A Mail Order Bride Arrived With a Sewing Machine and No Money—By Winter, She Employed the Whole Town

Chapter 6

The workshop was quiet for a long time after the man in the city suit left the street.

One of the women said, soft, “Four hundred shirts.”

Another said, “More money than the mine.”

And Delia Marsh, fastest hands in the county, looked at the door where the city man had gone out and said nothing at all, because her husband Cole was out of work and her baby had colic and she had learned, at twenty-two, that hope and arithmetic do not always sleep in the same room.

Emmett was rattled, and said so, once the women had gone home. “Four hundred shirts, Estelle—even at a poor price, that’s cash the town desperately needs. Turning it away feels like pride we can’t afford.”

Estelle heard him out fully. That was one of her gifts—she listened to the whole argument before she touched it, the way a good machinist watches a wheel spin before she sets the oil. Then she explained the trap, and she explained it so clearly that he never forgot it, not in forty years.

“If we take Mr. Tolliver’s price now,” she said, “that price becomes our worth forever. Every future order he brings—and he’ll bring them, because we’ll be his cheap elbows at the end of a long line—every future order will be measured down from it. He sets the starting mark, and we spend our lives crawling under it.” She looked out the window at the empty street. “Better to be small and unbought, Emmett, than large and owned. I’ve been owned. It costs more than it pays.”

He nodded slowly, and then he said the honest thing that was on his mind. “I know. I know it in my bones. But I’m scared, Estelle—scared of watching the first of the month pass us by because we were too proud to take a bad price.”

“Then let’s do the arithmetic of it,” she said. “Not pride. Numbers.”

And that night, she was not reckless, and she did not simply refuse Tolliver and wait. She took his own numbers and took them apart on the back of a feed bill, figuring what a St. Louis clothing house truly paid, what the freight cost, what margin the man in the soft hands was pocketing between the hands of Cedar Hollow and the shelf of a city shop.

The figure she landed on made her sit back in her chair.

Emmett looked up from his ledger. “What is it?”

“Mr. Tolliver is not offering us a lifeline,” Estelle said slowly. “He is offering to get rich standing between us and a market we could reach ourselves. Do you see it, Emmett? He buys from us at pennies because we’re at the end of his road. We’re not at the end of the road. We’re at the road.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Do you know where four hundred workshirts go in St. Louis? Into a train car. And the train car goes to a depot, and the depot feeds the army posts out west—the soldiers, the quartermaster, the whole national machine. Mr. Tolliver’s city house is nothing but a clerk holding the door open between our thread and a buyer that doesn’t even know our name.” She looked at him across the lamplight with a new fire in her face. “We don’t need Mr. Tolliver’s order, Emmett.

“We need Mr. Tolliver’s customer.”

He stared at her. The lamp guttered. Somewhere down the street a dog barked at the moon, and the first of the month, which had been coming like weather, seemed suddenly to be coming at a different speed entirely.

“The army,” he said.

“The army,” Estelle said. And the word hung in the room between them like a door swinging open on a larger country.