One Step Enough

by Carla Kelly

Owen bowed his head. Martha, one of many canyon women who had nursed Angharad in the desperate days after Gwyna’s death, had asked the impossible. He could not tell her aye, nor could he tell her no. He raised his head and conveyed everything in silence to Della, his wife of no more than ten hours, trusting her as he had never trusted anyone in his life.

  To his infinite relief, Della understood. “Owen will stand with Angharad and me, and we will all try to sing.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I cannot say it will be our finest performance, but we three will try. Depend upon it.”

  “I can ask no more,” Martha said, her voice serene even as her twined hands shook.

  Polite hostess to the end, she saw them out the door and closed it quietly behind them. Owen knew she would sit close to her husband’s coffin until morning. Seven years ago, with an infant in his arms, he had rested his head against Gwyna’s casket and wept until exhaustion claimed him.

  They had visited every home Bishop Parmley had requested. They walked to the Parmley home, left the list of instructions with Mary Ann, and picked up Angharad and Della’s carpetbag.

  In silence, they walked to Owen’s sister-in-law’s house next door to the Edwards boardinghouse, where the pile of dead men’s clothes remained. Della sighed, and he knew she was remembering her distress at finding his blue-and-white-striped shirt on that scorched pile.

  Mabli had finished serving dinner in the boardinghouse and had leftover food on her own table. “I made too much,” she said, her head down. “There are only ten men there now, and I forgot.”

  Almost overwhelmed by the urge to sleep, Owen dragged out his timepiece. Half ten o’clock. No wonder he was tired.

  Della put her arms around Angharad. “Dearest, would you stay here with your Aunt Mabli?”

  “Oh, I …” Angharad started, her eyes full of distress.

  Bless his wonderful sister-in-law, so protective of Gwyna years ago and equally kind to Gwyna’s daughter now. She rubbed Angharad’s cheek with the back of her hand. “I would rather not sleep alone tonight, my love. I need you.”

  He watched his daughter with real appreciation as she looked from him to her aunt and back. “Would you mind if I stayed here, Da?” she asked, and then she gave him a look both practical and womanly, which touched his heart. “Mabli would be alone, and you have …”

  Her eyes questioning, she touched Della’s arm. “What do I call you now?”

  “Whatever you like,” Della said, and then she laughed. “As long as it’s not Miss Anders! I may have started the day as your school teacher, but I don’t appear to be ending it that way.”

  Angharad gave Owen an apologetic look this time, full of tenderness because she was a thoughtful child. “Da, I never knew my mother. I love her, but would you mind if … if …”

  She paused and Owen could nearly see her child’s mind at work, wanting to be polite, but uncertain of the right words, especially since they were speaking English because of Della. He could also tell she did not want to hurt his feelings. With real appreciation, his tired mind threw off exhaustion and let him journey through their years together, father and daughter. Now there was Della too, and he saw no resentment in Angharad’s eyes.

  “Would I mind if you call her Mam now?” he asked, finishing her thought.

  Angharad nodded. Deep in his heart, Owen could nearly hear Gwyna’s sigh of satisfaction that he had finally taken the step she had probably been waiting years for, since she was a kind woman and a practical one, much like her daughter, and she had loved him.

  “I think … I know … your mother is probably rejoicing right now,” he said quietly. “Before she passed, she told me to do my best. Aye, call this nice lady Mam.”

  Della sniffed back tears and then folded his daughter in her arms. “Mam it is,” his new wife said.

  Here we are, Gwyna, Owen thought. He felt no sadness, only relief. His arms around Della, Angharad, and Mabli, he wanted to tell everyone in the canyon that life was going to go on. It might not seem so this evening, but it would. Seven years ago, he wouldn’t have wagered even a groat that he would ever feel happy again.

  Maybe even more than happy, as he watched Angharad and Della so close together, as if they belonged that way. If he had died in the mine, he had no doubt Della would never abandon his daughter. She was not a woman of half measures.

  Angharad inclined her head toward Della.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mam, but he snores, and more’s the pity.”

  Della laughed, the sound wonderful to his ears.

  Chapter 5

  L

  Funerals tomorrow, starting with the Finns,” Owen said as they walked up the canyon. “I’ll need my …” He shook his head as if to clear it. “… my something. Della, I’m losing my mind.”

  “You’re tired. Maybe your suit and a good shirt?”

  He replied in Welsh, and she reminded him to speak English. “Aye. A suit. Shirt.”

  They walked in silence to his house, which seemed strangely out of place because there was no coffin in front of it.

  He opened the door. “I’ll warn you. It’s a mess,” he said, ushering her in.

  He was right; it was a mess. The remains of two bed frames and the rest of the large carved box littered the floor in the front room, along with wood shavings and sawdust. Della peeked in the kitchen. Her heart pounded as she remembered that late-night sight of him, stoking the stove, when she thought he was dead.

  She walked to the door of his room, which looked surprisingly spacious with the carved box and his bed gone. Owen just stood there, as if wondering where he was.

  “Your suit?” she reminded him. “I hope it doesn’t have sawdust on it.”

  He gave her a strange look. “I doubt anyone would notice.” He sighed. “This place is a wreck. How did Angharad and I live here?”

  “I know it looked better than this.”

  “Not much.”

  The bare mattress and the pillows and blankets appeared as forlorn as the cardboard boxes, stenciled “Pleasant Valley Coal Company,” with his possessions inside. Della knew Angharad’s little room lay beyond, built out of his larger room, so she stood in that doorway, admiring the dollhouse, seeing the bed neatly made, the child’s clothes on their wooden pins. The tidiness soothed her soul. It will be this way again, she reminded herself.

  He found his suit and brought it to her. “No sawdust. I have one of those new shirts you bought me at Christmas, still in its package. Here is my green cravat. Angharad likes it best.”

  She carried the clothing into the kitchen, draping it over a chair. He followed behind with his new shirt, and she put it on the chair too.

  She tensed to hear the sound of a wagon heading deeper into the canyon toward Finn Town. She thought of her friends Eeva and Kari Koski and all the mourning in the sauna, where Eeva had told her the men would be laid out and shrouded for their coffins.

  Have I done enough there? she asked herself and went to open the front door.

  Owen stopped her, his hand on the door. “Don’t open it. I can’t bear to see one more coffin and hear one more wail, and … and feel like a black-hearted cur because I survived.”

  It was finally too much. “No more what-ifs, my love. You can’t change the fact that you survived,” she told him as she walked him toward the bedroom.

  “I don’t want to change the facts. Am I a coward?”

  “That is the last thing you are, Owen Davis,” she said, at a loss in the face of his great sorrow.

  She saw all of his confusion, as if he sat on the mantrip up to the Number Four and it was Tuesday again. “Richard scolded me and told me to pray better. I did what he said, the Holy Spirit answered, and I listened. I listened! My last view of Richard Evans was his big smile that I had finally done what I should have done sooner: petition the Lord for a real answer and not what I wanted.” He kissed the top of Della’s head. “I wish I could tell Richard what I learned.”

  He must not have been aware o
f how much he leaned on her. She braced herself, not willing to stop the words that poured out of him.

  “I know I did the right thing, but it’s hard to bear,” he continued. “For years, I mined coal beside my friends, and now they are gone.”

  “You are here,” she reminded him.

  “God’s mystery. Evidently I have work to do.”

  But not in a mine, she thought.

  He leaned against her, and she closed her eyes, so tired. He felt heavier and heavier until she realized he was asleep standing up.

  “Silly man,” she whispered.

  Unsure of what to do but unwilling to wake him, she backed herself toward a chair where he had set a box of stockings. She bumped it off with her hip and sat him down. Now what?

  She watched him a moment, satisfied herself that he wasn’t going to fall off the chair, and hurried into the kitchen, where she lit a fire in the stove to warm some water.

  She leaned against the table, wondering how to face two days of funerals, then felt ashamed. She had lost no one in the disaster. The Lord Almighty must be tired of her, and she couldn’t blame Him.

  When the water in the reservoir was barely lukewarm, she dipped out a basin, found a washcloth, soap, and a towel, and returned to Owen’s bedroom. She lit the kerosene lamp and almost wished she hadn’t because his dark eyes were disconcertingly half-open. Cautious, she passed her hand in front of them. Nothing. I certainly hope you don’t sleep like that every night, she thought.

  How to proceed? She closed his eyelids. She wetted down his hair, remembering a time he joked that Welshmen mostly had black hair because the Lord knew they would be mining coal.

  The water was black now, so she threw it out the kitchen door, wondering how to get him down to the mattress on the floor. Although they were much the same height, he far outweighed her in muscle. She had taken off his socks and was washing his feet when someone knocked.

  The door opened, and she heard footsteps then, “Sister Anders? I mean, Sister Davis?”

  She could have sunk to the floor in relief to see Bishop Parmley. “I really need your help,” Della said, then put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, but you probably came here to ask us to help you with something. I’m sorry!”

  “I had a distinct impression that you needed some help,” he said. “Let’s get this man to bed.”

  Della didn’t mean to babble, but she did anyway, sounding like a child plucking at her mother’s sleeve with the news that she was trying to clean him up, but she didn’t want to wake him and had no idea how to get Owen in his nightshirt and down on the mattress on the floor because he weighed more than she did.

  She stopped, tears on her face, embarrassed and so lonely for help from someone who had to be more tired than she was. “I’m sorry, Bishop,” she said.

  “No fears, Della. In good days and bad days, you know I walk this canyon every evening with my lantern. Something told me to stop.”

  She hugged Bishop Parmley, grateful for his assistance. Between them, they stripped Owen of his clothing, pulled his nightshirt down over his head, and set him gently on the mattress, all without Owen doing more than mumbling and opening his eyes once to stare around owlishly, then returning to slumber.

  “When he wakes up, tell him the Finn’s funerals will start at nine. The Koskis want you there.” She heard his sigh. “We Parmleys will be going to Provo in the afternoon for my brother’s funeral, and all the Gatherums’ too,” he said.

  “We’ll be there for the Finns,” Della said, even as she trembled inside.

  “Thank you. I’ve just come from Finn Town, and every woman there requested your presence in particular.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  He kissed her forehead and left the house.

  Della stood in the doorway until he was out of sight. She locked the door and stood a moment in the front room, wondering if the Knights had found them a place to live in Provo, something modest because they didn’t have much and were currently unemployed.

  She pulled her nightgown from her carpetbag and couldn’t help smiling as she put it on. “I came to a canyon to teach school,” she said softly, even though she probably could have banged a gong and Owen wouldn’t have heard a thing, “and look what I found: a snoring Welshman.”

  Chapter 6

  L

  Della woke in the morning to Owen Davis raised up on one elbow, looking at her with eyes fully open now and appreciative, even though she knew her hair was a mess.

  “I’m a sight,” she mumbled, patting the bedclothes for the hairpins she had neglected to remove and trying to tug her nightgown down.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, and he kissed her.

  Early that morning, in a quiet house in a silent coal camp, Della truly became Owen’s wife. For precious moments, there was no grief in the Davis house, nothing but each other, and it felt supremely right.

  Della had to laugh when Owen assured her, “With more rest, I will amaze you.”

  “What a relief to know that I am married to a modest, circumspect man,” she told the ceiling.

  “Della, Della,” he murmured. “You’re going to keep me humble, aren’t you?

  “Someone must,” she said, which made him laugh out loud.

  He sobered quickly and pulled the blankets up around them. “I don’t even want to face this day, but you made it a little more likely that I can. There aren’t sufficient words to convey my gratitude,” he said frankly.

  “I believe that is what our bishop intended,” she said as she sat up and stretched, then shrieked when he tugged her down to tickle her.

  Before his eyes closed again, she reminded him that the Finnish funerals and others would begin at nine o’clock.

  “I wish I didn’t have to even think about it,” he said. She heard his sorrow and something more. He put his hands behind his head. “I have already told you about what happened to my father and brothers, dead in the Abercarn Horror back in Wales and sealed in that mine, never to come out.”

  “Don’t,” she said, putting her hand over his eyes.

  “I must. There were more than one hundred graves for the men who … who were brought to the surface before the mine was flooded to put out the fire. I was ten. I still remember.”

  “And I remember my father’s funeral,” she said. “I cried and cried and no one held me.”

  Silence. Owen slept. “But he was only one man,” she told her sleeping husband. “You saw one hundred there and here are hundreds more, the Finns first. Does anyone need this much death in large numbers?” She sighed. “Or one by one?”

  The thought brought her to her feet, and she began searching for her clothes. Eeva Koski had said Mari Luoma wanted to see her, and there was no time like now, even though it was early. Who could sleep? she wondered and then shook her head in amusement. Except maybe a newly married man too long on a fallow field.

  She looked down at her sleeping husband. “I’d rather stay here with you,” she whispered, then reminded herself that she had other matters to attend to. Owen would keep.

  Mari and Heikki Luoma had come to her at the beginning of the school term, Heikki asking so politely if his bride could join the lower grades class, sit in the back quietly, and learn more English. And so Mari had, until her pregnancy became obvious, and Miss Clayson, a stickler for propriety, had said that was enough.

  Miss Clayson. Della dressed quickly. Surely there was time to see both Mari and Miss Clayson before the funerals.

  She walked quickly to Finn Town, hands rubbing cold arms, head down because she didn’t want to see the coffins, now filled and loaded onto wagons that trundled down the canyon, heading for the cemetery. She stood in silence by the Finnish communal sauna, where she had enjoyed many happy evenings with her now-widowed friends.

  Her heart sore, she watched as other Finns removed coffins from the sauna and loaded them onto a waiting wagon. Some of the men nodded to her, those lucky miners on the afternoon shift who had been home sleepi
ng when their countrymen died in the Number Four and Number One. She nodded back.

  Kari came to her when the coffins were tied down. With tears in her eyes, she watched as he patted two coffins. “Your brothers?” she whispered to the wind.

  She wondered at the enormous swell of grief that filled her heart, then realized her mind had taken another odd turn back to the Molly Bee on the Colorado plateau. She remembered she had done that precise thing.

  The memory compelled her forward to stand beside Kari and pat those two coffins, as well. His arm went around her as the wagon moved away.

  “My father died in a mine,” she told her friend’s husband. “I patted his coffin. Funny that it should take me this long to remember.”

  “Not so funny,” Kari said. “I have noticed, dear friend, that the mind pretty well does what it pleases at times like this.”

  They walked to his house and there was Eeva with her welcoming smile. Standing with her was Mari Luoma, dressed in black from head to toe, but her own smile wide as she held out her arms for her teacher.

  Della held her close as she could, considering that Mari’s pregnancy was far enough advanced to make it more convenient to stand a bit sideways. Her last view of Mari Luoma had been near the railroad tracks as Dr. Isgreen pulled her away from the approaching train. The vacant look was gone now, to Della’s relief.

  There were two other people in the room. When Della released Mari, her friend introduced them.

  “Isaak and Leena Mako, cousins of Heikki from Belt in Montana,” she said with a gesture. “Dear teacher, they are taking me home with them today.” Her lovely face softened as she rested a hand on her belly. “Heikki and I … This is our little American. I cannot return to Suomi.” Her head went up. “No. This land will do, and so I told the parents of Heikki only yesterday. I cannot return with them. I will not.”

  Della regarded the couple and saw kindness. She squeezed Mari’s hand. They embraced again.

  Della left as quietly as she had come. Her steps slowed as she neared the schoolhouse and then quickened as she saw Miss Clayson, dressed for travel, with a suitcase in her hand. She knew her prickly principal was not a demonstrative woman, but suddenly it didn’t matter. She held out her arms and embraced Miss Clayson, who set down her suitcase and hugged her back.