The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Arnold mocked surprise. “What? Possible that you might back a generous impulse?”

  “Not so generous,” Bernard said. “Tomorrow we'll tour.”

  The meal finished on cheese and fruit. Bernard went off and returned with bottles of whiskey and a pitcher of chilled water, followed by Betty carrying small crystal tumblers, and Eliza with a white bowl of ice from the icehouse, chipped small. She had sewn panels into each side of her dress to accommodate the rapidly growing bulge of her pregnancy.

  “Ahh,” Arnold said, “the malts, the Scottish cure.”

  Bernard pulled a cork and tossed it into the bushes. “Take care of yourselves,” he said.

  Arnold did the pouring, a darkish shot in each tumbler before he dropped ice into his own glass, swirled it, and sipped. “The old dirt. The privileged will always be with us.” He eyed Bernard ironically. “Bless them. The trick lies in shaming them into sharing the wealth. In Bernard's case, at least for this evening, I think we've got it working. But, old friend Bernard, there's darkness coming at us out of Europe. All your Scottish enlightenment won't cure it.”

  “Then I will change the topic to good news. Rossie and I stopped at the hospital. My fine doctor says I have some time left.”

  “Bernard! Jesus, what talk!” But Lemma was smiling. “Jesus!” she said again.

  Rossie wondered what they told each other alone in their room, if she had ever seen him pissing blood, or evidence of blood in the white bowl of the toilet.

  “Lemma thought there was more to life than an endlessness of parties in Chicago.” He was continuing the talk he and Rossie had begun in the morning. “I had holed up with my jazz records and the Scottish thinkers, but Lemma took me by the back of the neck and dragged me into life. And we hauled each other to Montana. My forebear, Robert Louis Stevenson, hauled his family to the South Pacific, where he died. His example was an inspiration. There are men like Arnold who have been jealous of me ever since.”

  Arnold smiled. “We've missed your people.” He turned to Rossie. “You do understand that you've taken up with crazies.”

  “Wealth,” Bernard said, ignoring Arnold, “is produced by acts of innovation based on careful observation. Each individual his own expert, that's the model.”

  This was fuel for Arnold's fire. “Rossie,” he said, “are you listening? We're both of us travelers, anthropologists who hear local economies in Montana talked about so seriously we think they might be descriptions of a religion. Here we witness rural beliefs and customs.”

  “Not all things are relative,” Bernard said. “Freedom is freedom. Truth, after all, resembles truth.” He directed his gaze at Rossie. “Don't you think?”

  “I don't even have much idea what anthropologists are,” Rossie said. He saw fit not to mention the fact that Bernard wasn't any proven relation to Robert Louis Stevenson or his own thought that anybody's wisdom was different from everybody else's. This was what he had been coming around to thinking.

  “He's a horseback man, with Nevada ideas,” Lemma said.

  “Western,” Arnold said. “No wonder Eliza loves you.”

  “Eliza defends him like a mad bear,” Bernard said.

  Arnold seemed to be assessing all this. “So, what do you think of being a fixture?” he asked Rossie. “What jobs do you do? Are you essential?”

  “I do what I can stand.”

  “Courting Eliza is clearly one of your items.”

  Rossie sipped at the whiskey. “Anybody could stand that.”

  Arnold lifted his glass to Rossie. “We hope you've found the sweet cunt that fits you.” In the silence that followed, he added, “That's an old Spanish curse.”

  “Arnold!” Lemma shrieked, smiling.

  “I heard that one up in Canada.”

  “Do Spaniards,” Eliza asked, “have something against cunt?”

  “A cunt that fits you,” Arnold explained, “is solace and a set of chains, the beginning and end. That's the meaning.”

  “Spaniards. What the fuck would some Spaniard know?” For that rush of moment Rossie had forgotten any impulse to walk softly. He spread his dark and callused hands on the table.

  “What I learned, riding in the Big Beef Field down at the Never-sweat when it was flooding, was don't quit. I didn't know one thing about horses or swimming and I thought I was going to drown on the old red horse that Slivers Flynn give to me. But I knew”—this talk rolled out of him—”I knew you don't quit on Slivers Flynn. Free is fine when you are, but anyway you don't ever quit.” The others sat quiet. Rossie thought he'd said something they respected.

  “Working for Slivers Flynn,” Bernard said, “must have been an agreeable freedom.”

  Arnold snorted. “Forgive me. It sounds like subservience.”

  “How do we tell the difference between freedom and subservience?” Eliza asked. “Am I freed to have my baby or chained to what's growing inside me?” She looked away casually, then turned back, clearly furious. “Arnold,” she said, “if I were a cat, you'd be my mouse. I'd play with you on the kitchen floor.”

  “I came west admiring Marcus Daly,” Bernard said, as if nothing of note was transpiring. “He was the mining baron from Butte who raised his Derby horses in this valley. I envisioned horses supported by dairy farming.”

  Arnold ignored him. “Eliza, what do you mean, mouse?”

  She met his gaze directly. “Chickenshit little creature.”

  “Which is a way of saying you're spoiled and insulted?” He stood and worked his way around the table, distributing ice and pouring shots of the Scotch. “My father made a life working for a billiards club in Paris. He swept floors, my mother cooked. The men who owned the club loved my father and mother but paid them nothing. I fled to the streets where I attached myself to Eli Meisner, a photographer who taught me everything. He so much influenced my being that I took his name when I was sixteen. Then Eli began photographing merchants and restaurant owners, forgetting his art to eat. The horse-race rich and the poor don't get much opportunity to enjoy life together, and when they do subservience is always in the mix. It's everywhere, we know it, you and I. That's my point to Rossie.”

  “That does nothing to mitigate your condescending arrogance.”

  “Mitigate,” Arnold said. “What absurdity requires mitigation?”

  “Maybe I'm the one,” Rossie said. He was lost in his anger at the frivolity of this parrying. “Maybe I'll mitigate your ass into next week. But you're an old man. So I should shut up. It's no good picking at shit like a magpie.”

  “There we have it,” Arnold said to Bernard across the table. “We value the same things and can't talk to one another.” He looked up to Eliza. “Are you bitter to a point beyond reconcile? Where's your good humor?”

  “Bitter beyond reconcile?”

  “Eliza, accept my apology.” Arnold turned to Rossie. “I hope, young man, that you don't mitigate my ass into next week. What an idea.”

  They can't say one single thing straight out, Rossie thought.

  “It's a game we've learned, and it doesn't occur to us that we might look ugly,” Bernard said. “So permit me to do some mitigating.” He strolled inside to the Victrola to put on a record.

  Louis Armstrong serenaded them with “I Can't Give You Anything but Love.” “At last,” Lemma said. “Frivolity of the right sort.”

  “Music in the trees above. The universal language,” Bernard said.

  Eliza was on her feet, skipping along in front of Rossie, the ice in her eyes abruptly gone. “Can't you dance?”

  “Waltzing songs, that's what I can do.”

  “Pull off those boots.”

  He kicked out of them and she pulled him onto his stocking feet.

  “Bend your knees, you can move. I've seen you.”

  Fleet and spinning, she circled the table and came back, taking his hand to lead him. Rossie caught up with her, reaching for the sweaty, round-bellied, and so solidly fleshed girl of her.

  As the trumpet
solo to “Shine” commenced, she pulled Rossie into a spinning arc, looping through light and shadows until her sweaty hand slipped free and sent him flailing backward. Eliza and Lemma joined hands and went wheeling on, barefoot on the lawn as Rossie skidded on his ass. When he floundered to his feet Lemma reached for him with her long arms, her hands strong and dry as they circled out and back until the music flared its finale.

  “There,” Lemma said, panting. “Anybody can dance.”

  “If that's what it was,” Rossie muttered as a slower, crackling recording began to play. “ ‘Broke and Hungry Blues,’ “ Bernard said when it was finished. “Blind Lemon Jefferson, recorded in nineteen twenty-seven, in Chicago, where miracles happen every night.

  The talk drifted to Chicago nightlife, the horse-race gamblers and barflies, a woman they'd called the Princess of Drift, newspaper writers, and club owners.

  “People ask after you,” Arnold said, then smiled at Lemma. “The both of you. They're praying to black-cat bones.”

  “Good of them,” Bernard said, and he looked pleased as he poured shots of the whiskey, passed the ice around.

  Arnold told of Lemon Jefferson, known as the Blind Homer of the South Side, going off to play a rent party on a cold night in 1929 and getting lost in an alleyway. “Drunk, but why not? Who wouldn't be? Frozen to the pavement and dead on the south side of Chicago. He had made the money to hire a chauffeur. In French, chauffer means ‘warm keeper.’ A lot of good that did him. Where were we on that night in 1929? I was uptown in some tavern.” Arnold went on about men who froze in Duluth and Milwaukee and again in Chicago. “Drunk in the alley, a blind man with a guitar.”

  “Bardolino's?” Bernard said. “The best osso bucco in town. Wonder which of the boys would be at the joint now. But it wasn't any joint, it was an ‘eatery,’ that's what we called it. It was our clubhouse. Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser came in together once.”

  Lemma turned to Rossie. “You should have heard that talk. I was a girl and sick of the dunces. These fellows were mean and foulmouthed and rabid and going to change the world.”

  “We were your age,” Bernard said to Rossie. “We believed in causes. I volunteered at Hull House, mopping floors. Can you imagine? That's about the time I started reading the Scots.”

  Lemma recollected to Rossie. “Immigrants leading their children by the hands into Hull House, a settlement house, run by a woman, Jane Addams, a true saint. She fed them and gave them a place to re-gather. Here's to absolution.” She moved around to pour a hard drink that tasted powerfully of apples.

  We're in the Bitterroot Valley, Rossie thought, under Montana stars at a table beside a stolen totem pole. Nevada got farther and farther away.

  Eliza led him off with no pretense of his going to the bunkhouse. In her bed, he dozed with his hand on her belly, feeling the moving child as she stroked his back.

  “They called your card,” she whispered. “A cunt that fits.”

  “No escaping.”

  “She says Daddy's terrified. But they're all terrified. And us, we aren't, are we?”

  At breakfast Bernard announced “the promised tour.” Arnold and Rossie piled in the Buick with him, the rancor of the night before forgotten or at least dissolved in the light. Bernard puffed a cigar and tried lecturing about the sights. “History here is simple. Looks like paradise, but there's a lot of impoverished farmers. Eighty years ago they trailed steers to Wyoming, feeding wagon trains headed for California. But transportation to markets is nowadays a killer. The woods were seriously overlogged for timbers in Marcus Daly's mines in Butte, great acreages denuded.”

  They traveled through irrigated lands, heading toward sage-covered hills that rose to the Sapphire Mountains. On the east side of the valley they crossed a plank bridge over a canal. “The Big Ditch,” Bernard said. It had been built early in the century with horse-drawn scrapers. It flowed from Lake Como well to the south, then crossed the Bitterroot and wove north for sixty miles along the sunrise side of the valley. “Below the ditch, we have irrigation. Above it, the natural grasses were overgrazed to sage and weeds. Water percolates out through its gravel banks into spring creeks that flow back to the Bitter-root—fine trout fisheries, but no one makes a living off trout.”

  “This is indeed a neck of the woods,” Arnold said. “You've learned your terrain.”

  Bernard parked on a ridge where they could see west to ordered fields, cottonwoods along the distant river, and the peaks of the Bitter-roots. “Plagued with drought and falling beef prices, the men who dealt their lands to me thought I was a savior. Others attempt to survive on farms with fifteen milk cows. They starve and think I'm a demon.”

  “What you are, around here then,” Arnold said, “is a bull of the woods.”

  Bernard climbed out of the Buick and stalked off through the low sage. “Six ruined sections, bought cheap. I retired these hills to let them recover. Locals hate me for it. Retiring land is seen as arrogance. It offends the idea that the world is here to use. Getting to America ought to have solved their problems. Their people suffered, and crossing to America should have earned them everything. That's what they think.” He plucked wisps of grass. “They feel betrayed. Eliza believes our luck might turn if we fail to support the impoverished. I support her, in a way—financially, that is—although her thoughts are based on mystic nonsense. We can't give away the entire farm. But we also don't want the indigent coming after us.”

  “A far land exploited and ruined by industrial barons,” Arnold said, obviously amused. “Revived by the baron of milk cows and fecundity. What if you took us to lunch?”

  Rossie remembered Nito riffling his cards as he talked about the diamond-necklace New York divorcées at the Riverside Hotel in Reno. “They come down from the moon.”

  Leonard Three Boy was coming in on the motor stage from Calgary to escort Arnold Meisner on a month-long photographic trip. Starting with the Salish south of Flathead Lake and ending north of the Blood Reserve in Alberta, he would serve as Arnold's paid guide and factotum before beginning his final year at the University of Montana. Bernard proposed that Rossie take the Buick to meet him at the stage stop in Hamilton.

  “Can't drive,” Rossie replied. “Never could.”

  “Can't drive, can't dance, can't cook, can't talk on the telephone,” Eliza retorted, fresh from her bath and brilliant in a ballooning yellow dress. “We can take the Model A, have a lesson as we go. We'll make a man of you.”

  “Got to ask,” Rossie said. “What's happening to those people we saw up in Canada if Leonard's down here?”

  “The monies go to Auntie Red every month, as they have been.”

  Despite being six months pregnant, Eliza drove like a whirlwind, plunging the Model A in and out of curves between old-growth pines and groves of aspen. Only out on the straightaway, a mile or so short of the main Hamilton highway, did she pull over. “Your turn, brother.”

  She put Rossie through the moves in the Model A starting drill— open the gas line, twist the choke a quarter turn, lift the spark on the left full-up to retard, and drop down the gas control rod on the right. He turned the ignition key, pulled out the choke, hit the foot starter on the floor, and passed two revolutions of the engine before jerking the spark lever three-quarters down and jamming the gas rod up to idle. The first three attempts the engine caught but jerked and died. On the fourth try he got the Model A in motion, weaving between barrow pits.

  “Very slowly,” Eliza said. “We'll inch along or Leonard will be waiting while we get out of the ditch.” She called it off after a quarter mile. Their thin tire tracks wobbled side-to-side in the dust. “It's like swimming,” she said.” First you can't do it, then you dream about it, and then you can. We'll try it tomorrow.”

  The stage had let Leonard Three Boy off outside the grocery store on the outskirts of Hamilton. Standing beside a stained canvas valise, Leonard was as he had been, wearing those perfectly clean eyeglasses with metal rims, the patriotic striped shir
t, and the same yellow feathers dangling. He raised a hand in greeting while the Model A came to a dusty stop.

  “You're here for the party,” Eliza said, and she and Leonard studied each other.

  Rossie was not included in whatever was passing between them.

  “You and me,” Leonard said to Eliza. “We're the party.” He held out a flat package wrapped in brown paper. “I found this.”

  Eliza tore off the paper. “Shit,” she said. “Where'd you get it?”

  “From Wanda.”

  Eliza used both hands to hold the sepia-toned photograph, framed under cracked glass. “Goddamn,” she said. “Charlie, you son of a bitch.” She spun past Rossie, took three long running steps, and hurled the picture across the street to land on a curb, where the glass shattered. As Leonard crossed to retrieve the photograph, she cocked her head rigidly to one side, eyeing the sky.

  “Who's this Wanda?” Rossie asked.

  “His mother, the French woman,” Leonard said. “She's alive in Alberta.”

  Eliza abruptly got herself in hand. “So's Charlie … He's alive. Except he's useless.”

  “Sounds that way,” Rossie said, studying the photograph. A burnished, hawk-nosed man gazed directly back at him. “Pale-gray eyes like granite,” Rossie said.

  She nodded. “Half-breed eyes.”

  “He don't look whipped.”

  “He doesn't think he is. But he's demolished. Deer Lodge Prison will be his life if he's not careful.”

  Rossie was startled to look up and find her not at all furious as Leonard loaded his old canvas valise into the Model A.

  “Rossie doesn't drive. So we had a driving lesson. No damages.”

  “It would be a treat if I could drive. I've almost forgotten how,” Leonard said.

  She gave them her cold-eyed smile. “I'll be the woman. I'll ride in the backseat.”

  “And pout like a baby,” Leonard said.

  Once they were on the road, Rossie turned in his seat and held out the photograph to Eliza. Shards of glass clung in cracks around the frame. “This isn't a present for me.”