The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  On the third day he reached the trails leading through the foothills of the Rockies into wilderness where streams cascaded from hanging ice fields and over great cliffs and evaporated into spray, wisping down into timber, then gathering again and running over gravel fields into the Bow River. As squirrels ran to their hideaways, Rossie studied rock slabs worn slick by glaciers and lavishly purple flowers that grew in the shadows. The summits and bluish skies beyond left him dizzy and utterly muddled—better suited to eyeing the squirrels.

  When twilight came, he'd been watching the ground and not seen beyond himself to notice that the day was ending. Through the wilderness afternoon he rode tucked into his fright like a child, listening to the creaking of saddle leather and the horses huffing, letting them pick their way. “Baby boy,” he'd scolded himself. But the mutter of his voice hadn't carried much in the way of comfort. This night, on a sodded embankment with the forest at his back, Rossie ate the last of the cold, crisp bacon and stale bread, then built a fire before drifting to sleep still fully dressed. Later, in darkness softened by glowing coals, he woke to another train, its roaring far off and growing until searchlights swept past and steel wheels hammered at the tracks. Kicking off his boots, he got into his bed, but didn't doze again until first light, after another train had passed.

  The next day he reached a clearing, where midmorning sunlight cut through yellow pines to lay in patterns on the mown grass just ahead. Rossie heard a man curse and a woman call out, hooting laughter. “Nice one.” He had, he discovered, emerged onto a meadowland golf course, fairways with old-growth evergreens between them and artificial mounds cut into orange-yellow sand traps. Flags blew in a breeze across the greens and limber-legged elk grazed while golfers in neckties played through.

  The summer he was fourteen, Rossie had earned spending money caddying at the City Park Golf Course in Reno, sweating under leather bags of sticks that belonged to bankers and automobile dealers who wanted him on the job every morning as if they owned him. He'd carry double, and they'd tip him two bits. It was work to hate.

  Startled for an instant to find this unexpected spectacle in the Rockies, he kept on crossing the fairways. Men and women in their foursomes waved, and the elk snorted at his horses but never stampeded or charged. What astonished him most was the green-roofed Banff Springs Hotel, a vast château built above the river by the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company, nine stories skyward and elegant against the glaciated mountains and snowfields, like nothing in Reno.

  Having clattered across rocky shallows to swim his horses through the current of the Bow River, Rossie rode to the little town a mile or so downhill from the hotel. He put his horses up in a livery stable and paid to roll out his bed on a cot in a bare room upstairs. There he was, lodged in a distant place in the mountains, where he knew no one, and had nothing to do but keep moving. He lay back on his bedroll. Fright is no door to anywhere, he thought, gathering himself to walk down the street to a barber shop for a soaking bath and a haircut and shave— the first time a stranger had shaved him. He trimmed his fingernails with the knife Mattie stole from Slivers and changed into the blue striped shirt his father had given him.

  Back at the stable, he found the milk-white heavy woman who'd rented him the room. “Where would you go,” he asked, “if you wanted to see the sights alongside the high and mighty?”

  “Up to the hotel, to the big bar looking out on the golf course. You order a cocktail and sit there like you owned the world.” She folded her soft arms across her chest and smiled like a light had gone on inside her. “You might take me along,” she said.

  Rossie saw that she wasn't much older than he was, only fat and tired out. “Tomorrow,” he said, and she sighed.

  “You damned fellows,” she said.

  Rossie cleaned his straw hat best he could and caught a free ride on a topless, red, German-made bus transporting tourists to the hotel. An Asian woman in a stiff embroidered dress sat beside him and poked a finger at his hat, and spoke a question in her strange language.

  “Buckaroo,” Rossie said. He wasn't the real grown-up item but he said it anyway and smiled.

  Lined up on a stonework balustrade in front of the hotel, a trio of big-bellied men in greenish leather shorts handed out flyers advertising steam baths and evening hayrides. Strangers thronged on all sides, paying him no attention, some wandering the raked gravel walkways across the lawns to the river, where a bridge would lead them toward the abrupt mountains. A suntanned, balding man in a gray tweed suit snipped the end from a cigar and lighted it, taking ceremonial puffs.

  “Where could you buy that smoke?” Rossie asked. The man stared at him. “Smoke shop,” he said in a British way. He gestured toward granite steps leading up to intricately carved double doors into the hotel.

  “Anybody go on in?” Rossie asked. “I mean you don't need to be living there to go on in, or do you?”

  The man smiled. “Suppose you can come and go as you please. It's a commercial establishment, so you can do any thing you need to do, at least for a cigar, don't you think? Or would you like one from me? A gift?”

  But Rossie hadn't thought of wanting a cigar. “No, sir. I want to sit in a bar beside a window, looking to the mountains, and order a gin martini.” He had been thinking about his father, what Nito would order: a martini, up, in one of those conical glasses, with onions on a skewer.

  “Early in the day for that one,” the man said, “but then, why should the hour matter? There's just your place up the stairs past the shops.”

  A boy in a bellman's getup, about Rossie's age, smiled without irony and held the door. “Sir,” he said, “welcome to Banff Springs.”

  Well, Rossie thought, yes sir.

  A narrow staircase rose just beyond a shop crowded with woolens. It opened onto a lobby with parquet flooring, where the profile of a bull elk had been pieced together from intricately sawn hardwoods of various shades. Beyond, wide doors opened into the tavern, all polished woods and brass fixtures. Huge windows looked out to the river and the slab-faced mountains.

  Rossie stood at the bar with his hands on the brass rail and eyed the barkeep, a thick-fingered, dark man with heavy jowls and a formal, red bartender's coat—one of those men who shave twice a day.

  “You tell me,” Rossie said, “can I sit at those tables by the window?”

  “Sir, you can sit anywhere you choose.”

  “A martini,” Rossie said. “British gin, up, with onions.”

  The barkeep nodded. “Sir, I'll send it to you.”

  “I'll just stand here and watch you shake it. You should know this is the first time I was ever of age to order my own martini. Twenty-one years old.” Rossie wondered if the barman knew he was lying, and if the man cared.

  “This would be your birthday?” the bartender asked.

  “Four days ago. Took me that long to find a bar where they made martinis.”

  “Then this will be on the establishment, and it will be a double. You watch carefully. You'll never get to do this again, not for the first time.”

  “I'll stand right here, and have the first sip.”

  “Fine,” the barman said, shaking the ice and gin in a quick-wristed way. The silver shaker, embossed with intertwined flowers, was coated with frost. “Go easy, it's a double.”

  So Rossie took the first cold, bitter sip, and looked up to find himself in the mirror behind the bar, dressed in a good shirt and an expensive hat. Why not?

  “I'll send it to your table,” the bartender said. “We don't allow patrons to carry their drinks around.”

  From a table placed dead center on the wide windows, Rossie watched a gray-faced woman approach with his martini in hand. Dark pockets of sad flesh sagged under her eyes—she was old enough to know his mother.

  “It's your birthday?” she asked.

  “Not exactly, but close.”

  She studied him. “You're not twenty-one. But nobody cares about that around here. You be careful with that drink. Martin
is are like bombs, and that's a double.”

  “Tell you what,” Rossie said. “I've had bad news, and I'm trying to look on the bright side.” The woman waited for him to finish his story.

  “My mother kicked my father out of the house. That was in Reno, Nevada. So I'm alone here in Alberta.”

  “There are people all around you,” the woman said. “That's the bright side. Everywhere you go.” Then she rolled her eyes and turned away. She'd heard enough of this story, or stories like it.

  Balancing the long-stemmed glass perfectly between his right thumb and forefinger, he took a second sip, which went down slicker than the first, and rested the glass on a freshly laundered, white cloth napkin. A mountaintop snowfield glittered back at him in the afternoon light.

  Abruptly, none of what he'd learned from his mother seemed like bad news. This was the gin kicking in, he knew, but suddenly Rossie imagined Katrina and Nito here with him, drinking their own double martinis, eyeing each other and laughing, and then he imagined them touching at each other and going into a room with a bed and not looking back—something he had never allowed himself to think about in his mother's house, listening as one of the divorcées in the guest rooms moaned and protested her loneliness in the dark hours.

  When Rossie's martini was empty, the bartender shook another one while continuing to talk with a tall man hovered over the bar, his yellow suspenders stretched over a red flannel shirt. The woman who'd brought his first drink carried this one over, along with a tall glass of ice water.

  “One more of those,” she said, gesturing at the martini, “should be enough for you.” She gestured toward the tall man with yellow suspenders. “Compliments of Mr. Bob Waters.”

  Bob Waters was already on his way to Rossie's table, carrying a pint glass of what looked to be black beer. A long-jawed man, his baldness seemed to accentuate his high-domed head. “You're the fellow on the pinto horse,” he said, after sitting down across from Rossie. “You rode the golf course, right over the edge of the fifth green. I was watching. Your pack animal went to shitting there, so I'm buying you a drink. Where you coming from?”

  “Nevada.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Montana.”

  “You got any idea what's out between here and there?”

  “Timber.”

  Bob Waters shook his head. “Yeah, out there in the timber there is going to be cold rivers and grizzly bears hunting you. That's what I tell my hunters. What rifle you carrying?”

  “What kind of hunters?” Rossie asked.

  “Rich men from California and France, for the main part. Helpless men looking to kill sheep and a bear. Those men pay me for the parts they can't do for themselves. And they got rifles, every one of them, otherwise I don't take them. Big rifle, you got some protection.”

  Rossie shrugged. “I don't carry no rifle.”

  “You know anything about dying the hard way? Crippled by a bear, can't move, wolverines and porcupines about to eat your asshole out?”

  “I seen plenty of shit.”

  “Sure. Bet you have, kid like you.”

  So Rossie told a story he made up as he went along, about a sister with freckles who had died of bad cancer. Rossie was imagining Mat-tie's mother, and though he knew the gin had a lot to do with it, he thought this lying was funny as he talked. “I got so sad-assed and lonely,” he said, “that I thought about smiling all the time, to persuade people into liking me, but to hell with the smiling. I'm my own man from here on in.”

  Bob Waters reared back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his shining baldness. “You got me smiling,” he said. “You're some talker. You drunk already?”

  “Two drinks. I could have one more martini. You got rich hunters, so these isn't hard times where you're concerned?”

  “Not much. People got their ways. Men who stayed out of the stock market, who own railroads and Kansas City livestock yards. They got money locked down, and pay in advance or don't go. I don't take fat men or cripples but men who stay sober and hunt and come back year after year. So now I got my money locked down. That's what I know about the Great Depression.”

  The third martini came, and soon it was empty.

  “You better drink that ice water,” the man said.

  “Forgot your name,” Rossie said.

  “Bob Waters. Like in ice water.”

  So Rossie took a long draw on the ice water as Bob Waters pushed back from the table.

  “I watched you coming across the golf course,” he said, “and I thought, there is a fellow who knows how to sit a horse. That fellow could help me. I know every man in town, and the good ones are gone looking for work in Vancouver or Victoria. None of the rest is worth hiring—too much time pimping for railroad tourists. So I talked to your girlfriend at the stable, fat Linda, and tracked you down.”

  “You mean a job?”

  “A week or so, helping me set my hunter's camp over in the Koote-nay, same direction you're going. Three dollars a day and what you can eat.”

  “Couldn't do it,” Rossie said, trying to think and talk carefully, past the gin. “I'm hurrying in my traveling—need to find a fellow named Bill Sweet in a town called Charlo, and after that I got to hunt up a girl who is pregnant.” The part about hunting up the girl felt like a discovery, but it was what he'd been intending all along.

  “You'll travel easier with me, and you'll see the backcountry,” Bob Waters said. “Otherwise you'll be traveling down that Kootenay Highway with automobiles and macadam, the mountains way off as you're nursing sore-footed horses.” He smiled a big-toothed smile and rubbed his bald head. “You think about it, or don't. But I can't let you go out there with no rifle. Tell you a deal, though. Tomorrow, if you're sobered up, you go see a man named Bignell Robinson, rifle maker's shop west of town. He'll sell you a good Model 54 Winchester .30-06 in a canvas scabbard for twenty-eight dollars American. He'll sight it in for you and include a box of shells as part of the price. It's a hell of a good price. You tell him you talked to me, Bob Waters. Better yet, I'll write it down. Bignell Robinson. You don't look like you're going to remember too much tomorrow.”

  He scribbled the name on a page in a little notepad he carried and reached over to tuck the paper into Rossie's shirt pocket.

  Rossie was abruptly, drunkenly furious. “Bullshit. All I got is ninety-four dollars. I don't want no twenty-eight-dollar gun.”

  “You don't?”

  “I never had a rifle. I can't afford no fucking rifle.”

  ‘It's not going to be like you lost the money. You can sell it once you get where you're going. Besides, you might want to kill something to eat. No grocery stores or cafés out there.”

  “What I think,” Rossie said, “is fuck rifles.”

  “Then you are thinking like one ignorant, drunk son of a bitch. You are likely to die ugly.”

  Rossie started to come out of his chair. Hell, he decided, was going to commence. But it didn't.

  Rossie woke up hours later, feeling no pain but in his hungover head. He was still dressed and booted on his bed in the room above the livery stable, the horses snuffling below. After he'd staggered across the room and slurped acidic water from the sink tap, it came in on him that he hadn't a single memory of getting to this bed from the big hotel barroom on the hill. But nobody had hit him and his money was still folded in his wallet. At daybreak he counted the bills to be sure, and found he'd drunk those martinis without spending a dime. Then he encountered the note tucked into his shirt pocket: Bignell Robinson— man with rifles.

  Rossie bought himself bacon and eggs in the café beside the livery stable. Bob Waters was right, he thought. A man without a rifle was likely a damned fool—what he most of all didn't want to be.

  When Rossie found him and stated his case, Bignell Robinson bridged his long, precise fingers before his mouth before lowering them to speak. “You're the cowboy. Heard you took a dive.”

  “Damned if I know,” Rossie said.

  “H
eard you swung on Bobby Waters. Lucky thing you went down before you hit him.”

  “How's that?”

  “You just passed out, went down untouched. Bobby would of beat the dogshit out of you, and them hotel police would of thrown you out on the lawn, and then some bird would of robbed you. Bobby Waters took the trouble to bed you down. Took him an hour or so to get rid of you, with everybody laughing at him.”

  “People know my business?”

  “Small little town, and we know Bobby Waters. He was over to see me for breakfast. Least you didn't puke in the bar. Bobby would of left you there if you was all-over puke.”

  “Must think I was a damned fool.”

  “Ever'body is,” Bignell Robinson said. “Now, how about a rifle? I'll sell you a rifle that isn't no fool. But let me tell you one more thing first. You find Bobby Waters tonight—he'll be having supper at the café right there by the livery stable—and you tell him you want that work he offered. You travel a week or so with him, into Kootenay country, and you won't be stumbling around in those wilds for a month. You'll come out the other end alive. There's men around here who got most of what they know from Bobby Waters. And this day and age, work is work and money is money—that's my guess. Let's start fitting a rifle to your shoulder.”

  Bob Waters didn't smile or shake his head or bother with any other nonsense when Rossie found him that evening in the café. “I got a Model 54 Winchester rifle,” Rossie said. “I'm looking for work.”

  Bob Waters stuck out his hand to shake on the deal. “Sit down,” he said. “We'll have some dinner. Tomorrow we'll load the packs, and be out of town the next day before sunup.”

  They'd spend three or four days heading for meadows high in the mountains along Verdant Creek, where they'd set tents and rebuild corrals for the fall season.

  Two days later, with the sun coming up over the mountain, they set out on the road west of Banff. Bob Waters was trailing eight loaded packhorses, and Rossie eight more, counting one of his own. A dozen miles up the Bow River, they turned south into a cedar grove along Redearth Creek, a canyon cut deep into a steep, stony maze. Rossie listened to the horses snorting as their iron-shod hooves struck the rocks, the only breaks in the quiet. The trail came down off a bench onto a stony beach and a crossing—thirty yards of swift, twisting water.