The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  When the western tour finished after three weeks on the road, the Butte miners’ wives led a caravan of ranchers hauling horses on parades through the towns on the eastern side of the state. Hard-eyed ranch widows and a variety of preachers and Chicano sugar beet farmers from south of Billings and city council members from Livingston and Miles City and Glendive and Circle and Plentywood came and gave their endorsement. Crowds got bigger and downright massive by the time Bill Sweet and Margie came to see him in Malta. Sister Hutchison was with them, her hair done up in that French bun.

  “We could turn this into a circus act,” Rossie said to the cluster of people in a meat market parking lot. “But let's forget the clowning and do the good work together.”

  “Paris,” Sister Hutchison said when she and Bill Sweet and Margie got together with a bottle of bourbon in Rossie's motel room. She sat on the edge of the bed and shook out her French bun, letting her graying hair cascade down around her. “You're our ambassador from Paris.”

  “You got me there,” Rossie told her.

  “Sister,” Margie asked. “You staying in town or riding home with us?”

  Rossie was careful not to catch her eye.

  “Riding home,” she said.

  His tour looped back through high-line towns like Harlem and Havre and Great Falls, where the newspaper said the talk in the Bitter-root was that Rossie had been a first-rate county commissioner. He's a public officer in touch with the people's needs. His secret is on-the-ground friendships with ranchers and schoolteachers, gyppo loggers and preachers, building contractors and plow-ground farmers. The article went on to say he was a fellow who listened, had great foresight, and would be an ideal governor. When a national newsmagazine called him a quintessential Montana man he and Eliza allowed themselves to fantasize about a triumphant election-night ride on the streets of Missoula in the back of a red fire truck, the sirens wailing. She'd redo the governor's mansion in Helena, adding white wicker furniture to the patio for fine days and a felt-topped table to the den for the winter evenings and poker games. Over in the capital building Rossie would decorate his office with a silver-mounted saddle, photographs of miners in narrow shafts through rocky depths below long-ago Butte, nineteenth-century Blackfeet shields and beaded Gros Ventre moccasins, a Remington bronze of cowboys lassoing mustangs, and a print of Margaret Bourke-White's cover for the initial Life magazine depicting the vast concrete spillway at the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri in 1936.

  Back in Missoula at a Union Club fundraiser, Rossie smiled out over high school teachers, small-engine mechanics, framing carpenters, mothers who made their living sanding floors and painting trim, and hippies of various stripes. Behind him on the stage was the evening's entertainment: a sweating band, Janine and the Chile Teppines, which featured a bangled Missoula girl given to shouting lyrics in imitation of Janis Joplin. He'd been handed a bourbon-ditch.

  “Proud to be here,” he said. “Running for office is a pleasure, like eating hotcakes. As a man who loves horses, there's one thing I've learned: the horsemen I admire and the working people and hippies I admire are the same breed of cat.” He raised the bourbon. “Let's drink to the future. Now you all ought to go dance holes in your socks.”

  Janine grabbed the microphone. “Come on, Governor. Let's you and me get sweaty.”

  Careful not to flinch, Rossie waved goodbye. “Got to be over to the Am Vets in a half hour.”

  As he went, a reporter asked if he regretted leaving the ranch.

  “First place, I don't have any ranch. My wife owns dairy cows. Second place, sure, I have regrets. That Bitterroot is hard to beat.”

  Rossie had been ignoring his Republican opponent, a balding, dark-suited car dealer from Bozeman, name of Lincoln Hutter, who was known to turn from a podium and spit on the floor. At the rate things were going, it was working. Rossie was going to be governor, and the Missoula office became clogged with hundreds of calls from people who wanted to prove they were pals with the would-be Governor Benasco.

  “There's so much a man can do,” Rossie said on a call-in radio show. “Only so much telephone you can answer. There's not much I can do for people who are upset about things I didn't start, not at this stage in the game. Men from Billings want me to set up a golf weekend in Virginia with the federal money men. ‘Hey, old buddy,’ they say, ‘how about setting us up?’ They ought to be ashamed. We can make our own way here in Montana. We don't need to suck around.”

  Ashamed and suck around didn't play well in the newspapers. A druggist in the high-line town of Harlem was reported as saying, “This big man ought to come out here and try to make a living.” Rossie was told that druggists in eastern Montana were his natural constituency—men and women who'd been to college—and that he'd damned well better start courting them. Towns on the high-line were dying, the economy drying up across the thousands of miles of the short-grass prairie running from Texas to the Golden Triangle wheat lands north of Great Falls. Reservation towns everywhere were even worse off.

  Waiting for a statehouse elevator in Helena, the ex-governor laid a hand on Rossie's shoulder. “Ross,” he said, in his hard, old voice, “it's time to shut entirely up. This election is in your pocket.”

  Rossie had been walking the marble-floored hallways in the company of oil industry lawyers from Billings and an economist from Bozeman—midcareer men with Ph.D.s from Pomona and Stanford and the University of Virginia—who were paying close attention to what he thought. Embarrassed in their presence, he brushed aside the ex-governor.

  “Can't say I agree. We're into a high gear. It's time to get specific.”

  The old man nodded and walked away, a bridge burned but Rossie didn't pay it much attention.

  With an eye to educating Montana, he took up reading from Adam Smith on what he called “the innate goodness in man” to honor students in Missoula. When he finished, a young university woman shouted, “Sir, do you understand that you are nonsensical? Don't you know that this world is rampant with evil?”

  A New York newspaper surveying elections in the “square-state hinterlands” wrote, Ross Benasco is a country intellectual in love with the sound of his own voice. Rossie began saying that New York was “New Pork” until told that this wasn't universally amusing.

  “You fellows,” Rossie told a delegation of ranchers and mayors from eastern Montana, each wearing his own name and the name of his community on a tag around his neck, “you feel like you're out of the loop. And you are. We all are. On our side of the state we've mined and logged unto death but not quite, and now people want to subdivide the Bitterroot. Sure, I tell ‘em: pony farms and Quonset huts and plywood subdivision houses from one end to the other. Good idea. Wake up. And over in the east, your buffalo are killed and speculators are still plowing thousands of acres that'll get the rain to support a crop about one year in twenty. The corporations and the railroads feed off you, and your family farms and ranches are going. We all know of towns with nothing in income but Social Security checks, nobody but old people and ghosts walking the streets. The boys with money keep you poor so they can call the shots, and you let them. People want to pity themselves and hate the government which is their only hope for relief, while the railroads plan to haul garbage from Minneapolis to dumping grounds in eastern Montana. There's people think that might be a good idea. Such ideas are a set of goddamned travesties. They are sins against Montana, you know it and I know it. Your living and way of life are on the line. You're bringing tragedies down on your own heads. Don't blame me for your troubles. I'm not the source of your defeats. Here in Montana we've been doing everything we were supposed to do in this nation. As a result we lose everything? We've lost all sense of how to control our fate and our lives, and with good reason we feel betrayed. It's hard to keep from souring on the vine.”

  By this time those men had gone wooden in their anger. A lawyer from Glendive called out, “Ross, we're dying and came to see if you offered any help. We didn't come for a lecture.” The rancher
s were putting on their hats.

  A red-faced man named Bert Swan according to his name tag, who came from the Rosebud country in southeastern Montana, lifted his hands. “Ross, we got to sell something for money if we want to support ourselves. That's real simple, we understand. But the only thing we got is our prairies. You got a better idea than to sell the use of that space? Otherwise, it's sell the land altogether and go off someplace to town.”

  “You're right,” Rossie said. “We've got to make a living without trashing what we've got, and I won't talk a straight-line tourist deal. We've got our pride, but territory is our one sure commodity. Ruining the country with mines and clear-cuts and polluting rivers and plowing up the prairies and, to top off the dumbness, cutting back on money for education—those are sure ways to lose track of the future. But if we preserve our beauties and educate our kids, people from around the world will be eager to pay their way into our economy. There's lots of folk who want to walk in the woods and jump up a mule deer. They like to eat good and sleep to the sounds of running water. Give them those kind of things, and we can call our shots. It's true, you watch. We can use our space to sell ourselves.”

  Bert Swan was putting on his Stockman's town hat. “Yeah,” he said. “Singing cowboys on the streets of Miles City. ‘Ring Dang Do, all covered with hair like a pussy cat.’ Pimping for tourists.”

  “You think so?” Rossie was smiling like he'd got the joke.

  “You're full of horseshit so far as I can tell,” Bert Swan said. His pale eyes were bright and hard.

  “Don't remember anybody ever telling me I was entirely full of shit before,” Rossie said.

  “You keep talking whorehouse ideas, you better get used to it.”

  Rossie had the sense to stay quiet while the men turned away from him.

  That same month, a youngster named Abbie Hoffman published an essay called “The Yippies Are Going to Chicago” in a magazine called The Realist. He called attention to a movement that was committed to displays of disorder, like disrupting trading on the floor of the Stock Exchange and destroying clocks in New York's Grand Central Terminal. On August 8, the Republican National Convention nominated Richard Nixon for president. On August 20, a full-scale Russian army moved into Czechoslovakia with tanks and two hundred thousand men, demanding that the Czech leaders pledge allegiance to international communism. Thus ended the Prague Spring, during which Alexander Dubcek had instituted liberal reforms he'd called “socialism with a human face.”

  Amid assassinations, burning ghettos, French riots, a profound sense of national futility in Vietnam, stoned and tattooed hippies reputedly wandering the streets of San Francisco and fucking whenever the mood struck, and Nixon's RNC nomination in Miami, this Czechoslovakian affair became the prime metaphor for failures everywhere. The American mood was divisive and rancorous as Democratic politicians readied for their own national convention in Chicago, to be convened August 26 in an amphitheater near the Union Stockyards. The issues were clear: racial, ethnic, religious, and women's equality; and what to do about the war in Vietnam. Eliza insisted that “rampant brainlessness” be included as she and Rossie prepared for their trip as unofficial delegates from Montana.

  It was predicted that a million militant protesters would come to Chicago for a Yippie Festival of Life. But the Yippies and hippies, combined with the SDS and Black Power adherents, numbered only a few thousand, and many of them were Chicago locals. It was rumored that they meant to close down the city, inject LSD into the water system, and send Chicago on a trip. But they seemed more intent on sport, dressing up in quasi-Vietcong outfits and handing out rice to citizens on the streets, floating naked in Lake Michigan, and nominating a pig for president. Nonetheless, Mayor Daley mobilized six thousand National Guardsmen to control the expected chaos. Never before, Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, had so many feared so much from sofew.

  Rossie and Eliza arrived at the Conrad Hilton Hotel the Saturday before official events began. Demonstrators were chanting, “Revolution now!” The police were about to drive them out when Allen Ginsberg, ceaselessly humming “Ommmm,” led them from the park.

  But Rossie and Eliza didn't know of that. They'd spent the evening with Montana delegates, toasting one another at a famous steakhouse in the Loop, and only learned of the showdown in the park from newspapers over breakfast the next day. The conflict seemed like a joke, a comedy act.

  On Sunday Vice President Hubert Humphrey arrived. A clowning and opportunistic figure, Humphrey shared Johnson's position on Vietnam and liked to be known as the Happy Warrior. Demonstrators moved to Grant Park and set up barricades of trash baskets and picnic tables. They flew Vietcong flags and the black flag of anarchy and the red flag of revolutionary communism, while calling out, “pigs, pigs” and “oink, oink” as the police moved in on them.

  Swinging their clubs, the police shouted, “Kill the motherfuckers.” They followed the demonstrators into the streets and took to clubbing bystanders, beating journalists, breaking cameras, and slashing the tires of every car in the Lincoln Park lot with a Eugene McCarthy campaign sticker. In the morning, violence in Chicago shared national headlines with updates on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The festival of love was over, and brutal, blood-splattered mayhem would continue on the Chicago streets through three more nights.

  In their room on the ninth floor of the hotel, Rossie gave up on the idea of seeking out jazz joints of the kind they visited with Bernard and Lemma in 1934.

  “I learned civility in this town,” Eliza agreed. “Now it's a shit house.” Ordering room service and watching television, she sat there in her nightdress and refused to leave the room.

  “We could go home,” Rossie said.

  “This hoopla is for you,” she said. “Go see it.”

  On August 28, Rossie took a taxi out to the amphitheater, and stood in the back to watch as the Democratic party endorsed the Vietnam War and Hubert Humphrey, backed by Richard Daley, as their candidate for president. Thus they sanctioned repression. That was how Rossie read it.

  Across from the Hilton in Grant Park, the demonstrators were exhausted, bloodied, and angry. A young man spoke and tried to calm them, inciting the police. He was beaten, then taken to a hospital as another night of clubbing commenced. Rossie watched from a window in the Hilton restaurant as the crowd surged into Grant Park, which stank and seethed with tear gas. Banks of blinding television lights illuminated the Chicago police and guardsmen battering away with clubs and rifle butts, beating on men who were bloodied and already fallen, dragging women across the asphalt, and in one case clobbering a child. The bloodied fell back against the windows of the hotel restaurant as they tried to escape. Glass shattered and they were inside, followed by police, who chased them into the lobby and beat them as they fled onto the streets again.

  All this splattering of blood was on national television, seventeen minutes of unedited film. America saw the spill of its rationality and honor while a radical crowd in Chicago went on chanting, “The whole world is watching.”

  Rossie made his way through the abandoned kitchen, its floor slick with spilled grease, and up an interior stair to the ninth floor. He found Eliza with a glass of white wine, gazing into the Chicago night.

  She studied the sprays of other people's blood on his face and his white shirt and poured him Scotch. “Snow on the moon. We could have gone home. I'm glad we didn't. Get out of that shirt. We'll have it framed and hang it on the wall, unwashed.”

  “Otto would have loved this one.”

  “Come here,” she said when Rossie came from the shower. “You're shining like a boy. I want my hands on you, all over you.” She threw the blankets back. “Come on,” she whispered.

  She was wet when he touched her and lay quiet as Rossie got above her and without particular gentleness lifted her knees over his shoulders and sank in her, rewarded by her breathlessness.

  She awakened him in sunlight, crouching and sliding him in, her breasts swayi
ng as she went off into whatever was happening inside her being until she collapsed, her warmth utterly soft. After a long moment she looked up, not quite tearful. “This,” she whispered. “This is who we'll always be.”

  As they packed their suitcases, they watched Hubert Humphrey accept the nomination on television. Humphrey blamed the violence on the demonstrators’ profanities: An insult to every woman, every daughter, indeed every human being, the kind of language no human being would tolerate at all. Is it any wonder the police had to take action.

  “That rat-faced, tin-hearted, chickenshit son-of-a-bitch,” Eliza said. “I'm a mother and a daughter and a woman. He'll never know anything about obscenities unless he looks in the mirror.”

  Back home in Montana, in an interview broadcast only on Montana television, Rossie gave his assessment of the ordeal. “Any fool there in Chicago, like me, would have been ashamed of his nation. Power makes men crazy. Lyndon Johnson helped the poor and blacks, but he thinks giving up in Vietnam is a personal insult. This fellow Humphrey is lying and devious and sadly ambitious as man can be. He'll say anything he thinks people want to hear. Nixon is more of the same. The presidency seems to be a job only nut cases want. I wonder if we'll always have crazy presidents. Maybe that kind of work would make anybody crazy.” As if he'd shared a fine truth, Rossie smiled, glassy-eyed, into the camera. “Voters want answers to questions which aren't answerable. They want daddies…. Politicians who talk about complicated ideas are accused of equivocating, and, realizing this, they try to sound decisive while knowing there are no simple solutions. They talk complications in private and simplicities in public. It's a royal route to double-blind insanity.”

  Newspapers across Montana were horrified at Rossie's schoolboy nonsense. It was an insult to the traditions of American politics, an accusation Rossie tried to escape with talk about liberty.

  “Freedom, racial and emotional freedom, cowboy freedom and women's freedom. They were taken to the junkyard in Chicago.”