The Grass Widow (8 page)

In the house, Joss handed over her Colt. “Mind it’s got a hair trigger.”

Slade’s look suggested he hardly believed she might know a hair trigger from a hair brush.

She shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it.” She leaned against a post on the porch, the dishes neglected in the sink. She didn’t trust Slade any deeper than she could have buried him today. He had her Peacemaker, but Ethan’s was handy, and the Winchester (also hair-triggered; her father had come up arthritic, and had taught his steady-handed daughter how to hone the inner workings of his guns) hung just inside the door. She supposed she could kill him with it if she had to, or talk him out of enough shells for Aidan’s instruction with that more deadly weapon. Slade cocked the revolver and handed it to Aidan, and took off his coat and hat. Joss bit her lip, wishing she’d told him to go to hell with his condescending offer to buy the bullets. He slipped his arms around Aidan from behind; Joss jammed her hands into her pockets. “You oily son of a—”

The revolver roared interruption. Dirt sprayed from the ground at their feet. Slade backpedaled an ungainly dance. Joss vaulted the porch rail and landed running, praying that Aidan hadn’t just relieved herself of part of her own right foot.

“You idiot!” Slade bellowed; Aidan, who had only flinched at his touch and was more surprised than he was that the gun had gone off, looked up in amazement as he raised his hand. “Stupid woman! I’ll teach you—”

“It’s the last thing you’ll ever do, Slade!” Joss was still ten steps away; her throat would be sore for a week from the force of her roar. He wheeled as she skidded to a stop between them, shielding Aidan, blazing her rage at him: “You’re the Goddamned idiot! I told you it had a hair trigger! Did you hear me?

Did you even listen? If your brains was bullets you couldn’t hit a

bull’s ass with a bagful o’ banjos! Aidan, are you hurt?”

Something feral burned in those dark eyes; Aidan would have looked away had she been able. “No,” she whispered. “No, Joss. He just—startled me.”

“That you’re unhurt is this imbecile’s extreme good fortune.”

Joss took the revolver from her. Slade’s hand hovered near his pistol. “Hang your fright, sir; I’d’ve killed you from the porch had I cared to,” she snapped, and yanked a black hair from her head to thread through the trigger guard. She looped the single strand across the trigger and drew back the hammer; she aimed at a bottle on the fence and tightened the fragile loop of hair. The Colt roared. The bottle exploded. She cocked it and pulled again; another bottle blew glittering shards into the sunlight, and another; on the next one the hair broke and Joss squeezed off the round with her finger. “That, you skirt-chasin’

son of a bitch, is a hair trigger by definition. Startle her again an’

I’ll define it a right smart o’ closer to you.”

“Are you threatening an officer of the Cavalry?”

“I’m tellin’ you how it is.”

“The round remaining in your weapon makes it sound a threat, Miss Bodett.”

She opened the loading gate to eject five spent casings and show the tip of the ejector rod through a sixth, empty chamber, the one she always left clear under the hammer. She offered the Colt. “Your turn to buy the bullets.”

He shook his head, and deliberately dropped six rounds into the revolver. He dangled it at Aidan by its trigger guard from his longest finger. “Does perchawnce” —it was a smirking drawl; Aidan was heartily weary of his damnable smirk— “the lady so desire?”

Her look made him seem like a neophyte in the unpleasantsmile business.
“Mais oui,”
she purred, accepting the Peacemaker.

“But my dear Captain Slade” —her voice was like honey, her meaning clear as the morning sky as she held the revolver casually aimed at his belly— “do please remember how easily I’m startled.”

0

Joss turned, barely stifling a laugh. Slade watched her stroll to the house; she settled into a rocker on the porch, her feet on the rail, her hat on her knee, a picture of arrogant disrespect for him and his position. He didn’t know she sat because she couldn’t stand, cold sweat prickling hard over her; she was but a week on the well side of death’s door, and between the run and the run-in, her legs had deserted her.

“You tell her—” he started.

“If you want her told, Captain, you tell her. You teach me to shoot. It is, if you’ll recall, your duty?”

“This is a harsh country teeming with savages with four legs or two, not some suburb of Philadelphia with constables you may call on,” he gritted. “God knows she’s crazy as a backhouse rat, but surely you have sense enough to see that two women alone stand no chance here. You’ll die here, probably horribly.”

And it dawned on her that Argus Slade was himself afraid of the West, of its harshness and its teeming savages, and that he swaggered and postured in a piteous attempt to hide that fear; she had heard his voice rise an octave when he had felt the threat of Joss’s rage. “That’s possible,” she said gently. “I merely doubt that our exflunctication will happen as soon as so many people seem to think. May we begin, sir?” Joss watched from the porch. Aidan’s first attempt went high, wide and handsome of any target; Slade talked, gesturing desultorily. Aidan raised the Colt. Smoke puffed and dirt kicked up in front of the fence—but purely under the post she had been aiming for, Joss noted;her aim was good even if her elevation wasn’t. She had to shake her head in grudging understanding for Slade’s predicament as a teacher when he started to touch her and remembered in time not to get shot. “Good boy,” she murmured, as he folded his arms. “You learn a right smart o’ quick, ol’ son.”

The Colt came up in Aidan’s two-handed grip.

A bottle exploded.

Joss scratched her jaw, wondering if luck or inherent ability should be credited, and was answered when the next three bullets blew three bottles to shards. The captain’s hands implied that

anyone might enjoy a moment of good fortune; he reloaded and offered the revolver. Joss didn’t hear what Aidan said; she only knew she said something before riveting her attention to bottles and fenceposts and the pride of Samuel Colt.

Four of six bottles disintegrated. The sixth wobbled, its fencepost newly-plugged; finally it toppled. A breath of breeze carried Aidan’s words back to the porch: “I think a man shot there might tip over as well.” Joss laughed out loud; a look like the one her cousin was giving the captain, Brother Ethan would have said, was enough to leave a man pissing straight out for not being able to find enough pecker to hang over the edge of his buttons.

Slade whistled to his horse. The mare trotted up agreeably, and from his advantage of height on her back he stabbed a finger at Aidan, obviously for some last, rancorous word before he gave the reins a jerk toward the Newtonville trail. Surprised, the mare reared, and got a rake of the spurs for her protest. “Take him under the sweeper at a dead run,” Joss muttered at the bolting horse. “Knock some sense into the damn fool.”

She stood as Aidan came up the step. “So what was the parting shot?”

Aidan turned to aim the pistol at Slade’s departing back. Before Joss knew she would do it, she pulled the trigger. The impotent click of the hammer on a spent shell was, to Joss, almost as loud as an explosion of powder would have been. “His prophecy for our mutual and untimely demise,” Aidan spat, and slapped the empty gun into Joss’s belly. “Here. Now I know how to shoot.”

Joss managed to hang onto the pistol. “Aidan—” She caught her cousin’s arm. “Aidan, wait! Why are you steamed up at me?”

“Because you—” She turned, looking as angry as her beginning words, and Joss braced herself, but the flare didn’t come; Aidan sagged against the side of the house. “Because I—”

She put her face into her hands. “Because I wanted you to teach me,” she whispered. “And he just—he just—he just thrust himself between us. And you didn’t stop him.”

“You didn’t leave me much room,” Joss said softly. “I opened every door I could think of, Aidan.”

“And I didn’t take them.” She crossed her arms over her breasts, hiding them from the memory of Slade’s eyes. “I know. I’m not angry at you. I’m just—”

Joss put the pistol on her chair; hesitantly, she touched Aidan’s arm. “Why’d you keep on with it? A few bullets wasn’t worth you goin’ through that.”

“It had nothing to do with bullets. I had to know I could stand up to him. I felt—”

Joss didn’t know what it was that flickered in her cousin’s eyes; she only knew that it was deep and cold. She touched her fingertips in bare suggestion to Aidan’s shoulder, but Aidan turned from her, refusing the solace of her arms. Joss stuck her hands into her hip pockets. “Well, I’m real proud of you,” she said roughly. “Took a parcel more’n twelve rounds ’fore I shot that good.”

“I had to get away from him.”

Joss snorted a humorless laugh. “You could rake out Hell with a fine-tooth comb an’ not find his likes in the lot.” She followed Aidan into the kitchen, hating Slade for his disruption of a morning that might have been so sweet, angry at herself for knowing no way to comfort her cousin now that her embrace had been rejected. “I won’t cry to see him off to Montana nor cry if he don’t come back. Pa hates him. Says if that’s what the Cavalry’s comin’ to we’re in for a hard go.”

She got the kettle from the stove to heat up her dishwater.

“Sit. I’ll do them,” she said, when Aidan reached for a dish towel; it sounded so abruptly like an order that meekly, Aidan sat. “They got no Goddamned business in the Black Hills anyway. They gave the Sioux that land, like it was ever theirs to give. Now they find gold an’ want it back. They act like that Roman god with two faces, an’

talkin’ out o’ both mouths at the same time.” She banged the kettle back to the stove. “I got no damn use for soldiers. They’re for the most part young an’ drunken louts from the cities who can’t ride or shoot, but I never met a Indian I didn’t respect.”

She sniffed the dishcloth, rejected it, got a fresh one. “The way folks keep comin’ round here tryin’ to get this place, I got a feelin’ for the natives. I’m a better farmer by a damn sight than ary o’ what’s offerin’ to buy me out, but the sons o’ bitches act like they’re God over me ’cause I’m a woman, same’s they act like they’re God over the Indian. I’m white so they prob’ly won’t just up an’ kill me for it, but they’ll try every other damn thing they can scheme up to get it.” She rattled dishes into the washwater. “I might win. But Crazy Horse is dead. So’s Sittin’ Bull. So are all their people. They just don’t know it yet.”

Aidan had known Joss was angry beyond the unpredictable flares of her temper; she hadn’t known how deeply ... and it had never occurred to her that Indians might be more than the savages she’d been taught they were, or that Joss might know and respect them. “You’re not afraid of them? The Indians?”

“They’re a clean, spare people. We’ve cornered ’em like cats in a stall, an’ that’s worth bein’ afraid of. Most cats got sense enough to back off from a fat-tailed tom in his own barn.” She jerked the rinsing kettle from the stove and thumped it beside the sink, and put the plates she had washed into the steaming water.

“But a soldier’ll just shoot every cat he sees for knowin’ they all got claws.” Her words were part rage, part resignation. “The only land the red man’ll have left when the government’s done is the two-by-six he’s buried in, an’ the white man won’t respect that, just like if I took Ott Clark’s or Thom Richland’s money an’ lit out for California—hell, they’d have beans growin’ up top the Bodetts buried out there an’ them headboards burnt in the stove. White men don’t respect nothin’ but their own wants.”

She snapped a cup towel from the wire over the stove and banged dishes to their places as she dried them. “They don’t understand home, or give a damn for just havin’ enough. They only ever want more, an’ don’t care how they get it.”

She dumped the dishwater, poured the rinsewater into the pan, and jammed cup towels and dishcloths into the still-steaming water. She grated in soap and sloshed the small laundry around, leaving it to soak while she took the bucket to the well. Back

with it, she slopped the rinse-kettle full; water hissed and danced over the surface of the stove. She dumped the laundry water and poured the rest of the fresh water into the dishpan to rinse the soap from the linens, and dumped that and wrung the cloths and hung them over the stove, all in a dark fury words hadn’t dissipated. “I’d burn this house an’ salt the fields ere I’d see that son of a bitch Slade own a speck of it.” She banged around in the china closet, finding a small, soft leather bag, and slammed out to the porch.

Aidan sat at the table, her eyes closed, her breath shallow in her throat; Joss might be a Bodett by name, but there was no denying her Blackstone blood. She sighed, finally, and stood. There was something she’d neglected to say, and if that oversight was part of Joss’s ill humor, it was a part she could try to appease. Joss was leaning on the porch rail, trying with fingers not quite steady enough to roll a cigarette. “I owe you an apology,”

Aidan said quietly, and Joss looked up. “I was dreadfully rude to you. You didn’t deserve it, and I’m sorry. And thank you for defending me. I’m sure he meant to strike me.”

“I’d be diggin’ a hole in the beans by now if he had. You’ve been struck often enough.” She abandoned the cigarette she’d been trying to make, jamming the little bag inside her shirt and her hands into her jeans pockets. “There’d be a measure o’

satisfaction in plantin’ that jackanapes.”

“He’s hardly worth the risk to your soul. Are you all right?”

“I’m angry. It’s nothin’ you did. It’s over principle, an’ it don’t go away. It only rises an’ ebbs, an’ it needs to ebb.” She picked the Colt from the rocker and took it inside; she cleaned it meticulously, and loaded it, and snugged it into its holster, and by the time she was done, the anger had receded.

On the porch, Aidan sat wearily in one of the rockers; she didn’t look up until Joss spoke.

“It seems since you’ve been here we’ve had so much turmoil, an’ so little chance to just sit an’ talk,” Joss said quietly. “If I made a pot o’ tea, could we try an’ start fresh?”