A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 12
The shirts were finished three days ahead of the frost.
Six hundred of them. Crated, stamped, and weighed at the Joplin depot by Emmett and Fisher and Cole Marsh standing double-file in line with half the town behind them, because a crate of six hundred perfect shirts is worth standing in the cold to see loaded onto a rail car and watched until the train took the curve and the last red lantern went out of sight.
Estelle stood on the platform with her arms folded and did not cheer. She watched the train go, and she felt the room she had been holding in her chest for eleven weeks give one long, slow exhale.
“Three days early,” Emmett said at her elbow.
“Three days,” she agreed. “It’s better than the army wished for, but it’s not the army’s approval. Nothing has counted, Emmett—not one shirt, not one seam—until an army inspector has stood over our work with a regulation card and an open mind and a reason to be hard on us.”
“What reason would he have to be hard on us?”
Estelle did not answer. She was looking past the platform, past the depot, to the far end of the main street, where the Cedar Hollow Bank sat behind its brass and its cold counters. She had not told Emmett everything. She had not told him about the letter Bess had copied out of the trash behind the bank, the one Mr. Pemberton had written to the quartermaster’s office, questioning whether a backwater workshop run by a woman could possibly meet military standard—planting doubt, formal doubt, the kind of doubt that gets an entire order rejected on a technicality and an advance clawed back.
It would have broken them past mending. Pemberton knew it. He had made the arithmetic of it deliberately: miss the frost, lose the letter, fail the inspection—any one of the three, and the whole enterprise came down on the town’s head.
“He’ll have written to them,” Estelle said, quiet. “A man like that never stops at the first squeeze. He’s had months to think, Emmett. I’d rather we be inspected by a hard man with an honest eye than meet the army through the bank’s good word.”
The next morning, the stage brought the inspector.
He stepped down into Cedar Hollow with a leather case and brass buttons and the face of a man who has read one doubting letter too many: careful, skeptical, and already slightly weary of finding what he expected to find. The whole town had turned out, the way a town turns out for weather. Even the porch men had come down off the porch.
Mr. Pemberton stood at the bank’s window with his hands clasped behind him, watching, and Fitch stood behind him with the look of a man who has practiced being invisible.
“The inspector from the army,” Fitch said, “comes to inspect the work.”
“So he does,” Pemberton said. And his smile was the smile of a man who has posted his letter and watched it arrive.