The Grass Widow (21 page)

“Blame him, too,” she muttered, and straightened up with a groan, a hand reaching for the small of her back. How did Joss stand this days on end?

She looked at her palms; soreness an hour ago had turned to puffy blisters. She suffered the handle of the hoe to carry it to the

barn. The bail of the bucket, when she got water from the well, was more than uncomfortable; she stopped midway across the yard to use the end of her skirt to pad the rope, not caring who might see her legs.

She wished they had a big yellow dog, with jaws like an alligator and a deep voice to warn her of comers, and comers of consequences. “Damned pokeweed,” she growled; it was all she could think to damn save Joss, and Joss kept herself in danger enough of eternal damnation without being helped along that unholy path.

She sat on the porch step, her skirt hiked up over her knees to let out the heat, and examined her hands. They had sprung a crop of blisters more quickly than pokeweed grew back behind the hoe; some had broken. Tight-lipped, she tipped the bucket to splash water over her palm, knowing Joss would pitch a fit that she’d been in the beans. She hadn’t accomplished much in two hours, but it was more than had been done when she started, and short of blisters, a sweat-soaked dress, and a back that felt as if she’d been beaten with a legal stick, the work hadn’t hurt her. That was what she’d tried to tell Joss last night—

“Oh, shoo.” She hauled the water into the house. There was warm water in the tank of the stove for a sink bath; she knew she’d feel better clean.

“Collie! Buck! Rassle up three hundrit foot oak floor an’

underpinnin’s for Mister Ethan Bodett,” Jacob Hart bawled, the bright diamond glittering on his pinky, and Joss hid a smile behind her hand as millhands abandoned tea and biscuits in favor of appeasing the celebrated temper of Mister Ethan Bodett. She hadn’t given Hart any name but Bodett; he had taken it upon himself to surmise, and the scrambling of the millhands proved that the news of Ethan’s death hadn’t yet reached the county seat. She wished Ethan would be home when she got there, for her to jibe about his good name in Leavenworth; it was fine to know that he was alive somewhere, if only in the fawning, wormy soul of Jacob Hart.

Whistling as she went about her other chores, she got good prices. Only the gunsmith noticed that the smudge over her lip was dirt instead of stubble; he inquired after Doc Pickett and set about what she had asked him for, and admired her aim when she tested his work.

Ethan’s memory settled into her as the horses, heavily-laden, worked their patient way down the post road. Of all of them, it was Ethan’s loss that tore at her heart most often. He had been crazy, so wild around the eyes on Saturday nights that he scared her, but he had been of her heart, a soul of her soul...and notorious at twenty-one. He’d taught her how to smoke and cuss and drink, and shared the secrets of Kansas City with her when he came strutting back so full of himself that he took Harmon’s tanning without a thought of calling out his father; it didn’t dent his pride a whit. What did he care about a whupping? He’d rode to Kay Cee, plundered the whorehouses, spent more money on a night than Joss had spent for boards that would last her lifetime and that of the baby whose knees she had defended in the buying. It was because of Ethan that she had known what to do (or at least, what to think of doing) when Aidan had come to her at last... And if Ethan nagged at her, the thought of Aidan made her squirm on the hard seat of the buckboard. Sure it was Friday, sure Doc always came for breakfast Fridays, sure she had counted on that in her leaving, but if he hadn’t...

Gossip said the Cav was a week away, but Slade was only one speculative man who might happen into their yard of a Friday morning with her gone and Aidan not knowing where she was or when she would be back; had she been out of her mind? Aidan could shoot bottles off fenceposts all day long, but would she be able to blow a hole in a man if she had to? Would she have thought to find Ethan’s Colt, or be in reach of it if she had?

“Yo, Charley! Get along, you Fritz!” Reluctantly, for they were far too heavily loaded, the horses stepped up.

Thinking of Aidan alone made her remember how innocent she was—not helpless; heaven help the fool who dared suggest that Aidan Blackstone was helpless—but innocent, a refreshing

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innocence borne of the trust that rose naturally from a trustworthy soul. But behind her stubbornness, Joss knew Effie Richland and Argus Slade were right in warning of the perils lurking for women alone on the remote post road, and she knew Aidan’s ingenuous trust might serve her ill more quickly than it might serve her well.

She remembered how Slade had looked at her, as if it would suit him if his next meal from soup to nuts was Aidan Blackstone. His Goddamned smile, the eyes it never reached, those flinty eyes that followed her every move—

But she knew that was how men would react to Aidan. How liquored up might the malignant Ottis Clark be, should he take a mind to come have his say? Or any rank of drummers or tinkers, silhouette-cutters or other peripatetics, hunting work or whiskey they wouldn’t find—or a woman they would? “Hie, Charley!

Keep up, you lazy Fritz!”

Charley looked back at her and rattled his traces, and hied. By eleven Aidan was freshly-dressed, her palms coated with the foul-smelling balm Joss used on Margaret’s udder, catching up her diary at the kitchen table. Ethan’s Colt was near, unholstered. There was laundry to be done (but no hot water, with Joss’s daytime fire restrictions); the floors were dusty, in need of oiling
(not with these hands, I’m not);
the stove was cool enough to clean and needed it
(I’ll get to it).
The butter was nearly gone, but blisters meant biscuits with cream for a few days. The woodbox was empty, and her mending basket was full; Joss was hard on clothes. She wrote: ‘On this, the last day of my 19th year, we take a day of uncivil rest. Joss is gone off in foul temper somewhere. I mean to do little today save prepare an evening meal, should she be here to eat it.’ She reached to dip her pen.

“Excusing, ma’am—”

“God in Heaven!” The ink bottle skittered across the table. She had heard no horse in the yard, no boot on the porch, yet here was a colored man at the door, hat in hand, an ill-kempt beard straggling over his shirtfront. “Who—” Her heart galloped

in her chest; she reached a hand to cover it. “Who—”

“Levi, ma’am, you not to fright, maybe work to trade for bite?

Beans you hand to poke they need—oh, not needing, ma’am!” he begged in alarm as her hand stole toward the Colt. “Honest ask work for meat, biscuit spare one you if not or on the way, you say, no harm I’m ask?”

Perhaps he was thirty, possibly fifty; he was painfully ragged, and once she had untangled the words she realized that his garbled speech was but a gracious request to swap labor for food. He was patient at the door, as if he knew he’d startled her and was giving her time to recover. One of his feet lifted to worry an ankle and she saw that he was barefoot; no wonder she hadn’t heard a step on the porch.
Why, he’s harmless—and hungry,
she thought, as his glance stole sidelong to a basket of yesterday’s biscuits on the sideboard. “When did you last eat?”

He scratched at an odd streak of pure-white hair over his left ear. Helplessly, he shrugged, and she suspected he had no sense of time. She stood, pausing to right the bottle of ink. The black smear would be a horrid mess to clean up, but she left it in favor of making him a plate of cold meat and biscuits. She set it on the table, but he wouldn’t come into the house; he wolfed it down on the porch with unwashed hands that he wiped on his denimed thighs when he was done, refusing seconds. “Work you now? For?”

“You’re right in saying the beans could use a hand to the poke. There’s a hoe just inside the barn door—”

His smile was wide and bright as the nearing noon, his dark eyes soft as a deer’s. “No ma’am, no hoe. Broke poke grow mo’

poke.”

He loped toward the field. She stood with his plate in her hand, watching him, a tall barefoot man with no meat on his bones stooped across a row, his fingers picking pokeweed faster than even Joss could chop it. She looked at her raw hands and wished Levi had come along three hours earlier.

And wearily, she smiled; three hours earlier, she probably would have shot the poor fellow where he stood. She turned to

take his plate back into the house.

Joss didn’t need to speak to the horses; a pull on the reins and they held, shaking their manes against the flies in the blistering early-afternoon sun. She squinted across shimmers of heat to see her bean field. “I’ll wear you out, Aidan, if you’re choppin’ poke,”

she warned, still too far away to know any more than the fact of a human figure in the field. “G’up, Charley.” Wearily, the valiant Charley stepped out; lacking options, Fritz went too. Joss watched the figure in the beans, her squint turning to a scowl as her sight defined a dark scarecrow of a man crabbing steadily down the row. “Pullin’ weeds? Sweet baby Jesus—an’

who in Sam Hill is it? Dad dang it, Aidan—”

“Come wagon!” Levi didn’t straighten up; he had heard the wagon coming before it crested the hill, heard it stop and start again, and knew it would turn in; when it did he announced it, recalling the fright he had given the good lady who had fed him once and might again. “Come wagon one man two horse come!”

Aidan raced to the door—and then, indignantly, she composed herself. She would
not
fly out to greet someone whose absence in the first place was inexcusable. She waited, the ire that had been stewing in her all day warring with her relief that Joss was home and safe. On another, idly curious level, she wondered what was making such an unholy racket in the wagon.

Joss swung lightly down, bringing a box from under the seat, and jerked her head at Levi in the beans. “Who’s the darkie?”

“And a very good afternoon to you, Miss Bodett.” She bit the words off coldly; relief might have won out over anger had Joss greeted her civilly, or had a gentle word for good help of any color. “So nice of you to call. I trust you’ve kept well since last we met?”

A dust devil skittered across the yard, rising a column high into the air before it collided with the barn to collapse as if in surprise; peripherally, she saw it. More directly she saw the bewilderment that flickered in Joss’s eyes, and she knew as suddenly as the tiny cyclone had risen that her cousin’s greeting hadn’t been meant

uncivilly. It had been logically curious, colored by her upbringing, rendered brusque by the filter of her own irritation—an irritation she had managed, now, to pass along.

“I got you a kitchen floor in the back o’ the wagon. Happy birthday.” Joss brushed past her into the house to put the box on the table.
Oglethorpe Orchards,
its endpaper read.
A-One Georgia
Peaches.
Aidan noticed that as she had noticed the dust devil, a sidelong distraction to the thinness of Joss’s lips. “Got crazy an’

thought you might like water in the sink, too. Like to killed the horses gettin’ the pipe here. Take it back if you don’t want it.”

“Joss, I’m sorry. I’ve spent the day worried about you. It’s made me edgy, so I barked. It was uncalled for, and I apologize.”

Joss shrugged a little. “It don’t matter.” But Aidan knew by the set of her jaw that she was still wounded. “Let me see to the horses. They’ve worked damn hard.”

Aidan let her go; she knew odds would be odds until Joss had time to even them in her thoughts. She watched from the window over the sink
(water in the sink?)
as Joss coaxed Fritz and Charley to back the wagon into her desired position by the house; they did look weary, dark with sweat that was ringed with dried salt-whiteness. Joss unhitched them and led them to the barn, and it seemed forever before Charley emerged into the pasture to ruin his new good looks with a thorough roll in the dirt, and longer before Fritz burst from the side door of the barn to do the same. Joss trudged across the yard slapping her gloves against her thigh, looking as tired as the horses before their care. Aidan met her on the porch with water drawn fresh from the well and a kiss against her throat. “You taste like faraway places and the heat of the day, my love. How was the road?”

“Be glad you didn’t go. My back feels like a bedspring in a whorehouse.”

Helplessly, she laughed. “Joss Bodett, you’re
so
vulgar.”

“I know,” Joss grinned. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not in the least bit sorry. Have you eaten?”

“Not lately. Who’s that feller in the beans?”

“Levi, and now you know as much as I do—except he’s simple,

I think, and hasn’t stopped since he started three hours ago on a charge of biscuits and cold venison. What’s in the box? And what’s this about water in the sink?”

“Got to thinkin’ on the way to town. Water always run downhill last I noticed, an’ we’re downhill from the spring. Seems like all we needed was pipe enough to get from there to here. Hope I guessed right on distance. Worth a try, anyway.” She hung her hat on its peg by the door. “The box is treasures from the East Coast to the East Indies. If you’d make me what you made your friend Levi, I’d show you.” She let a hand trail down Aidan’s arm, squeezing her hand; Aidan tried to catch back the flinch but couldn’t, and Joss caught her wrist again, turning her hand to look. “Aidan! What in tarnation have you done?”

“Nothing you don’t do every day—”

“I told you to stay out of the Goddamned beans!” she roared, and their fragile truce disintegrated. “Aidan, you’re with child!

You can’t—”

“With child, but not helpless or useless,” Aidan blazed back,

“and you don’t own me! I’ll not be commanded like a wife or a slave for I’m neither to you and don’t you dare think I am, Joss Bodett—and don’t you ever curse me again!”

“I cursed the beans! Aidan, I’m tired an’ hungry an’—”

“And you left without so much as a note to say where you’d gone or when or
if
you’d come back, and when you do you treat me like some—some—oh, make your own damned dinner!”