The Grass Widow (29 page)

“That road would kill him as effectively as my neglect,” Doc said dryly.

“—which would make me his executioner by my choice, assuming the outcome of the trial to which he is entitled.”
And
I’ll be damned glad when he’s dead and buried and I can stop finding
myself having to choose not to kill this rogue.
“I’ll do it as civilly as such an uncivil thing may be done, but I’ll take the responsibility for his blood. That’s what my hands are for.”

Doc turned abruptly, going into the house to check on his patient.

“Might one o’ your soldiers see us home?” Joss asked, seeing the captain’s look linger where Doc had been. “I ain’t all that comfortable goin’ past Clark’s place this time o’ night.”

The captain watched them out of the yard. He had memories of many places, many people, many acts of cruelty and kindness, but he wondered, if he lived to be eighty, if he would ever forget Joss Bodett taking both his hands in both of hers, raising them to her lips to kiss his palms, one and then the other, with a

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benedictory gentleness that made his eyes sting with tears. “Such a beautiful night,” she said softly.
“Ad astra per aspera.
Thank you, my friend.”

To the stars through hard ways
. “No, Joss,” he murmured, listening to the creak of the wagon in the night, feeling his hands warm with the absolution only the understanding of women can give.

“I thank you.”

Given what else he had to do, Doc had given Levi only a cursory patching-up that morning, smoothing out his nose and binding his ribs; there was little else to be done for him. Aidan did as much with cold water and tenderness when they got home, soothing his bruises and his heart.

“What happened to you?” She understood little of his garbled answer, but she knew what he meant when he asked cautiously,

“Blue man go die?” for Slade had still been wearing his uniform, albeit raggedly worse for wear. He curled a lip when she shook her head. “No good Station farmer Mister Joss call joke. No good soldier him, no call joke.”

He had tried to stop Slade from going into the house, and took a coiled rope across his already-broken nose for the attempt. Gagging in pain on his knees, he understood why Mister Joss had fainted when he had squeezed that already-hurt hand: hurt on hurt multiplied like broke poke, and as much as he wanted to defend his good lady, his legs wouldn’t work and he couldn’t see, and then Joss charged into the yard and it was over—save guilt that he hadn’t been able to protect her, guilt he had spent the day with as it squirmed in his guts.

Joss touched a booted toe to the black stain on the bedroom floor. The day had been hot; the room smelled thickly unfamiliar. She remembered the look in Captain Leonard’s eyes when he had answered Aidan’s question and knew he had spared them something blacker than bloodstains in his guarded talk of Argus Slade.
Had she been asleep when he came, had she not had the Colt
there by the bed, had she not dared—if all of that, if he’d had his way, if

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I’d just come home and found her or what he left of her—

But she wasn’t. She did. And she dared.
Joss gave the room a weary smile. “Remind me to tell your daddy not to worry about you, little cousin. Any fool that tries you might best expect to be catawamptiously chawed up.”

But before they slept again in this room or in this house, Argus Slade would leave it. She got a spade and two buckets and dug six pails of blood-darkened dirt from the floor, taking them up the track to pour the dirt in the ruts of the post road. She dumped half a box of matches into the hole, and fired one with her thumbnail and dropped it in; the acrid smell of sulphur rose as the matchheads flared. With her hands in her pockets and her thoughts blank, she watched the tiny bonfire burn itself out. There was oil of camphor in the medicine chest; she sprinkled half the bottle into the hole, sneezing at its pungency, and then filled in the hole with dirt from the bean field, and had salted and oiled it and was tamping it with patient application of her own hundred and twenty pounds when Aidan came in from the barn. She looked up. “Is Levi all right?”

“He’s badly bruised, but mostly he’s embarrassed and angry. Talk to him tomorrow, Joss.”

“I will. Did you get any answers out of him?”

“Not out of his mouth. But whoever did this to him was lefthanded, I think. It’s all worse on his right side.”

“I’ll want to have a look at Ott Clark’s hands tomorrow, then. He ain’t never had a good word for a colored man, an’ he’d look on Levi as our colored man. You know how dear Ott holds me.”

She sat on Aidan’s Saratoga trunk at the foot of the bed. “What about you? It ain’t like this’s been the finest o’ days for you, either.”

Aidan leaned in the doorway, considering the memory of the morning. Slade had surprised her, but his intentions hadn’t; she had known before Malin Leonard confirmed it that he would have killed her. She knew that before she pulled the trigger, though she was quite sure she’d shot him as much for not knowing what he might have already done to Joss. “I think I’m fine,” she said.

“Maybe I’ll go into shock in the middle of the night, but Joss, I think I’m fine.” She sat beside Joss on the trunk, stretching out her legs; they ached, and her back ached, and her head ached—

but she felt good; she felt calm and strong and composed.

“I’ve always had someone to take care of me,” she said quietly. “They’ve done it with varying degrees of competence or desire, but they’ve always been there. It’s good to finally know that when push comes to shove I can take care of myself. That I needn’t—to borrow one of your choicest vulgarities—take the fucking. Again.”

Joss studied her for a long moment; she wondered if she had ever really seen her, or if this was a new Aidan to be seen. She reached for Aidan’s hand. “I knew I loved you. I knew you mean more to me than anything ever has, or ever will.” She closed that small hand in hers, feeling the strength in its returned squeeze.

“But when I heard the shot, my first thought was like it was all one word: Aidananourbaby. I’ve studied that all day, tryin’ to remember if I thought you an’
the
baby, or you an
’ our
baby. An’

it isn’t that I think as if we’re—I mean, we’re both women an’

there’s no husband or wife to it, but—”

“But she’s our baby,” Aidan said gently. “A bad farmer in Portland planted this seed, but it’s you who’ll tend the crop. And no, there’s no husband or wife about it, but if she turns out to be a boy, he’ll not miss a father for having you to teach him how to do the things men do” —she sent Joss a sidelong, elfin grin— “the way a woman wants them done.”

August, 1876

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.

Psalms
23:4

“What do you pay Richland over in the Station for beans and corn?” Malin Leonard asked the quartermaster over a hand of cribbage one night, and suffered patiently through that officer’s disparaging commentary about Station farmers before figures were finally named. He took the numbers to Joss as an offer; she accepted, and asked that the Jackson beans—what of them there were—be allowed in the sale. “Clark’s too?” the captain asked. Joss spat into the dust of her yard. “Fuck Ottis Clark. They’d ought to crop that hammerhead’s ears, like they do a bad horse.”

Malin blinked at the hardedged vulgarity. “I didn’t know the blood was so bad, Joss.”

She jerked her chin toward the fields. Levi was picking beans, a cotton sack slung over his shoulder and trailing half-f behind him. “Ott’s the one took after him the night ‘fore Aidan ventilated Slade.”

The captain frowned. “You know that for sure?”

“Jack Bull—you know Jack? ’Tween Pa an’ Ethan they kept him open, I suspect—anyway, Jack tells me Ott got all horns an’

rattles into the corn, there, a few days after all the pucker. Ott said if I’d been born the man I look like I should’ve been, he’d’ve give me what he give Levi. Said he didn’t figure he’d get by with that so he give it to my nigger instead—those ain’t my words. Jack says Ott said it was a good thing he didn’t come after me

’cause my whore of a cousin prob’ly would’ve shot him like she shot Slade, an’ I already cost him a busted arm.” She spat again, as if there were words left she needed to get rid of. “His boys done give me a lot o’ help, an’ I expect they took their licks for it. I’ll help ’em back anyhow I can, but I ain’t turnin’ a word nor a hand for Ottis Clark. You want to buy his beans at the price you’re givin’ me an’ give the difference to Zeke ’tween that an’

what Thom pays, I know Zeke’ll take care o’ his brothers an’

mother. Find him up to Flora Washburn’s. Give it to Ott an’

it won’t be but corn down his gullet like any damn scraggledy rooster, hoggin’ the feed an’ crowin’ all hours.”

Malin rubbed the backs of his fingers against the day’s growth on his chin; he liked the pay and privilege of his captaincy, but not the politics. “How long before you’re picked off?”

“We’ll be done it by midweek next.”

“I’ll send a wagon.” He watched as Levi picked a plant clean, pulled it, shook it, dropped it, and moved along. “Putting in a second crop? You’ve got time for a pod dry.”

“Price o’ wheat’s up, I hear; I’ll put in ten acres an’ rent the rest to Marcus. He needs it, an’ he’s got the hands to mess with beans an’ corn. I don’t.”

“You know right where you stand,” he said quietly. “I admire you, Joss.”

She took her bag of tobacco from her shirt pocket. “Don’t.”

“Gentlemen, hush!” said the driver of the quartermaster’s wagon when he saw Levi wearing one of Joss’s coonskin hats; he had worn it non-stop for four (fortunately cool) days since she’d

given it to him. “I hain’t seen one o’ them since I left Tennessee!

How’d a nigger come by that?”

“I made it an’ I give it to him.” Joss had been picking and shucking and sacking beans for a week; her back ached like a bad tooth, and she cared for neither the heavy-set soldier’s looks nor language. “That pass your muster, gen’ral?”

He studied her from the seat of the wagon and decided that this narrow-eyed, short-haired, Colt-wearing female wasn’t anyone he cared to cross. “Your hat, lady. Your nigger. I’us just wonderin’ if you might have another one.”

“Hat, or colored man?” She came down with cool emphasis on the last two words, and he damned the fact that in Kansas a man never knew how a body might think on that delicate set of issues that boiled down to Blue and Gray. “Hat, ma’am. Hear it gets a right smart o’ cold here come winter.”

“You heared correctly, an’ a double eagle’s what you need to save the top o’ your head an’ the tips o’ your ears.”

He looked at the jaunty ringtail sweeping Levi’s back as the gangly fellow bucked sacks of beans into the wagon. “I ain’t got but fifteen.”

“I’ll take fifteen if you get your wide Rebel ass off that seat an’ help my hired man with the loadin’.”

The Tennessean worked side by side with Levi for an hour. Joss took his money and gave him his hat and he went away, and she looked at the coins in her hand and took Levi by the wrist, turning his hand palm-up, and planted the ten-dollar gold piece into his palm. “Called you hired. Means I got to pay you.”

“Food me sleep I work you pay no this got need do,” he stammered, trying to shove the eagle back to her. “Barn sleep food pick bean pay fine!”

“Just take it,” she said crossly. “Sew it into your shirttail for hard times or somethin’. An’ take off that damn hat if it gets hot, will you? One true August day in that thing an’ all you’ll be good for is soap.”

The next day three bashful, grinning soldiers showed up in the yard. For an eagle apiece and three felled and blocked oak

trees, they went off with coonskin caps and full bellies, and Joss reluctantly adjusted her opinion to allow the possibility that not all Cavalry soldiers were swine.

She and Aidan were both nursing the blisters left from shucking dried corn on the mid-month morning that Joss went out to find handsomely woven cornhusk mats at each door and footprints in the dust leading to the road and to town. “Damn,”

she murmured, and went back to the house to break the news to Aidan that Levi was gone again, and they knew they would miss his ingenuous smile and his garbled speech...and his strong back.

On the evening of the day the Cavalry hung Argus Slade, Captain Leonard showed up with a wagonload of oak flooring and a bottle of scotch whiskey. Joss relinquished the agreedupon diamond ring from Ethan’s treasure-box, and she and Doc and the captain commenced to the serious pursuits of tonsillacquering and three-handed cribbage, swapping silver dollars and increasingly rude insults across the table until Aidan lost patience with them and went to bed.

She found the bottle empty and its emptiers in various stages of poverty and wretchedness when she yawned awake the next morning and drifted out to the kitchen to make the fire. She had no sympathy for them save making the coffee strong enough for bootblack; they each had two or three cups and staggered around the kitchen until she threw them out. They staggered around the yard and finally launched a competitive attack on the woodpile, Joss losing to Doc but beating the captain in timed assaults on blocks of green oak; Joss won back all the money she’d lost to Malin at cribbage before Aidan rang them in for a hearty drunks’

breakfast.

“Men,” she muttered, banging their plates to the table, and they gaped at her, amazed that she could damn Joss so effectively in one word that was, at best, misapplied. They ate raccoon and eggs and fried corn and fat biscuits with gravy, and drank another two pots of coffee, and hauled the furniture from the bedroom

the women shared and had the floor nailed down by dark. The men stayed the night. Without hangovers, they had the other two rooms floored by suppertime. “We do good work, men,” one of them would intone every so often, and they’d have to let the laughter pass before they could continue. Aidan let them have their joke. She was getting floors through the house, and if they wanted to make that small jape at her expense, it was worth it.