The Grass Widow Read online

  The

  Grass

  Widow

  by

  Nanci Little

  2010

  Copyright © 1996 Nanci Little

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Originally published by Madwoman Press 1996

  First Bella Books Edition 2010

  Editor: Diane Benison and Catherine S. Stamps

  Cover Designer: Judy Fellows

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59493-189-5

  Acknowledgments

  To my parents,who raised me not as the girl they had or the boy they didn’t have, but as a person: a tough, tenacious human being, able to do what needs doing.

  And to Nana, for reading The Grapes of Wrath to me when I was nine years old and giving me the fever for the words. Thanks also to Uncle Bill, for living simply, and for giving me his copy of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book; k.d. lang, for two of her songs that were important to me in the writing of this book; and Diane Benison, for checking my homework.

  And to the people who have written to tell me what Thin Fire meant to them: many, many thanks. You help keep me going. In Memory

  Evelyn Randall Lamoreaux

  May 24, 1905 - June 20, 1995

  a pioneer woman

  About the Author

  Nanci Little lives in Aroostook County, Maine with Sawyer, her Miniature Pinscher.

  They tried

  to persuade me

  not to cross

  the curious hills:

  finally, shrugging

  called me foolish, stubborn.

  That’s how it is,

  I said;

  I’m going where

  my pig is headed.

  —anonymous

  (ergo. probably a woman)

  Dramatis Personae

  Aidan Blackstone

  the Daughter of a Physician from Portland, Maine

  Adrian Blackstone

  her Father

  Mrs. Blackstone

  her Mother

  Three Rude Soldiers

  Captain Argus Slade

  an Officer of the United States Cavalry

  Two Agreeable Soldiers

  A Dusty Mana

  Gambler or Gunfighter

  Joss Bodett

  Aidan’s Cousin twice removed, of Washburn Station, Kansas Ephrenia Richland

  a Merchant

  Hank Richland

  a Son of Ephrenia and Thom

  R.J. Pickett

  a Physician

  Ottis Clark Junior

  a local Lad

  Jack Bull

  a Saloon-keeper

  Ottis Clark Senior

  a Farmer

  Marcus Jackson

  a Farmer and Farrier

  Gideon Jackson, Ezekiel Clark, Will Grant, Daniel Washburn, Nathaniel Day, and their Younger Brothers Flora Washburn

  a Founder of the Village

  The Ghost of Ethan Bodett

  Jacob Hart

  a Lumberman

  Levi

  an indigent Man of Colour

  Captain Malin Leonard

  an Officer of the United States Cavalry

  Earlene Jackson

  Wife of Marcus

  Three Guards

  Jesus

  A Pawnee Warrior

  An Infant

  April, 1876

  Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.

  For if they fall, the one will lift up her fellow: but woe to her that is alone when she falleth; for she hath not another to help her up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?

  And if one prevail against her, two shall withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

  Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

  CHAPTER ONE

  There had still been gray and dirty snow in Portland when the train puffed from the station on the second day of April, but as it rumbled south and west the dreary end of winter and fresh burst of spring blurred by its windows; the landscape freshened through buds and lilacs and at last their fading, and Aidan Blackstone mourned that this spring she would not know the brief fragrance of those fragile blossoms. More sweetness than lilacs would be missed in this spring; more pleasures than her mother’s garden would be lost to the clear New England summer that would pass in her absence, for the coming year was to be given to Kansas, and as the train sped across alien countrysides, she argued with tears and lost to them often.

  A week ago her tears had softened her mother into almostacquiescence, but there was no breaking the Christian will of Dr. Adrian Blackstone. “You know the condition by which I’d allow you to stay,” he said flatly. “You made your bed, daughter.”

  “But Kansas!” she wailed. “Papa, it isn’t civilized, there are savages—”

  He slapped her with careless irritation, as if she were a fly buzzing at his ear. “There is Fort Leavenworth,” he growled from the sideboard where he kept his liquors; her mother looked at her in grave pity, and didn’t offer her hand. “Cousin Jocelyn has a husband and sons—cousins distant enough to you to be marriageable, might I add. You’ll be well enough protected. Now pack your cases! I’ll hear no more of your mewling.”

  And now it was Missouri the train chuffed across, the great Mississippi River behind her; the bruise the back of his hand had left was coming green on her cheekbone. In her last visit to her grandmother, the frail old gentlewoman had pressed a daguerreotype into her hand; she studied it now, trying to sense the hearts beating behind silvery images.

  There was a thick-shouldered, heavy-chested man with a droopy gray mustache, an indelible good humor lurking behind a severity assumed for the camera; his mouth was stern, but his eyes were kind. Leaning into his right side was a willowy girl of perhaps fourteen years, a black braid draped over the shoulder of a faded dress, her dark eyes expressively wary of the photographer. She would be a lovely young woman by now, Aidan supposed, the one with whom she would share a room—if she wasn’t long wed and gone, with babies of her own; the photograph was ten years old.Jocelyn Blackstone Bodett, obviously once beautiful, now as wearily faded as her daughter’s Sunday dress, stood at her husband’s left side, her arms corralling her sons: the younger fair and handsome face glinted with the inherent mischief of six-yearold boys, but the older of the lads, dark-haired as his elder sister, seemed to share her suspicion of the itinerant photographer and his contraption, or perhaps he resented having been coerced into a collar and tie on a day not Sunday; whatever it was, something unhappy simmered in his eyes.

  She slipped the photograph from its frame and read the delicately-drawn ink on the back of the plate.

  Jocelyn (Blackstone) Bodett & husband Harmon with children Jocelyn (14), Ethan (11), & Seth (7),

  August 1866

  Ethan, then, was the unhappy one. She studied him, trying to add ten years to his darkly handsome face. “Ethan,” she murmured. “Will you let me know you?”

  She looked again at her father’s cousin.

  For all Grandmother spoke lovingly of her, Aidan had heard little at home of her elder Cousin Jocelyn. In the rare times when her father mentioned his uncle’s daughter, his voice dripped with distaste. “Why a woman of her fine looks and breeding,” he always said, ever an unfinished hint of insult; recalling it now, Aidan smiled acidly. The same could be said of me, if we threw open the closets to dance with the skeletons. Fine looks and breeding—

  Aidan Blackstone wis
hed she had been born poor and grown up homely. Perhaps then she wouldn’t have won this exile in disgrace, an exile now speeding her ever farther from Portland.

  “There is Fort Leavenworth.” So her father had said, and so there was. The rutted street looked as if it had recently been a quagmire. Boardwalks in front of false-fronted buildings teemed with hard-looking soldiers and coarse-looking women; shouts and curses and laughter rang in the air. Tumbleweeds and dust blew willy-nilly in the gusting wind, and horses danced at hitchingrails, shaking their manes and rolling their great soft eyes. Her stomach took a queasy lurch as the porter handed her from the train. Three soldiers, smelling strongly of drink and long days in hard heat, crowded around her: Buy you some dinner? “No, I—” Need help acrost the street, dearie? “Thank you, no, I—” Buy you a drink, li’l lady? “Most certainly not! If you might but kindly direct me to—”

  She almost screamed when a hand closed around her arm.

  “Be off, you ill-bred cretins! There’s no decency in the lot of you!”

  Muttering darkly over their shoulders, the soldiers obeyed,

  and Aidan dared look up to find pale blue eyes and a flowing white mustache under the gold-braided hat of a United States Cavalry officer. “Captain Argus Slade, madam, humbly your servant in this disgrace that presumes to call itself a village.”

  With the sharpness of command removed from it, his voice was smoothly sonorous, and his face, while weather-beaten, seemed much younger than his silver hair and mustache would suggest.

  “May I assist you in the comfortable termination of your journey, or perhaps in its expedient continuation?”

  Gratefully, she gave herself to his assistance. She identified her trunk and traveling case, and he ordered a chevron-sleeved soldier to guard them; the fellow gave her a brilliant smile. The captain escorted her to the Wells Fargo office, and rousted a soldier from a bench that she might have a seat while he inquired of the station-master. Her wait would be brief, he assured her, checking his watch; might he wait with her, if for no better reason than to ward off the riffraff?

  She murmured her agreement, for the riffraff still loitered about the station, eyeing her and the captain and grinning at one another.

  “A long train ride’s best moment seems always to be its end,”

  he smiled; she managed a smile in return. The bench he had secured for her seemed almost to sway. “Odd how the sensation of motion continues when the fact of it has long ended.” He smoothed his mustache. His hands seemed too big for his body, graceful despite their size. “I’ve heard sailors speak of it as well. Sea legs, in the vulgar—begging your pardon, ma’am.”

  She was too weary to manage a blush. “How far is it to Washburn Station, Captain?”

  “Two hours by stage, on a road rougher than the one to the devil’s back door.” He drew a slim silver flask from his boot, unscrewing the cap to pour it full and offer it. “Perhaps a taste of this would ease you. This must seem so heathen to a woman of your refinement—it’s not whiskey,” he assured her, when she eyed the cup. “Very old, and very French—a fine libation, if not a proper vessel in which to serve it.”

  He made her think of the men who gathered in her father’s study to talk of politics in low, intense voices on nights when the fog lay heavy in the streets of Portland. “I’ve interest in the Station myself,” he said, “it being under the protection of my troop—and there’s a fine farm there that’s caught my eye, only recently and tragically come available. Please, have just a taste of this. It will calm you, ma’am.”

  Not without misgivings, she accepted the cap to his flask. “So you shan’t be a soldier all your life?”

  His smile was fleeting, tolerant. “Most men are soldiers all their lives only by the circumstance of misfortune, my dear.”

  “Yes...yes, I suppose you’re right.” Embarrassed, she dared a sip of his brandy. It was warm from his leg, as good as anything her father served, or better; she tasted again and let her eyes convey her thanks.

  In his returned smile she realized that the gentleness of that smile was only on his lips; his pale blue eyes considered her the way a man considers a horse he thinks he might buy. She shied her glance away, and regretted accepting his drink. “Thank you,”

  she murmured, returning his tiny silver cup. He looked into it and knocked back what was left.

  He tucked the flask back into his boot and straightened up, cocking his head to the north. “The stage is coming.” He hailed a soldier to help the guardian of her cases with their loading to the roof of the coach when it was time. “Will you be long in Kansas, Miss...? Teaching school, perhaps? Lord knows a ration of civilized education would behoove the youth of Washburn Station.”

  She heard his hinted request for her name. “I’m sure I don’t know how long I might stay, Captain Slade. The climate seems, so far, to be most disagreeable.”

  “It’ll seem farther that way if you’re still here in July.” Her omission of introduction hadn’t escaped him; the near-curtness of his reply made her glad of the stage as it rattled down the street.

  His soldiers made room on the roof for her cases and secured them there, and the captain handed her into the coach. “Enjoy your stay in Kansas, my dear lady.” His smile might have made him very handsome, had it strayed to his eyes. “Mayhap we’ll meet again.”

  “Perhaps. I thank you for your gracious assistance, Captain.”

  “I am ever your servant.”

  The man already in the stage was unshaven, unwashed, unscrupulous looking; he wore a thin mustache and a gold watch chain and enormous pistols in scuffed leather holsters, and she knew he must be a gunfighter (for since the subject of Kansas had first arisen she had read every dime novel of Western theme she could find, no matter how forbidden they were by her mother, and they had told her that gunfighters wore two pistols, and cowboys only one). She settled to the seat across from him with a look that suggested if he said a word more than hello she’d burst into tears or screams.

  He returned a polite smile and touched the brim of his dusty brown hat. “Lady,” he said, more compliment than greeting, and tipped his hat over his eyes and crossed his arms over his vest and slouched in his seat to sleep through the trip.

  Rougher than the road to the devil’s back door, Captain Slade had said of the track; by the time the stage made Washburn Station, Aidan was sure he had woefully understated its condition. She had all she could do to stay on the seat—and marvel at the dusty man, who snored through the ordeal. He roused enough to hand her from the stage, blearily ensuring that the driver and his shotgun rider unloaded her cases; he tipped his road-weary hat and slammed the door and the coach departed in a whirlwind of dust, leaving her alone on the platform of a village so small it defied the idea of township as she knew it.

  “A year . . .?” It slipped aloud from her as she looked down the hardpan track that was Washburn Station’s only street. “There must be lifetimes I could spend that would seem shorter!”

  Besides the coach station (which doubled as the telegraph

  station), there was Richland’s General Mercantile, the Red Dog Saloon, Mrs. Schrum’s Eatery, and an unnamed tonsorial on one side; across was the Station House Hotel, the Bull and Whistle Saloon, a financial institution as creatively-named as the barber shop (BANK, said its window), and Jackson Bros. Livery and Forge. At the end of the street was a small, squat church with an afterthought of a steeple. Two wagons stood in front of the store; outside the saloons, saddled horses twitched their tails at flies. A whip-slim young cowboy—at least, she surmised by hat and spurs and single pistol that he was a cowboy—emerged from the livery to approach the station at a determined clip, dust clouds puffing from his boot heels with each step. His two-step jump to the platform barely broke his fluid, feline stride.

  “Aidan Blackstone?” His fingertips touched the brim of his hat, not quite a tip but manners enough to be called such. “Like you could be anyone else.”

  He was clean-shaven
, handsome in that smooth, fine-featured way of certain lean, long-legged, black-haired men, but his dark eyes held no welcome, and brusqueness negated the silken tenor of his voice. The unhappy one? Is this Ethan, then?

  “See you got here in one piece. Stage ran early just ’cause I ran late, I suppose.” His look flickered to the bruise on her cheekbone; his eyes narrowed. “Yuh. Come on to the store with me. I got some things to pick up, an’ we’ll bring the wagon back for your cases. None’ll bother ’em here.”

  She drew herself up, managing composure where none had existed. “You have the advantage over me, sir.”

  Something—it couldn’t possibly have been called a smile—

  twitched at a corner of the cowboy’s mouth. “I reckon I do, Miss Cousin. I’m Joss Bodett.”

  Joss—Jocelyn?? She choked it back before she choked it aloud. This is Jocelyn—? But—but— Her mind seemed to stall there, babbling buts at her. A cryptic smile flickered to Joss Bodett’s lips, there and gone. Aidan recovered her voice. “I’ve so looked forward to meeting you, Cousin—is it Joss? Forgive me, I...I didn’t expect...I didn’t expect it to be so lovely here!”

  “I’ll wager somethin’ else surprised your expectations. The last damned thing I’d name this place is lovely.”

  Aidan flushed, shying her eyes away. That voice had been as hard as a Portland winter, and Joss had sworn easily, as if she were the man she’d looked to be in dusty Levi’s, a faded cotton shirt and work-worn boots, her hair hidden by a sweatstained hat pulled low over unwelcoming dark eyes—and most incredibly, the gunbelt around her narrow hips, its holster tied by a thong to her thigh, the grips of the pistol glossy from the wear of years of rough hands. “Let’s get these chores done,” said the extraordinary Joss Bodett. “I’ve things to say to you—an’ ask of you—that want for more privacy than this here.” And she turned and headed down the boardwalk, not looking back to see if her cousin followed.

  I want to go home! Aidan’s mind screamed, but her feet hurried after her long-legged cousin as scuffed boots rang down the boardwalk from the station to the store. She focused on the pistol; the gun was as terrifying as the idea of being trapped in this hot, lifeless place in the company of such a cold, flinty woman, but it was tangible; she could compare it to something known. Her father kept a derringer in a desk drawer in his study, but it seemed a toy compared to the dark tool worn as close to Joss Bodett’s lithe body as blankets to a bed, as frivolous as a debutante compared to the hard-worked being pausing at the door of the store so she might catch up. She didn’t want to catch up with this bizarre cousin. She wanted a room with a door to slam, a featherbed to catch her, a soft pillow where she could bury her face. She wanted to cry.