The Grass Widow (26 page)

“Do you know how much I love you?” Aidan asked quietly, and some strange answer flickered in the dark eyes, in hands and then arms gentle as Joss brought her close for an embrace that made her forget there was a world beyond their doors. She had never been held the way Joss held her; she had never known she was so treasured; she had never been so enveloped with the warmth and being of another soul. “I do, Joss,” she whispered. “More than I know how to tell you.”

“Without you—” The tenderness of her hands, and the lips she pressed to Aidan’s hair, was almost frightening in its intensity.

“Without you I’d’ve long since been up a tall tree with a short rope,” she whispered. “You gave me back wantin’ to live. I’d have wallowed here—” A laugh jittered from her, a laugh as frightening as the tenderness. “Smokin’ in the house, feet upon the table, drinkin’—bein’ Ethan. A week, a month, I don’t know”—she buried her face in the curve of Aidan’s shoulder— “tiltin’ at my windmills until they tilted me too far. You gave me—” Her voice broke. “You—oh, Aidan. Lord, I’m sorry—”

“Joss—” She sank with her in her slow collapse to the floor. She had never seen Joss cry: not when Levi had mauled her hand, not in her hurt and anger at her thoughts of failure with the farm, not when she had been delirious with fever, and to have the tears come now, on the heels of the accomplishments of the water and the floor, was bewildering. “Joss, what? Tell me—”

But Joss could only cry; Aidan could only hold her, rock with her, assure her of her love.

“Ma—” It was a rasping sob. “Oh, Ma! God damn all those men! Why did she have to—” She drove her face into Aidan’s belly. “He could’ve gave her this! Rings an’ a watch won at poker an’ a trip to town, that’s all it took an’ she spent her love on a fucking dirt floor—oh, Ma! I miss you so much—”

Aidan had never felt so helpless as she did with Joss’s face buried against her belly, knowing nothing to do but hold her as she wept for the loss; she had never been so bitter as she was in knowing that if tomorrow’s mail brought the news of her own mother’s death, she would have no such tears to cry. Tears, yes, but not this anguish; not the loss of such a rare and unconditional love. “Joss—” She hated knowing nothing to say that could help.

“Oh, Joss. I’m so sorry—”

At last she quieted, a few hiccoughing sobs leaking past the end of the storm, but it was a while before Aidan understood what she was doing: one hand at the small of her back, one cradling the growing roundness of her belly, her head pressed there, she was listening to the baby, or feeling its restlessness. “Can you feel her?” Joss nodded a little. Aidan slipped her fingers through the dark waves of her hair. “Are you all right?” Joss nodded again, a huge, unsteady sigh escaping her. “Can I do anything?”

A shake of the head was all the answer she could give; she curled into Aidan’s warmth, needing only her closeness while the hollowness subsided.

“Damn—” It was a raspy remnant of a voice; she sat up to hold her head in her hands, and sniffed and found her handkerchief to wipe her face and blow her nose. She stared at the floor, and reached to smooth a hand over its golden surface, shivering at what it had stirred in her. “It was so easy to do,” she whispered.

“It ain’t like she ever asked for it, but Lord, you’d think a man’d see his babies crawlin’ in dirt under his own roof an’ feel some shame. It didn’t cost as much as he drank in a year.” She ran both hands through her hair, and sighed and got to her feet, offering Aidan a hand, pulling her up to hold her for a grateful moment.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “Might I’d’ve done that well ago, an’ not let it eat at me so long.”

“You did it when you could, Joss.”

“I guess.” She leaned in the door, staring at the dark, listening to the water in the yard. “We’ve ’proved this claim more in a month than he did in twenty years.” Her voice sounded hollow, remote. “He did what he had to—he did good to start, buildin’

on with boards, an’ a porch—but after that? Fix what’s broke an’ promises, an’ never a new thing. Marcus, Ott—the whole damned lot o’ this place, they’re all the same. Goddamned Station farmers an’ all they’ll ever be. Earlene fixin’ to put a baby down on that same dirt six others crept on? Dirt don’t hurt the baby none, but it’d hurt my heart. Your baby comes an’ we’ll have floors through if I have to kill every coon in Kansas an’ sell more hats than Stetson. The only dirt this child’s knees’ll touch’ll be in the damn yard.”

“Don’t be hard on him, Joss.” Aidan slipped her arms around her cousin’s narrow waist, resting her cheek against her back, holding her. “He did what he knew to do, and he loved you. He loved your mother.”

“He loved us as much as he knew how to, I guess. He just didn’t put much imagination into it.” She rested her arms over Aidan’s. “This is about the best farm in the Station. Best soil, best lay of the land, best woodlot. The spring. A well that’s never gone dry. He chose it well, an’ then he treated it like—” Tight-throated (for she had loved the man she had called her father), she shook her head. “Like Stationers treat things,” she whispered. “Like a wrong man treats a right woman. An’ I’m damned if I will, it or you. It can be a good farm, Aidan. It won’t make us rich, but it can be a good farm.”

“Stars, girl, wouldn’t your momma be proud,” Earlene Jackson breathed, coming into the kitchen to see the oak floor glowing under its second coat of wax. Joss had seen her on the road and hailed her for tea, knowing the only time Mrs. Jackson enjoyed a cup of that was in other people’s homes. Marcus had plenty of whiskey money, but Earlene couldn’t afford tea, and put her babies down on dirt.

Earlene knelt to brush her fingers across the glossy surface of the wood. “I never seen anything so tight, Joss! It must have been—” Her eyes widened when Aidan freshened the kettle from the pipe in the sink. “Saints be praised, you put in water! Marcus said you had it to the crops, but Joss! Water in the house?”

Joss hadn’t meant to show off, only to afford Earlene a cup of tea; her mother always had, if they had tea. “We’ve got the spring,” she said apologetically; surface springs were rare, and

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rarer still the sort that didn’t run a brook on the downhill side.

“Made it a right smart o’ easy just to pipe it on down—short o’

almost killin’ the horses gettin’ the pipe here. I witched the water down, an’ the spring runs smack into the well. We feed the flow back into that. Can’t see how it’ll ever go dry.”

It occurred to her that all three bedroom doors were open; she saw them from a visitor’s perspective and knew no woman who kept a house could miss the fact that only one of them was seeing daily use. “When’s your wee company comin’, Earlene?”

“Save me another baby carried through the summer,” she grumbled; she had indeed noticed the bedrooms, and wondered why they slept in the same bed when body heat in July wouldn’t be welcomed. “October sometime. How you bearin’ up under the heat, Miz Blackstone?” She slurred the title enough for politeness; Jocelyn had been her dearest friend, but she had been a Blackstone and Joss a bastard (likely explaining her being the only brains in the Bodett family), and at some point one had to wonder if the behavior just ran in the women of that family—

except Joss. She was a case, was Joss, not a mite of interest in the boys and never mind Hank Richland and Earlene’s own Gideon chasing her all through the schooling years; she’d known that what they were chasing had more to do with prime acreage than her feminine charms.

“I spend every minute I can with my feet in cold water,”

Aidan confessed, and Earlene haw-hawed in heartfelt empathy.

“Do you get the headaches, Mrs. Jackson?”

“Headaches! Girl, you take a day the sun shimmies on the dirt an’ I ain’t worth a fart in a tornado, but with seven sittin’

supper an’ glad to feed ‘em—” After what had happened in this house in March, she’d never curse the board she laid three times a day. “Good Lord give me a girl amid all them boys. She’s a help to her momma, an’ I’ll be hanged if I’ll let some b’hoy knock her up at fourteen th’way Marcus done me. Two years short o’ forty an’ still at this taradiddle? It’s agin God’s law, I told him, an’ the last of it. You needin’ help gettin’ in the beans, Joss? Lord knows we ain’t got enough to worry about.”

“I ain’t turnin’ down help, but I’m good for two, two an’ a quarter acre a day, an’ we ain’t got but twenty. Wood, now, I’d take help with. Levi could make Charley snake out a tree, but hell if I can. I’m some sorry about your crops, Earlene. Save that spring, an’ we’d be cryin’ here.”

“You cried plenty this year. I know there’s some grudge you that water, but Jacksons ain’t among ’em—an’ who gives a soft crap for a Clark? Been hard enough for you ’thout losin’ the crops too.” She stirred her tea. “We saved about five acres. Plowed the rest under, both claims. Planted again after it rained. All a farmer can do. Good Lord give us season enough for two crops.”

The Jacksons had two forty-acre claims, as did the Bodetts. Harmon had built his house on the edge of one and put his barn on the edge of the other, thereby improving them both; the lay of the Jackson land had precluded that shrewd technique, so Marcus had ’proved his second one up just enough to keep it, building a cabin that had seen lackadaisical maintenance since then. “Leaves us startin’ from behind just like any spring, but only one crop comin’.” Any farmer’s wife would have recognized her short, soft sigh. “What with Ethan gone, Gid’s the best poker player ’tween here an’ the Fort, I guess. Mayhap it’ll make a difference.”

Joss shook her head. “Not if you count on it. Time we trusted on Ethan an’ he’d come home with his pockets inside out. But he got us the floor an’ the water with his rings an’ watches. God rest ’im, he passed in the middle of a hot streak at the Bull an’

Whistle.”

Joss rocked back in her chair, took a look from Aidan, set back down on all fours. She wanted a cigarette. “Devil’s pasteboards or no, them cards is the only reason there’s a crop out there. Gid takes a hard urge to roam, that’s when to stake him, if he’s like Ethan.” Her smile tightened. “He’d get all wild ’round the eyes
,
Ethan would. Get to pacin’ like a springtime bull. Bust outa here like a cat outin’ a cage. Come home three days later smellin’ like the bottom o’ the barrel an’ his pockets right full o’ double eagles an’ diamond rings an’ somebody else’s daddy’s watch.”

Aidan and Earlene could only watch, knowing it was coming

by her eyes, her voice, how her hands fisted on the table. “Not worth a continental with a hoe, nor plow a straight furrow to save his mortal soul, but give him a bottle o’ rye an’ a game o’ draw an’ a promise from a pretty girl an’ he—” Her voice broke; she scraped back in her chair. “Marcus or the boys headshoot a coon, I got a dollar for a raw pelt,” she rasped, and the screen door banged behind her as she fled.

“Bless that child,” Earlene said softly. “There’s lots here was hard—there’s hard ’hind every door o’ every house—but there was care enough to make up for it, an’ for her that cock-wild Ethan hung the moon. Is she holdin’ up?”

Aidan didn’t know Earlene had Effie Richland’s nose for gossip but none of her mouth; she had seen those curious eyes probe the bedrooms. “She drives herself,” she said tightly, aching to go after Joss. “Floors, the water—it’s all part of the driving. At least if she stays in with me she’s able to sleep. Alone, she was up all night walking ruts into the floor. I just feared she’d wear down.”

“Be a right smart o’ comfort in a body on the other side o’

the bed,” Earlene nodded, wondering why she hadn’t suspected that; tough on the outside didn’t pass a good heart able to hurt.

“Marcus can be common as dogshit, but he’s a good man, same’s Harmon was an’ all their faults. Just puttin’ my hand out, times, to know he’s there...” She shook her head with a little sigh. “Lord only knows what the dark’s got in it for that girl.” Her eyes met Aidan’s, frank and direct. “Or for you, child. Ain’t none o’ this was your idear, was it, from the gettin’ to the givin’.”

Tiredly, Aidan smiled. “Why I’m here was no choice of mine, but staying is. How could I leave her alone? She’s my blood kin, Mrs. Jackson.”

“Earlene.”

“Thank you. I’m Aidan.”

“Well, thank your momma; I always thought that was too pretty a name for a boy. You go find your cousin, Aidan. I’m flirtin’ late on supper already. I thank you for the tea—an’ if I can’t stand admirin’ your floor from where I set, I may come do it here, if you don’t mind a call of an afternoon.”

“I’d treasure it, Earlene. I’m starting to get nerves about the baby.”

“Laws, child, if you’re like Jocelyn—an’ you’re built just like her—that baby’ll pop right out ’fore Doc can hear an’ get here,

’less your man was tall as Lincoln an’ fat as Grant. What me an’

her done was swap horses the last month before. Come time, you have Joss turn that horse out with a sharp slap an’ he’ll come right on home an’ I’ll know you’re ready. I’m fair closer than Doc! I brung Joss into this world, girl; I can bring this one. Say grace you ain’t got a houseful o’ men! God love Marcus an’ rest Harmon, but we’d fain send both of ’em down t’the Bull an’ Whistle for four days an’ give us some rest durin’ an’ after the doin’.” All of this was said on her way to her wagon; she stopped there and gave Aidan a brusque hug. “Ain’t nothin’ to birthin’ a baby, child. It’s the next twenty years is a hard row. Be you lucky, when you die they grieve you hard. Means you was a good mother. Now you go find young Joss. Practice some motherin’ on her. She’s missin’ that bad, if you could only scratch the flint.”

I can scratch it if I can find it,
she thought, scattering indignant hens as she ran barefoot across the yard and up the old trail to the spring, seeing leaves and humus fresh-turned by recent heels; old hurts went the old ways, and the path wearing down along the pipeline was too new for instinctive flight.

She found her cross-legged by the spring, unmoving at her approach; Aidan touched a gentle hand to the back of her neck.

“Would you rather be alone?”