The Last Runaway (21 page)

I expect by now Mother will have asked thee for the Star of Bethlehem quilt I gave thee before leaving for America. I was ashamed to have to ask for it back, but I know my dearest friend will understand. Circumstances have led me to marry much sooner than expected, and I was not ready, in terms of quilts—and other ways too. I hope one day to make another quilt and send it on its long journey to reach thee.

Thy faithful friend,

Honor Haymaker

Pole Star

AS IT GREW
colder, Honor began to worry about the runaways sleeping outside. Those she had glimpsed had few clothes with them, and nothing warm. Most fugitives passed through during the night, simply taking the food Honor left out. Occasionally, though, one got stranded there at daylight, and hid in Wieland Woods. As the frosts came, and then dustings of snow, she looked for a warmer place to hide them during the day, in case any needed hiding. The haymow was the most obvious place, where there was also straw for bedding. But since it was obvious, slave hunters were more likely to search it. Moreover, she and Judith and Dorcas milked the cows in the barn twice a day, and Jack was in and out, mucking out dirty straw and replacing it with fresh, and feeding the animals with hay from the loft. It was a busy place to hide someone in. However, she could not think of a better spot: the chickens would make too much noise with someone in the henhouse, and the cows and pigs and horses would be stirred by a presence in their stalls beneath the haymow. The wagon shed was less used but more exposed, and cold and uncomfortable. The woodshed was too close to the house. Besides, Honor felt the hay was the best thing about the farm; it was there she herself felt safest.

The first runaway she hid there was a boy of twelve or so. Honor found him crouched behind the henhouse when she went out to collect eggs one First Day morning, so cold he could barely move. Handing him a corn cake she had slipped into her apron pocket, she thought quickly. “Wait here until thee sees us leave for Meeting—church,” She corrected herself so that he would understand. “Then hide in the straw in the far corner of the barn. Keep still if anyone else comes. I will call out when I come to thee later.” Because it was First Day, and a day of rest, she knew Jack would not change the animals’ straw, but only feed them.

That evening it rained, a cold drizzle mixed with ice. Honor excused herself to go to the outhouse, where she left the lantern and ran blindly to the barn. “’Tis me,” she called softly. She heard the boy emerge but could not see him, only smelling his sweaty fear as he drew close. “Here.” She thrust some cold beef and potatoes into the dark.

His hands met hers as he took the food. “Thankee.”

“Thee must leave tonight and head for Oberlin, three miles north of here. Go behind the barn and head that way. At Oberlin, look for the candle in the back window of the red house on Mill Street.” She left before he could say anything, fearful of being missed inside. She could hear him wolfing down the food as she pulled the door shut.

The next day Honor slipped to the barn while Jack was out delivering cheese and the Haymaker women were stewing apples, taking with her a pail full of peelings to feed to the pigs. She wanted to check that the boy had left no trace, but was astonished to discover he was still there, asleep in a nest of straw. When she woke him, he jumped to his feet, ready to run. “Why is thee here?” Honor cried. “It is dangerous to remain.”

The boy shrugged and lay back down in the straw. “Too cold out. I ain’t been this warm in a long time. Someone came in this morning to feed the animals and I kep’ real still so he didn’t find me. You got anything to eat?”

Instead of scolding him, Honor gave him some of the apple peelings and promised to try to bring something else later. Unlike other fugitives she had met, he was talkative, telling her while he ate about his journey from Virginia. Honor learned that he had been traveling with an older man, but the two had become separated in eastern Ohio when they were chased through dense woods. The boy did not know what had happened to the other.

“I didn’t want to go up north jes’ to Pennsylvania or New York,” he explained with the assuredness of a twelve-year-old. “Yankee land still too dangerous. Canada’s safer. I had help most the way ’long, especially from the Quakers. You a Quaker?”

Honor nodded. “Thee is almost there,” she said. “It will take only a few more days to reach the lake, and then someone will help thee find a boat to Canada.”

“Yep.” But the boy looked indifferent. He has become so used to the journey, she thought, that he has forgotten about the destination.

Before leaving she covered him so that he looked like an authentic heap of straw. It worked as long as he lay still and did not rustle. The boy could not, though, for his youth made him restless: he jiggled his foot and jerked his legs, and repositioned himself, burrowing deeper into the straw. Honor hoped that if Donovan or another slave hunter came looking, the mantle of fear would silence the boy.

Donovan did not come looking, however, and the boy disappeared that night. She prayed that he reached Canada.

* * *

A few weeks later she hid another. One morning when she went out to the barn to milk, Honor had the now familiar sense of someone in Wieland Woods, though she was careful not to look that way. The puddles and ruts of mud were frozen; a night outdoors would have been painful. When she went to collect eggs, the feeling was still there. Honor fretted, but could do nothing.

Later that day they had word that a Friend had gone into labor and was asking for Judith’s help. Dorcas accompanied her, but Honor stayed behind to help Jack with the evening milking. When his mother was gone, Jack became less serious and more playful. Now he had them milk the same cow, one on each side, and squirted her with milk till Honor laughed and told him to stop.

They worked in silence for a few minutes, Honor leaning her head against the cow’s flank and thinking of the runaway in the woods. “A birth,” Jack said then. “That will be us soon enough.” He grabbed her hand, squeezing it into the cow’s wet udder. “We can start now. The hay above makes a good bed.”

“After the milking,” Honor insisted, smiling into the side of the cow.

But before they had done, Jack was called to ride for the doctor in Oberlin, as the mother was bleeding. When he suggested dropping her at Adam and Abigail’s for company, Honor insisted she would be fine alone. “I have Digger with me,” she reminded him, “and the milking to finish, and plenty to do.” Though the dog remained aloof, he would defend her if needed.

Once Jack had gone, she shut Digger in the house and ran to the edge of the woods with a lantern. Holding it up, she shone it into the dark snarl of trees. “Come out!” she called, her heart racing. “I will hide thee!” Though her sense of urgency made Honor less frightened of the woods than she would normally be, she could not bring herself to enter the trees.

Luckily she did not have to—a woman stepped out from a clump of maples into the circle of light. She was wearing a bonnet and shawl, but still shivering with cold. As Honor led her through the orchard toward the barn, she could hear Digger’s furious, muffled barking. Then, beyond that, she caught the sound of Donovan’s horse, clattering and thudding along the track from Faithwell.

Honor blew out the lantern and ran, assuming the woman would follow. She did not go to the barn’s heavy front door that she and Jack had shut for the night, but headed around the side to a small door built in case fire blocked other exits. If they used the main door, Donovan might hear, and he would certainly spot that it had been left unbolted.

Inside it was so dark Honor could not see her hand in front of her face. She had no time to think, but grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her, bumping along hay bales, to the straw in the corner. Digging down, they covered themselves with handfuls of straw, and waited. They heard Donovan arrive in the yard and jump down, then the sounds of his progress around the various outbuildings: the chickens squawking in the henhouse; the squeak of the wagon-shed door; the slamming of the privy. Finally the sounds stopped. Now they must remain very quiet.

It seemed at last Honor had met someone who could keep as still as she.

She had always taken a secret pride in how still she sat at Meeting. When she settled on a bench, feet firm on the floor, legs pressed together and hands folded in her lap, she could hold her position for two hours without a movement. All around her men and women shifted in their seats to relieve aching legs and buttocks. They shrugged shoulders, scratched heads, coughed, reclasped hands. Jack was a particular culprit. On the rare occasions when he got up to speak, Honor suspected it was not because he felt moved by the Holy Spirit to do so, but because he needed to stretch. Being a Quaker did not mean you were naturally still.

Huddling in the straw next to her, the woman at her side would not have had Honor’s years of experience in not moving. Yet she was still—so still that Honor strained to detect even a single rustle of straw. All she could hear was a nest of mice stirring and squeaking nearby; and, once, the moist click of the woman’s blink, a sound that seemed enormous in the silence. It became almost a competition between them to discover who could be quieter.

Then she heard the snap of a stick, the creak of a leather boot, and tensed. Donovan too was playing the quiet game, though less skillfully than the women. The slave did not move except to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth with a tiny “tock.”

The sound seemed almost a signal. With a painful rasp of metal against metal, Donovan drew back the bolt on the barn doors and swung one open. After the intense darkness his lantern seemed as bright as sunlight. As he stepped inside, the temptation to bolt was almost overwhelming, but Honor knew they could not outrun him. They must remain where they were, and not only keep still, but somehow negate themselves so that he would not sense their presence. This was harder to do than keeping quiet. It meant harnessing and stilling the Inner Light.

Honor closed her eyes, though it went against her instincts. She wanted to be able to watch Donovan, whose outline wavered in the lantern’s light as he swung it to light up the corners. However, if she turned off the power of her sight, and in her mind left the barn, she might manage to diminish her self. She tried instead to imagine herself back across the ocean. She was standing with her mother and sister on Colmer’s Hill outside Bridport, looking toward the sea.

“Honor Bright.” Donovan said her name as if he knew she was there, and his voice brought her right back to the barn. Honor did not open her eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her, even covered in straw. Her spirit was stretching toward him, though he represented everything she opposed.

Inside the barn the air had become thick and tense.

The runaway did not respond to this change, except to blink with another click.

The three of them remained frozen for a long time.

At last Donovan cleared his throat. “I’m gonna let you go this once, Honor. Don’t know why. Won’t happen again, I guarantee it.”

Honor waited for a quarter-hour beyond the last hoofbeat of his horse before easing back into the straw and flexing her cramped legs. “All right,” she said. “He has gone.”

Still the black woman did not move.

“I have never heard another be so quiet,” Honor admitted. “Thee would do well as a Quaker.”

At last she heard something: the sound of a smile.

When they were back outside, Honor whispered, “Does thee know where to go?”

Still wordless, the woman pointed up at a star in the northern sky: the pole star. Samuel had explained to her once that everything in the night sky turned around that one unassuming star, and because it did not move, you could follow it. It always astonished her that in a sky full of movement, there could be one fixed point.

Faithwell, Ohio

1st Month 20th 1851

Dearest Biddy,

I was overjoyed today to receive thy letter that accompanied the Star of Bethlehem quilt, along with those from William and my Aunt. It has been a treat to receive the package, with letters from thee and Mother and Aunt Rachel all at once, with so much news and warmth to be found in them. They have truly broken the monotony of these winter days.

When I unwrapped the quilts and spread them on our bed, I cried to see all that familiar fabric and stitching. I am so grateful to thee for giving up the quilt, with such generosity and understanding—in particular since I am beginning to sense from the frequent references in thy recent letters to a certain Sherborne family that thee may soon be in need of quilts thyself! I thank thee, Biddy. My mother-in-law is pleased they have arrived, even if she and Dorcas inspected the quilts with puzzled looks they did not try to conceal. English patchwork is clearly not to their taste.

I had thought that with the coming of winter there would be more time for me to write letters. There is indeed more time, for nothing is growing now, there is snow up to the windows, and apart from milking and feeding the animals and going to Meeting, we rarely go outside. Yet I am disinclined to write, perhaps because there is less to tell thee. Each day is identical to the one before. Like the chickens and the cows, we have been cooped up inside together for a month, and I find I have become weary and dull. I do not recall such a sensation during Dorset winters: it was milder, with less snow, and being in town thee and Grace and I were always going about, with a circulation of people and goods and ideas and sea air to keep us fresh. Here I sit with Dorcas and Judith all day long in the kitchen, where it is warmest, and the air is as stale as our conversation. Then I wonder what I would write to tell thee, and so I put it off. For that I am sorry. But the arrival of thy letter and the quilts has given me a good reason to take up my pen.