The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “Let's forget Charlie,” Eliza said. “Forever.”

  “When they carried me off that bluff and the machine guns were rattling away, I thought about Slivers. They'll never get to me again.” Into his latest scrapbook Teddy pasted photographs of gray-faced Rossie with his shoulder in bandages alongside newspaper clippings of one-armed Charlie Cooper. Then, a note from Nito: I deal cards like I thought I wanted to do, but my job is looking for cheats and I sure as hell wouldn't recommend a steady diet of that. Stay with what you care for.

  “He couldn't get himself to write about love,” Eliza said.

  Along with recurring dreams of fleeing and being unable to escape, Rossie was inflicted with a sense of having been eager and more than willing to murder—he killed men in dreams that were impossible to recall at daybreak, when nothing remained but a guilt that felt true and earned.

  Eliza said the dreams were an infection and would cure naturally, but on the lanai at three in the morning, breathing the cool night air and eyeing the black infinities of ocean beyond the lights of Honolulu, Rossie told her that the dreams were coming to him from another life.

  “Somebody's memories crossed up with mine.”

  “That's crazy.”

  IN THE FALL OF 1946, MUSTERED OUT OF THE MARINES AND HEADING home to the Bitterroot on railway trains from southern California, Rossie felt the idea of admitting his state of mind was as frightening as his dreams. Label yourself a misfit and there you were, a misfit staring out a Pullman window to the harvested farmlands north of Eugene.

  “Shuffle the deck,” Eliza said, “and draw another card.”

  Bernard and Lemma greeted them at the station. After Bernard's handshake and the hugging and tears, they rode down the Bitterroot Valley in a brand-new, yellow Buick convertible, and shared the evening meal of osso bucco. The day seemed to Rossie a distant enactment of a movie.

  When Bernard finally said, “Now, tell us in detail about your war,” Rossie shook his head and went off as if bound for the bathroom. He ducked into Eliza's apartment, pulled off his boots, tucked himself away into their bed, and was happy to awaken far after midnight with Eliza breathing softly beside him. He hadn't dreamed of anything he could recall.

  Bill Sweet and Margie were married. She spent her mornings sorting post office mail in Hamilton, and Bill was a changed creature, a hardhanded country man who had gotten used to seeing that Bernard's work was done. “You got it back,” he said. “The whole show.”

  Rossie took a deep breath and thought what to answer. Bill Sweet with good reason had to hate the fact that Rossie was automatically taking back his job. Bill had to hate the fact that his work through the war had earned him nothing permanent. “We'll bring in some young horses,” Rossie said. “Two for each one of us. We been friends since Eagleville, nineteen thirty-four.”

  Bill Sweet didn't answer.

  Down in the corrals beside his brickwork barn, Rossie touched at his Cahill mare, thankful for this remnant of life. It was evidence like this that saved him in the months to come. Things began to solidify, and he escaped his quaking fearfulness.

  Then, in the spring, a pencil-written letter from Vernon O'Hearn made its way to Rossie's hand though it was simply addressed to Ross Benasco, Hamilton, Montana. Ross, if I had let you shoot then I'd have as much to live down as you do. This is to let you know I'm praying.

  Weeks later, into a third shot of Scotch with Bernard in his study, Rossie said, “You know about me.”

  Bernard said that indeed he did and reminded Rossie that he had suffered a collapse of his own in Chicago. “Staying busy is central in any cure. Focus on accomplishments. Maintain objectivity.”

  Rossie took Bill Sweet on a driving trip to the Sacramento Valley, where they brought four warm-blooded colts. With Bill loaded on the train with the horses, to feed and mind them during the trip to Montana, Rossie thought maybe he'd be lulled into peace by driving back alone.

  But it wasn't roads or horses or any abstract idea like trust which got Rossie moving toward the restoration of his nerves. It was sitting up late in motel rooms on the trip and by Eliza's side after he got home, reading about the Montana fur trade of the 1830s in a novel called The Big Sky. The writer was A. B. Guthrie, a middle-aged fellow from Choteau whom Rossie had seen sitting alone in the Florence Hotel barroom in Missoula. As he suffered through Guthrie's book and wondered how much time a man had to spend paying attention in the country where he lived to know such detail, Rossie began understanding who he himself had become. The men in the novel—in their confusions in that wilderness they were like Bob Waters in the mountains beyond Banff, and like anybody. Rossie wondered if Bob Waters still regretted the loss of the woman who had been his wife and if that kind of thing was something you were bound never to get over. Women and horses, he thought, were sides of the same coin, cures for desolation.

  Eliza hooted when he tried the idea on her. “Women? Who need to be placated with babies and diamond earrings. It's a pleasure, watching you try to think.”

  On the advice of Bernard, who told him he needed to focus on “rationality,” Rossie in early 1947 read of commercial speculators trying to take over the federal lands across the west, including the national parks. A man named Bernard De Voto wrote in Harper's magazine that an economy in the West would have to be based on the natural resources of the West, developed and integrated to produce a steady, sustained, permanent yield. The region, De Voto wrote, was moving to destroy the natural resources forever. The future of the West hinges on whether it can defend itself against itself. This was an idea that resonated with Rossie. Dam the rivers, strip-mine the hills, clear-cut the forests, wreck the beauties, and they'll never come back.

  “Not in a lifetime,” Rossie would say. He read De Voto aloud at the breakfast table. “Defend what you love,” Eliza said. “That's what he's saying.”

  “Simple as that,” Bernard said. “There you'll find your intentions.”

  “Your true story,” Eliza added, and it sounded like she meant it.

  “At the moment I'm paying attention to this man Marshall,” Bernard said in June, talking with a New York newspaper in his hands. Outdated by a week upon its arrival by train, the paper reported on a speech that Secretary of State George C. Marshall had given at Harvard, advocating a plan to restore “the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries.” Secretary Marshall proposed giving billions of dollars in aid to European nations, thus, Bernard said, “reinventing generosity. Restoring trust to the world.”

  Bernard theatrically drummed his fingers, in his pose of the rational man considering. “We, all of us, should be thinking of how to reinvent trust. Without trust we're hopeless. That's my experience. Trust. There's your cure.”

  It was an intimation of purpose. Rossie woke one August morning to realize he hadn't dreamed in weeks, or wasn't remembering. He moved slowly through that day and the days after, as if hurrying might bring back his dread. Years later, he'd sit up entangled in sheets and shrug dreams away, still tempted to think that these terrors came to him from some other ruined life. The dreams, he'd say, laughing to cover his uneasiness, were “someone else's bad movie.”

  In early September Bill Sweet announced that he and Margie had been asking around for months and had found a job managing the horseback work on the old Battle Creek, a historic ranch out on the eastern Montana prairies beyond the Little Rockies. “This Bitterroot is gone to pony farms,” Bill Sweet said. “But come the end of September I'm going to be my own boy over in that big country. They do it the old way. That's the idea, isn't it? Be your own boy.”

  “You're kind gimpy for a boy,” Rossie said.

  “You and me can visit back and forth. That's my idea.”

  It was an idea that sounded like it might keep them healed. There was nothing to argue about. “Bernard could put up some money. You could run brood mares,” Rossie said. “That way we could have excuses to visit.”

  But they didn't, not fo
r most of two decades.

  By October Rossie had sold four of what he called “gentle-broke” horses, animals he'd picked up around in the Bitterroot just that spring and worked with for only four months, three to women who just loved to ride and one to a realtor from Hamilton who made a hobby of competing in small-town roping events in Montana. “Good idea to show some income,” he told Eliza, “or Bernard might be shutting me down at the money tree.”

  “Did you ask Bernard about that? He's not going to shut you down, and you know it. You didn't do it for Bernard. You did it for yourself, so you could be your own man, selling horses like Bobby.”

  Which was true when he gave it serious thought, and a surprise. Man ought to grow up eventually and trade with other men. He'd been building his horse deal and sometimes the going was slow, he had to admit it. With nothing else to do throughout the short, overcast afternoons of that winter he drew sketches of a barn that would enclose a circular corral where he and the horses could stay in out of the snow while he worked. While he felt lucky each day as his craziness slept, he knew that merely biding time was no way to go. He needed full-time work year-round and to work with others—Bobby Cahill was a loner but Rossie wasn't, he needed companions in the work, somebody to talk to in the barn and corrals. So he listened to Eliza and in April brought in two wild-haired young men from the Crow Reservation over southeast of Billings, paying them little but promising to educate them in Bobby Cahill's art of gentling horses, skills that would find them work wherever they might settle. It became a tradition, and such men would come and go, year after year, summering in tents by the creek and putting up through the winter in the old cookhouse. “I got my degree from Bobby Cahill,” he'd tell them. “Good as college. I pay for the food, you do your own cooking, and don't do no drinking. You boys will get your degree from me.”

  But in the waning days of the next summer Rossie's sense of trust—if that was what he was relearning—was severely tested. A former communist named Whittaker Chambers had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was a spy for the Stalinist communists. News of this sent Bernard into a tirade.

  “Turncoats and informers,” Bernard said as he and Lemma were heading out on a walk. “We're turning Nazi.” Stomping along beside an irrigation ditch between chest-high rows of flowers in the garden, he lifted his arms and shouted, with what seemed to be mock anger. “Un-American activities? There can be no un-American activities. This is a democracy.”

  He then convulsed and grimaced, took two stumbling steps, and tumbled sidelong into a flowing ditch.

  Rossie heard the keening cries, the wailing, and found Lemma herself down in the ditch in her yellow dress, muddy and soaking, with Bernard's head in her lap. “So heavy,” she gasped after Rossie got her out of the muck and piled the slippery and ungainly deadness of the thing that had been Bernard into a wheelbarrow. “His head,” she whispered. She was panting like an animal, hovering as Rossie maneuvered the wheelbarrow along paths between banks of red and yellow roses.

  Only days after Bernard was buried at the foot of the All Frogs Pole, Eliza reached to Rossie in their bed, murmuring and consenting, and eight weeks later he wasn't surprised when she announced at breakfast that she was pregnant. The fucking cure, he thought, which leads to the child—that cure. But he never said such things to Eliza.

  On a chilly, clear, bluebird afternoon in October, while he was currying a new bay mare brought in from Nebraska, Rossie was surprised by Lemma in the open doorway of the barn, her back to the sun. The light shone through a gauzy black dress, silhouetting her long legs.

  “I had to get out,” she said. “I came to find someone who smells like a man.” Her smile was not in the least uncertain. “Once you did us both a favor. You didn't go after me when I asked for it. But Eliza's pregnant again and even widows get horny.”

  Rossie lifted the curry comb between them, but she came in under his arm.

  “Right now,” she said. “Can you smell my horniness?”

  Rossie took her by the shoulders and held her away. “Sure can,” he said. “I can smell. Not now.”

  “Not ever. You're afraid to sink your princely ship. You always have been.”

  He was indeed the one who was afraid.

  She studied him, then pulled away. “Who could blame you? This is what you've got. It's all you're going to get. Why risk it? But you should know that marriage is a mirage, a movie. You should have got me but now I don't want it.”

  “The last time this happened—you should know this—I jerked off thinking about you. All over my belly, more than once.”

  “Now you'll do it again.”

  Over breakfast at a table set up outdoors beside the All Frogs Pole, he tried recounting this to Eliza. “Your mother, she's suffering. She tells me marriage is a mirage. Like the whole world is a ghost to her.”

  Eliza was looking past him at a tiny, dark-headed hummingbird, and Rossie sat regarding her silence, remembering that time years before when Lemma had propositioned him. Eliza had shrugged it away after asking if he'd complied, as if the chance that her husband was enjoying her mother might be a practical problem, perhaps permissible once in a while if they kept it quiet but not as a regular thing. As if only when such a thing became regular would it have to be dealt with. He was beginning to suspect that women and men together, families, were always a conspiracy. It was a thought he hated and put from his mind until that night in bed.

  Eliza came to him breathless and began stroking at him. “There'll always be secrets,” she whispered, “but we can have this. If we're careful, if you ease it into me, we can do it—even while this baby grows in my belly.” As they progressed, Rossie managed to turn his mind from imagining Lemma.

  In late May 1949, fifteen years after the agonies of Teddy's debut into the world, Eliza gave birth to a gray-eyed girl they named Veronica in a moment of frivolity, after the actress Veronica Lake. Rossie held the baby and said she smelled like flowers although she didn't. He said miracle cures might not be necessary if distractions like this one came along.

  “Cures?” Eliza snorted. “I've been run over by a train.”

  Rossie tried his big grin. “Baby,” he said, “you've been long-cocked.”

  She regarded him solemnly for a moment, shook her head, and turned back to her newborn. “Your own blood child,” she murmured.

  “The blood of your passing goes through you into your child,” Rossie said, smiling like this was a joke. “That's how Bernard would say you stay in the world. Always sounded like bullshit to me. I'm just going to keep an eye on this girl and see how she's going to be.”

  Eliza looked up, finally smiling. “That can be one of your jobs.”

  Rossie hadn't finished high school, but he'd been entirely convinced by Bernard's claim that a useful person “necessarily” operated on the basis of knowledge. Rossie had counted on another twenty years of learning from those evenings over Scotch and despised his own ignorance, which seemed a perpetual impediment to the assiduous urge to be more than he was.

  At the poker game in the back room of a dance hall just north of Hamilton, Rossie chanced to be seated beside a university professor named Otto Nelson, who was locally famous for huge lecture classes in Montana history at the university. Balding and blade-thin, he was renowned for going out each day, into every Montana environment, dressed in a pinstriped suit from New York.

  “Bernard Stevenson's son-in-law, that's who you are,” Nelson said through the smoke hanging in the glare of the low-hanging light over the table. “Bernard was a beauty. If Montana had any sense, Bernard would have been governor. Think of the governor asking us to Helena for evenings in his mansion. French food and ‘le jazz hot’ and talk of the Scottish renaissance? Let's have a drink to Bernard.” Otto smiled. “Then, perhaps, another one after that.”

  Two weeks later they spent an evening in Missoula over dinner, during which Otto Nel
son quizzed Rossie on whether “authentic Spanish horsemanship” was displayed by Nevada and California vaqueros. They drifted into friendship, and by fall Rossie was driving to Missoula two afternoons a week to sit in on Nelson's lectures.

  With ironic humor and smiling distaste, the historian dissected mindless conquest and colonization—the lurid injustices brought onto the native peoples and then the settlers—first by the ruthless, racist military and then by the rampant, oligarchic powers of mining and logging corporations. He would smirk in his practiced way, then go on to evoke the details of this corruption—”yellow arsenic fogs hang in the air over Butte, children struggle for life while the air they breathe goes on killing them, wealthy men gaze over the heads of snot-nosed children at play in the muddy streets.”

  After lecturing, Otto led Rossie off to martinis in the art deco confines of the old Florence Hotel lobby—where Rossie had once spotted the writer A. B. Guthrie sitting alone over his own martini. It was now redecorated with brass and hardwoods and renamed The Clark Fork: A Tavern. Rossie told him of Eliza with the Blood Indians along the Bow River, and this talk led Otto to musing on the Spanish mustangs drifting north across the interior in the 1700s and native men on the Plains who then enjoyed a glorious century, chasing horseback after buffalo and one another until the buffalo vanished.

  William Hornaday's expedition from the Smithsonian in 1886 had killed the last wild bison, Otto explained. They sent heads and hides and bones to the museum, in order to save the bison.

  That remark generated another round of martinis.

  When Rossie recounted Bernard's fatal fury after Whittaker Chambers's performance before the House Committee, Otto shook his head. “ ‘Un-American.’ That's nonsense. But it's a long way from Montana. I don't care anymore.” Obviously, he did care. “I've escaped, and prize nothing but friendship.” He looked up and smiled in his thin way. “If that isn't fucked.”