The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  These people made a game of talking against each other, a game of trapping and releasing. “Women.” Bernard directed this closing remark to Rossie, then continued. “George Herriman, he does Krazy Kat. I have a friend who knows him, that's how I came by the print. Herriman loves deserts and warmhearted people. We'd call it hospitality. He goes to Kayenta, a community centered on a trading post, and finds a people at one with their desires. As people can be, anywhere.”

  Eliza hooted. “At one with their desires?”

  “Where's he live otherwise?” Rossie asked.

  “Southern California. Burbank, in the City of Angels, surrounded by clamor and anxiety.”

  “That kind of thinking,” Eliza said, parodying her father, “is clamorous and anxious.” She turned to Rossie. “You should know how lonely we are. We're showing off for you.”

  “Where are you bound?” Bernard asked Rossie.

  “Making my way. Stacking hay down the valley.”

  “You're living in the vicinity?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Eliza said. “In the vicinity. We'll be seeing him, on occasion, for dinner. I'll go riding out with him on Sundays.”

  Her father frowned.

  “Piss on daddy,” she said, lightly, then stood and spun away. Three long twirling steps and she was gone without looking back. Betty returned with “the cakes,” which were huckleberry tarts.

  “Well,” Lemma said, “aren't we having a moment?”

  Shirt off in the heat and sweating alongside Lootie as they sealed and slopped the final loads into a canopy, Rossie was surprised when Eliza appeared on a bay horse, going by at some distance toward the line of poplars along the river.

  “There's the rich girl,” Lootie sang, giving Rossie a broken-toothed smile. “She's come all the way to see you.”

  She didn't stop, but kicked the bay horse and cantered on, waving as she went, a happy-go-lucky girl on her afternoon ride.

  “She was looking at us,” Lootie said.

  In the cookhouse that night, all of them at a single long table, Samuel Burton at the head, Lootie brought her up again. “That rich girl,” he said. “You been to that house, how's the chances with her?”

  “They run me off,” Rossie said.

  “You should see your face when she waves,” Lootie said. “Looks like your face will fall off. Thought you might fall off that stack. Thought that might be the end of you.”

  McWhorter was at the other end of the table, facing Samuel Burton. “Samuel,” McWhorter said, “I was hoping this kid was going to run off with that girl. You'd be looking for another stacker, and you could hire my cousin Tim.”

  “Your cousin Tim,” Burton said, “is the sorriest drunk in the Bitterroot.”

  McWhorter laughed. “Yeah, but he's a stout son of a bitch.”

  Rossie quit his eating, and looked around to them. “You seen that brickwork barn sitting there empty, never seen a horse inside?”

  “It's more of them people's bullshit,” Burton said. “It's a beauty of a barn except it's bullshit. But one thing. Humping on that girl, it might be a living if you didn't mind the pimping. Rich people is always a pimping deal.”

  “You calling me pimped?” Rossie said.

  “No,” Burton said. “You and me, boy, we sweat our asses off, and they don't. But they get the money and we don't.”

  “Those people were fine with me,” Rossie said.

  “Some kid. You don't know shit about shit.”

  “What you could do for me,” Rossie said, and this was out before he could stop himself, “is go fuck yourself.”

  “You'll eat that, or I'm going to beat your ass.”

  “Outside,” Lootie shouted.

  The conflict on sod in front of the cookhouse was quick. Burton faced off with hands down, and Rossie caught him along the neck with a left hook. But Burton shrugged and lifted his left shoulder, dropped it and came under. Next thing, Rossie was down, nose streaming out blood, seeing double. Lootie was holding Rossie's head, and all the rest of them were inside the cookhouse, talking and finishing dinner.

  “You give it up,” Lootie said. “He's a famous man for hitting. Kicks like a mule.”

  All Rossie could recall was Burton's fist out of the twilight, then not a thing. He was passing out again. The next morning, before sunup, Rossie woke in his bed when Burton shook his shoulder.

  “I got me another stacker,” Burton said. He tossed a sliver of paper on the floor. “There's a paycheck. Thirty-six dollars for eighteen days. Catch your horses and get out of here before breakfast.”

  Rossie's head felt lopsided, aching seriously in the very early morning, as he eased his horses toward a bank so he could cash the check. Goodbye to this and head for Reno, that was the idea. The thought of breakfast made his stomach seize up, but by the time he had his horses tied at a hitching rail in front of the marble-faced bank in Hamilton, he was hungry. He pocketed his money and slipped down the block and into an empty restaurant called Staninger's.

  “You serve whiskey?” he asked the bartender in the back room, who didn't even study the ruined look of Rossie's face as he served up two shots, a beer back, and a rib steak.

  Then Eliza was framed in the light from the doorway. “If I'd missed you,” she said, “I'd of been devastated.”

  “I'd buy this woman a drink,” Rossie said.

  “You're a beauty.” She touched her fingertips to his face. “What I want,” she told the barkeep, “is one of those bourbons, like him. But I'm pregnant, so give me a glass of water.” She turned back to Rossie. “Margaret Poore called, like you would never do. She said you were beat up, paid off, and heading for the bank in Hamilton.”

  “Margaret Poore?”

  “She runs the café in Stevensville. She got you the job. She thinks you're a cutie. I'd have been sooner but I came horseback. A pregnant woman shouldn't be horseback, but I go slow and it's all right. I came on horseback so I could ride with you.”

  “How else were you going to come?”

  “We have automobiles. Telephones. People do. You could have called me on the telephone. You're a goddamned mess, but it's not every day a man comes after me. You know what my mother told me? She said, ‘He's not our kind. Bring him around a few times and he'll be here forever.

  Outside in the street, where their horses were tied to the hitch rack, two bulging canvas saddlebags were draped over the flanks of Eliza's bay gelding.

  “Food,” she said. “I thought ahead.”

  “You figure we're going to need provisions?” He was hurting but nonetheless feeling smart-assed, his head buzzing from the whiskey.

  “Sweet, old Hamilton,” she said. “We used to go to the movies. Now I don't. Run off with Charlie Cooper and the good girls don't invite you to movies.”

  They rode north along the highway until Eliza turned them onto a narrow, dusty track that progressed up toward the mountains, climbing steadily in switchbacks until the valley was spread below.

  “They're stacking hay down there,” Eliza said. “You're not. Be happy. “

  After another hour, the track leveled high up on the mountain and turned toward the canyon.

  “This, when we get there, it belongs to me. Me only. It's my surprise,” Eliza said.

  Kanaka Creek gleamed far below in the canyon. A barn and cabin, scrapped together from unpeeled logs and unpainted salvage lumber, stood utterly alone on the fractured edge of a gray basalt cliff.

  “The Cliff House,” Eliza said. “My father had it built for me the summer I turned ten, my birthday present. The deed was wrapped in a ribbon, beside the little cake. But I cried. I wanted a horse. So I got a colt, too, a baby mare for my own.”

  “Sounds like a tough life,” Rossie said.

  “Spoiled, ruined, and wrecked,” she said. “Our family was supposed to camp and stay overnight here. So that's what you and I are going to do.” She went on about barrel racing in rodeos the summer she was fourteen. “All around the valley with Daisy. But Daisy got
in the wire in the Tailfeather Field and they put her down.”

  “Daisy,” Rossie said. “That was her name? The Tailfeather Field sour you on horses?”

  “For a couple of years. But no more.”

  The barn reeked of pack rats, but there was timothy for the horses and a fifty-gallon steel barrel half-full of oats and lidded over with planks.

  “Don't look like anybody's been here,” Rossie said.

  “Not since Daddy told us the news about his dying,” she said. “Slowly, but dying. I told you that.”

  “Don't think so.”

  “I told you in Canada,” she said. “Do you listen, or just whistle?”

  “Thought I was hearing you, “ Rossie said. “He don't act like he's dying.”

  “He will. You wait. He'll let you know.”

  The house was backed directly onto the cliff, its dusty windows looking over the canyon. Trails of mouseshit decorated the floor and the blankets covering the homemade furniture, chairs built of unpeeled pine, and a pine bed frame without mattress. Eliza propped open the door, sent Rossie to a trickle of water springing from the edge of the cliff, and began gathering the blankets.

  “I'll sweep,” she said. “You bring buckets of water and man the mop.”

  He went back and forth, first waiting at the spring for the galvanized bucket to fill, then sloshing down the floor and mopping before retrieving a fresh bucket for the rinse. This mountainside with this glowing woman showing pregnant was the best thing he'd found.

  She came looking for him, a woman with her sleeves up, shaking blankets.

  “Somebody turned down your fire,” he said when he had the plank floor shining with unstreaked luster. “You don't act so jumpy.”

  “Now, we'll need your bedroll on the bed,” she said, ignoring him, and digging food from her saddle-bags. “And since I've got us here, it would be romantic if you made the salad. The vegetables are washed. You could cut up the chicken.”

  “Don't think I ever made a salad. But I made plenty of peanut butter sandwiches.” Rossie grinned as he got onto slicing cucumbers, tearing up leaf lettuce, chopping little onions, cutting the roots and sprouts off red and white radishes, mixing them, and pouring on the salad dressing she'd brought in a little sealed, screw-top jar.

  She sat and watched. “Cooking is a serious matter,” she said. “You've got to train yourself. It's not a joke. Don't give me that sheepdog grinning. Did you ever cook one meal? In your life?”

  “First,” Rossie said, “Burton kicks my ass. Then I got to cook.”

  “You want to talk like a fool,” she said. “You have nice hands, but nobody can talk to hands. You know what I dream? I mean, daydream? I daydream about my father's death. He's into a garden ditch, fallen into the water, flowers and birds all around. Birds calling and the cold water's the last thing he feels and he hears birds and feels himself flying. That's it, I can talk to you about flying. I have impulses. My father claims many of them are akin to jumping out of windows.”

  She stood and went outside, and he watched her from the big window as he cut up the cold chicken and laid out the plates and utensils she'd washed. She was standing at the edge of the cliff, gazing down. But she was not there when he finished, not where she had been, on the edge of the cliff. Abruptly, she was nowhere.

  When he called there was no answer. Silence flooded, and Rossie was suddenly breathless, running to the cliff's edge. She was utterly gone. Then he saw she was huddled on a slippery ledge below the tiny spring, her knees under her chin, staring off.

  “In the name of Christ,” he said.

  “That's it, in the name of Christ, acting like an asshole.” She stood, casually, like an animal there on the precipice, and stretched. “I wondered if you'd come and find me.”

  He was recovering his breath and close to angry.

  “It's three hundred and fifty-seven feet,” she said, clambering up to stand beside him. “I worked it out with trigonometry. A clean fall. Just about sure to kill you on your way to heaven.”

  “Sounds like you been close to crazy,” Rossie said.

  “For a minute.” She moved past him.

  He found her dishing out the salad and salting her chicken, and they ate without much talk. The whiskey had worn off, and Rossie ached everywhere, so he kicked off his boots, stretched out in sunlight, wadded up the pillow from his bedroll, and slept. An aching bladder woke him in the darkness to find her quiet beside him, her hair faintly aglow in the moonlight. He pissed near the edge of the cliff and saw that the canyon was black but the valley off to the east faintly luminous here and there from what had to be kerosene lanterns burning in kitchens.

  In the morning, banging around, building a fire, making coffee, she roused him without apology. Rossie watched as the coffee percolated, then sat with a cup she'd handed him. But she wouldn't look at him.

  “You about to cry?” he asked.

  “Not exactly, but I need to tell you, down in San Francisco I was scheduled for an abortion. Steel tools. I just walked the floor in a room in the Mark Hopkins Hotel. It was eleven stories down to the people on Nob Hill, and I was frightened by tools. So I canceled. I was a fool, but here I am with my baby coming.”

  “You was alone?”

  “That was how I wanted it. Tough girl who wasn't so tough. But listen. At the Mark Hopkins, in my daydream, I thought you could carry my baby on your shoulder. You. I didn't daydream about anybody else.”

  “Man with a baby on his shoulder,” Rossie said. “What I thought, camped up in Canada, I thought this is it, you. I couldn't think why that should be true in any long run. But here I am.”

  This didn't seem to be entirely what she wanted to hear. “What there is for breakfast,” she said, “since you finished off the chicken, is peanut butter sandwiches and coffee.”

  “Some cook,” he said.

  “Better than you're used to lately. But I'm not your momma. You feel like walking around?”

  The trail went off into scrub pine above the cliff, steadily climbing.

  “Two weeks, this will be loaded with huckleberries,” she said. “Black bears will come for the berries. But they don't want anything to do with people.” As if she'd called it into being, they came upon a heap of scat. “Shit,” she said.

  “That's what it looks like?” Rossie asked. “Some monster shit himself.”

  “Bear shit. Stick your finger in,” she said. “See if it's fresh.”

  “Stick your own finger in. I don't stick my finger in shit.” But he did it. The scat was soft and faintly warm. He held the finger out. “You want to lick it?”

  “At least it's not steaming. If it's a sow with cubs, even a black bear, we should get out of here. She could be in those trees, anywhere.”

  Walking back, they heard the chugging of a Model A Ford, which labored into sight as they emerged from the pines.

  “More shit,” Eliza said.

  Bernard parked and sat with his hands on the wheel, staring ahead, then climbed out. “Have you had your fun?” he called, and he seemed to be trying to smile.

  “Not enough,” Eliza said.

  “We've been searching for you since last twilight. Look at you. Running off into the woods. Betty finally told us that you'd planned on coming up here.” There he lost momentum and looked away, conceding that these were stupid, useless things to say.

  Rossie ducked his head and thought, Fuck you, goodbye.

  “So,” Eliza said, “here we are. You found us.”

  “Cohabitating,” Bernard said. “Look at you.”

  “Look at us,” she said. “Fully clothed, gone for a walk in the woods. You may have noticed that coming here was my idea.” She stalked off to the edge of the cliff, no one following, and skimmed a small, flat stone into the emptiness. “I have the entire weight of myself on this,” she said, “so you might as well get used to it. Which is how you've told me to live.”

  “The weight of yourself on what?” Bernard asked. But he was eyeing Rossie
, visibly gathering himself. “Apologies for my tone,” he said. “I wish you well. Eliza makes me crazy.”

  “We'll be riding home together,” she said. “I promised him a room in the bunkhouse.”

  “He'll be your special guest.”

  “Yes,” she said, “he will.”

  “You never promised me any place,” Rossie said, after Bernard had driven away.

  Eliza smiled. “One little lie,” she said.

  As they rode through the timberlands, a sense of aimlessness came down on Rossie. Maybe it was the natural result of getting knocked out. Or maybe this scenario was nonsense every moment, and he'd be back in Nevada by September. “The air is gone out of my tires,” he said.

  “My father,” she answered. “The air is mostly out of his tires. He no doubt imagined we were up there fucking and fucking away. But we weren't. We didn't even act like we thought about fucking.”

  The bunkhouse was a run of rooms tacked onto the side of the old barn and home to only two men and a cook. “The cook,” Eliza said, “is an old shithead named Albert. The gardener is Nelson, you met him. The cowboy is Larry. Who knows what he does?”

  They left Rossie's bedroll and pack at the bunkhouse and unsaddled and turned their horses loose into the Tailfeather Field, where the animals rolled, toured the fences, and commenced grazing.

  Back at the bunkhouse a bowlegged man in an undershirt came limping out from a back room.

  “Larry,” Eliza said, “Rossie will be living in the bunkhouse. Bernard said you would find him jobs.”

  “Plenty of those,” Larry said, like this kind ofthing was no surprise if you worked for rich people. “What kind of work?”

  “Horses,” Rossie answered.

  “Well, that's took. I got the horse work,” Larry said.

  “How many they got around here?” Rossie asked.

  “Nine, right this minute, a work team and seven saddle horses, counting three of mine.”

  “There'll be eleven with mine. Hell of a job,” Rossie said. “Take an hour or so a week just keeping them grained.”

  Larry didn't grin back. “I'm not looking for a job,” Rossie said. “I'm a boardinghouse hand. Working enough to pay my keep.”