The Grass Widow (20 page)

She brooded at the calm surface of the constant spring. When Ethan was alive it had sometimes harbored quart bottles of beer to be shared with his sister in that cool, private place. He had been able to talk to Joss about things, and talk her into things; they had pals in Gid and Hank, but she had been his best friend, and he hers.

She turned the cap of one of those old beers over in her fingers. In the matter of work Ethan had been nigh useless, in

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thinking of it or doing it, but in the impotence of not being able to, he’d be good to be around, and she missed him with a low, throbbing ache, like the one she saw Aidan’s hand reach for low in her back time and again in a hard-work day. “I need me a Dutchman, Ethan,” she whispered, a bitter little laugh choking out with the words; she found a twig to break into pieces. “Hell, I prob’ly couldn’t even bust a drummer’s nose was he here stickin’

it out at me. I’m tired, little brother. I am some damn tired.”

She tossed the crumbs of twig into the spring and leaned back against the tree. “Can’t hardly keep my face out o’ my dinner of an evenin’, an’ asleep ‘fore my head hits the pillow. She ain’t gettin’ no comfortin’, an’ you was the one said disappointin’

the lady was what set you off, so don’t tell me what I don’t know. Woman or man or ever what the hell I am, I ain’t enough.”

You might think about takin’ a day o’ rest now an’ then. Like the
Sabbath.

“I ain’t got time to rest.”

You ain’t got time not to. She’ll be thinkin’ that damn dirt means
more to you than she does. You ain’t the only one gettin’ weary, little
sister. You tell her about how Ma was resigned—hell, that was
with Pa
givin’ her Sundays. Her rest was havin’ him fetch the wood an’ water
an ‘dry the dishes for her, an’ bein’ there to talk to her an‘ keep us kids
out from under her skirts. What looked like lazy to us was help to her,
an’ what felt like work to her seemed like rest to him.

“Yeah, an’ next she’ll be wantin’ to go to town an’ hear the Baptist.”

So give her the damn Baptist!
He was so near she could hear his hardedged laugh.
That Blackstone Methodist’ll weary o’ him quick
enough an’ be glad to spend a Sunday mornin’ readin’ the Psalms to
home, long as you’re there readin
’
em with her. Go make up, girl. Them
pressed shirts ain’t goin’ to last long lessen you do.

“Oh, Aidan—” Aidan, who pressed her shirts for no more reason than liking how she looked in morning creases soon faded to sweaty limpness, who did all the hard work Jocelyn had done plus a fair share of Seth’s: countless trips across the yard, hundreds of pails of water drawn from the well, thousands of sticks of wood

wrestled into the stove, sad irons hotted, linens laundered, meals cooked, dishes washed, weeds pulled in the kitchen garden, when her life had once been hardwood floors and pianos in parlors and symphonies and—

How long before she tires? You promised her floors all through and
haven’t even given her one in the kitchen—but here you sit at your
sulking-tree, smoking money while she makes your supper on a bare
dirt floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said in the dim golden glow of the kitchen lamp, thick-voiced, her sheepdog struggling to contain too big a herd of tears. “It’s not your fault an’ I’m sorry I put it on you, an’

I—I didn’t mean—when I said—”

“I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry too.” Aidan delivered her dinner with calm control; Joss would have rathered the bowl hit the table with a bang. They might have fought, then, and had some release. She ate, but the stew was like noon dust in her mouth.

After supper they pretended to read, but when one looked up the other looked away, and the words on the pages swam like huddled fish in a drought-dying stream. She got up from the table, finally, and went into the room Seth and Ethan had shared, closing the door behind her.

She opened the drawer of Ethan’s armoire and touched things in there, and at last she picked up the little mahogany casket that held things he had treasured, guarding them in his life and since his death. She sat on his bed with the tiny chest cradled in her hands, searching for the heart to open it.

He had died in the morning. They all had, four in six sunrises, as if the rooster’s crow was the voice of the angel come to lead them home. She smoothed a finger across the glossy red wood of the treasure-box, wondering why they would struggle through the long, dim hours of the night, crowding back death (as she had crowded back sleep, as if her watchfulness would see them through) only to close their eyes and hearts and breaths to the new dawn. Was the brightness of day too much to dare after the

peace of the dark? Or was the night too dark to go into alone?

With a soft sigh, she worked the catch on the lid of his treasure-box. She had admired the casket the night he came home from the Bull and Whistle with it filled with his other poker spoils, mildly hoping he might give it to her, for he was often generous with his winnings, but he had said jokingly, “I’ll leave it to you when I die. Can you wait that long, little sister?”

“I’d’ve waited, Ethan,” she murmured. “I’d’ve waited a right smart o’ longer, little brother.” Slowly, she raised the lid. She sat for a long time on his bed, studying what she found there. When she heard Aidan close her book she put a few things into her pocket, and the rest gently back into the casket, and she stood.

They slept together that night, but Aidan didn’t reach for her; hollowly, Joss didn’t dare try to hold her. They may as well have been in separate beds, separate rooms, separate worlds.

Aidan woke groggy and grumpy, missing Joss’s warmth; for all Joss thought she slipped away mornings without disturbing her lover, it was a rare day that Aidan didn’t feel her leave the bed, but this had been one. Had she ever known a hangover she’d have remembered it now; she was headachy, thick-mouthed, queasy for the first time in weeks. But that wasn’t what nagged at her; she felt an absence, and sat up to listen for its source. There was a fire in the stove. Occasionally when Joss built it and left for the barn it died of a downdraft, and Aidan knew the feel of her house with or without a fire.

Margaret was milked and the pigs were fed, else they would have been clamoring by this much light.

There was heat and silence: a built fire and contented animals, but no sound of a hoe in the beans, no scrape of shovel or fork in the barn, no crack of axe against oak. She caught her wrapper

from the end of the bed and went to the kitchen pulling it over her nakedness. “Joss?”

Margaret drifted across the pasture, seeking something succulent; early sun shone hard on empty fields. Orion dozed on the porch rail, the headless corpse of a field mouse presented on the top step. Wind rustled through the woodlot and stirred dust in the yard; a squirrel chattered busily in the oak just behind the outhouse. Bewildered, Aidan turned back to the kitchen. The kettle had boiled nearly dry. She filled it, neglecting to make her tea first, and stoked the stove and went to the door again. “Joss!”

Finally she realized the wagon was gone from its spot by the barn; she was so accustomed to seeing it there that she had seen its memory when she looked. Charley and Fritz were also absent. She stared at the spaces those missing things left until the kettle rumbled on the stove; a small part of her mind commanded her to set it back to a cooler place. She did so, a much larger part of her mind asking a hollow question:
Joss?

She had never been alone there. She didn’t think it; she just knew it. She had never noticed how little scope there was in their valley, a wise choice for a house site to protect from the weather, but no place to see a distance; her eyes probed the hills and saw outlaws, Indians, those James boys from Saint Joseph—but Doc said they never robbed widows; she invented a late husband and wished her pregnancy was more than a soft rise at her belly. She looked for the Colt on its peg. It was gone, along with the wagon and horses. Feeling intrusive—it never bothered her to hang his shirts after Joss had worn them and she had laundered them, but this seemed different, somehow—she found Ethan’s gunbelt in his armoire; she loaded the revolver and paced back to the kitchen with it, shivering. She realized her nudity under her thin silk robe and fled to the bedroom to dress. She made tea, drank a cup, and lost it miserably off the end of the porch. Alone, she recovered, shivering, sweating.

She tried to recall a time in her life when no other soul had been within her reach. Touching distance, certainly. But no one within earshot?

If she screamed—if she had reason to scream—who might hear? Marcus and Earlene across the woodlot? Too many trees. The Clarks down the road? A harsh laugh spiked from her: down the road? The Clark door from where she stood took twenty minutes in the wagon, not that it mattered a whit whether they could hear her or not; she knew that neither Ottis nor his thin and razory wife cared for her any more than she cared for them. Ottis had proven himself an ass, and Mrs. Clark wouldn’t speak when they met in town—and she and Joss never passed the Clark homestead without hearing Pamela’s voice raised in shrill harshness, and the wail of at least one unhappy child. She allowed herself to scream at night when what Joss did with her hands and her mouth made her lose herself to that exquisite, wordless pleasure. And Joss had never said not to, never said someone might hear—

No one would hear.

“Joss...?”

“Why’d I want it smooth both sides? Ain’t but one side fixin’

to be up.”

Something about the lean farmer bothered Jacob Hart; he couldn’t put a finger on it, but whatever it was, it didn’t hide the fact of hard dark eyes clearly saying
don’t try to screw me.
“I’m makin’ a floor,” said the farmer. “Don’t want my baby gettin’

slinters in her knees, but I don’t reckon she’ll be crawlin’ on the bottom o’ the damn thing. Take the money from a man can afford it, hoss, an’ sell this plow chaser what I’m askin’ for.”

Thinly, Jacob smiled. “Stationer, are you?” He could tell a Stationer; they wore their rank poverty like a badge of fierce pride. “Got a name?”

“Bodett.” The Stationer’s thin, clean-shaven smile had a curve like the business edge of a Bowie knife, and Jacob’s smile expanded: no more warmth, but much more ingratiation. The only Bodett he knew of was Ethan, and if rumor had it true, a wilder, meaner son of a bitch independent of a bandanna across the face had yet to be born. He’d imagined Ethan Bodett to be

a bigger fellow, but rumor tended to inflate a man, and size be damned: from the look in those black eyes, marrying hadn’t much settled him down.

He hastened to smooth any feathers he might have ruffled.

“Wellsuh! If you’re making a floor, you want hardwood flooring, not a regular three-surface plane. Shame to go to all that work and not do ’er up right. She’ll cost just a little more—”

“I ain’t got ‘just a little more.”’

“Let’s calculate ‘er out both ways. With real flooring you won’t have cracks to let the wind in, or any nails showing on the surface.”

A dark eyebrow raised in mild disbelief.

“That’s for true. Look here.” He offered scraps for inspection.

Hands emerged from pockets to accept the wood, and the lumberman double-took at the size of the diamond embedded in a massive gold ring on the farmer’s right hand. He didn’t know much about jewelry, but he knew no piece of glass had ever sparked that way in the sunlight . . . and neither did he think he’d ever seen such supple hands on a man. They were scabbed and scarred as any farmer’s hands would be, but they seemed almost delicate in their graceful length.
Dealer’s hands,
he thought.
Right
off the bottom of the deck and the ice and gold to prove it.

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Bodett mused, fitting the tongue into the groove. “Nail it in here, then stick this into it an’ just keep on, yuh? Hell, a body could oughta build th’ whole damn house this way an’ never mind battenin’.”

“It’s been done.” Hart was grudgingly impressed by the quick study. “How big’s your room? Let’s have a look at numbers.”

But when the numbers were figured and he put the tip of his pencil to the bottom line, those graceful hands lifted in a regretful shrug. “Too much?”

“Too much.” The diamond gave a blue-flame wink. “Guess I got to settle for cracks an’ showin’ nails.”

Jacob Hart cleared his throat. “Let’s don’t be hasty, Bodett. Might yet be a way.”

“Dad-damned pokeweed, I know why she cusses it!”

There had seemed to be nothing in the house to demand her attention once the panic of solitude had seeped from her; Aidan chose the hoe and beanfield to occupy her time, hoping to also occupy her mind, but chopping weeds was drearily mindless once the novelty wore off. That had happened but minutes into the exercise. Then she found herself picking through yesterday, searching for reasons for Joss’s absence today.

She knew Joss had been bitterly wounded by Marcus’s vote of no confidence, however fundamentally justified. And ‘godforsaken backwater’ had been uncalled for in the extreme. “Meanness,”

she muttered, hacking a particularly overgrown weed to pieces.

“You are your hateful father’s daughter, Aidan Rose.”

She suspected the crack, meant or not, had been a last straw on a camel’s-back of impending failure; real or imagined, it had been failure—or fear of it—to send Joss into flight last night. But today...?

Today she was simply gone, and beneath her concern Aidan simmered with resentment that Joss had left without word or note or reason. If she was going to be like Papa, bingeing on her bad moods and ending up in the booze, disappearing and staying gone for days—well, the lie that would serve the James boys if she needed it was the one that had been meant to serve in Portland anyway, and she could blamed well go back there—they had to take her in, didn’t they? Joss had said so herself, in the fever delirium Doc said his shaman brethren believed was the voice of the Great Spirit speaking through a Human Being. And Doc! Where was he? He always came for Friday breakfast; of all the Fridays he could have chosen to be absent!