The Grass Widow

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 Man
a

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

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 wished 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.”