A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 20
In the spring of 1884, the Garment Works took its third army order, and the fourth followed in the autumn, and by the fifth season the name Cedar Hollow appeared in the quartermaster’s records at Indianapolis beside the names of city houses twice its size, and nobody who remembered the porch men with their tobacco and their patience could quite believe the town they were living in now.
The night school began in the winter, in the church hall, with the lamp hung high and the tables set for hands that had never held a needle. It was not a charity. Estelle was emphatic about that, the way she was emphatic about anything she believed: “A hand that learns a trade is earning its board from the first week. The school lends the learning; the hand repays it by teaching the next one.” So the older women taught the younger, the way Greta had taught Delia, the way Delia had taught Lena Pope’s daughters, and the skills she had brought in a crate outlived the reason anyone had ever doubted her.
And the coin in the pouch—the forty cents that had come down the stage road and been carried up the aisle in a wedding seam—went to work at last, as money is supposed to go to work, the way Estelle had promised over the letter from Ohio. Delia Marsh opened her own door across the street from the works, a little shop with a sign her husband Cole planed and hung himself with fearsome pride, painted in careful letters: DELIA MARSH, SEAMSTRESS. Estelle went to see it the day it opened, and she set the muslin pouch on the counter, its forty cents still inside.
“It came to me with nothing,” she said. “Go spend it like that.”
Delia looked at the pouch a long time, and then she picked it up, and she held it, and she said, “I’ll keep it under the till, Mrs. Blake, so I never forget what it came with.” And she never did.
The town went on. The bakery baked. The cobbler cobbled. The church roof held. Mrs. Wells’ geraniums came back every spring, and her bees did too, and the children of the women who had learned at Estelle’s first tables grew and learned at the new ones, and the young women who had learned a trade at the works began teaching their own daughters, so that the skills she had carried in a crate were by now the town’s common speech.
And the town learned to say her name the way you say the name of a person who saved your life—which, in the plainest sense, she had. She had come down a dusty road with forty cents and a machine and a dead husband’s note in the drawer, and she had made money flow through six hundred honest pairs of hands, and she had given every one of them back the one thing the county had taken: their own worth.
One evening, late in the summer, Emmett sat at the counter with the ledger closed and said, in the middle of the quiet, “I wrote an advertisement into the dark once, Estelle. And I got back a partner, and a wife, and a future.”
“You undersold it, Emmett,” Estelle said, without looking up from the sample shirt she was hemming. “You also got a town.”
He laughed. In the corner under the west window, the old treadle stood in the lamplight with the letter from Ohio folded in its drawer, beside the note in Aaron’s hand, beside the scrip of Bess Rawley’s first wage, and the machines hummed in the back room, and the bakery smoke went up straight in the last of the light, and the geraniums in the window box below were as red as the day Mrs. Wells had planted them.
Somewhere up the road, a stage was rolling. Somewhere in the dust of evening, a load of cloth was coming in on the freight train, and the lamp in the workshop window was lit for the night’s work, and the town of Cedar Hollow, Missouri, which had once been a held breath, breathed like a thing with a long life ahead of it.