He Paid Two Dollars for the Bride No One Would Bid On—By Winter the Whole Town Owed Her Their Lives

Chapter 4

The first Saturday they went into Hardpan together, Silas understood what he had done to her, and what the town was going to do to her, and he felt the weight of it settle across his shoulders like a wet coat.

The store was called Peavey’s Mercantile, and it smelled of coal oil and coffee beans and new rope, and the moment Hannah Bowman walked through its door the sound of the place changed. Conversations did not stop so much as lower and then rise again behind her back. The name they had for her had traveled the twelve miles of road faster than any wagon — the two-dollar bride. That was what they called her. When they thought she could not hear, and sometimes when they knew she could, children stared at the burn on her face as though it were a thing that might jump.

The women of Hardpan drew their skirts in a little when she passed, the way women do around a thing they believe might rub off. Plainness, and a scarred face, and a humiliation out behind the freight office — these, in a small town, are contagious.

The worst of them was Myra Crane.

Myra Crane was the banker’s wife. She ran the Ladies’ Aid, and the church social calendar, and the unwritten law of who in Hardpan counted as respectable, and she was a tall, handsome woman of forty with hard eyes and a way of speaking that could make a person feel small without raising her voice. She had lost a child once, years ago, before she came to Kansas — people knew this without knowing the details, and they made allowances — and grief had hardened in her the way grief sometimes does, into a kind of arithmetic about who deserved what.

Myra Crane made a point, in the middle of Peavey’s Mercantile, of discussing Hannah Bowman in the third person while Hannah stood four feet away choosing thread.

“Some women,” Myra said to her companion, loud enough to carry, “will sell themselves for any roof. In my day a woman had standards. And if she couldn’t get a husband honestly, she did without.”

Hannah Bowman set down her thread.

She did not raise her voice. She did not even turn all the way around.

“In your day, ma’am,” she said, “I expect a great many women did without a great many things and called it virtue, because they had no other word for the lack.” She picked the thread back up. “I’ll take three spools of this, Mr. Peavey, and a paper of needles. My husband and I have a long winter to sew through.”

My husband. She said it plainly, claiming it.

Two aisles over, pretending to study a harness he did not need, Silas Bowman felt something turn over in his chest that he did not yet have a name for.

And Myra Crane went the color of a boiled beet and said something sharp about the impudence of certain people, but something had shifted in the room, and everybody in it knew it. Two women in that mercantile went home that afternoon and thought privately that the two-dollar bride had more spine than the banker’s wife, and they said nothing about it out loud, but they remembered.

On the wagon ride home, Silas said, “You didn’t have to take that from her.”

“She didn’t have to give it,” Hannah said. “It costs her more than it costs me. A woman who has to stand in a store and build herself up by tearing down a stranger is a woman who is already standing in a hole.”

Silas looked at her profile — the good side, the unburned side — and said, “You knew her before, didn’t you? Back in St. Louis, maybe.”

It was a guess. He did not know why he made it.

For a long moment Hannah was quiet, and when she answered, her voice was careful in a way it had not been before.

“A face like mine,” she said, “people remember where they saw it, or they don’t. Mrs. Crane and I have never been introduced.”

She did not look at him when she said it, and Silas, who had learned already that his wife did not lie — she had told him that herself, that first night, I’ll always give you the truth whether you want it or not — did not know what to make of the fact that she had not exactly answered his question.

The weather turned in October. The first hard frost silvered the grass, and the geese went south in long, complaining ribbons, and the town settled in for the season of mud and coal smoke and small miseries.

The sickness started with a child.

It was the Peavey boy — the storekeeper’s youngest, Georgie, six years old, the one with the red hair and the habit of standing on the counter to watch the road for wagons. A sore throat first. Then a fever. Then a cough with a sound in it that made his mother’s hands go cold when she heard it in the night.

Doc Rawley — an aging man who had not opened a medical book since the war and drank more than he doctored — came out to the Peavey house, looked down the boy’s throat with the help of a spoon and a candle, and called it a bad case of croup. He left a bottle of syrup and a shrug, and the syrup did nothing and the shrug did less.

Within four days, Georgie Peavey could barely breathe, and a gray, leathery membrane had grown across the back of his throat, and old Doc Rawley had run out of both confidence and syrup.

Sadie Peavey heard, at the mercantile counter, that the two-dollar bride had been a nurse back east — that she had worked in a hospital in St. Louis. And Sadie Peavey, who was not proud of much except her children, and who in her terror forgot to be too proud to talk to the woman the town had paid two dollars for, caught Hannah Bowman by the sleeve of her gray coat as she was leaving the store and pulled her into the back room where the flour sacks were.

Hannah asked three questions.

“What color is the membrane?”

“Gray. Gray-white.”

“Can he swallow water?”

“Not without choking. He can’t — he can barely — ”

“Are there other children in the house?”

“Three. His brothers and his little sister.”

And Hannah Bowman’s level face went, for the first time since Silas had met her, truly grim.

“That’s not croup,” she said. “That’s diphtheria. And if it’s in your house, Mrs. Peavey, with three other children, then it is already in this town, and it will be in a dozen houses inside of two weeks — unless somebody who knows what they’re doing takes hold of it tonight.”

“Doc Rawley — ”

“Doc Rawley is a kind man who has not opened a medical book since the war,” Hannah said, not unkindly. “Mrs. Peavey, I worked a diphtheria ward in St. Louis through two winters. I am the only person within forty miles who has seen this disease do its worst and learned how to fight it. I am also the woman this town paid two dollars for and has not let forget it.”

She paused.

“So I will ask you plainly, because there is no time for anything but plain. Do you want my help — or do you want your pride? Because tonight, ma’am, you cannot keep both.”