The Last Runaway (11 page)

Faithwell itself is a tiny, rough sort of place. I know Adam did not deliberately lie in his letters describing it, but when he called it a ‘town’ he was clearly exaggerating. They boast that this part of Ohio is cleared and populated, much more so than ten years ago, but to me it feels like a frontier, with a few houses scratched out of the wilderness. Thee would be amazed at what is called the ‘general store’ here—a shop with mostly bare shelves and little to choose from, set on a track that a coach could never manage. Even wagons frequently get stuck in the mud, or the ride is so jolting one would rather walk.

The Meeting House is pleasant at least, and the Friends kind. I do not know why, but I have not been able to settle at Meeting yet; this is a great disappointment, as I normally take much comfort from the collective silence, and it would do me good now truly to wait in expectation with others. I need to be patient, I know, and a way will open once again.

I have not yet got to know the other families, nor discerned who might become a friend. The women in general here are straightforward, in conversation, in dress, even in the way they walk, which is flatfooted and rather graceless. Thee would smile. At least thee may be content that there is no rival here who would ever take thy place as my dearest friend.

I must stop criticising my new country. I will leave thee with something to smile at: in Ohio they like to call quilts ‘comforts’!

Thy faithful friend,

Honor Bright

Dandelions

TWO WEEKS AFTER
her arrival, Adam Cox asked Honor to help him at his Oberlin store on a Sixth Day, as Abigail, who usually helped him when needed, was unwell. Sixth Days were busy ones in towns, with the stores in Oberlin remaining open late for farmers coming in from the fields. Honor was pleased with the prospect of going to a larger town, for she was finding the isolation of Faithwell trying. She was also glad to have time away from Abigail, who had become increasingly hostile.

Adam normally rode his horse to the store, or walked if he had the time. For Honor, however, he borrowed a buggy. Just as they drove past the general store, Judith Haymaker came out carrying a sack of flour. Honor hoped her eyesight was not keen enough to spot the gray and yellow bonnet she was wearing. She had not touched Belle Mills’s gift since arriving in Faithwell, but thought that it might be appropriate while working in Adam’s store—smarter than her everyday bonnet but not ostentatious. Of course it should not matter what she wore, as long as it was clean and modest. She should not care. But Honor did care about that inner rim of pale yellow, its reflection lifting her face from the gray of the rest of the bonnet, just as she cared about the inch of white cloth edging the necklines of her dresses. Such details made her feel clearer and more defined. She suspected, though, that Judith Haymaker would not approve. Adam himself had raised his eyebrows when Honor came down wearing the bonnet, but said nothing.

Now he nodded at his neighbor, and Judith Haymaker nodded back, otherwise standing motionless to watch them pass.

East of Faithwell the trees closed in, and Honor swallowed several times to force down a rising panic. She wondered if she would ever grow used to the monotonous Ohio woods. It made her miss the ocean—not traveling on it, but the shoreline, with its definitive break from the land and its open, promising horizon.

Once they had turned onto the road north to Oberlin, however, she could relax a little, for it was clearer, running past farms and fields of corn, and the pressure of the woods receded. There was enough sunlight along the road that wildflowers could grow, chicory and Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans. There was also more traffic: other buggies and wagons and horses heading their way, or passing them in the opposite direction toward Wellington.

“Why do all the roads run north and south or east and west?” Honor asked. She had been puzzling over this regularity since first riding with Thomas from Hudson to Wellington. In England roads followed the contours of the landscape, which did not conform to rigid compass directions.

Adam chuckled. “Because they can. This part of Ohio is very flat, so there is nothing the roads need go around to avoid. Except for one dogleg by the Black River a few miles south of here, this road runs dead straight between Oberlin and Wellington for nine miles. The towns are more or less evenly spaced too, every five miles or so in either direction, like a net.”

“Except Faithwell.”

“No, we stand apart,” Adam agreed.

“Why did they place the towns so evenly?”

“Perhaps the surveyors of this territory were trying to bring order to a land they felt they had no control over.” Adam paused. “It is very different from Dorset.” It was the first time she had heard him compare Ohio to home since coming to live with him.

* * *

Adam drove Honor around Oberlin before stopping at the shop. It was a pretty town, more substantial than Faithwell and twice the size of Wellington. The buildings looked sturdier and more permanent, with a few even built of brick. In the center of town, four streets formed the sides of a square, which had been created by felling all the trees. Half the square had college buildings on it; the rest was a park planted in diagonal lines with new oaks and elms. Honor was glad to see trees that were familiar and ordered, so different from the thick, indistinguishable woods surrounding Faithwell.

Two of the streets making up the square were taken up by other college buildings. Honor sat in the buggy and watched the young people hurrying back and forth, so busy and earnest. Some were women, and some were black. “Are they all students?”

Adam nodded. “Oberlin was founded on principles of equality similar to Friends. Indeed, it began as a religious community, with strict rules of conduct. No alcohol is sold in town, or tobacco.”

“No spitting, then.”

“Yes, no spitting.” Adam chuckled. “It is surprising, isn’t it? Funny, though, one gets used to it. I don’t notice the spitting now when I go to Cleveland.”

Oberlin’s shops were for the most part on Main Street, and the variety after Faithwell dazzled Honor, with several groceries, two butchers, a cobbler, a barber, a dentist, a milliner, two bookstores and even a daguerreotype artist. The roads were better than the one running through Faithwell—wider and less rutted, though still prone to thick mud when it rained. Planks had been laid in front of the shops for pedestrians.

Cox’s Dry Goods on Main Street was modest compared to the shop Adam’s brothers had run in Bridport, where there had been bolts of cloth stacked in open cupboards from floor to ceiling and a ladder on runners they slid along to climb for out-of-reach material. Here the floor space was bigger but there was less stock, laid out on tables in the center of the room. Adam’s brother had not managed to make the shop into a thriving business before he fell ill. In the year since, Adam had built it up only slowly. It was perhaps the very principled nature of the town that drew Quakers like Matthew and Adam to run a shop there, but those principles were also the cause of the limits to its success. Apart from restrictions on diet and behavior, original Oberlin settlers were discouraged from wearing clothes made from expensive fabrics. Although the town population was now diluted by newer, less principled settlers, there were still few buyers for the more profitable soft velvets and bright satins the Cox family had sold to non-Quakers in Bridport. In fact, there was little Adam sold that Honor could not have worn herself. Full of gingham and chintz—which American customers called calico—and only a little damask or dimity for curtains, the shop’s brightest fabrics were the bundles of offcuts Adam kept in stock for quilters. There were no restrictions on what an Oberlinite or a Quaker could use in making her quilts, even if the bright reds and greens of Ohio quilts might never be seen in her dresses.

Adam kept Honor at his side for the first hour to teach her how to measure cloth against the marks made on the edge of the table, make a small cut and rip the fabric along the weave, and wrap it in brown paper and string. She had bought cloth often enough to be familiar with the procedure, which did not differ between Oberlin and Bridport. At least some things were the same in the two countries. Once Adam was confident that Honor knew what to do, he left her to deal with customers alone while he handled money and oversaw a boy he’d hired to sharpen scissors and needles brought in by customers, a recent initiative he hoped would help the shop’s prospects.

Honor was glad to have contact with new people. While living in a community of Friends was familiar, after just a few weeks in Faithwell, among the same people day after day, she was finding its limitations trying, and craved variety. At home she had been more used to the mingling of Quakers and non-Quakers, and with the coming and going of ships there was always something different to see, and strange faces to ponder. In Adam’s store she studied people’s clothes and listened to their talk about politics or the weather or crops, or what foolish Oberlin students had been up to. She watched boys run by with hoops, and smiled at a girl dragging a carved toy dog on a string. She held a baby while a customer spread out a bolt of cloth, and helped an elderly woman around the corner to the buggy waiting for her on College Street. All of these interactions made her feel vital rather than the unwanted extra she was at Abigail’s.

Among the steady stream of customers, several black women came in to buy cloth or needles or pins, or to have their scissors sharpened. Honor tried not to stare, but she could not help it, as they were like exotic birds blown off course to land among sparrows. They all looked the same to her, with brown skin like polished oak, high cheekbones, wide noses and dark, serious eyes. They conducted themselves similarly too. After glancing at her, they went over to Adam, waiting for him if he was helping someone else, then asking him for material, or giving him the scissors or needles for the boy to sharpen. It was as if they had established that Adam was safe, and so they did not have to approach her. Clear about what they wanted, they chose quickly, paid and left, saying little to Adam and nothing to Honor. They certainly would not have asked her to hold their babies for them.

When there was a lull in the shop, Honor went out for a brief walk to escape the heat inside, and discovered a few doors down a confectioner’s where a crowd of black women were gathered, chatting and laughing in groups. The man behind the counter, selling peppermints and shaved ice, was also black and clearly in charge. Honor had not expected Negroes to own their own businesses. Donovan had been right: Oberlin was radical.

As a Quaker, Honor had been used to the feeling of being set apart, and she was an outsider in almost every place in America. She knew the black women must feel more comfortable with one another, just as she did with other Quakers. However open-minded, people tended to gravitate to those like themselves. And Negroes had reason to be wary of whites, where one family could produce two people as different as Donovan and Belle Mills. But as she watched the women so clearly at ease, where they hadn’t been in Cox’s Dry Goods, she felt a pang. I am excluded even from the excluded, she thought.

Late in the day, as she was folding cloth, Honor heard a throat cleared beside her. “Excuse me, miss. How much is that a yard?”

A black woman stood next to her, intent on the fabric in Honor’s hands: a cream cotton dotted with tiny rust-colored diamonds. She was as small as Honor, and older, her cheeks smooth and shiny and crisscrossed with lines, like the palms of hands. She wore spectacles and a straw hat trimmed with dandelions limp from the heat.

Honor glanced toward Adam: he had disappeared into the back room. “I will look for thee,” she said, pleased to have been asked. Each bolt was wound around a flat piece of wood; on one end Adam had written the price. Honor searched for that now, pulling back the layers of cloth. “Fifty cents a yard,” she announced.

The woman grimaced. “I can manage that, just about.” She pulled out a lace collar yellow with age but beautifully made, and laid it on top of the cloth, smoothing it with long fingers tipped with pale oval nails. “This go with it?” She said this more as a statement than a question, and Honor did not know if she should answer. The collar went well enough with the material, but something finer like silk would have been preferable. She did not think she should suggest this, though, as silk cost much more.

“Is it for thee?” she asked.

The woman shook her head. “Daughter’s wedding dress. She need somethin’ she can wear after, for everyday or for church.”

She is like any woman, Honor thought, concerned that her daughter should look her best and yet have a practical dress. “Then it is a good choice,” she said. “How many yards would thee like?”

“Six—no, five, please. She’s a little thing.”

Her hands shaking, Honor measured and cut the cloth with more care than she had for any other customer that day. As she wrapped the cloth and tied twine around the paper, she thought, This is the first time I have helped a black person.

She felt eyes on her and glanced up. The woman was studying the yellow rim of Honor’s bonnet. “Where you get that bonnet? Not from Oberlin, did you?”

“No. Belle Mills’s Millinery in Wellington.” Several other women had already asked about the bonnet and had been disappointed that they would have to go all the way to Wellington for one.

Recognition sparked in the woman’s eyes; she gazed at Honor, a steady look unhampered by her glasses. She might have been about to say something when Adam appeared from the back room. “Hello, Mrs. Reed. Has Honor been able to help with everything thee needs?”

Mrs. Reed’s eyes disappeared behind a flash of spectacles as she turned to Adam. “Yep, she did. Where Abigail at?”