The Last Runaway (15 page)

It had not rained that afternoon to break the heat. Driving south down Main Street in the Haymakers’ wagon, they could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and the sky west of them was dark. Jack glanced sideways at her. “Don’t worry, it is still a ways off. I will get thee home before the storm.”

“I am not frightened,” Honor said—though she was, a little. American thunderstorms were much more dramatic than any she had witnessed in England. The air would thicken over the course of a day until the tension was almost unbearable, the far-off thunder and lightning promising release. Then the rain would burst out from the massed black clouds, the lightning that had been held back suddenly overhead and simultaneous with the crashing thunder. It was loud, ruthless, violent. Honor had never been caught outside in an Ohio thunderstorm, and did not want to be now. Adam’s borrowed buggy would have been quicker than the Haymaker wagon, or she could have waited out the storm in the safety of the shop. But she could not ask Jack to turn back.

As they passed Mill Street, Honor caught sight of Mrs. Reed turning down it. The black woman looked over and noted Honor and Jack together, then nodded, but did not smile. Her straw hat was trimmed this time with clusters of tiny white flowers that Honor had seen along roadsides.

“Thee knows her?” Jack did not sound pleased.

“She is a customer. What are the flowers on her hat?”

“Boneset. Used to treat fever. Don’t they have it in England?”

“Perhaps. Flowers look different here, even when they have the same name.”

Jack grunted. In the distance, thunder rumbled again, louder now.

Sitting next to Jack in the wagon felt nothing like sitting next to Adam, or Old Thomas from Wellington; nor was it like what she had felt when walking with Samuel back home. It was not just that he smelled of fresh hay even when covered with the mud and sweat of a day’s work. It was the raw, wordless connection, the buzz of electric tension in the air around them and the space between them that surprised her. She was painfully aware of him. Every breath he took, every toss of his head or roll of his shoulder or flick of his wrist as he guided the horses registered deep within her. She let her eyes rest on his forearm, exposed by his rolled sleeves so that she could see each blond hair pointing in the same direction, like wheat in the wind.

This is what lust is, she thought, her cheeks burning with shame. She had not felt such a thing with Samuel: she had known him since they were children, and he was more like a brother. Perhaps what he felt for the Exeter woman was like this with Jack, she thought. For the first time, she allowed herself to consider with a steady mind how Samuel had felt and why he had done what he did.

“Corn’s growing,” Jack commented as they passed cornfields cut out of the woods between Oberlin and Faithwell. He said little else on the half-hour drive other than to reassure Honor that the lightning hadn’t come any closer. Otherwise he hummed a tune under his breath that she did not recognize.

At Abigail’s house—Abigail on the porch, gaping—Honor thanked Jack for the lift as he helped her down, his hand lingering on her elbow. He nodded. “We beat that storm, eh?”

By the day’s end at Adam’s store she had been hungry and exhausted. But that night Honor ate nothing and slept little. The storm never came, and the next morning it was as hot and still and close as before.

* * *

“Corn’s almost tall enough,” Jack said the following Saturday as he again gave her a lift back from Oberlin. “Not quite ready, though.”

The third time she rode with him, he pulled the wagon off the road by a cornfield. They sat looking over the corn, now higher than a man, the ears swollen, the tassels long and silky, the stalks rustling.

“Honor, this corn is ready. Does thee agree?”

Honor swallowed. Was this how American courtship proceeded? One conversation at a frolic, three rides in a wagon, and a coupling in a field? Then the banns would be read and they would marry: first greeting to marriage bed in less than two months. In America time seemed to be buckling: stretching and contracting before her, the steady rhythm Honor had been accustomed to disrupted. Either it was slowed down—on board the
Adventurer
, while waiting for letters to and from her family, during hot afternoons with Abigail on the porch; or it speeded up—Grace’s death, Abigail and Adam’s marriage, Jack’s expectations. It made her breathless and unable to think.

“Honor?”

Did she have a choice? She could say no, and Jack would gee up the horse and they would continue along the road to Faithwell, where he would drop her off and never give her a lift again, and never smile at her except in a neighborly way. She would be stranded at Adam and Abigail’s house. They had married the week before, yet she felt just as awkward living with them.

Honor had always assumed she would have a deep familiarity and connection with her husband, born of a shared history and community. But then, that did not guarantee success either; Samuel’s abandonment had been as sudden as Jack’s courting of her was now. And the deep familiarity she had relied on turned out to be hollow when not accompanied by physical attraction. At least she felt lust for Jack. That was something.

“Yes,” she answered at last. “The corn is ready.”

Jack jumped down and held out his hand. As he led her into the corn, shaking and rattling the stalks above their heads, the long fibrous leaves pressed in, snagging Honor’s sleeves and gently and insistently scratching at her cheeks. Though they were walking in a straight line along a row, she became disoriented, with the rustling green all around and the hot dark sky buzzing, and swallows flying fast above them, looking for their roost for the night.

Jack laid her down on the sandy dirt between two rows of corn. He looked at her for a moment with a small smile, as if searching for the certainty in her face before he continued. He did not kiss her immediately, but pulled the white scarf from her neck and ran his mouth along her collarbone, gently biting the ridge. Honor sucked in a gasp. No man had ever touched her there—or anywhere, really. Her stalled courtship with Samuel had involved hand-holding and brief kisses, and occasionally she had leaned against his arm when they sat side by side. The touch of Jack’s mouth stirred a part of her she had not known was waiting to be moved.

All around them crickets were blaring their endless song. Honor’s breath quickened when he loosened her dress from her shoulders, pushing it down so that the white arrow of her neckline crumpled like a ribbon at her waist. As he followed down with his lips, Honor closed her eyes and allowed herself to enjoy the pressure of his mouth on her breasts. When he pulled up her skirt and stroked her inner thighs, though, she realized she was picturing Donovan, his speckled brown eyes pulling at hers, his tan hands assured on her white skin. She opened her eyes, but it was too late to stop what they had begun. Jack touched her between her legs, opened her and pushed himself inside. Shocking, and painful, and animal, yet she responded almost unconsciously to the rhythm he set, which she somehow recognized though she had never experienced it before. Faster and faster, stroke after stroke, Honor could not hold on to what she felt, the pain and excitement mixed up so that she lost track of herself in the pounding rhythm. Then Jack thrust and held himself rigid with a gasp. When he collapsed over her, Honor wrapped her arms tight around him, her nose buried in his neck while their breathing slowed together. Turning her face to one side to gulp air, she heard the crickets again, and felt the hard ground against her back. A rock bit into her waist. She gazed, unfocused, at the dark rows of corn, wondering if there were snakes nearby; nothing was moving but it was only a matter of time before one appeared, pulling its weight through the stalks, its gold and brown pattern flashing.

* * *

The next day the banns were read. Before they left for Meeting, Honor came upon Abigail vomiting in the backyard. When she straightened, she had the same sweaty upper lip and look of elated nausea that Honor had seen in other women, and she knew at once that Abigail was carrying a child—she who had just married. Honor said nothing when Abigail announced she was going back to bed. Everything is happening so fast, she thought. Too fast.

As they walked toward the Meeting House, she told Adam of her decision to marry Jack Haymaker. Adam simply nodded, without offering reassuring words or expressing pleasure.

Jack would have told his mother before Meeting as well, for as an Elder, Judith Haymaker would have to know of the banns. Honor was relieved not to have been with Jack to witness her first reaction. She was a sober, principled woman, from the brief exposure Honor had had of her at the frolic, at Meeting, and when she bought milk and cheese at the farm. Judith would have had a clear idea about the course her son’s life should take, and it was unlikely that her vision had included a rope merchant’s daughter untutored in dairy farming, small and quiet, and homesick.

Haymaker mother and daughter were already seated: Dorcas in the women’s section; Judith on the Elders’ bench. As Honor sat down, Judith Haymaker was gazing at the whitewashed wall opposite, her arched eyebrows giving her face its usual bright, hard openness. Dorcas was frowning. At least Jack smiled at her from the men’s section. For once Honor missed having Abigail at her side—she felt exposed to the community and would have liked more solidarity than Adam could provide from across the room.

She lowered her eyes and sat absolutely still, as if by not moving she could absent herself from the room. She could not concentrate, however. When Meeting settled into a deeper searching, Honor could not follow the silence down and still her troubled thoughts. Instead she felt her back aching, her nose itching, the heat of the day sending sweat trickling down between her breasts. By the time Meeting ended two hours later, she was more agitated than she had been when she sat down.

The reading of the banns was met by surprised murmurs. Honor turned red, and flinched when she heard a stifled sob from Caroline, Dorcas’s friend who had stared at her at the frolic. Honor knew little of her except that she was a farmer’s daughter. In such a small place as Faithwell, an eligible man like Jack Haymaker was likely to have had a potential wife already earmarked, by the community as well as his family. Now Caroline would either hastily marry another—likely a man from a nearby Quaker community such as Greenwich, twenty miles away—or she would go west with cousins, to Iowa or Wisconsin or Missouri. Honor closed her eyes, unable to bear seeing the defeated face. I am sorry, she thought, hoping that somehow this message would cross the room and settle like a balm on Caroline. I am sorry, but marriage is the only way I can make a place for myself here. Otherwise I am afloat, with no idea how to find land again.

As they rose from their benches, Caroline hurried from the room. Dorcas started after her, but stopped when Judith Haymaker placed a hand on her arm. Honor felt all eyes in the room on her and her future mother-in-law as Judith stepped over to join her, Dorcas trailing behind. Her hands folded so that she would not wring them, Honor faced her future family, as she knew she must—she could not live with her eyes permanently fixed to the ground.

Judith wore a dark gray dress and a flat white bonnet firmly tied with white ribbon. Despite the heat, she did not sweat. Like Dorcas, her shoulders were not sloped as was the fashion of the day, but were almost as square as a man’s, her arms bulging with muscles developed from a lifetime of milking cows. Her mouth was in its perpetual half-smile that Honor now understood held little warmth. “Thee and Adam must come over after dinner,” she said. “We have much to discuss.”

Honor nodded, noting that Judith had avoided inviting them for a meal. It was just as well, for she did not think she could swallow in the older woman’s presence.

* * *

It seemed what Judith Haymaker most wanted to discuss was quilts.

Honor had been to the Haymaker farm several times with Abigail to buy milk, and to the frolic a couple of weeks before. But she had not inspected it then with an eye to living there. As she and Adam walked along the track from Faithwell west toward the farm, each step took her farther from the cleared village and closer to wilderness. As they approached the farm, she looked at it anew. It was very different from Dorset farms, which, being older, had sunk into their natural surroundings, while Ohio farms had been boldly hacked out and stood perched on the surface of the landscape. The buildings were laid out carefully rather than higgledy-piggledy, and made of wood rather than stone, the boundaries lined with rail fences rather than stone walls, the whole of it surrounded by thick woods rather than manageable green meadows and hills and small clumps of trees. The two-story clapboard house was set back from the road, and the front yard had some lawn—an unusual feature here, as it required clearing every stump, diligent watering and a dog good at keeping away the rabbits and deer. They had one: Digger, a clever English shepherd who ran at them now, snarling and barking as he had never done when Honor came for milk. He seemed to sense that this visit had a different, more ambivalent purpose. Behind the house were various outbuildings, dominated by an enormous barn, much bigger than the house, painted red but now faded, and with a steeply sloping roof and a bank of earth built up to its entrance. The doors were open, and Honor could see hay in bales piled almost to the rafters.

The Haymakers waited for them on the front porch. Judith Haymaker held a Bible in her lap, Dorcas a shirt she was mending, and Jack sat with his eyes closed—though he jumped up to call off the dog. While Dorcas went inside, Judith ushered them to straight-back chairs before reseating herself in a rocking chair Honor suspected no one was to use but her—the first of many Haymaker rules she was going to have to learn. Digger sat near her, just out of reach of the chair’s runners. He was clearly Judith’s dog; Honor knew he would never come and lie at her feet. Perhaps she would have more luck with the calico cat slinking across the lawn and disappearing into the flower beds laid out on either side of the porch steps. It looked much wilder than her English cat.