A Short Story

Josiah  And The Relocation

    The relocation program was what had brought her out there, her and that other woman that had got a job in town.  Josiah saw her at the table at that place where he worked and knew she was different than the women he'd known in his life so far.   He looked at her sitting there stiff in her dress that came from charity and bet this one wouldn't need her face marked up to learn his ways.  She didn't even look around the table at all the men in the hay crew that had come in for dinner that hot day to look at her and that other one. 

    Josiah knew the other one, with her red hair and bold eyes, was trouble, but this one at the table, this one who held herself so still and quiet while the boss man's wife let out their story in her foghorn voice, this one had a dignity about her, a dignity that was not sundered by all the trouble that had led her to this place.  He could see she was older than the redhead, and was maybe someone's widow, with nothing left to lose.  She made his heart go still and quiet to match her, and she made him want to give her shelter. 

    "These here two's been sent down to us by the relocation," the boss's wife was saying, importantly, to the boss.  "I told 'em what you said, as we got no more use for a couple o' worthless women than any more dang dry cows, but that lady says we's signed up for free help and free help's what we got, so."

     The boss grunted his recognition of this fact, and Josiah saw how his face reddened with a deeper heat than what the sun had given off when he looked at the redhead's bold eyes.  His wife saw it, too.

    "This one's got the town job," she said, her chin jutted out at the redhead.  "She's gonna work in the healin' arts, with the doctor."

    Several of the men in the crew grinned at one another, betting they'd find some ailment or other to take them into town.  Josiah kept his eyes on the quiet one, wondering if they would assign her to his crew in the hayfield, wondering if it was possible that she would be made to drive a tractor in that heat and dust of the prairie hayland. 

    "What about this other 'n?" asked the boss.

    His wife gave a derisive snort.

    "Told her what we needed was help in the hayfield," she said, grinning around at the men at her table, playing to all their worst impulses.  "Told her she had t'drive the rakes."

    The old man studied his wife for a long moment, unsure whether to laugh or get angry at the idea of a woman in his hayfield, but then he seemed to recall that she  herself, his own wife, had once driven the rakes back when he hadn't had any other help, and she'd done okay.  Josiah could read the old man's mind remembering they'd all heard his wife brag about it and now the old fellow turned toward Josiah, his foreman and ramrod for all these years that the old man was too old to keep up, and it was clear, he was turning it over to Josiah.  Josiah met his look and nodded.

    "Says she's drove a tractor before," said the old man's wife in the same derisive tone, not believing it.  "Ask her yourself."

    And then, like a miracle made for himself alone, the quiet woman from some other land raised her eyes to Josiah’s as if she knew that he was the one with the power in that room, and she'd been waiting to sense it and to know who she would answer to.  She had deep blue eyes, almost navy blue, as she looked straight into him, and she didn't smile, or shift in her chair.

   "I was raised on a farm," she said, her accented voice quiet and clear. 

    Josiah saw the depth of the grief in her, the measure of her loss, and knew that she didn't care what she did now, at this stage of her life, in this extremity.  All she was doing was just getting through her days. Josiah had known times like that himself. If they wanted her to rake hay, she would rake hay, and she would start with them at sun-up and work with them until sun-down, and she would never even see the other men around her, except as workers. 

    "I told 'em I'd be glad to work in your hayfield, but my skin burns so bad," said the redhead, back by the stove, and the food. 

    She was smiling at the men who were watching her and wishing it was her who had been sent to their fields instead of this silent, steady woman who looked only at Josiah. 

    "I told 'em Maria's skin don't burn,” she said.

    And then she laughed, as if she'd told a joke on all of womankind in general, on all of the skin that women had that burned from the kind of use men could put it to, and the boss's wife chuckled with her, and all of the men around that table suddenly recognized what kind of a woman the redhead was. 

    The only one whose face did not change expression was the quiet woman, whose name was now known as Maria, who remained fixed in her focus on Josiah as the man she would work for.  Maria already knew what the redhead was, and she was watching to see, with a tired look of pessimism, what Josiah would make of it and if he would expect the same thing of her.  But Josiah was not surprised, and he shook his head slightly, not smiling, as he returned Maria's look. 

    "You ever drove a John Deere?" he asked her, quietly. 

    "Yes," she said. "But mostly International Harvester."

    The other men in the hay crew grinned and chuckled among themselves at the idea of a woman who knew the brand names of tractors, and the boss's wife and the redhead began setting the food on the table as if the main part of the show was about to being, and the men began hungrily to eat. 

    Josiah ate too, watching her watch his clean manners.

    "You ever mowed?" he asked then, still in his quiet way, the way he had with the horses he broke and trained. 

    "That was my main job," she answered.

    "Probably broke a lot o' Pittman's an' sickles, I bet, huh," said the old man, eating, trying to inject some joviality into the atmosphere. 

    But the woman just shifted her steady gaze to him briefly, and then back to Josiah.

    "No sir, I did not," she said. 

    "Well hell, we do," said one of the men, laughing roughly. 

    Josiah silenced him with a glance.

    "Watch your language," he said in his way that meant what he said. 

    There was a general silence then, as everyone in the room, the women at the stove and the old man and the five other crew members at the table, and Maria, recognized in Josiah's words and tone that an old banked fire was burning hot inside him, and had led him to take a position none other would soon dare to challenge, lest it bring out the knife in his boot.  Only the old man, who paid Josiah's wages, could be the first to speak in that dead space behind his words.

    "Well now, seems like you think we got ourselves a lady, ain't that right, son," he said around his food.  He had winked up at his wife and at the redhead. 

    Josiah looked across at the woman, whose name was Maria, and said nothing, because he didn't have to. It was clear in his black eyes, and in his tanned face, lined by the years of work and weather and hard times, that he did indeed believe she was a lady, and that he intended for her to be treated so.  He saw that Maria saw what he believed, and that she could guess about the knife in his boot. There was a quiet wisdom in those navy blue eyes that he was pleased to see.

    "Well," said the boss's wife, clearing her throat in an unnecessary way.  "She may be a lady to you, Josiah, but as we got nothin' out here for the hired help to sleep in but the bunkhouse, maybe you wanta take her into that trailer house with you, huh."

    She laughed a nasty laugh, and the redhead chimed in, commenting that she guessed if she'd known the deal came with a man included, she might of jumped at driving those rakes instead of the doctor.  The men at the table, all except for the boss, kept their attention on their plates lest their hot-headed crew chief, who was known to flare into open warfare, have a reason to notice them.  Josiah kept his own attention at the center of the table, and on himself, and then looked into Maria's eyes.

    "She can stay with me," he said, daring anyone to laugh.

    There was a short pause, as Maria nodded and gave him the barest hint of a very tired smile.  She’d had worse offers and far worse company.

    "Thank-you," she said, in her quiet way.

    "Oh you can't stay with him -- !" said the boss's wife, registering sudden, belated alarm.  "I only meant it as a joke, for heaven's sake.  Why he's -- !"

    She didn't say Josiah was an Indian by his mother's side, a white man only by what little was known of his father.  She left the accusation hanging in the air, making a wordless round-eyed plea toward her husband, aghast as she was, all of a sudden, at the prospect of such a scandal on her own ranch, the product of her own simple doing gone wrong.

    "Delbert, do something -!" she said to her elderly husband, who was smiling at her in his grizzled, bemused fashion.  Clearly, he enjoyed these jams she got herself into.  He shrugged, wiping up the gravy on his plate with a thick hunk of bread.

    "Seems t'me you done all the doing there might o' been done by it already, woman," he said. 

    "Well, for heaven's sake, I didn't mean -- !" said the wife.

    She was looking in horrified despair at Josiah and at Maria and thinking ahead to her church group and her club meetings and what all the women would say who were already a fairly clear cut above her in class and culture and breeding and background. She settled her blind rat's stare on Maria at last, as if it were all her fault now, all this embarrassment.

    "Well, I never meant you had to go sleep with that half-breed," she said, huffy and spiteful.  "Just because you come in here half-black yourself thinkin' we owe you somethin' due to some kind o’ fake ref-u-gee status, eatin' our food, you just see if you get away with this, you miserable beggar -- !"

    Maria had stood up during this tirade, and had taken up her flimsy raincoat, which was her only other possession besides the cotton housedress she had on and gestured toward the still-empty plate at the table where she'd sat.

     "I never ate your food, Mrs. Hutchins," she said.  "And I never will."

    Josiah, who had finished his own meal and had stood up with her, moved to precede her to the door, and to hold it open.  He was a tall man, lean and hard from his years of work, and it gave him pleasure to place his battered cowboy hat over his gleaming black hair and lean down now, to open the door for her.  He was glad for his long bow legs and his strong brown arms and hands and the way he could stride beside her to his old pick-up truck with his saddle in the back, and open that door for her too. He would open every door that they came to, all the rest of her life, if she would allow him to. And when she turned to face him before she stepped inside, her jaw still clenched from what had happened at the house, he felt the charge of her intensity. She lay her hand over where his heart might be inside his shirt, and he placed his own hand over hers, feeling the quick warmth of her contact out there in that sunshine.

    "I'll be no trouble," she said softly. 

    And Josiah knew that he had known from the very beginning, from when he had first seen her, that this was the truth upon which all her other truth rested.  She would be no trouble. Causing trouble meant worse trouble even than this. He had made a few of those same choices himself.

    He drove his truck with her in it far down into the hills, mile after mile, to the small silver trailer house underneath the stand of cottonwood trees where he lived alone, with half a dozen horses in a corral with a windmill. He never thought to be ashamed of his circumstances and she rode alongside him all that long way without talk, only turning now and then to smile her quiet smile at him as she noticed some especially beautiful setting of a lake or a stand of planted trees or the windswept grass rolling like waves in a sea as it drifted over the dunes.  Josiah felt that he had been riding like that with her for the best part of his life already and that she already shared with him everything he loved about that country and most of what his ancestors had known about its harvests from her own land.  And when he parked his truck underneath his trees and came around to open her door he saw how she was looking at the horses, and saw with what a deep divine hunger she was taking them in -- those great shining graceful and powerhouse creatures standing by his water tank in the sun -- and he led her over to the corral fence to have a closer look.  She reached through the planks to rest her hand -- and Josiah saw what a strong hand it was -- on the nearest warm sorrel flank, and he observed how the horse leaned into her touch and how the others shifted toward her, unafraid on instinct, eager to be handled.

    "Only two of 'em's mine," he said.  "The others I train for people."

    She smiled her direct, restrained smile, and he saw how the lines deepened around the corners of her mouth and knew how a husband must have loved her for that woman's look of pleasure and acknowledgement.  The wind drifted through the trees across them as they stood looking at one another, and her hair, which was tied up in a gray-blond braid like a crown around her head, shone softly in the hot summer sun.  Josiah believed he loved her then as much as it was possible to love a woman.

    "I'll need to borrow some work clothes," she said quietly, with both dignity and apology, reminding him of the work she was expected to perform in the hayfield.

    He nodded and was then able by that good excuse to escort her inside his trailer house. He was glad that he was clean, that his dishes were done, that his bed was made. He saw how she touched the dark polished wood of his counter-top and how she took in the compact tidiness of the place.  She met his eyes, everything about her aware, as he knew she would be, of the bed.  And Josiah, who had been aware of little else, could not help but stand closer, could not but touch her bare arm in that blue flowered house dress, that hand-me-down garment besides which she so clearly had little else. 

    "If you would do me the honor," he said, his hands on her shoulders, holding her like some precious jewel between his hands; "I will not hurt you." 

    She nodded slowly, her deep gaze studying him and measuring him, but as with so much else, having no choice. He had no way of knowing what was the memory in her mind or how much pain he might cause to her forcibly relocated heart; he just knew that he could have it no other way than this way, laying his claim.  Still, she wept, and by that he knew that her grief was not so well buried that it did not return in terrible heaving cries as from an animal caught and dying, from having been reminded in his arms of better times and younger days. He held her, watching her worn face, combing out her thick hair from its gray braid with his fingers, until she finally slept. 

    It was early the next day before they got back out to the hayfield -- her in an old pair of his jeans, rolled up at the ankle, with a clean work shirt and a spare straw hat.  Josiah put her up on his own mowing outfit with the double cutting bars and a harness on the front for scaring small animals away from the blades. He took the second mowing tractor for himself, following and watching and mowing inside her lines, directing the others to the rakes, sweeps and stackers, and they worked in tandem all that day and for the rest of the summer, to harvest Mr. Hutchins' hay. 

     The men in the hay crew would have bothered her had the two of them not been so clearly a pair, and Mrs. Hutchins would have made meals unbearable had they not packed their own food and water to the fields each day, taking their dinners in his truck.  As it was, old Mr. Hutchins watched her from the stacker and took note of the clean way she mowed, as good as any man could do, he said to the others, and when the time came to write out the paychecks, he wrote out two for Josiah, doubling his pay for having made a home for this silent woman stranger that his wife had so misjudged, and Josiah saw that Maria nodded. 

    He had bought her a ring on the day when they first went to town for boots in her size, and they were married with her in a nicer dress from the thrift shop and him in his town jeans and shirt.  The Priest pronounced those holy words of matrimony upon them in an empty chapel one evening with no one present but the parish housekeeper and when they came out of the Church hand-in-hand, shy in the early twilight of late autumn, they could feel the old Priest's smile on their backs on their way out of town.  They were not young anymore, Josiah and Maria, and this wedding was their only protection against the crew and the town and women like Mrs. Hutchins who would find a way to burn them out when the work was done, if they had that excuse. Though they seldom spoke of their past associations, only sometimes about childhood or work they had done or other places they had been, both bore the look of refugees who had been burned out before. Josiah was an Apache Indian, which gave him lifetimes of age behind his eyes, and Maria had lived through a war her grandfathers and fathers had fought, and lost, which gave her age beyond bearing. Both knew what they had found by God’s mercy and gift, a partnership formed in an instant of instinct, and that it would keep them alive if they were careful, and perhaps even give them reason for living.

    And so, when the work was done for the summer and the hay was moved up next to the Hutchins' main place where they could feed his cattle in the winter, and before it was time to sort off the several thousand head of calves he would sell in the fall, Mr. Hutchins invited all his hands for a special Sunday supper, as was his custom each year.  He could say good-bye to the hay crew for another year, and he would re-establish his primary dependence on Josiah and the one other man he kept on for the work of the winter with the cattle and the fencing, and it was a good time for looking back over the year and ahead to the next.

    But still Maria sat stiffly at their outdoor picnic table with Josiah, saying nothing and not eating, and the other men's wives eyed her uneasily, as they did Josiah, and tried to break the ice by remarking upon the nice rings he had placed upon her hands.  Mrs. Hutchins tried not to be astounded that there had been a wedding about which she'd been entirely uninformed and she started a dozen or more sentences which she could not finish, for fear of what she might say.  And after the meal they were separated -- the men going out to the corral to see a new horse Mr. Hutchins had bought and the women coming in the house to do the dishes -- but it wasn't long before Josiah, who had been keeping an eye on the door of the house, saw that Maria had left that other company and was striding out toward where he had saddled Mr. Hutchins' new horse to buck him out, as was his job.  She came inside the corral and Josiah waited, his face shaded from the sun by his hat, leaning back against the wooden planks with the snubbed-up and heaving horse, watching her.  He could see that she was as angry as the last time they had been in that house and he grieved at his inability to spare her, for all that he had tried to give her the right armor, what the women of that life could still do to her.  He knew too that the men on the fence were waiting with grinning faces to see how their hard-minded foreman, a man who had marked up women's faces in the past, would handle what was coming now from his half-white wife.

    "Somethin' happen in there?"

    She nodded, her stare hard. 

    "She tried to make me clean her bathrooms," she said in a way the others could hear. 

    Josiah shifted his posture and whistled softly. He looked at the house in a way that spoke of fire one of these fine nights, if it wasn’t for the old man, and then reached to take her hand, which clenched around his.

    "I told her it was my Sabbath day, and I did no work, especially not her dirty work, to keep my Sabbath holy," she said. 

    Josiah stared into her eyes, oblivious of the men on the fence and also very much aware of them, very aware of the dirty work they were having him do -- had always had him do -- on his Sabbath day.  He saw the set jaw of his fine wife, Maria, and how her pride was settling like a mantle down around him, too, and how maybe they could both afford to have a little self-respect now, the two of them together. They were God's people, honoring the Sabbath. 

    "Sounds like a real good philosophy," he said. 

    He saw how she understood him, and how she glanced at the visibly unbroken horse snubbed up tight to the fence just waiting to try to buck him off, and how she also saw the row of men waiting to watch it happen, men who hated him for his blood and for his skill and for the knife in his boot and for all the times he had beaten them and their kind until they spoke to him now with respect, and how they were just hoping against hope that maybe this time, finally, Josiah would be the one to get hurt. So maybe he didn't need to do their dirty work anymore either. He saw that wisdom coming into her mind as it came into his. He nodded, looking around at the faces, at the men who hated him but had to work with him, at old Mr. Hutchins who used him to run his big place, to remind himself of what he could remember of his own better hell-raising days, and paid him well for it, and he nodded again. 

    He gave Maria the second she needed to climb up out of the way, and then turned and unhitched the horse, stepping back as it reared over backward. He opened the gate as it scrambled up and slammed its back feet into the lower planks below the gallery of the suddenly scrambling watchers. It was a completely wild horse, its eyes rolling and insane, caught and cornered and murderously well defended, now that it was loose, and then it was out the gate, free of them, bucking and crow-hopping and bawling out across the prairie.  How he had ever caught it in the first place or would ride it was just who he was, but was also their wager that some day he couldn’t. Josiah looked up at Mr. Hutchins then, at where he sat grinning on the top plank of his corral, chewing on a toothpick, admiring his foreman and his horse and his entire outfit. 

    "Might come back in a day or two, get that horse into the trailer," said Josiah. 

    Mr. Hutchins nodded, re-adjusting his hat.

    "Sure thing, son," he said.  "Whatever you think's right."

    The other men, though clearly disappointed that they were to be cheated of their show, said nothing, and Mr. Hutchins followed Josiah and Maria out to their pick-up truck, talking all the way about the great plans he had for the place next spring, the good new bulls he would buy, the better blooded horses, the fine new equipment. 

    "Far's that goes, maybe even pull in a little bigger trailer house for you 'n the lady," he was saying at Josiah's window, eyeing him and Maria.  "No reason you folks can't have what you need."

    Josiah stared out ahead and then turned to the old man.

    "We got what we need, sir," he said quietly.  "But thanks anyway."

    And then they drove away.