Carla Kelly (31 page)

This was the test. Della glanced at the choir as they considered her idea. From their expressions, no one seemed to be wondering why someone named Anders would hint at her own poverty. Owen had spoken correctly; a few words in the right place had changed her life in the canyon.

“I think it's a good idea,” Tamris said. “Della, would you like me to help you organize such an event?”

“Certainly. We'll invite everyone in the canyon.”

Brother Evans looked around. “Any objections?”

Owen raised his hand. “You say, each household? I'm no cook.”

“I guess you'll have to do your best, Brother Davis,” Della said.

“Only if you promise to bid on it,” he countered.

“Never.”

The tenors and basses hooted again, and Brother Evans gave up. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Della. “You can probably still get out of this calling.”

“And miss all this fun? I wouldn't dream of it.”

“Still talking to me?” Owen asked as the others peeled off and they continued toward the Edwards boardinghouse.

“Of course I am. I don't know when I've enjoyed an evening more. I'm going to be scared to death up to and including Sunday morning, when we sing, though.”

“No need. Everyone listening is a friend.” He laughed softly. “I might lie about a secretary, but I'll never give you a wrong note! Pie auction?”

“That's how the miners in the Molly Bee raised enough money to bury my father and put me on the train to Salt Lake City.”

He didn't say anything, but he clasped his arm around her shoulder as they walked slowly along. In another minute he was humming “Lead, Kindly Light.” She joined him on the second verse and was still humming it after he had said good night.

Almost without knowing it, Della settled into the rhythm of Winter Quarters Canyon, ruled by trains twice a day, the growl of the tipple, the occasional distant rumble that meant blasting in the mines. In her own world, there was the smell of chalk dust and library paste, and as autumn deepened, the odor of children dressed in woolen stockings and coats. Miss Clayson was as prickly as ever, but Mari Luoma was learning English, and there was always Saturday night in Scofield with Emil Isgreen. That became her time to hash over the week, and maybe even solve the problems of the world, if dessert was slow to get to the table. The doctor listened, offered advice, and kissed her on the cheek after each walk home.

Equally fun to Della was the letter she received from Amanda Knight in answer to her first letter. To her delight, even Uncle Jesse had found the time to include a note. His totally unrepentant apology when she took him to task about his Pleasant Valley Ward choir comments was so funny she read it aloud to the choir.

“He had me thinking I was on my way to help out a fatally flawed choir,” she told them when the laughter stopped.

Her reply to the letter was easy to write. There was always something to tell the Knights about her children, the choir, and life in a mining camp that churned out more than half of Utah's annual coal output, according to Uncle Jesse, who never joked about profit.

The return letter a week later included an invitation to Provo for Thanksgiving, which made Della sit in silence for a long moment. When some of her old fears surfaced, she showed the letter to Owen Davis, her eyes anxious. “Should I say yes?” she asked him the night Mabli invited him and her niece to the boardinghouse kitchen to learn about pie dough.

“If you don't, I'll write it for you,” he told her, as he tried to roll a circle. “Sometimes you're a butterbean.”

“At least I can make a circle,” she answered, taking the rolling pin from him and deftly creating a bottom crust. Her acceptance letter was on its way two days later.

With permission from Mr. Edwards, she invited her students to the boardinghouse dining room the first Saturday to make posters for the Pleasant Valley Ward pie auction. To her delight, Mari Luoma brought along Pekka Aho's mother, who carefully copied the words for the announcement onto the large sheets of paper Della had wheedled out of Clarence Nix. She added stunning backgrounds of canyons and trees, turning modest posters into masterpieces. By unanimous consent, Mrs. Aho's posters went to the Odd Fellows Hall in Scofield and Scofield's bank.

Well-fortified with Mabli's cookies and snacking on dried apples, the children finished their posters, and Della arranged them around the dining room to dry. Billy Evans finished his last, after most of the children had left. Della stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, watching him survey his little effort with all the panache of a Renaissance artist.

“He learns at his own pace,” she whispered to Owen, who had arrived in all his day shift finery to retrieve Angharad.

He stood next to her but not close, still dark with coal around his eyes and caked into the sharp lines beside his nose.

“Billy Evans is the little one who said he would read when he was taller than your broom?” Owen whispered. “Any luck with that?”

Della shook her head. “He's not growing and he's not reading. From the little he tells me, I think Miss Forsyth ridiculed him.”

“But you don't.”

“Never! I sit next to him in our reading circle, hug him close when he lets me, and put my finger under each word as the others read aloud.”

“I have an idea,” he whispered.

“I'll take any suggestions. I know he's tracking the words with his eyes. He's just not brave. Believe me, I can understand that.”

“When you think he's brave enough, just tell me.”

“What will you do?”

“My secret,” he said. He went into the dining room to stand by Billy and his poster, admiring it too until Angharad joined him and the three of them left together.

Well, Mr. Enigmatic, I'll try anything
, she thought.

He looked back at her from the doorway, a child on each side of him, Angharad lugging his empty lunch pail. “It's going to snow tonight,” he told her. “Time to change your autumn leaves for snowflakes.”

Owen was right. There was just enough snow in the canyon next morning to coat the ugly machinery. It was gone by noon, except in those places were the sun's rays couldn't penetrate. He was also right about the bulletin board, which had given Miss Clayson something to complain about through September and into October.

The leaves had been green when school started, and the children wrote their names on them. By two weeks into school, the cardboard tree had fully leafed out, now including spelling words from that second grade level that Della chose for all three of her classes. They had added yellow leaves next, fortified with more spelling words, which drifted down to the bottom of the board like the quaking aspen in the canyon.

Della would have removed the leaves and put up another display, but Mari Luoma had drawn more leaves from orange construction paper and used a dab of glue to adhere them to the wall underneath the bulletin board, as though they truly fell from the tree. The children were agile enough to appreciate writing their spelling words on the wall's leaves and soon, the floor. By the second week in October, the leaves were glued to the floor and headed toward the windows, which made Miss Clayson sigh and purse her lips every time she passed the classroom door.

She had complained once about the clutter, until Della showed her the spelling test results. “Even my first graders have learned the second level words,” she pointed out. “I've started challenging the third graders with words from their own level now, and they're doing well. They're catching up.”

With Owen's coaxing, Israel Bowman's support, and Emil Isgreen's encouragement, Della had stood up for herself, respectful but persistent. The terror of the first time made her lose her breakfast on the way to school, darting around one of the machinery buildings to vomit. With her stomach empty, toes practically digging into the floor through her shoes, Della had presented her results, which left Miss Clayson with nothing to do but nod and agree.

The principal had even smiled when she walked by the door one afternoon to see brown and gold leaves high on the walls in circles. “Now I suppose you will tell me that a big gust of wind blew them there!”

Della had nodded and laughed out loud. Miss Clayson couldn't bring herself to go that far in public, but Della could have sworn she saw the woman's shoulders shaking when she walked away.

Della usually sat with her class for lunch, fixing herself a sandwich from the table in the Edwards boardinghouse where the miners selected their lunch. She nearly cried the morning all the miners presented her with her own miner's lunch bucket, a two-tiered, round container with the bottom level reserved for water. Someone had painted a garland of roses around the bucket.

“Della, that's a treasure,” Mabli told her. “Since you don't need that larger compartment for water, let's fill it with cookies.”

“Mr. Edwards won't mind?”

“Hardly! His boardinghouse is full for the first time in ages. Men have been transferring from the other houses.”

“I can't take credit for that!” Della protested.

“
I
would, if I were you,” Mabli replied with a laugh.

Knowing Mabli, she probably would have credited the steady increase in library traffic to her “interesting beauty,” as Dr. Isgreen put it one Saturday night, perhaps when he felt more bold than usual. Della knew better. Every week, Clarence Nix put a new book and one or two magazines on her desk. Soon the wives were coming by twos and threes to sit together and read
McCall's
and
Harper's Bazaar
.

Owen and Angharad dropped by regularly. He returned
A Tales of Two Cities
and assured her that he only sniffled a little when Sydney Carton declared, “ ‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.’ ”

“You have absolutely no romance in your soul,” Della whispered, and he just grinned in that maddening way. She held out another book. “Here! Read some Stephen Crane!”

Maybe it was the order she craved. Her classroom was lively every day, and Della found something soothing in the calm of the library, with only low murmurs and page turning. She settled in comfortably that night, eager to browse the latest
Saturday Evening Post
.

Della looked up when the door opened, surprised to see Bishop Parmley wearing miner's clothes, his tin pot lamp fixed to his cloth hat. She knew he wasn't usually in the mine. Something must have happened. Everyone else had the same thought, apparently, if the sudden tension in the air was any gauge.

The bishop nodded his apology to her, then looked around the room. Dr. Isgreen was already on his feet, pulling on his coat. Owen and Levi Jones stood up, and the bishop gestured them closer. Every eye was on him, the women alert and intense.

“There's been a cave-in in Number One,” he said, his eyes softening when two of the women groaned. “Doctor, come right now. Owen, I need you for timber work.”

“Aye,” Owen said. He looked at Angharad, then at Della.

“She can stay here with me,” Della said, crossing the room quickly to sit beside the little girl, who looked bewildered as the library began to clear rapidly of miners and wives. “Angharad, you'll help me shelve some books?”

The child nodded, then looked at Owen. “Da …”

Owen kissed her forehead and headed for the door, stopping to look over his shoulder at Della. “If I'm not back by nine …”

“She'll come home with me,” Della finished. “Nothing simpler.”

“Just until I get back.” He smiled his thanks and left right behind Emil Isgreen.

Angharad edged closer to Della. “I don't like it when he leaves so fast,” she whispered.

“I wouldn't either,” Della told her, pulling her close. “Oh, look! Everyone left in such a hurry. We have magazines and newspapers to straighten out. Do you want to straighten the magazines?”

“Aye, miss,” Angharad replied and started to gather magazines. Soon she was humming to herself, which told Della worlds about how the Davises coped.

When they finished, Della went to the shelves and found
Captain Horace
, the third Little Prudy book. “I think we should read while we wait for your father.” She sat down and held out her arms. With a sigh, Angharad climbed onto her lap.

Della was still reading at nine o'clock, even though Angharad had felt heavier and heavier for the last fifteen minutes, as though she slept. Della closed the book and remained where she was, comfortable and warm.

At nine fifteen, Clarence Nix came upstairs to see why the lights were still on. When he saw Angharad asleep, he tiptoed closer, kneeling down by the chair.

“They're still in the mine. Mr. Parmley's put Owen to work shoring up the timbers. They're taking out the bodies now,” he whispered. “One Finn and a miner from one of the boardinghouses.”

“Oh, no. Do you know who the Finn is?”

“Matti Aho.”

Della bowed her head over the sleeping child in her lap. Matti Aho was Pekka's father.
I know how Pekka feels
, she thought, anguished for her student.