Everyone Laughed When Widow’s Daughter Collected Their Rusted Horseshoes—Until They Entered Her Barn
Chapter 5
The next morning, Nell swept the barn floor to bare, smooth dirt. She took a long stick and began to draw. Not a bird. Not a howl. The outline of a full-grown stallion, standing on its hind legs, chest open to the sky, mane whipping like a storm caught in a photograph. It was the pose Boone had described when he talked about the wild herds that had ruled this land before the fences cut it into pieces. It was the pose of a thing that had decided, against all odds, not to be owned.
She made her list in her grandfather’s voice. The bones must be heavy: railroad iron, the sort that carries ore carts up the mountains. The ribs, the curve of old wagon rims. The coat: the hundreds of shoes she had saved. And she had none of the heavy iron. Her pile was thin nails and bent brackets, the small sorrows of a valley. A horse built of that would collapse under its own weight before a single shoe went on.
She knew where the heavy iron waited. Ten miles north, in the rotted belly of the county’s dead silver mines, the mining company had abandoned its machinery overnight when the silver ran out. They took what glittered; they left the rails, the shifters, the greased and salted iron that had carried their ore down the mountain. The rails weighed eighty pounds a foot. No fourteen-year-old girl in the county had ever lifted one.
Nell hitched the mule, a sullen gray creature named Barnaby who regarded her with the deep suspicion of something that had been sold and resold, loaded a coil of rope, two canteens of water, and a stout wooden lever, and set out without telling her mother where she was going. Ruth had enough worry to carry both of them.
The road north climbed through dust and sage toward the dead diggings, and the sun beat down with a spite that had no business in a working year. Three hours in, the wagon crested a ridge and Nell saw the camp below: a collapsed row of shacks, a hoist frame tilting against the sky like a failed prayer, and one man sitting on the porch of the old assayer’s office, whittling.
He was ancient and sun-cured, with a beard like spun wire and a wooden leg laid across his lap. He watched her wagon come, and his knife stopped.
“You’re lost, girl,” he called, in a voice scoured flat by dust. “Town’s ten miles back.”
“Not lost, sir.” Nell tied Barnaby to a post and walked past him toward a dark pile of iron the years had given to rust. “I came for the rails.”
The old man coughed out something that might have been a laugh. “The rails. Child, they weigh eighty pound a foot. You can’t lift one if your life depended on it.” He waited. Nell did not leave. She pulled her rope, looped it around the near end of the nearest rail, wedged the lever beneath the rail’s middle, and threw her whole weight onto the lever’s far end. The rail rose an inch. She kicked a stone under the gap, then clicked her tongue at the mule. “Walk on, Barnaby.”
The mule leaned. The rope sang. And the rail came out of its grave, sliding through the dirt toward the wagon, a creature of rust and weight surrendering to a girl with a lever.
It took her thirty minutes of savage, breathless work, slipping and straining, to load a single rail onto the wagon bed. Her hands were shaking. Sweat had gone through her dress to her skin. She turned around, heaving, and found the old man standing behind her on his crutch, staring at her with strange, wet eyes.
“Who taught you to rig a lever so?”
“My grandfather. Boone Whitmore. He was a blacksmith.”
The old man’s face went soft, the way a rock does right before rain. “I knew Boone. Fixed my axle once, when I drove rail for the company. Good man. Strong hands.” He looked at her then, long and slow, at her split fingers and her burning patience. “You got his stubborn,” he said, quiet. Then he looked at the pile of iron, and at the sky darkening toward evening, and he sighed, the sigh of a man signing a debt he thought he’d never have to pay. “You can’t load this much on your own before dark, girl. Coyotes own these yards after sundown. Show me the pieces you need.”
For two hours, the old rail driver and the ranch girl worked the pile together: his knowledge of weight and balance, her unspent, ferocious energy. Five rails went in. A dozen wagon rims. A crate of bolts thick as a man’s thumb. The wagon’s springs groaned under the load like a woman in pain.
Nell walked around to face him. “I don’t have money to pay you for the iron, or the help.”
The old man wiped his hands on his trousers and looked at the loaded wagon, and the far hills, and something in between that was no longer there. “I don’t want your money. I just want to know what a child’s doing, hauling a ton of dead iron into the desert.”
She looked him in the eye, clear and steady. “I’m going to build something nobody can ignore. I’m going to save my home.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he tipped his ragged hat. “Drive careful, girl. My name’s Moss, and I say that to you as one who’s lost his own share: iron is heavy, but losing your home is heavier.”
She drove. Behind her, the old man stood on his crutch in the dust and watched until the wagon was gone, and the weight of her words stayed with him longer than the smoke of her dust.