The Grass Widow Read Online Free PDF Page A

tucked into a stand of sad, gray elms. Since that first sight he had been wondering about his old friend Joss, hardest hit in the Station by the influenza. Effie’d said she’d bought seed anyway, paid cash for it—like she’d give credit to the last Bodett and Joss at that, she had sniffed; Seth, maybe, but—
    Doc Pickett’s lip curled. On her best days, Effie Richland could invest him with the dyspepsia. He leaned on the saddle horn, gazing narrow-eyed at the farm. Smoke meandered from the chimney. Chickens scratched in the yard. The wind drifted the voice of an unhappy milk cow to him...
    The cow. She wasn’t unhappy; she was in full-uddered agony. Doc touched a heel to his mare’s side. What had bothered him wasn’t the cow, but that Joss had bought seed and her fields were
     
    untouched late the next day; he knew her better than that. No Eastern cousin could have kept her from the serious business of planting this late in the spring; no cousin could long have filled the void she seemed able to satisfy only by driving herself at the farm with a fury unreleased in any other way. He dismounted, tossing a rein over the porch rail. “Joss! Joss, it’s Doc! You here?”
    He pushed open the door to a kitchen muggy with steam, pungent with the scent of eucalyptus; four pots and the teakettle on the stove boiled clouds into the air. “What the hell—?” He went cautiously in, his eyes probing the dimness of the kitchen.
    “Josie?”
    He found them in the room the Bodett boys had shared, Joss fighting for the labored breaths he had heard too often in this house in the last weeks, a golden-haired young woman collapsed in exhaustion on the other bed. He gave her a cursory glance before he touched the backs of his fingers to Joss’s face. The fever was hard and dry. Wearily, he turned the damp cloth on her forehead and turned away. He knew he could do more for the suffering cow than he could for her.
    With his face against the cow’s warm flank, unashamed, he cried; he loved Joss Bodett with the fierce protectiveness men usually reserve for daughters and little sisters, and watching her die would be the hardest vigil he had drawn since the influenza had struck a month ago. Not for the first time in the past sixteen years, he wondered bitterly why God had chosen him to do His healing work.
    He dumped grain into the trough for the pigs and slopped most of the milk over it, lingering to watch their greedy appreciation; he whistled the horses in from the pasture to rub their big soft noses and treat them to a scoop of oats apiece, and scattered grain for the chickens, and took the pail with its scant gallon of milk and trudged through the glare of afternoon sun to the porch to push open the kitchen door.
    A gasp and a crash of crockery met him, and the frantic hiss of liquid sizzling a steaming dance across the surface of the cookstove (tea; he could smell it even through the eucalyptus),
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    and his eyes adjusted to the darkness to show him the blonde girl looking at him like a deer on the verge of panicked flight, tea still hissing and spitting on the stove behind her. “Please,” she whispered. “Enough ill has happened here. Whoever you are, if you’ve a shred of human decency, go away and let me let her die in peace.”
    Cautiously—for she was young and supple and Joss’s gunbelt on the table was much closer to her than to him, and he was forty and his left leg as much wood as flesh—he set the pail on the floor beside him. “I mean no harm, Miss. I’m a friend of the Bodetts—just Joss, now—and a doctor.” He took off his hat, holding it in both hands. “You’re Joss’s cousin from Maine? Miss Blackstone?”
    “She spoke of Doc.” She was wary, admitting nothing; she was quite lovely, he thought, and still mostly terrified. “She said no name.”
    “Doctors have no name to our townsfolk. We’re just Doc.”
    And something in her eased, as if in some comprehension he didn’t understand, but it