The Last Runaway

by Tracy Chevalier

  “What did thee mean?”

  Thinking back over what she had said, Honor understood she had made the mistake of presenting England in a better light. She would have to praise Ohio somehow. Americans liked that. “I do like the firefl—the lightning bugs,” she said. “They are cheerful and welcoming.”

  “More so than the people?”

  Honor sighed. Again he was taking her few words and twisting them. It exhausted her. This was why she so often kept quiet.

  “It cannot be easy, living with Abigail and Adam,” he continued.

  Honor frowned. Though she welcomed sympathy from the right person, she did not know Jack well enough to accept it from him. As much as his physical presence drew her in, she wanted to back away from his words.

  “I’d best go in,” she said.

  “I will come with thee.”

  They went back through the kitchen and into the crowded parlor, where Dorcas Haymaker and her friend Caroline turned their faces toward them like two silver plates catching the light. Caroline’s cheeks were red—rubbed with mullein, Honor suspected, a trick Grace had used to brighten her cheeks when she thought she was looking too pale. Quaker rouge, she’d heard outsiders call the plant.

  Jack did not seem to notice his sister’s friend. “Will thee eat?” he said. “Quilting all afternoon must give thee an appetite.”

  Honor could not tell whether he was teasing her or not. It was hard to know with Americans: they laughed at things she did not find funny, and were silent when she wanted to smile. She said nothing, but stepped up to the tables heavy with food, hoping he would not follow, and that the buzzing in her head would subside. She did not know why he had such a physical effect on her. His easy manner unnerved her, much the way America itself did. Honor was accustomed to an efficient, organized life, and hers had been anything but that since leaving Dorset. Jack Haymaker was part of the American chaos that pulled at her, making her want to step back.

  She surveyed the field of food laid out before her. It was already predictable: the shoulder of ham, the roast beef, the mounds of mashed potatoes, the string beans, the johnnycakes, the army of pies. She swallowed a surge of nausea. What she longed for was a buttered crumpet, smoked mackerel pâté, a lamb cutlet, strawberries and cream—food prepared simply and easily digested, not served in a heap. Then she spied a bowl of gooseberries, pushed to the back of the table, and reached for it.

  At that moment there was a stirring in the crowd around the food, and it parted to reveal Judith Haymaker, carrying a large platter piled with ears of steaming corn, stripped of their husks and tassels. “Corn’s ready!” she cried, her face bright with heat and anticipation. For once she was smiling fully. There was a scramble as women moved dishes so that she could set the plate down in the middle of the table.

  “First corn of the season,” Jack explained as people surged forward to pick out ears. “The ears are smaller than they will be next month, but they’re tenderer too. Where is thy plate? They will go fast.” He reached over and picked up an ear between thumb and finger. “Quick, it’s hot!”

  Honor had no choice but to take a plate, and Jack deposited two ears of corn upon it. “I—” she began to protest, but Jack talked over her.

  “Thee can have it with butter, if thee likes. See the plate there with the slab of butter? That’s for rolling corn in. But I think the first corn is better plain. It’s so sweet, it doesn’t need butter’s help. Come.” He led her to a bench pushed up against the wall and waited for her to sit so that he could hand her the plate and join her. Honor could feel more eyes on them besides Dorcas and Caroline—Adam and Abigail, Judith Haymaker, Caleb Wilson the blacksmith. Caroline had glittering eyes and a hard stare.

  Honor ducked her head and studied her ear of corn, each kernel like a translucent tooth. Jack was already gnawing at his, turning it around and around as his teeth cut away the kernels with a chomping sound like a horse, or a deer crashing through undergrowth. Honor could not bear to look. Her brothers, Samuel, even Adam Cox would never make such a noise when they ate. Jack Haymaker ate joyously, brutally.

  Dropping his spent corncob onto the plate they shared, he stood to go for more and noticed hers, untouched. “Does thee not like corn?”

  Honor hesitated. “I have never eaten it on the cob.”

  “Ah.” Jack smiled. “Then thee has a treat in store. This I must see.” To her embarrassment he remained in front of her, looking down, with his broad grin and his hair messy and a kernel of corn sticking to his chin. If they hadn’t been watching Honor and Jack before, everyone was now. She flushed a deep, hot red but knew she had no choice. To hesitate longer would draw even more attention. Picking up the ear, she turned it as if trying to find the best place to begin biting.

  “Go on, Honor,” Jack said. “Jump in.”

  Honor closed her eyes and bit down, slicing the kernels with her teeth. She opened her eyes. Never had she tasted anything so fresh and sweet. This was corn in its purest form, a mouthful of life. Turning the cob, she bit again and again, to savor the taste, so different from the other corn dishes she’d eaten over the past weeks. Then she couldn’t stop, and bit all the way up and down the cob until it was bare.

  Jack laughed. “That did thee good. Welcome to Ohio, Honor. Shall I fetch thee another?”

  * * *

  Jack Haymaker came into Cox’s Dry Goods the day after the frolic, toward the end of the afternoon when the final rush was over and Honor was folding material while Adam Cox recorded the day’s takings. Though she tried not to show it, she started when Jack entered, and her chest grew tight. She greeted him, then concentrated on the fabric she was wrapping around the bolt—the same cream with rust diamonds that Mrs. Reed had bought for her daughter the month before. Earlier she had asked Adam’s permission to cut a small piece of it to add to the scraps she’d saved from Grace’s brown dress and Belle’s yellow silk.

  Jack turned to Adam, who had paused in his writing, his pen steady over his accounts book. “I have finished delivering a batch of cheese to the college,” he announced, “and thought I’d offer Honor a lift back, if thee is done with her. She must be tired after a long day here.”

  Adam glanced between Jack and Honor, the relief that crossed his face telling her more than any words could: Jack was courting her, with Adam’s tacit blessing. Her life, which had been so uncertain these last few months, now had a needle hovering over it, ready to tack it into place. She did not feel secured, though, but rather as she had when she stepped off the Adventurer in New York, the land pitching and heaving under her feet.

  “Of course,” Adam replied. “I can finish up here.” He began to write again. As Honor reached for her shawl—redundant in the heat, but a woman always carried one—hanging on a peg on the wall behind him, she glanced down at his ledger. 11 needles sharpened @ 1 cent/needle: 11 cents. 5 pairs scissors sharpened @ 5 cents/pair: 25 cents. 3 yards coarse calico, he was writing. From this angle she could see the bald spot on top of his head.

  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.