The Grass Widow (18 page)

he goggled. “What happened to your hair, Joss? Lice?”

“What’re you doin’ bustin’ in here? I could’ve shot you, you damn fool!”

“Not ‘til you move your Colt into Aidan’s room,” he grinned; the sidearm hung on its peg by the door. “No fire at nine is why—and Joss, your hair is beautiful!” He was recovering from the haircut, but not from the delight of knowing where she’d

slept last night (or, rather, stayed; from the look of the delicate bruises around her lips, precious little sleeping had got done).

“Where’s Cousin Aidan, Miss Josie?”

“Abed,” she managed. She had spent some barely-awake moments in the night scouring her mind for the admonitions of Leviticus, and hadn’t come up with enough to confirm any sin in what they had done—but still, it felt as odd as the space between waking and sleep, as alien as the sky before a tornado, as precarious as being on foot and too far from home in a blizzard... It felt as right as snow on Christmas, as healing as rain in April. Doc couldn’t get rid of the grin; it seemed stuck to his face.

“I might have been our good friend Argus Slade.”

“You might’ve been fish under my corn, too, an’ none the wiser—nor the sadder, in my humble estimation. Are you idly rounding, or about more serious matters?”

“Delivering the mail. Aidan has a package. Four tins, from the heft of it. One will keep my mouth shut,” he leered, and saw the relief in her eyes before the fire of her humor flared in them.

“So will my Colt, Hippocrates. I’m not bound by your oath to do no harm. Be useful since you’re here; start the fire.” She took the bucket to the well and came back wet-haired, spraying like a dog on the porch. “Doc—”

He looked up from adjusting the stove dampers.

“I wonder if—um—is there any—in our—will we cause any trouble—any danger—damn! The baby,” she managed. “Will we harm the baby?”

He closed the oven damper and nudged at the one on the side. “Not as long as you’re gentle, Josie. After the seventh month don’t insert anything into her” —she gaped at him; he smiled at her innocence— “saving your fingers, and be damn sure they’re clean with or without the baby.” She sat hard in a chair at the table, red to the roots of her hair. “You asked,” Doc said gently.

“Let me mortify you all at a time and get it over with. Try not to have an apoplexy.”

She learned more from his quiet lecture on what they could and couldn’t do for the baby’s sake than might have occurred to

her on her own in five years; at last she sat back to run her hands through her damp hair. “Lord,” she breathed. “An’ here I thought just lovin’ her was all there would be to it.”

“This may not be a widely-held opinion, but it’s my opinion that there’s nothing in loving that’s wrong as long as you both agree to it. But some needs wait until the baby’s born. What seems inconceivable now might sound like fun when you’re more comfortable with one another—mayhap next summer, when the corn and cucumbers are ripe,” he grinned. “I hear an ear of corn’s the—”

“Oh, make the coffee!” She fled, his laugh following her, and went across the bed on her knees to deliver damp kisses from Aidan’s neck to her hip, admiring her nudity, trying to restrain fractious thoughts of cucumbers and ears of corn. “It’s Doc. Wait til you hear the things he told me! An’ you got a package. He thinks four tins. Are you awake?”

“Mmmmm. Package?” Her voice was muffled by the pillow and her pure satiation; she had never thought to know how good it was simply to be alive and have Joss tracing soft kisses across her back. “I love you so much,” she whispered. “I can’t face Doc and not have him know it.”

Joss rested a hand at the curve of her waist. “We needn’t hide from Doc,” she said quietly. “He loves us both.”

When Aidan came shyly out Doc’s eyes convinced her; if they hadn’t, his softly-mustached kiss would have. He held a chair for her. “I might’ve known, seeing your corn so tall so soon. Shaman planting isn’t always shaman growing.”

Joss, adding wood to the firebox, dropped the burner plate and lid-lifter with a crash; she turned from the stove to look at him. “Shaman?”
There’s men, too.
She heard Ethan’s voice: Ethan, the sexual encyclopedia.
Men who do it with men. Injuns call
’
em
shaman, like a priest. Read Leviticus. Says right in it. Says don’t to
do it, but injuns ain’t Christian. Don’t matter to them what ol’ Moses
said.
“You?”

“Need I ask where you learned the word? Mercy, Joss, is there anything that boy didn’t tell you?” He leaned back in his chair

with a small sigh. “One thing, it seems, and that to his everlasting credit. Joss, Aidan...this must stay between us. No one will suspect the two of you—no one suspects passion of a woman—but mere suspicion has been the death of more than one man of my stripe. As the two of you are, so am I.”

Wide-eyed, Aidan looked at him. “But you told me the War—”

“I needed your trust and I needed it quickly. Was I to offer such truth to someone I didn’t know? I’ve no fondness for tar, feathers, or a ride on the next rail out of town.”

Joss retrieved the lid-lifter, dropping it again when it burned her hand. “Damn!” She wrapped the tool in a towel and seated the plate over the burner. “Ethan knew this?” She didn’t look at Doc; her voice was low and cautious. “How did he know?”

“Not what you’re thinking.” His smile was pained. “Ethan caught me.
Flagrante delicto,
as it were.”

Joss turned, an eyebrow raised in question.

“In the act.”

“I know what it means. How the thunder did he catch you?”

“It was afternoon that Tucker Day fell off the church roof. Ethan knew Tuck was bad hurt. He didn’t waste time knocking.”

“How’d you keep him shut up?”

Doc leaned back to accept the cup of coffee she put in front of him. “I didn’t,” he said quietly. “I said, ‘Ethan, you’ve got my life in your hands.’ He turned his back and said, ‘Tuck’s hurt real bad. You’d better come.’ He was on my elbow all afternoon, more good help than in the way. When Tucker died he sat with me for a long time. Finally he said, ‘If that’s how it is to have someone’s life in your hands, I ain’t cut out for it.’ Three days later he was knocking on my door with his pockets full of poker money, asking where he could buy a bathtub for his mother. We went to Kansas City and never a word of it passed between us, and I knew no word ever would.” He tasted his coffee and grimaced. “Did I make this? Lord have mercy, that’s coffin varnish!”

“You know where the milk is.”

“A little loving and you’ve turned flat lazy,” he grumped, and

came back from the barn with a pail brimming with milk, Aidan’s mail under his other arm.

The package held eight half-pound tins of tea and a letter. Aidan opened the page and read, her lips thinning until at last she threw it to the table. “Damn you! You may take your demands of me to perdition!” She shoved away from the table and stormed to the bedroom, leaving Joss and Doc looking wonderingly at each other, and at the letter. Reluctantly, Joss picked it up.
Daughter: Enclosed find a bank draft for two hundred dollars.
Leave half with your cousin & make immediate arrangement for your
return to Portland. It is unthinkable that you remain in Kansas without
male protection or suitable chaperone. Arrangements for your travel to
Bangor, where you shall stay with your mother’s cousin Rosa Snipes, are
making. Our heartfelt sympathy & deepest regards to Cousin Jocelyn
the Younger. We hope she & the doctor shall enjoy the tea.

“Well, thanks for the invite, Cousin Adrian,” she drawled. “I appreciate all hell out o’ your heartfelt concern for li’l ol’ unprotected—an’ apparently unsuitable—me.” She tossed the letter across to Doc, studying the bank draft while he read; she’d never seen one before. It was hard to believe a piece of paper made in Maine was good for Kansas dollars. She wondered if it would really work.

“What an insufferably pompous son of a bitch.” Doc’s disgust interrupted her ponderings. “Get me paper and ink, Joss. A rude country doctor is about to admonish a city physician about the delicacy of his daughter’s condition.”

He was done his letter by the time Joss coaxed Aidan from the bedroom, and read it to them: “...and although I appreciate your apprehension of what may appear to be an unworkable situation, I respectfully submit that you lack understanding of the peculiar capabilities of Western women. Your daughter is as well-protected with Miss Bodett as she would be with any man. She is as true and bold a shot as she is a judge of character. But that is not my deepest concern, sir. As her physician, I forbid

my patient to travel such an onerous distance in her delicate condition. I trust that I may thank you in advance for your regard of my professional judgment. Respectfully, Robert James Pickett, MD, Columbia College of Medicine, 1860.” He folded the letter into his coat pocket. “I’ll post this tomorrow—and expect Dr. Blackstone within the month.”

“It was a token protest,” Aidan said wearily. “He doesn’t care enough to come after me.”

Tight-lipped, Joss tapped the crisp edge of the bank draft against the tabletop. “What o’ this? It was meant for her travelin’

expenses.”

Doc hadn’t liked Adrian Blackstone’s ostentatious stationery, or his cramped, prim handwriting, or that he hadn’t had the grace to address his daughter by name or sign off on his letter; most of all, he hadn’t liked the dull certainty of Aidan’s words:
He doesn’t
care enough.
“Damn his intentions. It’s in Aidan’s name. Cash it posthaste.”

Shakily, Aidan smiled. Saving her refusal to marry Jared Hayward, defying her father was nothing she had ever done—or even thought to do—but much of what she had thought yesterday had cartwheeled off into the depths of last night, never to return.

“Thank you, Doc. To me, it looks like a board floor.”

“I said I’d build you a floor!” Joss pretended insult and won a smile.

“Floors! Does this mean I can tip back in my chair?”

Aidan looked at him in mock horror. “And scar my wood?

Never, Doctor!”

Joss made a leisurely breakfast that would serve Doc for lunch. They spent the bank draft a hundred ways, knowing the money would go into the tobacco tin under Joss’s bed. Doc caught them up on Leavenworth gossip, where he had been the day before: the Cavalry was mobilizing, and would leave for the Dakotas within a fortnight. Captain Slade was making the rounds of civilian homes under his protection; Joss heard his unspoken warning.

They saw him off with a venison steak and the heart of

the deer. He wasn’t to the track on his mare before their eyes locked and their hearts followed and they were back in bed, a tangle of arms and legs and desires and but one concession to the possibility of Argus Slade: on their way, Joss took her Colt into Aidan’s—their—room.

0

June, 1876

Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another ...
Ephesians 4:31-32

The fortnight passed with no sign or news of Captain Slade. The days rose hot and clear, the nights cooled mercifully, and their lives assumed a rhythm: Joss rose quietly at first light, leaving Aidan to sleep, and started the fire before going to the barn for her early chores there, milking and feeding and cleaning, having low conversations with her animals, turning out the horses and the cow. She checked the corning crock in its pit in the barn, and climbed to the haymow to see to the jerky turning wizened and hard in that dim, dry heat, and she would cut off a piece of the spicy leather to tuck into her mouth; the rest of the strip went into her shirt pocket.

Finished in the barn, she headed for the fields, working there until Aidan rang the breakfast bell. Recalling the silence save requests for salt or butter that had been mealtimes with their families, they used the time to talk, to laugh, to plan; they

ate leisurely, drank their coffee, retired to the porch for Joss’s cigarette. (Doc kept her supplied with tobacco, since Thom and Effie Richland, with their situational brand of morality, refused to sell it to her. Effie had barely spoken to her since her first sight of that scandalous haircut, but the colored barber had a laugh as big as his substantial belly and trimmed her ragged ends for free; Joss watched him closely and reported his methods back to Aidan.)

After breakfast she worked the crops until the sun was unbearably hot, then retired to the shaded side of the woodshed, patient in her assault against wood her father and brothers had blocked. Firewood was a back-of-the-mind worry to her. Half of their claim was forested, but Charley, that good and gentle horse, liked nothing less than snaking a tree out of the woods; only Seth on his back had kept him from jug-headed skittishness at the task, and she didn’t know how she might keep him calm without Seth. Fritz was no good alone; he was just as liable to lie down in the traces if Charley wasn’t hitched beside him to prevent it. Sometimes she would lean on her axe, staring at empty fields, thinking about all that had to be done and how little time there was to do it, and she’d have a moment of irritation with Seth and Ethan for not being at their chores... and then she would remember, and attack the blocks of oak and elm, sending stovesized chunks flying around the woodyard. When the sun was highest and hottest Aidan would ring her in for cold biscuits and milk and meat. She had lived her life with a hot mid-day meal, but she’d lived it not worrying about winter’s wood; a cold lunch saved three sticks of wood every hour for six hours...and spared Aidan the rank heat of the kitchen in the thickest part of the day.

When the meal was done and her cigarette smoked, there was always something to be mended: a harness, an axe handle lost to a block of twisted elm, a bit of oakum to be chinked into a light-showing space between logs in the cabin half of the house, a board to replace on the porch floor. (Aidan, watching her make a board one sultry afternoon with axe and adze and froe and