The Grass Widow (15 page)

first
they visit the shithouse then they walk on your dinner— “
Damn!

Git! God damn it, go on—”

“Whoa, Joss! Jeepers, gal, settle down, you got that deer

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about dead by now, I’d say! Come on—oof! Damnit, Joss—hey now! Settle your feisty self down before I—whoa! Joss, put the knife down, Josie, this is Hank, come on, you know I’m your friend—”

“Th’only one calls me Josie is Doc an’ ever’body else come to visit lately’s wanted somethin’ I ain’t about to give up. I don’t expect you’re any damn different. Speak your piece an’ get th’

hell out.”

All that was between him and three inches of German carbon steel was a felt Stetson hat. It was better than nothing; he held it there. “I’m s ‘pose to be askin’ you to marry me, but I know you don’t want me so I won’t offend you by the askin’,” Ephrenia Richland’s oldest son said softly. “I won’t bother your cousin neither, though I was told to an’ the good Lord knows I’d marry her if it’d put me close to you. I know what he’ll go, Joss. I ain’t sayin’ sell. I’m only sayin’ I know what you can get out of him, an’ a sight more’n he’s offerin’ you.”

She read twenty years of shared history—and their mutual distaste for his parents—in Hank’s eyes before she lowered the knife.

He backed away, glad to be intact; he’d known Joss Bodett long enough to know she had days when she wasn’t much less crazy than her brother Ethan had been. “Got a long day comin’, workin’ up a deer.” He found two rolled cigarettes in his tobacco pouch and offered her one.

“I’s realizin’ the lack o’ hands when you came by.” She accepted the cigarette and the light that followed it.

“I’d stay if I could, Joss. I’m headed for Leavenworth.”

“You could bring me a bottle o’ whiskey an’ know I wasn’t askin’ for more help than I got.”

“She workin’ out?”

Joss bristled. “She’s my kin, not my Goddamned lady-inwaitin’. You got news for me?”

Hank was a handsome six-footer, broad-shouldered, slimhipped, the easy-smiling heartthrob of most of the girls in western Leavenworth County; it had been his bad luck to fall

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hard in love at twelve with Joss Bodett, who had broken his nose once and his heart more times than he could remember. Right now he wanted to kiss her; he was sure that if he tried she’d run her knife between his ribs with no more thought than she’d need to slick the meat off that deer’s bones.

He named a figure and grinned at her double-take. “An’

Flora said she’d top him just for spite. I heard Mr. Carpenter at the bank tell Flora he’d lend you money against knowin’ she’d be good for it.”

“Jehosephat,” she breathed. The idea that Mr. Carpenter, with his pinstriped vest and gold watch chain perpetually straining at his enormous belly, would lend her money against her farm was boggling. “Pa’d come back to haunt me if ever I borrowed a dime, but what a thing to know!” She pushed her hair away from her face with her wrist. “Lord have mercy, Hank!”

“Ain’t it, though? Say, I could fix your hair so it’d hold better,”

he offered, and she looked at her bloody hands and nodded. He unpinned the ebony length, and apologized for his own comb; more slowly than he was able, treasuring the chance to touch her, he made a French braid. “I don’t suppose you would,” he murmured, halfway done.

“Would what?”

“Marry me. You know I love you, Joss. I always have.”

“I thought you wasn’t goin’ to offend me with the question.”

Finished with the braid, he reached into his shirt pocket for the pins. “You’d make me spend my whole life alone for not wantin’ anyone but you?”

“You done it yourself by keepin’ on with it when I said no the first time.”

He coiled the braid around itself, pinning carefully. “I’d make you a good husband, Joss. I wouldn’t let you do work like this.”

“You wouldn’t let me?” Coolly, she laughed. “That’s the trouble I see with marryin’, Hank. A man gets a wife, but a woman gets a master.” She tasted her cigarette and spat a shred of tobacco from her tongue. “No, Hank. Not you. Not anyone. Not me. Not ever.”

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“Don’t move, Joss.”

She had been thinking about Aidan, wondering about Hank, worrying about Aidan, thinking about Ethan, Effie, Ottis Clark, Gideon Jackson...mostly, her mind had been sidling around the edges of her thoughts about Aidan. The soft command froze her in momentary confusion. Fingertips touched her shoulder, staying her. “Don’t move—” She heard water meeting water and was suddenly warmer; she came to her senses, almost groaning in the pleasure of the bath.

“Don’t move.” Aidan’s aim with the teakettle was unerring: everywhere a part of Joss wasn’t, hot water went. “Just soak. Soak out the day.”

She had spent all the daylight with the deer: skinning, quartering, boning, starting the corning, slicing strips to soak for jerky, grinding the toughest parts for canned meat (as if it

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all wouldn’t be tough, disallowed the luxury of hanging time) and cursing Tucker Day, the deceased ice man, for falling off the church roof and breaking his damned neck. The work had kept most of her mind from Aidan, even when she was close beside her at the stove, or just across the table, or on the other side of the big kettle as they took meat and brine to the barn for the corning crock, and she had a new, weary respect for her mother and brothers, who had always done this labor before, Joss doing enough to know how to do it now but escaping the heaviness of it, as Aidan had escaped it today. She finished bone-tired and aching, bloody and irritable, sweaty and reeking and hungry, and Aidan met her on the porch with hot water and hard soap and her third shirt of the day, the scent of frying liver with chives wafting from the house.

Half-clean, she savored liver and bread and greens from the kitchen garden, and when she finished her smoke her bath was ready. She luxuriated there now, breathing a sigh of appreciation for the pampering...and for the absence of the precarious shyness that had quivered between them for most of the day. “You’re good to me,” she murmured. “Better than I deserve.”

“Don’t ever think you don’t deserve it.” That voice, like the susurrous murmur of night breeze in ripe corn ... hands, wet and intimate, traced her shoulders, and some visceral thing inside her slipped, a tilting warmth that suspended her breath and made all of her thoughts one name as fingers found her neck, soothing the knots work had left there, tying new ones under her heart. She knew she had never been touched the way Aidan was touching her now. She knew she had never been so intensely aware of another human being. Delicately, fingers tracked the lengths of her collarbones, brushed the hollows above them, wandered below them to stroke the soreness from hard-used muscles; softly, they drew up her breastbone to measure the vulnerable, exposed line of her throat. The warmth in her belly blossomed to a low, urgent heat. Stop, she knew she should say, but too much of her was pleading
don’t stop, please don’t stop—

“What would you say—” It was a breath of words in her ear;

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if she turned her head Aidan’s lips would be there.
But if you did
and it wasn’t the question...once might be named a mistake, but twice
and she’ll name it goodbye and you know you can’t live without her.

“
—
to a cup of tea? I’ll even make you a cigarette.” A low, soft laugh. “I’ll try to, anyway.”

Tea?? Lord above—!
She searched for her voice, hoping it would work, hoping it would say what it ought to instead of what it wanted to. “Make that a drink o’ whiskey an’ a cigarette an’ I’d be a happy woman.”
Aidan, it’s
you
I want. Can’t you see?

“Whiskey and cigarettes!” That throaty laugh again.

“Whatever shall I do with you, Joss Bodett?” Hands cupped her face; upsidedown from behind, a kiss brushed the corner of her mouth. “You know those aren’t proper things for a lady, heaven forbid in the house! But if they’ll make you happy...you shall be a happy woman if I can make you that, my darling cousin.”

Joss lay there in the tub, her jaw still clenched against the desire that had almost overpowered her when Aidan’s lips had touched her own, her skin alive with the memory of Aidan’s hands, her heart hammering painfully.
Find the reins, Joss, or tie a
noose in your rope. She’s just being Aidan—your dear cousin Aidan—

and means nothing more. This is how it has to be.

“I didn’t know you were so religious, little cousin,” she said when Aidan came with whiskey in her favorite jelly jar and a smokable cigarette, and she was surprised at how easy and playful her voice sounded. “You an’ Ethan wouldn’t have got on well at all. He taught me all the sins that pass my lips.”

Aidan’s eyes met hers. “It seems a bit late for protest of what’s touched your lips,” she said softly, “liquor or otherwise.”

She struck a match on the base of the tub and offered the flame between them. “I’ll leave you to your sacrilegious habits, dear cousin. Call me if you need hot water.”

Half the cigarette burned down between Joss’s fingers before the hiss of ashes falling into the tub made her remember she had it; she snapped out of a reverie of repetition
(lips that touch
liquor must never—)
and dared a look at the table, where Aidan sat writing. Joss revived her cigarette, and regarded the glass in her

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hand; finally, she tasted that, too. “What do you write?”

“A fat deer in the corn this morning is in jars and brine and our bellies tonight owing to the hard labour of Cousin Joss.
Et
cetera.”

A faint smile twitched to Joss’s lips, there and gone; she nibbled at the rim of her glass, wondering about the
et cetera.
She had never opened Aidan’s daybook or diary—had never considered doing so—but she wondered, sometimes, what might be there.

Aidan’s daybook read as she had spoken. It was her diary she wrote in now.

Joss shot a deer to-day. Misguided, I was horrified, & said vile
things to her. Worse yet, the ugliness of the Blackstone blood arose in me:
I slapped her. Horrified again, & utterly unable to face her! Tho’ I knew
her feelings were most grievously wounded, it took far too long for me
to reconcile my immediate knowledge that I owed her abject apology, &
the good sense of the kill. I feared she would deposit me on the next stage
bound for L’worth & the most express train east, but at last I found the
courage to go to her. Had she sent me away I would have been broken—
hearted! Never did I anticipate such dependence upon another soul for
all my happiness, but I know that without her I would surely die for lack
of sustenance to my heart, I love her so.

In accepting my apology she kissed me in a way I neither expected nor
understood. I do not understand it now beyond the certain knowledge,
borne by the tenderness of her touch, that naught but love & respect for
me underlay it, but even as I feared she would send me away
she seemed
to fear I might go of my own accord, & has been shy & uneasy with me
all day. I think were I to speak of it she would come quite undone, but I
feel I must, or come undone myself! I am at sixes & sevens, not knowing
what to make of my feelings. But the page is near done & so is the day.
Sleep shall certainly clear my mind.

A deer is a great lot of work!

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While Aidan wrote Joss soaked, and sipped, and she was calmer but no less confounded when she stepped from the tub and into the towel Aidan held for her. It was fresh from the line; something hollow touched her in its familiar smell and feel as she hugged it around her. She forced back the tears that stung her eyes, but the memory of her mother hanging laundry on a dry, windy Monday lingered in the smell of the flannel.

“Sure,” she murmured, when Aidan came with a shirt to find her staring blankly at the floor and asked if she was all right. She turbanned her hair in the towel and slipped into the offered shirt. It was crisply ironed, but still worn-soft; she would have known blind that it was Ethan’s. He had favored Saturday-afternoon barber shaves with liberal applications of bay rum, and that sharp, spicy scent lingered in the cloth.

“He’s so tall—” She sniffed a pained laugh, feeling the tails of the shirt brushing her thighs. “By the time he’s fifteen the sassy rogue’s callin’ me little sister, an’ me three years older.”

Aidan squeezed her shoulder in silent understanding of her missing those so freshly gone. “Come,” she said quietly. “Sit. I’ll do your hair for you.”

Joss sat. Aidan draped her shoulders with a towel to keep her shirt dry and unwound her hair; patiently, her fingers an occasional, gentle massage against her scalp, she towel-dried the thick black length. “Your hair is so lovely,” she murmured. “Like a crow in the sunlight, so black it’s blue.”

“An’ as much a trial as a crow in the corn,” Joss grumbled, irritable in the wake of too much work and too many emotions. She didn’t know how many times that day she’d tried to scrub her hands clean enough on her jeans to put that unruly mane back into its pins; even Hank’s braid hadn’t lasted through the job. She had wished it gone each time then, and she wished it gone again now. “I wish I could be shed of it. I wish I could just have it cut right off short like Doc’s.”

She felt Aidan’s lips touch the top of her head, and the breath of her whisper: “Silly. It’s what makes you beautiful, Joss.”

Joss blew a derisive snort. “First time I ever heard me an’

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beautiful in the same breath.”

“You are, you know.”

“I know what I ain’t better than I know what I am, an’ I ain’t ever been or ever goin’ to be beautiful.” She started a cigarette, needing something to do with her hands. She felt the comb, and the tug as its teeth met a snarl—and with that tug, she was out of patience. “Cut it off!” Tobacco spilled across the tabletop. “I’m past my tolerance for it! Women keep long hair for God or men. I’ll take my chances with God, an’ if I wanted a man I’d have him by now!”