"Not about hay."
"Not about hay," he said, and something in his face eased that Linnet guessed had not eased since April.
The press was a Washington, as she had thought, a number-three made in Cincinnati, rusted on the platen and with a cracked tympan frame, and there were two cases of long primer and a case of brevier and a jumble of wood type in a nail keg, and a great many dead spiders. Fenna Gault let her have it all for forty dollars, ten down and the rest at two a month, with the room above the store thrown in for a dollar more, and then refused to take the dollar for the first three months on the grounds that she would enjoy the company. It took Linnet nine days to clean the press and three more to sort the type, with Keziah at her elbow learning the lay of the case the way Linnet had learned it from her father, by being asked, again and again, where the k lived and where the em quads were, until she could put her hand on them in the dark.
The first job they printed was a handbill for the Albany County Stock Growers announcing a meeting at the Territorial on the second Saturday in November. The second was a notice for the Odd Fellows. Linnet did not charge for that one. She took it to the lodge herself, with Keziah beside her, and Keziah handed it to the Noble Grand, who was the man who ran the livery, and told him, in a voice that shook only at the beginning, what she had done with the money in the coffee tin and when she would have it back.
He was quiet for a while. Then he said that Caleb Morgan had once pulled his boy out of a well, and that he guessed a stone could wait until spring, and that he would take the handbills, but he would pay for them, and that was the end of it. It was not quite the end of it; there was talk in Elkhorn Siding all that winter, and some of it was unkind, and Mrs. Dimmock did not speak to Linnet until Christmas. But it was the end of the worst of it.
Nehemiah came in every Saturday. Linnet saw them go, from the window over the shop: the wagon and the sorrel mules and the man and the girl on the seat, and the girl talking, her hands going, and the man with his head bent to listen. They went that way all winter, through snow and wind and one Saturday in January so cold the mules' breath froze on their noses, and Nehemiah never missed one.
He did not court her. Linnet was grateful for that, and then, somewhere in February, she found that she was something more complicated than grateful, and did not care to look at it closely. He came into the shop sometimes when he brought Keziah back on Sunday evenings, and stood by the stove with his hat in his hands and watched her lock up a form, and asked questions about the press that were good questions. Once he stayed an hour and helped her pull proofs, and got ink to the elbows, and laughed at himself, and she realized she had never heard him laugh before. Once he told her about Caleb at nine years old, riding a calf into a church picnic in Iowa. Once, standing at the door to go, he said, "You were right, that first night. About deciding. I'd have made you a poor husband, Miss Rudd, if we'd done it Mrs. Dimmock's way. I'd have spent my life thinking you married me because you had nowhere else."
"I did have nowhere else," she said.