by Carla Kelly
“I wish it were that simple, m cara. I shouldn’t be joking, but I knew you would be frightened to hear from me this way. It’s your Aunt Caroline. There’s no easy way to say this: she’s dying, and she wants you here.”
Chapter 43
L
Owen knew dubious when he heard it, even through a telephone receiver fifty miles away. He also knew reluctance when he heard it, but had enough confidence to stand on the Interurban platform four hours later, waiting for his wife.
How to cajole or console the woman he adored? He understood her supreme reluctance. He had tried one more tack. Time was running out on this call, and so was Aunt Caroline.
“M cara, you’re looking at the distant scene. Try the one step enough. It worked for me in the mine. I’ll stay right beside you the whole time.”
“I’m to do this for you?”
He could hear her heart breaking, and he knew he had broken her heart enough. “No. You’re to do this for you. I’ll see you in four hours.”
And so he stood on the platform in the rain that turned to sleet that turned to snow. Four and a half hours later, the train pulled in, delayed either by weather or by one frightened woman dragging her feet. When he saw the lights of the Interurban, he stepped from the depot and opened his umbrella.
There she hesitated, looking for him through the late afternoon gloom. When she saw him, she started to run, picking up her skirts and flashing a bit of ankle to other commuters, some of whom appeared appreciative. He knew he was.
He dropped the umbrella, grabbed her shoulders, and held her close. “I don’t want to be here,” she sobbed.
“I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
She gave him that intense gaze of hers, the one that excited him, energized him, chastened him, and humbled him, depending on the place and the occasion. This time it was a train platform, and he felt her terror.
She broke the gaze first. “You’re standing here getting cold. If you catch a bilious fever and die, I will be forced to earn my living forever at a typewriter.”
She looked too serious, so he knew better than to laugh. “We’re both tougher than that,” he assured her as he led her through the depot to the taxi stand, where he hailed a cab and gave the avenue address.
She was silent until they turned onto the street where the Anderses lived, and where he knew she had been force-fed spite and contempt for years, all because she was poor and defenseless, the daughter of the family black sheep, illegitimate, and she didn’t look like the tall, blond Anders clan.
“I never wanted to see her again,” she murmured into his overcoat.
What could he say to that? He held her close.
She started to shake as he rang the doorbell. “With you every step,” he reminded her as the door opened.
In shirtsleeves but somehow managing to look like a guest in his own home, Karl ushered them inside. Owen heard Della’s quiet intake of breath as she took in the gray and drawn man before her, and he knew her heart opened, because she was kind.
She touched her uncle’s cheek and said nothing. Karl sobbed and put his hand over hers. They stood in silence, not close together but not far apart either, until Karl pulled away.
“She told me to get you here,” he said, tucking Della’s hand in his and leading her toward the stairs. “She’s waiting.”
Alarmed, she looked back at Owen and pulled her hand free. He was by her side in two strides, his arm around her waist as she clutched his belt.
Karl watched them. Owen saw a handful of emotions cross his face, paramount among them shame, and then the baldest kind of remorse that made him look away and collect himself.
Her face so serious, Della glued herself to Owen’s side. Maybe some day if he ever got the nerve, he would ask her how she managed to live in that house without a champion beside her. He didn’t need to ask. He already knew her deep well of courage that he had dipped from himself not so long ago.
Uncle Karl went into the room first, closing the door behind him. Owen heard the murmur of low voices. In a moment, a woman in a cap and apron came out, her face troubled. “She has been talking and talking to me,” she said, and Owen heard all the weariness. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Karl ushered them inside. Owen had to give Della a gentle tug to set her in motion again.
The room smelled of sickness and decay, no matter how tidy it appeared. If death had an odor, Owen breathed it now. Della looked at him, fear in her eyes. He took her hand to his lips, happy to breathe in her own fragrance for a fleeting moment.
Karl indicated a chair for Della beside the bed and a distant one for Owen. She shook her head at that, and Owen pulled his chair close to hers.
Aunt Caroline’s eyes fluttered open. She seemed not to know where she was for a moment, and then she locked onto Della’s face, her gaze unwavering. With a jolt, Owen felt himself yanked back a few years to a day in Number Four when a snake crawled out from the seam of coal where he was shoveling, stared at him with that same hypnotic gaze, hissed, and slid away to terrify three or four Farishes mining beside him.
The Farishes had laughed about it later, but they hadn’t seen what Owen saw. He never forgot that tightening of his gut. He felt it now. Slowly he put his hand into Della’s waistband this time, ready to jerk her back if the woman in the bed made a move of any kind.
This is no repentant soul, he thought. He whispered, “We can leave right now.”
Della shook her head, not taking her gaze from the dying woman. She swallowed a few times. “I’m here, Aunt Caroline,” she said clearly. “What is it you want from me?”
“I can’t stay here!”
Owen turned around in surprise as Karl backed away from the bed, seeing his own demons, or maybe a reflection of his own cowardice for his years of neglecting his niece when she needed an advocate, any advocate, and no one had taken her side.
“I can’t.” His voice sounded weak; he was weak.
“Then don’t, uncle,” Della said calmly, her eyes never leaving her aunt’s face. They appeared to be locked in a battle of wills. Owen saw Aunt Caroline’s expression quite clearly. He couldn’t see Della’s, but he could imagine it.
“I’ll … I’ll be right outside the door,” Karl said. “Call me if you need me.”
Della laughed softly, but Owen heard no mirth. “You always said that. You’ll be more comfortable downstairs in your office.”
“I would, Della, thank you,” Karl said, sounding relieved, as if she had given him permission to be a coward and he was happy with it.
What kind of a household is this? Owen asked himself in disgust. Karl nearly ran for the door.
Della turned her attention back to Aunt Caroline. “There, now. Do you have something to say to me? I don’t want to wear you out.”
Owen stared in dumbfounded fascination as the stick-thin woman in the bed opened and closed her mouth several times. No sound passed her dry and cracking lips. She seemed to be forming words, and oddly enough, her face appeared as animated as if she spoke. Nothing.
He watched the weirdest sort of dumb show, with Caroline Anders forming words with nothing behind them. Her eyes were stormy and placating by degrees. He didn’t understand any of this. The nurse had said she could speak. Why didn’t she?
“Della, what do you make of this?” he asked softly.
She turned her gaze on him now, the same look she must have been giving to Aunt Caroline. If he lived to be a hundred, he knew he would never see such tenderness in anyone’s eyes. Della had looked at him like this before, as she held him up as he stood beside the grave of his best friend Richard Evans and sobbed, again across the altar in Manti, and more recently as he stood in the snow with the carolers and prayed that she wouldn’t leave him there to pick up his valise and walk away.
“I think Aunt Caroline can’t bring herself to apologize,” she whispered back. “Poor soul. The words won’t come out. If we leave right now, she will die alone, and I won’t have that on
my conscience. Sit across from her and take her other hand.”
He did as she directed, picking up the paper-thin hand that seemed composed of hummingbird bones. She was cold to the touch, and he thought of that reptile in the mine again. If Welshmen had a fault, it was a superstitious nature.
“Let’s sing to her,” Della said, her voice normal now. “I like ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ Pitch it.”
He did, and they sang. Because of the season, the hymns turned into carols. He found himself relaxing, soothed because singing always made him complete. He had been a fool to stop singing. Della frowned but followed him when he sang, “Let Us Oft Speak Kind Words to Each Other,” which he noticed made Aunt Caroline flinch and look away, her jaw working again. So there, you old trot, he said to himself, and he didn’t feel much remorse. Would it have killed you to show kindness to Della Anders?
Heavenly Father must have given him a cosmic smack on the head. Oh no, it was Della leveling one of her patented appraisals in his direction, looking remarkably like Saladin. He quickly sang “Sweet Is the Work,” which got him out of the theological doghouse.
Then it was over. Della leaned closer with a warm cloth, wiping around her aunt’s eyes, closed now. She stopped when Caroline opened her eyes and slowly raised her hand to Della’s cheek. Owen watched, alert for trouble, but he needn’t have worried. One gentle pat, another one, and she died.
The hand he held relaxed, and he set it carefully on the sheet. He leaned back as Della gently closed her aunt’s eyes and folded her hands neatly together.
“We can leave now,” she said.
He helped her from the room and closed the door on death and malice and perhaps, just perhaps, grace, because that deathbed needed grace. Della had been full of it. Maybe if he stayed around his woman long enough, he would become a better man. He resolved to find out.
At the foot of the stairs, he helped her into her coat and opened the door. She breathed deep of the bracing air, midnight air.
They walked down the front steps, and she turned around at the bottom to look up at the elegant house. “I never have to go back there, do I?”
“You do not.”
“I’m tired,” she said simply, and she sank down to the sidewalk almost before he could catch her.
Owen picked her up, unsure of what to do because he had no intention of returning to the Anderses’ mansion for assistance. Through some manifestation of divine providence, a taxi came by and stopped.
“Need some help there, sir?”
“I do.” He gave the cabbie the Whalleys’ address. Within the half hour, Della was tucked in bed and sound asleep, while he explained to his kind hosts with the worried eyes what had happened that evening.
An hour later, he unwound enough to lie down next to the darling of his heart. She woke up enough to give him her extra-tender look, so he had to ask her. “Was I wrong in insisting you go there?”
“Not at all,” came her drowsy answer. “I learned something tonight.”
“More like yesterday now,” he teased gently. “What did you learn?”
“That I was always the strongest person in that house. Who would have thought it?”
Chapter 44
L
Thoughtful, Della returned to Provo in the morning after a lingering kiss on the Interurban platform that should have embarrassed her, but didn’t. She gave her husband an equally tender kiss at the end of the week when he returned to Provo, valise in hand.
The following week, Owen finished the frame for his dragon and secured a piece of beveled glass to it. He debated with Della whether to glue “Lead, Kindly Light” to the back, but asked her to print it smaller, so he could put it in the front. “In case I need to remind myself,” he told her. She obliged, and he was satisfied.
He borrowed a tea towel and arranged an elaborate unveiling ceremony when Angharad returned from school one afternoon. “Oh Da,” turned into a hug, an ample reward.
“This is going to hang in every house we live in,” he announced to them over cake, because Della knew what an artist’s unveiling required. “In the front room.”
In the end of January, her man answered a summons to the Knight Building for a conference with the Knight brothers. Uncle Jesse was still traveling, seeking investors for that project to the north involving major construction.
Owen left the house wearing his suit and Angharad’s favorite dark green cravat, going to the Knight Building for a Saturday meeting, auspicious enough in itself. After watching his rollicking walk toward Center Street, Della went to her knees to pray.
One hour. Two hours. She baked a mound of Welsh cakes, unable to stop herself. She put them to good use, because three little girls had joined her daughter down the hall and were rearranging the furniture in the dollhouse already legendary in the neighborhood.
When everyone was fed, she went back to her bedroom and prayed again. If she thought she was well acquainted with deity before Aunt Caroline’s death, she had learned something more, something she wished Caroline Anders had known. “His grace is sufficient,” she told Owen one night after family prayer. He understood.
She felt it now, but that didn’t prevent her from standing by the front room window, equal parts anxious and aggravated with herself. She reminded herself that she had a job and their nest egg was cooling its heels in the bank. How long she would keep her job was an unknown, but she knew her man would never fail her, not now.
And there he was. The door was closed against the cold, but he was singing, never a bad sign. She opened the door and he struck a pose.
What are you up to? she thought, enchanted.
“ ‘The Maple Leaf, our emblem dear; The Maple Leaf forever,’ ” he sang to her. “ ‘God save our King and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf forever!’ That’s just the chorus, m cara, and yes, it’s King Edward now. I’m going to Canada with Raymond. I’ll learn the other verses.”
She whooped and ran down the steps, her arms out. He grabbed her and swung her around. “Uncle Jesse is in Canada right now, making a deal with someone named McGrath. No guarantee for me yet, but things are leaning in my favor. The architect gave me a favorable report, so we shall see. You’re cold! Doesn’t your husband take good care of you, little lady? Is he around?”
“You are very nearly certifiable,” she scolded, her hands on her hips.
“Not around?” He winked at her. “Better and better for me.”
Arm in arm, they walked inside. “What is the job?” she asked.
“Building a sugar beet factory.” He sank down on the sofa and pulled her with him. “My goodness, I can’t believe I just said that. Me, a coal miner.”
“Tell me what happened in the meeting.”
“Not until you snuggle up. Ah, better. Uncle Jesse is negotiating with said Mr. McGrath right now. He’s a former member of Canadian parliament and now an official with the Northwest Irrigation Company. Jesse just bought a thirty-thousand-acre ranch.”
Owen grabbed her apron and fanned himself with it, which made her giggle, since she was still attached to the apron. “M cara, Ray said the transaction took a half hour. There’s already a township on the land and some houses.”
“I spend a half hour just mulling over the purchase of two yards of cloth,” Della said, “and he buys how much land?”
He laughed and squeezed her shoulder. She leaned back and watched his enthusiasm, a far remove from the blank-faced man with red eyes who buried his best friends last May.
He was watching her face now. “So much has happened,” she said simply. “I have changed. You have changed.”
“For the better, or the better or worse?”
She considered what he was asking. “Maybe both. Marriage might be bliss, but it comes in little doses.” She sat up. “You said you’re going to Canada when?”
“By Friday at the latest. Jesse wants us to meet with Mr. McGrath in Lethbridge, where the depot is. For some reason, they think a man with an accent like mine might reassur
e the good chap that the Yankees come in peace, with lots of greenbacks.”
“You will never cease to amaze me,” she teased. “And to think you are mine for a really long time.”
“Better or worse, m cara. I wonder … Do you think Mr. Holyoke would mind if I walked Angharad to school tomorrow and asked to look at a map of Canada?”
Since the Knight brothers and Owen were going to spend a day in Salt Lake City consulting with another lawyer before taking the night train toward Canada, Della took Owen’s measurements one night and telephoned Mr. Whalley in Menswear. Informed that her man was a pretty standard size, she put Owen under orders to stop there first thing for a fitting and alteration if needed. Mr. Whalley had just the suit, a black worsted wool, for five dollars and fifty cents.
“If you’re going to be talking to Mr. McGrath, and heaven knows who else, you need to look your best.” She kissed his cheek. “The green cravat is entirely for luck, my darling.”
She and Angharad saw the men off for Salt Lake and points north before school on Thursday. On Saturday she received a telegram at the office from Ray Knight, who assured her all was well and they were in Lethbridge with his father for talks.
And then they waited, which was less onerous than usual. Amanda Knight invited them over one evening to pull taffy, talk about books, and worry a little, at least on Della’s part.
“I don’t know how you take all this in stride,” Della asked. “I mean, these huge amounts of money!”
“I used to worry. What woman wouldn’t?” Amanda replied. She took Angharad’s stretched-out taffy and began to cut it into bite-sized pieces on her marble slab. “Did my husband ever tell you about his vision?”
Della shook her head. Chin in her hands, she listened as Amanda told her of the time Jesse and Will were climbing up the side of Godiva Mountain, ready to work the Humbug claim, a bold venture for a man in modest circumstances, and one scoffed at by others.
“We had the Payson Ranch,” Amanda said. She arranged the taffy on little plates, a faraway look in her eyes. “My goodness, we were in debt, and here was this mine that a prospective investor had called a humbug.” She shook her head, almost as if she still didn’t believe what happened.
