The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Rossie shut off the television. “What I'm really wondering is what in the fuck our politicians think they're doing.”

  Eliza shrugged. “We're powerless, and anyway I can't stand that kind of thinking. So I'll fry my other fish.” Her smile was brittle.

  For years she had insisted that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was evidence of an inevitable progress toward justice, and she wouldn't hear any other opinion. Through days of violence in Selma and riots in Harlem and Watts and Newark and Detroit, she had kept on with that insistence. But now she was ducking away from the evidence that progress was not, in fact, inevitable.

  “We're dying on the vine, and right now I hate this country,” Eliza said. “I've got tickets to Paris.” She wondered if Rossie would go with her or if she should invite Teresa Robertson, the doctor from Boston.

  “I'm with you, breathing hard,” he said.

  By March they were strolling on what Eliza called her Hadley Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald memorial walks. Rossie renewed a habit, begun with Otto Nelson years earlier in Missoula, of sitting at an outdoor, streetside table in the evening to smoke a Cuban cigar. They feasted on platters of Bélon oysters in the Brasserie Lipp, where the maître d’ took to calling him Le Cowboy. Walking the narrow alleyways in snakeskin boots, Rossie eyed the Parisian girls in their silk, see-through skirts and high, Italian heels but more closely watched Eliza move through her sadness.

  Then word came that Otto Nelson had tumbled over before a classroom with students seated even in the aisles. He'd been lecturing on the ruinous working conditions in a narrow mine shaft some seven thousand feet down through “fundamental stone” beneath Butte, and he was dead when he hit the floor, absolutely gone. Teddy read the Missoula newspaper obituary aloud over the long-distance telephone.

  “So, here we are,” Rossie said. “On foreign shores.”

  They talked of flying home, but didn't, since Otto would have laughed off the gesture as ridiculous. Instead they sent telegrams, wired flowers, and toasted Otto with a hundred-franc bottle of wine at dinner. The next day, restless in their grief, they undertook a journey and strolled along the river and the Quay Voltaire to the Musée d'Orsay, where Renoir's Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette—its lovers at a pavilion with yellow-green light bobbing on the heads of couples and children clamoring around them—struck them as a ghost of years and lives long gone. They took a taxi to the Cimetière du Montparnasse and walked the perimeter, then followed along the Boulevard Raspail to its intersection with the Boulevard du Montparnasse and stood before Rodin's enormous greenish bronze likeness of Balzac, a favorite of Otto's. They'd had enough walking and crossed the street to end their journey at the Dôme, with a stacked platter of snails and lan-gostina, before taking a taxi back to the hotel for a nap.

  “Sadness,” Eliza said, “has to be walked to death.”

  That evening, on their way to watch children sail toy boats across the great circular pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, Rossie bought a bouquet of purple violets.

  “Guess what?” he said. “You win.”

  Eliza looked up from the blossoms, her face alight with surprise. “Which game?”

  “Governor.”

  She eyed him like he might be lying.

  “Really?” Finally, tentatively, she smiled.

  “It was Paris,” he explained, over lamb shank at the ancient Restaurant Benoît, “and Otto.” He marked lines on the tablecloth with a butter knife as he talked. “Over here, they eat better than we can dream of and they've got Renoir and Rodin and string trios playing Bach in the cathedral by the river, but still they move to Montana. It's open country that draws them. Even our share of hardheaded nitwits in the Bitterroot aren't banded up so tight as the people in these European towns, who've lived side by side for ten or fifteen generations. The wild ones run to America or Australia like Nevada boys running to Montana.”

  “Not so often,” Eliza said, but he shrugged and went on.

  “Montana is settled all it can stand,” he said, “and the damage is just beginning. Anybody knows it, if they've got eyes to see. Bernard said that you and me would have to take responsibility for keeping the roof from caving in.”

  “He never said any such thing.”

  “It's what he meant,” Rossie said. “What we want from France is traditions and talents, not the people themselves, in person, not many of them, anyway. We need cooks and artists.” He continued inscribing the tablecloth with the butter knife, talking about outside money that could be lured to Montana and invested in high school teachers and summer festivals, rich-man money that could be poured into Yellowstone and Glacier lodges, and dude ranches and backpacking trails and Indian powwows, and old time-fiddling contests. Attractions, he called these.

  “Hippies, drawing in chalk on the sidewalks, four or five colors, like they do,” Eliza cracked.

  But Rossie went on about pioneer reenactments, men sharpening Bowie knives and shooting flintlock rifles, casinos on the shores of Flathead Lake, full-scale operas brought in from the East Coast to Mis-soula and Billings, and cowhands reading their poems in Glendive and Big Timber. Montana could rework the laws that allowed mining and timbering corporations to ransack the pretty country and abandon it. “Here's our motto,” he said. “Give Montana back to the independent people. Take it back.”

  Eliza was stirring cold coffee, eyeing him like an unexpected problem. “Baby, that's all sort of batshit.”

  “I'm talking about people with patient money, interested in hooking up to the future. Money from people in those apartments down by the river. “

  Walking the Île St-Louis, they had gazed up through second-story windows to lighted rooms where Parisian wealth lived, ceilings painted with angels.

  “Open land will be worth as much as gas and oil. That's where the real millions will be. This isn't crazy. We'll have French restaurants in Miles City and Chinese merchants from India partnered up with ranchers on the Musselshell. Everybody stands to win.”

  “Auction us off to Chinamen? Don't think I'd try selling that one in the Bitterroot. Outside money won't cure everything. Maybe not even anything.” But clearly she was taking him seriously, if not his ideas.

  “Montana is nothing but outsiders all along, except for Indians,” he said. “All Montana ever had was outside money. Bernard was outside money.”

  “You mean this, don't you?”

  “All my life I've followed my nose. This is the next thing. It might keep us from altogether dying on the vine.”

  “We've kicked and battled,” she said, “but we'll be all the way together in this. This could be our reward.”

  Ignoring this implication of mutual emptiness, he smiled.

  Two days later, on March 13, the International Herald Tribune reported that Eugene McCarthy came within 230 votes of defeating Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. On March 31, Johnson shocked the world by announcing that he was withdrawing from the Presidential election, and the next day an acquaintance from the U.S. embassy in Paris sent word to their hotel that Rossie and Eliza should get on a flight to New York. The note read, On April Fool's Day Paris is going to turn unpleasant and dangerous for U.S. citizens. Chaos on the streets. Then, as they packed, word came that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis. On April 5, as they flew from the night into sunlight over the towers of New York, they saw that Harlem was afire, sending vast plumes of smoke into the fresh sky.

  “The house is burning down,” Eliza said.

  A month later, they heard that Paris had come unglued. Who knew where the trouble started—students throwing stones at the police or the police going after students without provocation—but when the students set barricades, the police attacked them with gas grenades. By May 13, protesters, students and teachers, and unionist workers numbering more than eight hundred thousand were on the streets, preaching revolution and freedom. By May 22, nine million workers were on strike across France.

  Even as the European and American mood soured
, working people in Montana were enjoying a positive turn in their fortunes. The huge and plutocratic corporations that had dominated Montana's economy for more than a century were in decline. The nation might be sliding into chaotic sadness, but people in Montana felt they finally had a chance to build a society of their own choosing. They took pride in overcoming a century of robber-baron exploitation and loved their prairies and wheat fields and mountains.

  “The roads end above our house,” Rossie said, talking of the wilderness that ran along the spine of the Bitterroot Mountains and deep into Idaho. “Up there you're into the real world.”

  “The real world?” Eliza said. “You sound like the chamber of commerce.”

  But Rossie never wavered and was soon out on the road, traveling town-to-town and talking to Democrats. On May 30, 1968, at an anti–Vietnam War gathering on the lawns at old Fort Missoula, Rossie was introduced as “our natural candidate for Governor.” He stood, removed his hat, and looked out on college students dressed up in clownish U.S. Army costumes and Frisbees flying across the lawns as the odor of marijuana wafted toward him in the twilight. Perched on a temporary stage wrapped in Montana flags, he began his speech. “Years ago I come to Montana with nothing but two horses and a passion for Eliza Stevenson. I owe her and her parents a considerable debt for educating me in the importance of freedom and justice and every possible reward for all the hardworking enterprise we can muster. And I owe a debt to Montana, a debt I'd enjoy the paying back. So I'm going to run for governor even if I can't stand wearing neckties.”

  When this joke didn't seem to be appreciated, Rossie tried a more direct tack. “Helping people make a living with their work in a way that doesn't tear down the house is my idea. The thing that most impressed me when I rode into Montana was the rivers and how far you could see, and the run of mountains and the way big territories encourage people to try seeking what they want. Those things still impress me. Corporations like the Anaconda Company and Montana Power ran Montana. They owned the newspapers and a lot of the politicians. They ran Montana like a fiefdom, and that wasn't good for anybody but them. But our independent people can take their state back. I'll support the workers and their towns. I'll take care of rivers and fields and forests. We'll have something left in the long run to be proud of.”

  Rossie recited Lyndon Johnson's words upon his signing of the Wilderness Act of 1964: If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, then we must leave them with something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning.

  “Lyndon Johnson was right on that one, even if he's dead-on wrong on Vietnam. We've got to preserve our forests, where the elk can bugle and the bears can hide.”

  Rossie lifted his hands. “You, you folks, tell me what you think. This is your state.”

  After a long rustling, an elderly man stood. “Some of us up in Lincoln been working on that proposition quite a while,” he said.

  “And you deserve success,” Rossie said. “I'm proud to acknowledge the work of citizens in Lincoln like Cecil Garland, who owns the hardware store. Cecil and his friends are working to save the wild country outside their back doors, by the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The Forest Service and their timber company cronies see it as just more land to be logged, but some folks in Lincoln are determined to create a people's wilderness. Generations will walk the forests north of Lincoln and bless them. They'll bless Lyndon Johnson for the Wilderness Act.”

  Rossie reached down, shook the old man's hand, and then stood to face his audience. “Makes me proud to be here. We can make a good living without cutting every stick of timber, without clear-cuts and roads in the wilderness. Locals should be logging with horses, not tearing up the woods with D-Eights. We should be investing in furniture factories, door and window factories. They're doing it in Oregon, and they're on their way to getting rich. Meanwhile, we've polluted rivers with hard metals and poisons from the mines and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. We should cut it out. What do we want with more gold and silver? There's enough gold in Fort Knox to hold the dentists and precision tool makers for centuries. Has anybody read Silent Spring by Rachael Carson? You ought to. They got copies in the libraries. Nobody likes to watch the world die. I realize there are Montana citizens who are leery of change. They think changes equal the failure of our proven ways, but change is how the world works. We've got to change in order to take care of ourselves. We have no choice. The great world out there is a goddamned mess. We see it on the news every night. There's not much we can do about that. But we can hold the line on this end. Here, in Montana.”

  Rossie gestured to the students in mock army uniforms, some of whom were responding with their signature, two-fingered peace sign. “I believe in taking care of our own but I despise this war in Vietnam. It kills people and erodes belief in America as a force for justice. Since John Kennedy was shot people have been trying to rebuild belief in America. Lyndon Johnson rode that impulse. But he ought to be ashamed of this bombing. Maybe he is, maybe that's his trouble, too much shame to swallow. The war I believed in was against the Nazis and Japanese. I've got a gunshot hole in my shoulder to prove it. But most of anything I believe in Eliza. She's my luck. Eliza tells me to believe in no chickenshit cynicism of any stripe whatsoever. I've had years working as a commissioner in the Bitterroot and that experience has trained me on the practicalities. I've learned enough about politicking to do this job. You'll see me. I'll be marching around, asking for your vote.”

  Oliver Wardell, the sweating former P-38 pilot who was running the program, came to the microphone in the quiet after Rossie sat down.

  “Damn you, Ross,” he said. “I'll buy you a drink on that one. That's the first time I ever heard somebody say ‘chickenshit cynicism’ in a political speech. We know what you stand for, and we sure as hell ought to vote for you.”

  “That wasn't exactly the story about the Chinaman from Bombay,” Eliza whispered, after Rossie kissed her cheek.

  “One thing at a time.”

  Rossie said he was “riding my horse down the street at the right moment,” advocating a program he called “good people taking charge, playing a smart hand.” Montana couldn't go on supporting itself through mining and logging and farming. The state needed to cultivate tourism and develop “a phalanx of value-added buisnesses to export our beauties to the world.”

  “Phalanx?” Eliza gasped.

  The week after Memorial Day, Rossie was out on horseback, wearing a new, white Stetson hat and riding the back roads, climbing down and shaking hands outside country stores, talking, listening, laying a hand on some husband's shoulder, asking if hard thinking wasn't one of the good things, like everyday work. “People want decent jobs, and corporations off their backs,” he announced. “They want their hunting and fishing preserved, they want to take pride in the place where they live. We'll have town meetings and pull in ideas from all over Montana.”

  Walking the hillside streets of downtown Butte, Montana's ruined empire city and the radical, working-class heart of his Democratic constituency, Rossie talked and laughed with a newspaper reporter who accompanied him as he shook hands. They met with a huge, shaven-headed man named Truman, a shift boss in one of the only remaining deep-shaft mines—the very one Otto had been lecturing about before his fatal collapse. When they entered the battered old M&M tavern an ancient humpbacked man, seated at the bar with two equally ruined women, turned on his stool.

  “Here's the pretty boy,” he cackled when he was introduced to Rossie. “Tell you what, good-looking, buy us a drink.”

  Rossie paid for boilermakers all around, even for the newspaper reporter. “There's spirit,” the old man said, coming down off his stool. “A toast,” he cried, radiating happiness, “to the Anaconda Company.”

  Shot glasses clinked.

  “Fuck the company,” he screeched. “Another round on the pretty boy.”

  The story of that toast to the compa
ny, under the headline “A Real Montana Candidate,” made newspapers all over the state, only to be eclipsed the following day by headlines announcing that Robert Kennedy, having won the presidential primary in both California and South Dakota, had been shot dead in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight. The psychic chaos had gathered momentum. America was increasingly numbed.

  Eliza stayed in her bed for two days. “He wasn't anybody you could like,” she said, “but I thought he was going to win. He'd have stopped the war. He believed in justice. Now we're hopeless. The motherfuckers have fucked all the mothers.”

  Rossie kept his feelings out of public statements. He hadn't liked the look of Kennedy, but he'd believed in his chances against Nixon. “There's not much we can do about the craziness out there,” he told people. “We have to hold the line on this end and take care of things here in Montana. America is going to have to heal herself.”

  His Missoula campaign office distributed letters and flyers headed with a quotation from H. L. Mencken: For every complex problem there's an answer which is clear, simple, and wrong. “Simplicities won't do us any good,” Rossie explained. “We need real solutions.”

  His horseback tour of western Montana accumulated an entourage which included a hawk-faced Vietnam vet from Browning, a Blackfeet man who rode his pinto horse bareback like the old warriors, three Irish miners’ wives from Butte in an eight-year-old, rusty Ford pickup and Flathead farmers in wagons pulled by Farmall tractors, and horseback ranch boys sent out by their fathers. “We're running for governor,” Rossie would say at a gathering in Plains or Polson. “Drawing a crowd, talking about the idea of a new Montana. Come join us.”

  A Bitterroot Valley rancher was quoted in the Missoula newspaper: “I've dealt with Ross Benasco for twenty years. You can trust that man to think his way past the idiots and foolishness.”

  Eliza was impressed. “Who would have thought?”