The Grass Widow (25 page)

to Leviticus, same’s Doc layin’ with a man. You feel as if you’re goin’ to Hell for eatin’ a lobster?”

“But it says and ‘surely they shall be put to death’ for laying with a man as with a woman. It seems a larger abomination, given the penalty.”

“Ought I take you out an’ shoot you, then? Leviticus offers up the death penalty for cursin’ your father, too.” She took a biscuit from the pan and broke it in half, slathering butter onto it.

“An’ Jesus said, ‘It is not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart, and they defile the man.’ Jesus wanted people to be kind to one another. An’ it seems God in the Ol’ Testament was sayin’ He wanted His chosen people to behave in a more comportly manner than the Canaanites an’ the Egyptians—like sayin’, ‘look here, Joss Bodett, Ott Clark beats his horse, an’

maybe he ain’t goin’ to Hell for it, but that don’t mean I want you followin’ his customs just ’cause you live next door to him.’

But if I did beat my horse, would He turn His back on me?”

“I can’t imagine you beating your horse.”

Joss bit into her biscuit. She knew Aidan wasn’t being obtuse; Aidan was simply dreadfully uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. “All o’ that bein’ what it is,” she said, flicking soft biscuit crumbs from her lip and her shirtfront, “this ol’ raccoon don’t taste half bad. Wonder what Thom’ll allow me for the hide.”

Captain Leonard appeared a few days later; Aidan was making bread so the fire was up, and he had his cup of tea. She asked him if he had ever eaten raccoon.

“You ask a Kentucky boy if he ever ate coon?” He laughed.

“Why, my best friend when I was a lad was my old bluetick hound. We kept meat on the table and money in my pocket.”

“And you weren’t concerned about eating the flesh of a beast that ate flesh?”

He glanced at her across the rim of his cup. “Poor folk haven’t much room to worry about the next world, Mrs. Blackstone,” he said gently, “busy as they are trying to survive this one. A raccoon

would feed my family, and I’d get five dollars for a coonskin hat.”Joss came in from the barn in time to hear that. “I saw one o’ them once! Boy howdy, that was nice. You really know how to make one?”

In an hour, so did she. The Captain taught her how to make a bag of the raw pelt; filled with oak gall and water and hung from the game pole, it would tan in a week. He hewed a chunk of oak into a rough block that she could smooth down later with her drawshave. He told her how to block the pelt, and stitch it, and knew by her hands that she understood.

“I’ve a fair contingent of Blue Ridge boys in my troop,” he said, picking at a sliver in his knuckle; Joss got it between her fingernails and flicked it away. “Thank you. They might provide a bit of a market if someone made a good coonskin cap.”

“What’s one worth anymore?”

“Twenty years ago, with every other lad in Kentucky making them, I asked and got a half-eagle. It would seem that their paucity here would make one worth at least double that.” He folded his knife against his thigh and stood to slip it into his pocket. “Hard to say. Test your market and charge what it will bear. You must tell me what you’ve done with your crops, Miss Bodett. This is the only piece of the post road that looks as if it remembers what life and breath mean, and I know you’re not getting help with a bucket brigade. Everyone else is too busy trying to save their own.”

She told him about the irrigation. He followed the pipe to the spring and was still grinning when he emerged from the woods.

“That woman of yours,” he said, turning bread from the tins for Aidan; Joss had noticed Fritz limping, and was out coaxing a stone from his foot. “She’ll have water in your kitchen sink a day after the first rain. Lord, but the two of you are a grand union.”

That won him Aidan’s thoughtful study for the next hour; he left saying he thought he’d go see if he could find Doc.

Doc came the next day for high tea; Aidan asked if the Captain had found him, and Doc blushed and grinned and finally

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admitted. “Nothing serious, you know soldiers, but...”

“Is that a difficulty for you?” Joss asked her that night, holding her; Aidan had seemed shy with Doc all afternoon, and Joss knew Doc had noticed. “Doc an’ the Captain? Seems they might care about one another same as we do, given enough time an’ the same grace as Doc’s given us.”

Aidan sighed. “Nothing I believed in before I came to Kansas seems to fit here,” she said softly. “Everything’s been turned upsidedown. I love Doc, and I like Captain Leonard very much. Perhaps I need leave it at that, and leave God’s judgment to God.”

They ate raccoon until they were sick of it. Pelt-bags hung tanning from the game pole, from the woodshed roof, from tree branches, until Aidan wondered how Joss kept track of them—

and how there was a coon left in the county, but each night, lured by the corn, one or two fat bandits fell to the Winchester. It rained ten days after the irrigation had been set in, a hard, two-day rain that kept Joss out of the beans while they dried; she moved the water to the house. The system for the crops had been balky, and wouldn’t work at all in its first incarnation to the house; she spent most of a morning walking from the spring to the house and back, her hands shoved into her hip pockets and her hat raked back on her hair, staring at the pipe as if it might give her answers. She cut a forked branch from the cherry tree and dowsed down from the spring; the witching said its underground stream came within feet of the never-failing well. She squatted there to draw in the dirt with a stick. She went to the house to draw in the margins of a newspaper with a pencil, and Aidan could make no sense of her pictures. “Won’t a pump work?”

“Would, but I ain’t got one, an’ Pa’d never put one in even with all of us to run the pickaxe. We ain’t got but a foot’n a half o’

topsoil; under that’s as much o’ clay that’s hard as Effie Richland’s heart. Then three foot o’ somethin’ harder than that. Frostline’s some ol deeper’n what I care to dig a pipeline.”

Six feet,
Aidan thought uneasily.
She knows too well what the

first six feet look like, four graves later.
“Gravity won’t just feed it down?”

“That’s what it’s doin’ now, but it don’t work into here, an’

even if it did it’d freeze up come cold soon’s you turn off the water an’ stop the flow. Then you got no water an’ busted pipes. I don’t know that I want to have it runnin’ day in an’ day out in the sink.”

“I don’t,” Aidan said definitively; she had lived with dripping faucets, and didn’t want a constantly-running one.

Joss went to sift through her box of couplings, coming up with a T; she stared at it. “Gentlemen, hush,” she murmured, looking narrow-eyed at the well. “Will this...?”

She didn’t know what she was doing; there was only a gut feeling that it would work. She laid pipe past the house to the well and elbowed a four-foot section upright, leaning it against the well; she sawed a foot off the end of a full length, and fixed the T sideways to the top of the upright and added the short piece to the top of that, water gushing onto her feet. “Outflow’s lower ’n the source an’ higher’n the sink,” she confirmed, not sure why that was important, only knowing that it was. She drew a deep breath. “Please, Jesus,” she prayed, and hollered, “Aidan!

Open the pipe in the sink!”

She knew before the whoop of success that it worked, for the flow at her vented pipe gurgled and stopped. “Hail Caesar! It won’t freeze ’cause it runs all the time–an’ back into the well so even if it does freeze we’ll have water. We can tap it for irrigation do we need it again, an’—Hi! Is that ol’ pickle barrel still in the barn?”

By the time she was done not only did they have water in the kitchen, but there was a cooling tub by the well; no more would butter or milk or meat need to be carried to and from the spring. She chiseled a hole in the side of the well for an overflow pipe from the tub, with a coupling that would allow her to channel the overflow to the kitchen garden. Finished, she could only stand there and stare at it. “I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “I’ll be Goddamned if this don’t work.”

And for a long time that night she laid awake, her fingers stroking a rhythmic caress against the blonde head sleeping on her breast as she listened to water burble from the pipe into the cooling tub. No symphony would ever play sweeter music to her ears than the sound of running water in her front yard.

The floor went so quickly Joss was sorry she hadn’t done it sooner, forgetting that her sprained hand would have disallowed that much work with hammer and saw even a week ago. “How will you move the stove?” Aidan asked, watching Joss lay her framework under the cast-iron behemoth. “Or will you?”

Joss glanced up at her. “Give me a long enough lever an’

where to stand an’ I could move the earth.” She wiped sweat from her forehead before it could run into her eyes. “Somebody said that first. Some Greek schoolteacher.”

“Archimedes.” Aidan remembered Captain Slade’s remark about a ration of civilized education behooving the youth of Washburn Station and wondered where Joss had encountered the quote. There was nothing to suggest such education in the books that had been in the house when she arrived, and now that Joss had read
Don Quixote, A Christmas Carol, Tom Sawyer
and the

poems of the Brownings, she spent her reading time browsing the Bible in no apparent order: where it fell open in her hands, she read.

But the Greek schoolteacher hadn’t mentioned balancing that three-quarter-ton monster once she had it off the ground; Joss was sweating more from nerves than exertion by the time she got her block set so that the stove seemed to balance when she gave it an exploratory raise on the old iron whiffletree she’d found in the barn.

“Stand away as far as you can, Aidan. For God’s sake, don’t put any part o’ you under any part o’ the stove. If I yell, jump away an’ no questions. Just move.” She sketched a hand across her forehead, catching sweat; her shirt was soaked. “Doc or Gid could come along just now an’ I’d not refuse their damned help.”

“Stop worrying. Lean on the bar.”

They both knew that the missing part of the equation was a long enough lever. Joss had to put all her weight on the whiffletree to get the stove far enough off the floor for Aidan to slip the next board into place, and Aidan was glad to be out from under and Joss glad she was by the time the stove was standing with its four legs on oak boards—and of course they were barely done when they heard a horse in the dooryard and Doc sauntered in to exclaim, first in delight at a floor at last, then in admonition that they hadn’t waited for him to help with that most dangerous part of the process.

“Pooh, Doc,” Aidan chided gently. “If we always waited for you, we’d get naught done and quickly. Do please excuse me; I must check the chickens.”

Doc examined the job so far. “Looks damn good,” he said.

“Flora Washburn would be jealous if she saw it, Josie. This is a fine job.”

“Flora Washburn’d tear my head off for not havin’ the battenin’ done yet. Pa’d call me a pure fool, spendin’ money on such a thing.”

“Mayhap, but your mother would sing your praises, as will

Aidan, each time she sweeps or drops a biscuit. It’s a woman’s house now, not a Station claim shack.” He took off his coat; there were unwieldy objects yet in the way of floor-building. “Let’s move the china cabinet while she’s in the outhouse or she’ll make us empty the damned thing first.”

It took a long day to set the frame, and a longer one to lay the boards; that night they trod its alien length and breadth, marvelling at its cleanliness, at how the lamp cast so much light against the paleness of the oak, at its sweet scent. “I’ll hate the first stain or scratch,” Aidan mourned. “Please, Joss, can we try to keep it clean until I can get a coat of wax on it?” It wasn’t pegged, but it was oak and it was hers, a gift of love in answer to a request born of pain, and she loved it, and its giver.

“Hart said shellac it, steel-wool it, do that again, then wax it. Do a little work now to save you a lot later. I only believed him cause he threw in the shellac. He ought to’ve, for what he charged me for the damn lumber.” She stretched; she had thought to get the first coat on tonight, but she was tired and sore. “Tomorrow,”

she promised.

The next day she worked at the floor until her hand protested; it wasn’t all healed, and she had been using it hard. She rested, smoked, had a whiskey, went back to it. By the end of the job she was quite tipsy, but the oak glowed in the lamplight, and she sat cross-legged between the table and the bathtub, massaging her aching hand, satisfied with the job and how Aidan moved in the kitchen across its glossy surface, barefoot and loving it; a smile settled onto her when Aidan went to the sink and drew water to put in a pan with potatoes from the kitchen garden. The succulent smell of roasting chicken masked the odors of shellac and wax.

“My dear cousin Aidan,” she said softly, and Aidan looked up at the odd gentleness of her voice. “A floor in the kitchen an’ water in the sink. You’ll have me thoroughly civilized yet.”

“When you start wearing skirts, I’m going back to Maine.”

“I’ll wear skirts when you accept a proposal o’ marriage from the hopefully late an’ utterly unlamented Argus Slade.”

Aidan rolled her eyes. “A classic impasse, if we’re waiting on those eventualities.” She watched Joss get up; even with one whiskey too many she was graceful as a cat. At first Aidan had been afraid of the liquor, too many memories of her father too strong for her comfort, but in the past Joss’s occasional daytime drink had only made her a little more talkative, her humor against Argus Slade or Effie Richland a little more biting. Aidan knew today’s excess had been to dull the ache in her still-bruised hand; now it (she assumed the whiskey, anyway) had given a deep smile to her, a look that tugged at her as Joss came across the floor.