The Willow Field
By William Kittredge
Vintage, 339 pp., $14.95
The number of novelists from Missoula, Mont., must be small compared with those from the East Coast, the South, and the Far West, but the prodigious gifts of one of them, William Kittredge, belie their underrepresentation. His poetic descriptions convey a vivid sense of the sights, sounds, and smells of Missoula and of Reno, where most of the action in "The Willow Field" takes place. Nevada, the home of protagonist Rossie Benasco, for example, is a land of "rattlesnakes, cutthroat trout, Reno divorcees, and 3,000-foot canyons cut into the rock by glaciers."
Rossie is the son of a card dealer whose ancestry is Spanish Basque. When he tires of school as a teenager during the Depression, his parents send him out to take on his first job: running 257 3-year-old geldings from Nevada to Calgary.
A simple cowboy, the reader starts to think, with a love of horses and the wide-open country through which he and the other cowpokes pass on their way to Canada. The novel will be nothing but horses, riding, roping, bordellos, and rough living.
And then Rossie meets Eliza Stevenson, rich girl, descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, educated in Chicago, and a rebellious runaway from her Missoula family, who is currently living in a tepee with the Blackfoot Indians. Despite the fact that Eliza is pregnant with the child of Charlie Cooper, half Blackfoot, now in prison after a bank holdup, she and Rossie fall for each other, and we witness a sweet, if unique, courtship.
Rossie, determined to follow Eliza as she heads back to her parents' home and yet not live off her family's great wealth, gets a job with her father, Bernard, who sold his stock just before the Depression and bought cheap acreages of pasture to run dairy cows. The Stevenson family is literary, sophisticated, traveled, and quirky. Once they see the depth of feeling between their daughter and Rossie, they embrace the union, which becomes a marriage, after the birth of little Teddy Blue.
If a reviewer wanted to quibble, she would question how Rossie Benasco, cowboy, is able to move smoothly into the privileged life of the Stevensons, but he manages it, generating a complete change of dialogue in the second half of the book.
His dying father-in-law hands over a barn and 60 acres to him, and the couple is able to live out an idyllic existence with several more natural and adopted children, on their Montana ranch, in between World War II and Vietnam and McCarthyism and the drugged-out 1960s.
"Teddy and [his sister] Corrie slammed through high school, volleyball girls slept over, Teddy stayed out all night in Hamilton, and the telephone cords reached under closed doors into closets where some friend from school was weeping over love. . . . They would all of them ride out for evening meals on Hudson Bay blankets by the creek and fish for rainbow trout that Eliza fried up in cast-iron skillets as soon as they were caught and gutted."
Always around them are the willows, from the "willow-lined banks of the Bow River," to the forked willow sticks the Indians used to lift coal from the fire, to the willow branches twisted by Bitterroot Valley women into horse sculptures.
For readers unfamiliar with this part of the country, the novel is a thorough and picturesque description, as well as a look at its part in American history from the '20s to the present.
Julie Hatfield is a former member of the Globe staff.
