One Step Enough

by Carla Kelly

  “I hope you weren’t planning to leave without a goodbye,” Della scolded gently when she released her principal.

  “Farewells are hard,” Miss Clayson said. She visibly gathered herself together. “Remember in the library a few weeks ago when you gave me that classified section of the paper?”

  “I teased you about job-hunting, didn’t I?” Della said. “Cheeky of me.”

  “You do have that tendency,” Miss Clayson said, but with only a touch of her former asperity. “I’m going home to Boise to teach sixth grade and live with my mother.” She looked toward the cemetery. “I’m leaving now. I have not the courage for funerals of miners.”

  “Good luck to you, friend,” Della said. “I wish you well in Boise.”

  “And good luck to you and your miner. I hear you were married yesterday morning.” She handed Della a note. “Here is my Boise address. Let me hear from you.” She looked up the canyon. “Here he comes. I envied you for a while, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Della said, touched.

  “He had better take good care of you,” Miss Clayson said, and as Della had heard all year from her steely administrator, it wasn’t a suggestion.

  “Goodness, Dr. Isgreen already threatened him in person,” Della said, which made Lavinia Clayson laugh. “Thank you for more than I can ever say.”

  “Thank you.” Miss Clayson squeezed Della’s hand. “You’re not the only one who learned a lot in the Winter Quarters School this year.” Her chin quivered, but her gaze never wavered. “So did I.”

  Angharad had insisted they stop for her, but her Aunt Mabli came outside to tell them she was still asleep. “She doesn’t need this. I will keep her here,” Mabli said, and then she went back inside and closed the door so there was no argument.

  Della would have given her none. Her eyes on her husband, she watched him carefully as they walked to the cemetery, with its long trenches of coffins in place.

  Owen stood in silence for the brief service, head bowed and bare in the cold wind. He took her arm after the final prayer. “They came from so far. France, Switzerland, Germany, Finland. Same as me, seeking better lives. God bless us all.”

  She wasn’t surprised when he joined the boys and the mourners with shovels, a man with strength in his back from years of shooting down coal, then digging it out and loading big lumps onto ore cars.

  She wanted to turn away from the awful sight of so many coffins in trenches. The rain had turned to sleet that the wind tossed back at their faces, but she knew she would not leave until her husband finished his work. It touched her heart to see him look back at her, as if reassuring himself that she was there.

  I will never leave you, she told him silently.

  Her wait became immeasurably easier when she felt a gloved hand in hers.

  Startled, then delighted, she saw Kristina Aho, her blond loveliness set off by the immaculate cut of her gray suit. And there was her son Pekka, who had been Della’s first student to leave her class after his father died in a Number One cave-in last year.

  “I came for Viktor, my brother-in-law,” Kristina said in her ear as they hugged each other and then made room for Pekka, tidy in Finnish short pants and embroidered vest. “Reet is too young for this, so she stayed with my landlady in Salt Lake.”

  Mrs. Aho indicated the tall man behind her. Della held out both hands to Mr. Whalley, Menswear manager at Auerbach’s Department Store in Salt Lake, where Della had found the newly widowed Kristina Aho a job. A quiet man, he had been Della’s boss the summer before when she sold shirts and sundries in his department.

  Mr. Whalley shook her hand and then looked beyond her. “A size sixteen medium,” he said. “Miss Anders, is this the man you bought the shirts for?” He chuckled. “And claimed he was just a friend?”

  Della turned around as Owen approached the little gathering. He leaned the shovel against the shrinking mound of dirt, wiped his hands on his trousers, and held out his hand.

  “My dear, this is Mr. Whalley, who knows shirts,” Della said. “Mr. Whalley, I’m Mrs. Davis as of yesterday.”

  She had only known Mr. Whalley as a manager who suffered no fools gladly, even though the customer was generally right. She saw sympathy in his eyes now, and tenderness when he glanced at Mrs. Aho and her son.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Davis, and congratulations to you both,” Mr. Whalley said. “I wish it were under better circumstances, but I wasn’t about to let Kris … Mrs. Aho travel all this way unescorted.” He smiled then, and the look he gave Pekka told Della worlds about his fondness for both Ahos. “Not that she was unescorted, eh, Pekka?”

  And the smile Pekka flashed back told Della even more about how matters stood with her friend. We keep on living, she thought, grateful to see evidence of it, even on such a sad day.

  Kristina’s eyes were on other graves farther away. She touched Pekka’s head, and they started toward the row where her late husband, Matti Aho, lay. Della’s hand in Owen’s, Mr. Whalley beside them, they followed at a respectful distance.

  “I have been keeping company with Mrs. Aho for several months now,” he said. “You know I am a staunch Presbyterian, but lately I have come to enjoy Lutheran sermons, because that means Sunday dinner with the Ahos. Ahem, I suspect that the God of the Presbyterians and the Lutherans is one and the same.”

  “I couldn’t be happier,” Della said, impressed with Mr. Whalley, partly because that statement was as close as he had ever come to a bit of humor, at least in her hearing. “I think you should keep company with the Ahos right now.”

  “So I shall.” He tipped his hat to them, reached inside his suit and pulled out a white envelope. “Everyone in the store took up a collection for the miners’ families, and Mr. Auerbach doubled it.” He put the envelope in Owen’s hand. “There is one hundred dollars for each widow, and a little more.”

  Mr. Whalley wasn’t a man who ever appreciated dramatic overtures, so Della offered a sedate handshake and heartfelt thanks, when she really wanted to dance around and hug him.

  “We’ll see that Superintendent Parmley gets this,” she said. “You couldn’t have done a kinder thing.”

  “Death is hard even when you expect it,” he replied, his eyes going over the rows of coffins. “And like this? Who can bear it?” He nodded toward the widow and her son standing with heads bowed by another grave, one filled in last fall. “And here is something else: Mr. Auerbach insisted that Kristina received one hundred dollars too, even though Mr. Aho died months ago. She and I are going to arrange for a proper stone for his grave. Good day, Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and good fortune to you both.”

  “Good luck to you too, Mr. Whalley,” Della said, touched at his generosity and affection, grateful for this glimpse into the heart of a quiet man who bore sorrows of his own.

  “I should shovel some more,” Owen said, but she heard reluctance in his voice.

  “No. You should walk me to the Wasatch Store, where we will slip this envelope under Bishop Parmley’s door,” she said decisively. “I have a key to the library. We’re going to go in there and just sit.”

  She thought he might object, but he did not.

  “Just sit?” he asked, and she heard a sliver of humor. “You wouldn’t mind if I kissed you once or twice?”

  “I was counting on that.”

  Chapter 7

  L

  The ordeal of burying Richard Evans on Saturday would have been impossible without Della and Angharad beside Owen, holding his hands.

  He had spent a sleepless night sharing his mattress this time with both Della and Angharad, because his daughter had seen too many coffins and weeping classmates and refused to be away from them.

  Bless Della’s heart. She made the best of the situation, sitting there in her nightgown, with her funny Magic Paper, those sheets of flexible cardboard found inside men’s shirts. She had given Angharad the task of drawing her own bedroom in their new house in Provo, something none of them had seen ye
t, if it even existed.

  “What if there isn’t a house when we get to Provo?” he spoke into Della’s neck when he held her close after Angharad slept.

  “I don’t know. I’m trusting Uncle Jesse.”

  He wanted Della, but there was no way, not with Angharad sleeping beside them. When he could tell Della slept, he got out of bed, dressed, and walked to Martha Evans’s house. He knew she would be awake, the same as other widows of men he had mined with mere days ago. There were flickering lights all over the canyon, pointing out the homes where husbands waited for burial tomorrow.

  Martha seemed not even slightly surprised to see him when he tapped on her door, and she opened it, the perfect hostess at midnight. She patted the chair next to hers as she leaned against her husband’s coffin. “No sleep for you either?”

  “None. I’m sharing my mattress with Della and Angharad tonight.” He took a deep breath, wondering if he was about to add to her burden. “And there is this: Richard’s last bit of kindness to me was to scold me into petitioning the Lord in the right way, and not seeking my own interests at the expense of truth. I owe him this visit.”

  “I, for one, am glad you listened, even if it was likely a royal scold,” Martha replied.

  He heard all the strain in her voice. “Martha, my answer from the Lord was to leave the mine, so I did. I am all that is left of the day shift and the men’s choir, and I feel it acutely. Why me?”

  She held him as he wept next to his best friend’s coffin, with its magical dragons and its leeks and daffodils, symbols of Wales, carved years ago by a miner grandfather he never knew, and handed down to him following his father’s death. What better place for such a box than underground?

  “Forgive me, Martha,” he said when he could speak. “I have no right to burden you.”

  “What are friends for? Promise me that you will find another occupation in Provo, as I know you told Della you would.”

  Her eyes bored into his. Maybe she knew him too well, the bereft father who had taken his infant daughter from nursing breast to nursing breast in the canyon, hers included, after Gwyna’s death. It was an admittedly odd intimacy. He had to look away from the intensity of her gaze.

  When he averted his face, she forced him to look at her. “Don’t go back on your word to the best woman you could ever have married. Don’t even consider it, Owen Rhys Davis.” She gave his face a shake.

  “I should stay here and help you and the others.”

  “And how would you do that? You must move on,” Martha said firmly. “Bishop Parmley has already asked me to manage a boardinghouse in Clear Creek, only eight miles from this man of mine. When this awful week is done, I will be going there with my little ones. I will manage, Owen.”

  “And the others?”

  “They will manage too,” she said. “Your obligation is to Della and Angharad now. Don’t forget that.”

  What demon drove him on? “Martha, maybe I can convince her, change her mind. She could teach here. You know how hard it is to find a single woman to teach in the canyon and the district might make allowances. I could go back to the mine. I know I could.”

  He hadn’t felt Martha’s wrath since that time three years ago when the Pleasant Valley Ward Relief Society turned on him for not pursuing a lovely lady, friend of the Parmley’s, who came to visit and seemed interested in him. He felt that wrath now, only worse.

  She pulled his face close to hers, and he saw all the anger and exhaustion in tired eyes. “Owen, if you make that good woman—your wife—have to choose between you and a paltry mine, I’ll have nothing more to do with you. For shame!”

  It had to be said. Maybe he needed her anger to jolt him back into reality. He had made a promise to another lovely lady. He had already married her. In a few days they would be sealed for eternity in Manti Temple. He had no business waffling and dodging. He kissed Martha Evans’s cheek, hugged her, and stood up to rest his head against the coffin he had fashioned out of his own Welshness and his regard for the best of men.

  “I’m sorry for whining, Martha,” he said quietly. “And yes, I will sing for Richard and David tomorrow.”

  “We thank you.”

  His hand was on the doorknob when she stopped him. “Didn’t Della’s father die in a mine cave-in?

  “Aye, and so she was sent to Salt Lake to live with wolves,” he said, not mincing words, surprised at his own bitterness.

  “How is this horrible week upsetting her?”

  “That was years ago.”

  She gave him another leveling look. “And you think a body can ever forget? One man or …” Her voice failed her for a moment and then returned stronger. “… or two hundred. It doesn’t matter. Think about Della in all this.” She managed a smile. “Now go away and leave me here with Richard.”

  He blew her a kiss and walked through the sort of dark he knew so well underground, pierced here and there by little points of light. Women mourned in silence now, and despair roamed freely up and down the wagon road like the last plague of Egypt.

  He only thought Della slept. Shawl around her nightgown, she stood on the porch, moving from one foot to the other because she hadn’t bothered with shoes. The sight of her warmed him, and made him shy, because he was a modest man, and here was a pretty woman in a nightgown on his porch.

  “You’ll catch your death,” he said as he took her by the arm and steered her inside. He held her close in the front room.

  “I watched you walk to Martha’s,” she said, caressing his face.

  “And here I thought I was quiet and discreet.”

  “You were, but I missed you. One day and I already missed your warmth.” Della turned her face into his shoulder. “I know you are unemployed and this is a terrible time. Please don’t regret what we have done. Bishop Parmley did move us along rather quickly.”

  What could he say to that? He led her back to the bed they shared with his daughter this night, dazed with the enormity of his regrets and unable to articulate any of them to the one person to whom he should share them all.

  “I said my goodbyes to Richard,” he managed to tell her.

  “Did you?” she asked, as if she knew what he was thinking.

  L

  The burials continued Saturday after a funeral under the direction of church leaders from Salt Lake City.

  The newly completed Odd Fellows Hall, supposed to be the scene of Tuesday night’s dance celebrating Dewey Day, was the only building large enough to house all the mourners, everyone wanting some reassurance, some hope. They sat on chairs brought in from everywhere and stood against the walls when chairs ran out, a congregation exhausted by anguish and tears.

  Only the little ones, children who couldn’t understand what was going on or know why their mamas seemed so distant, looked around in delight at the veritable garden of flowers, furnished by women from Salt Lake City and Provo, where husbands and fathers didn’t die by the hundreds on a single day.

  God bless Della Davis. She kept her arm firmly around his waist and her hip cemented to his as they stood close together, Angharad in front of them, almost as if they were unconsciously—or consciously—serving as his buttresses. Packed together as they were, somehow Della managed to lean even closer and shush him when Elder Reed Smoot, an apostle of the Lord, counseled the miners to “say no rash words, do no rash act. Take no especial steps demanding what you may think is right from the Company.”

  He saw he wasn’t the only surviving miner listening and being shushed. Other men around him stirred and whispered and then returned their attention to the church leader from Salt Lake City who maybe didn’t understand what had happened. Elder Smoot had never shoveled coal, picked out stones, eaten endless oatcakes when the money ran out in summer, wished he could give his children new shoes. What did he know of grievances?

  Apostle or not, Elder Smoot, you could have said anything but that, Owen told himself as he listened, shocked. But no, Elder Smoot stood there at a pulpit brought in from the
Scofield meetinghouse and said, “Don’t let men come among you to harrow up your souls.”

  “He’s telling us not to strike, Della,” Owen whispered in Della’s ear. “Couldn’t it wait?”

  She patted his chest and his arm went around her shoulder. He didn’t want to remember those words. He wanted to remember what the well-meaning man said next: “There is a bishopric here that loves you …”

  Maybe he should have stopped there because it was true, but no. He continued, “… and we hope the conditions of each family may be learned.”

  Conditions of each family? Owen thought, wondering where this enormous surge of bitterness in him was coming from, he who paid his tithing, lived the Word of Wisdom, attended his meetings, and fulfilled his church callings. I’ll tell you the conditions, he wanted to shout. There are widows and fatherless children, and the coal company will turn them out soon. They have no income, I’m unemployed, and we feel so terrible.

  “I have to leave,” he whispered.

  He towed Della from the hall, Angharad trailing after. Outside, he leaned against the wall and gathered himself together, Della close beside him.

  “I can’t bear it. I simply can’t.”

  “No one can,” his wife said, “but we have to. Just a little longer.”

  She was right; he knew it.

  “You needn’t go back in there,” his practical darling continued. “It’s stifling, and you’re the only man in there who smells good to me.”

  Who couldn’t laugh at that? “Della, you’re hilarious,” he said.

  “I know. Angharad, see if you can find Da some water.”

  His daughter darted off, and Della kissed him, no simple peck, but a full-bodied kiss that made him grateful everyone else was still inside.

  Angharad got him a drink of water from somewhere, and Della sat him down on a bench. In a few minutes, his breathing turned normal. He listened as the choir sang “Wanted on the Other Side.”