A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town
Chapter 21
Five years after the wedding, on a cold clear morning with the frost white on the rooflines, Estelle Blake walked into the empty workshop an hour before first light, lit the lamp, and sat down at the old treadle in the corner under the west window.
The Garment Works ran three shifts now, under Bess Rawley’s books and Delia Marsh’s foreman’s eye and a whole county’s worth of skilled hands. It did not need her in the morning. It had not needed her help for years. But the west window was full of first light, and the machine had carried her across a continent and through a life, and when the room was empty she still sometimes ran one seam on it just to remember where she had started.
The needle went in at the top and came out true at the bottom.
She sat a moment with her hands resting on the machine, and she was not thinking about the forty cents, or the brothers, or the banker, or the letters. She was thinking about the women—about Greta Kessler, who could turn a collar so fine you could not find the seam, teaching Thursday nights in the church hall at seventy-one; about Bess Rawley, whose ruined hands were now the most trusted set of numbers in the county, and whose son, grown and come home to run the freight ledger, brought her coffee every morning without being asked; about Delia Marsh across the street, opening her shop at dawn behind her own sign, with a pouch of forty cents under her till and her own daughter already learning her hands’ speed at the night school’s lamp.
The door opened. Emmett came in with two cups of coffee, and set one by her elbow without a word, and stood at the window looking out across the town—the bakery smoke, the cobbler’s lamp, the church steeple with its mended roof, the window box below them, red with geraniums in the frost.
“Cold one,” he said.
“Good one,” she said.
Somewhere up the road, a stage was rolling; somewhere a widow of some age would step down into a town that did not yet know its luck, carrying nothing but the weight of her own two hands. The town of Cedar Hollow had learned, by then, to look up.
Estelle Blake ran one final seam, folded the cloth, and set the needle home. The treadle came to rest.
Behind her, the empty workshop waited for the day’s first shift. In the drawer under the west window, folded together like a family: her husband’s note, a lawyer’s letter, a foreman’s widow’s scrip, and forty cents that had never once measured her.
She stood up, took Emmett’s hand, and went out into the light.
THE END