The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  After the desert branding crew came back, she'd chide him at the dinner table. “Look at him eat that spinach,” she'd say, that sort of thing—until one time Slivers shut her up.

  “You ought to watch your mouth,” he said. “Rossie is going to get tired of acting like a kid. He's going to kick your ass. I'll be thinking it's good work.”

  “The big old man,” Mattie said, and she gathered her dish of rhubarb pie, and went to finish eating out on the side porch and away from everyone.

  But then she'd ask Rossie about Reno, what it was like to try kissing girls in movie theaters, if some of the girls went for it and kissed back. Did Rossie go downtown and watch his father deal cards to the rich men? She would tilt her head, trying not to make fun of him, as if she really wanted to know what it was like.

  When he was home for a visit, Rossie's mother watched him finish up a load of breakfast pancakes and fried eggs in her immaculate kitchen. “Are you just being stubborn? Your father and I thought the desert would cure you. We thought you'd come home.”

  “Feeling fine,” he said, licking the syrup off his fork, smiling at her, lying a little, a boy sometimes sick for his mother and this talk.

  “Well, then you can help me in the garden. Buckaroos help their mothers in the garden.”

  On a summer morning in 1933, in the shade of willows beside Hill Camp Springs, Mattie bit at her lip, took the back of his neck in one of her strong hands, and leaned in and kissed him. Rossie didn't keep his hands to himself, and she didn't stop him. There was not a thing to it in the beginning but the fucking. They'd gone vacant-eyed and luminous. The lean, cigar-smoking woman who cooked for the haying crew took to asking Mattie about her “lovey-dovey,” and though Mattie acted like she might spear the cook with her fork while the hay-hands smirked, she told Rossie she didn't care what anybody thought. “Why should we give a shit? You and me, we don't know no better. We're kids.” She wanted to tell her father, the king-of-the-mountain cowman at the Neversweat, that they were in love.

  A champion of the world, one of those legends, Slivers Flynn was thick in his chest and narrow-hipped, with a long spade chin, high cheekbones, and huge, quiet hands. The men who worked for him, as they put away beer by the case on the porch of the North Fork Café on Sunday afternoons, talked about Slivers and balance and how he “rode them bang-tailed horses like they was rocking chairs.” He had won the 1911 saddle bronc contest in Madison Square Garden, but by 1918, home from the war in France, Slivers had quit thinking about the rodeo and instead gentled horses around northern Nevada on contract. “Sweet horses,” he would say, “and damned few people. That's the deal. I got out of their war in one piece but I'll run for the mountains if they try sending me again.” When the summer branding started in 1921, he was put in charge of hiring and firing at the Neversweat. Nobody in their right mind would defy him and not expect consequences, but Slivers Flynn was as honest as God. Why shouldn't he be the boss?

  “Love?” Slivers said when Mattie broke the news. “Who don't know that?” So the fat was in the fire. “You be careful with it. You're not playground children.” He tossed Rossie a pack of rubbers from the drugstore in Winnemucca. “There's more. I bought four dozen. You use a new one, every time. You run out, you ask for more. We don't need babies. Not at this point.” He told them to go fix up the slant roof at Hog Island, a one-room cabin sided with tarpaper on a lava-rock outcropping where a spring bubbled up alongside a withering orchard of apple and pear trees planted by early settlers. “You figure,” Slivers said. “Water coming cold from the mountains. Miles and miles of cracks in the rock.”

  Hog Island was named when Watson and McGregor, a Scottish émigré landowning and livestock-raising combine, bought seven thousand acres of meadow along the Horse Fork, the core property at the Neversweat. Henry McGregor set up his hunting camp beside that cold spring. His men ranged out into the tules with rifles, shot feral hogs and dragged their carcasses into sloughs so the bones wouldn't litter the meadows, leaving the meat to coyotes and circling birds. Soon the place was known as Hog Island.

  “You got the winter,” Slivers said to Rossie, wiping crumbs off the table with a huge broken-fingered hand. “Nothing to do but a few colts. Give it a try. Ever'body did. There's no wages. There is not going to be, not in these times, but you're eating. That's better than some people got.”

  Mattie and Rossie played house at Hog Island through the winter, until it was time to go out and camp alongside the cook wagon, moving every day while driving the mother cows to their desert range. “The little woman worn to the quick this morning?” cowhands would ask, windburned lips flecked with chewed tobacco. Mattie would grin. “At least I'm not going to die horny, like you assholes.”

  One afternoon the joking ended. A stocking-footed horse called Banjo charged onto a ridge populated by rattlesnakes that had emerged from their rock-pile den to bask in new spring warmth. Their buzzing agitation startled that Banjo horse sideways in a set of stumbling moves. Rossie lost his right side stirrup, hung up in the other one, and went down flailing on the rocks. He dangled there bleeding a seep of blood from his left ear, his left foot still in the stirrup and the snakes buzzing all around but none of them striking. Banjo held steady, trembling but locked in place with forelegs set like posts and looking down while Slivers Flynn got Rossie loose and out of there. If that horse had bolted, dragging Rossie across the lava, it would have been the end.

  Rossie didn't come back to himself until he was laid on his bedroll inside the line shack at Lone Grave Springs. His eyes opened and he lay silent, lost like a skinned animal and paying no mind even to Mattie as she tried to feed him spoonfuls of navy bean soup before giving it up and lying there, tucked up beside him and shivering. Slivers sent a Mormon man named Brother Handel off on horseback to the ranch. At daylight, while Slivers was out catching horses for the day, Brother Handel came rattling across the desert in Sliver's black Model T Ford and hauled Rossie and Mattie and their gear to Hog Island, where she nursed him in her rough-handed way. “Slivers said to go with you and plant a garden,” Mattie said, when Rossie was into himself, “if I was going to act like a girl.” She smiled at this. In a couple of weeks, Rossie was eating from a plate of scrambled eggs, not talking much but mumbling.

  “Kid,” Slivers told him, “you been better than lucky. You was on the edge of no-man's-land. That Banjo horse stood with them snakes buzzing all around because he saw you in trouble. Could have stampeded and drug you until you was killed before anybody stopped him. A horse can act like a woman, and forgive you damned near anything, even falling off. Nothing you ever done could have earned it. You ought to thank the goodness of horses every morning.”

  Three weeks after that, Slivers sent Mattie to Winnemucca with the cook to buy staple groceries for the chuck wagon, and he came over to sit on a block of stove wood in the cabin at Hog Island. “Time we got down to brass tacks,” he said to Rossie. “Late May, you'll be horseback. Fit enough. But I got a different plan. I got you lined up for job going to Canada, running horses to Calgary from Eagleville. Get you out of the country.”

  “Out of the country?” Rossie was abruptly angry.

  “Best thing that could happen. Time you left that girl alone for a while, to think her thoughts. You been sampling for free but that's at an end. Rightly so.” Slivers looked up at Rossie. “You understand?”

  “Guess I don't,” Rossie said. “You been giving me rubbers. I thought you was happy.”

  Slivers shook his head. “I give you time. It's used up. You either marry her or not.”

  “Goddamn. Never thought of this.”

  “Time you did. She isn't the all-day free-lunch counter.”

  “Free lunch?” Rossie was abruptly angry. Fuck you Mr. Slivers Flynn, boss of the rodeo, fuck you. “What if I stay here,” he said, “do my thinking, and don't take that Canada job?”

  “Then you're saying you want to get on with marrying.”

  “I don't get no choice.”
r />   “Not around here.”

  “What if I'd run off with her.”

  “Then you'll be somewhere else. Stop and think. That girl is going to get knocked up if you keep on, and that's no good. Stay here, you'll be a married man by June. You'll be another dumb son of a bitch who don't know a thing but how to gather cows out of the brush, and you'll have a mess of redheaded kids, you and Mattie.” Slivers shook his head. “You'll be feeling sorry for yourself, and fall to drinking and acting like an asshole. We've seen that one, from the beginning out to the end. It's the shits every time. You're better off seeing some world if you plan on amounting to more than nothing. If it was me, I'd be gone to Canada.”

  “What if I don't do any of that? Not one thing you say? What if I do as I damn please, stay right here, and keep on chasing down the road with Mattie? That's what I'm likely to be doing.”

  “Mattie is the only family I'm going to have. You don't treat that girl right, I'm going to kick your ass on a daily basis. Until you see the light.” Slivers stood up and stretched like he'd gotten stiff during their talk. “See if you don't think I'm right.”

  Over the next three nights Rossie and Mattie went on as they had, using three more rubbers. But deep in darkness he lay awake listening to Mattie in her sleep. By the second morning Rossie was thinking that Slivers was right about ending up nothing more than a cowhand with redheaded kids, a fate that seemed like walking off into quicksand. Rossie spent the third night devising a story about how he'd been broken and had healed back into a different boy, how he was owed one summer on the road, and how going away couldn't be explained better than that.

  Decades later Rossie would see that night of concocting as a step toward faithlessness. But as they ate breakfast the next morning, and Rossie stared Mattie in the eye, he believed what he was saying. “It's the shits,” he said, “but I'm gone, no matter what. It's just one summer.”

  “I got to think,” she said. “I would have died if you died, and I might die if you leave forever. I got to think about that. Dying is not what anybody wants.”

  The next day she got her clothes and gear together, and moved back to the cookhouse, into the second-story room where her mother died. She ate at a linoleum-topped table in the cookhouse kitchen, sharing chatter with the lean woman who cooked and ignoring long looks from the hay-hands before she went off to work out her days irrigating in the vegetable garden.

  Most men would have said that Canada without her was a crazy idea. Mattie had grown into a brilliant creature, tall but not fragile, with thick, red hair in a braid down her back and freckles as large as pennies head to toe. Even after Rossie announced he was leaving, she would make her way through the meadows to Hog Island on a path she'd worn along the tops of sod-and-manure dams spanning the swales and over planks bridging the head gates, while blue-winged teals cut and banked over the swamps.

  Still healing, his head slow to give up aching, Rossie would sit on a three-legged stool in the sunlight, braiding riatas from eighty-foot strings of rawhide soaked in washtubs. He couldn't sell those braided ropes—nobody had any money, and anyway, cowhide came free at slaughterhouses all over Nevada. But the braiding felt like work, something he could manage.

  Announced by a racket of magpies in the cottonwoods, Mattie would climb into Rossie's bed, curling her long body under his blankets, and roll her cigarettes, playing invulnerable by running her sweet mouth and blowing smoke until she commenced weeping because he was leaving.

  The day of Rossie's going she wore a short, home-sewn, green dress that showed off her luminous white and freckled legs. In the palm of her right hand was the bone-handled knife she had that morning stolen from her father's room. She found Rossie constructing a pair of buckskin gloves like the ones he'd once fashioned for women in his mother's house, before Katrina said divorcée women were looking for men and not gloves. His saddle and bridles and chaps were bundled into a burlap sack beside the doorstep, alongside his bedroll in its canvas tarp. He was waiting on his ride, and on his way. The evening before, Mattie had rolled a cigarette and lit it, stared at him a long, green-eyed moment and said, “Adiós, asshole.” She'd walked away into twilight across the meadows.

  But here she was again, wearing her dress, on a mission to make peace.

  “Pretty flowers,” he said, careful he didn't smile. “You look like a ready-to-go girl yourself.”

  “Pretty fucking stupid. Flowers.” She was holding out pale field lilies and wild pink roses. “Anyway, there they are.”

  Rossie kept his eyes on his stitching. “Making you some gloves.” He was intent in his work, the left glove inside out while he sewed around the heel of the thumb.

  “What I don't need is gloves. I've quit anything where you'd need gloves.”

  “You're breaking your own heart, pissing and moaning.” He turned the glove right side out and whacked it over his knee. “I never made a mistake on these gloves,” he said, getting off the topic of heartbreak.

  “I'm done playing boy, then. From here on I'm all girl. What I'm going to do is smile. This morning it's going to be sweet, and that will be the end of that. What I'm going to do is pick another batch of flowers and start over.”

  She circled out among the lilies and the wild roses on the fence lines while Rossie sat there like he didn't care what came next so long as he got on the road and trying not to look at her in that green dress.

  “I thought I'd come over,” she said, “and fuck you out of leaving. Now I don't want it. I'm going to the college in Reno. I'm going to learn to be something.”

  “Shit, just shit. You might go to Reno, but you'll never make it up the hill to that college. You don't even own a book. I never saw you try to read a book. You could be something but it's not going to be a college girl. That's one you're not going to be.”

  She hurled the flowers and in two running steps caught him with his hands down, landing a right-handed hook that took him off his three-legged stool. Mattie stood panting and rubbed her nose with the back of her fist. “You know what? Hope I broke your head. I don't care where you go.” Her lips were tight and thin against her teeth, and her eyes were glassy as she gazed toward the blue-white sky as if like someone—maybe even she, herself—might be up there watching. She ducked her head, lifted her skirt, and dropped the dress onto the grass, leaving herself to face him in pale-green undershorts she had sewn to match the dress. Her whiteness in the light was nothing he could look at.

  “What the hell are you doing? What do you think this is? You think you're acting in some movie?”

  “Being a woman.” Mattie folded her arms across her breasts and looked away. “Tell you what I want. Unstrap that bedroll.” She met his eyes.

  Fucking was a thing they'd learned to do, but never in the sunlight. Mattie lifted herself so his slide into her was the beginning they'd know. She hooked her legs over his shoulders, and as they moved he let his mind glide until she was sweaty beneath him, panting and not moving.

  “I never looked up at the sky before,” she said. “The whole empty sky and here we were.” She got back into her green dress. “Here's the funny part. I stole something so you'll come back when you've got Canada out of your system.” She showed him the pocketknife. “From Slivers.”

  Rossie opened the long blade and shaved a path of bare skin down his forearm. “I'll be back before the summer's out.”

  Mattie smiled like she was done with sorrow. “Yeah, you might. If some Indian don't kill you. But this is not something you get over. It don't work that way.” Rid of him, she turned for home on her path across the meadows.

  SITTING ON HIS BEDROLL, ROSSIE WAITED FOR HIS RIDE TO RENO. Oscar Dodson was coming in the Packard he'd repainted a mustard color he called gold. He'd bring cold beer.

  They drank it before they made Winnemucca, so Oscar bought another case of A-One, talking all the time as he did when he was drinking, shouting in the wind, not altogether drunk but acting like he wouldn't mind if he was. “You need a ride and I need
to blow off the stink. Another summer to run.”

  By midnight they were in Reno and stalled in a tavern called Whistling in the Dark. Oscar talked about doctors and bought shots of whiskey. Newspapers called him Schoolboy when he was on his three-year run, winning saddle bronc contests from Cheyenne to Fort Worth. But for most of a year Oscar had been wearing a stainless-steel brace belted above his left knee to curve under the instep of his boot. Unable to walk much without it, he was spending his afternoons at lightweight gambling. “A dollar, something to do. You get to chasing the women. That costs money. There I am, gimping around on the dance floor, looking for a rich one.”

  Rossie wondered what it was like listening to announcers talk about you on the radio. Oscar lit up another Lucky Strike. “For a while I thought nothing could be so easy. But this leg don't heal.”

  He had made it look like a cinch. Three years older than Rossie, he had been riding rough string at the Neversweat when he won the bareback and saddle-bronc finals at the Labor Day rodeo in Winnemucca. Then he went off to make his fortune. “That boy,” Slivers Flynn had said, “is as pretty on a horse as I ever saw.” But now Oscar was twenty-two and crippled, nothing to show for his pretty moves but a steel brace and that high-assed automobile in the parking lot.

  “When it gets down to selling the Packard,” he said, eyeing Rossie, “I'm at the end of my shit, working for wages. You know what I'd do? If I was you? I'd marry that redheaded girl. I'd have Slivers looking out for me. But you're running off so I'll try it. I'll marry her while you're gone if you tell me one thing: how was it?”

  Rossie didn't say anything for a long moment. Kiss my ass, he thought. None of what went between Mattie and him was any of Oscar Dodson's affair. He was used goods, Rossie could see it—up to nothing but bullshit and not much but a cripple after all. “That is a sorry fucking plan,” he said.