The Grass Widow (14 page)

“Joss—” It was a shivering breath as Aidan broke from her.

“Oh, Joss, no. No.”

No...no—? No!? What—
“Aidan, I’m sorry, I don’t know what—”
came over you? You damnwell know what did! and catching
her by surprise doesn’t mean she meant to kiss you back (but she did, she

did—)
and now you’ve frightened her witless and unless you’ve got the
luck of Ethan Bodett at poker she’ll be on the next train East.
“Aidan, I—” She drew a ragged breath, tasting her own hard earthiness and Aidan’s soft, clean scent...and some deeper essence that was of them both, raw and private to the point of secrecy and she backed away: from Aidan, from that hot, subliminal awareness.

“Aidan—” It was a plea, struggling between them like a rabbit caught in a spring-freshet river, freezing to death even as it tried to dodge the tumbling chaff of the current.

Aidan didn’t look at her. “I’ll make the stove if you want tea—?”

“No. Thanks.” It almost strangled her to have to say so normal a thing; nothing was normal, not the hard flush she could feel on her own face, not the way Aidan’s hands were knotted in her apron—and surely not knowing that those lips had parted under hers, that the sharply-drawn breath had been as much quickening desire as it had been shock—and knowing that desire had been clamped down on, lidded, locked behind a door as impenetrable as a bank vault. “But make up the fire. I’ll need hot water all day.”

She heard her voice: rough, like an order. “Please,” she amended, and wondered when, short of burying her family, she had done as hard a thing as watching Aidan walk away from her, watching as she drew a pail from the well and took it to the house—

“Dear God, what have I done,” she moaned, and turned to the wood for a lost battle with the panic breaking in her. It drove her to her knees, her hands over her face, raw fear welling out of her: “Aidan, don’t—oh, merciful Jesus, please don’t let her leave me—”

The fire had burned down to a thick bed of coals; the sticks of oak Aidan coaxed into the firebox caught quickly. Heat bloomed in the kitchen, but she didn’t feel it. She dumped water into the big kettle on the back middle burner, where it would heat to almost, but never quite, boiling. If the stove was to run she might as well make bread; she got the mixing bowl, and set milk and lard to heat, and opened the barrel of flour; she measured salt and molasses and flour into the bowl, and sank into a chair at

the table to wait on the milk and lard...and buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Joss! Oh, my Lord—”

Had she been mistaken in what she had felt? Had their lips really parted, had their tongues really touched, had that leaping flame of—what had it been?—really happened in her belly, and if it had, what had it been or meant or...?

You know what it was. You know what it meant. You’ve known-

“Oh, Joss,” she whispered. “Oh, dear Jesus, help me.”
—since the
night she held you. You’ve known.

Her instinct smelled the lard hot on the stove and she retrieved it, and set about her bread, and as she mixed in flour and stirred in the starter and added more flour she could only remember the metamorphosis of that kiss, the warm question of Joss’s tongue, the willing parting of her lips.

She shivered, and paced the kitchen, and went back to the bread and was helpless with it. “Help me,” she begged the side of the woodshed she could see from the door. “Joss, please help me with this—”

“Whatever else has happened,” Joss whispered at last, “you’ve killed, an’ you’ll not commit the sin o’ wastin’ the flesh of a beast you caused to die.” She felt her pocket for tobacco, but her little sack of makings wasn’t there; she sat on the chip-scattered ground, trying to work up the courage to go to the house to get it, and couldn’t. She drew a breath and got up to address the deer with the knife.

Sometimes the skin came off a deer as easily as she’d take off her own shirt. Sometimes—and this was one—the membrane between meat and hide seemed as sticky as half-set glue, and every inch had to be coaxed away. Halfway through, the point of her knife slipped with unanticipated ease through a layer of fiber she had expected to resist, and the blade sliced through the hide.

“God damn it all to hell!” She stabbed the knife into the end of a piece of stovewood and paced, fuming, around the woodshed; an intact hide was worth a gold eagle, and a punctured one worth not a picayune. She filled her arms with an excuse of wood and

stalked to the house, finding the kitchen empty, bread rising under a cloth on the table. She listened hard for Aidan and heard no hint of her, and wrestled the wood into the box and slapped her makings from the sideboard.

Back at the woodshed, she rolled a cigarette; the making and the smoking helped calm her, and by the time she had ground the end of it under the heel of her boot she was able to check the hide for damage. It was a small nick; maybe Thom wouldn’t notice (maybe Margaret Milk Cow would jump over the moon; maybe double eagles would be picked from cherry trees). She tested the knife against her thumb, stroked it on the steel, checked it, cut herself; she sucked the blood from the cut and started again.

“Oh, damn your clumsy hand!” Another slice in the hide, her sight blurred by the memory of the shadow of Aidan’s slimness inside backlit silk. She took no more caution with the skin; it was ruined (and of course came off without further damage). She tossed it to the wood and leaned against a stack of split oak and elm, her stomach jumpy; still headed but denuded of its hide, the deer looked like an obscenity hanging there, its eyes glassy with death, its tongue lolling. “You worry about her eatin’ any of it,”

she swallowed. “Your own taste for venison ain’t holdin’ up so good.”

She shivered a sigh and took the kindling axe from its pegs inside the woodshed. “All right, deer. You’ll be work an’ not short, but I’ll be hanged if you’ll die for naught.” She started the quartering, Aidan flickering around her thoughts as persistently as the fat flies drawn by the scent of the blood, and more distracting. There was no satisfaction in the job; it only needed doing. She knew she’d think beyond the kill when next she pulled a trigger. She wished she could shake off the vision of Aidan in the house, gathering her belongings, packing her trunk, preparing her exit from the life of someone who had finally done one arbitrary thing too many. She wished she could dispel the image of the house empty of her gentle warmth: it was a meaner emptiness than had been there before she had come, an absence hollower and more—

“Will you eat?”

Her hands and her thoughts had been miles apart. The quiet question jolted them together, jarringly unsynchronized; she jumped, and the knife blade she had been working between two vertebrae snapped from its haft. She stared at the bone handle in her palm. “Damn,” she said, tight-jawed, and worked the blade out of the deer’s spine. “You been a hard luck son of a snake from the start, deer. Pa give me this knife.” She touched the broken ends of the blade together, and blew a sigh, and closed what was left of the blade and slipped the Barlow into her pocket.

“Come eat.” Aidan’s voice was low, controlled. “There’s fresh bread.”

Joss looked up, finding eyes to match her cousin’s voice: cautious, bridled, something hidden that she wanted to keep that way, and she wondered: would a woman on the verge of flight spend the morning making bread?

“Come have a wash and a cold drink, and you’ll feel more like working.”

She didn’t want to go inside, to see the bare spaces she was sickly afraid would be there: the china closet where Doc’s teapot had been, the shelf by the side door where Aidan had kept daybook and ink bottle and quill, the bookcase she had put by Aidan’s door, where
Don Quixote
and
A Christmas Carol
and the poems of the Brownings had resided. But Aidan turned; reluctantly, Joss followed. Halfway to the house she stopped, her belly squirming like worms in a tomato can, her heart screaming for one answer.

“Aidan—”

Sun glinted on golden hair when Aidan turned. Their eyes held long in the hard noon light. “Are you—” She swallowed, and forced the question out. “Have I driven you away now?”

There was no knowing what flickered in her eyes, but her voice, when finally she spoke, was calm. “Don’t be foolish, Joss. Come eat.”

“That’s no answer.”

“The question scarce deserves one. You’ve done nothing to offend me, save ruining a shirt that looked so good on you. Will

you have your wash on the porch, please? I’ve a sink full of dishes. I’ve left you a clean shirt.”

Joss washed, and left the bloody shirt to soak in the basin and went in, her fingers fumbling with buttons, her eyes seeking the china closet, the shelf, the bookcase, and she breathed a taut sigh, seeing teapot and daybook, Cervantes and Dickens, the Brownings open at the end of the table. Buttoning her cuffs, she paused at the book of poetry.

If thou must love me, let it be for naught

Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,

“I love her for her smile—her look—her way

Of speaking gently—for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may

Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry—

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher

Until the lengthening wings break into fire . . .

Too aware of Aidan watching her, she turned from the book; she put the pieces of her knife in the china cabinet next to the Baptist hymnal.

They barely spoke through the meal. “It’s good bread,” Joss said.“I didn’t sun the flour, and I’ve cut into it much too soon. I’m surprised it’s fit to eat.” There was a faint smear of blood on

00

Joss’s chin. Yesterday Aidan would have wet her napkin with her tongue and reached to wipe it away. Today—

“It’s good as Ma’s. You’ve turned into a good cook.”

“Thanks to her recipes.” She watched as Joss carved the heel from the other end of the loaf she had opened for dinner. It was still warm; a thick spread of butter melted to accept sugar sprinkled liberally on top of that. Joss ate it standing up, looking out the window over the sink.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith...

“Damn cat’s got a rabbit,” she said, and wiped her hands on a towel and got the kettle from the stove to fill the dishpan. “Watch he don’t try to bring it in to show you.”

“Don’t bother with those. I’ll do them.” Aidan stood, smoothing her apron. “Can I—is there anything I can—I’ve never—” She sat again. “I suppose I’d just be in your way.”

Joss turned. “What?”

She didn’t dare look up. “I—is there anything I can do to help you? With the deer? I know I’ve never done it before, but—”

Slowly, Joss came back to the table; she sat to roll a smoke with careful precision. “I’ve never done it alone before.” She licked the seal of her cigarette. “About all we can do is can it an’

jerk it. Prob’ly it’s too hot to try cornin’ any, but I don’t know what else to do with it. Hard to keep meat with no ice.” She stood, going to the window again; Aidan knew she was looking at the split-rail fence between the corn and beans. “Wasn’t thinkin’

clear when I shot it,” she murmured. “A deer’d hardly last two weeks before. Lucky to have enough to make jerky, an’ lucky to get any o’ that away from Ethan.” A humorless laugh bit from her. “Get all I want now.”

She went to the porch. Aidan heard the creak of cane and the scratch of a match, and smelled smoke; reluctantly, not sure her company was wanted, she went to the door. Joss rocked slowly, her cigarette between her forgers, her elbow on the arm of the chair and her chin on her thumb as she stared at the little graveyard. She sipped at her cigarette, barely moving; smoke leaked from her nostrils. “Come sit,” she said quietly.

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Aidan wrapped a corner of her apron around a finger and wet the cloth with her tongue. Gently, she wiped the smudge of blood from Joss’s chin.

Cane creaked. A faint breeze toyed with the leaves of the elms. Up on the wooded hill, a woodpecker hammered an incessant rhythm on a dead tree.

Joss shot her cigarette end into the yard with a thumbpowered forefinger and sighed to her feet. She scanned the simmering sky; there were no clouds save high, useless wisps.

“God-awful weather. Need some rain.” And she stretched, her shoulders popping. “Well. It ain’t doin’ itself.”

“Joss—”

One foot on the first step down, Joss turned.

“I brought this for Seth,” Aidan said softly, offering the scrimshawhandled folding knife from her apron pocket. “It’s from Germany. A sailor on Nantucket—that’s an island in Massachusetts—

did the carving on the ivory. I know it can’t replace the one your father gave you, but...”

Slowly, Joss picked the knife from Aidan’s palm. She turned it over in her fingers, and opened it, and tested the blade against a few hairs on her wrist; it shaved them off cleanly. “It’s a good blade,” she murmured, and closed it again to examine the finelydetailed hunting scene on the handle. “Almost too pretty to use, it seems.” She cleared her throat. “Seth likes pretty things. He’s always pickin’ up little rocks an’ shiny things, an’—an’—thank you.” Abruptly, she turned; she was halfway to the woodshed before she could open her fingers enough to slip the knife into her pocket.

Hot.

The scent of fresh death called flies that buzzed thick, dull songs in the blood-smelling afternoon as they landed on the
—

Goddamn flies—
meat, crawling over the blood-sticky surfaces—