I tipped it into my palm, and I had to grip the shelf, because what came out of that lamp was a brass tag on a fine gold chain, and the tag was stamped with a number I have known since I was nine years old.
417.
That was my father’s check. In these towns every man who went underground had a brass check with his number on it, and he hung it on the board going in and took it off coming out, and the board told you at a glance who was still down there.
My daddy’s stayed on the board on the eleventh of February, 1968, along with four others.
The company kept the checks. That’s how it was done — they were company property, and when the mine closed in 1983 all that brass went into a barrel somewhere and out into the world, and my mother wrote letters about it for years and got nowhere and finally quit.
Folded flat in the bottom of the lamp under it was how Hank did it. A receipt from a fellow in Beckley who buys and sells mining artifacts, four hundred and forty dollars, dated in January. A printed page from an auction listing with LOT 62 — ASSORTED MINE CHECKS circled. And a photocopy of a payroll sheet from the state archives with the numbers written next to the names, and the line for 417 highlighted in yellow, and my father’s name beside it.
He didn’t just buy a barrel of brass and hope. He went and proved which one was my daddy’s before he ever bid on it.
And then he took it to Ferrell’s in town and had a jeweler put a bail on it and hang it on a chain, because I had been hinting about a necklace for weeks and my husband, who never in his life bought me a piece of jewelry that wasn’t wrong, had already had one made in November.
His note was down in the lamp with the papers.
You’ve said your whole life you had nothing of his. Now you’ve got the thing that had his number on it the day he went down. Don’t put it away, it’s spent forty years in a barrel. Keep it where you’ll see it every day. I know it isn’t a store necklace. It’s better and you’ll figure that out. — Hank
It’s better and you’ll figure that out.
He handed me a battered lamp from a junk shop and said the one sentence that would have told me everything if I’d had the grace to hear it, and I set it up on a high shelf out of the way and made sure he watched me do it.
Two weeks later he was gone in his chair with the ballgame on.
I wear it. It’s not a delicate thing — it’s brass, it’s scratched, it’s heavier than any necklace ought to be, and women at church ask about it and then wish they hadn’t because I tell them the whole story every time.
The lamp is on the kitchen windowsill where the light gets it, not on a high shelf. I dust it on Saturdays. My husband was right about where a thing belongs.