The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Using the portable forge hauled all this way in the bed-wagon truck, they rasped hooves and shaped horseshoes to fit, nailing them in place.

  Once the blacksmith's fire was out and the little anvil tucked away, Bill Sweet brought up the idea of testing the new horses. “I'm going to try out that old Hammerhead, the squealing blue roan son. I'd like to show him something.”

  “You'll be kicking and squealing,” Jap Hardy said. “But you ought to put on your spurs. It might shut you up.”

  “Or I might ride him right down.”

  “We'll hear about you in Madison Square Garden,” Tarz Witzell said. “We'll think about how we knew Bill Sweet when he was just a kid.”

  Rossie kept quiet, not wanting to bust his head. He was beginning to think that rodeo was bullshit and wondered if that labeled him an all-the-way coward. Later he felt guilty, like he'd known what would happen and should have warned Bill Sweet. But who guessed luck could run so quickly haphazard?

  Corralled, the blue roan stood quiet as Bill Sweet got a toe in the stirrup and tested his weight there. He swung aboard and speared the big gelding with his sharp Spanish spurs. It was, as Jap Hardy said later on, a kid's trick. The roan settled on his haunches, then charged, not bucking so much as escaping, across the corral and directly into the pole fence, where he recoiled backward and fell. That quick, Bill Sweet was underneath on the dusty ground as the roan scrambled to his feet and stepped for no reason other than bad luck with his whole weight on Sweet's left shin. Rossie heard the snapping bone, the cracking.

  “That son of a bitch is broke off.” Already Bill Sweet looked green in the face.

  “It's not off, but she's broke,” Jap Hardy said, taking his knife to Bill's Sweet's trousers as he howled. White bone and blood showed through the flesh.

  “You are going to do some crying,” Tarz Witzell said. “But we are taking that one to town.”

  They splinted the leg with rawhide thongs and willow sticks and eased Bill Sweet into the Model A truck.

  “You're coming with me,” Jap Hardy said to Rossie. “You can sit on that boy if he starts thrashing.”

  Rossie found himself holding Bill Sweet's hand.

  “Tell you a sad thing,” Sweet said. “You are what family I got. Right here. You're it. If this ain't the shits-for-luck.”

  “The complete shits.” Rossie looked away.

  “There's never no justice to it,” Jap Hardy said. They reached the hospital in Choteau by late afternoon. The doctor was a bright-eyed fellow who'd been out fishing on the Teton River and was still in hip boots when he came into the operating room. “You boys clear out of here,” he said.

  Rossie and Jap Hardy walked the leafy streets of the town, passing elaborate white-painted houses where roses bloomed in the yards.

  “Pissant shame, but they is nothing we can do about it,” Jap Hardy said. “You get used to it. In these farmer towns people think they can't break their leg. They think they're getting away with something.”

  “What you going to do about him?”

  “He can't travel. I'm going to pay the doctor and give the kid fifty bucks. He can get the rest of what he's got coming from Dufferena. If he had any sense he'd stay here, find a girl, and live in one of these houses. Best luck ever struck him. For us, it's open prairies from here to Calgary, so we can go shorthanded.”

  “He said we was family.”

  “Then he's got worse luck than a broken leg. Anyway, he said you was, not me.”

  “What if I broke mine?”

  “Same thing. Except I'd have to hire somebody.”

  Bill Sweet was white-faced and passed out with drugs in a hospital room when Jap Hardy scribbled a note that read: “Here's fifty. You'll get the rest from Dufferena. Left your gear and your horse with the fellow who owns the French Field. Good luck.”

  So now, Rossie thought, you know. You got no excuses for trusting to luck.

  COMING NORTH THROUGH MONTANA, THEY RODE ROLLING GRASSY hills within sight of Browning, the headquarters town for the Black-feet Reservation, where unpainted houses lined the dusty streets. “Nothing like Choteau,” Jap Hardy said. “Them Indians are living at the bottom of a well.”

  They rested the horses alongside the windy shores of Duck Lake, just short of the Canadian border. Off west the peaks in Glacier National Park gleamed under remnant snow, and hummingbirds hovered over the white and yellow prairie flowers.

  “We're going into Canada with rested animals,” Jap Hardy said. “Dufferena wants these horses first-rate plush when they're delivered.”

  The crossing into Canada took place the next afternoon on a back road with no one to notice, about a hundred and twenty miles from Calgary. “Boy, this your first foreign country?” Tarz Witzell asked.

  Rossie hadn't thought about it. He was listening more and more to the creaking of his saddle. The clarity of air over the mountains looked touchable.

  “Me, too,” Tarz Witzell said.

  Half a dozen miles upstream from the haze of home-fire smoke that hung over Calgary, they camped at a place called Liskie House, a ranch leased out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the willow-lined banks of the Bow River. Alexander Beets, a string-bean of a man who managed property for the province of Alberta, came to greet them on a black-flecked gray that showed Appaloosa blood. He and Jap Hardy counted the same two hundred and fifty-seven horses into one last fenced field.

  “Son of a bitch,” Tarz said, “if we isn't been good boys? Got here with the entirety of them.”

  Clifford Dufferena wasn't due off the train from Vancouver until the second day of June. They had three days. Louis Clair and Angus Jackson set up planks on sawhorses for a table, a fire pit lined with stones, and rounds of log for stools. They ate in the twilight with the lights of the Liskie house showing through the trees.

  “Been so long at traveling I forget what it would be like indoors, sitting there with a woman waiting table,” Dickie Wilson said.

  Tarz Witzell eyed him. “Don't worry. We get to one of those whorehouses, you'll remember.”

  Jap Hardy came back from a look-around with the news that just a mile or so downriver, toward the smokes of Calgary, there was a cluster of buffalo-hide tepees huddled beside log buildings roofed with mossy shakes. “Nobody told me about an Indian camp.”

  “Them Indians don't got it left in them to steal horses,” Tarz Witzell said. “Down there at the Klamath Marsh, at Bear Flat, they was eating dogs. Snow three foot deep and dogs was hung up and skinned behind the store. If you offered to buy food, they cut off a frozen shank of dog and cooked it. We don't got any dogs. There won't be no trouble.” He smiled, showing teeth like this was a fine irony. Jap Hardy shook his head. “These Blackfeet are another kind. They got more stomach. This is their home country. They see us like we was magpies.”

  “I knew an old white woman, made her living cooking bootleg whiskey at Bear Flat. She said the plains people was ruined, acting like they was wolves. Wind and snow, that's what they got left out on the plains, she said. It's gone, anything they would want.”

  “Shit, Hutterite farmers are making a living out there. Raising turkeys and pigs and every other goddamned thing.” Jap Hardy was smiling like he had won a debate.

  “Hutterites is crazy. They gone crazy on religion.”

  “Crazy enough to work hard.”

  “That's no accounting. You and me are proof of that. Running down the road like we was warhorse buckaroos. She's over, that show.”

  “Not everywhere, You know where I'd try? Australia and South America. You can stay right where you grew up but I always figured that's a dumb-fuck thing to do when there was new country.”

  “We could,” Tarz Witzell said.

  “What's that?”

  “We could take that train to San Francisco and go boating off to Australia.” Tarz Witzell smiled at this first-rate joke.

  Jap Hardy looked at him like he'd never heard such idiocy before.

  “I'd do it,” Tarz W
itzell said.

  “What we're going do is draw straws and see who gets night-herding shifts. We deliver these horses and then we can think about Australia. Hold up a bank in California and run for the South Seas.”

  In the end they all put in their shifts. Rossie saddled a horse in moonlight and patrolled in circles around the pasture, waiting for sunup. This was a waste of time—there wasn't going to be no horse stealing—but it set him thinking of Bill Sweet down in Choteau, in some boardinghouse room, probably watching out the window for morning, trying to guess how long it would be before he could get horseback again.

  Come morning, his pinto horse turned loose to roll in the dust, Rossie was cradling a cup of coffee by the cook fire when a rider on a shaggy, white mare approached over the prairie. Pushing back a sweat-stained hat, the rider turned out to be a hawk-faced girl in a pale blouse and baggy, black trousers. Rossie took her for Indian until he saw her gray eyes.

  She spoke in a clipped way, from astride her horse. “I have come to appeal for breakfast, on the hope you have bacon. I can pay for breakfast if you have bacon. Thick and crisp-fried.” She lifted her chin at Rossie.

  “Thought you was an Indian,” he said.

  She studied him. “You're the one who might be. From your coloring.”

  “Guess I should get a haircut. What I am is half-Basque. From Spain, but nobody calls us Spaniards. My grandfather was a dockhand in Spain. My father is a cardsharp in Reno.”

  “European.” She considered this. “You look like a cardsharp.”

  Rossie had dug out his white-handled knife and was peeling away wisps of thumbnail. Why, he didn't know.

  “The Blackfoot tribe and I, we're outlaws,” she said. “We know abandonment.”

  “Abandonment,” Rossie said. “Do you think about saying that stuff before you say it?”

  Her smile hardened, though she looked reluctantly amused. “Aren't you an asshole.” It was not a question.

  Jap Hardy stepped in front of Rossie, one hand up, palm open. “You got to forgive this boy. Been on the trail and lost his manners. Get down and we'll give you bacon.” He gave Rossie a sideways look, like this was joke between men. “We got a cook to fry it up. That's his job.”

  The girl swung off the shaggy mare. She was almost as tall as Rossie, holding out the bridle reins in her big hands. “If you were going to be a gentleman, you'd do something with my horse. Her name is Sky.”

  “Will she stand?”

  “She will.”

  “So you could just drop the reins anywhere, and she'd stand like a cow horse. Something you could do yourself if I wasn't busy being a gentleman.”

  “Of course, but will you do it for me?”

  “Sure will.” Rossie took the bridle reins and led the mare off to the Model A truck, dropping the reins over the front bumper. “There she stands.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled with what seemed to be no trace of irony.

  “Louis,” Jap Hardy said. “We got company. Break out the bacon, and you could mix up some pancakes. You've got plenty of time. We ain't doing nothing but entertaining this lady.”

  Louis Clair produced a slab of bacon and Angus Jackson bit at his tongue as he labored to slice it evenly.

  “My name is Eliza Stevenson,” the girl said to him. “Tell me yours.”

  “Angus.”

  “And you?” She smiled at Louis as he mixed the pancake batter.

  “My people,” Louis Clair said, “understand that food is a sacrament.”

  Tarz Witzell was eyeing Louis like he thought the cook had gone crazy. “You saying a sacrament? What about women? Be a big thing for me if women was a church. That way I'd have spent my life dreaming about church.”

  “Angus,” she said. “You must be Scottish.”

  “My mother come from the Hebrides Islands,” the boy said. “When she was a baby child.”

  “What of your father?”

  The boy stopped sawing at the side of bacon, swallowing before he spoke. “Nobody knows. Not even my mother, according to what she claims.”

  “Tragic. Do you feel your life is tragic?”

  “Lady, I'm supposed to be cutting bacon. My last name is Jackson and my mother says she just made that up.”

  “My father,” she said, “is related to Robert Louis Stevenson. The Stevensons are a Scottish family you may know about. That's what my father claims. But I don't believe him.”

  “Why's that?” Rossie asked.

  Eliza Stevenson smiled faintly, then raised her eyebrows. “He's unreliable—spoiled and unreliable.”

  Bacon and pancakes and a dozen eggs sizzled on a griddle over the fire. The table with sawhorse legs was set with butter and canned syrup while Louis Clair filled each tin plate.

  “Here we are with bacon, breakfasting,” Eliza Stevenson said. “Isn't this a holiday.”

  “I'm happy you come,” Tarz Witzell said, dropping his slick tin plate in the washbasin where hot water was steaming on the grill. “We don't eat this fine every morning.”

  “It's not a easy thing to cook over an open fire,” Louis Clare said.

  “By God, no,” Jap Hardy said. “We're damned proud of you, Louis. Ask anybody.”

  Tarz Witzell turned toward Eliza Stevenson. “So, you might settle me a mystery. What are you doing here on these plains? Who's looking after you when Louis isn't cooking?”

  “Nobody looks after me. No one but me.” It didn't seem to be a subject she intended to pursue. “All of you should come to my gathering. It's on Sunday.”

  “Too bad,” Jap Hardy said. “We'll be on the train out of Calgary.”

  “Some church thing?” Rossie said.

  “It's a party with friends. My friends are Blood Indians. You look like an Indian, so you'd be comfortable. A going-away party.” She broke into a phrase of song, her voice high, light and clear. “Fare thee well, little darling. “ She smiled. “I'm going home to the Bitterroot Valley because I'm three months with child and the father has run off to the warrior life. And my own father tells me he's dying of a cancer, my second reason for going home.”

  “That cancer's a hell of a thing,” Tarz Witzell said.

  “I'm taking the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Vancouver,” she said, “and a train to Seattle, and then Missoula. I'm going to my father's house in the Bitterroot Valley, where my father and mother will look after me, don't mistake it, and my child.”

  “What sort of a cancer?” Jap Hardy asked.

  “In his groin, where he sits, a slow cancer. It doesn't pain him yet, but he says it inevitably kills. The doctor tells him that and he won't have it cut out.” She looked up and her gray eyes were dry and still.

  “My daddy had that damned old agony,” Tarz Witzell said. “Sat on a feather pillow at the end.”

  “And I'll be a pregnant woman on the train,” she said.

  “Woman?” Rossie scoffed. “You're a girl.”

  “Whatever we are,” she said. “Sweethearts. We could be, in another world. That's a wonderful idea.” She batted her gray eyes, not morose at all but at sport with her flirting.

  Clifford Dufferena arrived in a rented, red-painted buggy drawn by Standard-bred geldings.

  “Pretty team,” Jap Hardy said. “Never seen them kind of horses broke to harness before.”

  “Pretty enough to suit us,” Dufferena said. But his attention was on the horses drifting among the willows along the Bow River. They had to be counted through one more gate and the deal was done. He stood with Alexander Beets beside him and the two of them counted the animals.

  “Good enough,” Alexander Beets said.

  Dufferena produced a fan of paycheck envelopes and a bottle of Irish whiskey. He pulled the cork, tossed it into the brush, then sat with the bottle beside him. “I got a bank in Calgary that'll cash these checks.” He tossed them the pay envelopes, each marked with a name. “I got another envelope for the boy that hurt himself. He sent a letter to General Delivery in Calgary, begging for his pay. He
's doing chores for a deer-hunting camp headquartered in a Montana town called Charlo. Three pages of his scribbling but no hint of where to send the check.”

  “I could find him,” Louis Clair offered, “if I'm driving the truck to Reno.”

  “That truck is sold to a man in Calgary. You ought to be happy on the railroad. You'll be eating in the dining car.”

  “I been thinking about them rock mountains,” Rossie said. “I might never get back to this country. That Malinda, down in Eagleville, she told me the Bitterroot Valley was a dandy for horses. I'm thinking I should ride down there before I go off for home.”

  “There's extra horses,” Dufferena said. “I promised these boys I'd buy the ones they brought to Eagleville for twenty-five dollars cash, now, in a minute. Three extra private horses. You can take two, and that would leave one more I can sell to the Mounties. Then I don't got to pay your way on the railroad. You carry this paycheck to that boy if you find him. That would be a fair deal all around.”

  “What if I got his check cashed and kept his money?”

  “Then you'd be known far and wide around Nevada as a cheap-shit thief.”

  “What if I didn't care?”

  “Then you would be a cheap-shit thief, and nobody would want to deal with you another time.”

  “I'd want that Rock horse, and the pinto called Pinky.”

  “Square deal,” Dufferena said, and it was done.

  “Wondering about square, how much in dollars do you realize from us running them horses for you, and you selling them?” Dickie Wilson asked.

  “That's for me to know.” Dufferena began pouring Irish whiskey into tin cups Louis Clair had set out before him.

  “Me,” he said, licking his lips in an old-man way, “I am thirty-five hundred dollars to the good. And you fellows did the work.”

  “We ought to have two bottles of that whiskey for that,” Jap Hardy said. Dufferena offered his false-toothed smile. “I got three more in my bedroll.”