The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Eliza's voice was barely audible. “Here, you have him,” she said to Rossie. She tried a smile. “Nothing to it.”

  “It was a tough time,” Rossie said.

  Mrs. Peters took the child from her and turned the blanket away from its tiny reddish features. “Little squatty face,” she said, moving to hand the child over to Rossie, who backed away.

  “Don't know about that.”

  Mrs. Peters paid him no attention. Rossie took the fold of blankets with the child inside, a tiny boy sleeping, breathing, almost weightless, and not at all inert. “This is something,” he said.

  “He won't break,” Mrs. Peters said, following him. “If you're going to be the man who's around, he better get used to your smell right away. You better start getting used to him.”

  “What're you calling him?” Rossie asked.

  “That's up to us, you and me,” Eliza said, her voice still a whisper. Then her tone sharpened. “His last name is Stevenson.”

  Rossie grinned, thinking he would try a joke. “How about Bucky Stevenson?”

  “No,” she said. “No to Bucky.”

  “Your folks ought to be in on it.”

  “He's not their boy. He's ours.”

  The baby began to whimper. “Now you rock him. You owe him that much.”

  “Never thought about this as owing anything.”

  “That's another idea you better get used to,” Mrs. Peters said.

  “What color are his eyes?”

  “They'll turn blue,” Eliza said. “Like mine. Or they won't.”

  “Well,” Rossie said. “Blue. That's what I'd call him.”

  “You can't call a baby boy by the name of Blue,” Mrs. Peters said.

  “Sure can. I went to grade school with a fellow named Blue.”

  Bernard brightened. “There's Teddy Blue,” he said, recalling a legendary cowhand who came to Montana from Texas with the trail herds. Teddy Blue Abbott had been a drinking buddy with Calamity Jane. “Those people knew about names,” Bernard said. “Teddy Blue. His story begins with the name.”

  “This is not a cowboy story,” Lemma said.

  “It could be,” Bernard said.

  “Blue is not fair. Think of this boy in school.” Lemma studied Rossie. “Are you serious?”

  “Not much.”

  “It's fine,” Eliza said, and she was smiling. “For anyway the time being. We'll call him Teddy Blue. Teddy for sure.”

  “Time being? That name is going to be hard to shake,” Mrs. Peters warned.

  “No need for any shaking,” Rossie said, “once you're used to it.”

  “Teddy Blue,” Eliza said. “Bring me my baby. I need to sleep with him.”

  Lemma finally smiled. “Here I am consorting with lunatics.”

  “This crazy boy is going back to sleep,” Bernard said as Mrs. Peters ushered them out of the room.

  “Wish I was named Blue,” Rossie said. “Always did, sort of.”

  After wandering in the house wishing he'd feel sleepy, Rossie sat behind a worktable on the kitchen porch to watch the snowfall in the dim rising light. Lemma was there behind him. She struck a wooden match and lit one of her Lucky Strike cigarettes.

  “They've got that house too hot,” she said, blowing smoke. “All I can think of is holding a baby of my own, before my life is gone entirely. It's on me like a sickness.”

  Rossie sensed that she wasn't exactly talking to him.

  After dragging on the cigarette, she went on. “You should know the truth. Bernard is experiencing pain. The dark part of his going may be starting, and then you'll be the man around here. For all of us.” She stood and went across the porch to flick her cigarette away into the snow. “What's happening with me is I can't stop dreaming about men, night after night. Some of them are you.” Her voice turned to whispering. “Would you like me to ask for it? Isn't that what men like— women wanting it, giving in, asking for it, insisting?” She was quiet a long moment. “I see you seeing me. You don't have to be careful. I don't have any stitches.”

  Rossie understood where she was taking this talk and could hardly catch his breath. “Whatever you're doing, it's working, but I better get some sleep.”

  “So you won't have it in me on the couch in the living room where nobody would ever know but you and me.”

  “I'm thinking,” Rossie said.

  Lemma touched her cool fingertips to his cheek and blew him a kiss. Later, in the bunkhouse, he jacked off all over his belly and fell asleep without moving to wipe it up.

  The next afternoon, alone with Eliza as she nursed her new boy under the folds of a lilac-colored goose-down quilt from Labrador, he recounted the previous night's encounter with Lemma. “She started telling me things, about fucking. I was wondering, why me?”

  Eliza smiled down at her child. “Think of yourself as any port in the storm.”

  “You listen a minute. She was after me.”

  Eliza looked up from her suckling baby to the ceiling. “Did you want to get at her?”

  “Thought about it.”

  “But you never did it? You never lifted a hand. Or did you?”

  “I was sitting there with a hard-on and not much brain.”

  “But you didn't touch her?” She watched carefully as Rossie shook his head no. “Horny.” She smiled. “I think we'll call it horny. I'd be worried if something didn't get you hot.”

  “Once it was over I felt like I'd got away but not from her—from me. I had the idea to put my hand on her bare arm and see how far that went, if she'd stop me once she felt how I was. I was surprised I didn't.”

  “Why do you tell me things like this? Do you want me to mother you? We don't momma and daddy one another, not in this life. Try to think about her. Her husband is dying, he won't talk about it, and she's frantic. But she wasn't after you. She loves you. You're her cowboy. She wanted you to understand. We don't want to ruin you. Nobody does.”

  BERNARD AND LEMMA ANNOUNCED THAT HOWARD WOULD not be coming to Montana for the wedding, Howard having gone deep into Mexico.

  “Our boy is sipping fruit drinks on beaches under palm trees,” Bernard said. “Bless him. Perhaps this will be his real life, in contact with primitive gods.” He smiled like an angel. “If he's not careful, he'll end up in our bunkhouse. Eliza might be the sole support of her uncle Howard. That may be his real life.”

  “Nonsense,” Lemma laughed, waving this talk away. “This one has her own money.”

  There had been endless telephone calls back and forth to Nevada, as they figured and retallied the costs, until Bernard finally blew the whistle on quibbling over money. “He just threw his hands in the air,” Lemma said. “He considers this a time for inventing family, and so we'll forget expense.” She explained that Katrina and Nito, Slivers Flynn and Mattie, would travel on the railroad from Reno.

  “Mattie?” Rossie asked.

  “Her romance with your friend Oscar apparently existed only in your daydreams,” Eliza said. “She's coming, her idea. I didn't want her, but why not confront the thing? Let's see what she is.”

  “I know what she is.”

  “You? I'm certain you do—or think you do. Hot pussy.”

  The travelers were to change trains in Sacramento, sleep in Pullman berths, and sightsee through a day in Seattle, spend a night on the Great Northern, and arrive in Missoula midmorning on the twenty-first of December. Bernard and Rossie would greet them in the Buick while Lemma and Eliza waited at the ranch.

  Arnold Meisner would arrive later, on a train from Chicago, and be met by Leonard in the Model A. His luggage was to include the enlarged, framed photograph of Eliza and Rossie taken in the orchard for which Lemma had cleared a place of honor on the living room wall.

  There would be a reception on the night of December twenty-second, after the travelers had rested for a day. Guests from Missoula and the valley would join them if the roads were passable. Through all this Betty would have three women from Hamilton to help with the cooking an
d cleaning. Finally, the wedding itself would take place in the living room the afternoon of December twenty-fourth with family and close friends. Christmas Day would be celebrated with a tree and small gifts.

  At the breakfast table over pancakes the day before the guests arrived, Eliza proposed that the marriage ceremony begin with a walk out into the snow. They would hold hands before the All Frogs Pole as Leonard said a Blackfeet prayer.

  “Wouldn't it be better luck,” Bernard asked, “if that pole heard things that might have been said on the Queen Charlotte Islands, where it was made?”

  “Absolutely,” Eliza said. “But no one knows Haida.”

  “Your guests from Nevada may think you're excessively interested in Indians and their mysteries,” Lemma said. “Sacred prayers are seldom orchestrated to the howls of a freezing child.”

  Eliza, with the baby in her arms, went still and white. “Mother, that's nonsense. There are freezing children on the Northern Plains as we speak—many have frozen to death and people are praying in circumstances you can't imagine.”

  “Well, you would know.”

  “Mother, your sadness is not my fault. Not to speak of your jealousy.”

  “Jealousy? In what way? Of what, may I ask?”

  Rossie held his breath, having learned long ago to ignore the women in his mother's house when they came to breakfast weeping. Even Betty kept silent, tending the stove with a spatula in her hand as eggs splattered and hissed.

  “Jesus!” Lemma said. She dropped her napkin over her breakfast plate. “Jealous!” They heard her bedroom door slam.

  Bernard, smiling, continued to discuss railroad connections. Rossie pondered the quicksand they had stepped around. By dinner, however, Lemma was back among them, the brittleness dissolved into laughter about the baby's doings. Bernard offered a final reconciliation with a round of whiskey after the meal.

  Dry snow fell the next morning as Bernard and Rossie got into their coats and went to chain up the Buick for the drive to Missoula. Even with the heater turned on high and Rossie climbing out every few miles to clear ice from the windshield wipers, their progress was deliberate and slow along a highway and streets empty of traffic.

  “You and I,” Bernard said. “Going to the train is becoming a tradition.”

  The locomotive steamed and screeched into the Great Northern station just as Rossie and Bernard were parking the Buick in front of the old brick depot. Mattie appeared at the head of the stairway. Her red hair was twisted up under her stained hat, and she wore horseback Levi's and a coat sewn out of a Hudson Bay blanket. As she surveyed Missoula, her lips trembled so that Rossie thought she might be talking to herself.

  “Hey, good looking,” he said. “You come to see somebody married?”

  She ignored him as Slivers, in a slicker made of canvas tenting, stepped out of the Pullman carrying a worn leather satchel.

  “You better climb down,” he told her. “There's people behind you.”

  He shook Rossie's hand as Mattie went on staring off to the mountains. “Redheaded and freckled like she always was. Your folks, they're getting their baggage.” Then he reached down and packed a snowball with his raw hands. “Winter in this old Bitterroot is what I wanted to see,” he said, pitching his snowball to bang against the side of the Pullman car.

  “This here,” Rossie said to Slivers, “is Bernard Stevenson. He's the father-in-law. “

  “Heard there was a baby kid involved,” Slivers said.

  “But this isn't the kid's father,” Rossie explained. “This is Eliza's father. She's the mother of the baby kid, she's the woman I'm marrying, with the kid.”

  “Sounds like you need name tags.”

  “So, the horseman, named Slivers,” Bernard said. “Quite utterly unique.”

  Slivers eyed him. “Born to the name of Everett,” he said. “I had a granddad, dim old man, said he was tired of names he couldn't remember, so he called me Slivers. I got on the voting rolls in Battle Mountain with the name of Slivers Flynn. Had to go through a judge, but lawyers say that's enough to make it your name.”

  “Remarkable,” Bernard replied.

  Slivers hadn't smiled and Rossie wondered if Bernard would have caught a slap alongside the head if Katrina hadn't come down off the railway car at that moment, her hair tucked under a gray woolen beret. She stood close and Rossie looked away like a child but felt her watching, as she would through all these doings.

  “You,” Katrina said, reaching to Rossie as if no one else was there. Her grip was sure and fierce. “You,” she said again. “Put your arms around me.” Her perfume was lilac and citrus, and her softening features were not girlish anymore but broad and snowy pale. “On the cheek, there, like my child.” Rossie was abruptly engulfed, eyes tearing, until she pushed him back and whispered, “Fine.” She smiled. “You look healthy.” Then she was taking Mattie by the hand and pulling her forward. “Her,” she said. “You remember her.”

  “Hard to forget,” Rossie said.

  Mattie gave him a quick, big-toothed smile before pulling her hand away from Katrina. Nito had emerged from the Pullman bareheaded but wrapped in a long, black coat in which he posed, turning to show off. “Alpaca from Peru. I won it, jacks high, just for this trip. Cards can be a solution.” His thin hands were strong as ever when he shook with Rossie, who noticed him eyeing the white, straw Panama hat that he had worn, despite the snow, to honor his father. “Kiss me on each cheek,” Nito said, laughing. “Twice, like the European you turned out to be.”

  Bernard took Katrina's hand and raised it to kiss but not quite, then turned to grasp Nito's while Slivers rested one of his huge hands on Rossie's shoulder. “If we don't land on our feet like a pack of cats,” he said. “My father's older brother, Little Jamison they called him, come up here hunting gold before nineteen hundred. He said this Bitterroot Valley was the best horse country he'd ever seen.”

  The snowfall persisted, dry flakes drifting in the stillness.

  Katrina and Nito were traveling in the Buick with Rossie and Bernard.

  Slivers and Mattie, who would ride with Leonard Three Boy and Arnold when the Chicago train arrived, waved farewell to the Benascos once they had loaded their luggage into the Buick. “I got dealings in this town,” Slivers said. “There's a man might show me a horse. I might rent a tuxedo.”

  On the highway, Nito reared around in his seat and spoke to Rossie, who was in back with Katrina. “This Bernard,” he said, speaking as if Bernard were not beside him. “He's a man for horses, is he?”

  “Race horses.” This was maybe the first joke Rossie had ever shared with his father. “He tells me about going down to the Kentucky Derby but he never owned purebreds. That Bernard says he likes the idea of owning one.”

  “Or two,” Bernard said.

  “Seeing them run,” Nito said, “would do us good.”

  Katrina had been crouched forward, looking out to the snowy world, but now she sighed and sat back. “You,” she said to Rossie. “Look to me. This is all right, I see it. You're with good people and you'll amount to something.”

  “You told me—I was listening—not to break my heart. You said amounting up was a worry that could break your heart.”

  “That was for then. You're going to be a man with a wife.”

  “Anyhow, Eliza does the worrying.”

  “Nevada, the way you were going, amounted to idiocy.”

  “Horses is no idiocy,” he said, and wished he'd let it go.

  “Idiocy. For a boy without schooling.”

  “At least he made his way to us,” Bernard said after a long moment.

  At the house, Betty came out with a tray of steaming whiskey drinks. The adults gathered around Lemma, just in from a walk in the snowy meadows and got up in a canvas coat, a man's brown fedora, and black, buckled galoshes. Her eyes shone. “Good fortune,” she said, “on our doorstep.”

  Bernard had Rossie's parents in his study looking at Krazy Kat when the other travelers arrived in
the Model A. They went down to gather in the snow again, and this time it was Arnold who produced a flask of brandy. “Bless Leonard,” he said. “He wouldn't take a sip. So now there's enough to pass around.”

  Slivers said, after his pull on the flask, “This much snow is an excuse for anything.”

  Arnold handed the brandy to Rossie. “Slivers tells me he's to blame for you.”

  “Not entirely,” Katrina said.

  Eliza appeared with the baby fresh from a nap, and held him so his face could be seen amid the flannel blankets. “Teddy,” she said, after he'd been inspected. “Teddy Blue. He's named for a trail-herding cowboy. “

  “You don't know how lucky you was,” Slivers said to Rossie. “Trail driving is at its end. You caught the last. It's gone to railroads.”

  “The young men might trail drive our boxes and suitcases down the hall to our rooms,” Arnold said. “They could get on with that while Mr. Flynn and I get inside and warm up.”

  When Rossie and Leonard finished their muscling, they found the others around the table in the dining room, helping themselves to a late-lunch spread of lamb stew and bowls of chopped condiments—a Basque recipe Betty had prepared in Nito's honor.

  “Arnold kissed me,” Lemma said to Rossie. “Do you think he's softening?”

  “Could be he's in love.”

  “Ought to be,” Bernard said. “Considering the way he's treated around here.”

  Mattie finished up eating and went outside to roll a cigarette.

  “Did you talk to her?” Eliza asked Rossie, who rolled his eyes. “You go do it. I mean you.”

  Rossie shuffled out to stand in the snow behind Mattie, who was staring away toward gray light in the timber. She was bareheaded, and snow had already nestled into little piles among the pinned-up redness of her hair. “They smoke in that house,” he said.

  “There's a baby,” she said. She didn't look at him.

  “What do you think of this country?” Rossie said.

  “Too soon to tell.”

  Eliza had come out, closing the door behind her. “So Mattie,” she said. “This thing in my arms is Teddy Blue.”

  Mattie flipped her cigarette into the snow and stepped forward. Her eyes, to Rossie's surprise, had gone wide.