To bring in cash that first summer, Lionel worked around in the valley for day wages, cleaning up trash dumped along the banks of sloughs and out behind barns, using his GMC pickup to haul off rusted-out fuel barrels and rotted mattresses to the landfill east of Victor. When people asked what he was up to, he replied, “Looking skyward to the turnings of evolution. No revolutions but in the sky.”
“That boy may be onto something,” a grinning Hamilton car dealer told Rossie. “We could stand evolutions around here.”
Come winter, when the road up the mountain was blocked by drifted snow and sheeted with ice, Lionel lived in the old bunkhouse room where Rossie had slept when he was courting Eliza. “Rather be up there on the mountain,” he said, “hearing the snow fall, flake by flake.”
In the spring, Eliza hired a Caterpillar road grader to cut an irrigation ditch to her onetime Indian farm. Apple and pear and cherry trees in the old homesteader's orchard hadn't seen irrigation in decades and were mostly dead. Lionel dragged them from the soft loamy ground with a borrowed Fordson tractor, stacking the trunks to be cut into firewood in the fall. He plowed under reefs of decaying sweet clover. “This is the only time we'll use a tractor on this land,” he said. “Can't stand compaction.”
Two young men and a young woman from California arrived. Each of them, Lionel said, he'd vouch for, each was a “vitalist primo horticulturist” from the “primo garden systems” at the college on the hill above Santa Cruz. “They came up here,” Lionel said, “to put their education to work.”
“They let you graduate in gardening?” Rossie said.
“It's called horticulture,” Lionel said.
“Looks like you'd have stayed in a place like that,” Rossie said.
But Lionel's friends worked from sunup into darkness, raking, planting, building little garden-ditch headgates. A blond Vermont woman with hair in braids to her waist showed up with a child in arms and a toddler, two pale creatures. Bitterroot people wondered how long it would be until one of those children fell from the cliff. But she hauled those kids up the mountain and down as she worked the garden like the rest of them.
“How far,” Rossie asked Eliza, “are you going with this hippie farming?”
“It's under control,” Eliza said.
He left it at that. In their division of powers, Eliza ran her properties, the creamery and dairies, and the acreages that she'd inherited. Rossie had his barn at the edge of the Tailfeather Field and his horses and occasional young men who worked with him, as well as his arcane network of horse people, livestock merchants and trainers and veterinarians and rodeo ropers who would sometimes call at night and want to spend an hour or so talking over what had happened that week at the cutting show in Lubbock, or at the million-dollar quarter-horse race in Ruidoso.
“What I'm doing about those garden kids,” Rossie said in the barbershop, “is looking the other way.”
“Hard to tell them apart,” people said. But come daybreak those kids were down in the garden, bare-legged and barefoot, muddy to their knees.
The garden was brilliant with vegetables—sixteen varieties of hot pepper, cantaloupe by the pickup load, corn and cabbage and sweet yellowish Siberian tomatoes. In the evenings they hauled two-by-fours and sheetrock up from Teddy's store in Hamilton and hammered away at the Cliff House. A preacher from the Mormon community sent a letter to the Hamilton newspaper calling them “communists” and asking, “Who invited them? What are their purposes?”
Eliza held her silence. Rossie, in the barbershop, said he guessed they were doing “just fine enough.” But rumors of drugs and free love and perversities drifted across the valley. Another letter to the editor questioned if those “ninnies on the hill” intended to stay in the valley and “start families and send their children to the local schools. Corrupt ideas and heedlessness could infect the younger generation. What if a child came down with disease? What about doctors?”
This line of reasoning collapsed when Teresa Robertson, a retired medical doctor, moved in and said she was offering free care to “my kids.” Public service and challenge, she said, were just what she was looking for. She had come west to give something back.
“At last,” Eliza said, “educated company.” Overhearing a woman in the Hamilton Bi-Lo grocery store speculating if Teresa Robertson was sleeping with “the boys or the girls,” Eliza announced aloud in the woman's presence that such talk was “common, sluttish, indecent bitchery.”
Teresa contracted to have a tight shingle-sided house built on a former homestead site beside the next creek south from Kanaka, and when the work was finished, brought her eighty-six-year-old mother from Boston to share it with her.
Eliza said that should put a stop to talk about Teresa's motives. “What she's on the lookout for is clear sailing. People who say what they mean.” Then she smiled. “Whatever that is.”
Rossie kept his head down, intent every morning on breaking in a pair of brothers from the Crow Reservation to his version of the horse world and getting another set of three-year-old geldings settled for the summer. Teddy ran his hardware store and Corrie was in Seattle, deep into the writing of her scientific thesis about archeological developments in Chile. Veronica thrived in her senior year at the high school in Hamilton, a strapping girl and an utterly whirlwind softball pitcher. Breakfast after breakfast, after the winter snows and into spring and summer, Rossie read the day-old sports page out of the Missoula newspaper he'd saved from the afternoon before, and went out to his horses, leaving domesticities to go their own way.
“Evolutions,” Eliza said after an evening telephone talk with Teresa Robertson. “Don't you love it?” When Rossie didn't answer, she smiled in a cold way and accused him of having turned into “one petrified buckaroo, not so interesting anymore.”
“Get you into the bedroom,” he said, “and we'll see what's interesting.”
But she only shook her head. “Don't you wish,” she said, and she started washing the dishes.
IN MAY OF 1966, THERE CAME A SCRIBBLED NOTE FROM BILL SWEET, mailed from the eastern Montana town of Malta: Time you got off the rocking chair and drove over to see the real thing. Come late June, over a Sunday. We'll brand calves and show you country roping. Call on the telephone.
This was after nineteen years of silence punctuated only by Christmas cards. When he called on the telephone Margie answered and Bill Sweet never did come on the line, but Rossie could hear him shouting in the background, telling Margie what to say.
“We're getting along in years,” Margie said. “That's why. You ought to see this country before we all die. That's what Bill says. Blow off the old stick-in-the-mud Bitterroot stink.”
“Certainly, go,” Eliza said. “It would be a vast relief to both of us. Maybe you're one of nature's on-the-road men.”
On a late June evening, after a long day of traveling up the Black-foot River and over the Continental Divide to the Montana high-line, Rossie turned off a two-lane highway about thirty miles south of Malta and followed a dirt road out onto the infinite run of rolling grasslands. The headquarters building at Battle Creek Ranch was a slumping but freshly painted white house surrounded by a patchy lawn and sucker-wood remnants of hundred-year-old cottonwood and locust trees planted by the first generation of cattlemen from Texas. The yard was boxed by a hog-wire fence that was thick with wild roses.
Bill Sweet—it was clearly him, the same towheaded fellow after all the years—was out at the gate, darker at first sight, heavier through the shoulders but otherwise the same skinny piece of work. “Heard you coming,” he said after Rossie stepped out of his Ford. “Heard you half a mile away. Can't get away with making a sound in this country.”
Before Rossie could answer, Margie came from the house. She was meatier but solid, looking strong rather than at all fatty. “Christ in heaven,” she shouted, wiping her hands on her apron. “Kiss my cheeks.”
So Rossie did it, both cheeks.
“Kiss mine,” Sweet said, and he be
nt over, sticking out his butt.
“You boys,” Margie said. “What a welcome. Me and Jack Sprat, living on the lean and fat of the land. What we got tonight is rib steaks, ice cream, and whiskey. Peach ice cream Mr. Sweet churned himself and a half gallon of Jack Daniel's.”
Rossie and Bill Sweet sipped bourbon and water over ice while Margie went to the cooking.
“You'll be on my blue mare,” she told Rossie as she stirred up a salad. “You can rope off her. She'll drag a calf. Less you don't want a mare. In which case I'll be insulted. Piss on them that don't want a mare.”
Bill Sweet broke from his brooding quiet and grinned. “Them women.”
“This woman,” she said to Rossie, “is going to be trucking your bedrolls and your dinner down to the river tomorrow. Same old delivery service. Isn't got no kids but I got you boys.”
It was planned that Rossie and Bill Sweet would ride off south the next morning across the folds of prairie to the remains of a defunct town called Far Point, down on the banks of the Missouri River. They'd camp amid the abandoned storefront buildings for a night and the next day help out at a branding. Margie would spend an afternoon quilting in Malta and be along in the late afternoon.
“God knows …” Rossie didn't know what to say beyond that.
“Yes sir,” Margie said. “And he don't give a shit.”
Horseback in ninety-degree heat the next afternoon, Rossie and Bill Sweet gazed down from high, chalky cliffs above the sand-bar undulations of the Missouri River. They'd crossed dry creek beds and rode through a dozen hundred-acre prairie dog towns but seen no fences and only a lone sod-walled schoolhouse. “This here was the Exeter School,” Sweet said. “Kids all came in on horseback. It was still going when we first come out. But too much of this rangeland went back to the federals during the Depression. All along the river it's a federal preserve. Off limits to hunting down by the river. A lot of the early settlers are gone. Fucking federals. How would they know anything?” He took off his hat and mopped his forehead. “Seen it when there was a breeze up on these cliffs.”
But this day it was dead still. They made their way down a long, brushy ravine to the river, where a hundred and thirty-some-odd mother cows and their unbranded spring calves grazed a roughly fenced, thousand-acre field.
This was Far Point, an occasional cow camp set up amid the saw-lumber buildings that remained from what eighty years ago had been a steamboat stop and then a renowned Montana wolf-hunter town. With their horses turned loose to roll in the dust of a pasture, they found their bedrolls where Margie had left them, in a cabin sealed against vermin with flattened tin cans nailed over the knot and rat holes. She'd provided them with canned peaches and fresh tomatoes, which they rustled from the cool water of a spring bubbling up inside a cavern in the white cliffs.
“Them wolfers killed each other and every other damned thing,” Bill Sweet said. “Held up trains, stole horses, and rustled calves. Ranchers hanged them off cottonwoods. Don't think we miss those times, though I'd take the music and dancing that came with the steamboats tied up here for putting on wood for the boilers. You recall the Snake River and that Gypsy girl? You was a fearless dancer.”
They were salting the fresh tomatoes, biting in and letting the juice run down their chins, and spooning peaches out of the cans.
“You could buy into this country.”
“You selling me something?”
Bill Sweet turned serious. “I'm offering a present. This life out here is a Christmas present. I think about you once in a while. Too many corrals, you end up taming yourself.”
“You always was a philosopher.”
The evening cooled as Bill Sweet led Rossie up into an erosion canyon in the white cliffs. “They's been a lot of this forgot,” he said showing Rossie an enormous thigh bone, six or eight feet long, embedded in a chalky wall above their heads. “Dinosaurs. Professors come looking for bones, but so far they don't know about these. I got a feeling that someday they'll be out here in Jeeps.”
“What I got,” Rossie said, “is a feeling we could eat them hamhock beans cold and unplug that whiskey.”
So they sat on logs and spooned beans from the pot Margie had left, wiping their fingers on their pants and sipping from the bottle as they watched young, limber-legged elk graze and dance at one another across the river.
A Labrador retriever came dripping from the water, a huge, brown fellow.
“Bruno,” Bill Sweet said, as the dog bounded toward him. “You're far from home.”
The dog stared off into the canyon behind them, where Rossie saw a man on a gray horse, a slow ghost in the shadows.
“Mr. Frakes,” Bill Sweet shouted without looking around. “Your dog is running loose. You been shooting coyotes?”
Standing before them, the man was tiny and ancient. “Poisoning prairie dogs. Heard you'd be down here tonight. Thought I'd get some company and a drink of whiskey.”
“You bring your bedroll? Turn your horse loose in the catch pasture. You ain't going home. Can't have you wandering around drunk in the dark.” Bill Sweet held up the bottle. “Then you can start drinking whiskey.”
“Afraid I started seventy years ago, in Wales, where you never been.” He looked to Rossie. “I was bumming the world, then ended up here and never left.”
“Mr. Frakes has been in these badlands since you and me were born. He keeps track for us. He's had cows in these breaks since the First World War.”
“Keeping track of more than you,” Mr. Frakes said. “There's plenty to keep track of, plenty.” He was at the whiskey bottle. “What do you think of Mr. Sweet?” he asked Rossie. “He spends all his life running other people's cows. Somebody has got to keep track of him if he's going with that much foolishness.” He pushed the bottle toward Rossie. “Don't let me near that whiskey again. Another shot and I'll be asleep.”
But Mr. Frakes didn't make a pass at sleep until the moon was clear and high overhead. He told the tale of the first Texas trail drive in 1866, when Nelson Story and his hands brought six hundred head of long-horn cattle north to Montana. By 1883, some six hundred thousand had been turned loose on the eastern ranges only to perish in the blizzard winters by the hundreds of thousands.
“Texas cowboys was bullshit. They didn't own none of the land. This is the people's land. We got some history too. Crazy, snoose-eating fuckers robbing trains and the ranchers hanging them. Habitual killers.” Mr. Frakes grinned, his false teeth huge and white in the moonlight. Blasphemous talk about the old, heroic, nineteenth-century killing spree was clearly his forte. When it was done, he worked his way to his feet and wandered into the shadows, hunting his bedroll.
Bill Sweet caught a nightcap hit on the whiskey. “Other people's cows. I've thought about your Slivers Flynn. The work runs out on you was what he said. Branding and fixing fence, seeing after the cows, which is the stupidest animal you can find. Partway he was right. Trailing cows, you can feel like you ought to be ashamed of yourself that you didn't do more with your life. But it's work that comes with horses attached, so I take it. I think of riding out here alone for a few days, and I do it. Margie, she don't mind. She likes this country with me or without me, she says.”
At dawn a rattling old blue Dodge pickup truck came down a rutted, two-track road through the breaks. It was driven by a suntanned woman with a yellow dog in the seat beside her. Three shaggy-headed boys, brothers by their looks, rode in back, wedged between juniper firewood, camp coolers, and crates of oranges and boxed raspberries. She pulled up beside the fire where Rossie and Bill Sweet were back into the ham-hock and beans and sipping coffee from tin cups.
“Mrs. Bart,” Bill Sweet said. “You're early.” The woman was slight and pretty even if worn beyond her years. Her husband was Wilson Bart, who owned the calves they'd be branding.
“This is our day to put on the party,” she said. “The boys, they wouldn't sleep.”
“Them boys are thinking about eating calves’ nuts off the branding fire,�
� Bill Sweet said.
But the boys, eyeing the men with solemnity, would not give away a smile.
“It's going to be a fine day,” she said. “People can load their plates off the tailgate.”
“There's plenty of time for setting up. You better have a cup of coffee with me and Rossie. This fellow is Ross Benasco, come over from the Bitterroot to see how the good people are doing.” He turned to Rossie. “This is Mrs. Bart, name of Gert.”
Gertrude Bart colored slightly as she met Rossie's gaze. “Pleased,” she said. “Which is true. Pleased.”
When Mr. Frakes emerged from the weeds where he'd rolled out his bed, Bill Sweet tossed the dregs of his coffee, poured the cup full again, and gave it to the old man, who in turn wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Wilson tells me they's a hundred and thirty-six spring calves and a sprinkle of two-year-olds we missed last year. Three, maybe four of those two-year-olds.”
Gertrude Bart turned away from him and smiled out over her shaggy boys. “This is one year we'll have a Christmas.”
“Too much for an old man,” Mr. Frakes said. “Better off I saddle up and go home soon as I finish this coffee.”
“You got steaks in them coolers?” Bill Sweet asked. Gertrude Bart nodded. “But don't you think about it. Those boys will get the coolers up into the spring. We'll fill the water bags.”
As Mr. Frakes rode away into the luminous morning, the smiling, mustachioed owner, Wilson Bart, turned up on a gray roper he called Bermuda, along with five other men who'd saddled up miles away in dark corrals before daybreak. Stirring a dust, they drove the lowing cows and dithering calves before them, A fire was built inside the log-fended corral. Wilson Bart claimed his three Circle T branding irons from the Dodge pickup driven by his wife and put them on the fire, where they were heated red. Then he and Bill Sweet caught their horses while Rossie stayed to work on the ground. Newcomers roped only when invited. The ropers rode quietly into the herd as the men at the fire sharpened knives. Bawling calves were dragged by their hind legs to the branders, who seared a black Circle T onto their left ribs while men with knives notched ears and went through the quick motions of castration before tossing the testicles, to be cooked later, into a clean gallon can.
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