The Grass Widow (30 page)

But when the men were gone and the woman damned in the same breath as them was left, that woman stood leaning against the porch rail post, her lilacribboned hat low over her eyes, arms folded across her ribs, her booted ankles crossed, watching the dust they left as they rode off, dust that hung long in the close August air before it settled sulkily back to the earth, and still she stared after them. When Aidan emerged from a kitchen still hot from the preparation of supper Joss didn’t turn; she asked her question in a low, neutral voice, as if she asked it of the yard, of the wagon track that led to the post road, of the memory of the dust. “Is that how you see me, then?”

“Is what how I see you?” Aidan sank into one of the rockers on the porch, fanning herself with the Leavenworth newspaper Malin had brought and she hadn’t yet had time to read; it was scarcely cooler outside than in.

“As a man.” She flipped her cigarette end out into the dirt of the yard. “Short hair. Trousers. Doin’ a man’s work. Smokin’. Takin’ too much pleasure in drink.” She turned to regard her cousin with hat-shaded, unreadable eyes. “Is that what you see when you look at me? Lackin’ the part of a man that hurt you, but a man all the same?”

“The part of the man that hurt me was his certainty that I existed only as a vessel for his desire, and there’s none of that in you,” Aidan said quietly. Short hair and jeans be damned, there was nothing masculine about the supple body leaned against the post—except, perhaps, the cock of her hat. “I’ve never seen you as a man, Joss.”

“You called me sir when first you met me.”

“Which misconception lasted only until it was corrected, and never was renewed. I expected to be met by a man. I’d never seen a woman in trousers, never mind wearing a gun; what else might an Eastern girl have thought? Joss—” Almost hesitantly, she went to her, touching her face; she smelled of dust and sawdust and sweat, of shellac and floor wax and tobacco, as Doc and the captain had smelled when she had hugged them goodbye, but the underlying essence of this person was redolently female. “Joss, I’d never say such a thing save as the joke I meant it to be. You laughed with them—”

“Was I to weep in front of ’em?” She retreated from Aidan’s touch, abandoning the shade of the porch in favor of the sundrenched yard, and kicked at a stone with the toe of her boot. “I may not be a usual woman, but I’m no damned man. I do a man’s work because it needs doin’. Am I to wear skirts to muck stalls an’

split wood? Does takin’ up a shovel an’ a axe over the cookstove an’ washtub make a man o’ me? I’d be doin’ cookin’ an’ laundry if you weren’t here to relieve me o’ the burden. I’m woman enough to want a bath when I’m as worked as I am now, an’ clean clothes, an’ more meal than biscuits an’ beans every night o’ my life. My rogue brother taught me to smoke an’ swear an’ drink liquor, an’

I enjoy those things, but does that make me man enough to go to the Bull an’ Whistle an’ have a drink or a hand o’ cards? A man save all the privilege?”

“Joss—”

“I’m not man enough to buy a quart o’ whiskey or a tin o’

tobacco in this town! In Leavenworth, where they don’t give enough of a damn for a Stationer to know fourteen of us died this miserable spring, I ride on Ethan’s reputation ’cause I look so much like him, an’ ’cause it gets me better lumber than they’d sell me as a woman, an’ ’cause I can walk into the Green Front Saloon an’ buy my bottle—I let ’em call me Mister ’cause it serves me to let ’em think I’m Ethan, an’ ‘cause it keeps him alive in some small part, but damn it! It don’t please me that they look at me no closer than to think me a man.”

The day had been blisteringly hot, and Joss had worked hard:

her hat was sweated through, her shirt still plastered to her after an hour’s rest. Years of labor had left her whip-slim and rangy; what small breasts she may have had with an easier life had long since given over to muscle. Her dark-tanned face was smudged with the grime of flooring nails, giving her a faux beard-shadow; had Aidan known Ethan she would have seen him standing there, but she hadn’t. All she saw was Joss, wounded and angry and bewildered. “I’ve never seen you as a man, Joss,” she said quietly.

“I’ve never thought of you as one. I named you with them out of pride in you—no, you’re not a usual woman. Side by side to a man you’re as good as any and better than most at their own games, even to holding your decency with a bellyful of whiskey. And you’re as good as any woman at the things expected of us. What does it matter whether you wear pants or skirts? What matters is who you are. You’re strong and fierce, and you’ve made me strong and fierce. Were I to go back East I’d be like an animal in a cage. You’ve taught me independence and—and cussedness, and—”

“An’ I treat you like my father treated my mother! Stuck in that fucking kitchen, doin’ my cookin’ an’ cleanin’— How do I treat you but as a housemaid, Aidan? You came here so you could take your dignity back home an’ I—”

“What dignity would I have there, Joss? I’d rather be called a grass widow here than a strumpet there. Dignity here is weighed by a different measure, and a truer one. Accomplishment matters here, not appearance. Who in this town has time for a woman who faints at the mention of legs instead of limbs? They may not approve of my condition or your haircut, Joss, but saving Ott Clark and the Richlands—and who cares a whit for them?—

there’s not a soul in the Station who doesn’t respect what we’ve done with this farm.”

Tight-lipped, Joss stared at the ground. The last offer she’d gotten on the farm had been from Marcus Jackson, almost two months ago; had they stopped because she’d said no to everyone interested, or because she’d proved herself?

“Last week Flora herself buttonholed me in Richland’s to

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sing your praises—oh, and didn’t she make sure Effie heard every word!—and a note for me, for blowing a large hole in a small target. She thinks you’re the best farmer this town’s ever seen, and if the men would take a leaf from you maybe they’d be able to hold up their heads in Leavenworth County. Does she care if you wear your brother’s shirts and gun? Not a whit does she care. Does she see you as a man? She sees you as a person, Joss. Tenacious is what she called you. A tough, tenacious human being, able to do what needs doing—and doing a damned good job of it.”

Joss jammed her hands into her pockets and kicked at the dirt. Praise from Flora Washburn was notoriously hard to come by, as anyone who had ever worked for her could attest, but unexpected approval from Flora couldn’t dispel the quivering feeling of near-desperation she had been carrying for two days, a distortion of her inner vision that made her feel hollow and thickly magnified, a panicking loss of her grasp on her perception of herself that had happened when it seemed Aidan saw her as just another man, so scathing had been the denunciation Joss had heard. That single muttered word had delivered a kick that sent cartwheeling the can of worms that was self-doubt in Joss’s mind, and those loosed worms of question had squirmed too far into too many corners of her thoughts to be gathered back now by Flora’s praise and Aidan’s calm assurances. “I don’t treat you well,” she said hoarsely. That was no worm; it was a snake, thick and lethal and coiled around too many thoughts: He treats it the way a Stationer treats things, she had said of her father and his farm. Like a wrong man treats a right woman.

Like you’re treating Aidan. Just like a wrong man treats a right
woman. Just like a man—

“Joss, what are you talking about? I’ve never been so loved, or so respected. When I feel mistreated I’ll tell you. Joss—” Aidan went to her, taking those slim, hard shoulders in her hands. “You misunderstood me,” she said softly. “I never meant you to think I see you as anything but a woman. I love you, Joss. I—”

“But who is it you love? What am I, that you can love me?

Some—some—hermaphrodite, neither man nor woman an’ a poor excuse for either—”

“Joss, stop this! You’re the most capable, the most kind and caring person I’ve ever known. I could never be as happy as I am with you. One of us must run the house and the other the farm; we do what we’re best at. You’ve been forced to assume the role—”

“No one forced me! I love this dirt! I love my water pipes!

I love the barn an’ the woodpile an’ hittin’ my thumb with a hammer—” She pulled away from Aidan. “An’ none o’ that feels womanly to me! For God’s sake, I lay with a woman at night—”

“So do I! Does that make me a man, or mean I wish I was one?”

“Or does it but mean you wish I was one?”

“If you were a man I’d not be laying with you.” Her voice was cold in the bruise of her cousin’s accusation; she felt that and looked away, waiting for the sharpness to subside. “Joss, no man could awaken in me the things you do,” she said softly, when she could. “It’s because you’re a woman that I love you. You can do the things a man does, but you feel things—you understand things—as a woman, and that’s the difference. You can cry, where a man wouldn’t allow himself to admit the pain.”

“But I don’t feel like a woman.” It was a rasping hiss between her teeth. “My hair was all I had to make me feel womanly an’ I was glad enough to see it gone, but ever since—” She fisted her hands deep into her pockets; the pain that ricocheted in her mind couldn’t mask the dread that one of those hands might flare out suddenly—

I get afraid of what I might do, Joss.

Ethan. She remembered the wildness that had come over him, and knew his need to flee when that turbulent thing happened in him: I
want to break all the dishes, and kick out the windows, and
burn down the house and barn —I need to hurt something, and I have
to take it away
from here.

She swallowed around a breath too pent to escape, glad for the brim of the hat to hide her eyes, knowing what was there;

she had seen it too many times in her brother. She brushed past Aidan, reaching for Ethan’s Colt, buckling it on and tying the thong around her thigh, barely aware of what her hands were doing.

“Where are you going?”

Joss knew the tone, and the struggle behind it; she’d heard it from her mother times enough, asking after Ethan with a woman’s fear of what a man might do. It grated at her, as she knew it had grated at him; it grated at her that she would know so surely how that man had felt. “I don’t know.” It was Ethan’s answer, low, cold, rude—but not as rude as its alternative:
that
ain’t none o’ your fuckin’ business.

“Joss, don’t do this.” It was an echo of Jocelyn’s eternal supplication of her perilously-balanced middle child:
Ethan, don’t
do this.
The sense of déjà-vu was blindingly disorienting; did this conversation run in the family?

Ethan’s reply was all she could give: a simmering look under the brim of a sweatstained hat, dark eyes so flat and deadly that the woman who had borne him had stepped back from the danger there. It was Aidan’s first glimpse of that virulent look, and it drained her courage and her color from her. “Joss—”

The whisper of her name—and that she didn’t take the backwards step Jocelyn always had taken from Ethan—penetrated the ferity; Joss groped for her voice. “This isn’t you.” The words felt like fishbones in her throat. “Whatever it is, it’s in an’ of me, an’ I need to be alone with it. I’m afraid—”

I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.
The knowledge turned her on her heel. A sharp whistle around her thumb and finger brought Charley from a far corner of the pasture. She used his mane and the fence to boost herself onto his broad bare back and put her heels to his side hard enough to startle him into flight.

Night settled nervously around the house. Aidan sat on the counter with her feet in a sink full of water that had been cold when she had drawn it from the tap, her forearms on her knees, her head weary on her own shoulder, her Colt close enough if it was needed.

She had watched the sunset, recalling Joss saying that when there was such a rage of orange in the sky there had been a dust storm to the west of them, a fury of wind out in prairies she had only heard of, where trees faded to long grasses shimmering gold in the ripe summer. That tempestuous sunset was long since gone to the thick, muttering darkness of a night pregnant with storm, and still she stared out the window, listening in the dark for Charley’s odd gait (a pacer, Joss called him) bringing her cousin home; she listened, too, for a hoofbeat less familiar, perhaps more dangerous.

She heard the grumble of distant thunder; she heard owls in the woodlot and coyotes beyond the rises, and tree frogs shrilling their evening complaints; she heard the clock ticking on the shelf. She didn’t need to watch it; long minutes ago it had struck ten, and would soon announce the half. The living sounds outside made her wonder who had told her, or where she had read, that stalking Indians communicated with perfectly-mimicked noises of the night. She wondered briefly, and put the thought away. All through the house, until the light had faded too far, oak floors gleamed. In the flurry of furniture-moving—Seth’s and Ethan’s beds had gone into Joss’s old room, and Joss’s bed to an empty stall in the barn in case Levi returned—a dusty cradle had emerged from the barn to go into the room the Bodett boys had shared, the room she and Joss had shyly started calling the nursery. Malin had polished it to a loving shine with a waxy rag Doc had abandoned. Only Seth had enjoyed the rocking bed, Joss had said; she and Ruth and Ethan had berthed in the bottom drawer of the armoire in the room she and Aidan now shared. None of the rest of the babies had lived long enough to get out from between their parents on the bed.

Joss, are you all right? Where are you?

She had agonized with guilt over Joss’s flight; guilt had tipped over into the brittle rage of desertion, but it was an anger too brittle to last too long. Now, there was only a dull ache of fear. The first time she had been alone at the farm she had been terrified; now, even in the dark, she wasn’t afraid; not for herself. She had blown a large hole in a small target once, and coldly, she knew she could do it again. But those eyes: those dark, haunted eyes...