A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 17
It came slowly, the way things came to Estelle Hale: tested, measured, carried, turned over in the lamplight to find the flaws.
They did not rush. The spring turned to summer and the summer found the workshop meeting its second army order a week early, and the whole county learned to say the name Cedar Hollow without the word ghost attached to it. Emmett courted her the only way he knew how, which was the way he did everything: plainly and daily. He brought her coffee without being asked. He left a geranium from Mrs. Wells’ box by her machine one morning, and she sewed for an hour before she noticed it, and then she sat staring at it with her hands in her lap, and did not move it. He taught Fisher his letters better, and Fisher began keeping the freight book. He mended the workshop’s shutter, and the church’s steps, and the porch rail of the house where she boarded, and if a thing in Cedar Hollow wanted a nail, Emmett Blake was a man who knew where the nail lived.
One evening in late August, they sat at the store’s counter with the ledger open, the way they had sat a year ago with eight dollars and ninety-one cents and a dying store. The ledger now said other things. The line for wages ran long and steady. The army’s payments were marked clean, in the margin, in Bess Rawley’s careful hand—she had taken over the books entirely, her ruined hands folded on the desk like two sleeping animals, her head a better machine than the shop had ever seen.
Emmett closed the ledger and did not open it again.
“Estelle,” he said. “I ask you once more, and I want you to know my terms before you answer. I want no man’s permission, and no benefactor’s blessing, and no paper signed out from under either of us. I want an equal partner, in the business and in the life. I want your name on the papers beside mine, plain and equal, and I’ve already had them drawn up that way—the workshop’s name, the store’s, and now, if you’ll have it, mine.”
Estelle put down her pen.
“Yes,” she said. It came out of her the way all her best things came out: before she could argue herself out of the happiness.
The papers for the Cedar Hollow Garment Works were signed the next day at the counter where they had once counted the till, and both names went on them, side by side, plain and equal, exactly as he had promised in the red light of the stove a year before. It was not a gift he gave her. It was not a rescue he made. It was a thing they held together, and that was the whole difference, and Estelle Hale—who had once walked out of a life owning only a single machine—now owned half of an enterprise that clothed soldiers and fed a town.
She kept the treadle machine in the corner of the workshop, oiled and working. The women were all on the new machines now; the old one was hers alone, and sometimes, when the room was empty, she ran a seam on it just to remember where she had started.
Three days before the wedding, a letter came for her, care of the store, in a hand she did not know, with an Ohio postmark, and Emmett carried it out to her on the porch where the geraniums were in flower, and stood back, and watched her hold it unopened a long time in the evening light.