The state mine inspector who knocked on my door at dawn was a tall, quiet man named Warren Haddix, with a gray mustache and a clipboard under his arm, and he had not come alone. When I opened the door in my robe, I saw behind him on the gravel road a line of pickup trucks stretching down the hollow as far as I could see. Men in clean work shirts were climbing out of them. Women in church dresses. Old men leaning on canes. Children in their Sunday shoes. Every one of them looked at me, and not one of them said a word.
“Mrs. Fields,” said Mr. Haddix gently, “I am sorry to come so early. But I think you would want to know before anyone else. The four letters on the tag of the lamp of your husband, the ones scratched into the brass, are a message. I believe he meant it for the families.” I held onto the doorframe. Behind me, in the kitchen, the dinner bucket of Royce sat on the table where I had put it. “Which families?” I asked. A woman at the front of the crowd, small and gray haired, stepped forward and took off her hat. “Mine,” she said. “And five others.”
I made coffee. I do not know how else to say it. I made coffee in the big enamel pot, the one I had used for church suppers, and I carried cups out onto the porch, and the people of the hollow stood in my yard in the morning cold and drank it in silence. My son stood at the edge of the crowd with the lamp in his hands, holding it as if it were something alive. Mr. Haddix sat beside me on the porch swing and told me the story.
In February of 1988, he said, there had been a roof fall at Number Four mine, in the northeast section. Six men had been working the face. The company declared the section unsafe and sealed it three days later, with the six men still inside. They were listed as lost, and families were told it was too dangerous to attempt a recovery. The company gave each widow a check and a paper to sign, a waiver releasing it from any further obligation, including the duty to try to bring the men out. Most had signed. Royce had refused.
Some men are never celebrated, because the best thing they ever did was done in the dark, for people who would never know his name.
“Your husband was a section foreman,” Mr. Haddix said. “He knew those men. He had worked beside them for twenty years. The company told him to stay quiet, and he would not. Three years after the sealing, in 1991, he went down by himself through an old ventilation shaft that nobody had mapped. It took him two nights. He found them, Mrs. Fields. All six. They had gone to the refuge chamber and waited. They had died together, in peace, side by side, with their lamps in a row. And Royce left his lamp with them, and scratched the tag.”
A sound came out of me then that I had not made since the day of his funeral. Four letters, I thought. Four letters scratched with the point of a nail. I took the lamp out of the hands of my son and turned the tag in the light. The scratches were crooked but plain. H O M E. The men were not lost. They were waiting to be taken home. For thirty five years my husband had carried that knowledge, coughing, choking, fighting the company for his own benefit and refusing to sign a waiver that would have buried it. He had never told me. He had told no one.
“Why did he not tell the families?” I asked. Mr. Haddix looked out over the hollow. “I think he was afraid,” he said. “If he told, the company would deny it, call him a liar, and cut off his black lung benefits. If he said nothing, he could keep the case alive by refusing the waiver, and wait for the day when someone with authority would listen. He left the lamp as a marker. He left a map in his papers, we have found it. And he left the one thing the lawyers could not erase. His signature, or rather, the lack of it.”
The woman who had spoken first, whose name was Edna Skaggs, took my hand. Her husband Dewey had been one of the six. She said, “Your Royce kept my Dewey safe all these years. I want to thank him.” I could not speak. I held her hand in both of mine, and one by one the people of the hollow came forward and said a name, Dewey Skaggs, Ned Perdue, Arlie Combs, Tommy Ray Blevins, Jim Hatfield, Carl Mullins, and laid a flower on the porch rail. By the time they were done, the rail was covered in blossoms.
The state ordered the recovery that same week. It took eleven days. Rescue crews from three counties went down through the ventilation shaft that Royce had found, under the supervision of the inspector, and one by one they brought the six men up to the light. The families were waiting at the mouth of the mine in folding chairs, in the cold, with blankets across their knees. I sat among them, holding the lamp. When the last man came out, a hundred and forty people stood up together, and not one of them was dry eyed.
The funerals were held on a single Saturday at the Methodist church in Logan, six caskets in a row. I sat in the front pew with Dwight on one side and Crystal on the other. At the end of the service, the pastor asked if anyone wished to speak, and my son rose. He stood at the pulpit with his big hands gripping the wood and said, “My father is the reason these men are home. I have been a fool and a coward and a greedy man. I want to say that I am sorry, and that I hope to be half of what he was.”
Dwight told the gas company the next week that the mineral rights were not for sale. He did not need to be asked. He drove up the hollow every Sunday, with his wife and the children, and fixed the roof of the porch, and the mailbox he had broken, and the three loose steps. The company settled with all six families for far more than the waiver would have saved them. I asked that my share go to a fund for the widows of miners.
I keep the lamp on the kitchen table now, beside the dinner bucket. On the first Sunday of every month, the families come up the hollow with covered dishes, and we eat at long tables set up in the yard, under the old maples. Then Edna Skaggs, small and gray, stands up and lifts her cup. “To Royce,” she says. “Who went down in the dark to bring us home.” And all of us answer, softly, in the warm light, “To home.”