‘You’ll grow out of it.’ She didn’t know whether he meant the faith or the doubts. ‘You look younger than twenty,’ he said then. ‘Twenty’s a good age. I liked being twenty.’ They were walking in the old area of town, the area that had been all of Sweetbrier when he was a child. He stopped suddenly, pointed to a small building with a picket fence in front of it, and the childlike delight that sometimes came to him, came to him now, taking her as much by surprise as his anger had only moments before. ‘Look, Sarah,’ he said, ‘that’s the old Sook Faris house.’

‘They still live there.’

‘Do they? Really? Is that Nannie Gander’s? It is, isn’t it? I wanted to ask you before: Benbow Wikin still owns the grocery store, doesn’t he? I did see him, didn’t I?’

Sarah laughed. ‘Of course you did. Lots of things are the same. Are you always so changeable?’

‘I never change,’ Jonathan said, humoring her – which she saw and which caught at her heart so painfully that she could not answer him. ‘Other things change,’ he went on. ‘I remain the same.’

The snow picked up; it began to grow dark. They turned back toward the house, and by the time they could see the lighted windows ahead of them, it was too dark for them to see each other, too dark even to make out the road beneath their feet.

‘How pretty you are under that crepe bow,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘You can’t see me now – or anything else.’

Out of the dark his voice said, ‘You’re wrong, you know. It’s an especially fetching hat. I can see you perfectly beneath it.’

She laughed once more, fuller this time and with a gaiety he hadn’t sensed in her before. ‘Then my hat’s a proof of your faith, Reverend. You can see for yourself it’s never left you at all. You can find faith if you only look for it – hats, anything at all, little things same as big.’

3

The wedding took place in mid-February in the Methodist church in town. Sarah wore Bessie’s wedding dress with French lace on it, and tears rolled down Mr Finster’s cheeks as he gave her away. Jonathan hardly heard the ceremony; his ears rang and his heart knocked at his ribs. Benbow Wikin himself supplied the feast that followed. That night in a sagging double bed of the best room in the only hotel in Sweetbrier, Jonathan was so terrified of hurting Sarah and she was so terrified of she knew not what that they didn’t even touch hands. They left town the next morning on the first leg of the trip to the Pacific Northwest, where he had got the Methodists to assign him a circuit: the lie was to be institutionalized.

It all came down to money and sex. What doesn’t? The Finsters had listened respectfully to him but Bessie, always practical, ended up with, ‘Well, Jonathan, if you give up preaching, how are you going to support a wife? You need money for a farm.’