The Grass Widow (12 page)

“Tell ’em to send it by the case,” Joss suggested, pushing her luck by rolling a cigarette; Aidan, disenchanted with her affection for tobacco, had finally asked her not to smoke in the house.

“Bein’ a tea dealer in this town o’ sorry merchants would be a right nice supplement to our income.”

“Someone might think to take up the ice trade, too,” Aidan grumbled. “I daresay we’ll be lucky to see a tin of tea without a ride to Leavenworth, knowing my father. If you light that stinking thing in here, Joss Bodett, I’ll pitch a proper fit.”

We are attentively protected by a Cavalry troop quartered at
Fort Leavenworth & commanded by one Captain Argus Slade, most
recently of Philadelphia, who honored us with a personal visit. He

humored my request to learn how to fire a pistol & spent quite too much
time ensuring my success. He is terribly handsome with his flowing
moustache & dashing uniform, & seats
his fine steed superbly. Should
he call again, perhaps he might humor a request for the benefit of his
equestrian expertise to improve my notoriously poor seat.

“You need a bigger shovel,” Joss drawled, “to spread manure so thick. The attentive Captain, may he rest in peace as soon as possible, more resembles a toad on a stool than a knight on a steed—an’ you’d have as good a seat as any cowboy if you’d only wear trousers when you ride. Not that you should ride at all, in your condition.”

Aidan blushed. She was used to Joss’s swearing, and could even do some of it herself now, but her cousin’s casual use of such words as trousers (and her insistence that chickens had breasts and thighs, not white and dark meat) could still raise a flush to her cheeks. “I’m not even evident, and I certainly shan’t wear sit-down-upons. It suits me for them to think I’ve an interest in staying here, as I’m most certain it suits them.” Aidan dipped her pen. “But I couldn’t write this in the morning without vomiting most dreadfully, I fear.”

“If you long continue your admiration of the pestiferous Captain Slade, I fear I shall be required to join you at the dreadful end of the porch.” Her mimicry of Aidan’s accent was ruthlessly accurate; Aidan gave her tall cousin a gentle shove. Nimbly, Joss saved her own balance and righted the tipped-over chair. “Can I smoke this in here? Just this once?”

“No. Next you’ll have your feet on the table.”

“I’d never! But I enjoy your company so much, Aidan, an’ you won’t be done for hours at the rate you’re tellin’ fibs. Please?”

It was hard for Aidan to resist the appeal in the dark eyes, playful as they were; she managed. “Out, Joss. I fear I must insist.”

We’ve cut our first crop of hay—in April! The rhythm of life is
so different here, at once faster and slower. I imagine the lilacs have
blossomed all across New England by now. We importuned Dr. Pickett

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for the largest of his volunteers before he applied the bush-hook to them,
as we had none in our yard here & he has both white & purple. We
put four small bushes about the house, & while I may never see them
bloom, it should serve to make more fond my memories to know lilacs
blossom here for my silly insistence. I fear my dear Cousin Joss must find
me frivolous at times, but she so graciously accommodates my Eastern
desires.

“Your dear Cousin Joss takes eternal delight in your Eastern frivolity.”

Aidan had to smile back at the laughing affection in her cousin’s eyes, a smile that lingered despite her displeasure with this letter. “Go have your smoke, dear cousin, and let me finish this horrid exercise. It seems easier to ride to Leavenworth for tea than suffer this.”

“You’ll not ride so far even in Levi’s. You do intend to see our lilacs bloom, don’t you?”

“I intend to fill this house with them, and never mind silly superstition. And I shall ride to Leavenworth if I so decide.”

Joss grinned. “Let me know when you plan to go. I want to see you try to saddle Charley.” She dodged the swat Aidan aimed at her as she passed and struck a match on the doorframe, pausing there to light up.

Aidan smiled as fragrant smoke drifted back into the house. It was the repartee she enjoyed more than the tobacco she disliked, though the smell of it in the mornings could make her stomach roil uneasily; that was why she refused Joss the privilege of smoking in the house. But it was comfortable of an evening to sit on the porch while Joss had her smoke; she was graceful with it, and it seemed as if that smell on the evening breeze might let all to sense it know there was someone here who would brook no trouble...and it was oddly stirring to discover that rich scent in her hair, and on her breath, in those times when chance or quick affection brought them close to one another.

Her gaze lingered at the door as she remembered how long she had watched that morning as Joss started an arduous day

of splitting wood. It hadn’t been long before she had broken a hard sweat, and there had been something compelling about the widening line of wetness soaking the back of an old shirt with its sleeves and tails torn away, something magnetic in the power that coiled and sprang with each swing of the axe, and the flash of pale skin at her waist as that tool reached the apex of the swing. When finally she sat to rest in a breath of breeze Aidan had turned from the door, sensing that to be caught in her attention by those dark eyes would be like being found at something intensely personal. Now, seeing the winking fire of that cigarette and the handsome profile of the smoker, some warm, alien thing stirred in her belly. “Away from the door, please,” she called gently, blaming her sensitive digestion, but it was a moment after Joss had stepped from the porch before she could bend to her letter again.

Given the circumstances, all is well, my dear parents. There is much
hard work to be done, which Cousin Joss & I share as equitably as we are
able. When something simply demands a man’s strength we importune
our friend the Doctor, & if he cannot manage it he sends round someone
who may—most often our neighbor Gideon Jackson, who is handsome
as any black Irishman and delights in proving his youthful manliness
to me! With few exceptions I find the folk here likeable & generous, &
sympathetic to our situation; most gladly lend a hand if able—with the
exception of procuring tea! Never would I have dreamed that such a
simple matter could be made so tiresomely complex. We eagerly await
your generous gift in that regard. Hoping this letter finds you both in
good health & spirits, I remain—

Your loving daughter, Aidan

“Just send the damned tea,” she grumbled, blotting the page before she folded the letter into an envelope. Doc would take it whenever he came round next; it was written, and that was the labor of it.

Joss watched from the door as Aidan addressed the letter, able to imagine that fine hand laid across the paper; her own writing

was legible at best. There was so much that was so different about Aidan, she mused; good penmanship was but the tip of it. She was refinement, even with her new habit of swearing delicately, and she knew things Joss had never thought to imagine: last night the northern lights had shimmered in the sky; Joss had called her out to see, and she had said—what? “It looks how the strings of the orchestra sound when they’re tuning for the symphony.”

Joss had heard two fiddles played lively at a barn dance, but she couldn’t imagine forty of them all in harmony—or pianos in parlors, or fireplaces in drawing rooms, or gents retiring with cigars after dinner (though her banishment to the porch for her smoke seemed close). She had no concept of a debutantes’ ball, or shaking white-gloved hands with senators, or dining with the President, all things Aidan had known in her nineteen years; Joss at twenty-four couldn’t imagine prettily-patterned paper on the walls, or running water in the house, and until Aidan had railed at her about the kitchen floor it had never occurred to her that her house might have boards underfoot (their board porch was, on the post road, considered an Eastern frivolity).

She knew those things existed. It simply had never struck her that they would exist in her immediacy. Her mother had rarely spoken of home; for all the East had influenced Joss’s life until Aidan came into it, Jocelyn might as well have been born and raised in Washburn Station. Joss had never been across the river into Missouri, or west of Topeka; Aidan had seen Paris and London, sailing on a ship as big as a city. “Aidan,” she said softly, and blue eyes came to hers in question; she studied that enigmatic being who was of her own distant blood. “Why would you stay here? What is there to hold you?”

It seemed long before Aidan set down her pen and smoothed her hands across her face. Wearily, she found the pins in her hair, setting loose a lush tumble of gold. The lamp, still writing-high, made her silk gown diaphanous when at last she stood, making her approaching suppleness a shadow inside it before she slipped into Joss’s arms. Bewildered—for Aidan never asked for her comfort, and sometimes refused it when it was offered—Joss

could only hold her, feeling the firm warmth of her before Aidan shook her head, her fingernails painfully hard at Joss’s ribs, and at last came the catch of breath that meant tears.

“Aidan, what? Please tell me.”

“Why did— Oh, damn—” Joss waited, allowing her to regain the threads of her control, or at least gather enough of them to allow the words. “Why did I have to come so far to find someone who could forgive me a sin I didn’t commit? No, I’ve never been loved; not until you. You gave me the chance of blood—and damn their hearts that they couldn’t give the same chance to someone they should have loved without condition!” She broke away with a harsh laugh, seeking the warmth of the stove instead. “Without condition, indeed. Even without this delicate condition, they couldn’t even pretend to love me.”

Joss leaned wearily against the doorframe, staring at the floor, her hands in her pockets. “Damn our blood,” she murmured at last. “It’s a family tradition, Aidan. Your child an’ I will have some things in common. Most notably our bastardy.”

Aidan looked up in amazement; Joss smiled tightly. “I’ve almost told you ten times earlier. It never seemed like just the time.” She brushed at hair that had escaped its pins, pushing it back from her face; she left her hand there to shade her eyes.

“You had Ma to come to—at least in thought. They put her on a train with a one-way ticket—no money—not even a letter of introduction. Lord knows what they thought she’d do, save be a whore in some poker parlor. She got off the train in Kansas City an’ fainted. Harmon Bodett rescued her then an’ never let her go, but it surely might not have gone so easy for her. Or for me.”

“Oh, Joss.” Aidan sank to a chair at the table. “Have you always known?”

“Since I was old enough to understand.” She went to sit across the table from Aidan, her forgers finding the pen, toying with it. “All the Station knows. They’ve long since found new gossip to spread, but they know. Ma thought it best I hear it first from her, instead o’ the likes o’ Effie Richland—I got it there second.” She laid the nib of the pen to Aidan’s blotter, watching

the slow spread of ink remaining in the quill. “Pa was a hard man, but he was a good man,” she said quietly. “He never separated me from Ethan an’ Seth. To me he was my father. Whatever man convinced Ma he loved her so he could leave her a grass widow when she told him she was with child...” She laid the pen on the table. “He was no father to me. Just a damn poor farmer, sowin’

seed with no regard for where it grew.”

“But she—Joss, did she love him? That man?”

“Yes, but she was raped sure as you were. Takin’ a spirit must be as much a sin as takin’ a life. All we had o’ her was a shadow, betrayed everywhere she looked back.” She unpinned her hair. It slithered down in lamplit shimmers, blue-black and gold as she shook it out; obliquely, Aidan wondered at the difference between the tersely efficient farmer that was Joss with her hair pinned up and her battered old hat shading her eyes, and the feral, feline femininity of her with that ebony mane wilding around her shoulders: they seemed extravagantly different people. Joss flicked the wealth of hair back over her shoulders. “The first you heard me say o’ Pa was harsh words,” she said quietly, and Aidan came back from her wondering to listen, “an’ true. He was far too fond of his whiskey, an’ ofttimes he shirked work, but he spent every night o’ my memory in this house or had fair reason for his absence. He’d lay the rod to me an’ the boys for our education, but never for meanness, an’ I never knowed him to raise hand nor voice to Ma. What was left o’ her cared for him, but he loved her. He loved her with every bone an’ drop o’ blood in his body, an’ I thank God that he died before her to never know the pain o’ losin’ her—an’ that she died with the hopes o’

three livin’ children.”

She got up to open the china closet; in the soup tureen was a bottle of whiskey. She poured a jelly jar half full. “May I do this here, or would you rather me out for it?”

“Stay.” Aidan had heard the unsteady jitter of glass on glass as Joss made her drink. “Smoke if you want to.”

Joss gave her a glance of weary gratitude for the generosity.

“Women should never predecease their husbands.” She tasted her

whiskey, letting its bite serve as excuse enough for the roughness of her voice. “Nor children their mothers. It’s not the order o’

things people stand well.”

“And what of the child losing everyone?” Gently, Aidan asked. Doc had said he’d never seen Joss cry for her family; she stayed with them while they died, and for long enough after to be sure; she prepared them for burial, and buried them, refusing his help
(God damn you, tend to the living! I’ll tend the dead),
and made their markers, those carefully-carved boards inside the fence between the corn and beans. But she didn’t cry.