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

Chapter 3

What moved him — what sat in his chest heavy and warm for three days after he read it — was the dignity of her language. The plain, unapologetic way she had described herself and what she wanted. I will not begin a correspondence under any false impression of myself. It was the sentence of a person who had been hurt by pretense and had decided honesty was better, whatever it cost.

He wrote back the next morning and enclosed a train ticket.

Miss Bennett. Come to Oak Haven. We will be wed the day you arrive. I only pray you do not turn back when you see my face.

October 14, 1878, was a brisk, winded day that smelled of coming snow.

By one o’clock in the afternoon, the entire population of Oak Haven had invented an excuse to be near the Union Pacific depot. The telegraph operator had mentioned, to one person, that Gideon Mercer’s mail order bride was coming in on the two o’clock westbound, and that one person had mentioned it to six others in the time it took to cross the street.

Mayor Horatio Miller stood on the boardwalk checking his pocket watch with the expression of a man expecting free entertainment.

Jeb Stone, a loudmouthed ranch hand who had been making sport of Gideon Mercer for years with the impunity of someone who understood that his target would not retaliate, was taking bets by the watering trough.

Five dollars she faints dead away, Jeb hollered, to the amusement of the hands around him. Another five says she gets right back on and rides to San Francisco.

Gideon stood at the far end of the platform.

He wore his one good suit. He had brushed every trace of soot from the wool jacket, tied his bootlaces twice, and held in his right hand a small bouquet of wildflowers — asters and late-blooming sage — which he had collected from the draw behind his cabin that morning and which were already suffering somewhat from the iron grip of his nervous fist.

His hat was pulled low over his scarred forehead, which was not a pretense of concealment — there was no concealing it — but a habit, the way a man holds his arm against his body when it’s been hurt. He stood as still as he knew how, and his heart hammered a frantic rhythm he was doing his best to ignore.

The locomotive came in hissing steam and iron noise, and the town held its breath.

The conductor set down the wooden step-box. A salesman disembarked. A young couple. And then Josephine Bennett appeared in the doorway of the passenger car.

A collective intake of breath moved through the crowd like a wave. Clara Jenkins, the worst of the town gossips, dropped her parasol in the dirt.

Josie was massive. She filled the train doorway nearly from frame to frame. The long journey had left her traveling dress rumpled and damp under the arms, clinging to the heavy rolls of her stomach and the wide breadth of her hips. Her face was flushed from the warmth of the car and the abrupt transition to the cold mountain air. Her breathing labored slightly as she assessed the steep steps down to the platform.

Jeb Stone let out a long, low whistle.

Good Lord Almighty, he said, loud enough for half the platform to hear. He didn’t order a bride. He ordered a whole herd.

The laughter that followed was the specific laughter of people who need someone else to be the target.

Josie froze on the top step.

She heard the laughter. She saw the pointed fingers. The flush in her face deepened and her chest tightened with the suffocating, familiar weight of public humiliation — the same weight she had carried out of every parlor in St. Louis, out of every shop where she had squeezed through a narrow door, out of every occasion where she had been the thing that people looked at instead of the person they talked to.

It’s the same here, she thought. It’s exactly the same.

Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes.

Then the crowd moved.