The Grass Widow (19 page)

drawshave and sweat, resolved to say no more of floors.) When the rank heat abated she returned to the crops, weeding through the lowering afternoon, watching from a corner of her attention as Aidan tended the garden or took in the morning wash or the evening wood. By the time she got to the end of forty acres, tall weeds jeered at her from the start of them. Her hands grew shiny with calluses, as tautly curved as the hoe-handle; her monthly bleeding was but a distant memory.

Men came to talk. She listened out of courtesy and sent them away, but when they were gone she did sums in the sun, figuring the contents of the tobacco tin under her old bed and the profit on beans and corn after the winter’s store was removed. She wondered why she had planted beans and corn, when wheat and oats demanded such less labor; she wondered if she could afford to plow under forty acres and reseed with the grasses, and if she did, if she still had time to get in two crops. She wondered if Mr. Carpenter would really lend her money if she needed it, or, if he wouldn’t, if Flora Washburn might...or if Harmon would return to haunt her if she asked either of them.

She wondered why her family had been taken, and why she had been spared. She wondered if there was any gold left in California, and if a woman would be allowed to stake a claim if there was. She wondered and figured; she chopped weeds and wood, and the days blurred together in mindless similarity. Out in the beans one mid-morning, she heard a wagon in their track and squinted to see who was coming to call. “Boy howdy. I’m in for it now,” she groaned, and trudged in from the field fully expecting a tongue-lashing from the irascible Flora Washburn.

“You look like you been workin harder’n three darkies.” Fourfoot-nine, eighty-two years old, Flora quivered with too much irritable energy to sit with the tea Aidan had made for her; her steel-gray hair corkscrewed out in all directions. “Work’s good for a body, but you’re takin’ it a sight futher’n the good Lord intended—like He gives a rat! We ain’t but a gnat on a bull’s ass to Him. Not a lick o’ fat on you! I s’pose you work it off faster’n

this’ere Yankee can fork it into you. Smell o’ this house they’s a good cook livin’ in it. Kitchen garden looks good. Effie says she’s lah-de-dah, but Effie wouldn’t know bootblack from her own bunghole. I’d oughten chaw your chops for not bringin’ ’er by to make a decent hello to a neighbor, but I don’t ’xpect you’ve had time for a fair squat since the family went acrost. Place looks better‘n I figured it would. Now! Out back o’ the wagon—an’

that puke over to Leavenworth calls hisself a lumberman! I ask for lath enough to plaster up a dinin’ room an’ he sends enough, all right, if your dinin’ room’s in the Goddamn White House—

what’s left over’s out back o’ the wagon. What the merry hell am I s’pose to do with it? I’m too damn old to bust it up for kindlin’

an’ damnwell tired o’ lookin at it, an’ you don’t batten up the board end o’ this house an’ this little Yankee girl o’ yourn’ll be all winter sweepin’ snow out’n the bedrooms. Your daddy never had a lick o’ no sense to him, boardin’ an’ not battenin’—God rest’m an’ all that Baptist blather, I know you miss him but you got to admit. Under the seat’s a box o’ them bitty little nails. Take that, too. Go on! Go get it; I ain’t got all day to fiddledy-fart ’round here with the two o’ you. Twitch your tail, little girl; it’s easier work than you been doin’. Git!”

“Yes’m.” Joss managed to get outside before the laugh welled out of her; she leaned against the side of the house, her hand clamped over her mouth to keep it as quiet as she could, tears leaking from her with the effort to keep it contained. “Oh, Aidan! God help you, stuck in there with her!” She hiccupped a ratcheting breath. “That’s Flora Washburn, little cousin. Aren’t you glad you asked?”

“My stars,” Aidan whispered, dazed, when Flora had tornadoed out of their yard, her horses running as if for their lives in front of her whip. “I had no idea she was so—oh, my stars!”

“Ain’t she, though! But you got to think on Flora. She accused you o’ good cookin’, complimented your garden an’ your housekeepin’, gave me a nod, an’ saved us more shiverin’ than you can imagine. Ma’s been peckin’ at Pa forever about battenin’

the bedrooms. Oakum don’t stick ’tween the boards, an’ Lord

knows we tried it. She give up on him an’ made quilts. Hell, we put what’s the corn this year in cotton a few years back, an’ she used up most of it just quiltin’. Hung ’em on the walls. I ain’t never growin’ cotton again! One crop o’ that an’ I know why the rebs fit to keep the slaves. She’s got a good heart, Flora has; she’s just a trial to have in the kitchen—an’ God help the faint o’ heart. She’s cruder’n a Saturday night at the Bull an’ Whistle.”

Marcus Jackson came one day, emerging from the trail cut by the energies of the Bodett children and their Jackson counterparts through the years and the woodlot the two farms shared. Joss was sitting on the chopping block, waiting for her muscles to ease their overworked quivering so she could roll a cigarette; she heard movement on the trail and assumed it would be Gideon. He had been Ethan’s best buddy, and came sometimes to visit or lend a hand, bringing gossip and big eyes for Aidan and, if he had been to Leavenworth, Joss’s standing order of whiskey and tea. She rolled her cigarette, waiting for him. She supposed she ought to take time to go visit with Earlene, but as much as she hated to admit Argus Slade had been right about anything, leisure was indeed a precious commodity for her. “Never mind,”

she grumbled to herself. She loved Earlene, who had made her midwifery debut at the age of fifteen with the delivery of Jocelyn Bodett the Younger and had attended every birth, successful or not, to follow in the Bodett household. Until Doc Pickett’s arrival ten years ago, Earlene and Jocelyn the Elder had swapped midwifery the way they swapped recipes and scraps of cloth, until their children were born, their kitchen books identical, their quilts bearing as many pieces from the one household as the other. But it was her father’s best mate, not her brother’s, who emerged from the trail. He shook his head at her haircut and her cigarette, but he knew Joss well, and respected her as he had respected her mother.

He sat on the block of wood she would split next and quietly, they talked: of guns, for Marcus’s had frozen, and she tinkered with it while they spoke; of horses, for Fritz seemed listless (damn

horse ain’t but flat lazy, the farrier said); of beans and corn and wheat and oats, and firewood, and finally of money, and Marcus went away shaking his head again.

“You ever been to California?” she asked Aidan late that afternoon. In from the corn, almost immobilized with weariness, she was too spent even to wash off the heat of the day. Aidan, a curl of hair escaping its pins to hang damply against her cheek, looked at her from the stove; Joss shied her eyes from the unspoken question. “You went to Paris an’ London an’ Rome, all them old places. You ever had a yen to see a new place?”

“Who came today?” She had seen no horse or visitor, but Joss only mentioned California when someone had tried to talk her into selling the farm.

Joss took a dipper of warm water from the tank at the end of the stove and splashed it into the washbasin, and tackled her hands and face and hair. When she was done the water was grey, her hair dripping, her face a few dusty shades lighter. Aidan offered a towel. She buried her face into the flannel and spoke so softly that Aidan had to study the muffled whisper to realize what she had heard: “Marcus Jackson.”

Aidan closed her eyes, a brief, hurt breath escaping her. “Oh, Joss. What did he say?”

Joss towelled her hair with exacting thoroughness; she took her comb from its crack in a log over the sink and did what the fat barber had recommended. “Seems Mr. Carpenter’s ready to front money to anyone I’d sell this place to.” She stuck the comb into its crack and went to the table to sit, looking as weary as she had before the wash. “Marcus’d leave my family buried decent. If I was to sell it to him, Gid might marry that Newtonville girl he fancies when he ain’t busy fancyin’ you, an’ they could set their babies down in a decent house ’stead o’ that back claim shack. We could go to California—”

Aidan blew a derisive snort. “And do what? Pan gold?” Impatience edged her voice. “What might we do in California, save marry out of desperation or be whores for the same reason?”

“I can pass for a man. No one’d know we wasn’t man an’ wife.”

“I’ll never agree to such a lie, Joss! And I’m not going anywhere until this baby’s born. If you’d let me help you—”

“The hell! If you weren’t with child—”

“Next year I won’t be with child. Joss, I’m not—”

“Next year you’ll have a child, an’ twice the work under this roof you have now an’ too much already! Do you think I don’t know how you sweat in here? Do you think I reach for a shirt not knowin’ your labor in boilin’ an’ hangin’ an’ ironin’—an’ why you iron ’em!”

“I iron them for loving how you look in a pressed shirt, however long it may last. I’m not overworked or I’d not do it. What did Marcus say?”

“He said it’d grieve Pa for this land to lay fallow but how there’s nothin’ but that to do with it, an’ how I’ll kill myself tryin’

an’ he’s right—”

“Then let him farm it!” She knew that if she felt betrayed by Marcus’s offer, Joss must be writhing under the ache of it, but the words had flared unbidden from her; she went on with it. “Gid Jackson’s a strapping boy! He could have that claim shack looking like a home in short work if he’d but put his back into it, and if they’re so joe-fired heartsick at the thought of land laying fallow, let them pay for the privilege of planting and harvesting it. It’s called rent,” she snapped. “Even in this godforsaken backwater, they must be familiar with the idea.”

Joss’s eyes showed a brief, baffled hurt before that familiar dilation of temper blazed in them and Aidan knew:
too much, too
far, too harsh...
“Joss, I’m—” Joss’s chair tumbled halfway across the kitchen when she uncoiled from it. “—sorry!”...
and too late.

“Joss, I didn’t mean—

“I don’t want your pity for my trouble no more’n you ever wanted mine for yours,” Joss snarled. “If you’re stayin’ in this godforsaken backwater for pityin’ me, you can go the hell back to Maine!”

The momentum of anger carried her across the yard, her long legs eating the uphill distance to the woodlot she shared with Marcus, but by the time she got to the coldwater spring

where she always took her wounds, she knew she had dealt as much hurt as she had been delivered. She collapsed to the soft moss beside the spring to knot her fingers in her hair, trying to make enough physical pain to overwhelm the other. “Aidan, I’m sorry—” She crowded back the tears the way a sheepdog refuses its herd the wrong gate; she gave her hurt the eye of that capable dog, baring her teeth with the warning: I won’t cry, so don’t even try. “Marcus, why? Why you? You was Pa’s best bud; you’d have to know how I feel about it! Jesus, why—”
(hast thou forsaken me)
At last she drew her makings from her shirt pocket, but it was long before her jittering fingers could roll a cigarette; when it was made and lit she leaned wearily against a huge old oak, a sigh shivering from her. “Go apologize before she takes you at your word,” she whispered, but the hurt still squeezed hard in her chest, and she was afraid of it; she knew how hurt spilled from her. It came out sounding like anger, with all of anger’s destructive force, and harm enough was done already and too much. “Damn your hot Blackstone blood—an’ hers too. Damn us both for it!”

She drew up one knee to rest her wrist on it; her cigarette smouldered away, smoked only enough to keep it going as she searched for stability. When the butt was too hot at her fingers she took a last taste and buried it in the damp moss. “Godforsaken backwater.” Wearily, she shook her head. “Would that I could argue the point.” It hurt as any hometown slur hurts one whose roots are deep, but she knew who had delivered the killing stroke: Aidan, with her sweet shepherd’s stew simmering on the stove, was innocent—and too right about everything else, from babies to California. “Damn you, Marcus!”

You can’t understand how it felt.
Ethan’s voice whispered to her from the not-so-distant past: too many hands of cards, too much to drink, too much else to think about when at last he took the girl upstairs to discover that what should have worked, wouldn’t.
So I busted the Dutchman’s nose. Just bail me out, Joss, an’ don’t try
tellin’ me what you know,
’
cause you don’t know this.

“Shit.” She jittered a laugh. “I think I got an idea of it now, Ethan.”

She knew it, and knew she was wrong. They were two, where five had fought to hold the same pace they kept now. The second crop of hay was in the barn thanks to the Jackson and Clark youth, but she knew their efforts on her behalf had given her a hard adversary in Ottis. The beans were choking in weeds, a dry spell would take them to ruin with no hands to water—and the hands spared for the occasional haying bee would not be spared in a drought. There was no long wood in the yard behind the shed, the corn was lodging one plant in ten to cutworms, the promised floor was yet unmade and money was part of why not. The cash in the tin was dwindling; without crops to sell, they would survive the winter at no level above pure existence. She had given Aidan only cursory instruction with the rifle. It was imperative she be able to shoot, and shoot well, but she didn’t enjoy the innate ability with the carbine she had at the Colt, and cartridges were dear. The last rain had proven a leak in the roof that she hadn’t been up to find; the handle on the axe was the last one she had, and she hadn’t found or made the time to seek out an ash tree to cut and carve. Flora’s generous pile of lath still sat beside the house; she told herself the breeze sifting through the walls was appreciated in the hot summer nights, and that she’d do it before the chill of fall set in, but she knew it wasn’t done because too much else drew her away from it. “Fuck,” she muttered. Ethan had taught her the word; it was satisfying in its raw coarseness even if Harmon had liked to flail the skin off her back the once she had said it in his hearing.