One Step Enough

by Carla Kelly

  After a prayer, Owen cradled his friend in his arms and wrapped him in the quilt Martha had left in the front room. He carried Richard to his new home of oak, surrounded by carved dragons of his homeland. Owen wailed every step of the journey, keening his sorrow to the sky.

  He thought he was alone, but he saw Della’s friend Eeva Koski and her husband, Kari, out of the corner of his eye. He took in their sympathy and something else on Eeva’s face as she looked behind him.

  Startled, he turned around to see Martha Evans following him, resolute and courageous.

  “Martha, no.”

  She ignored him, walking ahead to open the door to his house. Her face calm, she carefully took the quilt from her husband’s ruined body and arranged it just so in the coffin, a pat here a pat there.

  “It’s a lovely coffin, Owen, my dear.”

  “I didn’t want you to see him like this.”

  “Silly man. Do you think I did not look at him in the canvas bag?” she said, reminding Owen again of the strength of women.

  She watched as Owen gentled the body of her husband, lover, friend, and confidante into his new home. Without a doubt—no words passed between them—they both knew Richard Evans, choirmaster dubbed the sweetest singer by Bishop Parmley, had probably assembled the men’s section of the choir into some corner of paradise. Owen could almost hear them tuning up with “Men of Harlech,” all his lovely, dead friends.

  After kissing Owen’s cheek, Martha left as quietly as she came, to be followed into his house by Eeva Koski, looking not a bit pleased.

  “Kari tells me you made Della and Angharad get on the train,” she said, poking his chest for emphasis.

  He looked over his shoulder at Kari, who was regarding him with something close to amusement. “Aye. They don’t need to be here.”

  “You need them.”

  “I’ll be fine, Eeva,” he insisted, knowing how feeble he must sound to an audience of one irritated Finn and another trying not to smile.

  “You are not fine,” she said. “I am going to do something.”

  She turned on her heel and left his house in a swish of skirts that somehow managed to sound angry too.

  Owen stared after her. “What in the world … ?”

  Kari shrugged. “I learned that my life is much happier when I do not argue with someone who is probably right. It’s late. Go to bed.”

  “I don’t even have a bed.”

  “No, and you probably can’t sleep,” Kari agreed. “You’ll stagger around until you drop dead too.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen it happen. So have you. What a waste, considering that there is an almost-wife who would like to see more of your sorry carcass.”

  “I’ll try to sleep, Kari.”

  “See you later.”

  He tried, but he couldn’t. Kari was right. He was going to die without Della.

  Chapter 2

  L

  Bishop Parmley must have wired ahead after Owen put them on the train. Both Amanda and Jesse Knight were waiting for them at the depot in Provo three hours later.

  Della stared at the Scofield-bound train with a stack of coffins waiting to be loaded. She longed to sprint across the platform and leap aboard, hang decorum. She belonged nowhere but with Owen.

  At home, trust Amanda, Della’s shirttail relative, to know what Angharad needed. She helped the child from her coat. “Are you hungry? Your Uncle Jesse is famished and says I don’t feed him enough.”

  Angharad couldn’t help smiling at that, but then she put her hand to her mouth. “I shouldn’t laugh.”

  “Of course you should.” Amanda whispered theatrically in the child’s ear. “I know I feed him enough, but he always sneaks nuts and candy when he thinks I am not looking. When did you eat last?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Then it’s time for food.” She ushered Angharad toward the kitchen. “There is cinnamon bread cooling, and my cook is ready to slice some. What do you think?”

  Angharad nodded. “I think I could eat it. Might there be butter?”

  “Always,” Amanda said. “Scoot on into the kitchen.”

  “I can do dishes when I finish,” Owen’s daughter said, not one to neglect a social nicety.

  “That’s not …” Amanda began, but then she stopped. “Actually, Mrs. McNulty could use some help. Yes, please. I’ll take Della to the parlor because she looks tired.”

  With a backward glance at Della, Angharad went into the kitchen. As one, the Knights each linked an arm through Della’s and took her into the parlor, sliding shut the pocket doors behind them.

  Della told them everything that had happened. Beyond tears now, because her eyes hurt too much, she told them of sudden death, vacant-eyed widows, bewildered children, screams of anguish, and paper flowers intended to decorate for a dance that night strewn instead on miners’ torn bodies.

  “Owen used my bed and his and part of his grandfather’s carved box to fashion a coffin for the choirmaster and his best friend,” Della concluded. She accepted Uncle Jesse’s handkerchief. “He insisted that Angharad leave the canyon, but I belong with him. Tell me, why is life so hard? I want to go to sleep and wake up when all this misery is over.”

  “I’ve wished that a few times,” Uncle Jesse said. “We all have.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I rolled up my sleeves and went to work,” he said simply. “Go back tomorrow, Della. We’ll try to convince Angharad to stay, but I doubt we will win.”

  Leaning against Amanda, she closed her eyes. When she woke up hours later, she lay on the sofa. She put her hand to her eyes and felt a soft, damp cloth over them.

  “Your eyes were so red,” Amanda told her from the wing chair close by. “I thought a cloth might help.”

  Della sat up suddenly, looking around. “Angharad?”

  “She has more sense than you do,” Uncle Jesse said from the archway. “We ate our way through half a loaf of cinnamon bread. What a sweet child—she asked me quite politely if she could lie down in the fairy princess bedroom in the turret.”

  “She loves that room,” Della said. “So do I.”

  His expression turned contemplative. “She wanted to rest her eyes before she went back up the canyon to Da.”

  “We have to go back,” Della said. She sat up and felt the parlor spin around. “Oh, I am dizzy.”

  Uncle Jesse came closer. “You’ve not let an ounce of your guard down since the mine blew, have you?”

  “How could I?”

  She closed her eyes but there it was—the explosion, the bodies, the shrieks and moans, her little students adrift in an adult world with no anchor, her own horror at finding Owen’s blue-and-white-striped shirt on the pile outside the boardinghouse where the dead were being washed, and the shock of seeing Owen in his own kitchen later, when she thought he was dead.

  There was another matter. In the middle of all this, she was back at the Molly Bee again, waiting to hear if her father was alive or dead. But that was years ago. She didn’t have time for Papa now. Maybe later. “I must go back.”

  “In the morning,” Amanda told her. “Go upstairs to your daughter.”

  “My daughter. I wonder what Angharad will call me, after I marry her father.”

  “As she was drifting off to sleep, she asked me when Mam was coming to bed,” Uncle Jesse told her. “She means you, Della.”

  L

  Della woke in the morning as the sun seeped around the window blind, her mind empty of everything except the reality that she had slept all night.

  She listened to Angharad’s even breathing. Soon there would be funerals and more tumult as widows and fatherless children went away … somewhere.

  But where? She lay there, upset, thinking of her friends, and now there was her father in the background, gone these twelve years in his own mining mishap. Hadn’t she put his memory to rest? Why was he here too?

  She closed her eyes, remembering a sermon given Sunday before the world fell apar
t in Winter Quarters. Nahum Powell, Tamris Powell’s husband and now a dead man, had spoken on the topic of hardship, something everyone who mined coal was already well acquainted with.

  Della remembered how Brother Powell had leaned on the pulpit in that casual way of his and reminded the congregation that no matter how hard things were mining coal, they were still in God’s hands, and He was mindful of them.

  She turned on her side, only to gaze into Angharad’s dark Welsh eyes, open and questioning. She touched the child’s hair, smoothing it down.

  “Da?”

  “We’re going home.”

  L

  Two telegrams waited for Della as she came downstairs with her arm around Angharad. Growing up in a Colorado mining camp and later in a lawyer’s house in Salt Lake City, Utah, she knew two things about telegrams: one was always bad news; two were worse.

  Calmly she slit one envelope, read the few words, and handed it to Amanda. Be still and know that God is God, she thought, remembering Nahum Powell’s sermon. She asked Angharad to go into the dining room and bring her an apple from the fruit bowl. The obedient child gave her no argument.

  “Eeva Koski is one of my Finnish friends in the canyon. I teach—taught—her daughter Tilda. She says Owen isn’t sleeping, isn’t eating, and she fears for him.”

  “Are you surprised?” Amanda asked.

  “No. He seems to feel some … some odd remorse that he is still alive.”

  “I’ve noticed that after mines collapse,” Uncle Jesse said from the doorway, looking as serious as she had ever seen him. “A rock crushes one miner, and the man working next to him is unscathed. It drives …” He stopped. “It causes some distress to the survivor. Let us leave it at that.”

  Della opened the other telegram and felt the tiniest bit of hope. “This is from Mary Ann Parmley, the bishop’s wife. Bishop says please return, and he also has a solution for us. I wonder what he can mean.”

  “Parmley is a shrewd man,” Uncle Jesse said. He clapped his hands once, decisive now. “I’ll go hold the train.” He started out the door then leaned in, smiling. “I can do that, you know. It’s a perk of stockholder power, and now and then I have no qualms about collecting.”

  “While you’re at it, send a telegram to Sister Parmley,” Amanda said.

  Jesse gave his wife a little salute. When Angharad returned from the dining room, Della took the apple from her, looked at it, and laughed out loud.

  “I didn’t know those apples were wax,” she exclaimed. “They look so real and I wanted one.”

  Angharad struggled not to laugh. Della touched her shoulder. “It’s all right to laugh,” she said simply. “You know your father would laugh.”

  “Even now?” Angharad asked, as her grin widened.

  “Even now, because it’s funny,” Della assured her.

  They packed and were on the train in twenty minutes. As Della left for the depot where Uncle Jesse waited, Amanda whispered in her ear that she would find a house for them, and not to worry about it. Della was too shy to suggest that they look for a bed too since Owen had used both of theirs to make Richard’s coffin. They could work out that little detail after a wedding in Manti.

  At the depot, Jesse told her to be brave and kissed her cheek. He had another telegram in his hand. “It just arrived.”

  He must have noticed the sudden alarm in her tired eyes because he smiled and waved the yellow sheet at her like a fan. “It’s from your great Salt Lake friend, Mr. Auerbach himself. See the return address?”

  She opened it on the spot because she knew Uncle Jesse wanted to know what was inside. “ ‘Courage, Della,’ ” she read out loud. “ ‘I’ll have a little something for everyone in the canyon. I have employment, if you need it. Your friend, Sam.’ ”

  Della rested her forehead against Uncle Jesse’s chest. “Please tell him thank you and that I will see him soon.”

  “Consider it done,” he said. “Better get moving.”

  Della grasped his arms. “Thank you and Amanda for what you are doing for us,” she said.

  “You know she would call this one of many back payments owed to you,” he said gently. “She still anguishes that she had no idea how difficult life was for you all those years in Salt Lake with her cousin Caroline.”

  “I was told never to complain or say anything to anyone.”

  Uncle Jesse sighed. “If only we had known.” He brightened then with the same resolve that had made him famous and wealthy in Utah mining circles. “But we’re moving forward now, and so should you. God keep you these next few days, Della.”

  She and Angharad made themselves small in their seats on the train, two people in a railcar full of older boys with shovels, and serious men in suits and carrying briefcases. Della watched the boys and saw the grim purpose on their faces. Either church leaders or scoutmasters must have recruited them to dig graves.

  The men in suits must be lawyers, or state officials, or perhaps insurance agents. She couldn’t imagine all the paperwork involved in catastrophe, but there it sat with her and Angharad on the train.

  She noted with odd satisfaction that this time there were no coal cars barreling through the canyon. Coal had never stopped for one or two deaths. Maybe two hundred men and boys meant something.

  As Angharad slept, Della recalled a song Sammy Padfield had taught them during a lull in the school day, something his English father, dead now, had sung. How did it go? “ ‘On a May day morning early,’ ” she sang softly. “ ‘Here a moo, there a moo, here a pretty moo.’ ”

  The words changed in her mind, and she appalled herself by singing, “ ‘On a May day morning early, here a death, there a death, here an awful death …’ ”

  In Colton, where they changed trains for the steeper pull into Scofield, Mary Ann Parmley met them, little Willie on her hip with Mary and Maria close by.

  “Mr. Knight’s telegram arrived two hours ago, and I decided I couldn’t stand another moment in the canyon,” Sister Parmley said as they came aboard the branch line. Her eyes took in the boys with shovels crowding on too. “It’s hard, Della, but you know that.”

  Bless Mary Ann Parmley for bringing along her daughters. Maria and Mary took Angharad with them down the aisle. In moments, they were playing cat’s cradle, heads together.

  “I’m worried, Sister Parmley,” Della said. “There was a telegram from one of my Finnish friends and …”

  “You should have seen her corner Thomas and demand that he do something to get you back into the canyon,” Mary Ann said. She gave Willie a cookie, which settled him down. “You have fierce watchdogs among the Finns.” She smiled. “Must be all that sauna and rolling bare in the snow.”

  Della nearly smiled. “They’re loyal and true. Poor Owen. It’s too much, isn’t it?”

  Mary Ann nodded. “Too much for a man who escaped certain death. He wonders why he is still alive.” She sighed, as if irritated with herself. “Della, I get exasperated when someone says the Lord will never give us more than we can bear. He doesn’t give it to us, so I can’t blame Him. But sometimes too much is too much.”

  “I can’t argue that.” She looked at Angharad sitting with her friends, concentrating on the string passing between their fingers, children again, where only a short time ago Owen’s daughter wore the face of someone six times her age.

  “We’re going to feel almost normal again someday, aren’t we?” she asked Mary Ann. “Not now, and not tomorrow, maybe not for weeks or months, but we will, won’t we?”

  “I think we’ll be different,” Mary Ann said finally. “My household is in turmoil. My brother-in-law William …” She bowed her head and Della leaned closer to her. “My sister-in-law and her little ones have moved in with us, and Della, did you know she is expecting a baby this fall? What has coal done to us?”

  It was a question with no answer.

  “Maybe not the same then,” Della said. “Maybe we will be better, stronger, braver, and kinder. As for coal, I have had enoug
h.”

  “Has Owen?”

  “He said he has, but I don’t know,” Della said honestly. “Eeva once mentioned something called the lure of the mines.” Her voice trailed off as she remembered everyone gone now because of coal and mines.

  Better, stronger, braver, kinder. The words seemed to match the clack-clack of the train. Better, stronger, braver, kinder.

  Chapter 3

  L

  They reached the Scofield Depot and the engine hissed to a stop. Della thought she was prepared, but could anyone be prepared? Hand in hand, she and Angharad stared at coffins stacked on top of each other.

  A carriage waited for them. Sister Parmley wasted not a minute getting the girls inside as she tried to turn them from the stark view. Angharad looked back, distress written all over her face.

  “These are the last of seventy-five coffins that arrived from Denver earlier today,” Mary Ann said, her voice low in the quiet carriage, as the driver started into Winter Quarters Canyon. “There weren’t enough ready-made coffins available in all of Utah.”

  “The ladies of Salt Lake and Provo are gathering flowers to send tomorrow. Amanda Knight told me.”

  “How kind of them,” Mary Ann said simply. “Everyone wants to help.”

  Mary Ann glanced at her timepiece when the carriage pulled up to the Parmley residence. “The bishop said he would be in the Wasatch Store and that he would have Owen with him. I’ll take Angharad with me because it’s time for lunch.”

  Angharad took a moment to convince, her dark eyes rebellious. “Da needs us both,” she insisted.

  “I know, but the bishop wants to see me and your father,” Della said, wishing she knew what lay ahead. Time to try some negotiation. “Sister Parmley mentioned pancakes with butter and maple syrup.”

  “Perhaps,” Angharad said, after giving the matter some thought.

  “You’ll see us soon. I promise.”

  The driver indicated he could drive her to the store, but Della shook her head. “I’ll walk. You need to be moving coffins.” Besides that, I can’t sit on a wagon carrying coffins.