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.
Adam and Jack talked briefly about the oats and when the crop would be harvested, about business at Adam’s store, about a new slave law Congress was debating that Caleb Wilson the blacksmith had spoken of at Meeting. Honor wanted to listen but she was too nervous to pay much attention. She had brought with her some patchwork, and got out the brown and green hexagons she had already been working on. As she began to whipstitch them together into a rosette, the familiar gesture calmed her. Wherever she was, however foreign and awkward the place and the people, sewing at least felt familiar.