One Step Enough Read online

  “Someone like Mr. Weisman needs more than one dragon,” Angharad explained as Owen and Della tucked her in bed. “I should draw a dog too.”

  He leaned against the door and listened as Della and Angharad sang “Ar Hyd y Nos,” the lullaby he had sung to his child even before she was born, but which the mine disaster had sucked completely out of his life.

  Maybe the dragons intended for Mr. Weisman made Angharad especially brave. Before he closed the door to her room, his daughter sat up. “Da, you need to sing again.”

  “Oh, I don’t …”

  Her hand went up imperiously. “Da! I am a fine soprano. Mam sings a very good alto. We are not complete.”

  He thought about that the next morning as Della packed their lunches and carefully placed the dragon sketch between two pieces of cardboard. Angharad’s words of the night before had turned his wife quiet. He could tell something else bothered her, and he knew what it was. She had wakened him from sleep last night, crying for her father. He had soothed her back into slumber, but he knew this time she was aware, unlike other times when he mentioned her nightmares and earned himself a blank stare.

  “Do you know, Saul told me about dreams,” she said as she spread butter on Angharad’s cheese sandwich. “He had a friend in Vienna, a medical student, who thought dreams were our way of expressing things we can’t talk about.”

  She put down the knife and leaned against the table. “I don’t seem to remember my dreams, or at least not for long. Should I?”

  It was a question for the ages. He kissed her forehead. She laughed and picked up the knife again. When she made no more mention of the matter, he couldn’t help his relief. He was at that critical moment when the hinged timbers, measured specifically for the Banner’s third-level drift, were being moved toward the mine. He wanted to concentrate on that and not worry about dreams, his or anyone else’s.

  His hands gentle on her shoulders, he told her in his most matter-of-fact way that he would be late coming home that night because he did not know how long it would take to swing the beams into place, lock them securely in the passage, then put down a layer of stronger slabs across the whole affair. She seemed to shrink inside herself, her eyes huge, but the work had to be done, and so he told her.

  “I’ll be along as soon as I can,” he said as he enveloped her in his arms, touched to the depths of his soul how she clung to him. “I can tell you not to worry, but I know you will.”

  He took his lunch bucket. She jumped when the waiting train gave three blasts, and put her hand to her throat. She shook her head at this and walked him to the door, her arm around his waist.

  “I’ll be waiting up for you,” she said.

  “It might be late. You needn’t …”

  “I’ll do it if I want to.”

  She patted his waist and let go, but then she grabbed him again by the belt. “Do this for me,” she said, and it was no suggestion. “If you can’t sing, you can’t sing, but do at least think those words to the miners’ song.”

  He nodded, and thought about the words, finding himself repeating the last line over and over: One step enough for me. One step enough for me.

  To his relief and pleasure, he found the entire verse reverberating through that corner of his mind that seemed to reside just below the part that governed the actual duties of the day. He had reason to appreciate the team he had assembled in the carpenter’s shop. Yesterday he had talked them through the entire installation, assigning each man to a portion. He told them to be ready for anything and watchful, and they did not fail him.

  They only installed the first set of timbers, with their sturdier-than-usual braces and beams, which created a solid unit. He let out the breath he felt he had been holding for a month as the beams swung into place and anchored themselves against the ribs and roof of the drift, leaving plenty of space to wield the drills that extricated the ore. This was twice the strength of a regular square set, and hopefully what the Banner Mine needed. Time would tell.

  He felt a measure of pride when the mining engineer from one of Uncle Jesse’s other mines joined them in late afternoon, nodding to see their day’s work. He looked at the angle of the roofed structure and nodded again. “In theory, it should work,” he said. “There is every likelihood that a rock fall will slide down, because the roof beams are too strong to collapse now. The rocks will reach that angle of repose and stop.”

  “In theory,” Owen said.

  “I have no doubt it will be tested,” the engineer said with a shake of his head. “I have to tell you: I don’t know about the Banner Mine. The assayer’s reports are promising, but I have to ask myself, is it worth it?”

  By the time all the tweaking and fitting was done, the sun was long gone and the stars had come out. Tired and hungry, Owen rode the train home to Knightville, certain he would find Della up and waiting for him.

  The lights were out in all the houses except those belonging to the two men with him from his team. The others lived in a Silver City boardinghouse.

  “We tell them to go to bed, but they never do,” he murmured.

  “And we love them for it,” his crew member said.

  Della leaped up from the sofa when he opened the door and threw herself into his arms. “I prayed and prayed,” she whispered in his ear as he held her tight.

  “Thank you, m cara,” he said, humbled down to the core of his soul. “It went just the way it was supposed to.”

  Della let out the breath she had been holding all day, took his hand, and pulled him to the kitchen, where stew and hot bread waited for him. He ate, and she never took his eyes from him.

  Sleep came easy and quick. In no time, it seemed Owen was on the train again, lunch pail full, headed back to Silver City. A light snow fell, but he doubted anything was capable of making a mining camp look good. He rested his cheek against his hand and found himself thinking about Provo, where the leaves were probably gone now, but where snow could turn into snowmen that weren’t grimy from mine dust.

  But the work was here. Looking as tired as he felt, but also quietly triumphant, his crew was already in the shop, preparing more timbers for the finicky, contrary, arbitrary Banner Mine.

  They stopped an hour later when a warning siren blared across the valley, earsplitting and immediate. One of his crew opened the door, making the piercing scream louder until it drowned out the whine of the saw.

  They all stepped into the street, wondering, and then looked toward the Mammoth Mine in the distance. Looking, concentrating, they soon saw miners pouring from the mine.

  Owen shook his head, wondering at the state of the timbers in the Mammoth, wondering why he didn’t quit and go back to handyman work in Provo. They could be on the train tomorrow morning.

  The moment passed as he thought of Richard and David Evans and all those Farishes and Gatherums. “I owe it to you,” he whispered. “I can make this safer.”

  “Should we go, Owen?”

  “I’ll leave it to you. It looks to me that there are plenty of men.”

  As he spoke, a wagon full of men in mine rescue suits and helmets raced toward the Mammoth. Hands on his hips, he stared after them, shook his head, and went back inside his shop.

  But who can concentrate after that? He looked at his timepiece. He might be a little early for lunch at the assayer’s office, but Della had seemed edgy this morning, gasping when Angharad dropped a pan and then putting her hand to her stomach and managing a weak laugh. He could surprise her.

  And he would have, except someone pounded on the door. He hurried to open it, wondering if he should have taken his men to the Mammoth after all.

  Saul Weisman stood in the door, panting. Owen took him by the arm and tried to lead him inside, but the little man resisted. Hands on his knees, he bent double until he caught his breath. When he spoke, Owen felt the blood leave his face.

  “It’s Della. When the siren started, she screamed. She fell on the floor and she’s still screaming.”

  C
hapter 30

  L

  Why was she lying on the floor, cheek pressed against the wood, as if trying to burrow underground? Her head already ached from someone’s screams, which were even louder than the steam whistle from the mine.

  When she realized she was screaming, she stopped, opened her eyes, and looked at her floor’s eye view. His head cocked to one side, Saladin stared back at her. He lay near her and stretched out flat, his face level with hers.

  Relieved not to be alone, she touched his snout. He inched closer. “I’m sorry for the racket, Saladin,” she said. “Don’t know what got into me.”

  She shuddered and closed her eyes again, wishing she could block out the sudden sound and the panic that filled every part of her, all from a steam whistle. She knew Owen wasn’t in the Banner Mine today because he had told her over breakfast that he needed to prepare the next unit of timbers. Why, then, this sudden terror?

  She tried to sit up, but the floor felt more comfortable, soft almost. Maybe she would stay there until the mining boom in Tintic faded away, as they all did eventually, and everyone left her alone. She could turn into the floor and then maybe the dirt underneath.

  But no. She heard people running along the boardwalk and Owen shouting her name and saying something in a language she didn’t understand. She winced when the door slammed open and he threw himself into the assay office, dropping to his knees beside her. Luckily Saladin didn’t seem to mind. He whined and moved aside to nose Saul Weisman, who trundled in and collapsed in his chair.

  That was the end of her peaceful time. Ten to one, Owen would want to know what had happened, and she had no idea what to tell him. Already she was having trouble remembering what had happened. It was as though a cosmic hand was closing over her mind.

  She let Owen help her to her feet and sit her down at her desk.

  “What happened?”

  She couldn’t speak to tell him, and then she realized he was not asking her, but Mr. Weisman.

  “Get your breath, sir,” Owen told her employer, who still gasped for air from the exertion of running fast in a body so crooked.

  Della breathed quietly on her own. She felt her heart slowing. For one dreadful moment, she wished it would simply stop, putting an end to … something. The moment passed. A woman couldn’t sit knee to knee with Owen Davis and want to die.

  “I can talk now,” Saul Weisman said.

  Please don’t, she thought in sudden alarm. I have no idea what I said.

  “Tell us, please.”

  Mr. Weisman swung his wheeled chair closer. Della felt his light touch on her wrist and then realized he was feeling her pulse.

  “Better now, Della?” he asked.

  She nodded. It wasn’t true, but he expected her to be better. Owen probably did too.

  “Della, you screamed when the whistle blew. You dropped to your knees, kept screaming, and stared down at the floor.” His voice changed and he sounded uncertain. “It was strange. You were speaking in a child’s voice.”

  “She’s done that a time or two in bed, with a nightmare,” Owen said.

  When he kissed the top of her head, she suddenly resented him for speaking to Mr. Weisman as if she weren’t there.

  “What did she say?”

  Nothing at all, she thought in panic, as the hand in her mind closed shut and removed all memory. Oddly, it felt like a mercy. Nothing.

  “Owen, I’ll never forget. It was, ‘Papa. Papa. I didn’t mean it.’ ”

  She wanted to close her ears against Saul’s words. “I wish I remembered.”

  “I wish … well, I do not know what I wish. I do know for certain that when the whistle blew, you started to scream,” Saul said. “Did it set off something in your mind?”

  Owen kissed the hand he held, his eyes troubled. “M cara, did something like this happen to you on May 1?”

  She gave herself permission to think of that unforgettable day. She remembered glancing at the classroom clock just before the whole canyon rumbled with the explosion. She remembered one of the windows bowing inward from the percussion of the blast and throwing herself across her students closest to the window, in case the window shattered.

  “I didn’t scream,” she said.

  “There wasn’t any whistle at the Number Four,” he said.

  She felt the hairs on her neck rise as a tiny memory struggled to the surface. “There was a whistle at the Molly Bee,” she said slowly, remembering. “It was about one in the afternoon, and we heard it all the way to Hastings.”

  “What did you do that day? Think for a moment.”

  She didn’t need to. “I screamed,” she said simply, and turned her face into his shirt. “I couldn’t stop.”

  What was there to say? Della heard the calming tick of the Regulator. Saladin was not a young dog, and he had started to snore, now that his people seemed rational again. Outside, a wagon rumbled past and someone laughed. She heard Mr. Weisman get up and shuffle into his kitchen lean-to off the main room. He returned with a glass of water for her. Obediently she drank, and she thanked him with her eyes.

  He sank into his chair and wheeled himself closer. “Would you mind a personal ramble? It might have some bearing, or it might not. Let us say I am thinking out loud.”

  “Ramble, by all means,” she said.

  “I went to university in Vienna, with the hope of becoming a physician. I’ve told you this before. My father died unexpectedly, near the end of that first year, so my dream ended. I stayed in Vienna, however, and learned the assayer’s trade.”

  “Things can change, can’t they?” Owen said.

  “Indeed. I had a friend at university named Sigi. After I left school, we met in Vienna’s coffeehouses. You could stay warm in one of them and sip a cup of coffee, and if times were plush, eat sascher torte.” He kissed his fingers. “Food from the gods. Chocolate cake. Apricot jam.”

  “I have a jelly sandwich,” Della said, and Saul smiled.

  “Sigi is now a famous doctor in Vienna, but back then he was a poor student. We talked for hours. He told me he had a theory about dreams. He felt then, and probably still does, that dreams hold clues to our minds. Sigi thought it took little triggers to set them off. Like a mine whistle, perhaps.”

  Della considered it. “Even now, I have only the faintest memory of the mine whistle that just blew. And you say I was on my knees, looking down a hole? Why don’t I remember that?”

  “I’ve found you that way a time or two, Della,” Owen said.

  Startled, she had to know. “Before we came here?”

  “Once or twice, but not regularly until we were here and around mines again.”

  “I wish I knew more of what Sigi must know now. I haven’t seen him in years,” Saul Weisman said. “Well, questions seem to beget more questions.” He slapped his knees. “I am making an employer decision now. Mr. Davis, please take Mrs. Davis home, tuck her in bed, put a hot water bottle at her feet, and let her sleep.”

  “I second your motion,” Owen said. “Della, let’s eat those jelly sandwiches in Knightville. I’ll tell my crew. They might have news for us about Mammoth, and I’d like to know.”

  L

  “Here’s what happened,” he said when he returned. “It seems the earth rumbled a little up at Mammoth and shifted. Everyone is all right. Shall we go?”

  They rode home in silence, Della dozing, then waking, and then settling in more comfortably against a comfortable man. They ambled home hand in hand to a silent house, where he helped her out of her clothing and put her to bed. He lay down beside her on top of the blankets, his hands behind his head.

  “ ‘Papa, Papa, I didn’t mean it,’ ” he said. “What didn’t you mean?”

  “I wish I knew.” She suddenly felt that odd hand in her mind open a little and then close almost as if it were teasing her. “Maybe I don’t want to remember. Could that be possible?”

  “I suppose anything is possible. Too bad we cannot ask Saul’s friend Sigi.”

/>   Della felt the mattress begin to claim her, but she struggled awake because there was something she had to say. “You won’t like this, Owen, but we need to leave here. We need to leave now.”

  “I’m half beginning to agree with you,” he admitted. “However, I have another unit ready to install in a few days. I’ll have one more ready after that, and then we’ll take a few days and go to Provo for Thanksgiving.”

  “I mean we have to leave for good.”

  “I know you do. I made this promise to myself and to my dead friends.”

  He said it in such a matter-of-fact way, as if the spirits of Richard and David Evans and all the others hovered over him. In some way, they probably did. She knew the Welsh were superstitious, and miners times two.

  “You made me some promises, Owen.”

  There. She had said it. Maybe she had wanted to say it ever since he told her they were going to Tintic, a place she was coming to dread, as much as she liked Angharad’s school, and her pleasant association with the assayer, and Owen’s position of responsibility and increased wages.

  “You’re going to keep reminding me that I broke that promise, aren’t you?” he said finally. He got up and stood in the doorway, his back to her.

  “Until you come to your senses, my dearest husband.”

  The door closed. “Or until I lose mine,” she added to herself, because he was gone.

  Chapter 31

  L

  Even though Owen had admitted he was wavering, they declared an unspoken truce on the matter of staying or going. As Della thought of what Saul had told them, she began to wonder what else was lurking around in her mind that felt no free rein to come out until she slept. In consequence, more and more she found herself wide awake and staring into the dark, wondering if she wanted to sleep, because sleep meant trouble.

  Owen bore the brunt of her distress, which increased the guilt she felt over making demands of him when he had his own sorrow to deal with. He woke up weary because more and more, she kept him awake with restless movements.

  “Della, you made my heart stop last night,” he said early one morning before the sun was up. “I woke and you were standing over our bed, staring down at me. I fair had heart palpitations.”