Elias Marsh had a way with heights that looked like a joke, as if the poles themselves were old friends who’d lent him an elbow. He slung his coil of insulated wire over one shoulder and walked the main drag with the constancy of a man who measured days by the knots in his rope and the creak of a crossarm. Dust lifted in small, obedient swirls at his boots; a breeze with a salty sting came off the far valley and flattened hair against foreheads. Wooden poles rose from the ridge like teeth; the new line already ran a crooked spine toward the next outpost.
He paused outside the post office because that’s where the news lived now, not all of it but enough: bulletins, messages, the tiny conversations that refused to dissolve. Clara Hale looked up from the telegraph bench through glass smudged with flour—she’d been tending bread in the morning and messages by noon—and squinted, amusement in the small crease at her mouth. She wore a cardigan that had lost the argument with a moth and a handkerchief knotted like a coronet. "You look like you’re carrying a stubborn cat," she called. "Or a very tangled prayer."
Eli smiled without answering. He had his own ways of speaking; a tool laid on the bench, a sounder’s tap in the quiet. He set the spool down like a man who knew its weight and then pretended he didn’t. Around them the town adjusted to the pulse the wire brought: the saloon piano struck keys a little earlier because men expected news; the blacksmith checked his watch more often; a boy sold prickly pear jam from a chipped crock with more pride than prudence. The jam had nothing to do with telegraphy, but the boy’s mother swore a spoonful could settle a quarrel faster than a line of Morse.
A man in the shade of the general store roof had been trying all morning to court a seamstress by sending clumsy dots and dashes to the telegraph window. The message boiled down to three words repeated like a stammered confession. Clara had laughed so loud the seams of her patience gave a small sigh. "He thinks it’ll make him sound serious," she told Eli, then tapped the sounder and sent the fellow a teasing counter: dot dash dot—meaning nothing solemn at all; she had taught him the code in three jerks and a grin.
Eli threaded an insulator from his pouch and walked the line toward the nearest pole. His hands were capable things: callused, clever, the kind that remembered the exact angle to bang copper against brass to coax a stubborn connection. He climbed without fuss, feet finding rungs as if his soles had been drilled for them. Up top, the town spread itself small: the saloon’s tin roof caught the sun, a dog chased a hat, children made a racket over marbles. Wind moved across the valley in a slow, persistent wash, carrying scents of coffee and fryer grease.
He worked without theatrics, wrapped the wire, looped, strapped, turned the splice with fingers that had learned patience the hard way. Then his hand paused on a piece of ceramic—an insulator that should have held fast. Its flange had been nicked and scored; hair clung to it, coarse and dark as a horse’s tail. Eli frowned. He plucked the strand with a thumb and forefinger, feeling a small, weird insistence like a question in his gut. There was nothing friendly about the cut. He let the hair fall to the crook of his wrist and listened: the line muttered, an occasional scratch of a distant sounder. A town that learned to depend on instant tickings could become very loud in a different currency.