Whiter Than Snow (24 page)

“She can stay here. We’ve plenty of room,” Grace said.

Lucy nearly told her the woman was a hooker, because it was an unseemly thing that a girl from the Pines would sleep in the house belonging to the manager of the Fourth of July Mine. Instead, Lucy caught herself and only nodded. Grace knew the names of the children caught in the avalanche, had heard the women gossiping around the stove. She would understand what Mrs. Schnable was, would know that Essie must make a long, cold journey across the avalanche to the hookhouse. Lucy marveled at the kindness of the manager’s wife, the woman who did not mix in town. But then trouble, which often brought out the worst in people, sometimes brought out their best.

“They’re all accounted for now except one?” Grace asked.

“The little black girl. Jane.”

“Are you going home, then, Mrs. Bibb?”

“I suppose,” Lucy said. “There’s no one down there to wait for her. No mother, I mean. It’s odd. I never wondered where the mother was. I suppose she’s dead.”

“He’s there? Her father?”

“He was one of the first to dig. He’s never stopped. As long as he’s there, the others will stay.”

“Is there hope?”

Lucy shook her head. “Even with an air pocket, she couldn’t last this long. They’re digging for a corpse.” Lucy left then, and instead of going directly home, she went by way of the avalanche, hoping that the other body had been found. But the men were still digging.

At home, she undressed in the dark so that she would not wake her husband, but as she got into bed, Henry asked, “Did they find the last ones?”

“The Schnable girl. She’s dead. The other, the little Negro girl, Jane, is still buried.”

Henry threw back the covers. “I’ll be going, then. I best help with the digging. Joe’ll want us to dig with shovels.” Like the other parents, Joe had refused to let the plows and diggers from the mine onto the snowfield, for fear they would tear up the bodies.

“She’ll be dead. It won’t make any difference.”

“It’ll make a difference to Joe.”

And it did. When he thought about it later, Joe was moved that so many white men stayed to dig for his daughter. He wondered when they found the last white child whether everyone would go home. He wouldn’t blame them if they did. There was no hope, and the night was bitter cold. The men had been digging for hours in snow that was heavy and compacted, like sludge. He didn’t expect them to stay, but they did.

The men urged Joe to stop for a moment to rest, eat a bite of food, because he had not stopped digging since he reached the snowfield only minutes after the slide. But he wouldn’t. He dug through the night and into the morning, and it was nearly noon the following day by the time someone took the shovel from his hands and told him to go home. “There’s no hope, Joe. And there’s danger of another avalanche.” There was no more danger than at any other time, but it was the only way the men could persuade Joe to stop, by telling him he shouldn’t risk the lives of others.

Joe did not go back to the mill that day, or the next. Instead, each day at sunrise, he walked to the snowslide and dug, worked until sundown. It got to be a regular thing to see Joe Cobb digging in the snow—a week, two, then a month.

“You ought to wait till spring thaw, when the snow melts. You’ll find her then,” someone told Joe, but he couldn’t do that. He owed it to Jane, to Orange, to all of those he had left behind. He could not let his daughter melt out in the spring like some dead porcupine.

The Swandyke church could not hold all the mourners who attended the funeral for the five children killed in the snowslide. Although Jane Cobb’s body had not been found, everyone agreed that she should be mourned with the others, and so her empty coffin was lined up with the caskets containing the bodies of her dead schoolmates.

The little caskets were mismatched, because they had come from different funeral parlors in Denver. The two Turpin children, Jack and Carrie, rested in the only two coffins that were alike, fancy coffins, metal, with brass handles. Emmett lay in a pine box that Minder had chosen because it reminded him of the coffins he’d built for dead soldiers during the war. Sophie’s casket had a glass top and sides, and, dressed in the white gown that Essie had whipped up on her fingers, the girl was clearly visible as she lay against the white satin lining, her dark hear spread around her pale face. The fifth child’s coffin had not arrived, so the one waiting for Jane was full-sized, black, with silver trim. Like the others, even Emmett’s, Jane’s casket was open, displaying the vacant pillow, as white as the snow that still encased the girl, waiting for her. The dead children, clad in their best, lay rigid, their white faces waxy in the winter light. “They look as if they’re sleeping,” one mourner said, and others murmured their agreement, although Grace Foote thought they all looked dead.

The terrible tragedy had been front-page news in Denver, and a mention of it had even made the papers in New York City and Washington, D.C., so the service attracted the governor, a congressman, and one of the senators from Colorado, along with officials of the company that owned the Fourth of July Mine, because the slide, after all, had started on the mine’s property. There were, as well, a handful of journalists and the curious, who, because the weather was good that day, took the train to Swandyke to gawk at the bereaved and bask in their grief. And, of course, everyone in Swandyke turned out. Few in that town did not know at least one of the families whose children had been caught in the slide.

No building in Swandyke was large enough for all those who came to the funeral, so the service was held outside. The best place for such a large crowd would have been the open area below the Fourth of July Mine, but of course that was inappropriate, not to mention dangerous, because with the freezing and thawing in the past few days, the snow was as unstable as it had been the afternoon of the avalanche. In fact, there had been subsequent snowslides, small ones, none to compare with the one on April 20.

So the funeral was conducted at the Meadowbrook Cemetery, in an open area on one side of the graves, where no one had yet been buried. Usually, folks stood at such services, but chairs had been set out for the dignitaries and for the families of the students caught in the slide, both the children who had survived and those who had not, because as the minister said, they were gathered to rejoice in the lives saved as well as to mourn those that were lost. But of course, no lives were really
lost,
because the dead were innocent children who had gone to be with the Lord, gone to a better place, he added. Some believed him, but not many.

The woman from the governor’s office who had called to say the state’s chief official would attend had asked where the service would be held if it snowed, which made the people in Swandyke shake their heads. They were used to inclement weather and thought the governor should be, too. The service would be held in the cemetery even if there were a willow bender, as the thick spring storms were called. The minister probably would call such a blizzard cleansing, but the mourners would see it as God’s poor joke, because snow was what had killed the children. Many who were there that day were not pleased with God. But He did not cause it to snow at the service. In fact, the sun shone so brightly that some in the crowd got sunburned.

The front row was reserved for the elected officials as well as for the representatives of the Fourth of July, who had come out from the East. Grace did not want to sit with them. She would rather have been with the other parents, but as her husband was the mine manager, she had no choice. The officials seemed ill at ease, as if they didn’t want to mix with the mourners, but Grace insisted on introducing them to each of the parents, who were a little in awe. They had never met anybody higher than the local manager. Later on, it was remarked with some satisfaction that Grace knew each of the parents’ names and those of their children.

People were surprised, because Grace had never noticed them before. They did not know that she had studied the two lists of children that Essie Schnable had compiled. She had called on not only the other family members whose youngsters had been caught in the avalanche but also the parents of the children who were safe on the other side of the slide, taking cookies, a cake, a jar of jam ordered from some far-off store. It was as if she’d been born and raised up in Swandyke. She’d written condolence notes to those whose children had died as well as letters of thanks to the women who had helped her at the manager’s house that awful day, written them on creamy white paper almost as thick as cardboard, with her name, Grace Schuyler Foote, engraved at the top. The recipients kept those cards, because they were moved by them. They’d never in their lives received such letters. One woman who had brought a plate of snickerdoodles to the manager’s house following the avalanche put her note in a frame and hung it in the living room. Now Grace stood with the officials, greeting the parents and presenting them to the officers of the Fourth of July and the governor, who said again and again how sorry he was.

The Bibbs and the Turpins had been the first families to arrive. They sat in the second row with their children, the women next to each other. Dolly, her hair brushed back under a hat instead of hanging down in long curls, stared hard at the two coffins with the placards jack and carrie on them, began to cry, and clutched her sister. Ted was next to his wife, his face puffy, his eyes red, but he did not smell of liquor. The two Bibb children sat between their parents, and on the other side of Henry Bibb was Joe Cobb. Henry had seen Joe standing at the back of the crowd, dressed in his work clothes, and had taken his arm.

“I ought to be looking for Jane,” Joe said. “Besides, I haven’t got a funeral suit.”

“You ought to be here, and no mistake. Jane deserves to be mourned with the others.”

“I’ll stay in the back.”

“You do that, and you’ll bring disrespect to your girl. I believe you think she’s as good as any of the other children. Am I right?” And so Joe followed Henry to the seats, and nobody remarked that the Negro sat in the second row, just behind the senator.

Before he went to the funeral, Minder Evans, a little hunched over, walking with the aid of a cane that day, trudged the trail connecting the Civil War graves. He did not know why he needed to visit the war dead just then, but they seemed to call to him, as if they were old friends offering comfort. He could not shake the thought that Emmett was dead because of Minder’s own transgressions and that these veterans of that long-ago conflict understood. The old man sweated a little from the exertion of walking from grave to grave, brushing snow off the stones, removing leaves, and he knew he would not have many more years. He was glad of it. What reason did he have to live? He wondered about that. For what purpose did he stay on this earth?

He approached the crowd of people standing behind the chairs, some stamping their feet or coughing, wishing the service would start, because they did not want to be there. Nobody did. Several nodded at Minder, held out their hands, and told him they were sorry. One woman said it was God’s will, and Minder feared she was right, that God’s will was to punish him for the rest of his life, maybe into eternity.

He saw the prostitute Essie standing to one side, a little apart from the crowd, with the other hookers. Minder remembered her from the Pines. He’d gone there from time to time, not for the reason other men did, but just to sit and talk to a woman. He paid, of course, and went to the room with the girl. Once he’d gone to Essie’s room and asked her to tell him about her life. She’d said she was French and had been seduced by a prince, who paid her enough money to move to the United States. Minder’d known all that was a lie, but he’d pretended to believe her. He had not known she had a daughter.

Someone tried to steer Minder to the front row, said he ought to be there with the mining officials, since he had once been an owner of the Fourth of July. But he looked over at Essie and wondered why she wasn’t sitting with the other parents. So he went to her and offered his arm. “Mrs. Schnable, I believe it is. May I escort you to your seat?”

Essie looked surprised. “I’ll just stay here.”

“No, you ought to be with the other parents.”

A man overheard and said, “She can’t sit with decent folks. It’s not fitting.”

Minder stared at him, a black look on his face, and the man’s wife muttered, “You never know which way a cat’s going to jump. She might raise revolution. After all, she’s a…she’s a…”

“She’s a what?” Minder asked, staring down the woman. “I believe she’s a mother, and a bereaved mother at that.”

The woman would not be bested. She might not tell it out loud that Essie was a whore, but she would say the next best thing. “She’s a Jew.”

“Well, what of it?” Minder asked. “So am I.”

Essie was startled, but she took Minder’s arm and the two walked to their seats. Essie walked proud, holding her shoulders back, the way she’d once moved as a dancer. The minister went to each parent and shook hands, patted shoulders, offered a word of condolence or a blessing. He did not hold back when he came to Essie, which pleased Minder. Then he thought that perhaps the young man, new to Swandyke, did not know Essie’s occupation.

When he had finished with the parents, the minister went to a pulpit set up in front of the coffins and began the service with the Lord’s Prayer. The people repeated the prayer, all except for Essie, who didn’t know it. A few said the word
trespasses,
but most said
debts.
The governor gave a little talk. He told the mourners how sorry he was. He wasn’t eloquent. In fact, his words did not inspire the people or lift their burden, but they were gratified that he cared to be there. That was enough.

Jim Foote spoke for the Fourth of July. The mourners knew that another company, long gone, had done the hydraulic mining that denuded the slope below the mine, making it dangerous for snowslides. Besides, the slide had been an act of God. Nobody could have prevented it if the Lord wanted to send that avalanche. So they didn’t blame the mining company. Still, the tragedy had taken place on property owned by the Fourth of July, and the company wanted to show its compassion. So Jim told the mourners the mining company would erect a monument to the dead children, to be placed in front of the new grade school. It would honor them, make sure they would never be forgotten. People murmured and nodded their approval, because there were not statues in Swandyke.

Jim didn’t mention that the statue had been Grace’s idea. The mining executives who had gathered at the Footes’ dining room table the night before thought they might put up a plaque. But Grace said the parents would want more than that, suggested a statue depicting each of the five children who had died. When one of the men remarked about the cost, Grace pointed out that labor agitators were moving into Swandyke, and that the statue would bring goodwill. After all, she’d lived in Swandyke for almost eight years and knew the people, knew they wouldn’t organize a company that made such a gesture. Of course, Grace made all that up. She didn’t know any more about labor relations than a trout, but the mining officials did, and they knew she was right.

There was singing at the service, of course. You couldn’t have a funeral in a mining town without singing “Going Home,” and there were other favorites, such as “The Old Rugged Cross” and “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Then it was the minister’s turn. “Almighty God in His wisdom…” he said, then stopped and stood a long time looking at the coffins, rubbing his fingers together. As a young man fresh out of seminary, he had never conducted a funeral before. It was clear to the parents of the dead children that the man had been sorely taxed by the avalanche and his inability to comfort his flock. “It will always be remembered,” he said, beginning again, then was still. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand while people fidgeted, the women nervous, swishing the air in front of them with paper fans that bore the name of the mortuary. They expected some word of explanation from him. They expected the man of God to know the reason the slide had taken place, to explain away their grief. The minister appeared to know it, too, as he looked out over the upturned faces. The mourners felt cheated.

He sighed deeply, and then he uttered in a voice that some later said sounded like the voice of God Hisself, “The stones should cry out…” He burst into tears and could not continue. The bereaved, who had not been touched by the minister’s earlier attempts to comfort them, were satisfied then, overcome by his words, and many who had not cried before shed tears now.

The minister sat down, drained, and then at the last, Jim Foote stood and ended the service, inviting the mourners to the Woodmen’s Hall for coffee and cake. The crowd broke up, some heading for the Woodmen’s, others going home. Many stopped to say a word to the parents or to greet the governor, not that they admired him much, but they wanted to be able to tell others that they had shaken the hand of the governor of the state of Colorado. It did not take long for the burial ground to empty out, because despite the sun, the day was cold. Pine trees shaded the cemetery now, and the wind had come up. Over on the side, men hired by the cemetery waited with shovels. They would have to move the coffins to family plots and put them into the ground, all except for Jane’s. Her casket would be loaded onto a hearse and taken back to the undertaker’s, where it would wait until her body was found.

“You want to go to the Woodmen’s? You can come with us. I expect you need to get caught up with your eating,” Lucy told Essie, but Essie shook her head. The funeral had been strange to her. She didn’t know the feel of being a Christian, and instead of sitting placidly through the service, she had wanted to cry out and rend her garments, but she had kept still and made only a little tear on the left side of her dress. She did not know what was expected of her now. Besides, she was afraid she would be shunned, that her presence would make people remember Sophie as the daughter of a hooker, and as she had protected her daughter from disgrace in life, Essie would protect her in death.