The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  That same spring, Eliza and Rossie received an invitation from Mattie, who was putting on a gathering out at the Neversweat on the Fourth of July, to celebrate Slivers “while he's still kicking.” Eliza hadn't ever seen that country, and Rossie hadn't been back all those fifty-seven years. So sure as hell they were going.

  Mattie had been married to a field geologist named Peter Gottaka. They'd lived twenty-eight years in Elko and raised six redheaded girls, five of them married and “off into California” and the other a single mother dealing blackjack in Las Vegas. When Peter Gottaka died from colon cancer, Mattie had gone back to the Neversweat, where she could keep an eye on Slivers.

  “Thirteen grandchildren,” she promised. “They'll be here. Along with what's left of the old Nevada boys. Hope you and your kids can come. It would be a good thing.”

  Rossie held up a photograph Mattie had enclosed, displaying a life-sized horse sculpted of woven willow switches. “Damndest thing,” he said. “You can see the horse in those willow sticks, like it was alive.”

  “I've seen them on lawns in Beverly Hills,” Eliza said.

  “There's no keeping up with California.”

  In June, before the trip to Nevada, Teddy inscribed in his journal a line from the letter Leonard Three Boy had sent from Edmonton. This visit will be ancestor worship. He wouldn't be coming. Your people are no longer my life. Leonard had written in what Teddy thought of as his Native vein. Leonard had also written that the journal in which Teddy recorded the trip might be titled Cadillac Happiness. Teddy smiled as he copied that down, then added his own two cents. In the desert I will be the man upon whom nothing is lost. He liked this, his own nonsense.

  Long ago, when Lemma learned that he collected coils of psychological memory, which she called “archives,” she told him that recording memories was a sacred duty, and she quoted a line from what he guessed was poetry. The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of. Then she laughed about reasons the heart doesn't want to think about.

  Veronica and Lionel and their girls and Corrie and her archeolo-gist husband and Wilma and the boys were flying in to Reno and renting cars for the drive to the Neversweat on the morning of the Fourth of July. But Eliza and Rossie and Teddy were traveling the old horse-drive route from the Bitterroot, through the Oregon deserts to Eagleville and on south in the Cadillac. Teddy insisted on doing the driving, as Rossie and Eliza would beyond doubt fall into quarreling after days alone together on dusty roads, and besides, Teddy wanted to come along to see the territory he'd heard about so often, and anyway they were old.

  On the first day of July he took them east on Interstate 90, then south from Butte on Interstate 15 into Idaho at Monida Pass, where the horse herd had stayed a night and Jap Hardy had said, “She's all of it grass from here to Calgary.” They cut through the lava bed moonscape below Arco and detoured for a night in the Sun Valley Lodge, as Eliza wanted to try a sleep in room 333, where Hemingway had holed up to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls. Past Boise, they crossed over the Snake River, where traffic had been held up while the horses crossed a rickety, long since demolished bridge and a woman in a green dress had photographed Jap Hardy. Then they headed off across a hundred and fifty miles of undulating sage hills before turning south at Burns, toward the highlands of Steens Mountains and the wetlands of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. At Peter French's barn, its conical, shingled roof still intact, Rossie broke out crystal glasses and uncorked a sixty-dollar bottle of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. In a slant of sunlight falling across the red-juniper center post, Rossie proposed a toast. “Right here is where we stood,” he said. “Drink to them boys heading out.”

  “How do you see them?” Eliza asked. “How do they look?”

  “Just them boys,” Rossie said. “Suppose they're dead.” Bill Sweet, for sure, had been dead eleven years, of the liver cancer. At his funeral Rossie said he'd know him out in the far reaches. “Tarz and Jap Hardy and Dickie Wilson are anyway old as angels if they're still alive. Jap Hardy brought me in here, stood where we're standing, and told me the Peter French story about breaking horses indoors in the wintertime.”

  “The only one of them I knew was Bill Sweet,” Eliza said. “How did he look, those first days?” She sipped at her wine.

  “Looked same as he did when you saw him. Slick-haired blond fellow. “

  “There's more than that.”

  “Suppose there is,” Rossie said. “But I can't recall it.”

  “Or won't.”

  “Goddamn it,” Rossie said. “Leave it alone.”

  “Fine,” Eliza said. “There you were, before a post.”

  Teddy wondered if he should say some stupid anything about distances accumulating but didn't. They were that night in the Frenchglen Hotel under its enclosure of Lombardy poplar and by sunrise had negotiated a dozen dusty miles of washboard gravel to the top of Steens Mountain, a ten-thousand-foot fault block sloping from the deserts to drop a precipitous mile down to the alkaline playa of the Alvord Desert on the east side. On the uppermost ridge they lifted their arms and cast feathering shadows over the deserts of Catlow Valley.

  “Kings of the mountain,” Eliza said.

  “And the queen,” Teddy said.

  “Never saw this before,” Rossie said. That was it from him.

  At Roaring Springs, where Rossie and the others had tromped out barefoot and naked through skunk cabbage and bathed in the icy water of a sand-bottomed spring, they confronted a padlocked gate.

  “Bill Sweet told us that water was cold and clean as heaven,” Rossie said. “Tarz said he always thought heaven was slick and pink like a pussy. Something like that.”

  “There they were,” Eliza said.

  They dusted along the edge of Catlow Valley to Denio—its houses left from the early days, plus a service station and tavern combined, then west across the Sheldon Wildlife Refuge, on gravel roads built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression. On the bed of a dry wet-weather lake, they found antelope drifting in groups of two or eleven or in dozens. In Eagleville, the hotel had been torn down, and they traveled to Gerlach in silence, air conditioning turned up high in order to keep out the dust.

  “Dust and lava rock,” Eliza said. “But you're remembering what's gone. Is that why you won't say anything?”

  “We're seeing plenty,” Rossie said. “What about them antelope? When's the last time you saw so many antelope?”

  How could they manage to stay so strange to each other after five decades? But maybe this was just more of their ordinary struggling, dating back to the start of things.

  The pitted highway across greasewood flats was paved all the way to the gates of the Neversweat. Poplar and silver cottonwood still boxed the yard. Russian olive and apple and peach trees were planted in a grove behind the whitewashed ranch house, which pitched east like a grounded ship on the edge of hayfields after years of winter winds. The bunkhouse where Rossie had first unloaded his saddle and bedroll, where Nito had shaken his hand and had said, “Loneliness cures,” was sided with dusty white plastic shingles.

  Mattie, barelegged in a pale-green dress, was holding the screen door open with her back and rocking a vividly redheaded baby in her arms as they drove up. She came to them carrying the baby, her own hair gone nearly white. “So you got here,” she said. “Fifty years.”

  This was for Rossie. Teddy thought it was a thing she'd been waiting half a century to say.

  “Sure did,” Rossie said.

  Mattie held up the big-eyed baby. “This is Lorene. Isn't she a beauty? I've had her two weeks. Her mother's coming from Las Vegas this weekend to take her home.” She focused on Teddy. “You were the baby,” she said. “You broke my heart.”

  Slivers waited in a rocking chair, so very old, waiting and shaved slick, with what remained of his hair sharply combed. His eyes were entirely on Rossie. “Thought you'd got away.”

  “Where the hell do you keep your horses?” Rossie asked.

  Slivers grinne
d. “In the willows. All the horses worth a shit are the ones I remember.”

  Teddy boosted suitcases upstairs to the plain, board-walled bedrooms and returned to find them sitting in silence in a room with braided rugs over a linoleum floor, like they had forgotten language.

  “You remind me,” Teddy said, “of Buddhists in Missoula. They spend a lot of time thinking things over.”

  This didn't take well until Slivers said, “Better than most of them schoolhouse preachers.”

  “Let me show you my church,” Mattie said, as if this had reminded her, and she gathered good-baby Lorene into her arms and led them past the old dining hall where the cowhand crew had eaten when they were around and through the kitchen into the addition where she lived. Its huge windows looked beyond yellowing hay meadows to the Bloody Run Mountains. On a plywood sheet in the middle of the floor there stood a half-built, life-size horse—haunches curving with muscle, its muzzle down as if to feed—constructed of willow switches but coming alive. “This is where I find my horses,” Mattie said.

  Alongside knives and a hatchet on a battered workbench lay sprays and tufts of multicolored feathers, vivid green and red, which had come from parrots in Mexico.

  “I'm lighting my horses up with feathers. It's a new thing. So here you have me, every morning, my job. This last week, it's been with Lorene on the floor.”

  “Can't think what prices she gets,” Slivers said.

  Rossie touched at the half-built horse, and Mattie told them her husband had been a hunter, crazy about shooting ducks and geese off the marshes below the Ruby Mountains beyond Elko. He'd shown her duck decoys, preserved in desert caves, that had been woven from tule reeds by the ancient Shoshone.

  “Poorest people in the world,” Mattie said. “In terms of objects.”

  She'd made little animals out of tule reeds—cats and dogs and chickens—and sold them at craft fairs. It was Slivers who had said she could make a horse out of willow switches.

  “First horse took the winter. I'm faster now. They're my babies. I know who bought every one and where they are.”

  “Redheaded as she ever was,” Silvers said. “Why don't we run that Cadillac? Won't hurt the son of a bitch. We could hunt up those horses.”

  All five of them—six, counting baby Lorene—went cruising over stubble fields to find a dozen geldings grazing among the willows.

  “Pretty cute,” Rossie said. “I was wondering what become of Tarz Witzell.”

  “Couldn't guess, haven't thought of Tarz in thirty years.”

  Upstairs in late afternoon, Eliza lay alone in her nightdress on a creaking, iron-framed double bed in the bare room she shared with Rossie. Partly unpacked suitcases lined the wall, and the shades were pulled against the brightness. Listening to feathered voices from downstairs, Eliza was dismayed by the feeling that Rossie was whole only in this backland.

  Reno had certainly never been his home. Over the years he would stop and see Katrina and Nito on his way to and from California, and they had come to Montana every few years for Christmas or the Fourth of July, but Rossie had never talked of special trips to see them. Then on a September morning, he'd told her it was necessary that he fly down to Sacramento. It was, he said, “business.” After three days of silence, he called to tell her, to Eliza's surprise and dismay—because he hadn't prepared her at all—that he'd really been in Reno, to witness Katrina's death, her final gasping as she slid out into depths caused by the drugs being used to mediate the agony of pancreatic cancer. He'd be home, he said, soon as he'd attended to her burial in the old pioneer cemetery in Carson City, and had “got Nito settled.”

  What could she say? When she stammered at him, he cut her off.

  “Never mind. Stay where you are. This is mine to deal with.”

  As it worked out, he shipped home a walnut case containing Katrina's sixteen-place setting of table silver, signed some papers authorizing the sale of her house on the banks of the Truckee, left her scarves and dresses hanging in closets, and moved his father into a rest home in the care of a male nurse named Carlos. After two days back in Montana, during which he had been utterly unwilling to speak of those last days in Reno, word came that Nito had died, and finally Rossie broke silence.

  “I should have been there,” he said, and he told Eliza of telling Nito that Katrina was gone and how Nito had responded, sitting at the dining room table dealing hands of blackjack to no one and unable to recall even his own name. “Who would have thought he'd go so soon?”

  Then Rossie had calmly telephoned a Basque club in Reno and persuaded those good men to go out at three in the morning, when the city police weren't looking, and cast Nito's ashes into the Truckee River as it flowed by the old Riverside Hotel.

  Rossie had left his mother and father behind and embraced Eliza's family and life among northern rivers and mountains. Those were the bargains. Those deals, which had started as makeshift, she understood, were now their lives.

  That night, after their gin, when the pot roast was sliced and eaten, Mattie poured them coffee with shots of bourbon alongside and then turned to Teddy. “Your natural father,” she said. “I heard he froze to death?”

  “Out by the highway, north of Edmonton. Nobody knew for weeks. They found him frozen in a pile of snow thrown up by the plows. He went off drunk, hitchhiking, after Mary died. Anyway, he was freezing to death all his life, trying to crack rock. That's what he told me. Cracking rock. Most of us don't see everything as bullshit like he did. Or anyway we look away.”

  After a moment, Mattie asked Rossie about the man who had shot him. “Did they ever find him?”

  “No, but he done his job. Shucked me out. I used to watch, day after day, for a man with a gun. But I've turned the game over. I pretend I'm invisible.”

  “Oh, hell,” Mattie said, “somebody tell us a happy story.” She went on herself, telling of magpies chattering in cottonwoods as she hiked across the meadows to the Hog House, which was still standing. “That's a story. I go walking and I pick flowers. I've swept out the ratshit and mopped the floors. Widow woman, mopping up in her memories.”

  “Well, then,” Rossie said, and he lifted a toast to Mattie and little Lorene and to Slivers and Teddy and Eliza. “Not long after I left, up in the Canadian Rockies,” he said, “a man named Bob Waters told me he thought maybe women and men were too strange for one another. But I've come to think maybe that's why they stick together, always trying to make sense of the other one. Here's to strangeness.”

  “Plumb drunk,” Teddy said, grinning at Slivers.

  But Rossie was started. He talked about the bay mare named Ka-trina, after his mother, and evenings of just him and the mare, dry snow lifting behind her hooves, before the war. He drifted on to talking about the shadows that ran everywhere, the dead walking and talking like they were real. He told of Eliza on her white horse beside the Bow River. “It was all pure luck. There's no getting back to it.”

  What did they see? Teddy Blue watched as Eliza touched Rossie's hand.

  “You,” she said. “Tomorrow's a big day. The kids are going to be here and everybody. That'll be a happy story. Time to get upstairs and out of those clothes.”

  Mattie went alert like a startled bird. So, it never ends. Teddy imagined watching a redheaded girl stride across the willow fields, her green dress luminous in the morning sunlight and flowers in her fists. What could heal the abrasions suffered and delivered while going off to be your own man with horses?

  Acknowledgments

  This is to thank, first of all, my companion, Annick Smith, who talked me through it over the years, and read and reread the manuscript. And then, Amanda Urban, who offered her wise counsel over and over. And then, David James Duncan, who read the manuscript so carefully and offered crucial advice. And for certain, Gary Fisketjon, who took a chance on an aging first novelist, then helped develop the story, and finally cleaned it up with his legendary pencil. And Liz Van Hoose, whose patience and intelligent taste saw me through the
countless revisions, and Kevin Bourke, whose copyediting was immaculate. All possible gratitude to all of you.

  Copyright © 2006 by William Kittredge

  All rights reserved. Published, in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-54936-5

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