Years later, as Veronica grew, Rossie watched her turn away from Eliza and her manipulations to focus her own efforts toward acquiescence and “true womanliness,” as she called it, though it turned out to mean nothing more than caring for her man. But not until Veronica was a woman with children of her own, and it was too late in the game, did he try to understand the stop-loss reasons why she'd felt moved to perfect the art of relinquishing.
Rossie eventually came to feel he had failed her, his blood-related horseback girl and only progeny, in some minutely incremental but vastly consequential degree. It came down, he thought, to the fact that there hadn't been enough bottom or foundation to their lives, his and Eliza's—that was how he understood it: failure learned at home, by example.
While Teddy plugged along, in and out of school at the university in Missoula, Corrie had finished up at the University of Washington and announced her intention to spend a summer at an archeological dig in southern Chile. “Hearths, like ours,” she said. “They were cooking stew twelve thousand years ago.”
As Rossie opened the second bottle of pinot noir at the dinner table, Eliza started again on her lamentation about “these numbing years.” Rossie said it was her way of tricking herself into sadness.
“Why not?” she said. “Without sadness, we forget.”
“You just want somebody to stir your pot.”
“What you ought to try is fucking yourself.”
“I've tried it. It's pointless.”
Eliza looked to be amused perhaps by the notion that they understood each other on a level that was not numbing but always their contest. “That's what I'm sad about,” she said. “Pointlessness.”
Veronica, half hidden in the hallway, watched them and listened.
“Things got scattered,” Rossie said. “Hell to tomorrow.”
Awake at daybreak he lay beside her and wondered if it was grief that had soured her or if she was really just bored and not soured at all. The years had got away after Honolulu. Teddy and Corrie slammed through high school, volleyball girls slept over, Teddy stayed out all night in Hamilton, and telephone cords reached under closed doors into closets where some friend from school was weeping over love. In summer break, Teddy and Corrie worked the hay fields and came home sunburned, sweaty, and proud as they headed for their showers. They would all of them ride out for evening meals on Hudson Bay blankets by the creek and fish for rainbow trout that Eliza fried up in cast-iron skillets as soon as they were caught and gutted. So fresh, nerves still active if not alive, the trout would sometimes writhe in the pan as they cooked. Flowing water, dark mountains above them, the family noisy and bright riding home after dark, it should have been enough. But another fall: Bernard and Lemma in the ground beside the All Frogs Pole and Teddy and Corrie gone off. The house undeniably had emptied out.
“This July,” he told Eliza, “I'm renting a house on Flathead, a dock, the speed boat, the works. The kids can speed around and swim or sleep on the lawn or read a book or anything they can think of. But they're going to sit down with us at supper every night. You and me will be old folks.”
In July they convened their first summer encampment on Flathead Lake. Rossie got them into life jackets, even Wilma's babies, and into the wooden speedboat. After roaring across the open water they watched sunset from among the spruce-crowned Bird Islands as an osprey folded and plummeted into the water like a thrown stone to emerge with a flopping kokanee in its talons. They feasted on cold roasted chicken, spiral-sliced ham, and slices of Walla Walla sweet onions, wedges of cheese, plums, and Flathead cherries picked that day, iced Anchor Steam Beer from San Francisco, and Vernors ginger ale for Veronica.
Corrie had called from Seattle and persuaded Rossie to bring six pounds of venison steak for a mole de venado. Coming off the plane she lugged a duffle loaded with items from a Mexican market on the south side of Tacoma, jalapeños, serrano chilies, costeno and guajillo chilies, sprigs of espazote and avocado leaves, heads of garlic for the soup. She spent a day chopping and simmering, toasting chilies and roasting unpeeled garlic cloves, to assemble a dinner with corn tamales and quarts of Pacífico beer.
“She brought it off,” Eliza whispered that night.
“For our children,” Rossie said. Not exactly his children or grandchildren, in terms of blood, except for Veronica. “One of them, anyway, is mine.”
“Every one of them,” she murmured, shaking her head, turning away.
The last night, Eliza sat them down before a fire. “Think,” she told them, in her lecturing mode. “To be happy we have to be smart.” She said it would take “relentless concentration and smartness” if they were to realize their ambitions.
“I'm working on mine,” Teddy said. “No luck yet.” He was amused.
Eliza was not. “You have ambitions,” she said. “Or you'll be a wandering soul. We couldn't stand that. You owe us more than that.”
In bed she read Rossie a passage about Levin laboring in the fields from Anna Karenina. “We'll do this every summer.” And they did. By the time Teddy and Wilma's children could manage horses, the encampments involved weeklong horse packing trips to tent camps on the shores of tiny lakes high in the Idaho wilderness.
Having found her passion in the excavations in Chile, Corrie returned to the University of Washington to begin graduate work in archeology, and after years of on-and-off attendance, Teddy, at twenty-six, finished at the university in Missoula. Veronica rode a yellow bus to her last year of grade school in Hamilton.
“You,” Rossie said to Eliza. “You've got everybody on the job, everybody but you.”
This resumed an old argument about Rossie's intentions, and hers, their chances of having what Eliza had taken to calling a “positive effect” on the world.
“You go through the motions, year after year,” she said. “Those men come from California to buy horses, you go buy theirs. What are we doing?”
It was true. Without admitting it to Eliza, Rossie recollected that snowy day down by the creek, just after they were married, when Slivers Flynn talked about doing the same work all your life, over and over. He tried to think of where he could go beyond horses.
Finally, the summer of 1962, Rossie declared for a seat on the county commission in the Bitterroot and embarked on a campaign going horseback up and down roads across the valley to demonstrate neighborliness, stammering speeches in support of agricultural communities and good schools and flexible conservation rules for public lands, and telling his stories of having come home from Guam “wounded and scatter-headed.” After all this, along with hand-shaking and joking at the livestock auction yards and interviews at school board meetings, Rossie, much to his surprise, won.
“Of course,” Eliza said. “You're the good, prosperous man.”
He went on running every two years, winning and going out to meetings in Hamiliton Courthouse on Monday nights.
“A smiling public man,” Eliza said, paraphrasing William Butler Yeats's comment on his own political career in the country W. H. Auden, one of her other favorites, had called Mad Ireland in his eulogy to Yeats.
Deep in the small hours of November 23, 1963, a heavy-shouldered man with a black patch over his left eye, the cuffs of his Levi's jacket worn to threads no doubt by bucking hay bales in some field, spat on the tavern floor and scowled at Otto Nelson. Three teeth were missing. “Candy-asses,” he said.
It was four in the morning but the bars wouldn't be closing. All bets were off. It was homecoming weekend but the Missoula-Bozeman football game was canceled. President Kennedy was dead and the drinking had begun in the afternoon. Downtown taverns were awash with clamor and the unfocused confusion and grief that the one-eyed man seemed to reflect as he spat.
“Grieving in truth for themselves,” Otto said. “What everyone wants, this night, is fucking. Make-believe perpetuating. It's a good night to get laid.”
“Or beat up,” Rossie said. “There are boys out here who think they can set things straight.”
“Lone Rangers.” Otto eyed the one-eyed man. “Cowboys thrashing candy-asses, and the candy-asses outwitting cowboys, a cyclical intimacy.”
“Tell you, Mister,” the one-eyed man said, turning to Otto. “Go piss in your pocket.”
Rossie felt a half-drunken flare of anger. “You sound like you want to get your ass kicked.”
The one-eyed man turned on his stool and grinned. “You're pretty old for that kind of roostering.”
“Don't worry about me. You want your ass kicked, I can find friends. I can hire them. They'll do it.”
The man shook his head, picked up his beer glass, eased off his stool, and walked away.
Otto Nelson was chuckling. “Roostering! The colonialist tableaux. They yearn to kill us, we mention hiring violence, and it's over, they have the wisdom to melt. Power. It worked for Hitler, why not us?”
But Rossie was watching the one-eyed man hunch his way onto another stool. “Otto, you must think you're walking on water. One of these boys is going to knock your teeth out.”
“It's only bar talk, Ross.”
But it wasn't, not only. Rossie realized that he was far across the boundary that separated the one-eyed man from Otto. He'd found his way over onto Otto's side of the street, and he wasn't sure that was where he wanted to be. He considered walking down the bar to buy the one-eyed man a beer and a shot, but the scab-handed Basque boy who had ridden out of Nevada wouldn't have liked the one-eyed man or Otto Nelson, not either one of them. So he ordered a fifty-dollar round of drinks, a beer and a shot for “every swinging dick up and down the bar,” including the one-eyed man, all the while watching himself in the mirror behind the bartender. Rossie told the man he saw there to forget it, live with it.
At daybreak, they stepped into the Buckingham House room with glass-fronted bookcases. Rossie was falling-down tired but unwilling to think of sleeping. The day before he'd been driving Eliza to Mis-soula, heading for the homecoming party at Otto's house, when they'd heard the news on the radio in the Buick. By that time John Kennedy was dead. They detoured to their apartment in the Hudson Building and were watching the chaos on television when Otto called. “Get over here,” he said. “We need company.” By twilight they had gone out to join the mob rolling all over town, spilling from the taverns into the streets. “The last time I saw this,” Otto said, “was VJ day.” Then their women went home, but Otto said they had to see it through.
So there they were in the half-light of Otto's study, with Rossie babbling about that movie, Metropolis, that Eliza had taken him to see in Chicago all those decades in the past.
“Eliza and I fought like dogs about that one, right in the street. She said it could come true. I had to think she was preaching horseshit. But maybe she was right. Maybe the shooting match could come unglued and fall through the cracks like a house of cards.”
“You,” Otto said, “are a master of metaphor.”
“That's what everyone's afraid of, what we're afraid of,” Otto went on. “So they're out there fucking with their eyes shut.” He pretended to croon an old song lyric: They can't take that away from me. “But we won't come unglued. Not so long as the people believe in American royalty, princes like Citizen Kane and Gatsby and Jack Kennedy. We forgive them their cruelty and all the injustice they stir up so long as we get to believe in them and their fine fresh shirts.” Otto was lecturing. “Equality is our prime theoretical value. We dump slavery, champion civil rights, labor rights, ethnic rights, voting rights, women's rights. But we're afraid to face down the injustice and corruption which is the water we swim in. We can't stand the idea that our political and economic masters are indifferent to the suffering they cause, so we imagine them to be wounded princes, driven by memories of a childhood love, boys seeking approval, and thus forgivable.”
“Lemma, years ago”—in a drunk-man way, Rossie understood that saying this indicated how profoundly he trusted Otto—”she asked me to fuck her and I wouldn't. She said she didn't blame me if I was afraid it might jeopardize my chickenshit princedom. Maybe she didn't say chickenshit but she said we'd be friends the next day and we were. All was forgotten.”
“She asked? Bless her,” Otto said. “Should have given me a call.”He poured himself another shot of the bourbon. “But she wanted a cowboy. Women are more like us than we want to think, but disciplined because they have to be. There's no one harder than a woman who won't let compassion get in her way. You have your marching orders, Captain. Use your powers for the good of all. Roostering. It's our mission.”
In late spring, just before Teddy's graduation from business school at the university, Eliza sat him down and asked what he expected. “You must have something on your mind.”
“Wilma,” Teddy said. “No more school.” He grinned at Rossie. “The corrals been good to you. You got away with it.”
Eliza's eyes glazed, like she couldn't stand looking at either of them. “No doubt you'll think of something.”
The day Teddy was to wear his black gown for his university graduation, the family gathered in a Missoula restaurant for breakfast— Rossie and Eliza, Teddy and Wilma and their boys, Max and Leo, and Veronica and Corrie. After Swedish pancakes, Eliza slid a heavy ring of keys across the table to Teddy. These were keys to the old Wilson Brothers hardware store in Hamilton.
“The deed is in your name,” Rossie said, following her instructions. “It's your ship. Go down there and start sailing. Piss it away, and you're on your own.”
“Huh!” Teddy said. “Hardware?”
But Wilma wasn't hesitant. “Not too hard to think about,” she said. “Thank you.”
Teddy came around rather quickly. He borrowed money and bought a fixer-up house under cottonwoods beside the river south of Hamilton and put up a neon sign over the store: Blue Hardware. “Sounds mystical,” he said, “like it might be an Indian store.” He gave wheezing, corpulent Lon Winston, who had varying uses and dimensions of the thousands of hardware items catalogued in his memory, a raise often dollars a week. “So he never quits,” Teddy explained, since without Lon, at least until Teddy learned the trade, there was effectively no store.
He set up a ring of captain's chairs around a woodstove back by the office. Coffee went free. Men carrying half-pint bottles of whiskey, country wives, and women used to loud talk and making themselves heard got into the habit of visiting like the store was a club. In addition to bins of galvanized nails and one-ton rolls of logging cable stored in a lot on the alley, Teddy ordered whatever Lon Winston told him to order or anything anybody could draw him a picture of or describe in a sensible way. His evenings were spent memorizing the stock items in the store. It was its own language: carriage bolts, Jennings double-twist auger bits, jay rollers used by the men putting down veneer and laminates, radiator air-bleeder valves, tack hammers, spring-loaded brad drivers to set small finishing nails without a hammer, cat's-paw pry bars, and on and on, the apparatus of a civilization.
Teddy also spent time at a rolltop desk in the store, writing in buckram-bound journals he'd ordered from an art supply house in Chicago. He noted down scraps of talk and pasted in newspaper stories about Native affairs, birthday cards, and photographs people brought him. That habit, writing and pasting, learned as a boy in his room in Honolulu, had become a lifetime routine.
“So you see,” Eliza said. “Everything can come out all right.” Wait a while, just wait, Rossie thought.
On a July morning, a red-bearded fellow from Santa Cruz, California, ambled into Teddy's store. “They tell me you are simpatico to wanderers,” he said. “You might know of work for a good man who's relocating. This is the valley I'm looking for. I'm changing my name to Mr. Bitterroot, a man who's not hunting handouts. Gardening and carpentering is my talents. You and me can be friends and allies. You and Mr. Bitterroot.”
“We could be friends and allies?” Teddy said. “Who told you I'm simpatico to wanderers? That's a thing you made up, or I'd be wall to wall with tramps and hippies.”
“They say you're simpatico to everybody. Why not wanderers?”
“You hitchhiking? On the run? You a miscreant, a badlands killer?”
But Teddy was smiling and the red-bearded fellow turned out to be looking for actual work. He was thirty-seven dollars from broke but driving a red 1954 GMC pickup he'd brought north from Santa Cruz. “All-day work,” he said. “Paying debts to the Lord.” The fellow's hands were hard with calluses, and that GMC was a working man's pickup.
“Which variety of carpentering?” Teddy asked.
“My finish work is rough but I'm learning.”
“Well, you're in luck. Rough might be good enough. My mother is hiring. Talking to her, I'd shitcan that talk of the Lord. She has her own ideas.”
“She a freethinker? That's good. Freethinkers are into strength of soul and mind.”
After lunch, Teddy took him to meet Eliza. She'd been talking of hiring a carpenter to rebuild the old Cliff House above Kanaka Creek. It was Teddy's idea that “Mr. Bitterroot” might live up there for free in return for carpenter work.
“Got here with nearly no money,” the fellow told Eliza. “Give me use of the buildings and garden land down here, and I'll fix it up cheap. Next year I'll provide vegetables. I'll split a profit with you on what produce I can sell in the valley.”
“I was bored,” Eliza told Rossie over dinner that night. “He was cute. I went for it.”
After the first weeks, when the fellow was joked about as “Eliza's hippie,” locals shifted to muted respect, saying Mr. Bitterroot was loon-crazy but a hell of a worker.
“It's a deal for Eliza,” Rossie said, getting his trim in the Hamilton barbershop. “Everybody is doing fine.” He looked as if he might expect argument. “Anyway, his real name is Lionel. We won't hear any more of that ‘Mr. Bitterroot.’ “
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