Three Years Later

Amelia stood in the doorway of the forge with the ledger under her arm, and Will brought the fire up for the last piece of the day.

He was twenty now, and he did the work of a journeyman, working the bellows with his good arm and judging the heat of the coals by the color alone. Three years still on his articles, and a boy of fourteen to shout at, who was currently crouched by the slack tub trying to look busy. Everett paid Will properly, a journeyman’s wage, and pretended not to notice how much of the shop the boy ran.

Customers asked for Will by name now. Amelia opened the ledger on the workbench and entered the morning’s figures in her neat hand, two plowshares for the Henderson place, a set of hinges, a wagon tire, paid in full.

She kept the books for the Dunbar forge and for Will’s mother and for two other shops in town, and the columns marched straight down every page, and her fees, modest as they were, had paid for the new roof last spring. When the order was large enough to need her at the anvil, which was often, she closed the ledger, set down her pen, and took up the hammer. The men from town who had once stared had gotten used to it years ago. The ones who hadn’t didn’t get their work done on time, and word traveled.

“That one’s ready,” Will said, nodding at the coals.

Amelia took the tongs and drew the iron out glowing. Will held it steady, and she struck, and the sparks flew, and the piece took its shape under her hands, obedient and true. Four heats. When it was done, she quenched it, and the steam rose. Will whistled low.

“Show-off,” he said.

“Finish your articles, and you can show off too.” Amelia wiped her forehead with her sleeve. “And stop letting the boy sweep around your feet. He’ll learn nothing watching you do it.”

“He learns by watching me do it right.” But Will cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head as he passed. “Eyes on your own work. And bank that fire when you’re done.”

Amelia returned to her ledger, but her eyes kept drifting to the shop around her. Three years. The roof was new, the back wall rebuilt, the floor swept daily by a boy who complained about it. The sign over the door had faded a little, and she made a note in the margin of the ledger. Paint this spring.

Everett’s tools hung in their places, worn smooth by his hands. Her hammer hung beside his. The fourteen-year-old apprentice was sweeping with great industry and no skill, raising more dust than he collected.

Will let him struggle for a moment, then took the broom away, demonstrated twice, and handed it back. The boy tried again, better. Will nodded and turned away, hiding his approval, and Amelia smiled into her ledger.

Everett came up from the yard with little James on his shoulders, the boy’s fists full of his father’s hair, both of them dusty to the eyebrows. James had been “helping” in the yard all morning, which mostly meant moving dirt from one place to another and eating a good portion of it.

“Are the guests coming at six,” Everett said, “or at seven?”

Amelia looked at him. “It’s your son’s birthday. You might have asked a week ago.”

“Six.” James drummed his heels against Everett’s chest.

“It is, isn’t it?” Everett said. “Six.”

“Six,” James agreed solemnly, and then spoiled it by shrieking with laughter when Everett jogged him, and nearly took his father’s ear off.

They walked out together into the late afternoon, and passed Lottie in the garden she had kept since she came back, down on her knees among the rows with her sleeves rolled up and dirt to the elbows. The garden was her doing entirely, planned and planted and weeded by her own hands, and it fed them half the year. Tomatoes still hung heavy on the vines, and the squash sprawled, and the herbs stood in a fragrant border along the path.

Amelia stopped at the garden gate. “How does it look?”

Lottie sat back on her heels and surveyed her kingdom. “It’ll do. The tomatoes want another week, but the frost will have opinions about that.” She stood, brushing her hands on her apron, and came to the gate. “Is there anything I can do for tonight?”

“You’re a guest tonight.” Amelia caught Lottie’s hand over the gate. “You’ve done more than enough already.”

Lottie held her hand a moment. When she had come back, three years ago, she had been thin and uncertain, a woman asking permission to exist in her son’s house. The garden had changed that. The garden had given her something that was hers, that answered to her hands, and she had grown back into herself along with it.

Now she stood straight, and her eyes were clear, and when James demanded to be handed over, which he did immediately, she took him with the ease of long practice. James wrapped his arms around his grandmother’s neck and told her, very seriously, that he was two today, holding up three fingers. Lottie corrected the fingers with great solemnity, and James studied his hand, and decided two was also acceptable.

She followed them in.

By six, the yard was full. Nora came down from her new place at the other edge of town, on the arm of her husband, a broad quiet ranch owner with sun-bleached eyebrows who nodded to everyone and said little and kept Nora’s shawl from slipping off her shoulder.

He carried a basket of eggs from his own hens and set it on the table without a word, and Nora beamed at him, delighted. They had been married a year now, and Nora had never looked better, and the ranch owner, for all his quiet, kept finding small reasons to touch her hand, her shoulder, the back of her chair.

“How’s the new place?” Amelia asked, hugging her.

“Drafty,” Nora said. “He’s fixing it. He’s fixing everything, is what he’s doing. I’ve never seen a man so determined.” She lowered her voice. “It’s nice, being looked after. I’d forgotten.”

Margaret arrived at a gallop on the pony Everett had finally gotten her, a sturdy little mare with a white blaze, and slid off before it had properly stopped, and tied it herself, the knot neat and correct. Everett inspected it and nodded his approval, and Margaret glowed with pride.

She had named the mare Biscuit, for reasons she refused to explain, and Biscuit followed her around the yard everywhere she went. Margaret fed her bits of apple when she thought no one was looking, which was always.

“You rode all the way from home alone?” Nora asked, hands on her hips.

“Mrs. Abernathy was on her porch,” Margaret said, with dignity. “She waved.”

Nora looked at Amelia.

Amelia shrugged. “She’s eight. I was shoeing horses at eight.”

“You were not,” Nora said.

“I was holding them, which is the important part.”

Percy and Helen walked up from town, Helen heavy with their first child and moving carefully, one hand on the small of her back, Percy carrying a crate of Allen’s lemonade on one shoulder because Allen would not take money for it.

“Said it’s his contribution,” Percy said, setting the crate down in the shade. “Said a new Dunbar deserves lemonade.”

Helen lowered herself onto the bench with a sigh and accepted a cup, and within minutes she was holding court, the women gathering round to ask how she was feeling and telling her their own stories, and Helen, who had once been the most private person Amelia knew, held forth on the indignities of pregnancy with great good humor.

“Wait until your ankles swell,” Susannah told her. “You’ll be begging Elias to carry you up the stairs.”

“I already make Percy carry me up the stairs,” Helen said. “It’s the only reason I married him. Strong back.”

Percy, overhearing, bowed. “At your service.”

Amos brought his fiddle, already rosy from whatever he’d had before leaving home, and immediately began arguing with Will about the tuning. Susannah and Elias came with a wooden broom handle horse under Elias’s arm, painted red, with a yarn mane. Elias set it down with ceremony, and Susannah told James, very seriously, that it was a very fast horse, the fastest in the territory. James nodded gravely, taking it as important information.

Elias, who had filed the papers that made Amelia a Dunbar three years ago, winked at her over the boy’s head, and Amelia smiled back. The law had brought them together, in the end, as much as anything else.

James went straight for the horse the instant it was out from under Elias’s arm, abandoning his grandmother without a backward glance. Margaret studied it for a long moment with her hands behind her back, her head tilted. Then she went into the house and came back with her own toy wooden horse.

She handed it to James, very formally, “I’m too old for this now. You can have both.”

James patted the toy horse, gripping the stick-horse with his free hand. Margaret nodded, satisfied, and went to supervise the lemonade, where she immediately began instructing Percy on the correct way to pour.

Dave came last, walking up from town with his coat over his arm, unhurried. He crossed the yard, took his grandson from Everett without asking, and settled onto the bench with the boy on his knee. He had come back in the spring and gone to work with a builder, and the work suited him, and the town suited him, and he was better with his grandson than he had ever been with his children.

He let James bang a wooden spoon against his boot and laughed when the boy did it harder, and when James offered him a bite of birthday cake with both hands, Dave ate it with no concern for how clean the boy’s hands had been.

Percy came to stand beside Amelia at the tables.

“He’s good with him,” Percy said.

“He is.” Amelia handed Percy a plate. “Eat. You’re too thin.”

“I’m exactly as thin as I’ve always been.” But he took the plate.

Helen found Amelia by the tables, away from the chaos, and for a moment, the two of them just stood together, taking it all in. James was showing Dave the proper way to make a wooden horse gallop.

“He wrote again,” Helen said.

“Your father?” Amelia stilled. “Did you read it?”

“I read it.” Helen’s hands rested on the curve of her belly. “Four pages. He said Carson City agrees with him, which I don’t believe for a moment.” She was quiet for a moment. “I haven’t answered. I don’t think I will.”

Amelia nodded. There was nothing else to say, and Helen didn’t seem to need anything else said. They ate in the yard until dark. Roast chicken and potatoes and several kinds of pie, Nora’s pickles, a ham from the ranch owner glazed with honey, bread still warm from Lottie’s oven. The children ran wild between the tables and the adults let them.

James had covered his hands and most of his face in cake. Grandpa Dave produced a handkerchief and cleaned him up. Though James immediately re-frosted himself.

Percy cornered Everett by the cider barrel at one point, and Amelia, passing with a platter, caught the tail of it. “…and Helen says if it’s a girl we’re naming her after her mother, and if it’s a boy I’m naming him after me, so either way I lose.” Everett clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll survive. I named mine after my father, and he still won’t sleep through the night.”

Flint slept through all of the celebration on the warm bricks by the forge, one ear twitching in his dreams, oblivious to the honor of the occasion. He was old now, gray around the muzzle, and he had claimed the warm bricks as his own years ago, and no one disputed it. James had once tried to pick him up by the tail, at the age of one, and Flint had looked at him with such profound disappointment that James had burst into tears, and they had been cautious friends ever since.

When the last of the guests had gone, the lanterns doused and the dishes stacked for morning, Amelia sat with Everett on the front steps. The yard was quiet. The stars were out, thick overhead, and the air had the cool edge it got after dark, and somewhere in the house James was asleep with both wooden horses in his bed with him.

Lottie had gone to her own room. Will had banked the forge fire for the night and taken the apprentice home to his mother. The whole day settled over Amelia, warm and complete, and she didn’t want to shrug it off.

Everett’s arm was around her shoulders, heavy and familiar. For a while they just sat, listening to the night.

“You’ll need to make another crib,” Amelia said, “before the spring.”

“What’s wrong with the one he’s got?” He frowned.

She rolled her eyes, then looked at him. He stared while she pursed her lips. Everett was quiet for a moment.

She laughed. “I’m saying…We need a second crib.”

Then he laughed, low, and he leaned back, scrubbing both hands down his face. “Oh, Lord. I’m never gonna get a full night’s sleep again.”

“Oh, stop complaining.” Amelia leaned into him and looked at the shop sign with both their names on it. “If you wanted a full night’s sleep, you wouldn’t kiss me so much.”

DUNBAR & WIFE. The future came to her these days not as a question but as a list of good work to do.

She had stopped keeping track of how long she had been in Tecoma. She realized it all at once, sitting there on the step with her husband’s hand in hers. Somewhere along the way she had stopped counting the months, the years. She had never managed that anywhere else. Everywhere else there had been a tally, a reckoning, a date circled, a bag packed in the corner of her mind. Here there was just the forge, their home, and the boy asleep inside.

Now they had another little one coming, and her heart felt so full, she thought it might burst.

“I love you, Everett Dunbar.” She sighed.

“I love you too,” he answered. “And I always will.”

THE END