The Grass Widow (2 page)

He made her think of the men who gathered in her father’s study to talk of politics in low, intense voices on nights when the fog lay heavy in the streets of Portland. “I’ve interest in the Station myself,” he said, “it being under the protection of my troop—and there’s a fine farm there that’s caught my eye, only recently and tragically come available. Please, have just a taste of this. It will calm you, ma’am.”

Not without misgivings, she accepted the cap to his flask. “So you shan’t be a soldier all your life?”

His smile was fleeting, tolerant. “Most men are soldiers all their lives only by the circumstance of misfortune, my dear.”

“Yes...yes, I suppose you’re right.” Embarrassed, she dared a sip of his brandy. It was warm from his leg, as good as anything her father served, or better; she tasted again and let her eyes convey her thanks.

In his returned smile she realized that the gentleness of that smile was only on his lips; his pale blue eyes considered her the way a man considers a horse he thinks he might buy. She shied her glance away, and regretted accepting his drink. “Thank you,”

she murmured, returning his tiny silver cup. He looked into it and knocked back what was left.

He tucked the flask back into his boot and straightened up, cocking his head to the north. “The stage is coming.” He hailed a soldier to help the guardian of her cases with their loading to the roof of the coach when it was time. “Will you be long in Kansas, Miss...? Teaching school, perhaps? Lord knows a ration of civilized education would behoove the youth of Washburn Station.”

She heard his hinted request for her name. “I’m sure I don’t know how long I might stay, Captain Slade. The climate seems, so far, to be most disagreeable.”

“It’ll seem farther that way if you’re still here in July.” Her omission of introduction hadn’t escaped him; the near-curtness of his reply made her glad of the stage as it rattled down the street.

His soldiers made room on the roof for her cases and secured them there, and the captain handed her into the coach. “Enjoy your stay in Kansas, my dear lady.” His smile might have made him very handsome, had it strayed to his eyes. “Mayhap we’ll meet again.”

“Perhaps. I thank you for your gracious assistance, Captain.”

“I am ever your servant.”

The man already in the stage was unshaven, unwashed, unscrupulous looking; he wore a thin mustache and a gold watch chain and enormous pistols in scuffed leather holsters, and she knew he must be a gunfighter (for since the subject of Kansas had first arisen she had read every dime novel of Western theme she could find, no matter how forbidden they were by her mother, and they had told her that gunfighters wore two pistols, and cowboys only one). She settled to the seat across from him with a look that suggested if he said a word more than hello she’d burst into tears or screams.

He returned a polite smile and touched the brim of his dusty brown hat. “Lady,” he said, more compliment than greeting, and tipped his hat over his eyes and crossed his arms over his vest and slouched in his seat to sleep through the trip.

Rougher than the road to the devil’s back door, Captain Slade had said of the track; by the time the stage made Washburn Station, Aidan was sure he had woefully understated its condition. She had all she could do to stay on the seat—and marvel at the dusty man, who snored through the ordeal. He roused enough to hand her from the stage, blearily ensuring that the driver and his shotgun rider unloaded her cases; he tipped his road-weary hat and slammed the door and the coach departed in a whirlwind of dust, leaving her alone on the platform of a village so small it defied the idea of township as she knew it.

“A year . . .?” It slipped aloud from her as she looked down the hardpan track that was Washburn Station’s only street. “There must be lifetimes I could spend that would seem shorter!”

Besides the coach station (which doubled as the telegraph

station), there was Richland’s General Mercantile, the Red Dog Saloon, Mrs. Schrum’s Eatery, and an unnamed tonsorial on one side; across was the Station House Hotel, the Bull and Whistle Saloon, a financial institution as creatively-named as the barber shop (BANK, said its window), and Jackson Bros. Livery and Forge. At the end of the street was a small, squat church with an afterthought of a steeple. Two wagons stood in front of the store; outside the saloons, saddled horses twitched their tails at flies. A whip-slim young cowboy—at least, she surmised by hat and spurs and single pistol that he was a cowboy—emerged from the livery to approach the station at a determined clip, dust clouds puffing from his boot heels with each step. His two-step jump to the platform barely broke his fluid, feline stride.

“Aidan Blackstone?” His fingertips touched the brim of his hat, not quite a tip but manners enough to be called such. “Like you could be anyone else.”

He was clean-shaven, handsome in that smooth, fine-featured way of certain lean, long-legged, black-haired men, but his dark eyes held no welcome, and brusqueness negated the silken tenor of his voice.
The unhappy one? Is this Ethan, then?

“See you got here in one piece. Stage ran early just ’cause I ran late, I suppose.” His look flickered to the bruise on her cheekbone; his eyes narrowed. “Yuh. Come on to the store with me. I got some things to pick up, an’ we’ll bring the wagon back for your cases. None’ll bother ’em here.”

She drew herself up, managing composure where none had existed. “You have the advantage over me, sir.”

Something—it couldn’t possibly have been called a smile—

twitched at a corner of the cowboy’s mouth. “I reckon I do, Miss Cousin. I’m Joss Bodett.”

Joss—Jocelyn??
She choked it back before she choked it aloud.
This is Jocelyn—? But—but—
Her mind seemed to stall there, babbling buts at her. A cryptic smile flickered to Joss Bodett’s lips, there and gone. Aidan recovered her voice. “I’ve so looked forward to meeting you, Cousin—is it Joss? Forgive me, I...I didn’t expect...I didn’t expect it to be so lovely here!”

“I’ll wager somethin’ else surprised your expectations. The last damned thing I’d name this place is lovely.”

Aidan flushed, shying her eyes away. That voice had been as hard as a Portland winter, and Joss had sworn easily, as if she were the man she’d looked to be in dusty Levi’s, a faded cotton shirt and work-worn boots, her hair hidden by a sweatstained hat pulled low over unwelcoming dark eyes—and most incredibly, the gunbelt around her narrow hips, its holster tied by a thong to her thigh, the grips of the pistol glossy from the wear of years of rough hands. “Let’s get these chores done,” said the extraordinary Joss Bodett. “I’ve things to say to you—an’ ask of you—that want for more privacy than this here.” And she turned and headed down the boardwalk, not looking back to see if her cousin followed.

I want to go home!
Aidan’s mind screamed, but her feet hurried after her long-legged cousin as scuffed boots rang down the boardwalk from the station to the store. She focused on the pistol; the gun was as terrifying as the idea of being trapped in this hot, lifeless place in the company of such a cold, flinty woman, but it was tangible; she could compare it to something known. Her father kept a derringer in a desk drawer in his study, but it seemed a toy compared to the dark tool worn as close to Joss Bodett’s lithe body as blankets to a bed, as frivolous as a debutante compared to the hard-worked being pausing at the door of the store so she might catch up. She didn’t want to catch up with this bizarre cousin. She wanted a room with a door to slam, a featherbed to catch her, a soft pillow where she could bury her face. She wanted to cry.

“Y’all right?” Joss held open the door.

A glimmer of warmth might have softened her; she felt no warmth from her cousin. She felt only impatience, and it spiked something coldly resistant into her. “Quite so, thank you,” she snapped, and swept into the store, careful of the hem of her skirts against the fresh proximity to horses odoriferously suggested by Joss Bodett’s boots; the noise Joss made sounded suspiciously like a stablehand’s term for the very smell of those boots.

“Joss Bodett!” The woman behind the counter was plump and sharp-eyed; she spoke to Joss, but she probed at Aidan with her glance. Aidan looked away, disliking her as reflexively as she’d disliked everyone she’d met so far in Kansas—
except
a gunfighter
on a stagecoach? Oh, I hate this place! I hate it!

“Hain’t seen you t’see how you been holdin’ up,” the storekeeper said. “Hard times f ’you, girl; awful hard times. How come y’ain’t been to town?”

“I been too joe-fired busy diggin’ graves to be sociable.”

Graves?
Cautiously, Aidan looked up from her perusal of a slim selection of buttons.

“An’ we so sorry, Joss. Thom wants talkin’ at you. Let me go get—”

“I know what Thom wants an’ the answer’s no.”

“Joss, you got to think reason now! Things ain’t like they was, you—”

Joss barked a laugh. “Like I need you to tell me that! Save your breath, Effie, an’ let Thom save his—an’ save me a trip to Leavenworth an’ tell me you got seed, ’cause I know you do. Ours mouldered in that dank spell back March.”

“You ain’t thinkin’ of plantin’! Joss, you got no men left! You cain’t—”

“The horses didn’t die an’ the plow didn’t rust, an’ I didn’t disremember how to pull a straight furrow. Can’t eat dirt come winter.”

“Cain’t stay there come winter neither.” Effie’s voice bordered on cold. “Takes men to run a place, an’ ain’t none chasin’ you lately that I seen.”

What a cruel, hateful woman!
Amazed by the meanness, Aidan forgot her own resentment.
But what does she mean, no men left?

What’s—

“You hear my heart breakin’ over that? I plow like I do ’cause Seth’s crippled an’ Ethan, God rest’m, never turned a lick an’

someone had to, like you never knew that, Effie Richland. God rest Pa too, but him gone means I ain’t got to fill his hollow leg with whiskey nor do his work, like you never knew that neither.

Doc looks after me, an’ ’sides”—she jerked her head at the handsomely-dressed, if road-weary, young woman by the notions counter— “I got help now. ‘S my cousin there.”

“Not much, y’ain’t,” Effie muttered. Blackstone women were all built puny as far as she could tell, and this new one took puny to extremes. Jocelyn had been right scrawny and passed it on to her daughter; even if Joss had got some height from her pa, she still wasn’t but a shadow and a half. This new Blackstone female was oh-too delicate for western words: high-cheekboned handsome—pretty was too strong of a word (one of those high cheekbones sported a mouse, she noted)—rich by the cut of her clothes, pampered by the look of her hands...

And pregnant. She wondered if Joss knew that, or if that secret had died two weeks ago with her mother.

For Jocelyn Bodett was dead, her husband and sons with her, along with ten others of Washburn Station. Some called it the grippe; Doc called it infernooza or whatever he’d said, but it was a pure plague right out of Revelations to Ephrenia Richland, and she knew her true faith in the Lord Jesus was all that had spared her family. The Bodetts had been godless free-staters and were nigh gone, only Joss left—and why Joss (disgraceful anyway, let alone the display she made, swearing like a hayslayer and dressing like one, too, in Ethan’s clothes and Harmon’s gunbelt) had been spared was past Effie.

“’Sides, where’d I go? East? East be sendin’ theirs here.”

Aidan almost flinched from the derision in her cousin’s voice. “I need that seed—twenty acres o’ each—an’ sugar an’ salt, an’ soda, an’ a box o’ .44/40s.” Joss turned to bury a sneeze in a gloved hand, and sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her glove.

“Damn dust!”

Effie’s look, and the one Joss returned, made Aidan wonder what question and answer crackled between these women whom she didn’t know (past knowing neither of them cared a whit for her existence on the face of the earth). They liked each other as little as they cared for her; that much was blatantly evident.

0

“I ain’t askin’ for credit,” Joss said. “I ain’t ever goin’ to be that far up to the hubs.”

Effie gathered the small parts of her order, and Joss rang a double-eagle to the counter to square the bill. Effie tendered her change at long distance. “Hank’ll load you.”

As Effie turned to fetch her strongbacked son, Joss sneezed again. “Bless you,” Effie muttered. Every soul dead in the Station in the last weeks had started their dying with a sneeze, and if ever a soul needed blessing it was Joss Bodett—and that fair-haired, blue-eyed (pregnant) cousin of hers, looking for all the world like no one had yet broke the news to her that all her Kansas kin save Joss Bodett had been buried in the past two weeks.

“Fool girl’s sneezin’ an’ wants seed,” Effie snorted. “Load her, but stand fair away from her. She won’t last out the week.”

Hank Richland studied the speculation in his mother’s eyes.

“How you so sure you’ll get that place? Lots others want it.”

“That piece o’ Yankee work out there’ll take the money an’

run, an’ who save Flora Washburn can overbid us? Flora don’t want it.”

“Neither do I, an’ I ain’t goin’ to oversee no tenant farmer you suck in on a promise o’ credit here paid for by sweat there an’ blood interest. Th’ whole idea’s wrongful. It ain’t but slavery by some other name.”

“I heared enough free-stater talk out’n you, boy,” Effie snapped.

Hank turned. ‘The War’s done an’ over. An’ now you take her money for seed, hopin’ she’ll live long enough to plant so you can harvest the crop? That’s a right good Christian ethic, Ma.”

“You watch that mouth. I’ll wear you out, boy.”

He bucked a sack of bean seed onto one shoulder and took another under his arm. “Ma, you wore me out a long time ago.”

“Everyone? But—” Aidan sat stunned on the seat of a wagon lightly loaded with her cases and the day’s purchases as her cousin handled the reins to a pair of enormous bay horses. They were barely away from town, and Effie Richland had been rankly