"That's the most honest answer anyone's given me in 3 years," he said. "I'll grant you that much at least."
The farm, when they reached it, was smaller than Tobias had perhaps expected from Millicent's description. A modest farmhouse, a barn with a sagging east wall, fields gone half to Johnson grass for want of proper tending. But there was an orderliness to what remained cared for. The kitchen garden, neat despite its owner's evident exhaustion, spoke of a woman fighting a losing battle with more determination than resources.
Tobias took the barn loft without complaint, though Millicent noted he kept his few belongings arranged near the ladder each night for the first several weeks. A habit born of hard-won caution rather than any particular distrust of his new employer. And in the mornings, before Millicent herself was fully awake, Tobias was already in the kitchen garden or the near field working with a competence that spoke of skills learned somewhere far more sophisticated than a Carolina tobacco farm. "You know crops that don't grow in this soil," Millicent observed one morning, watching Tobias examine the yellowing leaves of a struggling corn stand with an expert's eye.
"Where did you learn farming? In a merchant's household?" "My mother kept the trading post's gardens," Tobias said. "Yams, cassava, things that don't translate directly to Carolina dirt, but the principles carry. Soil that's tired needs feeding before it needs planting. Same everywhere in the world, I'd wager."
He glanced at Millicent, something almost like humor entering his expression for the first time since the auction block. "Your corn's tired, Mrs. Fairweather. Tired soil, tired woman, tired farm. I expect we've got some things in common to fix between us."
It was the first joke Tobias had made in Millicent's hearing, small and dry as it was, and Millicent found herself laughing, a real laugh, surprising in its suddenness. The first one she could remember since long before Warren's death. "Then let's fix them," she said, "starting with the corn, since I expect the rest of us are considerably harder to mend."
They worked the fields together through that first month with a rhythm that built slowly, carefully, the way trust builds between two people who have each separately learned that trust given too freely gets punished. Millicent found herself watching Tobias across the rows some evenings with an attention she did not immediately understand. And if Tobias noticed the watching, he said nothing of it, though his own guarded reserve had begun, by small and careful degrees, to soften into something that might, with enough patient tending, become friendship, or something further still, though neither of them was yet ready to name it.
Willow's Ferry noticed, as small towns always notice, and it noticed faster and more cruelly than Millicent had allowed herself to expect. The scene at the auction block had already given the town enough to talk about for a season. A widow paying 17¢ to free a man the whole crowd had heard described quite publicly as freeborn and unlawfully held. But when word spread that Millicent Fairweather had taken the man to live and work on her farm, rather than simply sending him on his way with a coin and a blessing, the talk sharpened into something with a harder edge.
Prudence Callahan, who ran the mercantile and had appointed herself the moral bookkeeper of the town's affairs, began telling customers that no respectable widow kept a grown black man under her own roof, rather than a proper outbuilding, that the arrangement smacked of something improper, that Warren Fairweather would be ashamed to see what his widow had made of his good name. Millicent heard the first of it directly, standing in the mercantile herself one Tuesday buying salt, when Prudence made her comments loudly enough to be overheard rather than whispered behind a raised hand. The particular cruelty of gossip meant to be witnessed by its target. "I'll thank you to keep my household out of your ledgers, Prudence."
Millicent said more steadily than she felt. "You keep the accounts for the mercantile. I'll keep the accounts for my own farm and my own conscience." "Your conscience," Prudence said, "is drawing considerable notice for a woman who claims to have no particular attachment beyond hired labor. I've seen how you look at him in church, Millicent, when you can be persuaded to bring him to church at all."
The remark landed harder than Millicent expected because it was true in a way she had not yet allowed herself to examine directly. She did not answer Prudence directly, only paid for her salt and left. And she did not tell Tobias about the exchange when she returned home, though Tobias read something in her face regardless. "Prudence Callahan," Tobias said, not quite a question when they sat down to supper that evening.
"You've heard her talk, too, then." "I hear most of what this town says about me, Mrs. Fairweather, one way or another. It's a skill a person develops, being talked about." Tobias set down his fork, studying Millicent across the table with an expression more serious than the moment perhaps required.
"I could take a room in town, find other work, even at reduced wages, if it would ease what's being said about your household." "No," Millicent said, faster and more forcefully than she intended. "No. I didn't pay 17 cents at that auction block to have Prudence Callahan decide the shape of my household for me."
It was Reverend Aldous Pruitt some weeks later who brought the matter into open daylight. His sermon that Sunday concerned the proper ordering of households and the dangers of women who in their grief allowed sentiment to overrule sound judgment regarding the company they kept. And though he never named Millicent directly, the whole congregation understood well enough who and what he meant. She walked out before the closing hymn, unable to sit through it, and found Tobias waiting near the wagon rather than inside.
Since Tobias had long since stopped accompanying her to a church that made its opinion of him plain each time he darkened its door. "Bad Sunday," Tobias said. "Bad Sunday," Millicent agreed, and to her own surprise found herself crying right there in the churchyard where anyone might see. Not from the sermon itself, but from the accumulated weight of months spent pretending she did not know what she felt.
Tobias did not touch her, understanding as well as anyone the danger of being seen offering comfort too openly in a churchyard full of watching eyes, but he stood close enough that Millicent could feel the solid warmth of his presence. And he said, "You don't have to keep fighting this town's opinion of you on my account. I could go. Might make your life simpler."
"I don't want simpler," Millicent said. "I want honest. And the honest truth, Tobias, is that I don't know what to call what I feel when I look at you, but I know it isn't merely gratitude anymore. And I'm tired of pretending otherwise for Reverend Pruitt's benefit."