The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  But the semester was ending. Rossie wondered if their meetings would continue. Then, after dinner one evening shortly before Christmas, the telephone rang.

  “It's your friend Professor Nelson,” Eliza said.

  “Indeed,” Otto Nelson said, “‘your friend.’” He was calling to invite Rossie and Eliza to his annual New Year's Day party. “You will be fresh blood,” he said. “We're killing the fatted calf in honor of 1950.”

  Otto's parties were understood in Missoula to be resplendent events, so Eliza bought a new dress, dark purple with silver stripes, and Rossie wore a necktie. Three blocks from the oval brickwork entrance to the university, Otto lived in what passed for an old-money mansion, the historic, three-story Buckingham House, built in the 1880s. Otto greeted them at the door and kissed Eliza's hand. “High time,” he said, ignoring Rossie. “A beauty arrives.”

  “This, isn't it the famous house?” Eliza asked.

  “It's true. A governor shot himself here. Bad drugs. But we have good booze. And the will to consume. Get on to the bar, and introduce yourselves to the citizens.”

  The atmosphere of the huge room was that of a public museum, with great, dark oil paintings of western vistas, buffalo and steer heads mounted on pale-yellow walls, hardwood floors beneath Turkish carpets, ancient chairs and sofas covered in tanned zebra and spotted-leopard skins, a grizzly's hide with head attached and fangs exposed, and buffalo robes bought long ago from the remnant tribes. A bartender in a white coat was telling a run of Okie and Arkie jokes to fellows with full, graying beards down over their vests, and to students, at least two of whom were in possession of marijuana, the odor of which eventually drifted up from the basement.

  Remarkably, after their decades in Montana, Rossie and Eliza found that the “citizens” were mostly strangers. They were rescued by Otto's wife, Marion Overlook, who had kept her maiden name into this third marriage. Tall and pale-eyed, she wore great diamonds on her lean, dark fingers. “You two,” she said, coming through the crowd at the bar, “must be Benascos. I'm the slave Otto calls Maid Marion.” She gave Rossie an ironic look. “Otto tells me you have a history with martinis.” She ordered their drinks accordingly, winking as she handed them the conical glasses.

  “It's a mistake to throw a party and know everybody. You two are my saving grace.” Then she was gone, supervising the placement of baked cheeses and smoked turkeys, hams spiral-sliced on the bone, and steaming mounds of asparagus.

  Hours had gone by when Otto whispered to Rossie. “Nobody will be left but for kids smoking dope in the basement with Marion. Stick around.”

  The three of them, Rossie and Eliza and Otto, settled in a room walled by glass-faced cases of books while the hired help went on with cleaning up in the public rooms. “Here we have it,” Otto said. “The scholar, his wife's money, the brick house on the best street in a backwoods town full of third-rate university intellectuals blabbing away. The rewards of choosing a minor field.”

  “Minor?” Eliza asked.

  Otto swirled his brandy. “The famous West.” Marion appeared. “I've come to think of our romance as a cowboy drama. I let him bring me out to Missoula in the summer for a look around, and said yes. There was enough I wanted to get away from and this was a place for escaping. Why couldn't it have been a man who loved Tuscany?”

  Weeks later, Eliza asked about Marion's money. “First husband,” Otto said. “Petroleum in the early days. Pennsylvania.”

  In February 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he asserted he knew of more than two hundred communists in the State Department. Otto claimed to have privileged information from friends in government that made it obvious McCarthy was lying. But nothing was to be done.

  “Know history and the more you know the more cynical you become. But pay me no attention, inside each cynic there's a frantic, disillusioned, crybaby idealist.”

  Shooting began in Korea in June. By winter, after American success with the amphibious assault at Inchon, Chinese communists had intervened. When advance and retreat stalled along the thirty-eighth parallel in April, political discussions at home focused on failures, the “fall of China” to the reds, and supposed communist infiltration in U.S. policy making.

  Truman's presidency, Otto said, was ruined. “All of it idiotic, stunning,” he told his classes. “Do people in their right mind actually think the communists are about to take over the United States government? Do they imagine Russians are going to invade? There are oceans out there.” He ragged at Rossie on the topic of Nevada and its corruptions. “Your Senator McCarran,” he said, “is simultaneously hideous and unthinkable.” To temper his own disgust, he echoed Bernard on the Marshall Plan. “Trust, trust one another. There's no other way. Wars and these witch-hunting denunciations will otherwise go on forever as they always have in history. Which is most likely.”

  The fall of 1952, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson was defeated in his attempt at the presidency by General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower. Richard Nixon, who'd come to prominence prosecuting Alger Hiss, was vice president. Together they carried the Republicans to control of Congress.

  “The rains came,” Otto Nelson said, lifting a glass in toast to Stevenson. “We've lost the last decent man who will ever run for the presidency.”

  In the fall of 1953, after the Korean armistice had eased the nation's nerves, Eliza bought and refurbished a three-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of the Hudson Building in downtown Missoula. Veronica was four and old enough to be left with a sitter, so Rossie and Eliza began staying in town overnight. The apartment looked down on Hig-gins Avenue and the bridge across the Clark Fork River, inspiring Rossie to invest in a high-end set of binoculars. He flaunted these as his personal spy gear when people—mostly university poets and historians they'd met through Otto—came for drinks.

  Eliza had a television installed, and from April to June in 1954 guests came to huddle with the shades drawn in the afternoon, watching the thirty-six-day drama of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which came to a head when McCarthy attempted to destroy a younger lawyer's career by saying, without proof, that the man was a communist sympathizer, and the Army attorney faced him down.

  “Until this moment, Senator,” the avuncular Boston attorney representing the Army, Joseph N. Welch, said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Eliza turned up the sound over the satisfied murmur that had erupted in her living room. “If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I'm a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.” At this Rossie clinked glasses with Eliza and others joined in. But Welch wasn't finished. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

  “There,” Otto Nelson said. “At last. Civilization.”

  “You're topping off my education,” Rossie said.

  “You, my friend, have cultivated your own understanding in the art of tranquilizing an afternoon.”

  At night Eliza and Rossie sat with Otto at oilcloth-covered tables in Mollie's Place, a beatnik bar that became their club. Named for a bordello that had thrived in that same location until after the end of the war, the bar was now populated by pool-shooting hippie girls on scholarship and sad, bearded painters from the university art department, as well as firefighters who split cedar shakes to make a living through the snowy months, drug-dealing semi-poets, and Stalinist biochemists, all of them served by a tattooed, single-mother barmaid who owned the place and swore at her bartenders in Russian while Hank Williams and Ray Charles moaned, “Why don't you love me like you used to do?” and “I can't stop loving you.”

  Eliza said they were wasting the vitality of their finest years. “Drunk forever, every waking hour. That's where we're heading.” Then she tasted the salt on the back of her hand and tossed back her tequila and smiled with sweet romantic bitterness, like a fall in that direction might be a fine idea
for another night even if the years were getting away. Who knew what the children were thinking?

  HOME FROM THE BAR, ELIZA PAID OFF VERONICA'S SITTER AND fussed about Corrie, now grown into a tall, blond, volleyball star who led the honor roll in science and math. She came and went so quietly, always smiling, that Eliza worried she was actually frantic, just keeping the lid on.

  “Wouldn't you be frightened,” she said to Rossie, “if your father shot your mother in a tavern and then himself? And your next family turned out to be alcoholics?”

  “For Christ's sake,” Rossie said, “nobody is drunks and she's seventeen years old.” But Eliza insisted, so he tried a talk with Corrie.

  She splayed her fingers and peeked at him between them, almost flirting. “Daddy, I don't need reassurance. Each morning, I'm all right.” She spoke as if Rossie was the child. From nowhere, for the first time, she'd said, “Daddy.”

  Teddy at twenty was dark-eyed, stocky, heavy-shouldered, and a head shorter than Rossie. He was gone the other way, the antithesis of Corrie. “A perfectly predictable skunk,” Eliza called him. “Does blood actually tell?”

  Fights in the Hamilton High locker room with farm boys who called him a monkey-fucker brought him to the edge of being kicked out of school, which only compounded the fact that he was two years behind in his studies. Eliza accused him of acting out fantasies. “You're only a quarter-blood! And an entirely rotten apple.” At night she wept.

  Rossie eventually got Teddy down to the corrals to help with the colts, while Veronica, five that autumn, sat on a fence and watched. “Stands to reason you'd be smart-assed,” Rossie said. “Charlie and your mother are old-fashioned pissers. But you ought to think about it. There's all ways of beating your head. Don't fall for the dumb ones.”

  Through this talk, Veronica was quiet and listening. “All ears,” as Eliza said when Rossie told her about it, “a little girl gathering steam.” What, Rossie wondered, for what? In time he would learn.

  Meanwhile, the talk with Teddy seemed to work until the cold February of 1955 when, age twenty-one and finally out of high school, he vanished off the midnight streets of Hamilton. There had been no warning. Rossie said leave it alone, but Eliza talked of hiring detectives. “He could be in the river,” she said.

  “Well, then, it's too late,” Rossie said. “And he ain't in the river. He's seeing for himself. What can you do? Arrest him for ignoring you? He's a grown man and he's as all right as he's going to be.”

  “You don't know,” Eliza said. “There's that river.”

  But Teddy, it turned out, was trying his hand at rough-stock, the bulls and bareback horses across New Mexico and Arizona, embracing the notion of conquering animals Rossie had taught him to despise. And he was having no luck. A red-freckled bull had stepped on his left ankle in Las Cruces, and he was reduced to clumping along in a hard cast and bumming his way through beer joints around Flagstaff, Arizona. Then he encountered a girl, Wilma Duckfinder, who said she was escaping from the Crow Agency in eastern Montana. That's why she was a barmaid in Foster's Tavern. She touched Teddy's bare forearm and asked what he needed. When he answered that he needed a line of credit, Wilma brought him a Miller High Life and ignored his wrinkled dollar. He couldn't stop watching as she waltzed away, switching that long black ponytail.

  In late August, two days after Eliza got home from driving Corrie back to the University of Washington, Teddy called and stammered out his story. “This girl, we went and got married in Las Vegas. We're on our way home.”

  Teddy hung up without saying how they'd get there, but on a hot evening two days later he called from Hamilton and asked if Rossie could come give them a ride. Sure enough, they were standing on a street corner, Teddy and his sharp-featured little woman, when Rossie pulled the car into town.

  Eliza had brought a handful of pink-and-white gladiolas from her garden but then wouldn't get out of the Buick. “I can't,” she said. “Leave me. Let me look at them.”

  Rossie didn't hide his pleasure. “You find anybody better than her,” he said, reaching for Teddy's hand but eyeing Wilma, “you cut me a share.”

  Wilma was staring off toward the mountains.

  “Well,” Teddy said, his clenched, boyish sternness falling away, “she's a deal all right.”

  Eliza at last materialized out of the Buick and held forth the gladiolas. “Glories,” she said to Wilma. “For you, now that you're here.”

  “What I really want,” Wilma said, turning and softening, “is a shower. “

  When they got back to the house Veronica was out front to greet them, a serious girl in the twilight. “Brother,” she said, after Teddy had picked her up, “I love you.” She was cutting her eyes sideways toward Wilma. “Her too.”

  “Miss Big-Eyes,” Eliza said. “She sees everything.”

  Deep in the night, after Veronica had been put to bed, they called Corrie on the telephone in Seattle.

  “I'm jealous,” she said to Teddy. “You know what you want.”

  Teddy tried joking. “Wilma and me, you got it right, we're going to be somebody. We don't know who it is, but it's going to be somebody who don't shit in their own nest.”

  “See?” Corrie said. “I'm going to college. You've got a real life.”

  “A real life,” Teddy said, after he'd hung up. “She said I've got a real life.”

  “Maybe so,” Eliza said, “if you study curiosity. Find out which somebody to be. Both of you.”

  When Teddy rolled his eyes, Rossie patted her back. “There it is, these women. They got plans under way.”

  Wilma was soon pregnant. In the icy winter of 1956, she bore twins named Max and Leo. Rossie would soon be calling them Wrack and Ruin, as they rolled through the house like bear cubs, upsetting chairs and babbling a semiprivate patois, absorbed in their games.

  Lemma had moved to Chicago several years earlier to share an apartment with Howard, asserting that Bernard wouldn't have wanted her to live there in Montana without him. She'd cultivated new friends, accompanying women and their elderly husbands to chamber concerts and operas. Then, late spring of 1956, Lemma began her “extreme forgetting,” a result of what her doctor said was a long series of accumulating strokes. In the fall, after failing rapidly, she died with Eliza at her bedside.

  “She wouldn't let go of that photo of Teddy's boys. It was like her ticket to someplace,” Eliza told Rossie on the telephone. “She was lost and laughing and happy to be on her way.”

  Larch needles were turning and falling as Rossie walked out into the dry fields where Lemma had come to find him that long-ago afternoon. All their summers were ending. “They're gone,” Eliza said when she got home. “We're on our own. There's nobody else.”

  Arnold Meisner, after so many years, flew to Chicago from Berlin and traveled west on the railroad with Lemma's zinc-lined casket. He'd been in Europe throughout the last decade, photographing portraits of “ancient Nazis” as they contemplated the end of their regime. “It's vengeance,” he said. “My way of getting even.”

  On a rainy Bitterroot afternoon, Lemma's casket was lowered into its grave alongside Bernard's at the foot of the All Frogs Pole. She had willed her properties to Eliza, writing that the future generations were on their own so far as she and Bernard were concerned. “We've gone to the frogs.”

  Arnold spoke before Lemma's remains were lowered. “Lemma and Bernard Stevenson were people I cherished. I admired their wit and will, and I was jealous of their support for one another. On sleepless nights, as bombs fell in Spain, I thought of my old friends in this valley with their tranquilities. I cursed myself because I hadn't the sense to be here with them. Now they're gone and we've lost another foundation from under our reasons to continue. I weep for them and for myself.” Arnold grimaced, looking around as if he had just realized that he might in actual fact weep.

  Later, he chastised Eliza. “Look around. Where are your lives?” he demanded. “What do you see? Children's treasures, volleyball trophies, and silv
er-mounted saddles. Anything of significance came from Lemma and Bernard. Not one stick of their furniture has been replaced. What do you have that's only yours?” It was true, the flooring and the redwood walls and the river-stone fireplaces and Krazy Kat and the photograph of Eliza and Rossie with the bears, all had been laid down or put up and cherished by Lemma and Bernard.

  “Scaly handed little shit,” Eliza said, once Arnold was on his flight back to Berlin. “This house is inhabited by breathing memories.” At that time she was given to reading aloud from Proust on the death of his grandmother, a dead-on connection with sadness, Rossie thought, and contrary to her insistence that the atmosphere in their house resonated with the living essence of her parents. This continued for months until she finally gave it up and admitted that Arnold was correct.

  “You think they'll live forever,” she said. “It's entirely our house now.” In the spring she ordered bedding and drapes and kitchenware in Seattle. “A beginning,” she said.

  It had come clear to Rossie that Eliza's determined ambitions had in some part been a rebuttal to Lemma's steadfast willingness to accede to Bernard's whims. In girlhood, as he saw it, Eliza had learned to insist on having life her own way. But that, he thought, could be a recipe for another kind of ruthlessness.

  He wondered if she might even have condoned his fucking with Lemma once in a while if it had actually happened. Fondling his cock in the bed, with Eliza sleeping there beside him, he sorrowed again for Lemma and found himself recalling her long, white legs and wondering whatever she had been offering, if it had been more than simply a fuck on the side.

  That summer Rossie found his twenty-six-year-old mare, Katrina, in the Tailfeather Field, dead of aging after a venerable duration for a horse. There was nothing to be done. That which couldn't be cured had to be suffered, though he found solace in watching Veronica, his scrappy child, gallop bareback across the meadows on an old gelding named Snip. “I wanted a buckaroo like you,” he told her. “That's secret. Don't tell your mother.”