The Grass Widow (22 page)

Joss grabbed for her arm and missed. “Aidan!” She came up short as the bedroom door slammed in her face. “Damn it! Aidan, what do you want from me?”

“Leave me alone!”

She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. “I’m sorry! Is that what you’re waitin’ to hear?”

Silence.

“This don’t settle jack shit!” she yelled at the door, and turned to take four steps with an ache building inside her like the charge in the air that advanced a tornado before something in her splintered
(so I busted the Dutchman’s nose. Don’t try tellin’ me

what you know,
’
cause you don’t know this)
and she wheeled to drive her fist full at the wall.

Pain roared from her knuckles to her shoulder. It ripped her breath away, and took her legs out from under her; she buckled to her knees, tears burning at her eyes, stars twittering at the edges of her vision. “Aidan—oh, God,” she moaned, touching one searing, bleeding knuckle, wishing she hadn’t, and she felt a hand at her shoulder and didn’t have time to apologize before she was hauled up by the shirtfront and planted hard against the same wall she had hit. “Wha—?”

“No hurt! Good lady hurt do I you, you no hurt! Hurt you no here be good in lady house, you mister man!”

“What—? This is my—who the hell—oh no! Let go oh no

please Jesus let go—” He was a ragged scarecrow, but his hand around her injured knuckles was inexorable; the pain seemed bottomless. There was nothing in her stomach to rise but bile; it bittered in her throat as her knees deserted her again. As dimly if they were behind closed doors in another room, she heard Aidan begging him away. She cradled her scorching hand to her belly, trying to fight the faint, her stomach lurching; the dirt floor was cool at her palm as it rose in her fracturing vision.

“It’s just a bad sprain,” Doc decided after Joss passed his tests; he’d missed breakfast but come for high tea, finding Levi in a sobbing panic on the porch as Aidan tried to get Joss to her feet without jarring the damaged hand. “Aidan, fetch me some brown paper and a bowl of vinegar, and we’ll draw it out.”

Aidan headed for the barn, and Doc closed his fingers hard around the wrist of Joss’s uninjured hand. “What in the name of all Christ’s disciples is wrong with you? If you’d hit her that hard you could have have killed her!”

“Doc, no! I couldn’t hurt her—”

“And this is supposed to prove it? From what she said, you started this day off stupid and it hasn’t gone but downhill from there. Lord above, Joss! You can’t leave her here alone with the

Cav gone, or hardly with them here, for the love of—”

“Doc, it’s Friday! You always come Fridays, that’s why I—”

“I come if I can! Today I couldn’t. You listen!” he spat, hard against her beginning protest. “She wasn’t telling tales on you. She just said what happened. You might act the man around this farm, but if you need a daddy to teach you how to be a better man than your brother was, I’ll be that now. You’d damn well best learn to admit it when you’re wrong, and not go off halfcocked like this—and if
ever
you raise your hand to her, you’ll never touch her again, from your hand to the sight of her in your eyes. I promise you that. You’re as good a man as any, but you can be just as fucking stupid as one sometimes, so I’ll talk to you like one. You hear me, Joss.”

“I’m a better man than many, an’ well more able to listen.”

Her voice and her eyes were flat and cool and even; it was the dead composure of fear, not anger. “I hear you, Doc.”

It took time for Aidan to convince Levi that Joss belonged in and to the house, but when at last she did, Joss knew that anyone setting foot on Bodett land for as long as he was there would have to explain themselves to that stolid, uncompromising being. He was abject in his apology for hurting her, and adamant in his refusal of her femininity: “I think he needs to see you as a peer,”

Aidan offered hesitantly, “as much as a white man and a colored one may be peers. If he hurt a woman—a white woman at that he’s disgraced himself more than he could bear. If you’re a man, he did the right thing by protecting me.”

Joss didn’t feel like a peer to much besides the coyotes howling at the moon. “If you say,” she murmured, the fingers of her left hand comforting the darkening bruise that was her right. She had finally been able to eat for the first time that day since cold biscuits slabbed with butter for breakfast. Pain had roiled her stomach for the afternoon, and the whiskey she had taken to try to dull the hand had but further distressed her digestion, and done nothing for the throbbing ache.

Hitting the wall had been stupid; she wondered how much

additional damage the protective Levi had done in his defense of his good lady.

“Aidan—” She picked a shred of tobacco from her tongue, and licked her smoke where it was coming undone, smoothing it in one-handed concentration before she looked up. “Please be honest,” she said softly. “Have you ever feared I’d strike you?”

“Joss, no.” It came with such calm assurance there was nothing to do but believe her. “You’ve a vile temper, but you’d hurt yourself before you’d hurt me. I can take as proof what Doc denies.” Her touch was light and cool on Joss’s hotly swollen hand. “Him and his old wives’ vinegar! Ice would pull the fever from that. Levi!”

He was sitting by the well, as dejected as Joss, sifting a handful of pebbles from one palm to the other. “Levi, can I have a bucket from the bottom of the well? Please?”

He scrambled to his feet; the water was delivered in less time than it would have taken Aidan to draw it. “Bucket,” he announced. “Hot hand bucket mister Joss-man make small fever hand.” He grinned helplessly, shuffling his feet in his new boots; Harmon’s had fit him, as had Seth’s jeans and shirt, and his pleasure in his new gear was as evident as his guilt for Joss’s pain. That she’d hit the wall meant nothing to him; to him, he had caused it all. His largest uncertainty was why the lash hadn’t yet been introduced to his back. He didn’t remember much from the time before the rifle ball had laid the crease across his skull that left the streak of pure white hair, but he remembered the bite of ropes around his wrists, and the crueler snarl of leather against his flesh; he remembered being too proud to scream, or even to cry, and didn’t know if that pride was still in him. His nerves ached in waiting for this white man’s verdict.

Joss slipped her hand into water icy from the depths of the well; fire stitched to her elbow and subsided to a level well below what it had been. “Lord above. Thank you, Levi,” she breathed. His smile went shy and confused; he had seen many miles and much work since the end of the War, but few white men had thanked him for anything. “Sit with us.” Joss indicated the porch

step with her good hand; he looked cautiously at Aidan. She nodded, not so much permission as confirmation, and gingerly, he perched on the edge of the step.

Joss offered her bag of tobacco and he looked at it in wonder.

“Go ahead,” she said quietly. “My Pa fit for the Blue, Levi. I got the wrong words sometimes, but you ain’t but a man like any other an’ I know that. Sorry if you’d ruther a chaw; I ain’t got that.”

“Grace,” he whispered, and touched as little of the tobacco as he could in the rolling of his smoke, and accepted the flame of the match she offered him as he might have accepted Communion, had it ever been offered him. “Thankin’ you, Mister Joss.”

“You like a smoke, I’ll double up my order with Doc. Ain’t got much else to pay you save three hots an’ a squat an’ a bed in the barn. That’s good fresh hay there, just cut.”

He drew on his cigarette, treasuring the taste; tobacco had often appeased his belly and his soul when there had been nothing else to fill them. “Need up go loft,” he murmured of the hay, and added absently, for sometimes his caution left him: “Young get sons maybe soon.”

It was the good lady who chuckled; the sound of her laugh was low and soothing to him. “Maybe a son soon, Levi; yes. But long before he can pitch hay into the loft.”

“So Levi,” Joss said, flipping the end of her cigarette across the porch rail into the yard. “Tell me why you pull the pokeweed instead o’ usin’ a hoe.”

He scrubbed fingertips at the scar over his ear. “Broke poke grow mo’ poke.” He said it patiently, as if he were talking to a curious child. “Even no, hoe so slow. Hurt hands.”

“Broke poke ...? What d’you mean?”

He studied the field in the moonlight; he had returned to it after the fracas of the early afternoon, pulling more pokeweed in three hours than Joss could chop in a day, guilt driving him to try to please her. “Break by hoe? Night water part mo’ grow poke. Pull by root, sun die forever.”

Joss frowned. “You sayin’ each part o’ the plant runs a new plant?”

“Cha! One three break three, break three make—?” His hands, deft in the fading light, did the multiplication. “Nine. Damn no good Station farmer.”

Wearily, Joss smiled; she could take no offense at his offer of a county-wide opinion of Stationers. “Damned if I ain’t. Go ahead on an’ pull it, Levi. You done a fine job of it today. Got more done than I could’ve in three days,” she said, and he wriggled like a puppy in his pleasure at her praise.

“There’s a treasure untold,” she said quietly, when he had finished his smoke and excused himself with awkward, oddlyspoken grace. “That crease on his head tangled his tongue, but it didn’t relieve him o’ any aces, an’ he’s a strong back we could sorely use.”

Aidan was still amazed that Joss had agreed so readily to his staying. “I wished for a big yellow dog,” she murmured. “It seems better to feed a being who can pull weeds.” And she looked at Joss, sensing her still feeling small. “Having fed you at last, love of my life, what’s in the box?”

“Box—? Oh! I forgot all about it.” She got up to bring the peach crate to the porch. “You didn’t peek?”

“Not even a little bit—but oh, how I wanted to!”

“Well, you know about the floor an’ the water. Be a week ’fore I’m able, Doc says, but the makin’s is all there.” Levi had tied a tarpaulin over the wagon; under the lumber were two dozen tenfoot lengths of cast iron pipe. Hart had cautioned “Ethan” that his horses couldn’t haul it even if his wagon would bear the load, but the horses were Belgian and the Jackson brothers built one hell of a wagon.

“Tea, out of habit—” She set two tins aside and dug for a paper-wrapped package. “They tell me this fellow’s all the fashion back East.” Aidan split the wrap to find
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer,
and she exclaimed in delight; she had loved
Innocents
Abroad
back in Maine.

“An’ this!” Joss’s fascination was obvious as she pulled an odd contraption from the box. “It’s like nothin’ I ever saw! Hold it here—” She handed it over. “Turn the crank—see the little cages

0

go round? Can you imagine what it’s for?” It had occurred to her that this ingenious device might be everyday back East, but Aidan was bewildered, turning the handle, watching the mechanics of it. “It’s an egg beater! D’you see? Put eggs in a bowl an’ put the cages in an’ spin the crank—Aidan, he made egg whites thick as whipped cream! Merry-goo, he named it. Hell, he made whipped cream that stood straight up, in just a minute! It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw, an’ it only cost two bits.”

“We’ll have whipped cream every day. I can’t wait to try it.”

She didn’t mind beating eggs with a fork, but whipping cream that way was a trial, and she’d never seen whipped cream stand straight up. “But Joss, the money—two bits, yes, but books are so expensive! I could go without—”

“Not on your birthday, you couldn’t.” She reached into the box again. “I could’ve got this at Richland’s, but I hate givin’

them money.” She offered three wrapped packets; Aidan opened them to find broadcloth, ten yards each by the heft of the fold. “It seemed you’ll need some new dresses,” Joss said shyly. “I’ll help with the makin’. Sewin’s a good thing to do on a Sunday.”

“But there’s way too much here,” she protested. “And such good cloth for dresses I’ll never be able to wear again—”

“We can cut ‘em down after the baby’s born to where you’d never know it’d been made big. I used to do it for Ma. I got enough of each for a dress for you, a shirt for me—I like the feel o’ good cloth, too—an’ some extra. Curtains an’ quilts an’ such. Earlene’d prob’ly like some, if we got left over.” It was a gentle warning; Aidan let her fiscal protest go unsaid.

There were boxes of bullets for the Colt and the Winchester:

“cheaper there than here. Thom might’ve chose storekeepin’

over stage robbin’, but he’s still a bandit.” There was a handsome English etui with a large compliment of needles; Aidan shook her head in mute resignation and wondered if there was anything left in the tobacco tin under the bed, but was glad of the needles; she only had four left that were of a useful size.

“Praise God Ethan was lucky at the poker table,” Joss said, as if she had heard Aidan’s thought. “Pa’d cuss him for takin’

rings an’ watches instead o’ cash money, but the money would’ve been long spent. I found the fancies last night. When the floor’s laid we’ll be walkin’ on a diamond ring. The water pipes are a gold watch. This odds an’ ends o’ stuff used to be a ruby ring—”

Awkwardly, she dug her left hand into her right pants pocket.

“Hold out your hand,” she requested, and Aidan received eight double eagles into her palm. “That’s change from the rings, an’

jewelry left.”

It was the first time she’d been to Leavenworth alone, and surely the only time she had been there with spare money in her pocket. There were hair ribbons for Aidan, and a new hat for Joss; Aidan tied a fluttering length of lilac ribbon around the crown, winning a smile from her lover. There were horehound drops in a paper bag, and a bottle of French brandy: “A drink fit for a lady, should you care for one of a Saturday night.” There was a new diary for Aidan, a tin of lamp oil, a three-quart saucepan...and Aidan realized that with a pocketful of money, Joss’s indulgences had been miniscule, and largely practical.