Whiter Than Snow Read online

  This book is for

  Forrest Athearn

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  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  —Psalm 51:7

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  No one knew what triggered the Swandyke avalanche that began at exactly 4:10 p.m. on April 20, 1920. It might have been the dynamite charge that was set off at the end of shift on the upper level of the Fourth of July Mine. The miners claimed the blast was too far inside the mountain to be felt on the surface, and besides, they had set off dynamite hundreds, maybe thousands, of times before, and nothing bad had happened. Except for that one time when a charge failed to go off and Howard Dolan hit it with his pick when he was mucking out the stope and blew himself and his partner to kingdom come.

  Still, who knew how the old mountain took retribution for having its insides clawed out.

  Certainly there was nothing to suggest that the day was different from any other. It started chill and clear. The men, their coat collars turned up against the dawn cold, left for their shifts at the Fourth of July or on the dredge up the Swan River, dinner pails clutched in their mittened hands. A little later, the children went off to school, the older brothers and sisters pulling little ones on sleds. Groups of boys threw snowballs at one another. One grabbed onto the back of a wagon and slid along over the icy road behind it. The Connor girl slipped on the ice and fell over a stone embankment, hitting her head. It hurt so much that she turned around and went home crying. The others called her a crybaby, but after what happened later that day, her parents said the blessed God had taken her hand.

  After the children were gone, the women washed the breakfast dishes and started the beans for dinner. Then because the sun came out bright enough to burn your skin in the thin air, came out after one of the worst blizzards they had ever encountered, they got out the washtubs and scrubbed the overalls and shirts, the boys’ knickers and the girls’ dresses. When the wash was rinsed and wrung, they climbed onto the platforms that held the clotheslines far above the snow and hung up the clothes, where they would dry stiff as boards in the wind. Then because it was such a fine day, as fine a day as ever was, they called to one another to come and visit. There was a bit of coffee to reheat, and won’t you have a cup? Cookies, left over from the lunch pails, were set on plates on the oilcloth of the kitchen tables, and the women sat, feeling lazy and gossipy.

  “You know, the Richards girl had her baby last week,” announced a woman in one of the kitchens, taking down the good china cups for coffee.

  “Was her husband the father?” asked her neighbor.

  “I didn’t have the nerve to ask.”

  In another house, a woman confided, “The doctor says Albert has the cancer, but he won’t have his lungs cut on.”

  “Then he’ll die,” her friend replied, muttering to herself, “at last.”

  It was that kind of a day, one for confidences or lazy talk. The women blessed the bright sun after so many winter days of gloom. Nobody thought about an avalanche. What could cause trouble on a day the Lord had given them?

  Maybe the cause was an animal—a deer or an elk or even a mountain sheep—making its way along the ridge of Jubilee Mountain. The weight of the beast would have been enough to loosen the snow. That happened often enough. Nobody saw an animal, but then, who was looking?

  Or worthless Dave Buck might have set off the avalanche. He’d put on snowshoes and taken his gun and gone high up to hunt for a deer—a fawn, really, for Dave was too lazy to cut up the bigger carcass and haul it home. The company forbade hunting around the mine, but Dave didn’t care. He snowshoed up near timberline, where he’d seen the footprints of deer. He didn’t find any, and he stopped to drink from a pint he’d put into his pocket. One drink, and another, and he sat down beside a stunted pine and picked off the cones and slid them down the white slope. Then he tossed the bottle into that cornice of snow that dipped out over a ridge.

  But perhaps it was nothing more than the spring melt. That storm a few days before had dumped five feet of snowfall on top of a dry, heavy base of winter-worn snow. The wind had driven the snow off ridges, leaving them barren, and piled it into large cornices high up. But now the day was cloudless, the sun shining down as harsh as if it had been midsummer. It was so bright that it hurt your eyes to see the glare on the white, and some of the miners rubbed charcoal under their eyes to cut the sharpness.

  But who cared what the cause was? Something started the slide that roared down Jubilee Mountain in Swandyke, Colorado, and that was all that mattered.

  There was a sharp crack like the sound of distant thunder, and then the cornice of snow where Dave Buck had thrown his bottle, a crusted strip two hundred feet long that flared out over the mountain ridge, fractured and fell. It landed on layers of snow that covered the mountain slope to a depth of more than six feet—a heavy, wet, melting mass of new snow on top, falling on frozen layers of snowpack that lay on a bed of crumbled ice. That bottommost layer, a mass of loose ice crystals formed by freezing and thawing, lubricated the acres of snow lying on top of it just as much as if the bed had been made of marbles, and sent the snow careening down the mountain.

  The miners called such a phenomenon a “slab avalanche” because a curtain of snow slid down the slope, picking up speed at a terrible rate, until it reached one hundred miles an hour. Nothing stood in the way of the terrifying slide, because the mountainside was bare of trees. They had been torn out forty years earlier in the second wave of mining that came after the prospectors abandoned gold pans and sluice boxes. Men had trained giant hoses on the mountain, washing dirt down the slope to be processed for precious minerals. Hydraulic mining, as it was called, also rid the mountainside of rocks and trees and underbrush that would have interfered with an avalanche—not that anything could have held back the tons of white that slid down Jubilee Mountain that afternoon. The slide would have taken anything in its path.

  This was not the first slide on Jubilee Mountain. The hillside, in fact, was known for avalanches. But it was the worst, and it spilled over into the forest at the edge of the open slope, tearing out small trees by their roots and hurling them into the rushing snow, which turned them into battering rams. A cabin that perched under the pines was wrenched from its foundation, its log walls torn asunder and broken into jackstraws.

  The slide rushed onward, churning up chunks of ice the size of boxcars, gathering up abandoned hoses and machinery and the other detritus of mining that lay in its path. It hurtled on, thrashing its deadly cargo about, not slowing when it reached the bottom of the mountain, but instead rushing across the road, filling the gully with snow as heavy as wet cement and flattening the willows. The avalanche hurtled on until it started up Turnbull Mountain. Then, at last, its momentum came to an end and the slide was exhausted, the front stopping first, the back end slipping down the mountain and filling the gulch with snow higher than a two-story house.

  Snow hovered in the air like a deadly mist. The debris caught up in the avalanche rolled a little and was still. A jack pine, graceful as a sled, glided to a stop in the snow covering the road. Clumps of snow fell from the trees still standing at the edge of the deadly white mass, making plopping sounds as they landed. Snowballs broke loose and rolled down the hill, leaving little trails in their wake.

  For an instant, all was quiet, as silent as if the slide had occurred in a primeval forest. Then a high-pitched scream came from somewhere
in the mass of snow, a child’s scream. The slide thundered down Jubilee Mountain just after the grade school let out, and it grabbed up nine of thirty-two schoolchildren in its icy grip. Five of the victims were related, the children of the Patch sisters—Dolly’s three, who were Jack, Carrie, and Lucia, along with Lucy’s two, Rosemary and Charlie. The slide was no respecter of class, because it took Schuyler Foote, son of the manager of the Fourth of July Mine, and little Jane Cobb, the Negro girl, whose father labored in the mill, and Sophie Schnable, the daughter of a prostitute. And then there was Emmett Carter, that near-orphan boy who lived with his grandfather. All of them were swept up and carried along in that immense swirl of white.

  Four of the children survived.

  Chapter Two

  Lucy Patch was the smart one. People had always said that about her, ever since she was a toddling child. They still did on occasion, although she was a grown woman now, grown and married, with two children of her own. “Lucy’s the smart one,” they’d remark when Lucy was coming up. It really was not meant as a compliment, because that was only the half of what they told. “Dolly Patch is the pretty one,” they’d say at the beginning, and then add, “Lucy’s the smart one,” as if being smart was honorable mention.

  Dolly, whose real name was Helen, wore her hair in yellow-white curls as long as the spiral of a drill and kept her skin as white as quartz. She was plump, with a happy disposition, and her eyes were still the bright blue of a china doll’s, just as when she was a baby and her father had called her “Doll Baby,” and, when she was older, “Dolly.” The name had stuck, even after a packet of doll-size Patch children came along following Dolly. Everyone had called her by those names, even Lucy, who thought they were perfectly dreadful. People still did even now when Dolly was thirty-two, because she was still sunny as a summer’s day and lively in step, although she was portly in build. She still wore her hair in corkscrews, the color coming from a bottle, because with her pregnancies, her hair had darkened to the color of a mountain stream during spring runoff.

  Only a year younger than Dolly, Lucy had been pretty in her way, if you were partial to dark hair and skin and girls who were too tall and angular, which most folks weren’t. Nobody remarked then or now on Lucy’s looks, although they were generous in their praise of her intelligence. She believed it herself and had always been a bit of a show-off about it. Whatever she did in school could not be done better. Lucy couldn’t help herself. If being smart was her only attribute, why pretend to be stupid? There was this thing about Lucy: She’d been told so often that she was intelligent, she thought she was smarter than anybody else. It got a little tiresome.

  And incidentally, Lucy did not care for her own name, either. She wished she had been named Lucia, after the saint the Swedes in Swandyke honored with a parade each Christmas, although the Patch family was not Swedish. Lucia was romantic and exotic, and it would have been silly on someone as plain and straightforward as Lucy. Only Dolly knew Lucy preferred that name, and Dolly sometimes called her sister Lucia when the two were alone.

  Although the distinctions might have pitted the girls against each other, the fact was that during their coming-up time, the two were inseparable, as close as any two sisters could be. Lucy helped Dolly with her schoolwork, because Dolly was not much taken with learning. And Dolly, who collected beaux the way an old woman collects blue columbine on a June day, was sensitive when it came to Lucy’s feelings. She told a boy on a hayride once that he ought to sit next to Lucy. “At conversation, she beats it all hollow,” Dolly said.

  “Lucy’s okay if you want to hear the Gettysburg Address. Come to think of it, she is the spit of Abraham Lincoln,” he replied.

  “And you’re the spit of Theodore Roosevelt,” Dolly replied, pushing him off the wagon.

  Dolly was smart enough to know that her looks would fade in time—in the bright, harsh mountain sun that turned a woman’s skin into a wrinkled brown paper bag, there wasn’t a woman over thirty-five who didn’t look as if she’d worn out four or five bodies with the same face—but Lucy would always be smart.

  By the time she was fifteen, Lucy had skipped two grades and was in her last year of high school, something for which she was sorry after she realized she would be just sixteen when she graduated. Life didn’t hold much for her after that. She would get a job in the office at the Fourth of July Mine—her father had already discussed it with the mine manager—and that would mean long hours performing boring tasks. Her only option was to marry, and she shuddered at the idea of being the wife of somebody who mucked out a mine.

  “I wish I could go to college,” Lucy confided to Dolly that spring, only a month before graduation.

  “What in the world for?” her sister asked. For Dolly, who was made after the timid kind and never contemplated a life that went beyond marrying and raising three or four dandy-looking boys and girls, the idea was shocking. She’d never known of a Swandyke girl who had gone to college, although a few boys had done so. They’d never come back.

  “There’s got to be something more than working at the mine office.”

  “It’ll only be till you’re married.”

  “But I don’t want to be married. I want to go to college, someplace that’s green, where I don’t have to see a brown mine tipple or a yellow mine dump every time I look up.”

  “You’ll be terrible lonesome away from Swandyke,” Dolly said, then frowned. “You’d come back, wouldn’t you? I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t. You wouldn’t leave forever, would you?”

  “It doesn’t matter, because I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Why not, if that’s what you want? We both want something better, and we have to get it the best way we can.”

  “Unless I can order a college diploma from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, there’s no way I’ll ever have one. We haven’t got a dime for school, what with all the little kids Mama and Papa have to take care of.”

  “You must ask Papa to send you,” said Dolly, who had not the slightest idea what a college education cost.

  Lucy scoffed. “How would he do that? He’s no good with money. Papa’s already spent his wages from now to Christmas. Mama would like for me to go. She told me so, but she won’t stand up to Papa.”

  “No, he wouldn’t allow that,” Dolly agreed.

  “Besides, Papa expects me to go to work to help him carry the family.”

  While their father, Gus Patch, worked suitable, he made little, and his wages slipped through his fingers. He was a sucker for a hard-luck story, and many a time, he was skinned out of his pay envelope. So the family lived from hand to mouth, and in the few days before payday, there wasn’t much to put into all those mouths. In the past year, they had heard their father say often enough to this or that debtor, “When my girl Lucy goes to work at the mine office, I’ll pay that bill right off.”

  The afternoon of their discussion, the sisters were sitting on a rock in the willows that filled the gully at the bottom of Jubilee Mountain. Lucy leaned back so that she could look up the mountainside, up past the barren slope that had been washed clean of rocks and topsoil by hydraulic mining, to the Fourth of July Mine. That was where their father was employed. “I told Papa I wouldn’t work there until I finished high school. Graduation’s on a Friday night. So he’s fixed it up that I start on Saturday morning.”

  “You must talk to Papa anyway,” Dolly insisted. “If you explain it to him, he’s sure to go along with you. That’s what I’ve found.”

  Lucy didn’t reply that as the favorite daughter, Dolly usually got her way with their father. “I did talk to him, Dolly. He said I have a responsibility to him. His exact words were, ‘I don’t care for nothing about college. I got no more use for it than one of those airplanes.’ He told me while I was in high school that he’d let me do as I pleased, but now that I’m done with it, I’ll have to do as I can.”

  Dolly flung back her yellow curls and stood up. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Not more than a we
ek later, Gus Patch announced at the supper table that if Lucy could get a job in Denver to pay her way through college and would live with her aunt Alice, a sour old woman whom no one in the family cared for much, he thought he could spare her for a few years. “I expect with a college degree, you could make two or three times what you’d get typewriting letters in the mine office,” he said, stirring his potatoes and green beans together, then leaning over his plate and using a spoon to shovel the mess into his mouth.

  Later, when the girls were alone, Lucy asked, “It was you who gave him the idea I could be a bookkeeper, wasn’t it, Dolly? What did it cost you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Dolly looked down at a ribbon she was ironing between her fingers. “Besides, it was Mama’s idea.”

  “I know Papa as well as you do. It was you, not Mama, who had to promise him something. He’s not for giving away a thing for nothing.” Lucy grabbed Dolly’s hand so hard that her sister dropped the ribbon. “You’re not quitting high school, are you?”

  “It cost less than it was worth. Besides, I don’t care so much for school.”

  “I won’t let you quit.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it. They keep asking me at the Prospector if I won’t come and be a waitress. I’ve made up my mind.”

  “So have I, and I won’t go to college if you quit school.”

  The next morning, Lucy picked up Gus’s lunch bucket and told him she would walk him to the mine. That was what the children did when they wanted to talk to their father or ask for a favor, since the old man was usually hung-over in the early mornings, and his mind was a clutter. “Dolly’s not quitting high school,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, she don’t mind.”

  “Well, I do, and I say she’s not.”