A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 14
The celebration lasted two nights, and the town spent money it had earned, and the bakery sold out three times, and old Mrs. Wells brought her geraniums into the church for safekeeping, because even a flower in a window box deserves a share of a town’s good night.
The third morning, Estelle was in the workshop before first light, oiling the treadle, when Mr. Pemberton’s clerk Fitch came to the door with an envelope.
“A notice for Mr. Webb,” Fitch said, and did not meet her eyes.
Estelle took the envelope. She did not open it. She held it the way a person holds a snake that has been delivered to the door, and she said, “Tell Mr. Pemberton I’ll bring it to him when I’ve read it,” and Fitch left quickly, the way men leave rooms that contain weather about to break.
She opened it in the store, across from Emmett, with the ledger open between them. It was a foreclosure notice—the store, the stock, the lot under it, called in for the balance of the old debt plus fees plus a late charge that had blossomed like mold. The numbers had been arranged, arithmetic shaped until it fit a throat: the total came to nearly three hundred dollars, due in ninety days, with the storefront itself as security.
“He waited,” Emmett said. He was reading the notice over her shoulder, and his voice was flat, the way a man’s voice goes when he’s watching the last fencepost go by. “He waited until the contract was public, until the workshop had money, until we were everything we’ve been working to be—and then he called it, because he knows the town will hear about it, and because a public failure stings more than a private one.”
“Emmett,” Estelle said.
“I know. I know we’re not what we were in the spring. I know we can pay it.” He set the notice down on the counter and put his hand flat on it. “It isn’t the money, Estelle. It’s that he means to own the door. Every man in this county who’s ever owed him anything knows the look of that paper. He’s telling them all: you can build, you can work, you can win the United States Army—and I can still close your door.”
“If he closes this door,” Estelle said, “he closes the workshop’s door with it. The store and the works are one building, Emmett. He’s not foreclosing on a store. He’s foreclosing on the town.”
They stood a long moment in the cold light of the storefront window, with the geraniums in their box across the street, with the bakery smoke going up in a straight line, with Mrs. Wells’ bees beginning to stir in the hives behind her house. The town had a pulse now. It had money in its pockets and light in its windows and a rhythm of work in its mornings. And a man in a brass-and-cold bank had just posted a notice that he intended to own every stick of it.
That evening, Bess Rawley came to the workshop after the women had gone home. She came the way she did everything—straight, silent, both hands at her sides—and she set a tin box on the worktable in front of Estelle, among the oil cans and the folded pattern cards.
Her ruined hands rested on the box a moment, the way a person rests hands on a casket.
“I’ve had it thirteen years, Mrs. Hale,” she said. “I’ve never once told a living soul what’s in it, because the soul would have been mine, and I’ve got a boy in Joplin I wanted to see grown. But it’s time. It’s more than time.”
She lifted the lid.
Inside, folded flat as a dead man’s Sunday coat, lay papers: letters in a miner’s writing; a map of the Magnolia’s drifts, drawn in ink and tremble; and a thin leather-bound book, the assay record, with columns of numbers in a careful hand.
“My husband Ira,” Bess said, “was the foreman of the Magnolia. Thirteen years ago, he was the man who everyone says died in the collapse. And that’s true, the way most things the powerful say are true—which is to say, not the whole of it.” Her voice did not break; she held it the way she had held the box, straight and level. “He was the man who found the vein was salted.”
“Salted,” Estelle said.
“There was ore left in the Magnolia, Mrs. Hale. There was two years of good ore, maybe three. The men who owned the claim were drowning in notes they owed to a certain bank in this town, and a certain banker was offering them a way out of the notes that didn’t involve paying them—and it required, only required, that the last ore look like the first pinch-out.” Bess’s scarred hands were flat on the lid of the box now. “They flooded the lower drifts, they salted the assays, they let the word go round that the vein was done. The owners walked away clean, the bank took their claims and their notes and their debts at pennies on the dollar, and the town they smothered with it—my husband was paid in a collapse that killed two men, while he was sealing the drift above the flooded level so nobody would ever open it and find the ore that was still there.”
The workshop was very quiet. The lamp burned. Estelle looked at the map, at the assay book, at the letters, and she understood in one long breath the size of the thing Bess had just laid on her table.
“Every dollar Mr. Pemberton ever loaned,” Estelle said slowly, “every notice he ever posted, every default he ever fed on for forty years—it all came out of the Magnolia’s grave.”
“It all came out of it,” Bess said. “I kept the papers for the day a person in this town had the standing to use them. You’re that person, Mrs. Hale. You, and the six hundred shirts, and the army’s letter.” She lifted her scarred hands and set the tin box’s lid down gently, the way you close a door you mean to go through. “His money came out of the ground. Time a body gave it back.”