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

Chapter 12

She looked back.

He was, she had come to understand over these twelve months, a man most legible in the things he made. The chair built for her weight. The reinforced stool for the billing work. The shelves installed at her height in the kitchen. He had never said I thought of your comfort. He had only done it, over and over, in iron and wood, in the practical language of a craftsman whose care expressed itself through precision.

She thought of her letter. A husband who will not look upon me with disgust.

It struck her, looking at him now, how small a thing she had asked for. How far below what was possible she had set her expectation.

What? he said, catching her looking.

Nothing. She turned back to the ledger. Come see this calculation when you have a minute. I think we can afford to replace the roof on the supply shed before winter.

He crossed the yard and stood behind her shoulder, bending over the ledger with the concentrated attention he brought to measurements. His scarred hand rested on the porch railing six inches from her arm.

You’re right, he said. Let me pull the number on timber.

I already pulled the number on timber, Josie said. It’s there.

He looked at the figure she’d written. Then at her.

You already did it, he said.

I was bored waiting for you to get around to it.

The smile came — the full one, both sides of his face. He straightened and went back to the forge, and she could hear, a moment later, the hammer take up its rhythm again.

Buster moved from the railing to her foot and settled his elderly, three-legged body against her boot.

Josie looked out over Oak Haven — the main street with its familiar buildings, the mountains making their enormous presence known above everything, the wide Colorado sky — and thought about the parlor in St. Louis, the newspaper in the afternoon light, the advertisement she had almost not answered.

Bearing the physical marks of a harsh life.

They both were, she thought. They had both been marked by the particular hardness of the world they had been given, in different ways, and had arrived here — at this porch, on this afternoon, with the ledger balanced and the forge running and the roof going on the supply shed before winter.

She picked up her pen and went back to the accounts.

The hammer rang out clear and steady in the autumn air.

The heartbeat of Oak Haven. The sound of a man who had found, against considerable odds, that he had something to come home to.

__The end__