I pried it up at the hearth. The second I saw what my grandfather had hidden in that scuttle all those years, I had to sit down, because it was tags. Brass tags, a heap of them, black with age and stuck together at the edges.
Twenty-six of them. Each one stamped with a number and nothing else.
If you did not grow up around a mine you will not know what those are. They are check tags. Every man going underground took his tag off a board in the lamp house and hung it back on the hook when he came up. That board is how they knew who was still in the hole.
My grandfather was the lamp house man at Number Four from 1947 until the day they shut it.
On the ninth of December, 1951, an explosion in the east section took twenty-six men. He was the one standing at that board. He counted the tags still hanging on it, and then stood there four days while they brought men out, taking a tag down as each one was accounted for.
The company collected the tags afterward to be melted and reissued, because brass is brass and a number is a number.
He did not turn them in. He put twenty-six tags in his coat and walked out, and nobody ever asked him about it, and he carried it for fifty-one years and told nobody, including my grandmother.
Down in the bottom of that scuttle, folded under the tags, was an index card in pencil.
These are the boys that did not come back up. The company was going to put their numbers on other men and I could not have it. Number 118 was Alton Pruitt and he was nineteen. I know every one of them. If I am gone and you have found these, take them to somebody who will put the names back on.
He did not write the names down. He knew them, and he assumed anybody who cared could find them, and he was right, because the mine disaster records for that day are public and the lamp house numbers are in them.
It took a retired safety inspector in Beckley about six weeks.
All twenty-six are matched. Every tag is mounted on a walnut board in the little museum at the old tipple, number and name together, in the order they came off that week. The man who did the mounting is the grandson of number 141.
Nine families came to the dedication. A woman in her eighties held tag 118 in her hand for a long time. Alton Pruitt was her brother and she was seven years old.
The scuttle is back by my fireplace with the false floor out and nothing under there. My wife thinks I should put something in it. I cannot think of a thing that belongs in there.
The company was going to melt twenty-six numbers down and stamp them out again on new men. One man in a lamp house decided that was not going to happen, and then he said nothing about it for the rest of his life, and hid the whole thing under a layer of coal.