A stocky man sporting a dark, buttoned-up suit and a thin necktie had come into the room behind them. “Out of here,” he said. His hand felt hard as iron when he took hold of Rossie's arm and they went out before him, as Eliza said later, “Like lambs.”
The warden escorted them along the echoing, concrete hallways. “Don't come back,” he told them.
“They got to get my knife,” Rossie said.
At the entrance, a different guard handed the knife to the warden, who leered at Rossie.
“This it?” Rossie nodded, but when he reached for his knife, the warden opened the long blade and tested it on his thumb, then moved to a doorway, slipped the blade into the crack between the door and the jamb and snapped it off.
“Illegal weapon,” he said, offering Rossie the ruined bone handle that remained. “What do you think of that?”
“Shit,” Rossie said. There was not a thing to do but throw a fit and then he'd be in there with Charlie. “You taught me a lesson,” he said finally. “Never trust no jailer.”
“I do anything necessary,” the man said. “You keep that in mind. But you're a civilized man.”
“What does civilized mean? Chickenshit?”
The jailer smiled. “It means you're too sensible to cut your own throat when you'd like to be cutting mine.”
“Chickenshit.”
“Me,” Eliza said, as they paused on the icy snow outside Deer Lodge Prison, “I'm going to be ready when Charlie comes.” Her face was pale in the snowy, gray light. “We'll be barricaded.” After they'd walked a block toward the railroad station, she stopped again. “Our hearts ought to be broken. You've seen a man who's been overwhelmed, where it gets him.”
“Them walls,” Rossie said. “Jailers, they lead shithead lives.” He knew this sounded pathetic and insufficient.
They waited three hours in the Deer Lodge station in silence broken only when the baby whimpered and Eliza gave comfort. On the clacking ride home Rossie dreamed of horses running under a flashing storm, and awoke as the train began clattering beside the Clark Fork, approaching Missoula. “I was dreaming about horses,” he told Eliza. “Horses going batshit.”
“You sound like you lost something.”
“Boy on a train.”
“We saw something awful,” she said.
And we don't know the cure, Rossie thought. Or how much we should give a shit.
Before midnight they were off the train and checked into a room in the Florence Hotel, a room overlooking Higgins Avenue and the frozen Clark Fork River. Toward daybreak, while Eliza and the baby were sleeping, Rossie stood looking out at to snow blowing along the cold streets and down the icy river in waves and tried to recall exactly how stocking-footed bays and the blacks and sorrels and blue roans looked on a dew-heavy morning, grazing in the willow fields outside Eagle ville.
When Eliza awoke and rolled onto her side, Rossie turned to face her. “What if I went to Spain?”
Eliza rolled her eyes, then went attentive, like a bird he was to think, and he would remark on this likeness time and again during those years as the war came toward them.
“I'd be hell on wheels,” he whispered.
“You're with me,” she said.
“Monkey in a cage,” he answered. But Eliza was looking past him. “I'm a little bit serious,” he went on whispering. “Men like Charlie and that prison warden will run you down if you don't let things go their way. They'd kill you and me if it came to that. There's people who would. Makes me think I ought to do something.”
“Try to get some sleep. Let's act like we don't know what all that implies,” Eliza said. “There won't be any answer in Spain, not for a boy like you. Not for you and me.”
“Probably not, I guess, for anybody.”
PART THREE
AFTER DEER LODGE, ROSSIE VALUED EVEN MORE THAN BEFORE his time with his Bobby Cahill mare named Katrina. “We're a secret story,” he told Eliza, “me and her.”
Eliza made a clown's face. “Isn't that the problem? Secret stories?”
“Does everything need to be a problem? What if my secret is about an afternoon without bullshit.”
She looked genuinely surprised. “Who are you? Can you tell me?” Rossie forced a grinning, boyish, mock lewdness. “You,” he said. “You're my secret.”
“See there. Maybe all your secrets are fuck-me jokes.”
“Don't count it out.” He quit grinning. “I go down to the Tail-feather Field and lope along on with Katrina. It's my idea of fancy. I got secrets. When I'm out with that little horse I don't want nothing to do with a lawyer's office in Hamilton. But I don't tell you and I don't tell Bernard. That's another secret.”
“I'm glad to know. It's news Bernard can swallow, too. Holding secrets is like poison. Get them out of your system or end up like Charlie.”
“Missus preacher is telling me to puke up,” Rossie said. “So fine.”
Over dinner he blurted out the news that he didn't think he was up for shuffling papers in a lawyer's office. Bernard sat poised with a dab of spinach on his fork. He seemed curious.
“Is your willingness to say no a thing you learned at Deer Lodge Prison?” he asked, finishing the bite of spinach. “If so, your trip was worth it.”
“Partway,” Rossie said. “Partways got from a woman.”
Bernard smiled. “I congratulate you. Learning from women is not easy.” This was clearly meant to be a man-to-man joke, and Bernard was beaming at his own humor. “I, too, have my own announcement. Persuaded by a woman, I've scheduled my prostate operation for Groundhog Day. I'll hope to see my own shadow.”
By late March Bernard had suffered through. He'd gone into St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula with depressed determination and five days later emerged in jaunty spirits. “Alive and kicking,” he said, as Rossie wheeled him out to the Buick. “Don't have to spread my legs to piss.”
“Bernard,” Lemma said, “you are indeed such a sweet asshole.”
“They haven't,” Bernard said, “gotten rid of me. It must be spring fever. My fleas are jumping.”
Lawyers came to the house, and he closed a deal on a hundred acres of plow ground on Fever Creek, half a mile south from the big house.
“Water rights and a homesteader orchard, level land, garden plots. An answer to Eliza's fever for good works.”
By mid-April Rossie was out on that land, plowing with a platter-footed team of yellow Belgians. Leonard had put the word around in Canada, and Blood Indians were said to be coming. “Native farmers,” Bernard said at dinner. “We'll hope there are such a people.”
“A year ago I was horseback, going to Canada. Now I'm plowing hobby farms,” Rossie mused. “Don't know if that's forwards or backwards.”
Eliza told him to pull up his socks, but his weather didn't turn until a May morning when he was nailing together tent house frames alongside the garden plots and spotted a hawk-faced man, three old women, and a half dozen kids watching him from a mule-drawn wagon. They'd come from Browning and within a day were raking the fine Bitterroot loam and planting carrots and beets in long, meandering rows. A cook fire smoldered for the cutthroat trout the runny-nosed kids were hooking out of Fever Creek. “That Lester Ben,” Rossie said of the hawk-faced man that night. “Lester's like me except he don't get a shot of single malt at sundown.”
“Do you think that's a joke?” Eliza scolded. “His life is infinitely more difficult than yours.”
“Yes, Mrs. Mammy, I thought it was a joke.” It was true, he had.
Another wagonload of people arrived, having traveled hundreds of miles from the Blood Reserve in Alberta. “Teddy, my boy,” Rossie whispered to the baby, “we got our work cut out for us.”
Then after four families they stopped coming. “Not many Indians are interested in farming,” Leonard wrote. “The anthropologists say farming for Indians is a trick, by what Marx called the ruling class, to corral them into menial labor, a form of imprisonment once they've been done out of their homeland
s. They know it, and know they'd rather be running horses. So would anyone. I've had to stop recommending your ‘farm.’ “
“Not so many of anybody is interested in farming anyway,” Rossie said.
Eliza answered defeat by searching out Piegan grandmothers, bundling up Baby Teddy, and traveling in the Model A to the east side of the Rockies.
“We visit and talk and I listen” she said. “They tell me I'm a patronizing do-gooder, and I ask them, ‘Who else do you have?’ and we laugh.” Eventually she persuaded Bernard to buy a former bunkhouse in Browning, which she then turned over to those grandmothers, who in turn converted it into a home for young women with pregnancies and no tribal location to harbor them or any man to stand up for them. Eliza called it a place to practice “jointedness and connection.” The tribes since “time immemorial” had done so, as well as European generations who had labored for centuries building cathedrals and caring for the mad and the dispossessed. She bought other houses in Missoula and Great Falls and Billings. Raising money to support them became, Eliza said, her “business life.”
“You and me, Mr. Teddy Blue,” Rossie said. “Maybe, we get a hustle on, we could be her real business.”
But Rossie's initial inclination toward the horses soon turned to what Bernard called “the checkbook work.” With his father-in-law's blessing and access to his funds, along with a strict accounting, Rossie was sent on trips to public and private sales in the Bitterroot, then throughout western Montana and over east on the prairies, to old cow towns like Miles City. His major responsibility in all this, according to Bernard, was “to observe and learn to evade the hustlers, to tell a genuine enthusiasm from nonsense among horse traders and hobby riders.” This travel culminated in a week-long trip to the Sand Hill country of Nebraska, followed by another to the Tulare Basin in the central valley of California, where Rossie bought two three-year-old geldings and had them shipped home to the Bitterroot for him and Bill Sweet to work with the next spring.
Bill Sweet and Margie were established in a small house next to the highway and went out each morning to tend whatever work there was, mending the fences and caring for the young horses in the Tailfeather Field. One evening in early autumn, Bill Sweet put on a clean shirt and knocked at the door of the main house. What he was after, Bill Sweet said, was business talk.
“You and me good enough friends for this?” he said to Rossie, then went on without waiting for an answer. “Margie and me talked. Looks like you're skipping the main thing. You got us a couple of horses. But you and me, we don't know what we're doing. You better ought to see this Bobby Cahill, if he'll teach you, and you can educate me. That's what I got to say.”
That talk was irrefutable. Rossie called Nevada and talked to Malinda and caught up with her legendary husband a week later.
“Malinda tells me you're trying to be a man who makes sense,” Bobby Cahill shouted into the phone. “I'm taking her word. What I got is a three-year-old gelding—big hot-blooded, quarter-horse kid with quick enough moves, colored red. I can sell him to you, and you can come down here and learn to get him started. You want to come down here, you got to buy this horse. That way, you fuck him up, you don't leave me with a crazy red horse.”
“Red?” Rossie asked.
“What the fuck does red have to do with anything? You superstitious?”
Rossie got right off that topic. “Thought you was breeding Morgans to long-jointed traveling mares.”
“Them was remuda horses, for the ranches,” Cahill said. “These days it's roping horses. Thought it was roping horses you were after.”
By early October, Rossie had traveled to Nevada, where he found Bobby Cahill batching it in a thick-walled stone house that was cool and dark as a cavern. The faded linoleum was worn through at the kitchen sink and the cast-iron wood stove—all of it similarly old and used—but every lick of it, each spoon and cup, was immaculately clean.
“You got to spend a half hour every day mopping and cleaning,” Bobby Cahill said. “Or you won't amount to shit.”
There was no sign of Malinda. Bobby shrugged and said she was bound to show up at some point.
“You won't be missing her,” Bobby said. “You're going to have enough to think about with that horse.”
And it was true. Rossie was watching and listening daybreak-to-dark in the willow-walled corrals, wondering if he really could learn to think like a horse as it tried to make sense of what a slow-spoken man might possibly want.
“Man has a contract,” Bobby told him, dumping catsup over fried-ham-and-egg sandwiches the first morning. “Contract with his horse. You can't force him to do anything worth a damn. A horse has got to think that you are with him in playing the game together.” He tapped his knife on the faded, blue-pattern oilcloth.
“That mare of mine you got locked up in a barn, there in Montana. That's pure foolishness. Horses don't like it all the time alone any better than you do. She isn't going to be worth a shit if you're not careful. You know why? Because she's going to think you're the jailer, the man with the key. Horse don't work for some jailer, he works with you or you got nothing. Horses and women, if they're not ruined by mistreatment, they love good work. Nobody picks on a woman or a horse if I'm around. Man who beats on one of my horses is beating on me. I find out, I'll kick his ass. If I'm old and can't get the job done, I'll hire somebody who can. I make it clear when I sell a horse: You don't own my Bobby Cahill horses. You work with them like they's your partner and going to be all your life. You study them like they might be your wife. Each horse has got his own ways. Take your time and study each one like you're studying a woman. That's the deal. Rest of the shit will take care of itself.”
Rossie devoted those bright October days to reading the look in his gelding's eyes, the implications of the way he set his ears.
“Horses are like ballplayers,” Bobby Cahill said. “Some of them got more spring than others, some are smarter. You're always hoping to find one who can do anything. But mostly you don't.” He lifted his big hands and studied them, then looked up to Rossie with a vivid, off-center light in his eyes. “One-of-a-kind is what we want. Springy and well-knit, with pretty actions. Ordinary horses, they can be sweethearts and you love ‘em, but they can't get the job done. Swaybacks and high withers or them stick-necked boys, they can't do it. Simple enough, they don't have the right muscles. They know they won't do any good at roping, so you got to treat them right or they can sulk up and act like assholes, same as you and me.” Rossie was wondering how his red gelding stacked up in this game.
“Piggy eyes and Roman noses was born stupid and stubborn. Your fine horse is smart enough to be interested in what you're showing him. He trusts you and stays so busy studying what you're doing that he can't be bothered with any meanness—unless you fuck him up, which is a criminal shame. Putting your claim on a horse is like hiring and firing. You always want to hire men who can build better fence corners than you ever could, fellows who understood the work before you was born even though they may drink too much. But they also got to be smart enough to know who is the boss and that you'll fire ‘em before breakfast if they start trying to take over. Six parts of training horses is finding the good ones to start with.”
“What's the other parts?”
“There's only one. Letting your horses figure out that you want them to be having a good time. You learn to talk so they know clear-through what you mean and that you mean it. They don't understand, it's your fault. You got to stay ahead and wait for ‘em. Come trouble, you got to know what they're thinking and why they back off from whatever it is you've got them doing. If you're too dumb to figure it out, you ought to enlist in the Army. If one set of thinking don't sell, you got to stop and turn it around and try getting to the same place from another direction.”
The days were repetitive and sometimes boring. On Bobby's instruction Rossie sat in the barn watching a black, three-year-old mare with the habit of squalling back and snapping halter ropes. “You're go
ing to be friends with this lady,” Bobby said, as he tied her into an empty stall with a single strand of baler twine. Rossie waited until she jerked back and snapped the baler twine, then gave her ten or so minutes to think over the idea that she was still alone in that empty stall before going in and retying her with more baler twine. On the afternoon of the second day, she stopped breaking twine, and Rossie returned every hour to feed her carrots for being good.
“She's getting it,” Bobby said. “Or maybe not. Anyhow, this is how we get the work done. One clear thing at a time, day after day.”
After a week, and running a few dozen calves through the roping arena, with Rossie missing the catch more times than not, Bobby called a halt.
“This party is over,” Bobby said. “Beats me how you can go out buying horses if you don't know none of what I been telling you.”
“I got a couple of decent ones,” Rossie said. “Beginner's luck.”
“Must have been,” Bobby said. “Trouble is you, throwing a piss-poor loop. Your horse has got to see you do the catching, they got to feel the loop in the air. A calf on the line is like a trout. The horse loves it like you do. If they bust a gut and get you into position, you got to make the catch most every time, or the horse will get disgusted. Just like if you throw me the baseball and I don't catch it, game goes to hell in a hurry. What you got to do is buy a half dozen of those Mexican roping steers out of Sonora, and have them shipped up to you on the railroad early next spring by the time the mud goes dry. You turn ‘em out of a roping chute all summer and learn to rope so you never miss. If you can catch them little rabbit bastards you can catch anything. Then you come back down here in the fall and we'll talk horses. I'll keep that red horse through the winter.”
The Willow Field Page 27