Crescent of Dry Creek

Clara Hayes kept her shoulders forward as if the weight of Dry Creek rested there with her, right above the leather apron. Morning came in a flat, unblinking wall—sun that did not ask, wind that smelled of dust and iron. The forge spat orange into the metal. Each hammer fall rang against the hollow sky: steady, not pretty, honest. Her palms had a map of old burns and callus; there was a thin white scar on the knuckle where the leather strap had rubbed through two winters and a summer. Her father had made that scar like he had made most things in his life: careful, absolute, final.

Jonah half-dragged a straw-besmirched horse into the yard, elbows knocked raw, grin still clinging even when he squinted against the heat. He smelled of hay and coffee and the kind of careless good humor that had saved them more than once. 'You ever think we'll get tired of it?' he asked, balancing the horse as if it were a question about their bones.

'Not likely,' Clara said, rubbing a smear of coal from her cheek with the heel of her gloved hand. She laughed and the sound hit the metal and came back small. 'Tired of the sun? Tired of payin' a week late? Someone has to keep the nails square or the city folk'll think the West's gone soft.'

Her father had punched his mark into the anvil: two shallow crescents, a quick signature in steel. When Clara drove a nail she could feel the muscle memory in her wrists like a second heartbeat. The mark meant things in towns that read seals; it meant a horse's shoe would last a storm, a hinge would not come loose. The mark was a promise older than the notice tacked to the post outside Mrs. Alder's boardinghouse. It had been a promise that meant food at the table and a roof when the rains came.

Raindrops didn't come often in Dry Creek. The town made do with what it had: a saloon that smelled of sour whiskey and lemon oil, a general store with a cracked window and a woman who could find anything if you promised her a baked apple, and the sheriff who walked with a slouch he liked—Wyatt Rook, gray-hat, thumbs that made it easy to look like a man you could trust until you saw the way his eyes wandered.

By late morning the street had the shape of gossip. Men clustered around barrels, palms dark, chewing tidbits of rumor the way they'd chew tobacco. Women on stoops watched like anchors. Jonah moved between them, a young uneasy tide, talking about millwork and wages. Clara watched the stage as it ground into town, axles singing under the load. A man in a dust-stained coat stepped down with a rolled paper under his arm and a face as set as river rock. He looked straight down the street and not at the forge. When he crossed, Clara felt the heat pick up, the way a wind will rise before a storm.