A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 19
They were married in the spring of 1883, in the mended little church, with the whole working town packed into the pews and the window box on the main street flowering again.
Fifty years later, old women in Cedar Hollow would still describe that wedding as the day the town finally understood what it had become: not a place that had been saved, but a place that had bent its own back and stood up. The pews were crowded, the rafters were hung with cloth from the works, and Greta Kessler had turned the collar on Estelle’s dress in her own kitchen the week before, and Hazel North had buttonholed it, and Delia Marsh had held the skirt while Estelle pinned the hem, and not one woman in the room had not contributed a stitch, which is the oldest and most honest way of making a wedding.
Emmett stood at the front in his mother’s son’s coat, the coat they had aired for a year in the workshop, and he watched Estelle come down the aisle the way a man watches a field he thought was barren rise green in the spring—with hardly any faith that it would happen, and then entirely too much joy to hold it.
The minister read the vows, and Emmett said his, straight and plain, the way he said everything. And Estelle, who had arrived in Cedar Hollow with forty cents and a machine and a promise to herself about paper and greed, reached into the pocket sewn into the seam of her dress—sewn there by her own hand the night before—and drew out the muslin pouch.
She opened it over her palm: forty cents in silver and copper, the working total of her life as charged over against the world.
“Emmett Blake,” she said, in front of the whole town, “I came down the road with this and nothing else, and it bought me the best thing I ever got.” She folded his hand and put the pouch into it. “Forty cents and a thread,” she said. “Look what it made.”
And Emmett laughed once, wet-eyed, looking down at the coins in his palm, and the whole church laughed with him, and Mrs. Wells stood up and cheered, and the cobbler banged his cane on the floor, and for a moment Cedar Hollow made a sound it would have made for no other event on earth.
The papers for the Cedar Hollow Garment Works were already signed, both names plain and equal, and the preacher asked if anyone could show why these two should not be lawfully joined, and nobody could, because the whole town had been shown, week after week, in thread and freight and wages, exactly why they should.
That evening, after the celebration had wound down and the last piece of Mrs. Wells’ wedding cake had been eaten on the church steps, Estelle walked alone into the dark workshop.
She lit the lamp. The machines stood under their oiled cloths. And in the corner, under the west window, the old treadle waited, smelling of oil and the years—the machine that had crossed a continent in a crate, that had been fought over like a living thing, that had outlived the fight.
Estelle sat down at it, and she ran one seam, slowly, just to remember where she had started. The needle went in at the top of a scrap of cloth and came out at the bottom, true, and the treadle sang its one familiar note, and she stopped, and sat in the quiet with her hands resting on the machine that had been her living and her grief and her promise.
The door opened. Emmett stood in the lamplight with his coat off and a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Supper’s waiting, Mrs. Blake,” he said. And he set the coffee by her elbow, the way he had set the first one, years back, in a room full of twelve women and faith.
Estelle Blake, née Hale, turned the machine’s wheel once under her hand and looked down at her own hands, and then she stood up and blew out the lamp, and went out with him into the dark of the town she had helped to build, with forty cents in her own pocket and a town’s worth of light behind her.