The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Winner of the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award A

  Booklist Top Ten First Novel for 2006

  ACCLAIM FOR William Kittredge's

  “William Kittredge has remastered the Western saga, creating in The Willow Field a story with such classic scenes and characters that it nearly conjures déjà vu…. [His] characters are fresh and new while remaining faithful to the place and era of the mid-twentieth-century West.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Sharp, poetic and decidedly Western.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “As much as this powerful novel is infatuated with the American West—its grave succession that ends in modernity, its land and animals as viewed by humans, its conflicts and trials, its quiet—it is also a novel in love with language itself, as stargazers are in love with light. Kittredge's novel is ample and satisfying and luminous. It's surely the book he was most meant to write.”

  —Richard Ford

  “Beautifully written and as attentive to landscape as anything published this year…. A picaresque odyssey. This book has an epic architecture and a knowing engineer.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Kittredge takes his rightful literary seat next to Wallace Stegner in this memorable, beautifully written epic.”

  —Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

  “Hoist yourself into the saddle and ride along for this terse tumble-weed of a novel and you'll know what to make of the phrase writing the West…. Authentically crude and arrestingly vivid.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Superlatives can be annoying, but when a man so many of us love steps up to the plate in his mid-seventies and parks it, what can we do but throw our hats at the sky? The Willow Field is the shit. Historically and geographically sweeping; soaringly lyrical yet so tuned to the terse wisdom of its horseman hero it sends chills all the way down to your saddle and into and on out the horse. William Kit-tredge is the bard laureate of the American West, and this novel will be bringing people joy thousands of days from today.”

  —David James Duncan

  “Kittredge has written an elegy for the West.”

  —Men's Journal

  “Love, sorrow, frustration, the compromises that men and women make to live together, horses, politics, friendship, the look and feel of the West between 1933 and 1991—it's all here. Kittredge uses strong, earthy language to tell the story … laying his meanings between the lines like a modern Ernest Hemingway.”

  —Library Journal

  “Luminous…. An exploration of the magnetic fields that draw people together and push them apart…. Kittredge knows that deal, and he gets it exactly right.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “The Willow Field is a Western in the richest sense of that word. There is a taproot here, and something elemental about the American West comes pushing through the prose itself. I read it as a love song too, part lament, part passionate embrace, by a writer obsessed with a complex terrain he knows from the bottom up, from the inside out. I salute Bill Kittredge for what he has given us in this abundant and heartful book.”

  —James D. Houston

  “With a compelling confidence … Kittredge balances earthy dialogue with lyrical prose to create a memorable evocation of the American West.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Willow Field is a big, wild-hearted American saga. An instant classic.”

  —Gretel Ehrlich

  William Kittredge

  The Willow Field

  William Kittredge is the author, most recently, of The Nature of Generosity, and with Annick Smith he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. He grew up in Oregon and now lives in Missoula, where for many years he taught at the University of Montana.

  ALSO BY WILLIAM KITTREDGE

  The Nature of Generosity

  Hole in the Sky

  The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories

  We Are Not in This Together

  Owning It All

  The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology

  Edited by William Kittredge (with Annick Smith)

  To Annick Smith

  And the eyes of two Indian ponies

  Darken with kindness.

  They have come gladly out of the willows

  To welcome my friend and me.

  We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

  Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

  They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

  That we have come.

  They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

  There is no loneliness like theirs.

  —JAMES WRIGHT, from “A Blessing”

  PROLOGUE

  UNDER A WHITER SUMMER MOON, THE GLACIATED STONE peaks in the Bitterroot Mountains looked ghostly and unreal above the meadowland valley where grizzly and elk and cougar and herds of Salish horses once roamed. But summer was gone, and those cliffs had vanished into the storm.

  Eliza Benasco, a gray-eyed woman of Scottish descent, her tangle of hair white like a flag, stepped onto her stonework terrace with a porcelain mug of steaming coffee. The snow went on falling. There would be more snow, and then summers to run. She had always loved the notion of life as an undulation.

  At nineteen, Eliza had married Rossie Benasco in this house, her house, a redwood structure designed in the middle style of Frank Lloyd Wright—black and white tiles on the kitchen floor, hardwood Stick-ney furnishings with leather cushions, and fireplaces built of worn stones gathered from Kanaka Creek, a trout stream glinting in gray light through a grove of aspen. The house had been built by her father and mother in the 1920s, when they moved west from Chicago. But they were gone to Scottish heaven. The house was hers, and had been, these decades.

  Eliza had planned to educate Rossie. They would live as a secret society. But after he had slipped the wedding ring onto her finger and kissed her properly, after the festivities and the toasting, when they were alone in their bedroom, she had smiled like a crazy girl and lifted the skirts of her wedding dress to show red garters and long white thighs—and that she'd not worn underpants. “You sometimes can't expect,” he had said without smiling, “what commotion you'll find.” How could she not love this serious young man saying commotion as he touched her?

  The next morning, bundled under the Navajo rug thrown over her feather comforter, Rossie had whispered for some unaccountable reason that this snuggling reminded him of hiding in thickets along the Truckee River behind the mansions on the west side of Reno, only a block or so from his mother's house. Too young for school, he'd snake through dim trails in the willows and brittle late-summer grass to watch muskrats slink along the banks of fishing holes and find matted-down nests that stank of foxes and garbage-eating raccoons, where the men his mother called hobos slept. To Eliza, this sounded unclean, and she shuddered. Not until he whispered of galloping through the meadows on sunup mornings, gathering the great Neversweat herd of work teams, did she understand that he was trying to convey to her the degree to which he now—in the house, with her family—felt safe. How could she not cherish this man who spoke of her as the find of his life?

  She had been shameless. “Why don't you?” she'd whispered.

  “You, Eliza,” an elegant widow said, so many years after. “Rossie, chasing you, isn't that the story?” The woman smiled like a conspirator. “Your own horseman, tilting away?”

  “Sort of.” Eliza hesitated. “Not altogether.”

  PART ONE

  HORSES, A JUNIOR HIGH TEACHER TOLD ROSSIE'S CLASS, WERE an ancient symbol of friendship. “Horses are the amiable creature.” This was the spring Rossie became preoccupied with an incessant, secret urge to jack off that dist
urbed and frightened him. At his mother's kitchen table, as she weeded in her backyard garden, he sat nicking his left index finger over and over with her sharp cutlery and tried to ease his nerves by imagining the selfless companionability of old horses nuzzling at one another. It was a way to think the world was easy to live in. Training horses to ride and to pull chariots, he read in his mother's Encyclopedia Britannica, was vital to the power of a civilization called Assyria. “Power,” his mother said, wrinkling her nose. “Imagine. Your father would say it was the freedom to ride off.”

  When Rossie turned fifteen—gangling and black-haired and shaving every morning at the insistence of his father—he gave up on Reno Public High School and drifted off to sit on high-board fences at the Western Pacific stockyards. He helped out with the gates as men jammed and cursed the bawling cattle until a whiskery man named Fritzy Brewster gave him a chance horseback. “Kid,” he said, “a sensible boy don't work in the dirt. That's for farmers. A sensible boy stays on his horse.” Up on a bay gelding Rossie jostled steers and heifers into chutes as Brewster uncapped a beer, sat on a fence, and watched.

  Rossie's mother, Katrina, when she discovered he hadn't been to school since March, sat him down at the worktable in her clean, tile-floored kitchen. “What is it you most like about shit?” she asked.

  Rossie went defiantly blank-eyed, and she shook her head.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if your father is going to let you do as you please.”

  Nito Benasco supervised casino gambling at the elegant new Riverside, George Wingfield's modern gambling and resort hotel on the banks of the Truckee River, just a five-minute walk north on Virginia Street from the Washoe County Court House. Women waiting out their weeks in residence before divorce paraded the hotel lobby in spangled cowgirl outfits, heading out for rides with buckaroos. Divorcées at the Riverside, Katrina said, were fools who loved dressing up in gowns, to sip at martinis and watch roulette. Women with college degrees brought books in their suitcases and were likely to stay in a house like hers, where they could be at home with other civilized creatures.

  “So,” Nito said, when Katrina told him about the stockyards. “What's wrong with school? A man with no education is dead in the brain.”

  “Algebra,” Rossie said. “X equals h. They teach you to be nobody.”

  “You think the stockyards is somebody?”

  This, Rossie knew, was a moment to be faced carefully. Nito dressed in dark suits and spent his hours standing back, watching the cards and the roll of the dice and ivory balls spinning on the wheels. He would say a quiet thing to a white-shirted dealer, then smile as he went over to the drunk at a blackjack table, or the loud fellow from Pennsylvania or Idaho who was running out of money. “We don't worry,” Nito would say, “do we?” his eyes shining and his accurate hands riffling the cards as if he loved them or suspected irregularity. “Making trouble. That would be a shame. We're a luxury liner, on the banks of the Truckee.” This was his joke. The game never stops, not even for trouble. It's always here.

  “I read books.” Rossie drifted through summer evenings on his mother's screened-in veranda above the Truckee, deep in Zane Grey and the Charlie Russell book about life on the Montana frontier. He read the books the women had brought and left behind, The Cossacks and Youth by Count Leo Tolstoy and Giants in the Earth by a Norwegian whose name he couldn't pronounce, and My Ántonia by Willa Cather.

  “Who kissed the girl? That's what those books are about,” Nito said. “You need to know real things. That's what school is for. But you don't like school.” He smiled softly, like he had discovered a cure. “You should be with experts. We'll fix you up.” He made calls on the telephone, and three days later Rossie had a job as wrango boy on the Nev-ersweat, one of the vast Nevada empire ranches, on the Horse Fork of the Humboldt River beyond Winnemucca. Nito bought Rossie a classical Hamley saddle made in Pendleton—a secondhand rig with worn bucking rolls and a high cantle—and he drove Rossie northeast across Great Basin deserts in his immaculate black Chevrolet. Clouds were massing in hammerheads above the lava-strewn Bloody Run Mountains. Sweeps of thin rain would evaporate over the alkaline playa of the Black Rock Desert before reaching the ground. Past Winnemucca, the macadam turned to graded gravel, and alkaline dust drifted behind them in a rooster tail. Nito slapped the palm of his right hand on the dark velvet seat cushion and laughed at the print it left in the white dust. “She'll clean up.”

  Out front of the Neversweat bunkhouse, they unloaded the Ham-ley saddle and a snaffle-bit bridle bought the evening before in a Virginia Street pawnshop, then Rossie's clothes and bedding: a Hudson Bay blanket, flannel sheets, a pillow without a case, denim shirts, wool socks and long-johns, and old pairs of Levi's. Rossie's shaving gear and a bar of Lava soap, two towels, and wash cloths were rolled up and strapped together inside a canvas tarp with the bedding.

  Nito eyed Rossie as if estimating a distance, then shook his hand for the first time ever. “You're where you want to be,” he said. “You are going to be lonely. But it cures.”

  Nito had come from Bilbao, Spain's largest seaport, a Basque city on the northern coast. His parents had died of influenza in 1905, when he was twenty. Nito's eyes shined whenever he told this story to the women who stayed in Katrina's house.

  “My father's dream was that I should be a dealer in Biarritz, over in France with the rich. A Gypsy named Caro was teaching me cards. Caro taught me tricks. But there was no chance in Biarritz. I would be a servant. Caro told me go to America, so I sat in New York rooms and practiced cards all night and learned this language and here I am.” Nito would look around to the women awaiting divorce. Loneliness, he would say, cures.

  “This might be your road,” he said to Rossie as twilight came over northern Nevada and the Neversweat. “But you can come home. You are always our family. Your mother and I will also be lonely.”

  “You think I'm going to quit?”

  “This might not be the right thing. You'll know.”

  STANDING BESIDE HIS GEAR, ROSSIE BENASCO BEGAN TO SEE the terms of his new life as his father drove away. He was alone. In his soul he was quaking.

  There was nothing to do but commence moving in. As he dropped his bedroll onto a World War I military cot in a bunkhouse room nearest to the bullpen with its barrel stove, Mattie Flynn showed herself. Got up in a shirt buttoned at the cuff and shit-heeled boots, red hair stuffed under her sweat-rimmed hat, this Mattie was not some momma's sweetheart. Freckled and windburned, she was a horseback girl, her long-fingered hands scabbed and callused. “You don't sleep there,” she said.

  “Good as any. They're all of them empty.”

  “They been gone eight days,” she said. “That's where Francis Church sleeps. He's worked here twenty-three years and he sleeps there. You better get your junk out of there. You get the last room down the hall.” When he was stowed away, she told him to come and eat. “There's nobody here but me and Rudy. He's cooking. The rest of them are gone to the desert.”

  Old Rudy limped around and fried Rossie a patch of steak and two eggs. Mattie watched while Rossie went at the food.

  “She's going to eat you alive, boy,” Rudy said. “She's done telling me what to do. It's your turn.”

  Mattie showed him the room above the kitchen where her father, Slivers Flynn, lived when he wasn't on the desert with the cowhands. Rossie opened a clasp knife with a white bone handle, copper rivets, and a long, thin blade so often sharpened it was fragile like a razor and sharp enough to shave hair off his forearm. Mattie said it was a knife with history. Slivers had put it up to save. “That knife,” she said. “It's retired. He says that knife has done its work. He packed it for eleven years.”

  It had been atop a chest of drawers, out where anybody could see, beside a deck of playing cards still in the cellophane. When Mattie looked away, Rossie slid it into his pocket and she was on him so quick he wondered if this was some test he'd failed. “I don't lie. He knows it,” she said. “He's going to know yo
u stole that knife. Your ass is done for around here unless you give it to me, and I put it back.”

  Rossie fished the knife from his pocket, and she laid it beside the playing cards.

  “I knew you was going to steal it,” she said. “I'd steal it if I was you. I got a secret on you. If you knew one on me we could cut our fingers and mix blood if we wanted to. But we don't. This is our first secret.”

  MATTIE'S MOTHER HAD DIED ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON WHEN she was eleven. Houseflies and yellow jackets, she told Rossie, walked the window sills in the rooms where they lived, upstairs in the whitewashed cookhouse. The pains of cancer drove her mother to fold Mat-tie in her bony arms and curl up in her bed and howl. “I don't remember,” Mattie said. “I don't want to hear another thing about it.”

  Even a boy so short on experience as Rossie gave her credit for not being able to bear recalling her mother's bedsores or that howling in the afternoon. We all got to deal with dying someday, Rossie told himself. It was the thing he'd known since he was a boy studying stars in their configurations beyond the moon. Some distant day, he already knew, he would face great trouble in himself, trying to escape the thought that he was only another creature running for cover and never getting there.

  Slivers and his hired hands had raised Mattie. “She's a horseback kid,” Slivers would say, turning his eyes down to his hands, thumbs together like they were at war against one another, “ever since I went single.” Mattie dressed like a cow-camp tramp rather than some girl, riding the greasewood deserts twenty miles out to the South Fork of the Owyhee and never showing she was tired or even thirsty. There was not much horse work she couldn't handle, nor talk she hadn't heard as she tended a branding fire or drove a feed-wagon team in the overcast light of winter. Mattie was willing to stare the devil in the eye, and Rossie dogged after her on a Roman-nosed bay named Snip as she galloped along willow-lined alleyways between sloughs. “You got a man's saddle,” she said, “but you're horseback like a schoolboy.”