The only place on the farm where she felt any ease was in the haymow. There the hay’s sweet, dry, dusty scent masked the stench of piss and manure, and it was quiet, with the animals in the stalls below and the people going about their work. Here she could imagine coming to escape the rest of the farm for a few minutes. New bales from the recent harvest were stacked high. Only the straw in one corner was low. “When we are harvesting the oats, we will replenish the straw,” Jack reassured Honor and Adam. Honor picked up a strand-dull and dead compared to the hay, its life cut off when the seeds were threshed from it.
The house was a little more familiar, since Honor had now been in enough American houses to expect square rooms with large windows, plain furniture made of ash and pine and elm, and oval rag rugs laid on the floor. Judith led them through each room, including the pantry and the cooler cheese-making room off the kitchen. Honor was surprised when she then led them upstairs and showed them each bedroom, plainly furnished but for the red and green and white quilts on each bed. Honor was not expecting to see bedrooms-at home she would never have showed strangers the bedrooms, which she considered private. She glanced at Adam, but he did not raise his eyebrows. In Pennsylvania the families she stayed with had also showed her each room, as if to give her a clear idea of how they lived and what they possessed. In England it would be considered showing off, but here such things were natural and important. Besides, the bedrooms were no longer private to her, she reminded herself, for she was joining the family. Somehow she would have to think of this house as home.
Faithwell, Ohio
8th Month 4th 1850
My dear family,
I am writing to tell you that I am to be married this morning, to Jack Haymaker. We will live with his mother and sister on their dairy farm just outside of Faithwell.
This is very sudden, I know, but I hope you will give us your blessing and think fondly of us.
Please if thee could, Mother, ask for the Star of Bethlehem quilt back from Biddy and send it, along with those I gave to William and Aunt Rachel. I need them here. I am sorry to have to ask, but it is required of me by my husband’s family to have in possession a sufficient number of quilts when married. I hope thee and the others will understand.
Your loving daughter,
Honor Bright
Fever
HONOR DID NOT spend her first married night in Jack Haymaker’s bed. Their bed, as she would have to learn to think of it. After the marriage Meeting and a community feast hosted by the Haymakers, when the last neighbors had left and the sky was finally turning to ink, Jack led her upstairs and down the hall to their bedroom. “This will be more comfortable than the cornfield,” he said, smiling as he brought her to the bed. It was spread with the whole-cloth white quilt made at the frolic earlier that week-quickly and unevenly quilted by whoever could be spared. Honor held on to the iron bedstead to keep from swaying.
Jack removed his braces-“suspenders,” she must call them-and his shirt before noticing that she had not moved. “Will thee get undressed? Here, I’ll help thee.” Reaching over to unfasten the buttons that ran down her back, he let his hand rest on her neck for a moment, then frowned. “But thee is hot!” Jack turned her around and took in her flushed face, then made her sit while he felt her cheeks and forehead. “When did thee begin to feel like this?”
“I-’tis a hot night.” And it was-so stifling and still that Honor’s hot brow had seemed to her simply an extension of the weather. Jack called for his mother and sister, and Honor, having held herself together all afternoon, let herself slump on the bed.
Judith and Dorcas led her back downstairs and settled her in the sick room off the kitchen, a small, square room containing a single bed, a wooden chair, and a basin and pitcher set into a cabinet with a chamber pot inside. Above the cabinet a medicine closet hung on the wall, filled with strips of linen and bottles of camphor, mustard and other medicines unfamiliar to Honor. The bed was made up with old linen sheets and a gray wool blanket that she found unbearably scratchy. A window faced onto the backyard. The women left it open and the door to the kitchen ajar so that some air could circulate, though little did and it was very close.
For the first few days of her fever Honor swung between hot and cold, delirium and lucidity, a desire to have the Haymakers with her and a longing for them to leave her alone. Sometimes she pretended to be asleep when Dorcas looked in on her or Jack sat by her bed. Conversation-either speaking or listening-was too draining, particularly when she barely knew them. She had not yet built up the hours of talk about the weather, the cows, the chores, how well she had slept, the neighbors’ comings and goings, the milk souring in the heat, wonder over letters from relatives and friends. When Jack sat with her or Judith Haymaker spooned broth into her mouth or Dorcas hung in the doorway, they too seemed at a loss as to what to say, and often resorted to talking to each other, or rinsing the chamber pot when it didn’t need it, smoothing the sheets, opening or shutting the window, sweeping the clean floorboards.
Alone Honor lay and watched the light change on the walls, too weak and dazed to sit up and read or sew. At times the room was so hot she felt she and the air had lost any boundary between them and become one. Even in her delirium she knew this was nonsense, and then she welcomed the intrusion of a Haymaker or, once or twice, Adam, to remind her of who and where she was.
Apart from her seasickness on the Adventurer, she had never been so severely ill for so long. She was in bed a week before she could sit up, and another week before she could get out of bed even briefly.
Though the Haymakers were attentive in looking after her, they did not seem alarmed by the length or severity of her illness. “It’s ague,” Judith Haymaker replied when Honor wondered why she was not yet better. “It likes to settle in for a long visit. Everyone gets it.”
Her illness overlapped with the harvesting of the oats, though she was well enough by then that all the Haymakers could leave her to go to the fields, as every hand was needed. Honor regretted not taking part, as she had hoped it would help her to feel more a part of the farming community. She said as much to Jack when he came to see her briefly after the first day of the harvest. “There will be other years,” he said, and then fell asleep in the chair.
The window of the sick room looked out over the yard between the barn, the wagon shed and the henhouse, and Honor watched it for hours. Often it seemed nothing changed, but after a while she noticed small movements, of yellow and black butterflies hovering, of a breeze blowing leaves about, of the slowly shifting shadows across the dusty ground.
One day while the Haymakers were in the fields, Honor lay and watched two chipmunks chase each other around the well in the middle of the yard while the calico cat crept toward them, her belly low to the ground. She was not fast enough, however, and the chipmunks ran off. Later the cat recrossed the yard, three half-grown kittens following and then stopping to fight, the mother watching with indifference. The well cast no shadow now, for it was noon. A tin mug sat on its curved edge. Honor blinked, and then knew she must have slept, for there was a shadow to one side of the well. She blinked again. The mug was gone.