They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived

Chapter 11

The afternoon settled around them. Buster stirred, relocated his chin from the porch railing to Gideon’s knee, and went back to sleep.

The hammer had been still for a quarter of an hour, which was unusual. From the direction of the main street came the ordinary sounds of Oak Haven — wagon wheels, voices, the everyday noise of a town that had forgotten, mostly, that it had once expected the Mercers to be its entertainment.

They were not its entertainment. They were its blacksmith and his wife.

They were, as it turned out, considerably more than that.

Summer arrived in the mountains with its characteristic brief intensity, and the forge was busy from first light to last — courthouse contracts, a new batch of homesteaders who’d come up from Denver needing tools and hardware, two ranches that had fallen behind on equipment maintenance and were now paying the price in broken plows and missing shoes on working horses.

Josie managed the billing and kept the Tuesday and Thursday school sessions and expanded her kitchen garden along the south wall of the cabin, and on the first Sunday of July she attended church services for the first time.

She had not gone before. The first weeks had been too precarious, the ground too newly shifted beneath her. But on a warm July morning, she put on her best dress — altered and let out and made presentable by her own considerable skill with a needle — and walked to the white clapboard church at the end of Oak Haven’s main street.

Gideon walked beside her.

He hadn’t been inside that church since before the mine explosion. He’d had his own long argument with God about the nature of what had been done to him, and had arrived at an armistice that involved silence on both sides.

But Josie wanted to go. So he went.

The congregation was already seated when they arrived. The heads that turned did so — Josie felt the familiar tightening in her chest and breathed through it — but the quality of the attention was different from October. She could feel the difference even before she understood it. Nobody whispered. Nobody pointed. A few people nodded. Mrs. Ellis, seated toward the middle, caught Josie’s eye and moved slightly to make room.

They sat.

Reverend Finch, who had hurried through their wedding vows with such nervous energy, delivered his sermon with considerably more composure than he had managed in October. He spoke about the nature of community — its failures and its capacities, the long work of becoming the kind of place people could live in with their whole selves.

Josie thought it was possible he had written it with someone in mind.

Afterward, coming out into the summer light, Clara Jenkins appeared in front of them.

There was a long moment.

Clara Jenkins had called Josie the Bennett behemoth. She had dropped her parasol in the dirt when she saw Josie come off the train. She had pressed herself against the mercantile counter when Gideon snapped the cracker barrel.

Mrs. Mercer, Clara said. Her voice was stiff, the voice of a woman doing something that didn’t come naturally. I am told your arithmetic lessons have been very beneficial to the Harmon children. It was a generous thing to do.

Josie looked at her.

Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins.

There was nothing else to say. Clara moved on. It was not an apology — it was not adequate to what it was apologizing for, and they both knew it — but it was something. In the specific economy of small towns, where people live beside each other for decades whether they choose to or not, sometimes something was what was available.

That’s the best she’s capable of, Gideon said, watching Clara Jenkins retreat across the churchyard.

I know, Josie said. It will have to be enough.

She took his arm, and they walked home through the warm summer morning.

On a clear afternoon in September — almost exactly a year from the day Gideon had placed his advertisement in the Missouri Republican — Josie sat on the porch with her ledger and the week’s accounts, and looked up to find Gideon leaning against the forge doorway watching her.