The Grass Widow (32 page)

She heard leisurely hooves and bolted from her chair, letting a yell go up the track; Malin and Doc trotted into the yard, Doc dismounting when he saw her face. “Aidan, what is it?”

“Joss left angry last evening. I can’t ride—” Doc’s look sharpened, a probing visual examination for physical evidence of the quarrel. “Don’t even think it, Doc! Just find her. She left across the rise toward the branch, bareback on Charley.”

“Did it rain here in the night?”

“Past midnight, half an hour of hard rain.”

“Damn. Malin, a mile past the branch the trail forks. Check Jackson’s claim shack; I’ll take the south fork. Two shots if you

find her; pause and one more if you need me. We’ll both end up in Newtonville eventually. You’ve got your Colt, Aidan? I need to borrow your Winchester.”

“Joss was shooting coons; it’s light,” she warned; he slid the magazine full from a box on the sideboard and they were gone, leaving her to wait—and wonder why he would want the rifle when he carried twelve rounds at his hips, favoring the gunslinger look of crossed pistols.

“Just the one got away?” Doc asked Malin at the top of the hill; the captain’s call, while he needed little excuse to visit the Station, hadn’t been entirely social.

“That’s what the sheriff in Newtonville said. They were after horses when there were seven of them, but a lone buck—” He looked back at the house. “She’ll be all right alone?”

“No Pawnee will bother this farm or anyone on it, but it’s the farm that’s marked, not Joss. Away from it, she’s naught but another paleface. Check the claim shack. I’ve got to skirt the swamp; we’ll come out about even. I wish to God we had your scout.”

“If wishes were horses. Be careful, R.J.”

“Beggars might ride. And you, my friend.”

She sat on the porch in the rocker, her Colt in the folds of her skirts, not sure what she guarded against, only sure she should guard. She rested her head against the high caned back of the chair she favored, her eyes scanning the tops of the hills beyond the fields, her mind wandering; she remembered a conversation with Levi before he left. He had called Joss ‘Mister’ one more time than she could bear. “You do know Joss is a woman,” she’d said gently, across the row of tomatoes in the kitchen garden.

“You know that, Levi?”

“All cats are gray in the dark,” he said, and she stared at him; shyly, he ducked his head, and found a fat hornworm to drown in the kerosene. They picked bugs and pulled weeds in long silence until he added, “Mayhap him him. Or her, or—but kind you papa still make small inside! To. He do. He—she. Do. Kind—God

damn my head! Goddamn Station farmer. Hornworms!”

Remembering it now, tears stung her eyes. Yes, she would make the baby a kind papa—but only if she came home. Only if they found her. Why had Doc wanted the rifle, heavy with all fifteen rounds?

She watched the hills, dozing, but her ears never slept. When the clock struck six she made a small fire to heat water for tea and a wash; listlessly, she ate cold meat and a day-old biscuit. She retired to the porch to watch the sunset, and the close horizon. The last light was fading from the sky when the sound of horses snapped her awake; she strained to see through the gathering darkness.

Three horses, one empty
Joss no oh Lord Jesus God please
no—

but then she saw Charley was ridden double, Doc and a bloody bundle in his arms, and that was worse than one horse empty.

“Hot water,” Doc grated, an order as he brought in his burden without giving Aidan time to see anything but the limpness in his arms and the awful dark stain across his shirt. “Aidan, move!

I need hot water and I need it now. Alcohol—whiskey’s fine—

Malin, get my saddlebags. Aidan, I need hot water and whiskey!

In Jesus’s name amen, woman, will you move?”

Aidan spent two hours swallowing tears, swallowing knowing she would vomit, swallowing knowing she would faint; somehow, she didn’t vomit or faint. She did cry, but with quiet, grim control, and not so much that she couldn’t be a nurse for Doc as he worked patiently to suture a huge flap of Joss’s scalp back into place. Malin had found her under the sweeper, her face as white as the bone that showed through her wound, her Colt empty in her limp hand, four dead coyotes scattered around her. Two of them had died from her bullets. The third was crush-ribbed, Charley’s hooves bloody.

The fourth had an arrow buried in its throat.

He had thought her dead, partially scalped by the lone Pawnee warrior who had brought him to the county’s corner. But as he was gathering up her body to bring it home fresh blood

had run, and he fired his pistol twice in the dim hope that Doc would hear. Reluctant to leave her, he signalled over and over; twelve rounds later, he heard answering shots. He scouted in his wait, finding the nervous dance of Charley’s shod hooves...and the natural track of an unshod pony, the almost-barefoot sign of a moccasined foot. On a sharply axe-sheared branch stub of the sweeping cedar was a bloody clot of dark hair.

She had been asleep, he surmised, letting the horse find their way home; Charley, eager to be there, cleared the tree and expected his rider to duck. She hadn’t, and hit that slicing stub hard. Why her stiff new hat hadn’t saved her from the brutal injury, he couldn’t imagine; it was there on the ground beside her. (Later, Aidan would turn that pale hat over and over in her hands; there wasn’t a drop of blood on it.) There was no way to know how long she had been there, save that the blood on her was dry when he found her.

The Native sign—? Over that, he could only shake his head. Finally Doc came, and cleaned the wound with water and whiskey and bound her head as best he could with a shirt from Malin’s bedroll before they brought her in, not daring to hurry for fear of starting the bleeding again; her shirt and the dark stain on the trail were evidence enough that she had lost too much blood already.

Stitching the wicked wound closed now, he was as gentle as he knew how to be, but the whiskey burned and the needle stung as the chloroform wore off; Joss flinched and moaned, pain penetrating her unconsciousness. Aidan held her head and Malin her ankles.

Doc was almost finished when she opened her eyes and whispered roughly, “You might have shed a tear, you stubborn son of a bitch. What else did you think could cleanse your soul?”

“Hold her,” Doc said quietly, and they did; Doc sank the needle and her eyes rolled back in a pain-faint that almost took Aidan with it. “Aidan, I need you,” he said tersely. “You can faint when we’re done. Move your head; you’re in my light. Clip her hair there. Easy—”

At last he was finished. He gave the whole job a last wipe with a whiskey-soaked cloth. No blood seeped from the wound, and he decided not to bandage it for now; he adjusted the pillows to keep her from moving her head and sat back with his bottle of antiseptic to take a hard pull from the neck of it for himself.

“Heal, Josie,” he said wearily. “I’ve done what I can for you, my friend.” He thumped the cork back into the bottle. “All she needs now is a bath.”

“You both need sleep,” Aidan said, and they took their hint and left the women alone. Malin managed to get his boots off before collapsing in exhaustion to Seth’s bed, but Doc had held Joss in his arms for eight miles before spending the better part of two hours placing dozens of tiny stitches; he barely made it to Ethan’s bunk before he was snoring, his booted foot still on the floor, his wooden leg enjoying the mattress. Aidan got her water quietly, so as not to disturb her men.

But it was a moment before she could begin; she sat on the edge of the bed, biting her lip to hold back the tears, wondering how long Joss had been awake with what must have been mindreeling pain: long enough that the coyotes scented the blood. Long enough to defend against them. Long enough to know how deeply endangered she was: no one knowing where she was, on a trail little used save in the cold fall for hunting, terribly hurt and unable to get back onto Charley, who would have brought her home—

She recalled coming awake on the porch while the night was still hard dark, after the rain but long before the dawn, choking back a cry of unknown panic; had it been then? Malin said he had found her just past noon—ten, perhaps eleven hours she had been there; how much longer could she have lasted? Or had it been too long, had she lost too much blood, would she—

“You will,” she whispered fiercely. “You will, Joss Bodett!”

She kissed cool lips and felt no twitch of response, and put her face into the blood-smudged curve of Joss’s throat and wept. At last she was able to sit up, to wring out the cloth in the basin of warm water; gently, she wiped blood and dirt from Joss’s

face, fmally getting down to sleek, even tan; more gently, she worked at the blood that had dried in her hair, and when she had gotten what she could without moving that damaged head the water was a brackish, rusty brown. She changed it, silently barefoot on the gleaming oaken floors Joss had given her. Her scissors were still on the nightstand. She cut through the collar of the shirt and split it to the tail, easing the ruined garment out from under her patient, freeing her arms from its sleeves. She smiled tightly to see the cleanliness of Joss’s forearms above her bloody hands; she had washed the dishes after dinner yesterday, Doc rinsing, Malin wiping, Aidan putting away so she’d know where to find things when the job was done.

She dropped the pieces of the shirt to the floor and started at her neck, working from dark-tanned skin to the startling paleness of breasts and belly untouched by the sun. Joss’s natural complexion was the creamy flawlessness of the Irish, from her mother—and very possibly from her natural father too, given the breathtaking good looks and smooth salesmanship of so many Portland Irishmen. Adrian Blackstone had forbidden his daughter to see what he called Galway boys, mistrusting the very smoothness that had earned his cousin Jocelyn her trouble. “God bless your trouble, Jocelyn,” she murmured. “Your heartbreak is the only love I’ll ever know.”

Well away from the damaged part of that love, she scrubbed the strong, slender arms, removing blood and hard-work dirt. She changed water and came back to tug off Joss’s boots and ease her dusty jeans away. It occurred to her that this bath was nearly more intimate than their loving; she smiled hollowly and left a gentle kiss against the curving crest of a hipbone. Joss stirred briefly, and her breathing went soft and slow again. She didn’t even consider trying to get her into a nightshirt. She pulled the covers over her and checked the wound for bleeding. Patiently, she emptied the basin and wiped it out, and hung the cloth on the wire over the stove.

She relieved Doc of his boot and lifted his good leg to the bed, not interrupting the rhythm of his snores. She glanced at

Malin in the other bed and found him watching her. “Soldier.”

Her smile was weary. “Ever vigilant.”

“She’ll be all right, Aidan,” he said softly. “She’s strong.”

“I know she is.”

“I’ll sit with her if you want some rest.”

“No. Thank you, though—and Malin, God bless you for finding her.”

“I love her, too, Aidan. There’s something in her that heals me.”

There was a daguerreotype on the wall across from the bed, its silvery tones washed with gold in the early morning light. It was a picture of Jesus. Joss studied it, bemused. The Bodetts had never been long on churchgoing, making it into town for Easter and Christmas but not much more often. “Church is s’posed to be a hospital for sinners, not a storehouse for self-appointed saints,”

Harmon had grumbled of the churchgoing populace of Washburn Station, who eyed the Bodetts with haughty disapproval when they did show up. “Treatin’ us post roaders like we’s too sinful even to be in church?”

He had known it was because of his two Jocelyns: one turning away their sanctimony with gentle grace, the other withdrawing in frustrated hurt when children who were her chums at school refused to play with her under the eyes of their parents. So the Bodetts dressed up like church and took their weekly dose of

Bible at home, sharing a hymnal that said Washburn Station Baptist Church on the inside cover in someone’s elderly hand. Ethan swore the hymnal was the only thing he’d ever stolen in his life, and he didn’t think God would object a whit, since He could surely see how His churchgoers treated His post-roaders. And the daguerreotype of Jesus hung on the bedroom wall. Joss puzzled over it; something about it was different, and she ought to know; it had been there most of her life, that she would notice a difference now.

It was a daguerreotype, not a painted picture! How could there be a photograph of Jesus? And there’d never been anyone in the picture with Him before. Jesus was laughing—she’d never seen any picture of a laughing Jesus—and He had His arm around someone’s shoulders like they were pals. He wasn’t wearing His usual robes, either; He had on a plaid shirt and a sheepskin vest, His wavy brown hair and beard flowing like always, and that happy grin on His face as He laughed at the also-grinning face of—Ethan? Jesus and Ethan Allen Bodett, sporting it up in a daguerreotype on the bedroom wall?

That don’t make no sense at all, Joss. Ethan chumming with Jesus
Christ and the photograph to prove it? You look again, you’ll see that
painted picture of Jesus that Pa brought when he came home from the
War, and looking like He ought to with His robes on and no silly grin.
But when she looked again it was Jesus and Ethan, looking as if they were ready to raid a whorehouse or raise hell at a poker parlor, God’s sun beaming on them as they grinned for the camera, and Joss watched that daguerreotype for as long as the sun shone full on it, fighting sleep until the shadow cast by the edge of the window slipped across Ethan’s face, for she had never seen him look so happy. When she opened her eyes again the picture was in full shadow and it was just Jesus, white-robed and reverent-looking, a painting of the Lord Jesus Christ and no foolishness, but she couldn’t shake the memory of Jesus and Ethan together...or the smug feeling that neither Jesus nor His Father had minded a whit that Ethan had liberated a hymnal