OCR Text |
Show 224 An accident led to an out-and-out firing. Being fired led to unpayable bills, feelings of inadequacy on his part, feelings of guilt on mine. These in turn led to a desperate and unwise choice: he took a job driving a load of passenders to Los Angeles in a decrepit old Chalmers, which broke down in the desert, so that all the passengers had to chip in to get the rest of the way. I closed up the house and went home to mend; he stayed in Los Angeles and got a job driving taxis. All these calamnities plus the innuendoes of family and friends, the good excuse for self-pity on both sides, the enforced separation which lengthened into weeks, then months, could have spelled disaster except for the daily letters that passed between us, the clinging to that which we already had. Papa's death brought him home to me and we could start again in Salt Lake City and Bingham, back to the mines. He was working in Bingham and we had a little house in Midvale when the next calamnity struck. His work called for him to go into an untimbered stope and stoop over so that he was in perfect position to receive the large boulder which dropped from the ceiling, breaking off "the third and fourth processes of the lumbar vertebral' A broken back, with six months in a cast. There was a very small compensation check, sixteen dollars a week, so that by scrimping we could get by. He was never again going to work in the mines, we said, so we went to Colorado Springs where his people lived. Colorado Springs was a rich man's town, and its charter forbade the encroachment of industry, hence work was not easily available for men. It was also a TB town, with plentiful work for nurses. I left Elise with his child-hungry aunt and uncle and worked in the extensive tuberculosis hospitals there until a set of circumstances brought about our going to California. |