The Grass Widow (10 page)

Joss finished pinning up the black mane of her hair. “Didn’t go to church when I didn’t have a quarter to do o’ what I got to get done today, an’ already off to a late start. Rooster’s crowin’ on one wing this mornin’ or I’m lazy, one.” She took a speckleware cup from a nail on the wall over the sink and went to the stove.

“Meanin’ no disrespect for churchgoin’, Aidan, but I got yardful o’ livestock out there that’ll be a lot happier to see me gettin’ in the hay than spendin’ the mornin’ gettin’ to town an’ back an’

listenin’ to that gasbag of a Baptist in the middle o’ the mess.” She licked a finger to tap on the side of the coffee pot, like checking an iron for hotness, before she poured the cup full; she looked into the big kettle of water that always simmered on the back middle burner of the stove, and lifted the lid of the hot water tank, and checked the fire, finding everything in good morning order. “But I’d hitch you up the wagon if you wanted to go.”

Aidan knew how to drive a shay behind her mother’s gentle Morgan, but she had never been comfortable with the reins; she couldn’t imagine piloting a buckboard behind the immense pair of draft horses any more than she could imagine walking unaccompanied into the Washburn Station Baptist Church for the first time. “I couldn’t possibly. But surely you’re not going to work on the Sabbath? Joss, it’s—”

“Cousin, I’ll ask the good Lord’s mercy on how I go about survivin’ the situation He put me into Himself. He rested on the seventh day ’cause He had the job done. Next Sunday, if that hay’s all teddered, mayhap we can be restful an’ churchgoin’, but you need to know it ain’t a habit o’ mine. If it’s one o’ yours an’ you want to go on with it, I’ll teach you to drive the wagon. Won’t take no time. Charley knows what to do an’ Fritz goes along.” She tasted her coffee and went to the milk pail under the sink; she skimmed off some cream to stir into her cup. “I don’t mean to offend you, but I got my differences with how the Baptist reads the Scripture. I see Marcus an’ the Jackson boys restin’ of a Sunday, but Earlene puts a fancy board in front of

’em at four o’clock, an’ God ain’t doin’ the cookin’ or washin’

the dishes either, an’ both o’ them chores always felt like work to me. All I ever seen settin’ around on Sunday was the menfolk, an’—Damn! Milk’s soured.” She dumped her coffee into the sink and got the pail out from under it. “Chickens’ll get it, I reckon; I ain’t got time to fool with cheese this week.”

She put the pail on the edge of the porch, where the milk would clabber in the day’s hard sun, and stepped back into the house for her hat. “Guess you got your Sunday sermon after all. Sorry for runnin’ my jaw. I’m goin’ to milk the cow. If it’s against

your thinkin’ to work today, it won’t put me out o’ chirk, Aidan. Suit your own believin’.”

Aidan leaned against the sideboard by the sink, remembering the fine Sunday dinners that had welcomed her family home from church, remembering her father blessing the food that the Lord had provided— “The Lord in the personage of Matilda MacGuire,” she murmured, and put a stick of wood in the stove to bring the oven up for biscuits. If that devoutly Catholic woman who was the Blackstone’s cook could work on a Sunday, so could Aidan Blackstone.

There was a metronome in the field by the road, that nineacre plot surrounded by barbed wire to keep the livestock out of the hay; Aidan sat on the porch, her needle working in rhythm to the swing of the pendulum that was the scythe wielded by her cousin Joss. Stepsweep, stepsweep, stepsweep; hay fell in neat rows as Joss worked her way down the length of the meadow. She had been at it for hours, pausing only to drink from a bucket at the dooryard end of the field, and the swath she had cut was discouragingly narrow.

When she was almost back to the near end, Aidan put down her mending and drew fresh water from the well. She and Joss arrived at the fence at about the same time. “Aren’t you an angel.”

Joss leaned her scythe against the wire. “I was thinkin’ on that stale water an’ not likin’ the idea much.” She poured the first dipper over her head and drank the second one. “I quit sweatin’ a few minutes ago. That’s a shade too dry for my likin’.”

“It’s too hot for such work today.” Aidan refilled the ladle.

“And you’re still not completely well from your sickness, Joss. You mustn’t overdo.”

“I’m well enough. An’ this don’t hold a candle to hayin’ in August.” She held out her battered felt hat like a bowl; Aidan looked at her in question. “Fill it right up. Workin’ hay in August, you know what the good Lord’s got in store for you for workin’ on Sundays,” she grinned, putting on the filled hat; water cascaded over her back and shoulders.

Aidan wished she could smile back in complete appreciation of the teasing. She had justified cooking as a necessary evil, and mending as keeping her hands from idleness, but she wished Joss, had she felt compelled to do something today, might have chosen to make a new egg basket (or at least repair the one that was falling apart), or whittle an axe handle, or find some other chore that would allow her to sit in the shade and pretend she was enjoying what she was doing. “This is a pleasure next to August,”

Joss added, as if she’d been listening in on Aidan’s thoughts.

“Don’t even feel like work.”

“Don’t add purveying untruths to your sins,” Aidan said dryly, as Joss took a long whetstone from her pocket and touched up the edge of her blade, “or the Lord might not even see fit to provide you a stone to sharpen the instrument of your eternal torture.”

“That’d be small of Him.” Joss wiped her dripping face on her sleeve. “I’ve been talkin’ to the Lord out here, Aidan, an’ I got a feelin’ He understands me pretty well. He made them beasts in the pasture, too, an’ knows they’re countin’ on me for their bed an’ board come winter.” She stuck the stone back into her hip pocket. “I know the Book says to remember the Sabbath an’ keep it holy. I can pray an’ cut hay at the same time, but the hay ain’t goin’ to cut itself, an’ I ain’t testin’ the Lord by askin’ Him for no private miracles. Says not to, right in Matthew. I thank you for the water.”

“Don’t work beyond its lasting. Eternal damnation is long enough for you to know how sunstroke feels.”

Joss touched the brim of her hat in acknowledgment of the warning and took the snath in her hands. She turned and stepped and swept, and the blade hissed an eighteen-inch swath through golden grass. A clump of hay fell to her left, the start of another six-hundred-foot windrow. Aidan, seeing how long it had taken her cousin to clear a tenfoot path through the square field, suspected that the rest of Joss’s week was going to blur into a drone of repetition as dreary as the sound inside a train that was taking its passengers to places they had no desire to see.

It takes men to run a place.
Effie Richland’s voice came back to her as she watched Joss pace slowly down the field: stepsweep, stepsweep, stepsweep. She turned with a small, soft sigh, wishing she could disbelieve the acidic storekeeper.

“Will you look,” Joss murmured, looking at the golden roasted chicken, and at the woman across the table from her; slowly, her glance touched the empty chairs at the table. “A whole damn chicken an’ not but two mouths to peck at it.”

“What may I serve you?” Quietly, Aidan asked.

Joss slipped her napkin from under her fork; carefully, she spread it on her lap. “I’m used to a wing.” Her voice was soft and rough. “But if Ethan’s sick of a Sunday, or gone, I’ll sometimes have a drumstick.” A brief ghost of a smile haunted her face.

“He’s got to be a right smart o’ sick or busy to miss Ma’s Sunday chicken. Yankee chicken, Pa calls it. Says she never could fry chicken like a decent Southern woman, nor try to, even, but he sure can eat his fill o’ that Yankee chicken.”

Aidan didn’t think she’d ever seen a human being who had as much right to be tired as had Joss Bodett that evening. She had worked from seven until five, taking only enough pause to eat lunch and smoke a cigarette before she was back to the scythe; her only concession to the simmering heat of the afternoon had been to linger a few moments in the shade of the massive oak trees at each end of the field when she got to them. Aidan had called to her at four, trying to bring her in; she got a wave of response, but half an hour later when she looked Joss was at the far end of the field, the lowering sun flashing off the straw-scoured blade of the scythe. Aidan attacked the triangle at the end of the porch with the irritation of any woman whose afternoon in the kitchen has been greeted with yet-empty chairs at the table, even though dinner was almost an hour from being ready, and Joss was on the porch ten minutes later, her hair damp and her rolled-up sleeves wet at the distal ends from her quick wash at the trough. “Dinner already?”

“Dinner after you’ve had a bath. I’ve been near enough to

hay to know you must itch, though I’m sure I couldn’t know how horribly.”

“Bath?” Joss blinked at her. “I just had one last night.”

That was a piece of Kansas custom Aidan meant to change on the parcel of post road real estate over which she had influence, however minute: that business of a bath on Saturday night whether it was needed or not, but no more often whether it was needed or not. Joss’s sweat was fresh and honestly-earned, but tomorrow it would be old; by Saturday Aidan knew she would have been giving her cousin wide berth for several days. “Your tub’s all made. No sense in wasting such an amount of hot water.”

She plucked a clean shirt and jeans from the sideboard; Joss took them more out of reflex than wanting to. “You can have your privacy, or I’ll wash your back for you.”

Joss eyed the clothes in her hands. “Well,” she murmured. “I guess you got told, sister.” And now, clean and freshly-dressed, she considered the drumstick and thigh of chicken Aidan had put on her plate with the same expression she had aimed at the clean clothes: disbelief at the oddity of such a thing.

Aidan added a spoonful of fresh peas to her cousin’s plate.

“Eat. If you work like you did today without food enough to sustain such effort, I’ll be back where I started this uncommon adventure: nowhere else to go and you collapsing before my very eyes.” She cut into the pan of cornbread she had made. “I don’t know about this johnnycake. I followed your mother’s recipe, but it doesn’t look like any johnnycake I ever saw.”

Joss broke off a corner and tasted it. “I’d wager you used grits, not corn meal. It don’t taste bad; it’s just a little—” She stopped in the name of diplomacy; it was hard as a brickbat. “Corn meal’s in the lard tin with the C on the lid. Grits is marked with a G.”

Diplomatic again, she added, “Them two look a lot alike, don’t they, Cs an’ Gs.”

She ate a piece of the unusual bread with what Aidan had served her, and another piece with a wing of the chicken, and a fat slice of pecan pie (that morning Aidan had opened a lard can she hadn’t dared unlid before, fearing what she might find,

and discovered it full of shelled pecans). “Flora Washburn’s got a whole orchard,” Joss told her when she cut the pie. “Must be a hundred trees. Ethan was goin’ by one day an’ on a whim he stopped an’ asked what she’d get for a flour sack of ‘em. ‘Boy,’

she says, ‘you can take home whatever you can carry,’ thinkin’ he only had that one sack he’d showed her. Well, he’d been on his way to the miller—that’s Mister Nissen; he gives a penny apiece for sacks back. He must’ve had a quarter’s worth of ’em. T’ain’t hard work or he’d’ve never picked ’em all full. He said Flora like to died laughin’ watchin’ him try to hang all them sacks o’ nuts all over Charley. We was all the winter crackin’ his damn pecans. The shells’re good to light the stove in the mornin’, though. Flare right up on the leastest coals.”

“I hope the pie’s better than the cornbread,” Aidan said; Joss was touching the rolled edge of the crust with a tine of her fork, trying to get it to flake. “I used to help Mrs. MacGuire fill the shells, but she’d never let me touch the crust.”

Joss forked a healthy bite into her mouth. “Damn near good as Ma’s,” she allowed, and cleaned up the first piece and had another small sliver. “Let me know next time an’ I’ll help you with the crust. You got this one almost right. A tad short, but pie crust’s awful hard to learn.”

Clean, her belly full, her back warm from the dying woodstove, Joss was nodding before Aidan finished stacking the dishes. “Stay put. I’ll do them,” Aidan said gently, and when the dishes were washed she woke Joss only enough to make her easy to lead from the table to her room.

“I c’n do it,” Joss mumbled, fumbling for buttons when Aidan would have helped her out of her jeans. “Ain’ all that tired.”

She let her try; she ended up doing it anyway, and she turned back the covers and guided Joss into the bed. “Sleep well,” she said at the door; she knew Joss hadn’t the night before or she never would have been in bed past the rooster’s alarm. Joss made a noise that might have been a response or the beginning of a snore, and Aidan closed the door and went to finish the last small details of cleaning up her kitchen.

The Bull and Whistle was a quiet place on a Sunday night; most of the wives of Washburn Station forbade their men to take a drink or play a card on the Sabbath, but there was a desultory game of two-handed cribbage in progress when Doc Pickett wandered in. He sat with the players and nodded to Jack Bull when the barkeep held up a beer mug. “Two, four, an’ eight’s a doz,” Ottis Clark counted. “That’s a buck, Marcus b’hoy.”

“Oh, for Chr—crackin’ ice.” Marcus Jackson held his curse in deference to the day and tossed his cards face-up to the felt.

“Look at that son of a snake, too.”

Doc shook his head in sympathy at the hand that had come too late to count: pairs of fours and fives, four points turned into twenty-four by the six of hearts on the cut. “It’s a pretty hand anyway,” he offered.

Ott cackled. “Pretty hand’s like a pretty woman. No good if you can’t peg’er. You ‘member that, don’tcha, Doc? Post the pony, Mister Mudsill.”

“You callin’ me Mudsill’s like gettin’ called ugly by a toad.”

Marcus tossed a dollar across the table; Ott traded it to Jack Bull for a shot of rye and some change. “Seen Joss out there today slayin’ hay,” Marcus said. “When you gonna talk some sense into