Whiter Than Snow (22 page)

Another time, the teacher might have chuckled at the remark about beds at the hookhouse, but young children had been caught and perhaps killed in the avalanche, and it was no time for jesting.

Essie led the way back down the trail, and while the hookers petted and fussed over the little ones, feeding them bits of cake from their own dinner, Essie, together with the teachers, made out a list of the children who were safe on the west side of the slide. Then she wrote a second list, a harder list, of the students who were missing. One of the teachers offered to take it to the families, but Essie insisted she would do it. “I will wait with the other mothers,” she said.

The young teacher looked at her sharply, but the other one said, “Good luck to you, miss.”

“
Mrs.
I am,” Essie replied. “Mrs. Esther Schnable. Sophie Schnable’s mother.” Clutching her lists, she went back up the trail, and stepping like a bird on sore claws, she crept across the snow, past a child’s boot, a plaid scarf, an arithmetic book. “Sophie,” she called out softly, but she heard no answer, and the men digging in the hard snow ignored her. She picked up a cap lying on the ground, but it belonged to a boy.

Finally, one man told her kindly, “Lady, the men are tasked to do this. Best you wait with the mothers over there. We’ve already found three, two boys and a girl.”

“Sophie?” she asked.

The man shrugged. “I don’t know what they call the girl. She had on a green coat.”

No, that was not Sophie. Essie went to the group of women, standing a little apart from them, as was proper for a hooker, and then she realized that the others didn’t know who she was. Besides, she had the lists, and so she spoke up. “I came from the other side of the avalanche. The children that are all right, I saw them. Here’s their names. The teachers say to them, ‘Stay until it’s safe to cross.’ We got food there and beds.”

“Why, there’s nothing over there but the hookhouse,” said an old woman. She had no teeth, and her chin turned upward.

“Where else could they have went?” asked her friend. “You want them to stand in the cold?”

The first woman ignored her. She stared at Essie a few seconds instead, looking at the eyes that were outlined in black stuff and the thick hair piled on top of Essie’s head in a fashionable way. “Why, you’re nothing but—” She put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m a mother,” Essie said fiercely. “I am distressed.”

“Let her be,” a woman said.

“The list. Who’s on the list?” someone cried, and the crowd grew as still as midnight.

Essie read the names on the first list quickly, and with each name, a woman sighed or cried out or thanked God. One fell to her knees in prayer. When Essie had finished, she looked out over the crowd of women, seeing the ones with fear still on their faces. “I got another list. These here are the kids that started across the road.”

“The ones caught in the slide,” a mother whispered.

“Hush, let her read.”

Essie started on the second list. “Rosemary and Charlie Bibb.”

“Found!” someone called. “They’ve already been found.”

Essie’s spirits rose at that, for if two had been found alive, maybe Sophie was all right. She read the next name on the list, Jane Cobb, hoping someone would cry out that Jane had been saved.

But there was silence, until a woman muttered, “That’s the Negro girl. I reckon she’s still buried.”

“Schuyler Foote,” Essie read.

“He’s safe, too.”

“Jack, Carrie, and Lucia Turpin.” Essie paused, because no one spoke up. Then she saw a woman with long yellow curls, tears running down her face, and knew she was the mother of the three.

“Emmett Carter.”

Again there was silence, until someone muttered, “He’s Minder Evans’s grandson. Minder’s digging out there. I’ll go tell him.”

“Sophie Schnable.” Essie’s voice wavered a little. It was like a stroke of death to her to pronounce her daughter’s name.

“Martha’s girl,” a woman said.

“My girl,” Essie told her, and then she added, “That’s all of them.”

She stood by herself a moment, and then Lucy Bibb, standing with the woman with the yellow curls, reached out to her. “Come and keep warm with me and my sister,” she said.

A long time had passed now, ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and the men dug frantically, knowing the chances were not good that a child could live even a minute or two longer buried in the snow.

“Here’s a coat, a boy’s coat,” one of them called, and the crowd of women leaned forward as one. Knowing their children were safe on the other side of the avalanche, some of the mothers had gone home to gather food. It would be a long night, and the men would need to eat, and the women, too, because they would stand vigil as long as the men were there. They stayed because it was a town tragedy that had happened.

“Who is it?” the women asked one another.

“Jack, it must be Jack,” Dolly whispered, and Lucy’s heart leapt.

But it was not. The women heard one of the rescuers cry out, the long wail of an old man, and Minder Evans dropped his shovel and took the boy in his arms.

“It’s Emmett Carter,” Lucy said, and felt Dolly sag against her. “He’s limp.”

The women watched, silent now, as Minder struggled to carry the boy. Emmett’s arms were limp, broken, and his skull was crushed. A man offered his aid, but Minder told him no.

“Is he alive?” Dolly whispered, and Lucy heard the hope in her sister’s voice, because if Emmett were alive after all this time, Dolly’s three children might be, as well.

Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s not moving.”

“Carry him to the Foote house. The doctor from the mine is there,” someone told Minder.

The old man struggled up the path to the big house, others trying to help, but Minder wouldn’t let them. He carried the boy into the kitchen, where women were already spreading food on the table—pot roast and chops, cakes and pies and plates of fudge and gingerbread, food that they had prepared for their own families’ suppers. It would feed the rescuers now—and the rescued.

“The fireplace room. Take him there.” Grace set down the coffeepot she was filling and followed Minder into the parlor, the very room from which she had watched the avalanche. Minder laid the boy on the davenport, and Grace covered him with a white throw as soft as duck down, which she kept on the back of the sofa. The boy was pale and white and did not stir, and he looked like death. The old man, too, looked devoid of life, his eyes black and hollow, the skin on his face and neck as gray as mine muck. He looked as old as the mountains.

“Doc?” Grace said to a man who was sitting on the floor talking to the Bibb girl, but the doctor was already getting to his feet. He went to Emmett, took a mirror from his bag, and, kneeling down, held it to the boy’s mouth. He examined Emmett’s head, then listened for his breath, his heartbeat, and after a few minutes, he rose and took the old man’s hands in his and shook his head.

“He must have been hit by a log or a rock. I’m sorry. He died of a concussion.”

Minder slid to the floor and put his arms around the boy. “He died of cowardice, Emmett did. Cowardice. That’s what.”

“You mustn’t say that. There was nothing cowardly about the way he died. He was caught in the slide. You can’t blame him.”

“I don’t,” Minder replied, not looking up. “I’m the coward. It’s my abomination. That’s why he died. Retribution for what I did.” The old man began to sob, long, tearless cries that racked his body and seemed to draw the blood from his face drop by drop. “I was going to raise him till he’s grown, raise him up to be righteous.” His eyes grew even darker, until they were like dead coals, and he collapsed onto the body of his grandson. Grace and the doctor laid the old man on the floor. The doctor examined him and said he was all right, and Grace covered him with a blanket. “When he comes to, we’ll give him something strong to drink. It will stimulate him.”

“Does he want to be stimulated?” Grace asked.

The doctor smiled sadly. “We can heal the body but not the heart. That’s up to him, and it’s not likely he’ll do it. I know Minder Evans. He’s been through the war. Some of them never got over it. There’s times I think I ought to let people die.” He took a deep breath and stood up. “But it’s against my calling. Let’s move the boy’s body. Is there a place we can put the dead? That’s what the next ones will be.”

Ted Turpin came up to his wife, who was standing among the women with her sister and the girl from the Pines. “We just got the word down at the dredge. The kids?” he asked, breathless, because he had been running.

Dolly turned her face to her husband and opened her mouth, but she was so full of misery that the words wouldn’t come out.

“They haven’t found them,” Lucy told him.

“Luce?” Ted asked.

He had not spoken directly to his sister-in-law since that night so many years before outside of his house, and Lucy thought how much he had aged. Where once he had been slim and hard as a bone, he was fleshy. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red, and his skin was flushed, perhaps from the cold, but it might have come from being filled with drink, for he had become an imbiber. It was known that he had once passed out in a snowbank and would have frozen if someone had not found him. Ted still worked on the dredge, but he had never been promoted, and people thought of him as a man whose education got in the way of his common sense. Ted’s life had not been a good one, but that was his fault, and Lucy did not waste pity on him, not for his life. But she did feel sorry for him that his children were buried in the snow. “We’re waiting. Some of the children have been rescued already. There’s hope.”

“Yours?”

“They’re safe.”

“Thank God for that,” he said, and Lucy thought he meant it. He glanced at the girl from the Pines, and he seemed to recognize her, making Lucy wonder if stepping was another of Ted’s vices.

Lucy stared at her brother-in-law a moment, trying to remember what she had seen in this man that had made her love him so. She had spent too many years resenting him, and now she asked herself if he had been worth it. He was weak, unsure of himself, and the thought came to her of a sudden that she had married the better man. Henry Bibb was not as educated, but he was steady and was respected for his knowledge of mining, had been promoted three times since their marriage. Henry loved their children, came home in the evenings and read stories to them, selecting a book from among those that were lined up with Lucy’s college texts on a shelf that he had built. He put aside five dollars each month so that Charlie could go to college, and Rosemary, too, because Henry was a man proud of his wife’s education. He did not feel belittled by it. There is something lacking in Ted Turpin, but not in Henry Bibb, Lucy thought, and if her heart did not flutter at the sight of Henry as he sat in the easy chair each evening reading the newspaper and smoking his pipe, it at least was filled with affection, and with gratitude that she had married a man with such a good heart.

Then, as if her thinking had brought him to her, Henry stood by her side and put his arm around her. He was not much for such public display, and Lucy knew how deeply he must feel. “The children are eating cookies. Have they found the others, Mother?”

Lucy shook her head.

“I guess they can use another hand at the digging, since they can’t use the heavy equipment yet, for fear of hitting a kid. Ted, you coming?”

Ted said he would stay with his wife, and at that, Lucy gave him a hard look, trying to determine whether he was too shaky to dig. Perhaps he had been drinking on the job. Or was he a coward, afraid of another avalanche? Lucy did not want to think so. Maybe he just felt his wife needed him by her side. Lucy hoped that was it and looked over at her sister. For the first time, she observed how Dolly was dressed—a threadbare sweater that she had worn since high school, rubber shoes held together with adhesive tape, gloves worn through at the fingertips. Lucy had not known things were that bad for Dolly. She had not cared, she reminded herself.

As Henry started for the area where the men were working, a clump of snow broke off high up and began rolling down the mountain. Henry glanced up at it, watched as the ball gathered speed, puckering the snow and starting a slide. But the avalanche was small and short-lived, and Henry went across the packed snow to where the men were digging. He picked up the shovel that Minder Evans had dropped and began scooping up snow. Just as he did, a cry went up that another child had been found—no, two children.

Dolly gripped Lucy’s hand with both of hers, and Lucy thought how odd it was that her sister turned to her for comfort instead of to Ted. But she did not hold that notion for long, because the men lifted the two little bodies, and even from a distance, Lucy recognized Jack and one of his sisters, although she did not know whether the girl was Carrie or Lucia.

“Oh please, God,” Dolly whispered. “Lucy, God, let them be all right.” Tears ran down the mother’s face, smearing the powder she used on it, and with her childish curls, the tears gave her a grotesque look, like a carved wooden doll. Age had not been kind to Dolly. Ted stood mute, but Dolly held out her arms to the little ones being carried to the waiting knot of mothers. “Jack, Carrie,” she said.

“Ted, you take one,” Lucy ordered. “Doll can carry the other. I’ll wait here for Lucia.” She swallowed as she said the name, thinking how Doll had reached for her when she called her third child Lucia for Lucy, but Lucy had been too hurt and angry to accept the gesture.

Ted picked up Jack, while Dolly took Carrie into her arms, both children limp and white, bruised, their clothes shredded, and together, the parents carried them to the manager’s house. Henry went over to Lucy then and said quietly, “They’re gone. There’s no hope for them.”

Lucy put her head on his shoulder and cried. “Then you have to find Lucia, Father. Dolly has to be spared one child. She’s my sister. How can she live if she loses them all? How could anyone?”

“We’re digging,” Henry said, and went back to the workers, and just as he reached them, one called, “Here’s another’n.” It was not a cry of glee, for now the men knew it was unlikely they would find another child alive. The little ones had been buried too long—twenty minutes, maybe thirty now. No one could live that long covered in snow, deprived of oxygen.