The Grass Widow (27 page)

“Why is he so hard?” She had been clamping back the tears; now they came. “I thought he was too mean to die that way! I thought he could spit in the devil’s eye an’ live to laugh about it—God above, all the things we ever did together an’ diggin’

Ma’s grave was the last—”

A floor in the kitchen, water in the house—things your mother
should have had, things you’ve given me—things you
could
give me
thanks to Ethan, who hung your moon. If you could have made him
come to good in his life you would have, but death was the only chance at
goodness he had and you took it. Grieve him, now, and let him go.
She

held her, feeling the heat of her tears and the cool dampness they left at the shoulder of her dress.

“This ain’t goin’ to happen again,” Joss whispered finally, shakily. “I ain’t such a—”

Aidan heard the self-deprecation coming and cut it off. “You can’t have such pain and not cry. It’s not the tears you cry that drown you, Joss, it’s the ones you don’t cry. It’s not a weakness.”

“It feels like one.”

“The first night you held me while I cried, did you think I was weak to cry, or to ask you to stay?”

“No! Aidan, you were so hurt—”

“And now it doesn’t hurt the way it did. It was no weakness of mine, any more than you’re weak to hurt in the loss of people you loved. If you know love and death as part of life, you have to know the pain they cause, too.”

Joss studied her cousin, not comprehending her; a cigarette end in a coffee cup could send her into a snarling irritation, and yesterday she had been reduced to tears by a piece of wood that refused to fit into the stove until the house was full of smoke. She wrote to her parents out of duty, and was rewarded with tins of tea and letters as cold as a tax collector’s smile; she burned the letters, drank the tea, and mentioned Maine and the people there as if they had been a dream she’d had once, long ago, and yet— “How did you come to know so much o’ love? You were raised up with so little of it.”

“What I know, I’ve learned by knowing what I’ve missed that you’ve given me.” Aidan reached to tuck a straying curl back into the thickness of Joss’s hair. What Earlene had said came back to her; her smile was small and sad. “If we’re lucky, when we die this baby will grieve her family the way you’re grieving yours. It’ll mean we were good mothers. I’d rather the grief of losing a loved one than to die knowing I was never loved.”

“Better to have loved an’ lost—”

“Yes. Come, and I’ll trim your hair. You’re getting shaggy.”

Aidan tried to coax Joss into the tub once the haircut was

done, thinking if she was clean and freshly-dressed she might take the rest of the afternoon at leisure; there was nothing Aidan had to do that wouldn’t wait, save making supper, and as for Joss and the weeds—well, the weeds would be there tomorrow. But Joss, shaking the hair out of her shirt, decided there was too much daylight left (and too much wasted already this day) to indulge in a bath yet. “I’ll just tighten up that section of fence by the road,”

she said, and Aidan sighed and got her sewing basket. Joss couldn’t seem to touch barbed wire without damage to her clothes or her person; she could wear shirts that had been Seth’s, Ethan’s and Harmon’s, but all three men had been broader-beamed than she was, and she was wearing her last intact pair of Levi’s. On the porch, she ripped the side seams out of a pair of Seth’s jeans that were nearly new and measured them against a pair of Joss’s that were nearly rags, keeping an ear tuned for the treacherously musical scream of a breaking strand of barbed wire; the last time Joss had mended fence, Aidan had been required to mend her. The scar across her back was still fresh and red, and Aidan dusted with the remains of the shirt.

Joss straggled back to the house two hours later, her shirt sweat-stuck to her and blood leaking from her in several places, none of them serious; she collapsed to the other rocker on the porch. “Lord, but that’s miserable work!” It was, and harder still for knowing too well how fast one of those thorny strands could sing back to give her its vicious embrace. “I ought to’ve listened to you an’ quit this day a while back.”

Aidan got up to get her a glass of water, standing behind her to massage her shoulders while she drank it. “I wish you’d wait for Doc to help you.” She didn’t add the rest of her thought: that having the doctor on hand would be provident should a strand break again. She knew her cousin had gotten away lightly the last time, saved by a combination of feline quickness and a shirt thick enough to have afforded meager protection.

“If I wait for someone to help me with everythin’ hard I’ll never get anythin’ done. You said that first, an’ I take too much help anyway.”

She bent to touch her lips to Joss’s hair. “You’re so stubborn.”

“I’m a Blackstone by birth an’ a Bodett by raisin’. Stubborn’s my nature.” She tipped her head back, smiling upsidedown at Aidan. “You don’t think you’re tamin’ me at all? Here I am sittin’

on the porch callin’ the day done an’ it ain’t but four o’clock—an’

I know you’ll have me in the tub when I just had a bath day before yesterday.”

“You need the bath. Have I tamed you enough to get you to church on Sunday?”

She meant it as a joke; she’d long since given up on church, and was amazed when Joss shrugged. “If you’d like. I ain’t wearin’

no dress, though. Good Lord’ll have to save me in the same clothes I wear for my sinnin’.”

“You’d really take me to church?”

Joss raised her palms. “You want church, we’ll go to church. I ain’t closed to it, Aidan; I just been busy.”

“My stars. What a surprise.” Aidan sat in the rocker beside her, fanning herself with her apron in gentle exaggeration. “What might you do if we weren’t to go?”

“Well...” Joss found her tobacco pouch in a shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette. “There’s a brown ash down in the branch section I’d had a mind to get before someone beats me to it. It’s enough for a dozen axe handles an’ makin’s for a new egg basket too.”

She scratched a match on the sole of her boot and lit her smoke.

“An’ Gid said he caught a nice stringer o’ trout down there the other day. I sure am fond o’ the taste o’ fresh trout.” Not looking at her cousin, she broke the match and tossed the pieces into the yard. “That’s a right nice spot for a picnic. Figured we’d take the spider, catch some fish, cook ‘em right there, an’ maybe some corn to roast in the coals...yuh, I thought we might just have us a lazy day, but if you’d ruther go to hear the Baptist—”

“Joss Bodett, you don’t have an ounce of shame. Making me choose between church and a picnic! Not a smack nor a scrid of shame do you have.”

Joss slid her a sidelong grin. “I should be ashamed, offerin’

you a picnic?”

“You should be if you’re only offering it to get out of going to church.”

“Cousin, you hurt my heart even thinkin’ it. If you want to hear that hellfire an’ brimstone Baptist spout his brand o’ preachin’, we can go to church an’ come home an’ have the picnic too.”

They didn’t go to hear the Baptist. On Sunday morning Aidan made a pecan pie; while it was baking off she packed a basket with bread and black raspberry jelly and fresh corn, a jar of milk and a smaller one of butter, a cloth and napkins and plates and flatware, and finally the pie on top, and Joss lifted her to Charley’s broad bare back and strolled the mile to the brook with the halter rope loose in one hand and the basket easy in the other, her shoulder brushing softly against Aidan’s knee. Orion followed them for a while, winding around Joss’s feet and staying clear of Charley’s massive hooves until a squirrel caught his attention and he tore off into the woods to hunt. “He’ll find his way home,” Joss said when Aidan worried about him. “He always does.”

The brook was a clear, quick rill, no more than ten feet wide at its broadest, overhung by the branches of tall, brooding trees that dappled the sunlight on its glittering surface; there was a bentboled cedar sweeping halfway across the water, and a clearing on the bank center-pieced by a circle of blackened stones around the ashes of a hundred old fires. Joss held a hand over the fire ring; the design of the ashes told her more than she thought Aidan needed to know, but they were cold, and she trusted that the Pawnee who had paused there for a meal was well away. She received her cousin from the horse into her arms, gentling her to her feet. “This is a nice spot. It always feels cool here, even on the hottest day. Flora owns it, but she’s never minded us usin’

it.” She spread a blanket, setting their basket and her poke of tools on it, and put the corn into the stream to soak in its husks. Aidan studied the fire ring. “I read—of course, it probably wasn’t true; so much of what I read in those silly dime novels has long since been disproved—that the Indians make fires that leave patterns in the ashes when they burn out. Do you suppose

an Indian made this one?”

Joss glanced at her; she looked more curious than cautious.

“Suppose it’s possible,” she allowed. “But I can make a fire like that, an’ so can Gid, an’ he was just here. Ethan taught us. He was pals with a few Pawnee bucks. Made good sense, makin’ friends. Ott’s always losin’ stock, but we ain’t had a lick o’ trouble.” She paused to cut a long branch from a willow tree. “The day after Ethan passed on, I got up an’ found a funny little pile o’ rocks on the porch,” she said, stripping bark from the branch in deliberate curls. “Doc said it was a Indian mournin’ thing, that they was payin’ their respects an’ tellin’ me I’d get no bother from ’em. That’s that little bunch o’ stones on his grave—you remember, I asked you not to disturb ’em while you was pullin’ the weeds from around the boards one day. I put it there soon’s I got him buried, as close to how I found it as I could.” She whipped the branch in the air, testing it. “I like it bein’ there.”

Aidan considered the tangle of forest across the brook. “How did your mother think of them? The Indians?” she asked, turning; Joss was tying a line to the end of her willow branch. “Was she afraid of them?”

Joss slipped her knot below the first knuckle of the fishing rod she was building and tested it. “I don’t think Ma was afraid o’ anythin’ except rattlesnakes—which I ain’t ever seen but two of in my whole life—an’ this brook in spring freshet. Zeke wasn’t the oldest Clark boy. Their firstborn drownded about a mile downstream. Fishin’, an’ the current caught him down. Drug out his body halfway to Newtonville. What’s a brook now’s a regular river come spring.” She tied a hook to the end of her line. “Ma said they doomed Ott Junior, namin’ him after a dead son. Give a name once, she said, an’ let it go with the child if needs be.” She spat on the knot and drew it tight. “You been thinkin’ on names for yours?”

Aidan found a stick and drew an X in the ashes of the fire ring.

“Not really. Not yet,” she said softly. “Do you have any ideas?”

Joss’s hand snaked out into the tall grass beside her; she turned her back to spare Aidan the sight of her making bait out of

the grasshopper she had caught. “Guess it depends on if it’s a boy or a girl. I like Esau for a boy. A cunnin’ hunter an’ a man o’ the field, an’ he’d have no brother to plague him like Jacob done.”

“And if a girl?”

“I don’t know. I got named after my mother, an’ you’ve got a right pretty name. I never gave enough thought to havin’ babies to worry about namin’ em.”

“You didn’t want them?”

Joss toed off her boots, her socks staying with them, and stepped into the stream. “Babies are nice enough. I helped Ma with Seth an’ Ruth enough to know I like ’em. It’s all the foofraw that goes with bein’ a mother I never cared about. Husbands an’ all their orders an’ demands. Do this, be here, make that, go there.” She tossed the hooked grasshopper into the current.

“Don’t know where I fit, but not there. Seems to me a husband or a son ain’t so much different. All want to be coddled. Ma was always chasin’ an’ waitin’ after Pa an’ Ethan, an’ Seth more like a daughter to her, an’ me—Lord knows what I was. Some o’ both, I sup—whoa, fish!”

The green willow branch bent double; a brawny trout fought line and air and current as Joss played him, tired him, coaxed him to her hand, finally catching him to ease the hook from his mouth and hold him in an oddly spiritual moment before she broke his neck and tossed him to the shore. “There’s your dinner! Now I but need catch mine.”

She fished around the stream bed with her hand, coming up with a crawdad to use for bait.

She didn’t go back to her train of thought, and Aidan didn’t quite dare pursue the question of how Joss saw herself. Joss whistled while she fished, a song Aidan had never heard and thought was mournfully beautiful until her cousin gave voice to it:

When this cruel war is over,

Mother I’ll be comin’ home to you.

00

Well, I’ve eaten all the chicken, Mother

But I saved the bones for you.

“Oh, you!” Aidan tossed a pebble at her. “How can such a lovely tune have such horrid words?”

Joss dodged the unmeant missile. “I didn’t write it, I just remembered it. I s’pose you’d ruther I sing a Baptist song, seein’s how you got cheated out o’ your churchification by my picnic.”

She deepened her voice—she really had a fine voice, true and clear—and intoned,

So I’ll cling to the old ragged bay

till in the traces at last he lays down;

I will cling to my nag of a bay

And exchange him some day for a roan.

“Joss, you’re terrible! How can you be so sacri—”

“Hi! There’s a fish!”

Watching her play the trout on a crude willow rod and a line of white carpet thread, Aidan thought of her father’s fine and mostly idle fly-fishing rig from England and wished for it for Joss, who seemed to care for the stream and the sport and the fish, once it was in her hands; she held the heavy-bellied trout almost mouth to mouth to her, saying some soft something that Aidan was sure was a benediction before she broke its neck in a clean, spare motion. “God can’t be too displeased with me.” Joss splashed across the stream with the fish in her hand. “He allowed me my dinner.” She knelt by the water, opening the scrimshawhandled knife Aidan had given her, and cleaned the two trout.