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

Chapter 9

My God, Josephine, he said, his voice rough and wondering. You hit him harder than a Missouri mule.

She let out a sound that was partly a sob and partly a laugh.

Don’t you dare make me laugh right now, she said, and held him tighter.

Sheriff Tobias Reed and most of the town arrived within the half hour, drawn by the smell of the fire and the single shot Gideon had fired.

They came with water buckets and formed a line from the creek, and by the time the fire was out the forge was damaged but standing — its stone foundation and iron frame had held, and what had burned was primarily the wooden roof and the supply shed attached to the north wall.

Jeb Stone was found unconscious and was helped to the jail. His accomplice with the broken shin followed, and between them they provided a confession sufficient to secure a warrant for Josiah Dalton before morning.

Dalton left the territory before the sheriff’s men could deliver it. He did not come back.

The town of Oak Haven stood in the dark and the snow and looked at Josie Mercer.

She sat in the snow, her massive frame entirely unashamed, her ruined nightgown frozen at the hem, Gideon’s head in her lap. Her hands were steady. She looked back at them — the mayor and the gossips and the ranch hands and all the ordinary people who had laughed at the train platform — with the calm, direct gaze of a woman who has just learned something definitive about herself and has decided to be at peace with it.

Mayor Miller took off his hat.

One by one, without a word being spoken, every man in the crowd followed.

Nobody had laughed. Nobody whispered. The silence had a different quality than the silence that had greeted their arrival in October. This one was the silence of people revising something they had believed.

That’s a remarkable woman, someone said quietly, from the back of the crowd.

Nobody argued with it.

They rebuilt the forge in the spring.

The town built it, which was not something any of them had planned or organized in advance. It simply happened the way things happen when a community has been confronted with its own failure and is trying to find a concrete way to acknowledge it. Men showed up with lumber. Women brought food and stayed to make the work sociable. By the end of the first week the stone foundation was relaid, broader than before. By the end of the second, the roof was up.

Gideon worked alongside them all day and said very little, because he was not a man of many words. But when the building was done and the last man had gone home and Josie came out with coffee, he stood in the doorway of the new forge and breathed in the smell of fresh-cut timber and new iron and said nothing for a long moment.

All right, he said finally.

It was his highest available praise.

Josie had her own projects that spring.

She had begun teaching arithmetic to three children whose parents couldn’t afford the schoolmaster’s fees. She did it at the cabin table on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with the methodical patience of a woman who finds genuine pleasure in watching understanding arrive in a person’s face. Word moved through town the way word always moved in Oak Haven — completely and without invitation — and by May she had seven students and a formal arrangement with the school board and a small salary that she recorded in the household ledger with satisfaction.

She had also acquired a friendship.

Mrs. Ruth Ellis, the wife of a neighboring farmer, had appeared at the cabin door three weeks after the fire with a pie and no particular excuse. She stayed two hours. She came back the following week. By spring she was there every Thursday, and the two of them talked about practical things — livestock and growing seasons and the management of difficult husbands — with the comfortable directness of women who have given up performing for each other.