The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “You're exactly the one it's for.”

  Just before dinner that night, when Rossie and Leonard, freshly shaved, showed up, Arnold offered to mix Rossie a martini that would settle him down.

  “Last time, in Canada,” Rossie said, “I passed out on them things.”

  Arnold went on mixing. “It's easy to start spilling, and just one will undermine your best behavior. It will be a good idea.”

  “Tonight,” Lemma said, “in honor of Arnold, Betty is serving osso bucco, veal shanks braised in wine.”

  “Brussels sprouts?” Bernard protested as Betty served a portion only to him.

  “For what ails you,” she explained.

  The martinis, there'd been two of them, had quick fingers in Rossie's thoughts. “What ails me is gin. My brain is thinking anything it wants to think.”

  “That's how it's supposed to be,” Lemma said.

  “Rossie thinks buckaroo,” Eliza said, caressing the word. “He carries a bone-handled knife, but he won't cut meat with it. Buckaroos don't.”

  This might have been a way of bragging him up, but Rossie understood that she was making a stranger of him. “Don't eat with your nutting tool,” he said, fishing the slim-bladed item from his pocket to shave a feather of hair from his forearm. “Might cut your tongue.”

  “Rossie,” Bernard said, “believe me, I'm sympathetic. This is distant to you, I know, but you'd better eat something.”

  Instructed by Arnold, Rossie fished the garlic marrow from hollow bones with a tiny fork.

  “Pretty decent,” he said.

  “Kid,” Arnold said, “stick with me. We'll be eating sunshine.”

  After they'd polished off Betty's peach ice cream, Bernard produced a magic lantern borrowed from the hospital in Hamilton while Lemma tacked a white bedsheet to a wall in the living room. Chairs were arranged, coffee was served, and the lights, except for a bulb on the projector, were turned out. The bedsheet was brilliantly illuminated with the image of a whiskery man sitting on a steel bridge over a great river. He was sucking a cigarette, his nose mottled by exploded capillaries, his eyes white with a webbing of cysts and interwoven tentacles.

  “Bennie Loomis,” Arnold said. “Last year in Davenport. I went over there hoping to find a magazine series about Bix Beiderbecke. There was a hotel by the river. I sat out front on a bench and shared cigarettes with Bennie. But I didn't get far with Beiderbecke. That tragedy seemed utterly what it was, American sadness beyond control, a worn-out story.”

  But when he recounted the long story of Bix's disintegration, everybody but Rossie acted like they knew what he was talking about.

  “Booze,” Arnold said. “Willingness and booze. They don't mix with genius. That's the cautionary tale we know and love.” Next he showed a photograph of men in New York, dozens of them along the curbs selling apples from wooden crates. “That's from nineteen twenty-nine. It was around in the newspapers.” He loaded another slide. “Now, Chicago, in black and gray.” Four young men stood before a garbage truck, their shirtsleeves ripped off at the shoulders to show their biceps. A street milling with men spanned the background, and metal buildings loomed over it all. “Out of work,” he explained. Next, in a room with peeling wallpaper, two black women and one white one rested back on an unmade bed surrounded by seven thin-armed, indolent children. Then, a snaking line of men against a brick wall that reached beyond sight. “Waiting for soup,” Arnold said.

  “You see those fellows in Reno,” Rossie cut in, but the picture had flicked to a suited man, hard-eyed under the brim of his fedora, smoking a cigar outside a beer joint.

  “The proprietor, the boss of Whiskey Mountain,” Arnold said.

  “The King Bear,” Bernard said.

  The final photograph displayed a massive Klan gathering, men in sheets beneath dark trees. Arnold shook his head. “Enough,” he said. “It's a trapeze. I take pictures and we lament and sympathize, swing on our sorrow.” He smiled. “But it doesn't change a thing.”

  “It takes time,” Leonard said.

  “Ah, youth. I hope you're correct.” Arnold switched off the projector. “Has anyone seen the Germans? Do you get the newsreels? Hundreds of thousands hailing Hitler.”

  “We never see newsreels, we wouldn't,” Lemma said.

  Arnold turned to Rossie. “You've made the right move. You've got yourself isolated. The Nazis will never make it this far.”

  “Rossie's our blue-moon boy, walking on water,” Bernard said. “Every day of his life is once in a blue moon.”

  “Every day,” Arnold said, “is once in a blue moon. But Rossie has aligned himself with people like you. The starve-to-death West will learn to hate him.” He turned to Leonard. “What do you make of it?” But then he went on without giving Leonard a chance to answer. “Indians hate us. Wouldn't they? We sit on our moral mountain with our Victrola and Scotch whiskeys. The world will get us.”

  This was the moment Rossie would recall as he aged, in which he intuited, right or wrong, that they all but Eliza took him to be a sort of know-nothing cipher. A joke on innocence.

  “Bernard,” Arnold said. “Play us a sweet one. Let's forget political shit.”

  Bernard dropped the needle on a recording of Bix Beiderbecke and his syncopated cornet. “A sound like that of a girl saying yes,” he said.

  “Or the right boy,” Lemma said. “A sweet, insistent boy asking, how about it?”

  “Louis Armstrong split his lip in London,” Arnold said. “He's in Paris. Unable to play.”

  Bernard crooned, imitating Armstrong's inflections. “Just another jig I know. Just a gigolo.”

  “I hadn't noticed that you'd been into the martinis,” Arnold said in that lean way. “You and Rossie have an affiliation.”

  Bernard smiled. “I'm reduced to jazz and milk cows, divorced from the world.”

  “Ordered joyousness,” Lemma offered. “That's what we can make of our lives.”

  “At this vivid moment,” Bernard said, “I choose to announce a trip to Chicago. Arnold will be on the windswept plains confronting verities with Leonard. We'll be at a table in the Grand Pierce Ballroom and Terrace, watching Earl Hines broadcast on NBC.”

  “We?” Lemma asked.

  “You and I and Rossie and Eliza.”

  “Me?” Rossie asked.

  “You're becoming part of us.” Bernard spoke this as if this should be obvious.

  “Don't think I bargained for Chicago.”

  “Don't think you've bargained for anything,” Bernard said. “But I'm astonished at your reluctance. Do you imagine that I'm trying to purchase your attention?”

  “Shit,” Rossie said. “I thought it was the other way. You might get tired of me hanging around.”

  “You must see people buying their way in Reno,” Bernard said. “Men and whores. Boys off the ranches with rich women.” He smiled. “This is nothing like that.”

  “I guess it isn't,” Rossie said after a long moment. “I talked to a woman up in the Flathead Valley. She said it was a good idea to keep a list of things you'd never do, and Chicago isn't on my list of things to never do.”

  “Have you notified Howard?” Lemma asked.

  But Bernard went on talking to Rossie. “Understand,” he said. “When we left Capone and Bugsy Moran were machine-gunning and beating enemies to death with baseball bats. I refused to go on living in the proximity of barbarians, but I continue to love the city. The last week of September, as baseball ends.”

  “We could have looked forward to it if we—and my brother— had been consulted,” Lemma said. “But it's settled? The tickets are purchased?”

  “We're going?” Eliza asked, clearly deferring to her mother.

  “Well,” Lemma said, “certainly.”

  Bernard eyed Rossie. “Are you coming?”

  “You're giving me a tryout,” Rossie said. “That's fair enough. I can pay my way. I've got a hundred and some dollars.”

  “That,” Bern
ard said, “is not a problem.”

  “On that happy note,” Lemma said, “it's settled.”

  “They don't know anyone in Chicago anymore,” Eliza said, when Rossie had come through the darkness to her bedroom. “And there's no one in this valley but strangers and hired help. You're their luck, the man who does not mind about my baby. They're greedy. They want to take you over. But this is ours, isn't that the idea? What an idea.” She lay back, knees apart, and lifted her pale thighs. “Quietly,” she said, drawing quick breath as she touched at herself. “Slowly. Put it in me. This is a pregnant woman.” After half an hour of resting, she said, “Put it in me again,” and it was midnight when he made his way down to the bunkhouse and into his bedroll.

  At daybreak he was awake, considering how running off from Mattie had been like ducking a trap, and how this life of dinner parties could be a greater predicament, or whether their talky ways ought to be admired, and wondering if holding his own with a photographer from Chicago was part of what he wanted to amount to.

  Eliza, wearing her gray, sweat-stained hat, was dressed as she had been when Rossie first saw her, in baggy, black trousers and the starched, cornflower blouse stretched over her belly. She'd showed up for breakfast in the bunkhouse and wanted to ride into the jagged ridges of the Bitterroots.

  She and Rossie and Leonard headed up the creek into Kanaka Canyon, which Eliza told them was named for Hawaiians who'd arrived a hundred years ago, shoveling gravel, working for gold nobody found, and freezing to death in January. She led them into a boulder-strewn headwater cirque where trickling streams drained from ice fields lasting into summer.

  “Freezing and death,” Leonard said. “Stories about the mountains told the Bloods how to live. But mountain stories won't help the Bloods anymore.”

  “Stories was never my hobby,” Rossie said.

  “Gods live in mountains,” Leonard said, and Rossie wondered if he was serious.

  “I'm going to the top,” Eliza called out, starting up toward Idaho on the trace of trail that angled across a vertiginous fall of scree.

  “Get used to it,” Leonard said. “Climbing everything. Right now it's you.”

  “Talking to you is like talking to a book,” Rossie said. “Everything means something else.”

  Leonard smiled. “Go to school with Mormons and that's what you learn. But I'm reverting to type, back to pureblood.”

  “You and me could go into the horse business,” Rossie said. “Bernard is hot for the horses.” He waited as Leonard digested this. “We could build corrals over there by his brick barn and train horses. Bernard would own them.” Leonard looked skeptical. “We could do it,” Rossie said. “We'd be our own hired men.”

  “I'm going to back to Alberta.”

  “I got to get beyond wages. I got to do a business. Indian fellows could come down here from Canada. We could buy shares and someday own ourselves. Otherwise, nobody is going to carry any weight. I'm learning that much.”

  “She could evaporate,” Leonard said. “Look at her up there.” Eliza was high on her trail across the jumble of scree.

  “I'm asking myself,” Rossie said, “am I just crazy for pussy? Or are these people something I could amount to? I'm trying to stick with her without turning into a fool who fetches and carries. Me and you, we're going the same speed.”

  Leonard was cleaning his eyeglasses on his shirttail. “We are not going the same speed,” he said. “I'm going to graduate from the university and go back to Alberta. Why should I put my life together with you? And why are you letting them drag you to Chicago?”

  “Hell,” Rossie said, “I might learn something. One thing, though: I'm not going to spend my time in a Buick, beholden to a woman, driving around and checking on dairy cows.”

  “Beholden? Do you love her?”

  “It's a voice gets in your brain. It won't get out. You get to answering when she's not around.”

  “That's it,” Leonard said.

  “Shit. How would you know?”

  ON A BRIGHT AUTUMN MORNING ON THE GREAT NORTHERN platform in Missoula, a stack of suitcases behind them, they stood for photographs as Betty snapped away with her Kodak. Lemma and Bernard were elegant in their city-going suits, Bernard in tan and Lemma in lavender.

  But Eliza, showing a plentitude of pregnancy, had got herself up “like a frump,” according to Lemma. She'd drawn her black hair into a bun at the back of her head, worn a brown dress let out to accommodate her belly, and not a ring on her finger, nor a shawl, nor even lipstick to color her paleness.

  “From here on,” Eliza said, “I'm a quiet creature, soon to be a mother.”

  “I don't worry about you,” Lemma said. “You'll be dancing.”

  Rossie wore his Panama hat, which Betty had steamed until it was elegant again, and slick, tan gabardine trousers with cuffs that broke at the instep on his polished boots. The pants, as well as his matching shirt with a button-down collar, were presents from “the family,” bought at the Missoula Mercantile. He even had a saddle-leather valise, a gift from Bernard.

  “On time, and here we are,” Lemma said, as the black steam engine and string of Pullman cars came sighing and clanking in from nighttime travel over the mountains from Spokane. They were the only passengers getting on in Missoula. A black man named Mr. Horton loaded a brass-bound trunk and suitcases into a sitting room and bed chamber reserved for Lemma and Bernard, and their bags in the separate singles for Eliza and Rossie.

  “Our steel railroad kingdom,” Eliza said. “Closets for our clothes, hooks for our hats, fold-up sinks, a table, a toilet, and a bed that Mr. Horton will make up. We look out and watch our people at work, haying and harvesting. I'll be your princess.”

  At lunchtime Bernard led them on a swaying walk to the dining car for fresh Dungeness crab. They were east of the Rockies by late afternoon, and dinner was rare steaks at a table with blossoming flowers in a tall, thin-necked vase. Later, seated in a green, leatherette lounge chair in the bar car, Eliza announced that she had quit drinking until the baby was born. But she begged sips from Rossie's Ramos gin fizz while Bernard and Lemma played muttering bridge with a Norwegian couple named Rolfing, who'd gotten on the train in Livingston, Montana, after a vacation spent camping in Yellowstone National Park. “In tents?” Bernard had asked, concerned.

  The Rolfings were returning to Rochester, New York, where the pale, blond husband worked as a chemist for Kodak. Chemists, he said, were like bartenders, mixing components. They had been hoping to observe the great bears before beginning a family. Thus, tragedy, should they be killed or mutilated by the creatures, would be their own and not their children's.

  “We must see all of the world we can,” Mrs. Rolfing said. Her first name was Inge. “Yellow bears. Imagine them coming to you.”

  Late in the night Eliza knocked softly on Rossie's door. “Imagine them coming to you,” she whispered. “This is your chance,” she said, kissing his shoulders. “The last time until after the baby is born. Then we'll make up for it. Most men never get to bed a pregnant woman on a train.”

  They slid together carefully and afterward rested in his bed with the lights out and the shade up to reveal profound darkness across the prairies.

  “Rattling along,” Eliza said, “looking out for lights and wondering who's out there, what they think. That's the best part. For years I did this, going to and from school, back and forth, mostly by myself. I loved school but gave it up. Charlie Cooper rubbed my neck and said he would be my teacher. Alberta would be my college.”

  “I knew a girl,” Rossie said, “who claimed she was going down to Reno and up the hill to college. But there's lots beside colleges.”

  “They had a camp down by the river, him and Chevrolet. They set me up to knock on the banker's door on a Sunday afternoon, put a pistol in his face, and walk him up the street to the bank. I'd leave him locked in his vault and make off with the money, then give it to them. They said I was crazy enough to do it. I liked that talk, and t
hey were right, I would have done it. You won't want to hear this, but I'm telling you. I kept going down to the river. I was from Pliny School in Chicago, and I'd been taught to love Indians. Pliny was a Greek who wrote about man and nature. Think of it as man and woman, cunt and cock. It's nature. That's what I learned to think. Charlie carried his blanket out in the woods and we fucked all the way to Alberta, where I got pregnant. I would have burned down my father's house for Charlie. All he had to do was ask.” She almost shone in the nighttime Pullman. “That is who I am, a girl from Pliny School. But Indians aren't an idea.”

  This sounded like craziness. Or lying. Why would she tell him such things? “Sounds like you're selling me something,” he said.

  Eliza hesitated, looking uncertain. “I'm trying to impress you,” she said. “If you thought I was crazy over you, only you, and I'd let you do anything, what would happen to me? Sooner or later you'd know about me and Charlie. You'd give me the run-around like I was a Chinese whore. So, I've got you on a train. You can't ride away.”

  “A Chinese whore? You're knocked up. I don't need the details.”

  A great fall rain fell and the train swayed across a long, steel trestle over the Missouri River. “Soon there'll be nothing but cornfields,” Lemma said to Rossie. “The great nation.”

  In Chicago, the night of September 26, they were greeted by Lemma's dark-suited twin brother, Howard, the long-faced banker who was, according to Lemma, “between wives.”

  “Wives are Howard's weakness. He's an utter romantic, helpless before certain women.”

  Howard was carrying clusters of hothouse flowers, one for Lemma, and another for Eliza. He was thrown near to helpless tears at the sight of his sister, who pushed away the flowers and held him at arm's length.

  “You bozo,” she said. “You,” she said again. “Bozo.”

  Rossie wondered how his mother would act if he showed up in Reno bearing flowers.

  Howard tried to smile after shaking Rossie's hand. “The cowboy. A welcome development.”

  With their luggage loaded into two taxicabs, the flowers riding in the front seats alongside the drivers, they headed for the Drake Hotel through a chaos of lights and traffic.