I perched on the edge of the bench. “You haven’t picked a name?”
Marian shook her head. “If she had been a he, I would have chosen Amos, after my husband.” She drew her daughter down to rest in the crook of her arm. “Maybe I’ll go with Eliza. That was my mother-in-law’s name.”
I fidgeted with the basket on the table, wondering about Gid, wondering about Marian, wondering about Gid and Marian. “I’m sorry about your husband. Do you … miss him terribly?”
“I miss him, for he was a good man: steady, honest, driven. But ours wasn’t a love match. My father wanted the union. I was very young. Sixteen. Too young.” She tucked the blanket more securely around the babe. When she glanced up, her expression was quizzical. “Did you run away to avoid a matchmaking parent?”
“No. I ran away…” How to explain this? “To be myself.” I shrugged. “Actually, I didn’t run away at all. I left with our parents’ knowledge, then”—I ran a hand through my cropped hair—“changed along the way.”
“Our parents?”
“Gid’s and mine.”
“You don’t look anything alike.”
“He’s my stepbrother, but as good as a natural one. We’ve been siblings for as long as I can remember.”
She nodded, her face lightening with a smile. After a minute, she asked, “And Daniel?”
“Daniel,” I sighed. “Well, he’s kind of everything: our Middleton neighbor, the man everyone goes to for help and advice, my parents’ hoped-for son-in-law, my enemy for a bit, a man who can be aggravatingly competent, but now one of my best friends.”
Her smile widened. “In other words, he’s your beau.”
I nodded.
“A love match,” she mused after dropping her eyes to her baby. She didn’t need to see my expression to verify her conclusion. I supposed I’d sounded precisely how I felt. In love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The following week was to be my last in the new territory. Though Daniel, Gid, and I respected the Sabbath, at twilight on Sunday we started the garden and worked well into the night by the glow of the stars and moon, squaring off a space, removing stumps, tweaking out the rocks that made up the earth in these parts, and improving the garden’s soil with manure.
The weather had turned warm and dry. High winds blew from the west. Under such favorable conditions, in Middleton, folks might have already prepared their fields. Our tardiness fretted my brother, who paced during meals and worried aloud about finishing the plowing. A man could never grow too much hay and corn. What if he didn’t end up with any? He needed to raise at least enough for the cattle’s bedding and feed.
While Gid and Daniel turned their attention to the field (one plowing like a bedlamite, zigzagging around stumps, the other digging out the worst of the great rocks and dragging them away on the stoneboat), I worked in the garden and planted the crops that could survive the late frosts. Mama had sent us on our journey with an array of supplies. I selected her pea and bean packages and sowed the seeds directly in the unctuous clay soil. Marian had given me some potatoes with rooting eyes, so I planted those, too, then gave everything a good drink of stream water.
As soon as I finished planting what was seasonably permissible, I set aside the watering can and got to work digging the storage pit for Gid’s hay and corn. I’d never encountered such a mean soil: rich but so laden with clay and rocks I could barely shovel it. My progress was disappointingly gradual, and at the end of every day, I had very little to show for all my scraping and heaving. I did, however, acquire a great many aches and pains, not to mention blisters.
The completion of the cabin meant we were sleeping indoors now, a circumstance that protected us from the night’s chill but also kept Daniel and me from romantic pursuits. How could we do much of anything with Gid practically in arm’s reach? It was awkward. Plus, my brother obviously disapproved.
Exhaustion partly reconciled me to the restriction. We were working so hard, come nightfall we fell asleep quickly. The labor hastened the time, and the week’s end beckoned me: the impending travel by horseback with Daniel, a quick service in Batavia to clinch our partnership, and on our journey toward Middleton, plenty of spring evenings under the stars.
Yet reservations plagued me. I felt torn, half thrilled with newlywed fantasies, half anxious about who and what I was abandoning here: Rachel, Gid, and freedom, the unquestionable liberties that came with being Freddy. Like a cage trapping canaries, my stomach reacted to my confusion by remaining perpetually aquiver.
Daniel was impatient. I could tell. He broke the news of our departure to Gid over Thursday’s supper.
“Monday? Leaving? So soon?” At my nod, he stared at us for a long moment, then looked despondently around his cabin, as if he was trying to picture it without our company.
My uneasiness stirred. “We’ll return for visits.”
“And I don’t think this place will stay empty for long,” Daniel said, smiling gently.
My brother’s cheeks reddened. He shrugged, lowered his eyes, and plugged his spoon disinterestedly into his potatoes.
I gazed at him in frustration. Maybe his opinion of Marian Gale was a bit too reverent. Was he planting her on a pedestal like he had Rachel? If so, this was becoming a bad habit.
I doubted the efficacy of worshipfulness in courtship. It established unreasonable expectations and invited failure. To be the object of adulation? Well, no one was perfect. Better to love the fact of the person rather than an idealized version. And better to be loved for oneself. Rachel had said as much not too long ago.
*
For all that its fertile soil promised good crops, the inland location of the Genesee Valley not only complicated transporting produce (abundant or otherwise) to market, it made communication with families back in the old states a challenge. A person here had to travel hours just to reach a postmaster.
Gid and I had dispatched only two letters to our folks since leaving Middleton, one in Canandaigua, right before we met Phineas at that horrible tavern, and one in Batavia, after my brother had signed the Holland Land Company papers and secured his property.
Since Daniel and I would be returning to that latter town in four days, we told Gid to prepare whatever messages he wanted mailed. We would post his along with our own. The carriers who served the post offices rode quickly and would get the letters to Middleton days before we’d reach home.
We wanted to offer to post our friends’ letters as well. Paying visits and collecting their messages would give us the opportunity to bid farewell. I dreaded the visit to Phin’s. How could I possibly say good-bye to Rachel? It was too soon and didn’t feel right—didn’t feel kind.
On Friday, the very day I planned to call on Rachel, she surprised me with an appearance. I was washing clothes when I heard the sound of wheels clomping and creaking over the uneven road. Before investigating, I hung my brother’s shirt from a branch by the stream and left it dripping there.
Daniel and Gid already waited in the yard and stood side by side, one tall, one short, but both frowning and their arms similarly folded.
Rachel arrived with her cousins. In the wagon, the three Weldses sat combed, scrubbed, dressed in their Sunday best, and looking about as cheerful as mourners on their way to a funeral.
I didn’t care to see the brothers—they annoyed me—but I was glad to welcome Rachel.
Her answering smile was decidedly strained.