The Grass Widow (9 page)

“English tea, please. That Chinese brew of yours—”

Joss grinned. “I know. The vile concoction. Good pekoe it shall be.”

She managed a smile, holding it until Joss turned, then went back to her silent battle with her digestion. For weeks, waking up had been enough to distress her; any disruption of her morning routine queased her breakfast in her. The Kansas battles with her father had reduced her to a cold-sweating misery huddled over a basin or the back porch rail; halfway across the continent by train was an experience she wanted only to forget. Argus Slade—

“I forget if you take milk or—Aidan? You’re white as butter!

What—”

“I’m sorry, Joss, I’m going to be—”

Joss got her to the edge of the porch, and held her head;
strange,
Aidan thought, gagging,
how a cool palm at your forehead
helps you know you’ll live through the indignity.
“I’m—oh, Joss, I’m sorry—”

“Shh. Just let it come.”

She had no choice. When it was over her legs deserted her; Joss supported her in her collapse to the porch floor. She hated needing the support, but had no choice in that, either, and she leaned, swallowing and shivering, into Joss’s worried embrace.

“Aidan, what is it? Are you—please, are you all right? What’s the—”

“It’s just the baby,” she managed. “I’m fine, I just feel like hell—oh, Joss.” It was part sob, part laugh. “Now you’ve taught me to cuss.”

“There’s naught wrong with a cuss if you feel better for the sayin’.” Her hand was cool, holding her head to her shoulder.

“Should I go for Doc?”

“No,” she whispered. “No. Just stay with me. Just for a minute—”

Joss held her. For a moment, that was all she wanted. She hated the raw taste in her throat, the tears, the stuffy nose; she felt like a child ill with something, wishing for a mother to hold her as gently as Joss did now, and that want shivered through her like a leftover from the night before. After Jared, all she had wanted

was to huddle in her mother’s arms, to know the elemental bond of women wounded by a common enemy, but that day she had learned what it meant to be alone.

“It’s all right—” Joss was all arms and legs and comfort around her, keeping her close to the hard curves of her body. “It’s all right, little cousin. I’m here.”

I’m here.

I’ll just love you, so you’ll always know there’s someone who does.
She drove her face hard into Joss’s chest, clenching her jaw against the tears that wanted to come, against the words that wanted to come: I love you too. She didn’t want to say them; she didn’t dare say them. She was afraid she didn’t know what they really meant. “I need some water,” she whispered, and felt Joss’s lips brush the top of her head before she untangled herself enough to stand and offer her hand to help Aidan up. She sank into a rocker, wondering when she had ever felt so awful, or so pampered, and while Joss got her water she missed her with a low, lonely ache; her last conversation with Doc turned over in her mind the way her breakfast had turned over in her stomach. She wished she could so easily get rid of the words. Joss brought a glass of water for her, and a cup of tea for herself, but she didn’t sit; she tapped a booted toe against a rocker of the chair, and finally, hesitantly, she said, “You said it was the baby. Aidan, should I go for Doc? If you’re—”

“It’s just morning sickness, Joss. The baby’s all right. Didn’t your mother go through this?”

“No. Did it happen while I was sick?”

Wearily, she smiled. “I didn’t have time to be sick while you were sick. It’s simply self-indulgence now that you’re well.”

Appeased, Joss sat at the edge of the porch with her cup.

“Indulge yourself, then. I owe you an’ welcome the debt.”

She snorted a laugh. “Some self-indulgence, puking off the porch.”

Joss laughed, too, a burst of spontaneous amusement at her crudity. “There’s those who’d choke ere they’d suffer the indulgence! Lord, I’ve no use for them who’d falute so high the

porch rail’s past their possibility.” She had started earlier to roll a cigarette, and found her makings now to complete the job; Aidan watched in bemusement. “Seems to me” —Joss paused to lick the seam of her smoke, then sealed and shaped it— “as like too many got their noses too high up in the air to scent the difference between commonness an’ common humanness. We all puke, an’

we all call it that to ourselves. The difference is what we call it in polite company” —she scratched a match on the sole of her boot— “which I ain’t.”

“My stars,” Aidan said faintly. “You’re going to smoke that.”

A smile twitched at a corner of Joss’s mouth; she lit up and blew out the match with a smoky breath. “I’ve been known to take the occasional an’ not entirely medicinal dose of whiskey, too. I’ll warn you now to save surprisin’ you later.” She slid a sidelong glance at Aidan, seeing her shock; she sighed and used the matchstick to coax a bit of something hard and brown out of the crease between her boot and sole. “Cousin, I’ve spent my life cheek by jaw with men, puttin’ out the same sweat an’ blisters for no more reward than the wings o’ the chicken whilst the menfolk get the breasts an’ thighs an’ drumsticks—an’ Ma gets the pope’s nose an’ the bones to give a pickin’ once the boys is out smokin’

on the porch.” She broke the stick of the match between her fingers and tossed the pieces into the yard. “Seems if Ethan earns a drink drivin’ the hay-wagon, I’ve surely earned one spendin’

the day forkin’ hay into it an’ waitin’ while he gets first water in the bath. But if it offends you—the smokin’ or the liquor, either or both—I’ll keep it out of the house.”

Aidan ticked a nervous fingernail against her glass. “I can’t make such a demand of you in your own home.”

“You don’t sleep under that roof? It’s your home as well.”

“Not to the point of denying you your pleasures.”

Joss watched the smoke drift from her cigarette. “I take more pleasure in your company than anything else,” she said softly. “I wish you’d feel enough at ease to say if things I do distress you, so I’d know to stop.”

Aidan hid behind a sip of her water, confused by the warmth

her cousin’s words had stirred in her; Joss seemed discomposed, too, scratching at her jaw, flicking a forefinger at a spot of dirt on the knee of her jeans, finally staring out across freshly-turned fields, searching them as if for a hint of burgeoning life in soil planted but a day before. “I’ve never known anyone like you.”

Shyness softened Aidan’s voice. “You do puzzle me sometimes, Cousin Joss.”

“I expect you ain’t the first one I’ve puzzled.”

It wasn’t the first time she had seen the set of weary disquiet in her elder cousin’s shoulders, but it was the first time Joss had allowed it there if she thought Aidan could see. A breeze wandered across the porch, ruffling Joss’s shirt and taking the smoke of her cigarette away, and Aidan leaned back in her rocker, letting the cool air and the dry, comfortable creak of cane calm her. Almost reluctantly—for in their silence there seemed to be a low, warm trust she wasn’t sure she dared chance breaking—she ventured, “Joss?”

Joss glanced at her in question when she didn’t go on.

“I meant to say—” She gathered her courage. “Last night? I... you were so—thank you. You were—are—so...kind. I know it’s childish to be afraid of the dark—”

“No, Aidan.” It was a remote protest, as if most of her mind had followed her gaze back across the damp, dark fields. “If it’s childish, it’s that children have sense enough to fear what deserves fearin’. It ain’t the dark they fear so much as what they can’t see comin’ at ’em out of it.”

“I never was, before—” Self-consciously, she touched her belly. “But I—I remember it. What he—I remember, and it—it I get—it drives the sleep from me. And today—Captain Slade—” She rubbed a hand across her forehead. “I don’t know what, saving that I hope I can sleep tonight.”

What Joss examined was not the fields or the distant hills, but the still-disturbing memory of drowsing from sleep to find Aidan in her arms; she had never shared a bed with anyone, or considered how deeply intimate that might be. She had awakened as Aidan had, confused and cautious, to realize that the soft

warmth in her hand was her cousin’s breast, and she had moved that hand as quickly as she could without disturbing Aidan . . . but Aidan had murmured a sleeping protest, her hand searching for Joss’s, returning it to that warmth, and Joss, with her hand full of that silken roundness, felt smooth legs close around her thigh to draw it near to that most private warmth; she felt Aidan’s breath deepen, and heard her sleeping murmur:
you feel so good—

There had been no more sleep. She felt the pulse of her palm, and the fullness it cupped; she knew her awareness of Aidan snugged into the curve of her. She searched how her breasts and belly felt, pressed close to that silk-clad back; she breathed the scent of her hair, and brushed that hair aside to let her lips find the smoothness of her cousin’s neck, and knew the purr of unconscious pleasure her kiss drew from the woman in her arms. “I hope you can too,” she whispered, and took a last hot taste of her cigarette and dropped the end to the ground and stepped on it, and looked up to find blue eyes heavy-lidded in their consideration of her.

“I felt so safe with you holding me.” Aidan’s voice was soft as the song of night wind in grown corn, the sound of the night’s cool invitation. “I felt so...treasured.” She looked away, and so did Joss.

“As if nothing could ever hurt me again, because you wouldn’t let it. And he would have, but you stopped him, and...” She faltered; her face felt hot with some unnamed embarrassment.

“I wanted to kill him when he touched you.” She didn’t dare look at Aidan; she picked at a scab on her knuckle. “I knew he’d take it too far, or not show you decent respect, or—an’—it was like I was jealous,” she said softly. “I’ve never been jealous before. Ethan told me what a God-awful thing that was, for me to know what to name it now. He said it’d make a person’s guts feel like... like swallowin’ hot coals, an’ that’s how it felt to me, when he touched at you.”

Something twitched at her belly; Aidan stood, not knowing why she needed distance, only knowing she did. She went to the end of the porch, hugging the post there. The chickens argued in the yard; the horses, Charley and Fritz, stood somnolent in

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the pasture, sharing tails, ignoring the placid cow. The gray cat walked the top rail of the fence under the willow tree. She closed her eyes against the markers inside that fence, forcing back a burn of tears. The porch floor squeaked and she knew Joss was behind her. “I begged my father to end this pregnancy,” she whispered.

“I begged him, Joss. His answer was to try to beat the fear of God into me.” A harsh laugh jittered from her. “Doc says he will, if I decide in the next two weeks, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do! That’s a baby, a child inside me that I don’t want—Joss, can you keep me safe from this? Can you keep this from hurting?”

Hands closed around her shoulders. “I know what to say as much as you know what to do.” Aidan felt the warmth of breath against her neck. “I only know to say that you’re welcome here, Aidan. Whatever you decide, you’re welcome here.”

Her throat fluttered with tears. She swallowed, trying to hold them back. “Do you have an opinion?”

“Yes. But it’d be wrong to tell you, an’ always wonder if I swayed you. You’re my blood kin. If you go with Doc, I’ll love you. If you go without him I’ll love you both.”

It was too hard to cry alone; she turned to the shelter of Joss’s warmth. When it seemed she might have her control she tried to pull away, for she was embarrassed by so many tears in such a short time, but Joss kept her in her arms. “Let me hold you—” It wasn’t a demand, just an invitation, and she couldn’t refuse it. “I don’t know this hurt, but I know how hurt feels to have it alone. Please, Aidan. Let me hold you.”

She saw the little graveyard, its markers blurred by tears, and wondered how many times Joss might have wished to be held when no one’s arms were there for her. “You asked if I’d ever been loved,” she whispered into the worn-soft cotton of Joss’s shirt. “I don’t know, Joss. They’d say they did” —a pained laugh escaped her— “usually just before he’d beat me for my own good. That’s what they said. It was for my own good. But it didn’t feel like love. It felt like—like I was a mistake they made and had to put up with. I don’t want this baby to know I didn’t want it the

way I know they never wanted me. I never mattered to them—to anyone—” She swallowed. “Until now. Joss, tell me how you feel. I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do.”

The hands that framed her face were as hard-palmed, as rough-skinned as the hands of a working man, but they were as gentle as a mother’s. Her voice was unsteady. “Decide as you will, but stay with me. Aidan, you don’t just matter to me. You’re all that matters. You, an’ the baby—” Too late, she tried to catch it back.“Oh, Joss!” Aidan jammed her forehead into Joss’s throat.

“You want me to keep it? You don’t know! What he did to me—”

“No,” Joss whispered. “I don’t know what he did to you, Aidan, any more than I know their minds when they call it your fault. I know it wasn’t. Aidan, please...is that Doc’s crop out there just ’cause he planted it? It’s my land, my sweat to come, my heart beatin’ an’ the good Lord’s will if the corn grows tall an’ the beans set on—sowin’ ain’t reapin’, Aidan, an’ nothin’ more to the Scripture savin’ how you care to read it.”

She didn’t know what she felt, besides cold; she didn’t know what she heard besides the hard pulse of her cousin’s heart. She didn’t know where the words came from, or why, when they came: “A floor,” she whispered. “Please, Joss. I want a floor in the kitchen.”

Joss’s arms closed hard around her. “I can give you that.”

The rooster had crowed half an hour past on the morning of a Sunday that already promised to be hot. “Joss,” Aidan said almost timidly, when her cousin emerged dressed in her usual Levi’s and one of Ethan’s shirts—it had probably once been red, but had faded to a dusty rose, and it made Joss look sharp and clean and feral in the morning light—“won’t we be going to church?”