger. In Paris, after your war, in the Brasserie Lipp with French cigarettes, I'll eat Bélon oysters and toast your memory with wines that cost fifty dollars a bottle. Maybe you'll be there.”
“Everyone is failing her,” Eliza said afterward, in their bedroom. “Arnold is leaving, forever. Bernard's preoccupied with dying. There's just you and me. She may turn cruel as a cat.”
Bernard collapsed at breakfast. Nito and Katrina and Slivers and Mattie were packed up, getting ready for the drive to the Northern Pacific Railway in Missoula, when Bernard moaned and slipped from his chair. His plate rattled onto the floor, splattering pancakes and maple syrup. Rossie got him under the arms and dragged him down the hall to the bedroom where Lemma was still curled under a down comforter.
She sat up in a plain, flannel gown, vividly alert as Rossie eased Bernard onto the bed beside her. “He's dead,” she said. “Is he dead?”
“He's breathing. He's just out.” As Bernard stirred and muttered, Lemma scurried into the bathroom and emerged prying at the top of a small, rattling vial of pills. Bernard shook his head, his eyes frantic. Sweating and slick-faced, he kept his lips clamped shut when Lemma brought a glass of water.
“Open up,” she said. When he refused, she turned to Rossie. “Blood-pressure pills. He must have forgotten.”
“What do you think?” Rossie said to him. “Those pills cause the fainting?”
Bernard nodded. “Fainting, utterly,” he murmured.
Slivers came into the doorway. “Mop off his face,” he said, bending over Bernard. “Any pain?”
“Nothing,” Bernard muttered. His color was coming back. “Too much Scotch whiskey, and them pills,” Slivers said. “I never did get much help from pills. But we're staying on. That train runs every day or so.”
Steven Fullerman drove down from Missoula that afternoon, unshaved and exhausted, and spent a half hour in the bedroom where Bernard lay quiet and stunned. “The damage report is nil,” he said, when he came out. “Signs are vital. He'll survive, unless the depression persists.”
“Crazy!” Lemma asked. “He's not crazy?”
“Some give up. Fold their hands and quit. People do.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rossie said. “He's not crazy. He's tired.”
“He needs rest,” the doctor said, turning to Betty. “You tend to him and keep them out of that bedroom.” When Lemma thanked him for coming so far, the doctor waved her away. “It's my duty.”
The rest of the day was leftover lamb stew for lunch and a walk in the snow organized by Arnold in early afternoon. Lemma begged off saying she had to watch over Bernard. Eliza, Mattie, and Margie drifted off on their own along a trail above Kanaka Creek with the baby while the remaining men—Rossie, Bill Sweet, Nito, Slivers, Leonard, and Arnold, the six of them in coats and gloves, watch caps and rubber galoshes—straggled up the snowy road in a shuffling pack. “Well, young fellows, if it's not Spain, what will it be?” Arnold asked. “Mares and stallions?”
After a moment of no answering, Leonard said he was going back to Alberta. “Accounting work for the reservations.”
Slivers rolled and lit a cigarette, looking away as if he wasn't talking to any of them. “Tell you something,” he said, then embarked on a life story of gathering cattle off the Nevada deserts in the fall; herding them onto frozen meadows where crews fed them from the haystacks through February; doctoring heifers through a cold, bloody cycle of first births and cutting out two-year-old steers and cull heifers to be shipped on the railroad from Winnemucca to the feed lots in the rice country north of Sacramento; driving dry cows and heifers and the cows with spring-born calves to the deserts in April, followed by purebred bulls to ensure another run of calves the next spring; going out with the wagon to brand on the desert in June and moving the damnable creatures to water when the country dried up in the fall; and, when the snow was about to blow again, gathering off the deserts for another year. “Point is, enough years, and it runs out on you. Same damned things, too many times.”
“That's the personal news,” Arnold said, “behind my leaving for Europe.”
“Keep it in mind,” Slivers said, his eyes on Rossie. “Horses is one thing. Tending other people's property is another.”
The next morning Bernard was dressed and back into himself, so he claimed, insisting on driving them to the train in Missoula the next day.
“Bernard, for God's sake!” Lemma said. “Last afternoon I thought about us, and I was sick of your risking yourself.”
Slivers clapped a hand on Bernard's shoulder, smiling. “I'm not riding with the likes of you at the wheel.”
“You let me do the driving,” Bill Sweet said.
“Like hell, I seen you drive,” Margie said. “Me, I'll drive.”
“Shit, I never seen you drive.”
She smiled. “There's plenty you never seen. I was driving my boyfriend's Ford around Riverside when I was fifteen, all over the place since he was a drunk and couldn't be trusted. Not that you are altogether a drunk. But you can't be trusted.”
As Rossie gathered Nito and Katrina's suitcases to load for the trip to the railroad, Katrina shut the door to their bedroom. “You wait a minute,” she said. “You have to tell me something. This girl, do you love her enough to put up with all this?”
“Suppose so.”
“Don't tell me you suppose so. I'm your mother and I'll tell you something. There'll be bad times and there's one solution. You take her into the bedroom and you come out the bedroom door on the other side of what the trouble was. That's how it has to work.” Rossie tried ducking away but she wouldn't allow it. “You look at me,” she said, “and you look at this bed where your father and I were sleeping.”
“Sure deal. You told me, in that letter you sent to Calgary.”
“Don't you laugh me off. You remember.”
Rossie wondered if his mother truly believed it was possible to fuck your way to happiness, or if she was driven to giving him such opinions in order to explain away the life she had. There was no asking, and he put it from his mind.
Betty came out to see them off. “Spain,” she said to Arnold. “I might want to go with you.”
Arnold nodded like this was not altogether unexpected news. “You and I, we'll stay in touch.”
Whatever mysterious deal they were negotiating lay in the cold air, silencing the others as they finished loading up. Leonard and Margie drove them to Missoula while Bill Sweet stayed behind and did patch-up carpentry on horse stalls in the old barn. Bernard had hired the two of them to live out the winter in the bunkhouse and work for their keep. “Rossie will find your work,” he'd said. “You will be his first hired hands.”
On the railroad platform, Rossie went over to Slivers. “Mattie and me,” he said, “we knew the same things but that was all we knew.”
“Shit,” Slivers said, and he laid one of those hands on Rossie's shoulder. “Wasn't your fault I run you off. Good thing, anyhow. Cowherding don't go anywhere in the long run.”
Katrina took Rossie's hand. “You look at me,” she said, “and you remember.”
The locomotive engineer blew his steam whistle and the drive wheels ground into motion. “It's over,” Lemma said. She was looking off toward the sky over Missoula, smudged by dark smoke from the lumber mills.
“We built a contraption,” Eliza said as she and Rossie made ready for bed. “Pulleys and whistles.” She offered her irony-will-see-us-through smile.
Rossie knew she was talking about the collection of family. “Your mother, she was fixed on Slivers.”
&nb
sp; “Her life is her own fault. She went for it.”
“That's the way you talk about your mother?”
“Sometimes,” Eliza said, staring at herself in the bathroom mirror.
A week later they made a trip to Hamilton to visit the lawyer and sign the papers deeding the brick barn to Rossie. “A family partnership,” Bernard explained to Rossie at breakfast. “It will exist equal in status, if not in the extent of your holdings, with the agreement owned by Lemma and myself.”
Ned Henry, a calm, gray-headed man, sat behind a clean desk in an office with hardwood paneling. Once the introductions were over, Eliza and Bernard sat down with her baby beside her in his portable bassinette, and Rossie remained standing with hands on the backs of their chairs.
“If you think of selling this property, if a thing went wrong …” Ned Henry bridged his fingers. “If Eliza left for New Zealand, and Mr. Benasco elected to go with her, Bernard and Lemma would have first refusal. They could match any reasonable price if you wanted to sell.”
“Don't think it'll be New Zealand,” Rossie said. “Anybody, if he was leaving, would just give it back.”
“I'm used to Scots,” Bernard said. “They're inclined to give nothing back.”
“It comes around to what you'd expect. I might ask,” Ned Henry said, “how do you see your future in the Bitterroot?”
“Eliza and horses, no milking.”
“Horses equal freedom? Eliza means family. Does that add up?”
“Never did the arithmetic,” Rossie said.
“Aren't you young to give up so much of your freedom? I was three years in the Far East, Hong Kong and the like, with the merchant marine. I sometimes wonder who I'd be if I'd stayed there, then I wave that thought away. But it isn't nonsense. I sold my life for this law office, the love of my wife and my children, and this community, my work. Without work, we're nothing.”
“Rossie's had his runaway,” Bernard said. “But that time is over.”
“For Rossie, all this may be premature,” Ned Henry said.
Bernard stared away at the window and shook his head.
“Rossie is married with a child and responsibilities,” Ned Henry said. “He could someday wonder if he was tricked, if he had tricked himself, and think of escaping to a life of his own choosing. So we're simply attempting to get ahead of that idea.” He spread his hands on the desk. “Which gets us around to work. You could work afternoons for me. See if the law takes with you. To begin with, errands and filing. Boring at the start, I'll admit. That said, let's finish the paperwork. See what you think.” Not in this lifetime, Rossie thought, would he work in this office.
The secretary brought a folder containing the stacked deeds. Once the signing was done, the papers swept away, Ned Henry sat back and smiled at Rossie. “You're a man with property. But you have no high school diploma, as I understand it. That can be arranged. You're three years behind your peers. But you've seen something of the world. It might be time to embrace an idea of who you want to be.”
“Dumb is no way to go,” Rossie said. “I know that much.”
“Ambitions are important,” Ned Henry said. “You could start coming to the office at the beginning of February. But be careful. We come to recall the days of youth as the legendary time when we chose our life. An office like this can become everything you know.”
“No shit. Don't doubt it.”
“Perhaps you don't have a lawyer's mind.”
IN THE QUIET HOUSE, AFTER DINNER, LEMMA READ MORE Virginia Woolf aloud. “For you,” she said to Bernard. She began to smile for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and thought, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness.
The next afternoon, Eliza extracted the little photograph of Charlie Cooper from beneath the bed. She wandered the house with it late in the night after fussing over the baby and appeared at breakfast still carrying it, shards of broken glass clinging in the frame.
“Berserk and crazy,” Lemma said. “Angry enough to be evil. He hones in on wreckage, and will bring you down with it if it can.”
“Berserk isn't crazy,” Eliza said. “Or evil. Berserk is overwhelmed by fury or sorrow.” She turned to Rossie. “This is nothing about you, but you're coming with me. You, you're my husband.”
“Where you going?”
“To see him.” She looked away from Rossie like he was not so much dense as beside the point.
Three mornings later, Leonard drove Rossie and Eliza and the baby to catch the eastbound train from Missoula, which they would ride to Deer Lodge. Eliza would show her baby to his blood father. Arrangements had been made.
The prison resembled a stone castle, with crenellated rock walls and guard towers three stories above the main street of what otherwise looked to be a Montana rancher's town, with a scattering of black automobiles parked diagonally to the concrete curbs and women idling at their shopping in a food market but almost no men on this working day.
“You and me,” Rossie said, holding Eliza by the elbow and shuffling the icy sidewalk in black rubber galoshes, “you carrying that baby, we could be just about anybody.”
“We are,” Eliza said.
Inside the first gate, they were shown into separate rooms and searched. A tall, gray-faced guard with watery, brown-flecked eyes grew suspicious when Rossie fished up his knife. The man snapped the main blade open and tested it with his thumb.
“That's an implement you don't take with you,” the guard said. “Blades like that have sliced jugulars in here. We'll hold it.”
“You keep an eye on it,” Rossie said.
“I'll try.”
“You better. Otherwise there's me.”
“What's that to mean?”
“Same thing it always means.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Rossie looked away. He had meant to threaten the man. “Sorry,” he said. “This place gives me the skitters.”
“Worse than that, if you get caught threatening officials. But no mind. It happens with you fellows, they lose their balance.”
Escorted through a series of clanging gates that the guards opened with antique keys, Rossie followed Eliza down echoing corridors to more gates and eventually into Charlie Cooper's presence. They were directed to sit on a bare bench in a cramped chamber, facing a portal blocked by steel bars that separated them from a rock-walled room. Charlie Cooper sat well back from them, in the isolated center of the holding cell. A uniformed guard with smooth jowls, absorbed in a pulp magazine called Western Action, sat looking down onto Charlie from a third chamber. “Do not pass anything back and forth,” he said in a quiet voice, then turned back to his raggedy magazine.
Charlie Cooper was indeed the man in those photographs, except that his head had been shaved. On the side of his skull, a tiny swirl of tattoo depicted a dark-feathered bird spreading its wings above his left ear.
“Here he is,” Eliza said, displaying the baby. “Your son. His name is Teddy Blue.”
Charlie Cooper shook his head. “Black and Blue? He's not mine, he's yours. A quarter-breed who'll wish he was pure. You see me? You see my eyes are open? You see I'm past hating. I'll be out. I'll want to be dealt a hand.”
“Pure?” Eliza asked.
“Pure white, that's what he'll want. Unless he's crazy.”
“Would you like to kiss him?” Eliza offered. “I imagine you kissing him.”
The guard looked up from his reading. “Not allowed.”
“They think I might bite him,” Charlie Cooper said. “They think I'm a wolf.” He smiled as if this was something he had been waiting to announce. “My son someday will love me and kiss me. You'll see it. Under these floors they lock me in alone. I tell myself stories about fishing with my mother and my grandfather, Kicking Goose, and cooking trout with onions and spuds. I wash the frying pan. The story lasts all night.” Charlie's eyes flashed with amusement. “Dog time. Everyb
ody does dog time.” He looked to Rossie. “You got her, and I got dreams about onions and spuds. But you're the same as me.”
“Trying to be our own luck,” Rossie said because he needed to say something. “Most things don't amount to shit. We know that. They don't amount to a goddamn.”
“You want to be my friend,” Charlie Cooper said, “but you don't know anything. How could you? You don't see anybody who don't love you.” He spread his hands. “One day I'll be out. You'll see me.”
“What's that bird mean?” Rossie asked. “On your skull.”
“It means I'm not like you.”
“You're just like us,” Eliza said.
“Nope. In here, we're junkyard people, dead if we do and dead if we don't.”
“I brought money,” Eliza said.
“Thought you would. That's your job. We're not stupid. Some of us, we been counting on your money, soon as I heard you were coming. I told people she's money in the bank. How much?”
Eliza folded three ten-dollar bills together and tossed them inside the bars, where they floated onto the concrete floor.
“That's handsome.” Charlie stood and bowed. “That's it? Enough.”
“Sit,” the guard said.
Abruptly, Charlie crouched on his knees, head down, as if he might be ill.
The guard laid down his reading. “Back on the bench,” he said. “Sit.” Charlie looked up. “I'm praying.”
“Sit.”
“I'm praying that you can swallow shit.” Charlie came to his feet, poised there a moment with hands down in his trousers, then growled and charged toward the guard in his barred window. He had fished a toilet-paper roll filled with shit out of his pants as he crouched, and it was shit he was hurling, shit splattering on the walls and even on the guard.
A clanging bell was ringing and Baby Teddy began to shriek. Three men in yellow shirts banged the door open and rushed in, cautious for a moment as they eyed Charlie before one of them circled around to tackle him on the slick concrete floor, and the others batted at him with lead-weighted saps until he went quiet and Rossie thought he was dead. Blood streamed from his shaved head as they dragged him, his skull just bouncing on the floor, trailing blood. When the steel door slammed behind them Rossie found himself standing, grasping the bars, while Eliza clutched her wailing baby and the guard mopped at his own long face.
The Willow Field Page 26