Betty had provisioned them with roasted chickens, European cheeses, salad, hard-boiled eggs, coffee to heat, cube ice in a burlap-wrapped chest, gallons of spring water, bottles of French wine, and a quart of single-malt Scotch.
“We can't go dry into a thing like this,” Bernard said as Lemma and Eliza set out the food and drink. Arnold aligned his camera with one of the observation slots. Rossie strained to close the heavy door built of six-by-twelve planking. He dropped two steel bars into place.
“Bulletproof,” Bernard said. “I wonder what willingness to kill would be like. I wondered in Chicago. I wonder now. What it would be like to emulate Teddy Roosevelt and love vigorous reaping and killing. An ultimate capitalism.”
Arnold shook his head. “Ultimate?”
The day was falling to twilight in reefs of clouds swirling violet and amber. Once Rossie got the generator going and lights blazed in the trees, Bernard claimed grizzlies were coming.
“It's something you know,” he whispered. “Sit quiet, they'll smell our food and be on us, trying to batter down the doors.”
“The outdoorsman,” Arnold said, smiling for Rossie.
But Bernard was right. An acrid stench floated in to accompany the sounds of its breathing, and a great male grizzly humped and rippling and silvery, came to them silently. Arnold was under the hood of his camera, reaching to turn and adjust his lenses.
“We're secure,” Bernard said. “Close enough. But secure.”
“Close enough for what?” Lemma asked.
“Mr. Bear,” Eliza whispered. “What do you think, Mr. Bear?”
Lemma tore a drumstick from one of Betty's baked chickens and tossed it out. The creature caught it in flight, crunched it away bone and all, then lifted onto its hind legs, poised there, reared with jaws chomping, settled, and reared again, and this time struck a shuddering blow against the door, which held.
“The rifle,” Bernard whispered.
Arnold remained under his camera hood and muttered in a language Rossie took to be French while Lemma hovered close beside him.
Just as the bear turned and carelessly drifted off to feed on the apples, another grizzly appeared in the shadows, a female followed by twin cubs. “We waste our days,” Lemma whispered. “It's her, with her babies.”
The grizzly rose onto its hind legs again, eyeing the sow and cubs, then dropped, turned away, and was gone.
“What we want is a wedding photo,” Lemma whispered. “Eliza and Rossie with the bears. Creatures lying down with one another. Fertility everywhere, Eliza swollen, there in the orchard with a mother bear and her babies.”
“What I'm thinking about,” Eliza said, “is walking out there. It's an idea that won't go away.”
“Lying down with one another?” Rossie said.
“She can answer for herself,” Lemma said.
“Sure,” Rossie said. “So can I.”
Arnold stepped away from the hood of his camera. “What you're talking is craziness. Our bride will be eaten like an apple.”
“What would you do if she went out there?” Lemma asked Rossie. “Some cowboy trick?” She handed him a corkscrew. “In the meantime, a bottle of red and one of white.”
Rossie thought of telling her to jam the corkscrew up her ass but instead opened the wine and carefully put together a fire in the home-built stove.
As Eliza and Lemma conspired to warm the chicken, each moving delicately in the ensuing silence, Arnold continued sliding glass plates into and out of the camera until finally he turned, hands trembling as he sipped a glass of the wine. “It worked,” he said. “I think. We'll see.”
After the food, the men sat in the leather chairs while Lemma and Eliza whispered and, laughing privately, tucked themselves in on the cots. The little enclosure remained lit by candles, and Bernard drank until he was asleep.
Arnold began whispering to Rossie. “These are not silly people. They're willing to be foolish. I hope you don't lose patience.” He nodded toward Bernard. “He's facing a cruel time. She was selfish and hot. But she supports him in what he's got left. I envy him.”
Rossie wondered if Arnold was confessing a connection to Lemma and if the others were listening and why Arnold would broadcast old news and if airing it could be cruelty. Looking around at Bernard in his chair and Arnold drifting off and the women already sleeping, Rossie thought not one of them knew how to mean anything they said. He was trapped in this barricade and despised himself for being here. Thoughts of the red-faced man he imagined as Bobby Cahill and stone buildings at Shoshone Meadows and riding at sunrise on a quick, three-year-old mare eventually drew him toward sleep—and toward the end of being their fool.
By noon the next day they were back in the Bitterroot and, with no word of goodbye, Rossie slipped off on the pretext of napping, loaded his bedroll and pack on Rock, saddled Pinky, and was down the road in a chill of wind. He closed the shutters on Eliza in his mind and rode on toward Hamilton until he heard her dusting up behind him in the Model A. Huge in pregnancy, she stepped from the car and stood before him. She was hard to make out in the cold sunlight of that late October. “You.” Her pale eyes were huge in her white face. “You asshole. What? Look at yourself.” Then her fury collapsed and her eyes went swollen.
“You all right?” He suddenly thought she wasn't.
“Fine.” She was almost to weeping. “It'll snow tonight. You'll be in snow before you get to Idaho.”
“Damned if I know.”
“Where will you be?”
“Nevada.”
“This is the last time I come after you.” She bit her lip. “Never again. You should know that. You were the one. Right when I saw you, and then you smelled like it. You were the one even after that morning in Alberta. That was it. Then you came to find me, and I thought, ‘What's this? I'm not wrecked?’ “
“You want to walk in there with the grizzly bears like nothing could happen and everything is a joke. People would say you're the joke. You goddamned people.”
She gazed away, her eyelids nearly swollen closed with her weeping. “This is the last time. You think about that.”
“Go on back to the house,” Rossie said.
“You know what they think? They think we're children.” Then she was gone on the dusty road.
Rossie was alone for a bit, then nudged his Pinky horse and followed her back. That night, he went to the cookhouse too late for dinner, and Albert laughed and said he thought Rossie had been chased off for good. “But,” he said, “I kept you a steak.”
In the morning Rossie headed up to the house, let himself in, and found Bernard and Lemma over pancakes at the kitchen table.
“You're learning,” Bernard said. “Keep the women stirred up.”
Lemma touched Rossie's hand. “I was rude. Bernard told me last afternoon, when you were gone. He told me severely and for some time. We had a serious moment. I apologize.”
Distended in a yellow brocade dressing gown, Eliza came into the kitchen, and Rossie was entirely given to watching her pale lips, slightly parted as she studied him.
“There you are,” he said and he stood and pulled out a chair for her and she touched his hand and nodded and thanked him.
“Isn't that sweet,” Lemma said. “Like a lady.”
When Arnold came in to breakfast he announced that he would photograph Eliza with Rossie the next morning. Once he was back in his developing room in Chicago he would print an image with them alongside the bears. “Very uptown, very magic.” He said this as if it was a photographer's joke.
At sunup the following day, he perched his wooden box of a camera up in another apple orchard and photographed them as they were after awakening, Eliza swollen and gravid in a bluish linen gown. “Actual lovers,” he said. “I will bring the photograph when I return for Christmas, for the wedding.”
“The wedding?” Rossie said, looking across to Eliza who was looking to the ground.
“Didn't you know?” Arnold said, smiling.
“For that matter,” Bernard said, “neither did I.”
“Now you do,” Arnold said. “I've sold a photo essay about an elegant western wedding in snowy distances to a notable fashion magazine. It will be called ‘Beloved Turmoil.’ “
“There it is,” Lemma said. “Announced.”
Eliza lifted her eyes and gave Rossie a sardonic smile, shaking her head slightly as she did but also watching to see how he was taking this.
“Guess it is,” Rossie said.
Low clouds had begun to scatter rain and snow, bringing winter seriously down upon them, when Rossie found Larry in a pissed-off uproar at dinner. “You got it,” he said to Rossie.
“That so? What's that?”
“My job. Didn't take too long.”
Bernard had visited the cowhand only a couple of hours earlier to tell him he was to be out of the bunkhouse by December twenty-first. “I'm planning to issue you a check for three months’ wages,” he said. “Cause trouble about this and the sheriff from Hamilton will escort you from the property. Trouble for the sheriff means jail.”
“Wintertime and out of work,” Larry shouted.
“Shit,” Albert said, “you never had no work. Nothing a man would call work.”
“You better watch your little ass.”
“If you plan on eating down here,” Albert said, “you better watch yours.”
The next afternoon, Bernard came to find Rossie. “You and I should go for a drive.” He was dressed in a green fedora and Harris Tweed jacket.
“This will be more winter than you're used to,” he said, once they were in the Buick. “I imagine it will be difficult. Eliza and some other man's child.”
“Don't seem so far that it matters.”
“I think it will. Do you continually consider going back to Nevada? Even when the women aren't driving you crazy?”
“Not right off.”
Bernard bit at his lower lip. “It's in my interest to forestall such ideas.” He pulled in before the empty cork-floored horse barn. “This will look different.”
“Looks the same as any time I seen it.”
“There's a difference. Now, since right now, it's yours. Eliza has her property on the cliff. I'm giving this barn to you. Consider it a premature wedding gift, an attempt to ensure that the birth of this baby doesn't incite you to spook again.” Bernard smiled in mock conspiracy. “The barn, along with sixty acres, should be initially sufficient. You'll build your own corrals here in what we call the Tailfeather Field. Eliza lost a horse named Daisy to wire in this field. So it should carry weight in your burgeoning family. She'll make sure you keep the wire up.”
“Two horses,” Rossie said. “That's what I got.”
“There'll be more. That's one major point in this. Leonard tells Lemma that you've talked about the horse business.”
“Talked about it, him and me, one time. People where I come from would say that owning horses was the point. They'd say owning a barn was jumping the gun.”
“What do you think?”
“I'm wondering what kind of horses.”
“That, of course, is up to you.”
“Quick fellows,” Rossie said. “Smart and stout.” Out of the Buick, he walked a slow route over to the barn and knocked his knuckles on the varnished, hardwood double doors before sliding one open to step inside into the dimness, which reeked faintly of timothy hay in the loft. Shuffling along on the soft cork flooring, he opened the immaculately clean stalls, climbed the ladder up to the loft, and flopped over backwards into the dry timothy to lie watching dust float in the faint light. Close to perfect, except it was too quiet and didn't stink of horseshit.
Bernard was still standing by the Buick. “Well?” he said.
“I'm learning to say what I'm thinking,” Rossie replied. “You fired that cowboy, his job is open, and you're giving me this barn like it's not much. And to you it isn't. At the same time I can buy my ass back any time I want by riding away. So there's no use worrying. Eliza is what I want, and you got me. I should say thanks.”
“Enough,” Bernard said, eyes gleaming. “There will be papers.” He gazed away toward the valley. “Signatures. In a few days we'll visit my Mr. Henry, the lawyer in Hamilton.”
“My daddy would love this. He'd tell me to watch out for the next card, saying, ‘You can't gamble an empty hand into anything more than once or twice.’”
“You didn't start empty. Lemma and I regard you with considerable affection. Lemma has been on the telephone with your mother, and plans are in motion. I've negotiated a rate from the railroad. We don't want you to run off and leave all of us stranded. You own this barn and the acreage surrounding it. That should hold you.” He laid a hand on Rossie's shoulder. “Enough with running for cover. Your friends will be coming, one of them a man named Flynn.”
“Slivers? He was my boss in Nevada. He was the father of my girlfriend. The girl before Eliza.”
“Betrayal?” Bernard was beaming. “Jealousy and discontent? A man of experience.”
“Anyhow, man with a barn, who'd be a fool to run off?”
“Exactly. Your horses, if you have the will, someday might run at Santa Anita.”
In his bunkhouse room, Rossie commenced the braiding of an intricate horsehair rope called a martingale, quickly settling down to what he thought of as winter work.
“That cowboy got his check,” Albert said over pork chops and green beans drenched in hot bacon fat. “He rides off in the snow. Be a handsome boy in Hamilton with that wintertime paycheck. So your hired men are me and Nelson.”
“Sounds right.” Rossie smiled. “I'm sitting in my room, braiding and thinking like a boss.”
“Careful with that. It's a malady.”
Lemma and Bernard had wanted to take Eliza to the hospital in Mis-soula, or even into Hamilton, but she insisted on the midwife, a heavy-shouldered woman named Peters from down the valley. She brought blankets and her own pillow and moved in to share Eliza's rooms, proclaiming that they should call her the missus or Mrs. Peters, and declaring that Eliza was healthy as a barnyard animal. No one should even consider being worried about the birth.
“But if something went wrong,” Lemma said, “we're helpless.”
“Mam,” the missus said, “things can go wrong, but not often by surprise. You sense if things might go wrong. There's not a thing in the world the matter with that girl. There's the doctor in Hamilton, but we won't need him. She's strong and her baby is in position to come.” She spread a cloth on the chest of drawers in Eliza's room and laid out the steel forceps, a scalpel, scissors, a catheter, thermometers, linen cord, rolls of cotton, and a stethoscope. “This is normal,” she told Eliza, smiling as she set out bottles of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant along with a vial of silver nitrate for the baby's eyes. “Tools of the trade.”
Betty led Mrs. Peters to the kitchen and Lemma joined in to help with the stacks of white linen sheets the midwife kept in an old suitcase, which were to be steamed, ironed, and scorched dry, thus sterilized.
“It's man and woman,” she said at dinner. “The babies come right out, the woman is happy with her love, the man loves her happiness.” She spooned up a third helping of chicken soup.
“Everything is for the good?” Lemma asked.
“Part of happiness.”
Eliza's contractions began at four in the morning two nights later, snow burying the roads, valley schools closed since midafternoon the day before.
Bernard came to breakfast in the bunkhouse with this news. “There is nobody cooking up there,” he said. He dumped a half pint of brandy into the coffee and poured a cup for himself. “Just to take the edge off things.” Albert smiled his toothless smile and helped himself to a cup. “After we eat,” Bernard said to Rossie, “Eliza wants you scrubbed up and in the room with her.”
Rossie waited out the minutes in one of the big chairs in her sitting room, the contractions getting serious after eight hours. He held Eliza's hands while Mrs. Peters sa
id, “Cry out, loud as you please.” But not one sound, nothing but the breathing and grunting, even during the quick cutting, when the odor of blood came over the room and blood dripped onto the floor. Rossie held Eliza's sweaty hand as she squeezed, until the crowning of the newborn and the ultimate putting on of pressure brought on the slippery birth, the baby boy appearing just after midnight. Seventeen hours after her labor had begun, Eliza lay back, her thighs smeared with blood, and avidly eyed the baby—with fright, Rossie thought—until the infant wailed and was then cleaned with a soft cloth and given to her.
Once the cord was tied and the afterbirth expelled, Mrs. Peters severed the cord with scissors. “No mystery. You feel the mother's pulse in the cord. It stops, you tie the cord off, and cut it. The child is on its own, in its life.” She spoke calmly, quietly excited and damp with perspiration, but Eliza wasn't listening. “Good girl,” Mrs. Peters said. “You didn't flinch.”
By now Lemma was in the room, pretending that she wasn't weeping, and Rossie was sent to summon Bernard, who'd been asleep on the couch in his study.
“We're cleaned up spick-and-span,” Mrs. Peters told Bernard when he came stocking-footed down the stairs. “No more bloodiness. The mother is sitting up with her child. Three stitches. A complete success.”
Eliza was propped up by fresh pillows at her back, her pale eyes vivid as she looked up from the child, which was hidden from the rest of them by the folds of a cotton blanket.
“They told me in Hamilton, when I was packing to come up here,” Mrs. Peters said, “that this baby would be a part Indian. I don't see it.”
“Who told you that?” Lemma asked.
“Women told me.” She gave them a reassuring smile. “I've seen surprises. Nobody cares what tribe if it's a live child.”
“Little squatty face, like a baby,” Rossie said. “You could tell me boy or girl or Indian. I wouldn't know.”
The Willow Field Page 22
