The Grass Widow (5 page)

“Have you tasted your soup?”

“I’ve not had the stomach.”

She knew by the look of him how much he loved Joss Bodett.

“Her last lucid word was for you,” she said gently. “Can she take some of this, do you think?”

He pushed at a bowl on the table. “She wouldn’t for me.”

“Have your tea,” she murmured. “I’ll try.” She ladled a cupful

into a new bowl. “What did her mother call her, Doctor?”

He knew what she meant: the sweet names mothers use when their love beats strongest out of fear. “I—” He himself called her Josie, but was the only one who did; he had treated the ills of this house for ten years, and displays of affection had been rare, but at the end, when Jocelyn had known she would die, her fever delirium calmed for that last hour... ‘My best son,’ she had whispered, her only daughter at her side. ‘My most precious son.’ It had startled him, and mortified Joss; now, he looked away, reaching to scratch at the knee over his wooden leg. “She called her Joss,” he murmured, and felt the examination of forget-menot blue eyes before Aidan turned. He heard the murmur of her voice, and watched as she cooled the fever with a wet cloth, her hands gentle as a mother’s; she coaxed half the broth into her cousin, and eased her back to the pillows and smoothed the covers before emerging with that look around her mouth, that mask of women’s gritty stoicism. “Go to bed,” he said roughly, and she leveled a look at him and took her cooling tea to her room and gently, she closed the door.

“The horses,” Joss muttered. “They have to take you in.”

“There, there, Josie,” he said, helpless at her side. “There, there.”

By the time the cow was milked in the morning Aidan thought she knew how, and she waved to Doc as he rode reluctantly up the hill to see to a neighbor-woman on the verge of birth. He had promised to be back for the night if he could, but by night... She fled to the house to sit with Joss.

She held a cloth dosed with oil of clove to her cousin’s face until Joss turned in weak protest from the pungency. She boiled pads until they were too hot to handle and wrapped them in scraps of blanket, and put them to Joss’s chest until she gasped and coughed under the heat; when she coughed, Aidan held her up to spit out the poison.

She read aloud from books she had brought: Cervantes, Dickens, the Brownings. She forced her to sip at broth or milk. She

covered her when she shivered, and cooled her when the sweats of fever broke on her; she changed nightshirts and bedclothes, when that was necessary, with a nurse’s grim efficiency, and that laundry fluttered on the clothesline in the ever-present wind. When it was time she milked the cow, resting her forehead on that warm, patient flank, her hands aching; the lean gray cat watched her intently, but she didn’t know to aim a squirt of milk at him, and gave him some in an old tin saucer instead. She fed the pigs and chickens, keeping an ear open for Doc.

A young boy arrived on a horse. “I’m Ott Clark Junior. We’s next up the road t’ard town. Doc’s birthin’ me a brother an’ sent me to aks after Joss.”

“She’s alive,” she said quietly, and the lad flapped off, all knees and elbows on a horse too big.

There was a brief, neat fence under a weeping willow between two fallow fields. She went to it, and read what was carved on the planted boards:

Harmon, Jr. Jan 21 - Feb 27, 1854.

Joshua B. Oct 16, 1857.

Hannah M. Nov 24 - Dec 2, 1858.

Ruth S. Sept 24, 1863 - Aug 16, 1864.

Abraham L. July 4, 1864.

Harmon William Bodett. Sept 27, 1815 - March 20, 1876. Jocelyn Ruth (Blackstone). May 12, 1833 - March 21, 1876. Seth Aaron. June 15, 1860 - March 23, 1876.

Ethan Allen. Feb 28, 1855 - March 25, 1876.

She sank to her knees and wept, and prayed for those she had never known, or known of, and she prayed for Joss Bodett, living daily with that fence and the memories it might surround but could never contain.

She gathered eggs, hardboiled half a dozen, and ate two; she coaxed Joss to swallow warm, slippery pieces of one. “Go home,”

Joss rasped. “Get away from me.”

“Shhh,” she soothed. “We’ll worry about that later.”

She dozed.

She slept.

She awoke to the feel of a hand on her shoulder, not knowing where she was or who might be touching her, and found herself half in the chair, half on the bed, her head cradled on Joss’s hot belly and Doc’s hand gentle against her. She let him lead her to her bed, not questioning how long it might have been since he had slept, and when sometime later he spoke to her she sat bolt upright in the dark, dread spiking into her. “Doc, no. Don’t say she—?”

“Asking for you.” The lamp lit his smile of weary triumph.

“The fever’s broke. God bless you, my nurse; one Bodett’s going to make it.”

She raced barefoot across the dirt floor. “Joss—!”

“Aidan.” Her voice was just a breath, her hand barely strong enough to feel its squeeze. “I’m sorry I was so hard with you.”

She shivered, as if in residue from the fever. “Knew I was sick,”

she whispered. “I didn’t want you carin’ about me at all, if all I was fixin’ to do was die on you.”

“Shhh,” Aidan soothed. “You need to rest, Joss.”

“You took good care o’ me. More’n I did them. Wish you’d been here.” Her eyes closed. “One thing left in this life to do an’ I figured I’d die ’fore I could get at it. I was...I was—afraid—” She drew a soft, deep breath. “For you...maybe of you. I don’t know what, but how fear feels.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing the damp hair back from Joss’s face. “I know that, too,” she said quietly. “How fear feels.” Joss looked a cautious question at her; Aidan traced the backs of her fingers across her cheek. “Of you. For you. Of here. Of. . . nothing.” Joss closed her eyes, and Aidan knew how closely she had understood that. “We had a hard beginning,” she said softly, “but I know we’ll be friends.”

Weak fingers tightened around hers. “You might stay?”

“Of course I’ll stay.” She leaned to press her cheek to her cousin’s face, to brush her lips across mercifully cool skin. “As long as you want me to.”

“I hesitate to intimate that Joss Bodett can’t accomplish anything she’s set on,” Doc said on the porch, inhaling the musky fragrances of his tea and the sweet, damp morning. “I’ve seen her have varying degrees of success, but I’ve never seen her fail. But a farm’s a blamed hard row for two men with a woman in the kitchen. I know Joss; she’ll go where her pig is headed, but if you try to keep up with her—” He shook his head. “In the time I’ve known her she’s done the work of two men because it was required of her. Her brother Ethan was—may I say, less than reliable? Seth fell from the haymow when he was eight; he broke his left hip, and contracted pneumonia in his convalescence. He made a fair enough recovery to allow him to get around with a crutch, but he had no stamina. Joss took up the slack. So did her mother, and my dear, she probably expects you to pick up where Jocelyn left off, not understanding that such a load of work would kill most women.”

“And of course I’m but a poor little rich girl, raised with servants to attend my every need,” Aidan said dryly, “ergo not only not half the woman my elder cousin Jocelyn was, but barely a quarter. Don’t bury me yet, Doctor. I may surprise you.”

“I meant no such implication. I know you’re strong, for I’ve seen it. I meant but to imply how much work you’re liable for if you stay, and how likely it is to be for naught.”

“I’m as short of options as she is, Dr. Pickett.” Doc waited when she hesitated, sure she would tell him now of her condition, but she only shook her head, looking at the split-rail fence and the markers under the willow tree. “But I think I might stay were the world open before me. I’ve never met a soul so critically lonely as is my cousin Joss.”

Doc’s eyes followed hers to the little cemetery. “Critically lonely.” It was a soft echo. He finished his tea in a swallow and stood, cautious of his balance on his wooden leg. “I’ll help with the hardest labor when and where I’m able,” he said, looking down at her, “but I doubt that a year of my help could ever equal a day of yours.”

0

“Why, Doc, what’s this?” Aidan asked the next Monday, when the broad-shouldered fellow appeared in time to join them for breakfast, for he handed her a paperboard box and held her chair that she might sit to open it. “But I can’t, I’ve ham on—”

“I’ll worry about the ham.” He didn’t worry about it much; he slid the skillet to a cooler place on the stove and sat. “It’s a thought you told me not to think that I couldn’t help thinking when I saw it. Open it.”

Carefully, she lifted the cover. “Oh, Doc!” Tears stung her eyes as she took the china teapot from its nest of excelsior. It was delicately curvaceous, with a scalloped neck and handsomely finialed lid, painted with violets and winding leaves, almost a match to the cup she had given Joss. “Doc, it’s lovely! But you shouldn’t have—”

“I swept up the shards of our disaster a week ago, to know

the quality lost to my thoughtless intrusion. This was the least I could do. And Miss Josie—” He offered a tin of tea and grinned at the way her eyes lit up when she saw the label. “This vile brew you favor, direct from China via Kansas City. Did Miss Aidan get you to church yesterday?” He aimed the question more at Aidan than at Joss; Aidan shook her head.

“I’m still feelin’ pretty peaked.” Joss dug in her front pocket for her folding knife. “Hitchin’ up the horses seemed an awful lot of work.” She opened the knife to pry the lid from the can so she could smell of it. “I love this tea. Ma says it smells like a ol’

anchor rope rottin’ on a clam flat. Not knowin’ from a clam flat, that’s by me.”

Aidan raised a dubious eyebrow, reaching for the can. She sniffed and gasped, “Oh, my stars!” and shoved it back at Joss, her fingers pressed to her lips. “She’s right! Joss, surely you don’t drink that!”

“It don’t taste like it smells. It’s good.”

“I’ll never know. Don’t you dare brew that horrid leaf in my new pot.”

Dolefully, Joss sighed. “Back to strainin’ it through my teeth. Ma never lets me use her pot, neither.” She lidded the can and set it on the table. “Thank you, Doc. Where’s your watch, sir? You leave that with some Cowtown card shark?”

His hand went to the place on his vest where the chain had rested. “That’s more story than I can tell in mixed company, but in a nutshell it involved a Baltimore drummer selling toothbrushes—I ended up with a lot of them—and a Mexican who didn’t know any English except, ‘Señor, you got to eat the worm,’ and a game named Red Dog.”

“Red Dog! Hell’s bells, Doc, even Ethan knew better!”

“He never ate the worm,” Doc said ruefully. “I did.”

“Don’t sound good to me. What about these toothbrushes?

You got to show me one o’ them. Ma said a hundred strokes on my hair; do I need to do as many on my teeth?”

“My father doesn’t believe in them,” Aidan supplied. “He says they abrade the gums and cause premature aging.”

Doc tried not to let his reaction to the last part of Dr. Blackstone’s opinion show. “Well, invested of fifty of them as I am, I tried one. I’d seen them, of course, but they’d never impressed me until” —he stifled a laugh— “until I’d eaten a Mexican worm. It got the taste out of my mouth, anyway. You all right, Aidan?”

he asked, for she’d gotten up from the table; she sent him back a reassuring smile and went into her bedroom.

“Sounds like that worm was a powerful feller, impressin’ you into buyin’ fifty of a thing you’d got along without all this time—

an’ losin’ your watch to boot. Hope it wasn’t your daddy’s.” Joss got up to move the ham back to the hotter part of the stove, turning the pieces with a fork.

He dismissed the watch with a wave of his hand. “I won it in a poker game while I was going to medical school.”

“Get any schoolin’ losin’ it?” Joss asked dryly. “Ethan told me all about them Kay Cee poker parlors.”

He could imagine that Ethan had, including the fact that most poker parlors were also whorehouses of one description or another; Joss had never felt like mixed company to Doc, either. “The name of the drink is tequila. The first one tastes like kerosene, but after that it’s like drinking silk. After the worm...”

He shook his head, which still ached vaguely; there had been a lot of tequila between the first taste and the worm, and he’d had more witnesses than assistance in its disposal. “It’s like puking burlap. Stay away from it, Josie. I know you like a taste of the corn now and again.”

“I don’t expect they’d let me into a poker parlor in Kay Cee or any other place to get a taste o’ anythin’, ‘less I was painted up an’ showin’ tits I ain’t got,” she grumbled, but she grumbled quietly, for Aidan had come back to the kitchen.

Aidan offered her hands cupped around something; Doc held out his hands to receive a heavy, ornately-carved silver watch and chain. “I—” Sure of her thought but not of her timing, she shied a glance at Joss, who had come to look. “I brought it for Ethan,”

she said softly, and saw her cousin’s hand close hard around the handle of the fork. “I hope it’s all right to give it to you. I hope

it’s not—I—I—It’s Swiss,” she stammered. “You need a watch. A doctor needs a watch.”

Doc looked at it, and at her; he looked at Joss (she had turned from them, and he knew the raw wound in her heart that was Ethan had just been ripped open anew); he looked at the watch again, and finally found his voice. “I couldn’t ask for one with more meaning than one meant for a man who was like a brother to me,” he said softly. “Thank you, Aidan.”

He examined the scrimshawed ivory fob, and tucked it and the watch into his vest pockets, then took the watch out and opened it; he set it to the clock on the mantel and wound it, and listened to hear it tick and slipped it into its pocket again. “Thank you,” he said huskily. “I’ve never had a watch I felt was mine the way a watch becomes a part of a man by its passing down to him. Now I do, and no worm will ever make it poker stakes.” He stood. “I need to check my horse.”

Aidan turned, feeling the ache radiating from Joss like heat from the stove. “Joss, have I—”