Whiter Than Snow (21 page)

He heard a commotion near the door of the mill, heard men yelling. “We’ll all of us go. There’s kids down there,” someone shouted, a voice of authority, and the men picked up shovels and picks. Another voice called, “Get the plow. Get anything that’ll move snow.”

Caught up in the excitement now, Joe hurried to the front of the mill and asked what had happened. “A slide,” someone told him. “Below the mine, where it’s bare. Took the whole face off the mountain. It ran all the way across the road. The manager’s wife saw it and called up to the office. Didn’t take half a minute.”

“A slide?” Joe said. “Hell’s fire! Is that enough reason to shut down the whole mill? Last winter when it ran, they just plowed a road through it.”

“That was only a little slide. This time it’s took the whole mountain, maybe a thousand feet wide.”

Another man handed Joe a shovel. “You don’t understand. The school’s on the other side of the slide. Nothing over there but the school and the hookhouse. There’s kids down there. The school’s just let out. Them kids was coming along the road when it happened. Mr. Foote’s wife saw them.”

Joe stiffened. “Kids? Whose kids?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“I got a little girl, Jane. She goes to the school.”

“I’m hoping she’s all right, Cobb,” the man said, touching Joe’s arm in a gesture of sympathy the mine workers did not often express. “Now, let’s us git.”

Joe shoved the man aside and ran out the door of the mill ahead of him. As he emerged, he stopped for a fraction of a second to take in the vast slope of white in front of him and the frenzy of figures at the bottom, already digging in the snow. Jane might be there. She always hurried away as soon as school was out, because Mrs. McCauley took her cookies out of the oven when she heard the bell.

At the west edge of the slide, Essie Snowball and two of the prostitutes were eating an early dinner before the hookhouse opened when they heard the snow crash down the slope, heard a roar louder than a steam engine and looked at one another and frowned.

“Avalanche,” said Margery, one of the girls.

“I guess that means we’ll be playing solitaire tonight,” complained her friend Thelma. “Those boys will be working all night, and even if they ain’t, they’ll be too tired to come here. No use bothering to get dressed.” She yawned. “I sure wish I was in California, where they don’t have to live with snow. Might be I’ll go there.” She said that every winter.

“Maybe we can make fudge,” Margery said. “You think Miss Fanny will let us make fudge, Essie? You’ll ask her, won’t you? She likes you best.”

But Essie was not listening. She stared out at the snow swirling around the hookhouse, snow thick as a snowstorm, because the hookhouse wasn’t more than two hundred feet from the edge of the slide. She watched as the snow began to settle and the noise of the avalanche died down. And then she heard something else. Children who were stopped on the road to the west of the snowfield had begun to wail, pitiful long screams that pierced the wintry air all the way to the hookhouse.

“There’s kids out there. There’s kids caught in the slide,” Essie yelled, turning around and grabbing a coat and rubber shoes. “Maybe Sophie’s been taken.”

By now, all five girls were in the kitchen, and Miss Fanny, too. “We got to help,” Essie said. “Me, I’m going out.”

“What do you care?” Thelma asked.

“It might be Sophie in there. What if it’s Sophie?”

The girls looked at one another, not understanding. “Who’s Sophie?” one asked, but nobody knew the name.

“Those kids can come here if they don’t want to go all the way back to the school,” Miss Fanny said.

“To the hookhouse?” asked a new girl. “Their mothers’ll skin us alive, if they don’t drive us out of town first.”

“This is a mining town. Don’t matter a tidbit who you are when there’s trouble. We all work together. You go with Essie and tell those kids to come on in here and get warm. Essie…”

But Essie was already running down the path toward the slide, screaming, “Sophie! Sophie!”

The rescuers worked frantically to release the small figure whose head was above the snow. The child’s wail had turned into a whimper as the men dug out arms and torso and then legs. “You okay?” a man asked, but the little one just stared at him.

“Who is it?” one of the men asked, but the others shook their heads. “Whose kid is it?”

“You know where the others are, how many got caught?” a man asked the child.

“No, ’course he doesn’t,” another replied. “How would he know? You wouldn’t yourself if you got caught in a slide.”

“I see another arm,” a worker cried suddenly, and the rescuers turned to dig out the second little one.

A man picked up the first child and walked carefully through the packed snow to where the women were waiting. “I got a boy here,” he said.

Some of the women, the mothers of girls, groaned. The others rushed to the man, calling, “Who is he?” and “Is it my boy? Is it Bill?”

And then the boy called out, “Mother,” and most of the women stepped back, some crying out in grief as they knew the child was not theirs.

“Mother,” he yelled again, and Grace gasped, almost sinking down into the snow in her relief.

Instead, she cried, “Schuyler?” She rushed to the little boy and took him into her arms. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” She covered his big ears with her hands to warm them, thinking as she had so many times how much he looked like his father. The boy’s face was scratched, his cap gone, and he wore only one boot.

“There was so much snow,” he whimpered. “It rolled me over and over like a snowball. I thought I was going to get buried.” He put his face against his mother and cried.

The other mothers stepped back a little to leave the two alone. They could have been resentful that the first child rescued was the son of the mine manager and his wife, the woman from outside with all her entitles, who thought she was too good to mix with the townspeople. They might have asked why she was so lucky, might have hoped her child would be the last to be found. That would take her down a buttonhole lower. But they didn’t. Instead, they were glad for her, glad that one child was safe. It didn’t matter whose child he was. Besides, if one victim was rescued, others might be, too.

“Come on, Schuyler, we’ll go home. We’ll fix cocoa….” Grace glanced at the faces around her, the faces of women crazed with worry over their children, and realized how blessed she was. Compared to these women, she had always been blessed. She bit her lip, and then she said in a loud voice, “We’ll fix lots of cocoa, for anyone who wants it. And coffee—gallons of coffee. People will need it. And we’ll open up the house.” She raised her voice. “The children will be cold and in shock and maybe hurt. Bring them up to the mine manager’s house. The doctor can tend to them all in one place. It’s close by. We have plenty of room. Please.”

She started for the house, and as she did so, one of the women broke away from the crowd and hurried after her. “Like Mrs. Foote says, you bring ’em on up to the manager’s house,” Mittie McCauley called, and because Mittie had been in Swandyke since the beginning and was much admired, the women nodded and knew they’d be welcome. Mittie caught up with Grace and said, “I expect you can use some help with the coffee, Mrs. Foote.” She paused, remembering a conversation of sometime past. “And the beds. I don’t suppose you keep your beds turned down.”

The crowd of women forgot about Grace then, because one of the workmen called to them, “We found another’n, and it’s alive.”

The women moved forward as close to the digging as they could get and asked one another, “Do you know who it is?” They watched anxiously as the men dug around the child to loosen the arms and then the legs.

“Alive!” a workman called. “A girl.” He pulled the child out of the snow and picked her up in his arms.

Lucy saw the green coat and clutched Dolly. “It’s Rosemary,” she said, tears running down her face. “Oh, Doll, is she all right?” The little girl gave a cry, and Lucy said, “She’s safe,” and lifted the hem of her damp apron to wipe her eyes.

“Safe!” Dolly said.

Lucy pushed her way out of the crowd of women and reached for her daughter, whose blond hair and chubby cheeks made her look so much like Dolly, taking her into her arms and holding her tight. Rosemary’s eye was black, and there was a long gash on her arm. She was barefoot, with most of her clothes torn away, and she shivered so. Lucy had no coat, so Dolly removed her cloak and wrapped it around the girl, but the little one was still cold. “Take her to the manager’s house,” Dolly said. “She’ll get pneumonia. I’ll watch for your Charlie.”

“Jack and Carrie and Lucia, too. I hope your three…” Lucy began, but they both knew what Lucy hoped, so she did not need to say it. “I’ll warm her up and be back.” Then she touched her sister’s arm, and when Dolly turned her gaze away from where the men were digging to look at her sister, Lucy said, “They’ll find them, Doll. They don’t know where they everyone are, but they’ll find them.” Lucy told herself that that had been a stupid thing to say. Of course the children would be found. But would they be found in time?

Dolly seemed to know that her sister meant well, and she smiled a little, motioning for Lucy to hurry. So Lucy carried her daughter the few hundred yards to the Foote house and went in through the back door. People always entered through the back door in Swandyke. Even in that time of great trouble, Lucy didn’t think to use the front door.

“Fetch her here,” Mittie McCauley said, indicating one of the straight chairs that the old woman had already drawn up to the stove in the kitchen. Lucy set down her daughter and wrapped a blanket around her. Grace and Mittie had already piled blankets on the table and were filling kettles with water and setting them on the cookstove.

“This is my daughter. She’s got a bad cut on her arm. The doctor ought to check her out. I’ve got a boy, Charlie—” Lucy said.

“You go on back. The doctor’s in the other room. We’ll see to your girl,” Grace said, interrupting Lucy, then turned to the child, recognizing her because she was one of her son’s playmates. “Rosemary, isn’t it? I remember your name because no other little girl in Swandyke has such pretty golden curls. We’ll feed you on cookies while Doc takes a look at you.” She brushed Rosemary’s hair out of her face and told her son to pass the plate, then find a shirt and overalls for Rosemary to wear. The little girl reached out with a cold hand and took two of the confections that Grace had baked that morning.

They did not look like cookies, but more like small cakes, Lucy thought. Maybe they were what passed for cookies with rich folks. Lucy’s heart swelled as she watched her daughter taste the treat. “Her choice food is cookies,” she said, barely able to get out the words because her heart was constricted. “I hate to leave her.”

“She’s fine with us,” Mittie said.

“I’ll be right back. I’ll just fetch Charlie.”

Mittie stopped her. “Your feet are wet. You’ll catch your death. Take these.” She sat down in a chair and removed her rubber shoes, handing them to Lucy. “And my coat, too.”

Lucy put on the shoes and coat and hurried back to the group of women. When she reached them, she saw that Doll had her arms around a little boy, who shook with cold. “They found your Charlie,” she said. “He’s safe, Lucy. Both of yours are safe.”

“Yours, Doll?” Lucy asked, hugging her son. “What news of yours?”

Doll shook her head, biting back tears. She might have thought it unfair, might have been a little jealous that Lucy’s two children were all right when her own three had not been found. But she was not. She joyed for her sister.

Just then, Henry Bibb, who had been working underground at the mine, came up beside his wife. He saw Charlie and smiled, then he turned to Lucy, but before he could ask, she said, “Rosemary’s at the manager’s house. She’ll be fine. You take Charlie up there. I’ll stay with my sister. Dolly needs me.”

Henry stared at Dolly, just then recognizing her. He had never seen his wife and her sister standing close together, but he did not comment on it. Instead, he asked, “Her children? Are they all right, Mother?”

Lucy shrugged.

“We will pray for you, Sister Dolly,” he said.

Then it was Lucy’s turn to stare. She’d never heard her husband utter Dolly’s name.

On the far side of the slide, the children were gathered in a group, frightened and whimpering, while two of the teachers tried to calm them.

“There’s no need to worry. The men will dig out your little friends in no time. They won’t have a scratch on them,” said the young teacher, who had been employed at the Swandyke school only since the fall.

The other teacher, the older one, who had been there for a long time, shushed her. “The children know better than that. They’ve lived here all their lives, and they know what an avalanche does. That’s no way to comfort them.” She raised her voice. “The men are digging as fast as they can. Let’s all go back to the schoolhouse. Your fathers will come for you when the road’s clear.”

She was herding the little ones toward the school when Essie reached the road, calling for Sophie. If the teachers—or the students, for that matter—thought it odd that a hooker was looking for one of the schoolchildren, they didn’t say anything. “Sophie?” asked Essie, breathless, as she reached the children. “Where’s my Sophie? Is she here?”

The teachers looked around but did not see Sophie, and then a girl spoke up, “She’s up ahead. She went with Rosemary to see the puppy. They were in a hurry.”

Essie looked at the older teacher, who gestured with her head at the tons of snow now resting at the bottom of the slide. “I’m afraid…”

Essie put her hands over her face.

“But the men are digging,” the teacher added. “There’s a good chance—” She stopped and then said brightly, “Would you help us? We need someone to take a list of the missing children to the families on the other side.” She corrected herself. “We need to tell them the names of the children who are safe. We’ll go back to the schoolhouse and—”

“Take them to the Pines,” Essie said. “It would possibly be good for them to go there. Miss Fanny’s got hot food. And beds she has.”