‘I’ll Take the One Nobody Wants,’ the Blacksmith Said—And Chose Her Without Looking Back

PART 2:

Nobody spoke. The wind came down off the slope and pushed at the awning canvas above them. Hadtie kept her eyes on a knot in the boardwalk plank and made herself into nothing at all, which was a thing she was very good at. Judson Ivy stepped out of his own door with his thumbs hooked in his vest.

 He said the town had seen the plain truth of it. “A thing nobody wants is not property,” he said. It is a debt and he supposed he would go on carrying it. Boots came up the boardwalk then unhurried. Caleb Ashby crossed through the crowd with coal dust still in the creases of his hands, stopped square in front of Judson Ivy and said it loud enough for the whole street to hear.

I’ll take the one nobody wants. Iivey’s smile went thin as wire. He said, “No unmarried man carried a girl’s paper out of his town, and he said it slowly so the crowd could enjoy watching the trap close on a fool.” “Ashb did not blink.” “Then fetch the preacher,” he said. They were married in 11 minutes on the hotel steps in front of every mouth that had laughed.

 He counted out the full $418 in gold, took her carpet bag out of Toiver’s hand, and walked straight to his wagon. He did not look back once. Ivy called after him about the road across Cinder Ridge, and a fair price paid for a fair grade. Ashby handed her up onto the seat, climbed on, and clucked to the team. The calling went on behind them the length of two streets, and he never turned his head.

The town fell away into pine. Hadtie sat with her carpet bag on her knees and her heart going like a bird in a grain sack. She had been bought for the price of her father’s debt by a man she had never once spoken to in her life. She waited for it to begin. Every kindness she had ever been shown came with a bill attached somewhere at the bottom.

 She counted the mileposts and braced herself for the moment he would tell her exactly what she now owed him. Two miles on, he pulled the team up, climbed down without a word, and shifted 100 lb of bar iron from under the seat to the back of the wagon bed. Then he folded a wool blanket over four times and laid it on the seatboard beside him.

“Bards bruise,” he said. That was the whole of it. She sat down on the folded blanket and could not for the life of her understand what had just happened to her. The road climbed all afternoon. Pine gave way to raw rock, and the wind came down off the snow fields with teeth in it.

 He pulled a buffalo robe from beneath the seat and laid it over her lap without comment and without looking at her. They camped at the head of the pass. He built the fire fried salt pork and cornmeal in a black skillet and filled her plate first and fuller than his own. She sat with it on her knees and waited for the joke about her appetite. It did not come.

 He looked at her hands instead at the split knuckles and the old burn scars from the hotel range. He asked how long she had been carrying water yolks. two years,” she said. He nodded slowly, the way a man nods over a well-kept ledger. She asked him finally, “Why? Why her, when the whole town had stood there and watched and laughed and kept its money buttoned in its pocket?” “They put your name under the mules,” he said.

 He turned a stick over in the coals. “A town that does that is telling you what it is. It is not telling you one thing about what you are. Snow started at first light and quit by 9. They came over the top at noon, and Cinder Ridge opened below them, a long black shoulder of rock and green timber with a creek running white at the base of it.

 A stone smithy stood at the center of it all with a chimney breathing steady smoke and past that a cabin, a pole corral, three charcoal kils, and a switchback grade cut into the ridge face by hand. One summer at a time, he set the break. She sat looking down at the only road that could carry or wagons off the rusk hollow side of that mountain.

She did not yet know she was looking at the reason a man had already decided she should be dead by spring. She had braced herself for a filthy hvel full of hides and flies. She found a swept floor, a scrubbed table, a bed with a clean tick, and a wall of books running from the doorframe clear around to the stove pipe.

 ropebound volumes on iron and a saying, a Bible with a cracked spine, Shakespeare and a mining almanac gone soft at the corners from handling. She stood in front of that shelf with her wet shawl dripping on his clean boards and could not think of a word to say. He carried her carpet bag in, set it at the foot of the bed, and told her the bed was hers.

He slept in the smithy loft, he said, where the banked fire wanted watching through the night. Anyway, she said carefully that they were married. He said they were married on paper because a paper was the only thing that would get her out of that town alive, and that nothing else under his roof would ever be decided by Judson Ivy.

 Then he went out to the forge and left her standing in it. She sat down on the edge of that clean bed in a house belonging to a stranger and cried for a long time without making a single sound out of pure habit. The first days went by in a silence she kept waiting to hear break. She rose before he did, worked until dark, and moved through the small rooms trying to take up considerably less room than she actually did.

He never raised his voice, not once. He set fresh meat in the cold house, split her kindling small so it would catch on the first match, and hung a lantern out on the path so she would never have to walk to the smithy in the dark. On the fourth morning, she baked. The cabin filled with the smell of it, and she stood square in front of the stove with her jaw set, waiting to be told exactly how much flour she had wasted on herself.

He came in, ate three pieces, standing up with his hat still on, looked down into the empty pan, and said one word, “More.” She turned to the stove so he would not see what her face was doing. She started hauling his charcoal up from the kils. The sacks ran 90 lb a piece, and the boy he had hired the summer before had managed exactly one at a time with rests.

 She took two, one on each shoulder, and never set them down on the slope. He watched her come up the grade that way, and said nothing for a good while. Then he told her the boy had quit over that hill in particular. She laughed out loud, a real one, and the sound of it surprised them both. In April, she asked to see his accounts, because his tally on the Rusk Hollow shoeing was $2 out, and it had been quietly bothering her for a week.

 He handed her the whole tin box without asking a single question. She found her indenture paper folded flat in the bottom of it and folded inside the indenture. A slip of bend house stationary covered in a clerk’s tidy hand. It was a receipt from the undertaker at Choke Cherry Bend. One plain pine box and one grave dug and paid in full made out in the name of Hattie Dunar and charged against the bend house placement account.

She checked the date twice and then a third time, holding it up to the window light. It had been paid three days before hiring day. 3 days before her name ever went on that board. In the margin the clerk had written in the same tidy hand the words, “As with the others,” below that sat two sets of initials she knew perfectly well.

 two girls who had gone off to the timber camps and never come back for their wages. Judson Ivy had never expected to sell her at all. He had expected to bury her. The winter camp was only the method, and the pine box had been bought and paid for before the town ever gathered to laugh at her. She sat down on the smithy step with the paper in both hands.

 She was not weeping over the grave. She was weeping because a man had sat at a desk and done the arithmetic on her and decided she came to less than the cost of the box. Caleb found her there. He read it through one time, standing with the rain starting on the shakes. She had never seen a man go that quiet in her life, and she had never seen anything half so frightening as what came up into his face afterward.

He opened the forge door, fed her indenture into the white coals, and held it down under the tongs until there was not enough of it left to name. The undertaker’s receipt he folded twice and set in the tin box on the shelf. That one we keep, he said. He told her then that she was not bought and she was not held.

she could take the wagon down to Helena in the morning with money in her pocket, and no man in the territory would ever put a paper on her again. She asked him what she was then if she was not bought. He said she was his wife if she wanted to be, and that she was worth more than the road and the forge and every dollar Judson Ivy had ever counted in his life.

She stayed. Spring came up the ridge slow and the work began to change her. She learned the great bellows and she learned to read the color of iron, straw, and cherry and white the way other women read weather. He taught her to hold stock steady on the anvil under a striking hammer, which takes more arm than most grown men have got.

 On Sunday afternoons, he set tin cans on the fence rail and taught her the rifle. On the ninth Sunday, she put five out of six through the same can at 80 yards. He stood with his arms folded across his chest and told her she had a Smith’s hands and a gunsmith’s eye, and no business ever apologizing for either. Then he said the thing she had waited her whole life to hear without ever knowing she was waiting.

Thinn does not survive a Montana winter, he told her. Substance survives. Substance is the only thing this mountain has ever respected. The thaw opened the pass in the middle of May. Assay men out of Rusk Hollow began riding the ridge in twos and threes, pacing off his switchback grade and writing in small leather books.

She kept the tallies and she saw exactly what they saw. There was no other grade off that side of the mountain. Every ton of ore out of Rusk Hollow either crossed Caleb Ashby’s ridge or went 110 mi around it. One evening he came up from the creek with his shirt over his shoulder and his hair still wet.

 And she sat down the dish she was drying and crossed that yard before she could talk herself back out of it. She kissed him. He went perfectly still for exactly one heartbeat, and then his hands came up to her face the way a man handles something he has made himself and cannot bear to mar. He called her plentiful. He called her the finest thing that had ever come up that road on any wagon, and he said it plainly in flat daylight, with the forge gone cold behind him, and nothing in the world to gain by it.

 By June, she had stopped making herself small. She walked her own yard, ate at her own table, and caught herself singing at the bellows on a Tuesday. That was the week the writers came. Judson Ivy came himself in a dark blue coat with a gold watch chain, driving a buggy up a grade he had not built and did not own.

 He looked over the smithy the way a man looks at a shop he already keeps the keys to. He offered $1,100 for the ridge and the grade together. He called the figure generous. He called it a mercy, considering the kind of winter a place at that elevation could expect to see. Caleb said the grade was not for sale at any figure.

 Ivy said everything in the territory was for sale and that a smith who could not read a contract would find himself learning to read one in front of a judge. Wade Toiver waited down by the horses with three men. He looked Hattie over and did not know her for a moment. Then he made a sound like a hog at a trough and his men laughed on cue the way hired men do.

 Hattie set down the tongs she was holding, still glowing, and asked whether Ivy paid him by the hour or by the insult. She said the bend house had fed her 2 years, and she had grown on it, and he was welcome to test that. To quit laughing, they left. Nine nights later, all three charcoal kils burned at once, and the smoke stood up so thick the mine crew saw it clear from Rusk Hollow.

Caleb found a bootprint with a squared heel in the mud by the near kiln. In town for iron, she learned the rest of it from the freight clerk’s talk. The mining company had signed Ivy to deliver a finished ore road by the 1st of July with a forfeit written in that would break him down to his boots. He had signed that contract in February.

 He had signed it before he owned 1 foot of the ridge, and he had signed it three days before he walked down the street and paid a man to dig her grave. Ivy found her outside the freight barn. He asked her pleasantly how she was finding the mountain air. He said girls of her particular constitution rarely lasted a winter at that height, and that he had always thought it a shame.

 She told him she had read a receipt with his own clerk’s hand on it. His face did not move a hair. He said paper burns easily and that a smith’s shop burns faster than paper. And then he touched his hatbrim and walked on. Nell Sacket caught her at the wagon before she could climb up. Ivy kept a black placement book locked in the hotel safe, she said, with every girl’s name and every fee written out.

and Nell had seen a short column at the back headed with the word settled. They rode home in the dark with the iron rattling in the bed and neither of them saying much of anything. That night Caleb loaded the Winchester and the shotgun and stood them both by the door where a hand could find them. For four nights riders sat their horses on the rim above the pass and watched the smoke of the forge.

On the fifth night, the north fence was cut in 12 places, and the horses were run off down the creek bottom. On the sixth night, a storm came in off the divide, late and wet and mean, and the wind tore the lantern clean off its path hook and put it out. Hadtie loaded the rifle at the kitchen table and stood it against the table leg.

 At 10, she heard hooves on the switchback grade, more of them than she could count, coming up fast and not troubling to be quiet about it. Caleb went out the smithy door with the shotgun. Torches broke around the corral in a ragged line, and the hay shed went up like paper in the wind, throwing red light clear across the wet yard.

 She counted six riders and Toiver on foot with a pistol, and behind all of them, back at the head of the grade, beside a waiting buggy, a dark blue coat standing perfectly still in the rain. Caleb put both barrels into the shed doorway, and took a man off his horse. Then a rifle spoke from the black beside the corral once, and the sound of it came back off the ridge twice.

 He went down on the smithy step hard with his right shoulder torn open and his hand no longer closing on anything. The shotgun went out of his fingers into the mud 6 ft away and altogether out of reach. Toiver came into the firelight laughing. He said to leave the smith where he lay, that a man bleeds out fine on his own, and to bring the fat girl out into the yard, so the boys could all watch her try to run.

Hattie Ashby set the rifle down on the table. It was 14 ft out to her husband and back, and she was not going to cover it in both directions with a gun in her hands. She went out low and fast, got both hands up under his arms, and hauled 240 lb of bleeding blacksmith across the sill and into his own smithy, while the mud sucked at her shoes.

 She kicked the door shut with her heel and dropped the bar into the brackets. A body hit it from the far side an instant later, and the bar jumped hard against its pins. The anvil stood on its oak stump beside the fire. 310 lb of good Sheffield iron. She squared her feet, took it under the horn and the heel, and lifted it clean off the stump.

 Her back screamed at her the whole way. She walked it four steps, and set it down flush against the door, and the next man who threw his shoulder into that door bounced off it and cursed his own arm in the rain. Then she went to the bellows. She worked the great handle until the coals came up past cherry and past orange into white, and the whole shop went the color of a sunrise at 4 in the morning.

The east shutter came in with a crack. A man got his head and a shoulder through the gap, and she met him with 18 in of white iron in the tongs, close enough to burn the air. He went out backward, screaming, his rifle stock smoking in his hands. Sparks took the smithy roof. The quench trough stood full along the wall, an iron tank on heavy timber legs, better than 400 lb with the water in it.

She set her shoulder under the near end, dug in, and heaved. The water went up the wall and across the burning shakes in one long sheet, and the fire died with a hiss she felt in her back teeth. Toiver came through the broken shutter into the steam with his pistol out. She took the long sledge off the bench, 16 lbs of head on a hickory haft, and she swung it the way her husband had taught her to swing it from the hips and through the mark.

 His forearm broke, and the pistol went into the coals. She put him on the floor beneath the tipped trough, and left him there, hollering into the steam, and then she walked out of her own smithy into the rain, with the sledge still in her hand. Judson Ivy had the buggy turned at the head of the grade and the whip already up.

 She came off the yard at a dead run and caught the near horse by the cheekstrap as the team swung around into the road. She set her heels in the mud and stopped 400 lb of frightened horse with one arm and then she hauled the team back a full step against the whip. Judson Ivy came off that seat into the road and his strong box came off the floorboards after him.

 The riders still standing were already gone down the switchback, two of them carrying a third across a saddle. She stood alone in the rain with the strong box under her arm and the hay shed burning itself out behind her. inside. She packed the shoulder wound with clean linen and a scald of whiskey, bound it off tight, and got him up onto the bed by herself without waking him.

 He did not come around until the gray of the morning. When he did, he looked a long time at the anvil sitting against his door, and then at his wife asleep upright in the chair beside him, and he called her a Valkyrie, and then he called her the queen of the whole cursed mountain. The strong box held the black placement book.

 22 names across six years with the fee for each and the camp for each and a short column at the back headed with the word settled. Four of the names carried a small cross beside them. Hadtie matched every cross against the undertaker’s receipts in Choke Cherry Bend and got four out of four. each one paid in full before the girl in question had ever left the town limits.

 She rode to the county seat with the book, the receipts, and the number off her own burned indenture, and she sat in the county attorney’s office for 3 hours and never once raised her voice. Wade Toiver, with his arm in plaster and 20 years standing in front of him, decided he would rather talk than serve them.

 He gave up the camp bosses, the fees, and the whole quiet arrangement in order from the beginning. At the inquest, they read the four names out loud into the room. Hadtie stood up in a borrowed black dress and explained what a receipt dated 3 days early actually meant, and every man on that bench understood her perfectly. The mining company voided the ore road contract inside the week and took its forfeit out of the freight barn, the hotel, and the scale Ivy had weighed the county on for 11 years.

Lucinda Prior counted no more biscuits. She left on the eastbound stage with two trunks and a hatbox, and not one person in Choke Cherry Bend came out into the street to see her go. Judson Ivy went down to the territorial prison at Deer Lodge in Leg Irons. He died there in his third winter in a cold stone room, owing considerably more money than he had ever managed to take out of anybody’s father.

The company routed the ore road up and over Cinderidge and paid the toll to the Ashbies ton by ton for 11 straight years. The forge shaw every team that worked the mountain and half the teams that only crossed it. They grew rich enough to leave and never once sat down and discussed leaving. Caleb widened the smithy and put in a second fire, and Hattie put in the books, and the books balanced to the penny every quarter for as long as she kept them. She hired girls.

 She took them off the hiring boards of four counties, paid them wages in their own names at the bank in Helena, and made every one of them sign absolutely nothing. They called her the ridge woman from Helena to the Yellowstone. Teamsters told it in the saloons that she had stopped a bolting four-h horse team with one hand in the rain.

 And for once in her life, the story people told about her size was the true one. Nell Sacket came up the mountain in the second year and ran the boarding house at the foot of the grade. There was a boy by then and later a girl with her mother’s gray eyes and her father’s stubborn jaw and no fear of fire whatsoever. The sign over the smithy door was iron and Caleb had hammered it out himself on a winter evening.

 It read Ashb and Ashby, blacksmiths, and hers was the name he had struck first. On an evening in her 40th year, she sat on the porch, watching the or wagons crawl down the grade. Her husband came out, turned her face up with two blackened fingers, and kissed her like a man who had never had to look at anything else. Below them, the road they had refused to sell went on, carrying the mountain down to the world, load by load, in the last of the light.

 The two of them stayed where they were and did not move and did not look