Excited the young boys, and one of them even came on a piece of rope, threw it over his shoulder, but Duncan knew Baxter’s wind was nothing but gobpile oratory that blew feeble in the cleaner air topside. Anyway, Duncan hated the hot-eyed bastard since the day a quarter of a century ago, during the IWW riots, when Baxter punched his ribs with a rifle barrel and tried to make him kiss the ass of an old mule. In later years, Baxter tended to muddle his old political vocabulary with the saints-and-demons gloss of the local holy rollers, but the message was still fermented in the same tortured bowels. Duncan was glad when Bonali, cool for once, brought them down off that angry mountain by changing the topic to how they should celebrate getting out.
As Barney Davis and his rescue crew pushed deeper, they ran into worse damage and bad air. Where they could, they closed the blown-open airlock doors, adjusted the regulators. But they were bareface and it was getting too much for them. Ben Wosznik was getting sick. So they brought out the first two bodies they found. One was Lawson, the other looked like Moroni; check his battery number when they got him topside, if it was still readable. Both were burnt black and had suffered from impact.
The five men sat there around Ely Collins feeling pretty rotten. “Well, boys, I guess that’s about it,” Mike said. He felt very weak and tired. He thought about just stretching out there and dropping off, forget the whole fucking mess. Several times already he had thought it might only be a nightmare, and now the idea crept into him again. The sleepier he got, the more convinced he became that he was in the process of waking up.
Collins came to long enough to ask them if they had burlap up. “Yeah,” said Lee Cravens, standing, “we gotta string us up a brattice, boys. Keep the bad air from gittin’ to us an hour or two anyways, and maybe somebody’ll git through by then.”
The project enlivened them. They hunted around, found burlap, nailed it up on the timbers. They began taking turns burning their headlamps. They guessed they had between forty and fifty more battery hours among them, using one at a time, and that was ten times what they supposed they’d need. They sat around Collins as though sheltering him, or maybe it was they who were seeking shelter. He was awake more of the time now and was feeling the pain more. Strelchuk gave him all the aspirin he had, and the other boys chipped theirs in, too. Collins recognized Cravens now, and he asked Lee to help him sing religious songs to keep his mind off the leg.
Angela Bonali arrived alone, breathless, surprised to find so many she knew. She had never caught up with Elaine Collins and her mother. The closer she had got, the faster they had seemed to run. Now her chest hurt, and a troubling lonesome fear gnawed at her. People asked her about her Dad. She didn’t know. They didn’t know. She walked among the intent people, under strings of yellow lights. Her brother Charlie was there, acting bored and chewing a toothpick, but worry told on him because he couldn’t keep still. Snapped his fingers like always, but there was no rhythm in it.
Then her Daddy’s friend Mr. Ferrero came out of the mine, his black face crying, and Angie started to cry, and he came and told them that Uncle Ange was dead, that they had just brought his body up. Angela had been named for her Daddy’s other friend, Angelo Moroni, and she had always called him Uncle Ange, though he wasn’t an uncle. They always kidded her he looked more like her father than her own Daddy did, and until recently she had supposed his paternity reasonable and had half believed it. Uncle Ange’s sister was Mr. Ferrero’s wife.
Charlie came up and asked about their Dad, “the old man,” he called him, and Angie saw that Charlie had started to cry too. Mr. Ferrero didn’t know, but he said he believed he must be okay. Angie believed so, too. Uncle Ange had died, so she could keep her real Daddy. It made sense. There was food and coffee arriving at the Salvation Army canteen now, and they all went there together to have a doughnut.
They keep coming. Families, miners, officials, newsmen, police, civil defense, state cops, priests, Legion, Red Cross, television, psychiatric service. Fully equipped rescue teams now enter the mine methodically. Trucks arrive with oxygen tanks, stretchers, and tents. A bank president moves from group to group, bringing hope. At the city hospital, beds are cleared and nurses alerted. The West Condon radio station asks for and receives permission to stay on the air twenty-four hours a day. The high school gymnasium, still, is brightly floodlit. The electric scoreboard reads: WEST CONDON 14, VISITORS 11. Its clock is stopped. In a few hours, it will host a new activity: already the gym has been designated Temporary Morgue. The janitor, alone, spreads a tarpaulin on the floor.
He heard them coming, and then they went away. Eddie Wilson stared down the dusty beam at his dead buddy Tommy. It was awful. God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it. God hated him. God loved Eddie’s bird dog, and Eddie always kicked it. Sometimes, right in the nuts. The more God hated, the more Eddie grieved, the more he loved. Won’t kick it again, won’t! A foot materialized between his eyes and dead Tommy’s stare. Hadn’t heard it coming. Almost scared him. It turned toward Tommy, then back to Eddie. Approached.
“Hey, boys, come help! It’s Eddie Wilson! He’s still blinkin’!”
— I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see!
They slumped in a group and listened. Sometimes they dozed. Lee Cravens’ voice, gentle and musical as a girl’s, flattening the vowels with the insertion of nasal a’s, glissandoed over them like a fluttery shield against the tons of black earth above their heads. Underneath, in short punched squawks of raw sound, Ely Collins followed painfully the principal beat. Pontormo muttered something once about saving breath, but Cravens asked for whom was breath if not for God? and Ely said, “Amen.”
Mike Strelchuk, who never attended church but always supposed he believed that something or somebody was out there, reacted ambivalently to the singing. It distracted him and gave him hope: they were connected by it somehow to the outside; on the other hand, there was something eerie about the way the sound floated off. They were pretty depressing songs, too, for the most part. He wished to suggest something more cheerful, but it was mainly for Collins’ benefit.
“Lee!” Collins whispered, when Cravens paused. “Agin!”
‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace my fear relieved—
What about it? Mike asked himself. If I die, what’s going to happen to me? He had no clear idea. He had always joked a lot about being hellbound, but he had never really doubted that God would take care of him when his time came. But what did he mean, “take care”? And what was grace? Did he have it? Who got it and how? Was it fair some didn’t? He wished to hell something would happen to take his mind off it.
— How precious did that Grace appear,
The hour I first believed!
And then Mike felt it coming. The grace. He didn’t know whether to resist it or not.
Up they came. Jesus, it felt good! On top, the air was cold, about sixty degrees colder than the air they had been breathing in the mine, but it tasted sweeter than honey in their welcoming lungs. Wives, brothers, fathers, kids, mothers piled on them, and, as Duncan had foreseen, most of them scattered immediately. Baxter the plotter himself wandered off peaceably, noosed by his wife and five children. Well, by God, they had made it! Duncan, without family, felt so weak suddenly he had to sit down. Just sank to the ground. Somebody gave him a smoke.