The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “You think so? Mexican steers?”

  “I damned well know so. You've got to learn to rope. It ain't some mystery, just takes work. But you can't teach a horse how to set up with the loop in the air and just about to catch something when you can't catch nothing.”

  This was inarguable. Rossie was already getting set to approach Bernard on the subject of buying Mexican steers.

  Cahill cadences echoed in Rossie's head on the long drive back to Montana as he thought about teaching Bill Sweet to forget the rough-house bronco busting. The day after his return home he laid out the deal to Bill Sweet in what he thought of as Cahill terms. “What if you beat on Margie?”

  “She'd stab me while I was sleeping.”

  “You rough up our horses I'll kick your ass while you're wide awake.”

  Rossie ordered a half dozen many-colored Mexican calves from Sonora. By the time winter had set in he and Bill Sweet had built a stout, round corral at the edge of the Tailfeather Field, and constructed a roping chute with used railroad ties. The Mexican steers came off a railroad car in Hamilton in late March, and Rossie and Bill Sweet started burning their hands with seagrass ropes, learning to sling loops with a rolling wrist and to set back in the stirrups anticipating that the catch was a dead-on sure thing, every time after every time. In August Rossie returned to Nevada and found that roping horses were less of a mystery if you got them into the game.

  “Couple of more years,” Bobby Cahill said, “and you might know something.” Rossie heard that as high praise, and as soon as he was back in Montana he told Eliza that Bobby Cahill had showed him where his life had always been aimed, in the direction of smart horses and her.

  “You always knew that kind of talk. It's a function of not fucked in a couple of weeks.”

  He smiled. “So?”

  On a rainy May morning in 1939, a man named Eldon Bermuda loaded a .44 pistol, walked a mile and a half of muddy road to the eastern outskirts of Hamilton, entered a tavern called The Mint, took dead aim, and shot his nineteen-year-old wife off the barstool, where she had been sitting with another man's hand up under her skirt. Bermuda then took the .44 into his mouth and without hesitation destroyed his own brains. “Blood on the walls,” the Hamilton newspaper wrote.

  Home from a week of looking at horses in Wyoming, Rossie banged his way into the house around midnight and found Eliza on the leather couch in their rooms with a skinny, startlingly blue-eyed two-year-old blond girl on her lap. The girl was wearing new, pink button-up pajamas. She gave him only darting looks.

  “This is Corrie,” Eliza said. “Corrie couldn't sleep so I was telling her a story. Corrie lives here now. Her name was Bermuda. It's going to be Stevenson. I was telling her about you and horses, how you'd be home and how she could have a horse.” Eliza spoke quietly, and the message for Rossie, as he stood there with his hat in his hand, was clear. “What you should do,” Eliza said to him, “is tell us about your horse, your Katrina.”

  Rossie sat at the far end of the couch while the girl stared at her knees. “Well, Katrina and Eliza are my sweethearts.”

  “Corrie,” Eliza said, “will be another of your sweethearts.”

  Rossie nodded. “Corrie, did you ever ride a horse?” The girl shook her head. “Corrie, what if I picked you up and you and me trotted around this room like I was a horse?”

  “Why don't you?” Eliza said. “Why don't you let him pick you up and trot you around?”

  There it began, the dancing that was Rossie and Eliza and Teddy and the blue-eyed girl named Corrie, child of a marriage that ended on the bloody floor of The Mint, whom Eliza had rescued from huddling in her dead father's barnyard. Those years before the war the dark boy and the pale girl were to Rossie like sides of the coin called childhood, and he would call them by nicknames, Teddy being “Fine” and Corrie “Bright.”

  AFTER BETTY HAD GONE OFF ON THE RAILROAD IN THE DIRECTION of Spain by way of New York, Eliza insisted on doing the cooking. “I don't want anybody serving me,” she said. “Nobody in this house except for us.”

  Bernard shook his head. “You are out of luck. We're overrun with ghosts.”

  His pronouncement was felt most heavily in the early winter of 1939, when word came from Arnold that Betty had died of pneumonia on the rainy northwest coast of Spain. Just that, a card signed, “Heartbroken, as you may also be, Arnold.”

  This was only a beginning. A global war was tearing across three continents, already the primary divide in the lives of their generation. After long nights of unresolved debate with Eliza, Rossie joined the frenzy of patriotism that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Marine Corps just before Christmas in 1941. Bill Sweet, with an agricultural deferment of the sort Rossie had refused, was left with Margie and the task of selling off the horses except for Katrina. From then on he was in charge of holding Bernard's home-place properties together, which wasn't much of a chore since there were no plans for going forward. “Holding the line on this end,” Bernard said. “That's us.”

  By New Year's Day Rossie was sleeping in the aisle of a passenger train that was taking him along with hundreds of other recruits east across the nation to South Carolina for nine weeks of boot camp at Par-ris Island. “We're learning basics,” he wrote Eliza. “Don't quit and marksmanship. They've nicknamed me ‘Cowboy.’ “

  But shooting to kill didn't loom in his future. For reasons he wouldn't soon discover, Rossie was irrevocably assigned to supply. “You don't need no training for supply,” he was told. “Any dumb shit can hand out blankets.”

  Six weeks out of Parris Island, he came off a transport docked in sight of the wreckage at Pearl Harbor. The beach at Waikiki was strung with barbed wire, but somewhere beyond it he would find Eliza. A young Hamilton hotshot who worked for a senator from Billings had arranged a Red Cross job for her, keeping records of durable foods stockpiled for “native relief” on islands eventually to be reconquered. She settled with the children in a tin-roofed mountainside house with a view across canyons of jungle to the glistening sea. Geckos ran the walls, pursuing insects.

  Eliza took a bus to a downtown office. Rossie bought a secondhand Chevrolet and drove to a warehouse at Pearl Harbor. Teddy and Corrie were picked up by a stern Chinese woman with a British accent, Lydia Lee, and taken daily to the private advantages of Punahou School, for classes in European art, piano, and French. Teddy kept track of the war day by day, marking boyish notes on the maps he had up on the walls of his room and pasting war stories from the newspapers into big scrapbooks. Corrie ran in the brush with a throng of Hawaiian girls and occasional boys and came home scratched and speaking the island patois. But Eliza and Rossie often forgot them, ignored them in the rush of other urgencies. “We were children raising children,” Eliza would say years later.

  Eventually they hired a live-in nanny, a young mixed-blood widow, Shirley Vesper, so they could take the Chevy on the twisting road through jungles over the stunningly precipitous Ko'olau Range— fluted heights like nothing in the Rockies—to sundowner parties on pavilions beside the Lanikai beaches.

  Purple and orange orchids on strings around their necks they danced to Glenn Miller recordings and on the way home they stood in the moonlight at the Nu'uanu Pali Lookout where they wrapped their arms around each other, still feeling the vodka, and gazed out at the shimmering seas. On Hotel Street in downtown Honolulu where beleaguered prostitutes lived in cribs above taverns thick with enlisted men, Rossie and Eliza danced and drank among them. They traveled in a pack with friends, joking and flirting to armor their souls against thoughts of being called up for invasions and the chance of instant dismemberment. No one spoke of fate or death until the late hours, when drunken, sweaty men cursed and broke bottles and stared out at the darkness while women wept over them.

  At work, Rossie talked his way onto transport aircraft that made island-hopping sweeps all the way to Fiji. He came to love the long hours of flying over the featureless Pacific to minuscule destinations, ato
lls with tiny lights amid the black immensity of water.

  “If this is war, I'm dreaming,” he told Eliza.

  “Better than that,” she said. “You're alive.”

  A turning came on Christmas Day, 1943, when the Great Falls newspaper broke the story that Charlie Cooper, who'd enlisted in the Marines with false documents after release from Deer Lodge Prison, lost an arm during the invasion of Tarawa. Lemma sent a copy of the newspaper, which displayed a front-page picture of Charlie, hard-eyed in hospital whites, and labeled him “a genuine American hero.”

  Rossie found Eliza in the kitchen with a glass of bourbon over ice. “Hell of a thing,” he said, reading from the news report. “Bleeding in the salt flats, arm shot off, knowing he was dying. Blue and yellow fish all around, ready to feed on him.”

  “Hero!” Eliza cried. “Charlie's a one-armed ex-con who is going to talk about being a hero until he's dead. What Charlie found out there is blood, and shit in the water. Little fish, eating dead flesh and shit.”

  Rossie poured himself some bourbon. “Little fish and shit.” He tossed it back, poured another inch, and they were quiet, looking away from each other until Rossie tossed back his second hit of bourbon.

  “All you can do is drink?”

  “Seems like it sometimes. Tell you what, I run away from school and my mother's house and I run away from Mattie and I been raising horses with your money and now I'm handing out blankets in Hawaii. There's got to be an end to ducking out or I'm going to be the sorry son of a bitch who got out of everything. Charlie's done a hell of a lot more than me. Slivers told us he'd never go back but he went once. If Slivers hadn't gone once then he couldn't say anything. I'm going to be the man who can't look anybody in the eye if I'm not careful.”

  “What heroes are for,” Eliza said, “is getting killed so life can go on. You go be a hero. Corrie and Teddy and I will run horses while your bones rot into the coral. We'll drink to your memory. Dead is dead. War isn't a horseback trip to Canada.” She explained that his assignment to base supply in Honolulu had been managed by the same Harvard-pedigreed Hamilton lawyer who'd arranged her Red Cross assignment. “Anybody but a fool would be grateful.”

  “Too late for grateful,” Rossie said.

  He called the lawyer and talked his way into reassignment onto a ship headed for New Caledonia, where he would be issued combat gear and join the Third Marine Corps Division, survivors of the miseries involved in the conquest of the Solomon Islands.

  Upon awakening the last morning together Eliza nudged his shoulder. “You must be the man who wants to be dead.” When he finished shaving she didn't get out of bed or say anything but, “Goddamn you.”

  While training on Eniwetok atoll Rossie learned of the Allied landing in Normandy on the same day he read a brief, precise note from Eliza. This is to reassure you that I understand your need to be what you think you are. I await your homecoming with prayer. Imagine it, even me, praying. All those thousands of miles away from her, dripping sweat and aching and stunned with such fatigue that he could barely fight off the black flies swarming around him, Rossie persuaded himself to smile.

  In first light on July 21, 1944, he climbed down a net of rope hung over the barnacled side of the troop ship to a landing boat. He had lived below deck in steamy, reeking intimacy with hundreds of other men, and now he was confined only by his gear—his rifle and a long, black-bladed knife, two canteens, a rain poncho, a shovel and gloves, K rations, waterproofed cigarettes, matches, candy bars, and oranges. He wasn't the supply sergeant anymore.

  They were carried toward a coral reef just off the high, green shore of Guam. Mortar and artillery shells exploded in flowering bursts of seawater as a pitched howl rang out through the ongoing incandescence. In the warm, waist-deep seawater colored by blood, as Rossie stumbled across the sharp coral offshore from the beach, he saw a man fall screaming, but no one could hear him over the amphibious tractors churning and wallowing and the constant explosions. Machine gun fire from concrete bunkers on the bluff above the beach came sweeping along, kicking up little splashes, and felling other men.

  “Numb,” Rossie would say, telling the story years later. “They said to leave the wounded and keep going. The medics would get them. A lot of them drowned and there was nothing to do but keep going. I had no idea what dying meant. I thought about it at night in my hammock and I guessed you'd never know. Of thirty men in our landing craft, nineteen went down on the reef. By the time I got to the beach I wasn't scared, I was alive, and I'd quit thinking.”

  Rossie found shelter at the bottom of the cliffs and dug in behind a fallen palm, throwing sand to make himself a hole while the Japanese machine guns were firing off over his head, up the cliff, fifty or sixty feet above him.

  A young Marine hunkered close to dig in beside him, and they remained there all night, until the cliffs were cleared. This new companion looked not a day over eighteen. He called himself Vernon and curled up in the dark and talked about his mother in Missouri and drinking water in the Ozarks. “Pure water and a good woman. She's doing prayers for me.”

  “Shut up if you don't want to get us killed,” Rossie said.

  They had heard stories about enormous rats in the dark so he and Vernon stayed awake and smoked their cigarettes and ate their candy bars and peeled their oranges. Rossie managed to imagine morning sun on the Bitterroot peaks, then slept and dreamed about frogs croaking until gray light slipped in over Guam and he was still there in the sand-sided hole. He suddenly thought of killing Vernon if he talked any more but knew that was crazy.

  Then they were told to advance. Rossie and Vernon O'Hearn and a row of other men straggled up sandy trails through blasted vegetation to the bluffs. There was dried blood on the floor of the pillbox bunkers and bodies covered with flies and already turning green in the heat. An Arabian-looking fellow remarked on the dead Japanese soldiers, how they were just like the Americans, all of them stupid shooters. “This isn't anything we earned,” he said. “Not any of us deserves it, not the Japs or us.” He was talking fast and going on crazy until a sniper got him and half his face blew off, his blood splattering through the air like he'd exploded.

  A slight, half-naked Japanese soldier was found hiding empty-handed in a rat hole under the trunk of a fallen palm. The hole crawled with coconut crabs, and Rossie, though he'd been warned about going pure batshit in war, felt helpless against the urge to shoot him. He wanted the prisoner to crawl and kept jabbing away with his rifle at the man's neck.

  Then Vernon O'Hearn shot his rifle and Rossie was flat on his back, with a bone-shattering wound in his shoulder. Vernon stood above him, weeping and protesting. “Ross, it weren't Christian.”

  Thirteen weeks later, Rossie disembarked from a transport ship in Honolulu. Surgeons had sewn up his left shoulder, which was bandaged and healing, and he had ridden topside while Vernon O'Hearn was kept in a steel lockup six decks below. Eliza was at the dock swishing her blue, polka-dot, silk dress around her legs, and they fixed their gaze on each other like radar as Rossie marched down the swaying gangplank.

  “Now, look at you,” she said. “The sergeant survives.”

  “You've been thinking about saying that, haven't you?”

  Other wounded men, without women to greet them, were watching.

  “Are you checked out?” she said. “Can you come with me?”

  She lifted her hands, swayed toward him, and touched his cheek with her cool fingers. She shut her eyes, and he rested his hands on her hips and kissed her. Men around them cheered.

  Rossie was quiet as she drove up mountain roads to the house in Honolulu, where she led him right off to the bedroom with gaudy Hawaiian flowers in vases, and linen sheets and goose-down pillows on the bed.

  “Now,” she said, undoing his necktie, “the children will be coming home, so no talking just yet.”

  Rossie slept away the days. Eliza brought him marmalade as he breakfasted with the children—breakfasts of cantaloupe and mango and h
eavy bacon and poached eggs. He went back to bed and woke with rain splattering on the metal roof and told Eliza that she'd been right about wars, that wars were “the most dipshit insanities of humankind.”

  Eliza touched his shoulder. “If I'd killed that man my life would have been done. I'd lay awake in the dark for all my life, ruined and a killer, a man who'd murdered.”

  She went on touching him, unabashed, eager to bestow herself and receive him. One night she said maybe the yearning she felt in her depths was something complex beyond fucking. Years later she said she'd loved taking him inside her those first weeks, unlike anything before or since, and that she used to think about it all day long.

  The Marines had shipped Rossie to Honolulu because of Vernon. Other men healed up in hospitals on Guam and made it back to duty in time to die on Okinawa.

  “Vernon saved me. I like as not would have killed that Japanese fellow,” he told Eliza. “The military would have shot me for killing a prisoner of war. And if I'd gotten away with it, I'd still have myself to deal with, night after night. So I have to save Vernon. Otherwise, who knows what they might do to him.”

  Vernon O'Hearn was accused of deliberately wounding a fellow combat marine. “It was an accident,” Rossie said to the officers overseeing the hearing. “Vernon stumbled. I saw it. Everything in the war caused it.”

  The colonel in charge frowned. “Sergeant Benasco, the war is only the most remote cause of this incident. You're contradicting the reports of other men, but your testimony, claiming to have seen yourself shot, outweighs all the rest. In my opinion, Sergeant Benasco, you're not fit to be a combat marine. You are a natural supply sergeant, and you're going back to it before you get some good men killed.”

  Inside a week, Vernon was pulling ninety days in the brig for “careless conduct in the field,” and Rossie was handing out transient barracks pillows and brown GI blankets to marines processing through Pearl Harbor. On Honolulu nights, in bed and on wooden decks beside the sea and in taverns on Hotel Street, he talked out theories. “I was trying to keep up with Charlie Cooper. That's nuts.”