The grass widow, p.13
The Grass Widow, page 13
he don’t miss them fingers none in a fight. Ma always says it was the good Lord’s doin’ that put the Bodetts ’tween the Jacksons an’ the Clarks or there wouldn’t be nothin’ left but the bones.”
“Turn your chair; I need to get at your front. Thank you.”
Aidan stepped between Joss’s knees so she could reach. “Tell me about Flora Washburn. Everyone talks about her, but I’ve never met her.”
“Flora’s a queer ol’ bird. She’ll give a boy a hand up one day, like Zeke, an’ hold another one under her boot the next. She let Ethan have go at all them pecans, but not a week later she like to wore the hide off‘n Nat Day for fillin’ his poke with what’d dropped over the fence. He picked a hundred bushels o’ nuts to pay for that pokeful, an’ his daddy barely in the ground.”
“Ethan asked her. Nathaniel didn’t.”
“I suppose. Seemed harsh to me. He didn’t jump into the orchard.” She fingered her unlit cigarette, keeping her eyes closed, but she could still smell the clean, soft scent of Aidan too close to her. “She’s about eighty, they say. Older‘n Methuselah, anyway. Don’t look it. Still rides, an’ drives her own buggy. Surprised she ain’t showed up yet. Maybe she’s waitin’ on me to present you. Suppose we could dig out the finery an’ pay a call one afternoon. I ain’t wearin’ no dress, though. She wears breeches. Only reason I ever got away with it.”
“You’d have done as you pleased with or without Flora Washburn. Tip your head up.” She touched a finger under Joss’s chin and gave her a critical look one side to the other; dubiously, she shook her head. “I’m as done as I can do. Mayhap the barber will take pity and finish the job.”
Joss let her fingers have first look; it felt like what she had asked for. It felt exotic and free and comfortable; it felt frightening. She wondered if she’d dare to take off her hat in town for the next—oh, six or eight years. She stood, brushing hair from her shirtfront, and lit her cigarette.
“Aren’t you going to look in the glass?”
“I will. I need to shake out this shirt, though. I feel all itchies.”
She went to the porch and stepped out of the light; Aidan heard the snap of the shirt, and in a moment Joss came back, still doing buttons. “How’s it look?”
“Don’t ask me. See for yourself.”
“Suppose I’ve got to,” Joss murmured. “Feels so good I hate to, though.” Reluctantly, she went to the mirror.
“Mercy—” It was a soft breath of shock. “Moses on the mountain, look at Ethan,” she whispered. “A rat’s-tail of a mustache an’ I’d be Ethan Bodett.”
Weakly, Aidan smiled, recalling her arrival in Washburn Station and her first sight of the slim and handsome cowboy who had approached her; she had assumed that person to be Ethan, had known he was Ethan. Two of the deepest shocks of her nineteen years had been her father’s dry, “You’re with child,”
and that cowboy’s equally dry, “I’m Joss Bodett.” Looking at Joss now, she saw that darkly handsome cowboy again, and it stirred something vaguely uneasy in her.
“You did a fine job of it, Aidan,” Joss said softly. “Thank you.”
And she smiled: it was an Ethan-smile, glinting and wicked. “We’ll tell Saint Paul I got the lice. Maybe he wasn’t lookin’ tonight an’
we’ll get by with it.”
“Hush,” Aidan protested, not at all comfortable with the possibility of Saint Paul’s opinion. She hung the hank of hair on the wire over the stove and got the broom and dustpan. “Do you really look like Ethan now?”
Joss found a damp four-inch lock of hair on the floor and stuck it under her nose. “Ethan. I wish you’d’ve known him.” Her mustache disintegrated as she spoke; she sat, brushing hairs from her lip. “An’ I say that—” She drew on her cigarette and found it dead; she scratched a match under the table, raising an eyebrow in request for permission. Aidan nodded, and Joss lit up and exhaled smoke in a soft sigh. “You’d love Seth. He’s like Ma—quiet an’
sweet—even if there’s somethin’ in the both of ’em to make you wonder if they ain’t just resigned. But Ethan—”
She frowned at her jelly jar, finally swallowing the rye left in it. “I don’t expect you’d’ve cared for him in the long run.” She picked a hair from her tongue and flicked it away. “You’d’ve fell in love with him at the first; he’s such a charmer. But he don’t understand—” She groped for a word. “Fences? Restraints. Or—
limits, I guess. An’ you’d have saw that. He was fun, but he just
wasn’t reliable. Had he not died of the grippe, it would’ve been by the hand of a jealous man, or one beat at cards—fair, though. Ethan didn’t need to cheat; he was God-blessed lucky at them pasteboards. But he lived what parts o’ life he enjoyed an’ never mind the rest. Today he’d’ve likely shot the deer an’ been gone, as if good aim was work enough an’ I couldn’t’ve did it.”
Aidan, remembering her own response to good aim, turned to the stove with her dustpan, not wanting Joss to see the blush.
“Land sakes, girl, don’t burn that great lot of hair,” Joss protested when she reached for the lid lifter to raise a burner plate. “It’ll stink to high heaven.” She rescued the dustpan and took it to the porch, winging its contents to the night— “No, cat. Stay out where the mice are.” —and came back brushing off her hands.
“But still, I wish you could’ve known him.”
“As do I. All of them.” Aidan sat at the table; she trimmed the lamp to its softest light. “Poor cat should have a name,” she murmured. Finally she looked up. “Joss, this morning...I hate it that I slapped you. I didn’t understand—”
Joss looked away; there was plenty about today that she didn’t understand, or dare to approach. “It’s all right, Aidan. Let it be. Let’s think up a name for the cat.”
“Orion, after the constellation; he hunts in the stars, like the cat. And it’s not all right. I saw something beautiful, and for a moment I despised you for killing it, but I had no leave to do what I did. We call it Blackstone blood and we damn it, but I don’t want this child to learn those ways. I need to remember how it hurt us both that it happened.”
Joss tipped her jelly jar to its side. “Did you empty the bottle?”
“Not quite.”
Joss went to the china cabinet and the soup tureen there. She got the bottle from it and came back to the table. The cork squeaked as she drew it from the neck; a quick shiver chased up Aidan’s spine. “You’ll remember,” Joss said quietly, emptying the amber liquid into her glass. “It’s the only time I’ve ever saw it true that it hurt you worse than it hurt me.”
“I don’t believe that. I can still see how you looked. I didn’t hurt your face, Joss, I hurt your heart. And I hate that.”
“I’ve got an’ given worse. Let it go, Aidan.”
Aidan sighed. “Would that I could. Perhaps had the others been here to share the work—but I was of so little use to you!
This morning I saw a murder. Tonight I see so much hard, hard work for little more end than keeping a frivolous city girl alive—”
Joss sent her an aggrieved look, remembering muttering those same accusing words that morning. “Aidan, you’re not—”
“—and I want you to know how dearly I appreciate it. At home there was meat on the table and we ate it, or we went to market and bought it.” She looked up from under a fringe of dark lashes. “Butcher shops by the dozen in those big Eastern cities,”
she teased gently; Joss managed a pained smile. “I deserved that. But here, saving chickens, whatever I’ve eaten was killed and tended to before I came—until now. I know what it cost now. I know good aim was the easy part and hardly work enough done, and had Ethan been here and left you with the work after the killing, I’d not have fed him tonight. Maybe from him, I’d have still seen it as a murder.”
Joss gave her a weary smile. “Ethan would shoot for the pleasure o’ shootin’ well, but I never saw him kill just for the pleasure o’ killin.’ I think was we required to eat all we killed we’d live in peace, but you can’t tell some men that. They enjoy the killin’ too much.”
“Argus Slade,” Aidan murmured. And she stared at her cup; it wasn’t just Slade. It was Jared Hayward, and his father, and her own; it was the newly-crowned man who was Ezekiel Clark, who had taken grim pleasure in the beating he’d given his father—and it was his father, and the soldiers who had accosted her when she had stepped from the train her first day on the western side of the Missouri River. They could fight a war to free the slaves, she thought, because they knew they still had women. She knew a man—Ethan or most any other—would make his kill and expect his women to clean up after him.
But Joss? Joss was as good as a man at man’s work, but she
thought like a woman: she assumed nothing, as likely to lend a hand at the dishpan or stove as she was to mend fences or split wood; Aidan felt like a partner, not a slave, to this enigmatic being who in the space of a morning could kill without compunction and then kiss her as gently as—more gently than—
Any man.
That strange and frightening kiss had been how a man might have kissed her...if men thought like women, and knew to stop when a no was said.
She looked up to be startled by a short-haired stranger, but she knew the warm, dark eyes. “Joss—” But the words wouldn’t come; she looked away. When at last she spoke, her voice was very soft. “Joss, I...what happened to us this morning?”
The short end of her cigarette suddenly demanded attention; Joss took a last hot taste of it and got up to put it in the stove. “What d’you mean?” She felt exposed in the thigh-length shortness of Ethan’s shirt. There came a sudden, pungent memory of that rogue brother of hers, laughing wickedly after his first trip to a Kansas City whorehouse, telling her about it: they licked each other, Joss! Would you ever do that, kiss another woman between her legs?
They liked it, too, both of ’ em. I could tell they did.
“You know damn well what I mean,” Aidan said, and Joss almost jumped.
“I—” She made meticulous adjustment to the stove lids, her blood roaring in her ears. They licked each other. Would you— “I
don’t know, Aidan. I...” She swallowed. “I don’t know.”
Aidan’s gaze was so gentle that at last Joss had to meet it, her own look pleading that this be left alone, and for a silent moment their eyes held; it was Aidan, finally, who looked away and said quietly, “I suppose I’m ready for bed, then. You must be tired.”
Joss breathed a tiny sigh of relief. “Yuh. Long day.”
Aidan cupped her hand behind the chimney of the lamp; in a puff of breath the night closed around them. Joss stood cautiously in place, waiting for her eyes to adjust. “Isn’t it dark tonight.” Aidan’s voice was closer than when the lamp went out.
“New moon?”
“I’d say.” Her nerves screamed at her, memory adding to the chorus: stay with me, Joss, I’m so afraid of the dark—
“Will you walk me in?”
“I—yuh.” Aidan’s fingers found hers, a touch like sunrise and moonshine, like heat lightning shimmering across August afternoons, or stars shooting to their deaths through midnight skies; Joss was acutely aware of her nakedness under the wornthin old shirt. “G’night,” she whispered at the bedroom door, and tried to turn, but Aidan kept her hand. “Aidan—”
“Stay with me,” Aidan said softly, and Joss’s belly took a painful leap toward her heart. “Please, Joss.”
“Aidan, I can’t—” She rescued her hand and tried to put it in a pocket she wasn’t wearing, and then didn’t know what to do with it, or its companion; she stuck them into her armpits. She wished she hadn’t had the whiskey. She wished for more of it. She wished for a cigarette. She wished she had on trousers. She wished she was out in the barn, out in the beans, out in the night—anywhere; just out of this precarious place.
“Joss, don’t leave me alone with this. Please. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but—”
“It’s not the talkin’ I’m afraid of.” She raked her hand through what was left of her hair, a breath escaping her that felt as if it had been held in tight rein all day. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,”
she said softly. “I didn’t intend that, Aidan. None o’ this. This mornin’—I don’t know what it was. I didn’t mean to do it. It just...happened. It won’t again.”
“Joss, I’ve never felt—” She drew a breath. “I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Not when—” She bit that off, as if it were an admission too close to the truth to reveal. “Joss, I—”
Joss waited, but there was no more. “I wish I could lie to you, Aidan.” She ran a hand over her face, and through her hair; she shook her head. “How I kissed you—” The words tasted odd and liquid; she had to stop, to absorb their intimate, unfamiliar flavor.
“It’s how I feel,” she said quietly. “About you. But I never meant for you to know.”
“Joss, why? Why would you keep that from me?”
“I’m afraid of it! It’s only part of how I love you, an’ if it’d cost you leavin’ me—”
“Leaving you!” It was a strangled laugh of disbelief. “If you told me to I’d go, but if they came for me, I wouldn’t.” She abandoned the support of the doorframe, took a step into the bedroom, turned back. “All the time I was growing up they told me I’d find a nice man and fall in love and live happily ever after. And then Mother would tell me about a wife’s duty. She’d say all a woman can do is suffer it. Well, I suffered it once! You didn’t frighten me, Joss. Jared Hayward frightened me. He hurt me and he humiliated me, and I’ll never let a man touch me again.”
“Aidan, he was but one man an’ a bad one. You can’t say that. It’s like—”
“Don’t tell me I can’t! A wife’s duty is naught but the worst of a life of slavery, and I’ll be damned first!” She fumbled pins from her hair and threw them at a basket on the stand by the bed; shielded by the dark and the thick fall of her hair, she searched for her composure. “I don’t know what I’ve thought today, but leaving you never occurred to me. And I can’t bear to be without you tonight. Could I let you go I would, but—” She shivered; she had never been so honest. “I so need for you to hold me,”
she whispered. “I need to feel safe, the way I felt when—oh, Joss. Please—”
Silently, Joss went across the bedroom; she took Aidan’s face in her hands, slipping her fingers deep into her hair. “I can’t just hold you.” Her breath was rich with tobacco and the warm, subtle hint of liquor. “The first time I did I knew I’d never be able to again. You don’t understand how I think about you, an’ I don’t know how to say it, but—”
“Joss, you’re all I’ve thought of! I don’t know what to call this, and I’m afraid and confused and I know you are too but Joss, I want you with me. I need you with me. When you—how it felt when you—I didn’t want you to stop. As soon as I said no I wanted you back, but I was afraid—”
“Aidan, you don’t know what you’re sayin’. You don’t know what you’re askin’ for. Stop this now, while we can.”
She touched her fingers to Joss’s lips. “I’ll never forget how it felt when you kissed me, Joss,” she said softly. “I’ll always want to feel it again.”
“I can’t—oh, God! Aidan, I can’t just kiss you. You don’t know what I want, to know if you want it too.” Would you ever do that?
Kiss another woman between her legs? “Oh, no.” Something halfway between a laugh and a groan jittered from her. “Lord, no. I can’t say that to you.”
Aidan tasted the length of Joss’s back with her palms, finding the washboard of her ribs, the sharpness of her shoulder blades, rediscovering the startling absence of hair at her neck before her hands found Joss’s face, turning from palms to fingertips against her skin. Delicately, she traced Joss’s lips with a finger, feeling a barely-controlled shiver of response there. “Whatever you want, I want it too.” It was hardly a breath; there was hardly a breath between them. “Kiss me, Joss. The way you really want to.”
“Aidan, you don’t know—”
“I don’t know the words, Joss. I don’t know how to say it any more than you do, but I know how I feel! I can’t be without you tonight. I can’t. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want to be close to you. Joss, please—”
“Oh, Aidan—” It was almost a moan. “I wasn’t born with strength enough to say no to you. God forgive me—”
It was a kiss like the morning, but daring to, this time; it was the soft question of lips tasting hers, and the press of fingers at her cheek as that gentle mouth sought her more closely; it was the query of Joss’s tongue asking if she might part her lips. It had never occurred to her that a lover might want that from her; now there was nothing she wanted more than the smoky warmth of that tongue against her own. She buried her fingers in Joss’s hair. Hands drew her closer; the warmth of that hard, lean body against her made some hot and liquid thing surge in her.
“Joss—oh, how you touch me—”
“Everywhere,” Joss said softly. “Aidan, I want to touch you everywhere—” She buried a deep, wanting kiss into Aidan’s throat, her hand coming to cup one heavy breast in gentle possession;
0
Aidan almost shuddered with the feel of it. “—with my mouth,”
she whispered, and Aidan’s breath deserted her in helpless shock.
“Will you let me?”
There was no answer she could have said that would have been more honest than what her body spoke as Joss’s thigh pressed between her own. “Is that how—oh, Joss—” She shivered, in terror and in aching want; Joss’s tongue sought hers again, and she imagined that probing tongue finding her (everywhere? Oh, God, can this be right? Can it be wrong?) as hard-palmed hands stroked to her waist, holding her close as that hungry mouth tasted her lips and trailed across her cheek; Joss’s tongue slipped delicately into her ear, pulling a moan from her. “Joss, this is—oh, you make me feel so—”
