The Grass Widow (13 page)

Joss touched the coolness of the glass to her cheek, looking at or past or through Aidan for a drawn moment before she drank.

“What of it?” Her voice was soft and raspy. “God calls the tune. You dance.” And she took a wide turn of thought, returning to the road they had started down. “How could I not accept you?

To refuse you would be to refuse my mother—to refuse myself. I had no choice but to care about you, Aidan. To find how much I care for you—” She emptied the glass; the whiskey whispered its warm song to her. “I’d love you if you were no kin to me.”

Slowly, Aidan shook her head. “Joss, I’ve never had anyone I could trust. I’ve never had anyone I knew I could turn to without wondering if they’d really be there. I’ve never known how it feels not to be lonely, and now...How can you think to ask why I’d stay? What you give me—!”

Joss scuffed the toe of her boot at the worn-hard dirt surface of the floor. “Yuh. Everything a city girl might ever need or want, right here in Washburn Station, Kansas.”

“It was good enough for your mother.”

“No it wasn’t. It’s just what she got.”

“Lord, you don’t listen—” She scraped back from the table, scarring the dirt with the legs of her chair. “You, Joss Bodett. I have you.” She went to Joss and took her face in her hands.

“Don’t you understand? Be we cousins or sisters or whatever we may call it, what we give each other is love back in our hearts. No floor can ever mean more, Joss.”

Be we cousins or sisters—
That was the kiss Aidan touched

to her mouth, but Joss had to grope for the reins of emotions charging away with her: she had never known a debutantes’ ball, or a symphony, or a president’s handshake; she had never known the pure ache of desire for a lover’s kiss—

Until now. It took of all her will not to bury her hands in Aidan’s hair, not to bend her head to that trusting warmth and ask with her kiss if cousins or sisters was all the love there might be between them. “Yes—” It was an unsteady breath into that fragrant hair; precariously, she held her, absorbing the frightened shiver that had started deep inside herself. “Yes, Aidan. I do love you.”

At first Aidan didn’t know what it was that night that drew her from sleep; she curled into the quilt she had grown to love for its history (the dresses Jocelyn had worn while she was pregnant with Ruth, too painful to wear and too dear to discard; Ethan’s first-day-of-school shirt; Seth’s first-ever shirt; Harmon’s backfrom-the-War shirt; Joss’s I-hate-dresses dress) and listened drowsily; finally she heard the scrape of chair legs against the hard dirt floor. Softly, she sighed: Joss, up again. The first few times it happened she had gotten up, going to ask what was wrong. “Nothin’,” Joss said, looking haunted in the flickering golden glow of the lamp. “Go back to bed. No sense in the both of us bein’ up.”

Nights after that she lay wakeful as Joss stirred around the house: out to the well for fresh water, or to the porch for a smoke; sometimes she heard the clink of the neck of the whiskey bottle

against the jelly jar Joss favored for her drink, or the hiss of a book being drawn from the case Joss had put by Aidan’s door, and then the soft rustle of pages. Sometimes came the sounds of a stove being stoked by a hand cautious of the sleep of another, if the night was cool. Or—most often—just the slow, metronomic tick of her glass meeting the table as she put it down, glass against oilcloth-covered wood as she sipped an hour away.

It happened, on the average, every other night.

This night she heard a drink made, and smelled the hint of a cigarette on the porch, and when she heard the scrape of a chair at the table she pushed back the quilt and slipped into her wrapper. She went barefoot to the door she always left ajar and saw Joss at the table, the jelly jar in front of her, her forehead rested on one hand, the fingers of the other ticking a slow, slow measure against the oilcloth: little finger, ring finger, long finger, forefinger.

Little finger. Ring finger. Long finger. Forefinger. Harmon. Jocelyn. Ethan. Seth.

Joss sipped. The glass touched softly against the table. Little finger. Ring finger. Long finger. Forefinger.

“Joss,” she said quietly.

“Go back to bed.” She didn’t look up.

“Joss, can’t you tell me?”

“Go back to bed, Aidan.”

She turned, and stopped, and turned back; she went barefoot to the table and stroked her hands down the mane of black hair glinting gold in the lamplight, and bent to press her lips to the top of her cousin’s head. “I love you, Joss,” she whispered. She was on the edge of sleep, drifting in and out, when she sensed a presence near her; she opened her eyes to the night and felt a warmth of breath near her face: hints of whiskey and tobacco, and then fingers gentle in her hair, lips soft against her face, a naked whisper: “Thank you.”

She reached to find Joss’s shoulder, the curve of her throat, the tangle of ebony hair so seldom loosed. “Stay here, Joss. Stay with me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t do this, either. You work too hard. You need to sleep.”

Palms found her face, a brief, needing caress; softly, lips brushed hers. “If only I could tell you what you mean to me.”

And Joss was gone, leaving behind her the echoes of tobacco, and whiskey, and critical loneliness.

0

“Joss! Oh, Joss, look! In the corn—”

Her hair pinned up but yet barefoot in the morning, Joss abandoned coffee and Cervantes to see where Aidan pointed. Unworried by their morning noises, a plump doe deer grazed in the new-sprung corn, cropping at tender shoots near the woodlot. “Damn! You dare eat my sweat?” It was her father’s deer-in-the-corn indignation, but her own labor over that black earth she defended; she plucked the Winchester from its pegs over the door and whistled sharply between her teeth. More curious than cautious, the doe raised her head, ears swiveling forward in inquisition.

“What are you—oh, no! Joss, no!”

But Joss was a quick shot, and a good one. Pure grace in living motion, the doe collapsed in the ungainly surprise of sudden death, her throat exploded by the bullet, and Joss turned with the small smile of a hunter’s pride in a long shot and a clean kill.

“Damn you!” Aidan’s fury was so electric, so unexpected, Joss didn’t have time to dodge the slap that lashed across her face.

“She was so beautiful! I only wanted you to see her and you
killed
her!”Bewildered, Joss reached for her stinging cheek. “Aidan, it’s meat! What—”

“Meat!” Aidan spat it back at her. “Is that all Mrs. Browning would be to you, then? Meat and never mind the poetry? Damn you, Joss Bodett!”

“Aidan, you don’t understa—” But she was protesting to a back; the door that slammed between them was definitive. “Aidan, you—oh, God damn it!” Just in time, she reined in the impulse to heave what she had in her hands across the room. The instinct that made her a good shot had made her ready for another if it was needed: she had reflexively levered the spent shell from the rifle, another round jacking into the chamber, the weapon cocking itself. She let the hammer down and banged the rifle to its pegs over the door. “No poetry in a chicken, I guess,” she snarled at Aidan’s door, “or a pig whose ham you enjoy of a Sunday mornin’

an’ never mind how fond o’ the damn pig I was!” She jammed her feet into her boots. “Ain’t no butcher shop in Washburn Station, Miss Eastern city girl!” That was resoundingly more than a snarl as she slammed out the door. There was no time to argue, or try to explain; there was no time to waste in hot weather if a kill was to be more than a murder.

She sent her knife into the deer’s white belly, splitting the skin in remaindered anger at her cousin’s lack of vision, but when its paunch and hot blood smell spilled out something potently visceral stabbed her as sharply as she had driven her knife into the deer. Her breakfast lurched in her. She fought its rising and lost, and gave it to the dark earth of her cornfield. “God damn it,” she whispered on her hands and knees, when she could; she coughed, and tried to spit the bilious taste from her mouth (and had a weirdly slanting moment of sympathy for her cousin, who had suffered this indignity almost daily for a month). “Damn your blood, Aidan! Did you have to hit me?”

She wiped the cold sweat of sickness from her face, and drew a hard breath and turned to the deer to touch a flank still warm, still almost vibrant under her palm. “Yes, you were beautiful,”

she said softly, “an’ yes, you were a poem. But a poem ain’t food in her belly or mine, an’ it’s the good Lord give me the taste for meat an’ not my fault to get slapped for it. I thank you for your poetry an’ for the meals you’ll put on our table.”

Grimly efficient, she finished dressing the deer, knowing the coyotes would clean up the leavings before the sun rose again. Aidan’s door was still closed when she took the heart and liver into the house; tight-lipped, she covered the bowl and stored it in the cool space under the sink before she went to draw a bucket from the well. She scrubbed sticky blood from her hands and arms, and buried her face in a double-handful of icy water; her cheek still burned with the memory of Aidan’s hand. “Damned frivolous city girl,” she muttered, and went to drag the deer to the woodshed. By the time it was hung on the game pole she was awash with sweat, bloody again, and simmering with resentment.

The skinning had long been her job, for her fine touch with a blade; she approached it now for no more satisfaction than knowing what a stretched hide was worth to Thom Richland, and that was something: salt to replace what she’d use today, or flour, or cotton or linen for dresses and shirts, or boxes of bullets, or part of the promised kitchen floor...

Or part of a train ticket East.

The thought lurched her stomach. She tried to shove it away, but it twittered at the edge of her consciousness, taunting as the malicious singsong of children in a schoolyard; it made her feel the way she’d felt as a child when that vicious ditty had been aimed at her:
Joss is a baaas-turd, nyah, nah, nah-nyaah nah—
“Nyah nyah yourself,” she muttered. “Go to hell an’ leave me be.”

Methodically, she worked.

She was aware of Aidan long before she spoke, but she’d be damned if she’d break the silence; even less than she had expected the slap had she expected to be so hurt by it. The only person in

her life who had ever struck her had been her father, and on those rare occasions his reasons had been well-defined. Immediate, raw anger had never been one of them.

At last, softly: “Joss, I’m sorry.”

“It don’t matter.” A simple apology might have sufficed an hour ago, but now, with the hurt in her as thick as the smell of sweat and blood in the day’s rising heat, nothing would be simple. She smiled bitterly, knowing the work that faced her today—and for what? Would Aidan concede to eat this meat? Would she even be here to eat it?

“Joss—” The hesitant brush of fingertips at her back stilled her hand. “I was wrong to criticize you, and—” Joss closed her eyes, hearing the catch of Aidan’s voice, feeling the unsteadiness of the hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry I struck you. Please forgive me for that. Please.”

Joss swallowed hard.
It’s a bigger effort she’s making than you
could do yourself. Would you wait until she cries?
She forced herself to yield, to turn, and found the ache in Aidan’s eyes; behind that came a blinding image of the belly of the deer as she had split it with her knife. That knife spilled from suddenly nerveless fingers. She reached, catching her cousin roughly into her arms. “Oh, no. No. Aidan, come here—”

Aidan buried her face into Joss’s shoulder, tears contained for the effort of the apology breaking now in its acceptance. “Joss, I’m so sorry, I hate it that I struck you, I’m just another damned Blackstone—”

“Aidan, no. Don’t cry. It’s all right—” It wasn’t all right, but she knew that if this reunion hadn’t come now it mightn’t have come at all, that they might have traded spoken jabs and slashes until the hurts swarmed like mosquitoes, buzzing and biting until further exposure was unthinkable and flight was the only answer.

“I’m sorry too, Aidan. I do things an’ expect you to understand, an’ knowin’ this is all still new to you.” She pressed her lips to the curve of Aidan’s shoulder, tasting sweat and dust and last night’s soap, and those mingled essences shivered something into her, a feeling like taking whiskey raw from the neck of a bottle, or

coming from hours of January outdoors into a kitchen Sundaydinner hot, or jumping from the haymow and seeing, halfway down, the rake glittering tines-up in the stack below. “I love you—”

It was barely a whisper, but she felt Aidan’s fingers tighten against her back; more than she heard it, she felt the breath of words returned: “Joss, I love you, too—” and Aidan raised her head as Joss bent hers.

She had thought only to press her lips against her cousin’s hair, to allow herself that brief indulgence, but what her kiss met wasn’t golden hair but Aidan’s lips, parted with the beginnings of some word or words, a thought caught back with a soft breath of surprise at the meeting.

Aidan didn’t withdraw, or retreat; her fingers brushed Joss’s throat, turning into a palm laid against her face. It was magnetic; it was opposite and alien and unthinkable; it was undeniable. Joss felt her arms, her hands, full of Aidan, the fit of their bodies together, the tentative inquiry of the lips under hers... She stood again in the shadowed door of the livery on the seventh of April, watching Aidan take her first look at the mean street of Washburn Station. She felt the pale, uneasy weight of Aidan in her hands as she took her from the wagon in this yard, and remembered wanting to hold her then, to make her know it would be all right. She struggled from the phantasms of fever to an awareness of this head asleep on her belly; she saw flickers and flashes of question and courage in the blue eyes, heard the laughs, held the tears, caught the smiling sidelong glances. She didn’t know her kiss had deepened. She didn’t feel Aidan’s slow question. She only knew the raw flame that flared in her as the corners of their mouths sought, avoided, knew, denied...she found Aidan’s lips again, fully this time, and there was a searing flicker that was their tongues meeting.