The Grass Widow Read online

  “Y’all right?” Joss held open the door.

  A glimmer of warmth might have softened her; she felt no warmth from her cousin. She felt only impatience, and it spiked something coldly resistant into her. “Quite so, thank you,” she snapped, and swept into the store, careful of the hem of her skirts against the fresh proximity to horses odoriferously suggested by Joss Bodett’s boots; the noise Joss made sounded suspiciously like a stablehand’s term for the very smell of those boots.

  “Joss Bodett!” The woman behind the counter was plump and sharp-eyed; she spoke to Joss, but she probed at Aidan with her glance. Aidan looked away, disliking her as reflexively as she’d disliked everyone she’d met so far in Kansas— except a gunfighter on a stagecoach? Oh, I hate this place! I hate it!

  “Hain’t seen you t’see how you been holdin’ up,” the storekeeper said. “Hard times f ’you, girl; awful hard times. How come y’ain’t been to town?”

  “I been too joe-fired busy diggin’ graves to be sociable.”

  Graves? Cautiously, Aidan looked up from her perusal of a slim selection of buttons.

  “An’ we so sorry, Joss. Thom wants talkin’ at you. Let me go get—”

  “I know what Thom wants an’ the answer’s no.”

  “Joss, you got to think reason now! Things ain’t like they was, you—”

  Joss barked a laugh. “Like I need you to tell me that! Save your breath, Effie, an’ let Thom save his—an’ save me a trip to Leavenworth an’ tell me you got seed, ’cause I know you do. Ours mouldered in that dank spell back March.”

  “You ain’t thinkin’ of plantin’! Joss, you got no men left! You cain’t—”

  “The horses didn’t die an’ the plow didn’t rust, an’ I didn’t disremember how to pull a straight furrow. Can’t eat dirt come winter.”

  “Cain’t stay there come winter neither.” Effie’s voice bordered on cold. “Takes men to run a place, an’ ain’t none chasin’ you lately that I seen.”

  What a cruel, hateful woman! Amazed by the meanness, Aidan forgot her own resentment. But what does she mean, no men left?

  What’s—

  “You hear my heart breakin’ over that? I plow like I do ’cause Seth’s crippled an’ Ethan, God rest’m, never turned a lick an’

  someone had to, like you never knew that, Effie Richland. God rest Pa too, but him gone means I ain’t got to fill his hollow leg with whiskey nor do his work, like you never knew that neither.

  Doc looks after me, an’ ’sides”—she jerked her head at the handsomely-dressed, if road-weary, young woman by the notions counter— “I got help now. ‘S my cousin there.”

  “Not much, y’ain’t,” Effie muttered. Blackstone women were all built puny as far as she could tell, and this new one took puny to extremes. Jocelyn had been right scrawny and passed it on to her daughter; even if Joss had got some height from her pa, she still wasn’t but a shadow and a half. This new Blackstone female was oh-too delicate for western words: high-cheekboned handsome—pretty was too strong of a word (one of those high cheekbones sported a mouse, she noted)—rich by the cut of her clothes, pampered by the look of her hands...

  And pregnant. She wondered if Joss knew that, or if that secret had died two weeks ago with her mother.

  For Jocelyn Bodett was dead, her husband and sons with her, along with ten others of Washburn Station. Some called it the grippe; Doc called it infernooza or whatever he’d said, but it was a pure plague right out of Revelations to Ephrenia Richland, and she knew her true faith in the Lord Jesus was all that had spared her family. The Bodetts had been godless free-staters and were nigh gone, only Joss left—and why Joss (disgraceful anyway, let alone the display she made, swearing like a hayslayer and dressing like one, too, in Ethan’s clothes and Harmon’s gunbelt) had been spared was past Effie.

  “’Sides, where’d I go? East? East be sendin’ theirs here.”

  Aidan almost flinched from the derision in her cousin’s voice. “I need that seed—twenty acres o’ each—an’ sugar an’ salt, an’ soda, an’ a box o’ .44/40s.” Joss turned to bury a sneeze in a gloved hand, and sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her glove.

  “Damn dust!”

  Effie’s look, and the one Joss returned, made Aidan wonder what question and answer crackled between these women whom she didn’t know (past knowing neither of them cared a whit for her existence on the face of the earth). They liked each other as little as they cared for her; that much was blatantly evident.

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  “I ain’t askin’ for credit,” Joss said. “I ain’t ever goin’ to be that far up to the hubs.”

  Effie gathered the small parts of her order, and Joss rang a double-eagle to the counter to square the bill. Effie tendered her change at long distance. “Hank’ll load you.”

  As Effie turned to fetch her strong-backed son, Joss sneezed again. “Bless you,” Effie muttered. Every soul dead in the Station in the last weeks had started their dying with a sneeze, and if ever a soul needed blessing it was Joss Bodett—and that fair-haired, blue-eyed (pregnant) cousin of hers, looking for all the world like no one had yet broke the news to her that all her Kansas kin save Joss Bodett had been buried in the past two weeks.

  “Fool girl’s sneezin’ an’ wants seed,” Effie snorted. “Load her, but stand fair away from her. She won’t last out the week.”

  Hank Richland studied the speculation in his mother’s eyes.

  “How you so sure you’ll get that place? Lots others want it.”

  “That piece o’ Yankee work out there’ll take the money an’

  run, an’ who save Flora Washburn can overbid us? Flora don’t want it.”

  “Neither do I, an’ I ain’t goin’ to oversee no tenant farmer you suck in on a promise o’ credit here paid for by sweat there an’ blood interest. Th’ whole idea’s wrongful. It ain’t but slavery by some other name.”

  “I heared enough free-stater talk out’n you, boy,” Effie snapped.

  Hank turned. ‘The War’s done an’ over. An’ now you take her money for seed, hopin’ she’ll live long enough to plant so you can harvest the crop? That’s a right good Christian ethic, Ma.”

  “You watch that mouth. I’ll wear you out, boy.”

  He bucked a sack of bean seed onto one shoulder and took another under his arm. “Ma, you wore me out a long time ago.”

  “Everyone? But—” Aidan sat stunned on the seat of a wagon lightly loaded with her cases and the day’s purchases as her cousin handled the reins to a pair of enormous bay horses. They were barely away from town, and Effie Richland had been rankly

  damned: “That miserable old sow can’t shut up long enough for her brain to cast a vote, let alone run the show. I work a week to figure how to say all this to you, an’ then I’m stupid as she is mean to think she wouldn’t flap that God-damned mouth o’ hers an’ takin’ you in there to hear it so cold! So how else to say it now? I’m all the kin you got left here, Cousin.”

  “But they—but—how—” Aidan drew an unsteady breath.

  “How, Cousin Joss?”

  “Doc said influenza; I called it the grippe. Whatever you want to name it, it came on quick an’ took ’em. In a week it was over, four gone.” She adjusted her hat against the lowering sun. “An’

  they’re buried.” The words sounded like the airless whump of a Baptist preacher’s Bible being closed in damning finality. “But I ain’t, an’ I got a farm to tend to. You can stay if you care to, long as you want, or go home. If it please you to lend a hand, I could surely use one.”

  Aidan didn’t—couldn’t—reply. She wondered how the deaths of four people she had never met could drive such a breathless ache into her. She wondered how this impenetrable woman could be so coldly stoic in the wake of such a bitter loss. She wondered how love and warmth could reside in such a heart—

  Joss glanced at her. She averted her face, not wanting that last thought to show in her eyes.

  The hand that touched hers was surprisingly gentle. “Don’t think I don’t miss them,” Joss said quietly. “I don’t mean to sound hard, or cruel. It’s just ... sometimes a hurt’s too big to get too close to it. I wish it was different, but it ain’t, an’ you need to know the truth of it. All I got to offer you is a fair bed under a tight roof an’ a long season o’ hard work. The whole county’ll call me a fool for tryin’ to keep it up, an’ it’s my choosin’ to be so stubborn as to try, but you needn’t be tarred with the same brush.”

  “You assume the luxury of choice is mine.”

  Joss’s glance touched the bruise under her eye; Aidan flushed and looked away. “Your daddy’s the Blackstone, ain’t he,” Joss murmured. “An’ prob’ly not a dime in your pocket. I got enough money to get you home an’ you’re welc—”

  “I have enough money!” She turned from her cousin, hating her. “They won’t have me there! And you don’t want me here—”

  “Don’t think that. I’d’ve wired you not to come had I not wanted you to.”

  Of course you did; you need a cook and washer-woman. “Then I’ll try to be of help,” she said stiffly. “I’m able to learn whether you think so or not.”

  “I didn’t figure you for stupid.” Joss’s voice was low. “An’ I surely didn’t mean to hurt your feelin’s. I’m a right smart o’ sorry if I have.”

  Miserably, she knew that her cousin had only spoken the truth, and she had lashed back in return. But offense was easier than apology; it was too long before she could think of an appeasing word. When finally she turned, the hardness was back in Joss Bodett’s eyes, her lips thinned in the tailing end of a look sliding coldly away. The apology died in Aidan’s throat. “God bless you,” she whispered when Joss sneezed, but there was no more conversation; Joss clucked the horses up to a trot that took them home.

  “This is it.” Joss jumped lightly from the buckboard, leaving her full-skirted cousin unsure of how to dismount the unfamiliar wagon without assistance. Aidan heard her sigh as she spilled a lean gray cat from her arms to the ground and came back. “Hold your skirts—put your foot here. I’ve got you. Just step off.” Strong hands closed around Aidan’s waist; it seemed the only effort needed for Joss to bear her to the ground was one of diminishing patience. Aidan stepped away from her with a curt thanks, and regretted the curtness when a flicker of bewilderment showed in dark, hat-shaded eyes, but the tone of Joss’s “Y’welcome” made the apology that leaped to her heart retreat unsaid; her throat felt full of the corpses of unspoken regrets.

  Joss refused her tentative offer of help in unloading her trunk from the wagon, working up a sweat as she swore it into the kitchen. “That’s my room.” Joss aimed her chin at a closed door. “Savin’ events we’d’ve shared, but events came to pass.

  Have either other one now; no mind to me.” She rattled open the stove and raked down the ashes, coaxing coals to life with sticks of fatwood, adding hardwood, checking the kettle and tank. “Got warm water here if you want a wash whilst I tend the horses, or you can wait on hot an’ a bath. We’ve got a real bathtub.” Aidan knew by the way she said it that bathtubs were an oddity or a luxury in this spare, strange place. “Necessary out the side door, if an’ when.”

  Aidan watched the weary set of her elder cousin’s shoulders as she led the horses away. “Oh, Joss,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but how could I have expected you? How could I have expected any of this?”

  Woman and beasts passed into the darkness of the barn, leaving no answers in the dusty gray yard.

  She turned to inspect the house in unobserved dismay. From the outside it had looked to be a bastard mix of a log cabin and a board shack; the log part was the half she stood in now. She had grown up with wallpaper, cabinetry, pegged oak; dirt floors hadn’t occurred to her, but here was dirt under her feet, its commonest traffic evident in the patterns worn smoothly into it, its hard surface scarred by her trunk. Where she would have expected cabinets with countertops were benches skirted with faded gingham; shelves were braced on walls where cupboards might have hung. Near the central stove was a rustic table with six chairs. In a far corner, a clawfoot bathtub nosed past the edge of a folding privacy screen. The space beyond the stove could have made a dining room and parlor as well; a paucity of chairs save at the table suggested that sitting had been done there, had sitting after supper been done at all.

  She let her eyes roam the perimeters of the room. Far past its rusticity, something bothered her, and finally, looking at a mantel shelf with a clock and a Bible and a few photographs, it occurred to her: but for the Bible, there were no books. “Dear Lord,” she murmured. “What rank poverty have I fallen into?”

  Dust motes danced in the afternoon sun slanting through unchinked gaps between logs; brittle beams of light trailed

  slenderly onto the dark dirt floor.

  She traced a finger along the edge of a china cabinet that had once been a fine piece of furniture. Now it was as chipped and worn as the hard-used dishes it held. Almost unconsciously, she noted things in it: a porcelain soup tureen, a few cups and saucers that matched—all with nicks taken from their edges—and tucked into a corner, a book. She opened the glass-paneled door. Baptist Hymnal.

  Softly, she sighed. “Baptists, no less.” She slipped the book back to its place.

  Reluctantly, she opened the doors of the rooms her cousin had offered. The rooms were Spartan, meant but for sleeping and the storage of a few clothes; daylight glittered between each unbattened board. The beds were militarily made up, corners sharply angled, sheets tightly cuffed over quilts. One room had a bedstead wide enough for two; the other, two narrow cots with thin ticks. Peeking into Joss’s room, finding the scant tick that had apparently been the lot of the Bodett offspring, she smiled in weary lack of surprise that the lesser mattress hadn’t been abandoned. Joss Bodett didn’t seem the sort to fall sway to creature comforts.

  But it relieved her to see the case by Joss’s bed; it bulged with books, its top stacked with volumes the shelves were too full to accept. She would have perused titles, but she didn’t know how long Joss would be about the barn, and she had no desire to be caught snooping; her cousin’s patience seemed too tightly reined already.

  She chose the double bed. It had obviously been Jocelyn and Harmon’s, and she felt more kinship with the cousin she had never met than she did with the one she had.

  A half-hearted tug to her trunk didn’t budge it. She carried its contents by the armful into the room she had chosen, hanging what she could in a shabby armoire, stacking the rest on the bed. She dragged the empty trunk into the room, stashing it in a corner, and reloaded it with what hadn’t fit in the cupboard. She opened the valise she had hand-carried from Portland.

  Wrapped in the soft folds of a woolen cloak she found the bone china teapot and tin of tea she had intended for Cousin Jocelyn the Elder, and a shaving mug with brush and soap that she would have presented, at the right moment, to Harmon. Seeing them, she battled back tears for what felt like the thousandth time in the last week.

  When she could, she lifted another fold of the cloak. “How hard it was to think what to bring you,” she murmured, “and for naught! Mayhap you’d have cared for these trinkets” —there was a folding knife with a scrimshaw handle for Seth, a silver watch and chain with an ivory fob for Ethan— “but how will I know?”

  Gently, she turned the next fold of her winter wrap, and she sighed in resignation at the Spode teacup and saucer, delicately painted with a winding pattern of violets, that she had chosen for her female cousin. “This will mean nothing to you! My stars, you wear a gun!”

  She forced back tears, wiping away the few that had escaped. By the bed was a rude stand with tree-branch legs, its top sawn from the bole of a large tree. Because she had them, she put two framed photographs there: one of her parents, and the one her grandmother had given her. She lingered at the feminine image of the pretty girl who had been Joss Bodett ten years ago. “Where are you?” she whispered. “Whatever became of you, Jocelyn Bodett?”

  Cousin Jocelyn the Younger had no answers.

  In the kitchen, the kettle billowed steam. Aidan closed down the stove and made tea in the pot that would have been her elder Cousin Jocelyn’s. She filled the Spode cup with hot water, and found a lesser cup and saucer in the china cabinet. She opened the icebox to get milk and blinked at its contents: frying pans, a dutch oven, pie plates; the ice tray held wooden spoons and spatulas, and the drip tray had been converted into a knife drawer. Slowly, she closed the door. “No ice? But how...” Wearily, she leaned against the sink—a sink that didn’t include the amenity of a pump. “Oh, my. Oh, this is going to be so terribly difficult!”

  “Would you care for tea?” she asked when Joss came in; her

  cousin looked up warily. “I brought it with me,” she snapped, to the look. “I troubled you for the water.”

  Joss hung her hat on a nail by the door; she came to the table undoing her gunbelt, and set it in a black sprawl across the oilclothed surface. Aidan regretted her sharpness, for her cousin’s face held a weariness far past a hard day’s work as she sat and pulled off her gloves. “You trouble me for nothin’.” Joss’s voice was softly raspy. “It’s been weeks since I tasted tea. I thank you for the bringin’ an’ the sharin’.”

  Self-consciously, Aidan saved the hot water from the cups into the tank at the end of the stove and put them on the table; she got the pot from the warming shelf and turned to find Joss with her head on her arms on the table, a study of exhaustion.