The Grass Widow (28 page)

“This is a good knife,” she said. “Seth had a good hand with a blade. He’d have whittled you some pretty thing, or a whistle. I ain’t much good for that, but I like a good tool. Did you know a fish tastes better if you leave it set wrapped up in grass for an hour or two before you cook it? Ma always said so, anyway. I’m goin’ to go get that ash tree. I asked Flora could I have it, an’ I think God’d be too surprised if I didn’t do some little piece o’

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work on the Sabbath.”

She was wet to the thighs from the brook when she went after the tree; she was soaked through her shirt with sweat by the time she had dragged eight feet of the butt end of it back to the clearing. “Hope to hell Charley’ll haul that home without too much fuss,” she panted. “That’s two or three good baskets if I can find time to make ’em. There was some Shaker group along where Ma lived when she was a girl—”

“Yes! At Sabbathday Lake; I’ve been there many times.”

“She said they made the nicest baskets, an’ glad to share their ways. She’d set Seth to beatin’ on a ash log with the back of a axe

’til the year rings broke apart, an’ she’d split ‘em down again so they felt just like silk an’ then weave ’em up. She made this one.”

She aimed a thumb at their glossy-patinaed picnic basket. “I hate to let her ol’ egg basket go, but it’s served its time, I guess. Past my fixin’, anyway, but I can make a new one.”

“We needn’t throw it away; I can use it for cloth scraps. My grandmother—your mother’s aunt—lives near the Shakers. She’s friends with them, and she’d take me to visit. They do make a lovely basket, and grow the most wondrous herbs. They’re a fine, God-fearing people.”

“Ma said so—but a funny folk, not believin’ in relations between men an’ women. Can’t see how they’ll last.”

“They take in orphans. Had I bowed to Father and gone to Cousin Rosa in Bangor, this child would have likely gone to them. A worse life could be had by a babe unwanted elsewhere.”

“An’ a better life could be had than bowin’ to your father for the rest of it. Your babe ain’t goin’ to lack wantin’.” She stood.

“The other half o’ this log back there yet is my axe handles. Let me drag it up an’ we can go on with our picnic.”

Joss showed Aidan how to lay a fire that would leave the starlike pattern of ashes that had been in the fire ring when they arrived. “But you can’t touch it once it’s lit. They make the young braves do it that way to teach ’em patience an’ stillness, Ethan said. I like to tease a fire—you know, poke at it with a stick an’

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such. An’ o’ course it don’t work when you’re cookin’ corn in the coals.”

She spread the checkered cloth on their blanket, and set out the plates and flatware and napkins. “Let me wait on you,” she said when Aidan protested. “You do it every day for me.”

“I don’t think of it as waiting on you, Joss. It’s just my part to do.”

“An’ you don’t get tired o’ the same part every day in an’ out?

I sure as hell do.” She used two forks to turn the trout sizzling in the skillet, and gave an ear of corn a quick squeeze, and sat; for a moment she tapped at the toe of her boot with the stick she had been using to stir the fire. “Will you be wantin’ to go to church next Sunday?” she asked at last.

Aidan looked up from the tiny grass basket she had been making just to have something to do with her hands. “I think not. The more I hear about this Baptist, the less he appeals to me. Our minister didn’t go so far as to advocate free will—Father wouldn’t have stood for that—but neither was he of the fire and brimstone school. I only said it hoping you might take a day of rest, Joss. I don’t want to drag you there if you don’t want to go.”“Well, I don’t. I ain’t the most sociable o’ critters anyway, to go minglin’ about the church yard with folk who don’t give a damn for me savin’ what gossip I can provide ’em, an’ I hear that preacher go on an’ wonder if he’s even readin’ the same Book as me. Accordin’ to him we might’s well all just curl up an’ die ’cause there ain’t no hope for our sinful souls anyhow. How’s he figure that? The Gospel accordin’ to John the Baptist says, ‘for God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved,’ an’ that if you believe in Jesus you’re not condemned. Well, I do, so I ain’t, an’ that preacher ain’t preachin’ the same brand o’ Baptistry that John was as far as I can see, so I don’t care to listen to him. I ain’t ever intentionally hurt anyone in my life, ’less you count a couple o’

noses I busted when I was in school, but I’ve mostly turned my other cheek when people was cruel to me an’ let ’em be cruel

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again, an’” —her laugh was small and hurt— “an’ I inherited my earth. I’ve questioned God, an
’
I’ve cursed Him an’ took His name in vain, an
’
maybe I ain’t kept the Sabbath like I’m s’pose to, but I ain’t ever forgot it. An’ I done pretty good on the other Commandments. I figure me an’ God can settle up when my time comes. He’ll know my heart for what was in it when I sinned.”

Aidan wove a strand of grass into her basket. Joss prodded at the fire. “Joss,” she finally said, softly, “do you think we’re sinning?

When we—oh, Joss. I’ve thought and thought about it, and I’ve prayed, but I just don’t know. I worry about it sometimes. Not just for us, but for the baby.”

“Do you love me?”

Aidan looked up. “Yes.”

“I ain’t ever seen anything in the Bible that says love is wrong. Saint Paul said, ‘I know an’ am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothin’ unclean of itself.’”

“But Leviticus—and I love Doc, Joss; I love him as dearly as a brother, but it’s so explicit! And I wonder how His word can condemn such love between men and not condemn it between women. It almost seems implied.”

“Aidan, I said before that I believe there’s a difference between what Moses calls unclean an’ what God sees as sinnin’. There’s a difference between what makes the neighbors frown an’ what makes God frown. I see that takin’ your own life is a mortal sin, an’ I was considerin’ that before you came. There wasn’t nothin’

left for me. If lovin’ you saved me from that, how can it be a sin?” Joss took the skillet from its perch on the rocks lining the fire. “I’m goin’ to live my life an’ let God decide if I done it right or wrong. I ain’t countin’ on the Baptist or any o’ his flock to decipher the word o’ God for me. If He sets me to cuttin’ August hay for all time, I’ll swing that scythe an’ remember how it felt to have you here lovin’ me.” She set the skillet into the grass beside the blanket and eased a fish onto Aidan’s plate. “Ain’t nothin’ in my life ever felt as good as havin’ you close to me. I’ll bet on that an’ take my losses if I’m wrong.”

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It was sweetly cool when Aidan awoke, Joss gone from the bed and a fresh breeze coming in the windows; she stretched in satisfaction. Their loving had been long and slow and sweet: once on their blanket by the stream, again after they got home—again and again, she thought, her smile soft and smug in the memory. She stroked both hands over the child-roundness of her belly, her smile deepening at the memory of Joss’s kisses there, delicately gentle as she loved the baby, too; gentle was all Joss ever was with her, even when their desires were so urgent it almost hurt to wait. A delicious shiver rippled through her at the memory of that long-fingered hand against her, caressing as Joss whispered against her lips:
Doc says some women like to have a
cucumber there? Can you imagine, hot out o’the garden
... The words had jolted a moan of helpless anticipation from her, accompanied as they were by a probing finger—and then another whisper,

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another possibility:
or maybe an ear o’ corn? Imagine how that would
feel, so slow and easy...

Her fingers told how slowly and easily she might do that; they told so well Aidan had almost felt it, a feeling that had taken her in a gasping rush so intense the memory of it now made her breath come quick and shallow in her, made her wish desperately for Joss, but there was only her own touch and the image of them both naked in the bed, sweating in the heat of the night and their desires, the lamp casting a shimmering glow over them as Joss’s mouth found her breast, her hand leading a ripe and golden ear of corn to the willing parting of her thighs before slipping it easily into her readiness—

“Oh, Joss! Oh, my darling, yes—”

Deep, rich, crawlingly familiar, the drawl from the door froze her. “Well, I’ll be damned if there ain’t a woman who got it once and needs it bad again.”

“Mother of God! What—”
If he’s

here—

Where

oGod please Jesus where’s

Joss?

Know what you’re aiming at, when you aim.

“Captain Slade”—Aidan’s hands were full of cherrywood and blued steel— “you’re not welcome here.”

The memory of exploding whiskey bottles flickered in his pale eyes before the faint, sarcastic smile traced back to his lips. “You may have the aim to hit me, my Yankee whore.” Lazily, he pushed away from the doorway. “But you don’t have the ballocks.”

And when you shoot, know you want something to die by your
hand.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, Captain Slade, I do.”

He didn’t believe her.

He should have.

It was the peculiar brotherhood of soldiers that had led

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Malin Leonard to spread a thin veil of propriety over the sudden civilianship of Argus Slade, the new captain allowed: soldiers tend not to reveal the flaws of their fellows even if the fellows are but marginally respected before their warts are discovered. In Montana, Slade had committed— “Let me say unspeakable acts, and leave it,” he said to his small audience: Aidan, pale and shaken on Doc’s porch glider, Joss close beside her, Doc in the doorway with one ear on the conversation and one alert to the patient in his small, neat home. “He was relieved of his commission. War is brutal, but never does it justify the individual acts of brutality at which Slade was found. No one will doubt you, Mrs. Blackstone. They’ll only wonder why you spared his life.”

Slade had pulled open his trousers, and Aidan had pulled the trigger. She didn’t know if it had been outrage or anger or fear that had tightened her finger; she didn’t know if it had been courage or the memory of Jared Hayward that had bathed her nerves in something as coldly liquid as water from the bottom of the well. She did know she hadn’t meant for him to be alive twelve hours later. Wanly, she smiled. “Joss says we should have to eat everything we kill. I guess I didn’t want to eat him.”

“Innate human decency has affected more aims than yours.”

Wish though he might that her aim had been truer, her bullet had gone wide of the killing zone, exploding the shoulder joint; luck put Doc at his side almost as soon as the shot was fired. That morning Joss had found Levi in the barn, his eyes bruised shut, sipping the painful breaths of broken ribs, unable to make her understand what had happened to him. She went for Doc. They had just turned off the post road onto the Bodett dooryard track when came the potent whump of a sidearm discharged within the confines of a building.

Joss beat both men to the house, skidding across the waxed oak floor with her Colt drawn to find Slade gray-faced and bleeding into the dirt floor of the bedroom, his trousers undone, Aidan naked on the bed with her pistol trained on him, apparently content to watch him bleed to death. She had meant to kill him, she said; when she knew she hadn’t, she cared neither to finish

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the job nor to get close enough to him to help him.

Now Slade was in Doc’s disgusted but capable hands, delivered to his house with no particular gentleness on Joss’s part. They’d met Gideon Jackson on the road and sent him for Captain Leonard, who came with a trio of guards; the guards were a distance off, their cigarettes winking like fireflies in the dark.The captain knelt in front of Aidan; someone passing might have thought he was proposing to her. “Are you all right?” That she had pulled her aim was one thing. Had she not been able to pull the trigger...

He hadn’t told even Doc of Slade’s unspeakable acts, or that he had been the one to find him at them; Doc only knew that whatever had happened in Montana, the memory had more than once made his lover wake in the night with screams barely caught back and cold sweats that lasted long past the awakening. Aidan looked at him in the dark, seeing enough of that in his eyes to know how well she had chosen in shooting. “He would have killed me?”

“Yes,” he said, much more simply than the dying would have been, and Joss felt the hard shiver that drove through her. Aidan took his hand. His male touch, and Doc’s, were gentle enough for her to bear today. “I had a choice today. Last time I didn’t—and might not have taken it had it been there.”

“I think this hard country makes hard choices easier—or perhaps it forces one to make them quickly. The element of pure survival is so much nearer—”

He almost pulled his hand away when she opened his fingers and led his palm to the rounding warmth of her belly, but then he understood; his breath stilled in helpless awe as he felt the movement under his hand. “Mother of God—to feel it! To know its life—how beautiful. How very incredible, Mrs. Blackstone.”

“It hasn’t always been beautiful to me. May I ask, Captain, if you might be comfortable addressing me by my Christian name?

I’m not, nor have I ever been, married, as I’m sure you know. All the man had to do with me was a moment’s subjugation of my

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will. Knowing that the next nine months or twenty years—the whole life of this child—was to be my burden...it was so terribly frightening until I met Joss, until I knew she loved me. This morning there was no choice. There was nothing to choose between.”

“What happens to him now, Cap’n?” Joss asked quietly. He stood. “Doc will save him,” he said, “so that I may hang him. Aidan defended herself, and her child. The Army will deliver the justice.”

“Why didn’t we just let him die, then?”

The captain looked across Doc’s moonlit yard. It was dead clear; the sky was ablaze with stars. He could see his soldiers leaning on the paddock fence, talking quietly to each other and their horses. “That would serve justice,” he supposed slowly, “but through the side door in the dark of night. To let him die when he would live with proper care casts the doctor in the role of executioner.” He drew his pipe from his pocket and packed it. “I could put him in the wagon and take him to post—”