A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 10
The workshop went perfectly still.
Emmett stood in the door with the envelope in his hands, and the women at the tables stopped mid-stitch, and Bess Rawley’s slate hung in the air, and Delia Marsh pressed a hand over her mouth, and Estelle rose from the treadle like a woman rising from a long prayer.
“Well,” she said. “Open it, Emmett.”
His hands were shaking badly enough that he fumbled the flap, and Hazel North said, “Somebody take it from him before he loses it,” and Tilda Voss actually stepped forward, and then the paper was out and unfolding, and Estelle read it standing, and the room could see her face change—see the steel in it loosen, once, at the corner of the mouth—before she read it out loud.
“The Quartermaster’s Department of the United States Army accepts the bid of the Cedar Hollow Garment Works,” she read, “for six hundred fatigue shirts, pattern forty-one, to be delivered complete to the depot at Joplin no later than the first hard frost of the season, in accordance with the specifications attached to this award.”
For one full minute, nobody in the room could speak.
Then the workshop came apart with a sound Cedar Hollow had not made in two years—women laughing and crying at once, because the figure at the bottom of that letter meant real cash wages for every hand in the place through the whole winter and into spring. Greta Kessler sat down suddenly on her work stool and wept into her collar. Hazel North threw her needle into the rafters and then spent ten minutes on her knees looking for it. Fisher, the store boy, ran out the door and down the street yelling the news at the top of his twelve-year-old lungs, and by the time the sun had moved a hand’s width, the whole town knew: the widow’s works had caught the ear of the United States Army, and Cedar Hollow was not dead yet.
Estelle let them have the joy, watched it fill the room like light, and then she rang a spoon against the stove and brought them back.
“Six hundred shirts by frost,” she said, “is not a celebration. It is a mountain, women, and we have eleven weeks to climb it. Eleven weeks, and the army doesn’t care one penny how tired we are at the top.”
She reorganized everything for scale. The single treadle became five machines, bought at last with the army’s advance—and not one dollar of Mr. Pemberton’s money. She put the fast hands to teaching the slow hands, so the skill spread through the room like a good rumor instead of bottlenecking on her alone. Delia Marsh learned the treadle in three days and was running seams by the fourth. Lena Pope learned to cut to a pattern blind, with her eyes shut, waiting for Tilda to call the measurements.
And the town’s idle men, who had watched their wives find work while they sat on the porch with their tobacco and their patience, were brought in too. They built cutting tables and hauled cloth and pressed finished shirts and ran the freight to the rail depot. Cole Marsh, Delia’s husband, found himself with a hammer in his hand and a wage at the end of the week, and he stood at the depot with the first freight crate and tipped his hat to nobody in particular, because there was no one in the world he wanted to prove it to other than himself.
For the first time in two years, a man in Cedar Hollow could walk down the street and say he was working.
The whole shape of the town changed inside a month. The boarded storefronts began to open because there was now money to spend and reasons to spend it. The cobbler came back from wherever cobblers go, and set up his last in the shop by the church. The church roof got mended by actual hands with actual lumber, and old Mrs. Wells, who kept bees and opinions in equal measure, planted geraniums in the window box on the main street as if daring the winter to argue.
Behind the counter of Blake and Webb, Emmett could barely keep flour and boots and lamp oil on the shelves, and he stood there one evening, after the last customer had gone, and understood something that had been arriving in him for weeks the way weather arrives: the woman he had sent for out of loneliness had not only saved him—she had reached down and lifted an entire town off the floor.