Signals at Sundown

Morning in Dryridge came in thin and bright, as if sunlight itself had been stretched by the wind across the valley and pinned down on the roofs. The telegraph station sat at the street corner like an unloved instrument—solid, reliable, and prone to being ignored until something went wrong. Inside, Abigail Mercer moved with the precise, economical gestures of someone who had learned to keep time with her hands. She wrapped a bandage around a nicked finger, wiped grit from the brass key, and set a small kettle on the single-burner stove because the station smelled of warm copper and cold coffee and needed a human punctuation mark to feel inhabited.

The cat—Morse, as if the joke of a name could tether him to the work—was curled across an inky-black coil of insulated wire and pretended the day belonged to him. He lifted a paw without looking, tapped the key once, and a single idle dot hopped along the line to the next town. For a full beat one of Dryridge’s housewives down the road swore the town bell had tolled; an old man at the livery swore he heard a woman humming; the post boy swore he’d caught the scent of someone’s stew three blocks away. Morse blinked and went back to sleep, the town right where it had been except for the small ripple of a stray signal.

Abby rinsed her mug, listening to the rhythm of the relay like a second heartbeat. There was a comfort in the machinery: the click, the tiny arc when the current jumped, the way a deliberate pause could rearrange a dozen people’s plans. Her work was about coordination—when to stop, when to let something pass, when to hold it in a pocket of silence. She liked to say, half in jest and half as fact, that she sold time by the packet. People paid for messages and not for the hush between them, but the hush was where the important things sat.

Outside, a dust devil passed through the main street and tugged at a laundry line. The town had its rituals—the Friday pie contest, the Sunday beans that everyone swore by, the old fiddler who practiced scales on porches at dusk—and none of those customs had anything to do with relays and poles. Still, they kept the grocery’s bell ringing and the blacksmith’s fire fed; they reminded Abby that the wires crossed more than distance. She liked to watch Mrs. Partridge—who ran the boardinghouse—arrange ceramic cups on a sill made from an old glass insulator. It struck Abby as the sort of small, absurd repurposing people did when they had no use for the original purpose of things.

A tap at the window made her look up. A courier stood outside, covered in dust, hat in hand, with the sort of expression callers wore when their boots carried messages larger than their mouths. He set a slim parcel on her step and said, "Miss Mercer? Mr. Kincade sent me. He says he needs something hush—on the stage to Bakersfield tonight. He left it in cipher, said you’d know." He glanced at Morse and added wryly, "Cat looks like he runs the whole valley."

Abby took the parcel, felt the paper’s crinkled weight between her fingers, and let the key cool beneath her hand. She did not let the courier know whether she understood the rhythm inside the fold. Instead she teased, offering the sort of smile she reserved for weather and small dogs. "Tell Mr. Kincade his handwriting is worse than his jokes," she said, folding the paper open with the slow, practiced motion of someone who handled fragile things. "And tell him I’ll see if the lines are being difficult today." The courier grinned, pleased to have passed something on. He left with a clack of heels and a glance over his shoulder that carried more questions than he’d been paid to ask.

When the door closed behind him, Abby set the paper on the table and tapped half a dozen keys of the telegraph machine as if she were aligning pins in a lock. She tested the relay, leaned close to listen, and then, as the sun tilted higher, she rose and slipped on her jacket. The wires were out there—taut and humming—and she could go measure their tension herself. It was the sort of work that made her hands honest: climb, reach, twist a brass clamp, settle back and judge. She liked the balance of exertion and calculation; she liked that, for every pound of sweat she put into a pole, a little less argument would pass across it. She liked having the ability to push at a situation with the same set of tools she used to repair a broken insulator.