I raised my flashlight to the black gap behind the wall and looked in, and I set that chisel down slow on the floor, because back in that space, where I had expected bare dirt and rock, there was a little room.
Not big. Maybe six foot square, hand-dug back into the mountain, shored up with old mine timbers, cool and dry, with a little cut vent up high that turned out to be where all that cold breath had been coming from. And it was full of books. Shelves of them, hundreds, built right into the rock walls. A little table with a good lamp on it, wired in careful. A chair worn soft. And stacks and stacks of spiral notebooks, filled front to back in a working man cramped hand.
The man who owned this house before us was a coal miner named Odell. Everybody around Beckley knew Odell, or thought they did. Went down in the mines at fifteen, worked the seams forty years, black lung and a bad back, an eighth-grade education, a rough quiet man who did not say much and was not the sort you figured for a reader. And here, behind a wall in his own basement, dug into the mountain with his own two hands, was the truth of who he really was.
He had been teaching himself. His whole life. The notebooks were all his, page after page, working through history and philosophy and poetry and even Latin, all of it, alone, by lamplight, in a hole in the mountain, because a coal-town man who read Marcus Aurelius would have been laughed out of every bar in the county. So he hid it. He built himself a secret room and a secret life of the mind, and he came down here after his shifts, black with coal dust, and he read and he wrote and he thought, and he never told one living soul, and he carried it all to his grave.
There was a note on the table, like he half hoped somebody might find it. A man can go down in the dark for a living and still keep a light burning inside himself. Nobody could take this room from me, so nobody knew it was here. But if you found it, then you know now. I was more than what they saw. Every one of us is.
I sat down in Odell chair, in Odell secret room, and I read his notebooks by his lamp until my wife came looking for me. Forty years that man went down into the earth and let the whole town think he was simple, and the whole time he was carrying Homer and Lincoln and the Stoics around in his head, teaching himself in the dark the things nobody ever offered to teach him in the light.
We are not walling it back up. We cleaned it, and I fixed the lamp, and I read down there myself now, in the room a coal miner dug so he could have one place in this hard world that belonged just to his mind. And I am taking his notebooks to the college in town, because a self-taught man who wrote forty years of that in a hole in a mountain deserves to be more than a draft I felt while I was doing laundry. He was more than what they saw. He said so himself, and he was right.