Whiter Than Snow (25 page)

“I’ll see you home,” Minder said.

“All right,” Essie replied.

The other hookers had left by then, and Essie’s friend Martha, the woman who had raised Sophie, had already deserted Swandyke, saying that with the little girl gone, she didn’t see any reason to remain in a place where it snowed twelve months of the year. “I got disappointed in this town a long time back. I ain’t never had nothing here after Sophie got taken, and I won’t ever have nothing again. You got to study and contrive so hard. I wouldn’t have stayed except for Sophie.” She hadn’t even waited for the funeral, explaining to Essie that looking at the coffins “wouldn’t be no good for me.” So Essie did not have even Martha’s comfort.

They were the last to leave, Essie and Minder, because he wanted to walk the war graves again. He’d never taken that path with another person, but Essie didn’t seem intrusive. She asked if he’d been in the war, and he replied, “Yes, and it cost me right sharp, cost me Emmett.”

Minder didn’t know why he said that, because he thought the girl would ask him to explain. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “God alone knows life brings a lapful of troubles.”

They walked slowly back to town, passed through it, and came to the place where the slide had been. Off to the side, Joe had already begun to dig. He’d be able to get in an hour or two before nightfall, shoveling the snow, which had become compacted and was as hard as granite. “That man gets along slim,” Minder observed. They continued on to the edge of the snowfield, and Minder stopped then, resting on a boulder that had been loosened in the avalanche. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said to Essie. He was a little surprised that he told her like that, because it was not a thing he had thought through, and he wondered if he should have waited, if he would be sorry later. But it seemed like he should ask.

“I don’t want you to trouble me,” Essie said, her voice edged with disappointment that the man who had been so kind to her was fixed up now to pay for her services. Or maybe after he’d been so nice, he’d want to visit her for free.

She took a step toward the Pines, but Minder held out his hand and said, “Now don’t get up and git. It’s fruitless for you to worry about me. I’m no rascal. Besides, as you know, I’m ill off in that way. What I’ve got to say to you is to offer you a job.”

“Doing what?” Essie asked suspiciously.

“I’m not asking you to make a penny dishonest.” Then, instead of answering her, Minder asked his own question. “Do you want to go back to hooking?”

“I could possibly be a dressmaker in Denver.”

“Then maybe you ought to do that.”

“How can that be? I saved up to get me and Sophie a start—you have to keep yourself until the women get to know about your sewing. But I didn’t have burial insurance, and every little money went for the coffin.” She shrugged. “So what is it I can do?”

“What about Sophie’s father?”

“A mutt. A dirty, rotten bum. He already had a wife when he married me. I was a dope.” She hadn’t intended to make such an outburst, and Essie took a deep breath to calm herself.

“Sounds like there wasn’t any other place for you to go. Well, I’ve got a choice you can consider,” Minder said. He patted the flat space on the rock next to him, and Essie sat down, her back to the man. “My trouble is I’ve lived too long. I got to find somebody to keep me, to do various pieces of work for me. With the rheumatics in my legs, I can’t walk as good as I should, and I can’t cook anymore. Somebody’s got to fix my meals, fix them careful, on account of I can’t eat much grease. And before long, somebody’ll have to take me to the cemetery to walk the graves. Now, I’ll pay you good to tend me, and you’ll have your own room. There’s even a room for your sewing machine. It’s a big house.”

“You offer me this with an open hand?”

“I do.”

Essie thought over the offer. Then, remembering back to when she was a girl with her sister, she said, “You have a big house. Have you got a chandelier?”

“Two of them.”

“Two chandeliers. Such a wonder!” Essie exclaimed, wishing she could write to her sister and tell her that, then deciding maybe she could. She thought a moment and asked, “What would people say?”

“Nothing good, most likely, but it’ll be no worse than what they’d say about you if you went back to the hookhouse.”

“You, I mean. What would they say about you?”

Minder held his cane between his hands and bumped it up and down on the packed snow, chuckling. “I stopped worrying about that a long time ago.”

“You’ve got nerve. I’ll give you that.” Essie looked out over the snowfield, over to where Joe was breaking up ice with a pick. She’d already given some thought to what she’d do after the funeral. As she’d told Minder, she didn’t have the money to set up as a dressmaker, and there weren’t any dress factories in Colorado where she could get a job. As for dancing, Essie had come to understand that she was not so good at it as she’d once thought, that Max had led her on when he’d told her she could be a Ziegfeld Girl. She burned with embarrassment to think she had believed him. So her only choices were to stay on at the Pines or go on over to the Blue Goose in Breckenridge, and while she hadn’t minded hooking so much before, she thought that after what had happened, it was time to get out of the life. It seemed disrespectful to Sophie’s memory. Now this old man was offering her something else. It might not be a flowery bed of ease, but then, what was? She wouldn’t mind keeping house, not in a place with two chandeliers.

“You could visit your daughter’s grave every day when I go to the burial ground,” Minder told her.

“What the earth covers must not be forgotten,” she said solemnly.

“Why don’t you rest your hat at my house for a week or two, see if we suit each other. I’m not pert, but I’m not fractious, either. I’m trusty.” He stood and held out his hand to help her up, although Essie was steadier on her feet than Minder was. “You think it over.”

Essie studied the man for a moment, then said she’d already had time to think it over. “A good heart you have, Mr. Evans. I’ll try it a little.” She frowned and pursed her lips. “But I’ll be just frank. A lie should not come between us.” She waited until Minder nodded at her to continue. “I’m not French.”

“That’s all right,” Minder said solemnly. “I’m not a Jew.”

Lucy and Dolly walked hand in hand a little ahead of their husbands as they made their way toward the Woodmen’s Hall. Their three children scampered in front of them, the girls stopping to make angels in the snow. Charlie pelted his sister and his cousin with snowballs, but the girls only laughed and chased him, pushing him into a snowbank.

The children, even Lucia, who had lost both a brother and a sister, did not yet understand the finality of death, Lucy realized. That was good. Lucia’s playfulness would help Dolly. She squeezed her sister’s hand, and Dolly looked up at her, eyes dry. “When he’s better seasoned, that man will make a good minister,” Lucy observed.

“He has heart,” Dolly said. “He’ll make it.”

“So will you, Doll. You’ll be all right.”

“I lost them. But I got you.”

Lucy thought that wasn’t much of a trade, but she didn’t say so. “We wasted a lot of years.”

“We’ll make up for them. We already have.”

Indeed, the day after the avalanche, Lucy had fixed a pot roast and potatoes and taken them, along with a bottle of green beans, to her sister, and the two sat down beside the cookstove in Dolly’s kitchen, Lucy on a straight chair, Dolly in the rocker, and they talked. They caught up on each other’s lives and the children’s, laughing at the antics of the little ones that they had never shared with each other. They spoke about everything except for what hung over them, what had driven them apart. And then Dolly said, “It wasn’t worth it, Lucy. Ted. He was never worth you.”

“Hush,” her sister told her.

“No, it has to be said. I betrayed you, just like they talk about betraying in the Bible. I ask you to forgive me.”

“You’ve paid for it,” Lucy said.

“And so have you.”

“No. I married the man I was intended for. Henry’s a good husband. He suits me.”

“You must have hated me.” Dolly got up from the rocker and went to the stove, where water in the teakettle was steaming. She measured tea into an old pot that was cracked, its spout broken, and poured in hot water. Then she sat down without looking at her sister. “You must have hated me,” she said again.

Lucy was about to deny it, but now was a time for truth. “I did at first. And then I stopped, but I didn’t know it. The hate became a habit. It hurt me as much as you.”

Dolly nodded. “Ted still loves you. I think he does. He never loved me, not after a while.”

“No. Ted loves himself.” The two sat there, silently for a minute. “And I don’t love Ted anymore. I haven’t in a long time.” Lucy did not realize that until she said it, and she paused a moment in wonder. Then she turned to her sister. “But I love you.”

“It upholds me,” Dolly said, and she went to fetch the tea.

The evening of the funeral, after Schuyler was asleep and Jim was at the depot with the departing Fourth of July officials, Grace went into the fireplace room with a pad of paper and a fountain pen and stood looking out at the snowfield illuminated by the moon. She looked for the figure of Joe Cobb—she looked for him every day, the black man against the white snow, and watched him dig—but he had gone home. She did not turn on a lamp, because the moon made the room almost as bright as day, but sat down on a footstool by the window and put the soft wool throw over her shoulders.

She wondered if it would bother the two women to sit in that room, where they could see all the way down the slope to the spot where the avalanche had buried their children. Grace had liked Lucy the best of the women in her kitchen that night, and so after the funeral, she’d said, “Come for tea.” And Lucy had asked if she could bring her sister. Grace said, “Of course,” remembering that Dolly, having lost two children, had suffered more than any of the other parents. Grace had thought they’d be more at ease in the kitchen over coffee and gingerbread, but then she decided she ought not to look down on them. In the morning, she would bake a cake and make tea sandwiches, because the two had agreed to visit that day.

She sat in the moonlight for a time, wondering if the women would become her friends. She rather hoped so, because she liked them. And then she set aside thoughts of the sisters and turned to the pad of paper and unscrewed her fountain pen, holding it poised over the paper. In a moment, she wrote the first lines: “It was very little of pretty things they had.”

She had intended just to put down the experience, to write about the avalanche so that Schuyler, when he was grown, would know what had happened. And then she thought she might write a magazine story, explaining how people in a mining town high in the Colorado mountains had come together when tragedy hit them. But when she wrote, the words of a novel came out.

And so Grace Foote told the story of the avalanche at the Fourth of July Mine. It was not a best-seller, like her later books, because, frankly, people on the East Coast did not care much about a little mining town in Colorado. There were a few good reviews, however, and later on, several literary critics believed that Grace Foote’s first novel, which had come out of her own experience as the wife of a mine manager in Colorado, was the most moving of all the books she wrote. It was always Grace’s favorite—and Jim’s, too. She dedicated it to him.

The book became a classic among folks who lived in mining towns along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, and there was not a house in Swandyke that didn’t have a copy, most of them autographed by the author, back when she lived there. After she moved away, people in the town did not recall her as the famous author, however. They remembered her as the mine manager’s wife, the woman who had opened her house to the town on the day of the April avalanche, who had asked that the bodies of the dead children be laid out in her home, who had taken in the prostitute mother and let her sleep in Grace’s own bed.

Minder Evans finished his tour of the graves and stood beneath a jack pine, looking out over the burial ground. He thought he was alone in the cemetery, but now he saw the figure of a man in the distance, squatting beside a grave. The man was Joe Cobb, the Negro, whose daughter had been killed in the avalanche along with Emmett. Her body had finally been found.

Joe had dug in the snow for Jane every day following the slide, churning up tons of snow in his search, but it was a miner, walking home from the Pines one evening, who had seen the hand sticking out of a drift that was slushy from spring melt. He went for the sheriff, and the two of them thought to dig up the girl and take her to the funeral parlor, but after some consideration, the sheriff said he believed Joe would want to do it. So he’d gone to Joe’s cabin and told him Jane’s body had been uncovered.

Joe did not care who had found his daughter, only that the search was over. He didn’t take a shovel to the snowslide. Instead, he dug up his daughter with his bare hands, saying now that she’d been found, he didn’t want to hurt her none by hitting her with a shovel or a pick. And so he’d slowly loosened the ice around Jane, and the people who had come to watch were humbled to see how lovingly he scooped away the snow from the peaceful body, which lay sprawled in the white. Joe carried his daughter to the undertaker and sat beside her through the night and into the next day and night, until the body had thawed enough to be fitted into the coffin. Then he himself placed the girl inside the box and closed the lid.

He did not want a service. Joe said Jane wouldn’t care to have people gawking and crying, and newspaper folks setting off their flashbulbs as they had at the earlier funeral for the dead children. But the real reason was that he was afraid nobody would show up to honor a Negro girl who had been dead for weeks. He didn’t want to let the town disrespect Jane. And so, accompanied only by Mittie McCauley, he stood at the edge of the grave under a pine tree as the preacher said a prayer. And then Joe, who had dug the grave himself, shoveled the dirt over the casket. Mittie and the preacher left him alone then. They knew he wanted to grieve by himself.