Mail-Order Bride Arrived in Rags — The Rancher’s Daughter Whispered, “Please Be Our Mama”

Chapter 9

The second wedding was nothing like the first.

The first had been a matter of four witnesses and a practical minister and the standard seriousness of an arrangement in the territory. The second was a matter of the whole town.

Word spread the way word spreads in a small settlement, which is to say faster than wind. William Barrett was marrying the schoolteacher properly, the woman he’d brought west, and the church at Morrow Creek was fuller than it had been since the harvest festival. People came because they were curious and stayed because they were glad. They filled the pews. They pressed against the back wall. The minister, who had married them the first time with four witnesses, beamed now at a congregation, and held the book up like a trophy.

Eleanor stood at the back of the church in the blue dress.

The blue dress that had come off the stage with her eleven days late, that had been mended by lamplight on the first night, that she had worn through the first week and the first month and the six weeks after, that had been washed and pressed and mended again until the color had softened to the blue of a late evening sky. She stood in it, and she felt, for the first time in her life, that she looked exactly like herself.

Abby stood beside her, in a dress that was new, white, with a blue sash that matched Eleanor’s — a detail no one had planned and everyone had noticed. Abby was carrying wildflowers, and her face was a study in concentration, because she had been given a job to do and intended to do it perfectly.

Elias stood on William’s side, in his first suit, which William had driven two towns over to buy, and which Elias had worn all morning without complaint. He was standing very straight.

William was waiting at the front. He had seen her come in — everyone had seen her come in — and the way he looked at her was the way a man looks at a woman he has been hoping to see for a long time, and has finally seen.

The minister began. The words were the same words, mostly. But Eleanor did not hear them the way she had heard them the first time. The first time, she had been hearing an arrangement. This time, she was hearing a promise, and she was making it with her whole heart, the way she had told William she would.

When the minister told William to take her hand, William took it. And he held it, and he did not let go, and this time, when it was over and the minister pronounced them married in the sight of God and this congregation, the whole church stood up and clapped.

Eleanor looked at Abby, who was crying and laughing at once, and at Elias, who was standing very still and very straight, and whose eyes were bright.

And then William said, very quietly, into her ear: “The dress. Why that one?”

Eleanor smiled. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “when we’re home.”

The years did what years do.

The blue dress was worn again, to the schoolhouse on the days Eleanor taught there, to the county fair, to church on Sundays, until it was softer and paler and had been mended so many times the mends had mends. Eleanor mended it by lamplight, the same small even stitches, and the dress went on being worn long past the age when it should have been retired, because Eleanor chose it every time.

Elias, who had been indifferent to reading, read his way through the three books Eleanor had brought in her trunk, and then through every book the circuit preacher could be persuaded to leave behind, because Eleanor had noticed he liked stories about exploration and had, without comment, simply made sure those were the books available. He named three more cats after governors, and then, in a gesture that made William laugh until his eyes watered, he named a particularly dignified tabby after Eleanor.

Abby grew. She grew out of the faded blue pinafore, and out of the white dress with the sash, and out of being six, and into being a girl who asked questions that had no end and no limit. She asked her father once, years later, why her mother kept a dress that was clearly too worn to wear anymore, and her father said she’d have to ask her mother that.

But Abby did not ask. Not then. She filed the question away, the way she filed everything, and waited for the right day.

And the blue dress went on hanging in the wardrobe, and being worn, and being mended, until the day came when it had finally worn through beyond mending in a way that even Eleanor’s careful needlework could not address. She folded it then, very carefully, and she did not throw it away. She wrapped it in a clean cloth, and she put it at the back of the wardrobe, on the highest shelf, where it stayed.

It stayed through the years. Through the winters and the springs. Through Elias going east to school and coming home a man. Through the new roof, and the new barn, and the new cats. Through the evening, one summer, when a grown woman came home to the ranch and found her mother standing at the open wardrobe, holding the blue dress.

“Mama,” Abby said. “What are you doing with that old dress?”