Whiter Than Snow (23 page)

Ted carried the girl to the crowd of mothers, and Lucy recognized the brown hair so like her own. “It’s Lucia! Let’s take her up to the Foote place.” Henry stopped long enough to wrap his coat around the girl, who was neither bruised nor scratched, but only still, and then he did an odd thing. Later, Lucy asked how he’d thought to do it, but he didn’t know. He put his mouth to the little girl’s mouth and breathed into it. He forced another breath into her mouth, and another. The women standing at the edge of the slide exchanged looks, because they had never seen such a thing. But Lucy had such faith in her husband at that moment that she knew Lucia would be restored.

And in a minute, she was. The small chest began to move, and before long, Lucia’s eyes opened. Her own eyes filled with wonder, Lucy looked at Henry with awe and whispered, “We’ll take her to Dolly.”

Together, they carried her up the mountain, where Lucy found her sister sitting in the manager’s house on a chair by the cookstove, a blanket wrapped around her, a cup of coffee in her hands. But she was not aware of the cup, and the coffee was cold. Lucy took it from Dolly and handed it to a woman, then said, “Here is something precious for you to hold.” Henry set Lucia on Dolly’s lap. Dolly, too overcome to speak, simply put her arms around the girl and held her tight.

“I went to sleep in the snow, Mama,” Lucia lisped.

“You it was who saved her life, Mr. Bibb,” said a woman who had entered the house behind Lucy. “There wasn’t a God’s thing to your girl until Mr. Bibb breathed her life back in her. He brought a miracle.”

“Likely there was an air pocket,” Henry explained, uneasy with the praise. “I’ll be getting back to the digging now. There’s two more still missing.”

Henry left, and Lucy sat down on the floor beside Dolly’s chair. “Is there any hope for Jack and Carrie?”

Dolly looked down at her sister. “There’s a preacher in there. He said the Lord took them because they’re Christians and it’s best to take them when they’re young, while they’re saved.”

“That’s hogwash,” Lucy said.

“I was thinking so myself,” Dolly replied.

An hour passed, two, then three. The children on the west side of the avalanche were led across the snow to the crowd of mothers, who took them home. The group of waiting women thinned out then, and some of the ones who had stayed behind in support began slipping away as night came on, bringing the winter cold. In lantern light now, the men kept on digging, their figures casting eerie shadows on the snow, long, thin shadows, as though they were giants. When their hands grew too cold to hold their shovels, the men went to the manager’s house, where they warmed themselves with the stews and roasts, potatoes, the pies and cakes. Grace served them on her good china plates, took the dishes out of the cupboard and used them instead of the cheap earthenware because she thought no dinner party she’d ever give was as important as the gathering in her kitchen that night. She even set the table in the dining room with sterling flatware and linen napkins, but the townspeople were more comfortable in the kitchen, standing up, the plates in their hands.

Jim Foote came into the kitchen once. He had been directing the digging and had gone to the house for only a minute to warm his frozen hands and gulp down a cup of coffee. Grace had not known he’d entered the kitchen and looked up with surprise as she saw her husband glancing around the room, taking in the table set with food, the men standing near the stove eating, Grace filling plates. He caught her eye and nodded, smiling a little. “I’m proud of you.” He mouthed the words, but Grace caught them, and for the first time in her marriage, Grace was proud of herself. In fact, she gloried in her husband’s praise. It was as if the two of them were a team that day, he in charge of the rescue, she ministering to the rescuers, not Lady Bountiful, but just another woman bringing aid to her neighbors. She started across the room to go her husband, but a child touched her arm, and she looked away. When she turned to Jim again, he was gone.

Minder remained in the bedroom that served as a morgue, hoping against all hope to see a leg move, an eyelid twitch. The minister tried to say words of comfort, but nothing comforted Minder. When Dolly crept into the bedroom to see her two dead children, she asked the preacher why, but his reply felt empty. He was a newly minted minister, and his inadequacy added to her grief—and to his, too, it seemed, because it appeared that the young man had taken the tragedy as his own.

After a time, Ted and Dolly took Lucia home. Henry and Lucy and their children went home, too, but something in Lucy would not let her remain there. Her body itched and twisted and would not stay still, and after the children were in bed, she told her husband that she would return to the avalanche. “There’s two not yet found and a woman there…” she said, but did not finish. In her mind, she saw the girl from the Pines standing in the cold and thought she should not be alone. So Lucy put on her arctics and her heavy coat and mittens and, taking a blanket with her, trudged back to the site of the avalanche, where men were yet digging. Many, exhausted from the work, had gone home, knowing there was no chance now that a child would be found alive. They would return with the daylight.

Essie Snowball stood by herself at the edge of the snowfield, near a pile of caps and mittens, shoes and schoolbooks that the men had uncovered in their digging. She had stopped shivering and stamping her feet. In fact, she was no longer aware of the cold that reached every part of her body. Martha, the woman who cared for Sophie, had stayed with her for a time, but Martha was restless and said she couldn’t bear the waiting. She would be more help cooking for the rescuers. “I can outcook any woman. You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, and Essie shook her head, not quite hearing.

So Essie stood there like a lone sentinel, apart from the others milling around, both men and women. Lucy went up to her and put the blanket around Essie’s shoulders. She didn’t ask if Sophie had been found, because if she had been, Essie would not be standing there. Nor did she offer words of comfort, because they would be as inadequate as the preacher’s. Instead, she stood beside Essie and waited, as women in mining towns always waited in a tragedy. From time to time, others came up to them and asked if there was news. Like Lucy, they could not completely abandon the one woman who waited. It was the way things were done there. The grief of one was the grief of all.

Mittie McCauley carried a plate of food from the manager’s house, encouraging Essie to eat. Others brought coffee, tea, even liquor, although Essie did not consume spirits. The women knew Essie was a hooker, but they did not look at her with hostility or even curiosity, but only with pity and maybe guilt that other children had survived while Essie’s daughter had not. They knew that by then—and Essie did, too—there was no chance the girl would be found alive. Essie’s soul was not filled with hope, but only with resignation.

“It turns the heart heavy, waiting like this, the knowing and not knowing,” one woman told Lucy.

“I wouldn’t be her if it turned me into gold,” remarked another.

They came and went, some talking, more to steady their own nerves than Essie’s, others standing silently. Essie did not respond to them, but she knew they were there and drew comfort from their presence.

Sometimes the men, too, stopped their digging and came to stand beside Essie. “We’re doing our best, missus,” one said, and Essie thanked him. Essie roused herself then. She took a bite of meat from the plate a woman had given her, wondered at the taste, and asked Lucy what it was.

“Pork,” Lucy replied.

“I never ate a bite of pork in my life,” Essie said.

“Never?” Lucy was surprised, because pork was a favorite in a mining camp.

“I’m a Jew,” Essie explained. “We don’t eat pork.”

“Oh.” Lucy did not think that was something worth remarking on. She had known Jews in college and found them no different from anyone else.

But another woman standing nearby overheard and muttered, “Oh my goodness!” And Essie knew it would not be long before the woman told it around that one of the hookers at the Pines was Jewish. But she didn’t care.

The way the women waited with her reminded Essie of her childhood, when death and childbirth brought the women into the crowded apartments in the Lower East Side tenements. There had been wailing and lamenting and raging, but sometimes in the middle of grief, there had also been humor and raucousness. The mirrors had been covered, and friends had come with their cakes and condolences to sit Shiva.

It was so different here, the people standing silent, resigned, instead of screaming their loss. Still, they seemed to bind themselves to one another. She had missed that connection with women, for there weren’t many deep friendships formed in a hookhouse. Essie longed to have her sister with her now, her mother, some of the old women whose keening she had once found stifling but now would have eased her pain. She was grateful for the woman who stood beside her. Essie wondered if she should ask her name.

A man came over to the women. He carried wood that he had chopped and arranged it into a sort of tepee and set it on fire. He brought more wood and stacked it, saying it wouldn’t burn as well as it should because the fire was set on a base of snow. Still, if they fed it, the fire would keep going and warm them. Then someone carried old chairs from a house nearby, and the women sat down. “I know what a clerk in a store feels like, standing up all day,” Lucy remarked, and Essie smiled a little. “Did you ever work in a store, Mrs. Schnable?”

“A factory. I sat.”

The wind came up, and Lucy tightened her coat around her and pulled her cap down over her ears. “Your girl, Sophie, how old is she?” Lucy said
is
on purpose, instead of
was.

“Six. She’s in the first grade.”

“My boy, Charlie, is eight. I think I know her. Does she have long black hair?” It was an easy guess. Most of the girls in Swandyke had long dark hair.

“Hair like a raven. And her neck and fingers, long, like mine,” Essie replied.

“Pretty like you, then,” Lucy said, “and smart.”

“She read. Before she started school, she read. And did sums. And draws! Like an angel, she draws.”

“A sower of all seeds,” Lucy said, and when Essie did not understand, Lucy explained. “Many talents. She has many talents.”

They talked then about their children, about school. “I didn’t like it that the school was over there, on the other side of the slide,” Lucy said. “We shouldn’t have allowed it.”

“Who knew?” Essie replied, adding that she’d been glad the school was located where it was, because she could catch a glimpse of her daughter on the road. “Was that your sister, the one whose two…” When Lucy said it was, Essie asked, “Ought’n you to be with her?”

“She has her husband.” Lucy paused and added, “We didn’t speak for the longest time. It was foolish, wasn’t it?”

“Not so foolish. I haven’t heard from my sister in a long time, either. Mama and Papa, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me after I got married. They called my husband a bum. They were right. I wrote them about Sophie, but her they don’t care about, either.”

“It’s their loss.”

“It’s my loss,” Essie said fiercely. “My loss.” She quieted herself, and after a time, she said, “There is no such idiot as me. I should have given up the life last year and gone to Denver. I’m good with a needle. I could be a dressmaker.” She cried, “But no, I had to have more money before I left…” Her voice faded out.

“You can still be a dressmaker,” Lucy told her gently. “You don’t have to go back to the Pines.”

Essie didn’t reply, and the two sat and watched the shadows on the snow.

Just before midnight, the men grew quiet and gathered in one spot. There was a hush, and the women leaned forward in their chairs, trying to hear, but the wind took away the words of the workers. Essie stood and walked slowly into the slide area, but a man held up his hand, and she stopped. “We found something,” he said. “A hand, a mitten on it. Did your girl wear mittens?”

“I don’t know.”

The men didn’t talk as they dug the body out of the snow, didn’t hurry, for surely it was a body. No one had ever lived that long buried in an avalanche. And it would be the body of a girl. Only two children were unaccounted for now, and both of them were girls—Sophie Schnable and Jane Cobb. They dug deeper, and they uncovered the little white face. One of the workers went to Essie and said, “Missus…”

Essie looked at him a long time, and then she began to wail, a primitive keening that erupted from deep inside her, that came from her bones. She cursed the evil that robbed her of her daughter, screamed her loss, beat her breast, and tore at her hair. Not one of those standing near the avalanche had ever heard such lamenting. They were people whose grief was mostly private, who showed their sorrow inside their homes. They looked at Sophie with fear and perhaps shame that the woman’s wailing was so public and uncontrolled, so animal-like.

After a time, Lucy took Essie into her arms and said, “Come, we’ll take Sophie where she’ll be safe.” She led the way to the manager’s house, where the lights were still on. A man followed them, carrying the girl.

The other little bodies had been taken to the undertaker’s parlor, where an order had been sent to Denver for children’s coffins, but Grace had left the bedroom as it was, the window open, so the room was as cold as the air outside. “Put her on the bed,” Grace told the man, and she herself tried to straighten the broken arms and legs, but they were frozen into grotesque positions. So Grace covered the body, letting only the face show and the long black hair, and she and Lucy stood to one side while Essie knelt beside her daughter. The two observers stayed like that, shivering in the cold room, until Grace raised Essie to her feet and led her into the kitchen, where a low fire burned in the cookstove, keeping the food warm. Grace urged Essie to have a cup of tea, a plate of soup, but the mother could not swallow anything.

Essie swayed a little on her feet, her eyes heavy, her hands gripping the back of a chair, and Lucy, knowing how tired she was, suggested that she go home and sleep.