The Grass Widow (24 page)

Squinting up the hill, she saw only dust. She shook her head. Levi saw the world in black and white, but he saw more of it with his hawk’s eyes than she could. She left the saw in the kerf and wiped a forearm across her face, depositing as much sawdust as she removed sweat, and went to warn Aidan of the impending arrival of Argus Slade.

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Aidan was churning butter with one hand, holding
Tom
Sawyer
in the other; Joss took the handle of the churn. Aidan abandoned it without protest. “Your attention to Mr. Twain is required to delay. Levi says soldier man one horse, an’ I can only assume the scurrilous Captain Slade.”

Aidan made a face. “And just in time to be fed. Why couldn’t he have ridden with Custer instead of Terry?” Doc had brought them the news of the rout at Little Big Horn, and Aidan had opened her bottle of brandy. They had a thoughtful drink, more commemoration than celebration, but she knew both Doc and Joss took grim satisfaction in the disaster even though they knew the retribution of the Cavalry would be both swift and vicious. “I don’t have time to amuse him at his convenience,” she grumbled. Suddenly extremely pregnant, she was miserable in the spell of hot weather they were suffering, and her disposition proved it at times.

But the soldier who arrived in their yard was a stranger.

“Captain Malin Leonard, replacing Captain Slade,” he said from his horse; his voice was thick with the accents of Kentucky birth and Virginia Military education, his gray eyes almost bashful, his hands calm on his saddle horn. He was barely taller or broader than Joss when he was invited to the porch, where he shook her hand with the firmness he would afford a man—offering his left, seeing her right still bandaged—and gave her the courteous halfbow a gentleman would offer a lady; he did the same for Aidan.

“Miss Bodett and Mrs. Blackstone, I trust. Is my horse welcome at your trough?”

“As you are at our table. Will you join us for a simple dinner, Captain?”

“Perhaps a cup of tea—” He produced a tin from a saddlebag.

“My arrival at mealtime is unhappy coincidence. I deplore the habit of officers inflicting themselves upon the civilians of their territory. It smacks of quartering. I’ve come but to introduce myself, and lay rest to rumors of the decimation of the entire Cavalry in the unpleasantness at Montana.”

He showed his horse the trough and returned to the porch.

“This heat must be heavy on you, ma’am,” he said in his liquid accent to Aidan’s now-obvious pregnancy. “If your stove’s not built, I’ll thank you for the offer and accept some other time. Cold water will do as well on such a day as this.”

He wouldn’t hear of them starting a fire for no more than a kettle of hot water, nor of either of them drawing a bucket from the well; he did it himself, and brought it to the house for his use now and theirs later.

Argus Slade, he said, had resigned his commission and was gone to parts unknown (his tone suggested that departure was to no one’s especial dismay). The situation with the Lakota Sioux was not good, but the trouble seemed to be keeping north of the Kansas border, at least this far east. He spoke his news with the churn between his knees, his hand easily metronomic on its dasher until it was ready; he savored a glass of buttermilk before he helped them with the washing and gathering and packing, and rinsed the churn over Aidan’s protest but to her satisfaction. “A soldier can be of more use than killing,” he smiled. “Take pity on a man without a wife in whose chores he may assist—especially those he so enjoys.” His grin was easily self-effacing. “Butter is so like playing in mud. The man doesn’t mind cleaning up when the boy is through his fun.”

“They’re sayin’ had Custer survived he’d’ve been court-martialed,” Joss said, when they were back out in what breeze there was to be had on the porch. It was a daring statement, but it was what Doc had said rumor had, and she was curious about both Custer and captain. “Relieved o’ his command, if not his commission.”

The captain packed a pipe. “It’s difficult to discern the decisions of the dead, but easy to criticize them. Will my pipe offend you, Mrs. Blackstone?”

“Not at all, Captain Leonard.” It was common knowledge around the Station that she was a grass widow, and common knowledge fast became common gossip; she appreciated his use of a title that afforded her propriety no matter what he may have heard.

He lit his pipe with studious attention; fragrant smoke lingered in the air before the sulky breeze took it. Joss had watched him, listened to him. Now she asked quietly, “Cap’n Leonard, what’s your opinion o’ the Indian trouble?”

His dark gray eyes were pensive; it was a long moment before he spoke. “Rarely does it behoove an officer of the Cavalry to speak his heart.” His smile was weary. “But some crocks don’t stink until they’re stirred, Miss Bodett, and there will always be those who live to smell that stink.”

Faintly, Joss smiled. She drew her sack of tobacco from her pocket and rolled a neat cigarette. “Will it offend you if I smoke, Cap’n?”

He struck a match, cupping it in his hand for her. She accepted the light and leaned back in her chair. “We start up the stove around five,” she said, studying the hills that framed the farm. “Eat a bit late to escape the heat. It’d honor an’ please us if you’d find our home some evenin’ in time for supper.”

Shyness touched his eyes again. “It’s an honor and a pleasure to be asked,” he murmured, and stood. “Your crops look better than some I’ve seen. You have some protection from the wind—a two-edged sword to be sure, on a day such as this. My Navajo scout prognosticates no rain for at least a fortnight.”

“Then your Quartermaster’s hard pressed for winter.” Harmon Bodett, like most farmers in the Station, had sold his crops to the Cavalry Quartermaster, albeit through the exorbitant brokerage of Thom Richland. Joss wondered if this captain might provide a source of kinder transaction, should she have a crop to sell.

“Buffalo or beans is of no mind to the belly of the Army. It’s farmers such as you who have my concern.” He raised a corner of the tarp covering the wagon by the house, idle since Joss had hurt her hand, and sent them an apologetic smile. “Please forgive my curiosity. I thought I smelled oak.”

“An Eastern frivolity,” Aidan smiled. “A floor, as if we needed one.”“One want satisfied can hold many others at bay.” He returned her smile, and she was comfortable in it. “A floor is a fine thing to

set a foot on when the day is spent in dirt.”

The time he spent with them seemed short; he left with directions to Doc Pickett’s place and fat biscuits slabbed with new butter and cold corned venison, fed whether he took it in their company or not. “What a wondrous surprise is our new captain,” Aidan said. “And to know Slade is gone—”

“It renews my shaman faith in the Great Spirit,” Joss grinned.

“I should get back to my wood, since the good captain left me day enough to do somethin’ with.” She stood. “Hey, Levi!” she yelled across the yard; in the corn, the gangly fellow looked up.

“Come take one end o’ this saw for me, will you?”

It had been relentlessly hot for a week on the day they were visited by Captain Leonard, and that sullen weather held; heat shimmered from the land all the time the sun was in the sky, and there were no evening rains to lay the dust or relieve the crops. Joss got up one morning to discover big footprints leading from the barn to the road, and Levi nowhere to be found. He wasn’t back for supper and they stayed up late, but at last they went to bed, and when he was still gone in the morning they could only assume he had drifted out of their lives as easily as he had drifted in. Joss, on the porch with coffee and cigarette, regarded her fields. A light breeze rustled the leaves of crops that were silvergray with thirst; it was a nervous, brittle sound, like gossip at a banker’s funeral. She flexed her still-lame hand. “No fool, our Levi. He hightailed it before I got out the buckets.”

“Let me help,” Aidan said softly. “Joss, please.”

Joss leaned against the porch rail; she took the last taste of her coffee and the last drag from her cigarette. “Ma lost Baby Abraham to buckets an’ we still lost the crop. I’ll be Goddamned if I’m carvin’ another board this year.” She settled her lilacribboned hat onto her head. “It would’ve been a fool’s errand with Levi here. He knew it. An’ he knew I’d’ve tried with him here, ’cause I’m a damn no good Station farmer doin’ it how we always done it an’ not smart enough to think up any other way?

Watch me fool you, Levi.” She stepped off the porch and looked back at Aidan. “I meant to have water to the house by now. I’m sorry we don’t, an’ now it’s got to go to the fields. First soakin’

rain, I’ll bring it in.”

By the end of the week Marcus Jackson and Ott Clark had seen the green of her fields and had come to gape at her irrigation, thinking what the price of beans was going to be. The sky was an eerily glossy silver, no rain forthcoming. “Goddamn Bodetts. Nigger-riggers to a man of ’em,” Ottis grumbled, forgetting for the moment that Joss wasn’t a Bodett man; she just seemed like one in her relentless capability.

The weeds thrived with the beans. Joss pulled them, finding a new set of muscles to ache at the end of each day. The crows got after the corn; Aidan made a dark and lanky scarecrow that so resembled Levi it spooked them both every time it caught the corners of their eyes. It spooked the crows, too, so they left it, and spoke often of that gentle, absent friend.

The scarecrow didn’t bother the raccoons. As soon as ears set on the stalks they began their nocturnal raids. Joss, on the porch for a smoke one early evening, saw one lumbering from the woods toward the corn; perfunctorily, she shot it in the head.

“Surely you won’t just leave it there?” Aidan asked, when she made no move to retrieve it.

“The coyotes’ll clean it up.”

Aidan regarded her for a long, silent moment before looking away with a tiny sigh.

“Well, y’don’t eat the damn things.” Joss rammed a cleaning

patch down the bore of the Winchester, cross in the censure of Aidan’s silence.

“I see. You just kill them.”

Tight-lipped, Joss got up. She cleaned the coon and skinned it, and stretched the hide, and dredged her memory for the time Earlene had told about being so short they had to eat coon; it wasn’t bad, she’d said, if you soaked it in salt water for a day and roasted it like a turkey. “Mind you git off all the fat,” she had warned, “else you’ll bite into somethin’ turrible bitter now an’

agin.”

Not bad was an understatement. It took Joss but one taste to sidestep her instinctive objection to eating varmint. After weeks of beans, canned venison, the occasional rabbit, and chicken every other Sunday, it was as welcome as it was tasty. She had to think long when Aidan asked why such a perfectly meal-sized creature would be ignored in the diet of a family that largely existed on meat that was canned, jerked or corned.

“I suppose because they’re meat-eaters,” she finally said. “Ma wouldn’t feed the hogs meat scraps. She said it made ’em mean—

that’s true enough—but she’d never let Pa shoot a bear, either,

’cause it was a—a—I’m wrong here-—cannibal?”

“Carnivore,” Aidan suggested.

“That’s it. She an’ Pa got into it one time—he’d shot the bear, y’see, an’ she wouldn’t even let the heart an’ liver into the house—an’ she said how the Bible says about eatin’ the flesh of a beast that ate flesh, an’ he come back just that smart with the part about cloven hoofs an’ cuds an’ how she never seemed to mind eatin’ off a hog or a rabbit—one’s got the split hoof but don’t chew cud, an’ one chews the cud but don’t have a hoof at all, an’

Moses didn’t leave room to mistake what he thought about that. Well, she just went stubborn on him. Said if he wanted bear he could cook it outside an’ eat it outside an’ sleep in the barn.” She shook her head, amused memory flirting with the corners of her mouth. “Ma with her back up, now, that’s to see. Ott got the bear, Thom got the pelt, an’ Pa never shot another bear that I knew about.”

She nudged at a sliver of meat on her plate with her fork before she put it in her mouth; it was tender and succulent and she had no trouble swallowing. “All that Leviticus stuff, what you can an’ can’t—the last month or so, I been readin’ that over. More I study on it, more it seems to me God was tellin’ His people that some o’ that stuff—sayin’ this or that, an’ doin’ this or that—wasn’t so much sinful as it was against how they was supposed to keep their religion. He says, ‘After the doin’s o’ the land o’ Egypt, wherein ye dwell, shall ye not do, an’ after the doin’s o’ the land o’ Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do, an’ neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.’ Ain’t He sayin’

that the Israelites got their own ways an’ He wants ’em to keep separate from the ways o’ the land they’re movin’ into? He laid down the ethics with the Commandments. This other stuff, why, mostly it’s just common sense, relations with near kinfolk an’ the like; that throws sickly babies, same’s it does with cows. He ends up by sayin’ ‘whosoever shall commit any o’ these abominations shall be cut off from their people.’ He don’t say nothin’ about bein’ cut off from their Lord.”

Aidan laid down her fork and touched her lips with her napkin. “By that interpretation, then,” she said quietly, “are you supposing He wasn’t averse to men laying with men as with women?”

Joss gave her a slight smile; she had detected a bit of distance between Aidan and Doc since the doctor had made his admission.

“He said don’t do it, but I ain’t so sure He was allowin’ as to how it was a mortal sin. He said about not eatin’ anythin’ that ain’t got fins an’ scales that moves in the rivers an’ the seas, ’cause they was an abomination unto us, an’ that’s the same words He uses about men layin’ with men, but Ma talks about eatin’ lobsters an’ clams an’ oysters, an’ ain’t none o’ them got both fins an’ scales as far as I can tell from the pictures I seen. You ever eat them things?”

“Yes...”

“Eatin’ them things was an abomination unto you, accordin’