Dahl lay on his back staring at the cellar ceiling, rain drumming on the house above them, and said, to no one, in wonder and horror: "You pulled me up."
"I pull everybody up," Marcus said, on his knees, shaking from shoulders to boots. "It's the one thing the hill ever taught anybody. Ask your family why it took a hundred years to learn it."
Then Prescott was in the doorway above them — mud to the elbows, left hand wrapped in a strip torn from her own shirt and darkening through, wrist held stiff — with Krell cuffed to the porch rail behind her, and she took in the heap on her cellar floor, and the log bundle beside it, and the broken shaft lip, and said, with the air of a woman closing a very long form:
"Vernon. You should have bought a flashlight and stayed home. Somebody help me get this fool up the stairs before his lawyers hear about it and bill the county for the rescue."
Chapter 26 — The Reading
They held it on the courthouse steps because the courtroom only seated sixty, and by nine o'clock there were two hundred people standing in the October sun with their hats in their hands. Somebody had brought folding chairs for the old ones. Somebody else had brought a flag. Marcus stood on the third step with his back against a pillar and tried to keep his hands still, and mostly failed.
Ilsa stood one step below him, where Pearl had put her, close enough that the back of her coat brushed his knee when the crowd shifted. The cord was new — Pearl had braided it from the old one's remains and a length of waxed twine — and the sphere sat at Ilsa's throat the way it had the night he found her at his gate, small and black and unremarkable, unless you knew.
Below them, in the second row of chairs, sat the families. Descendants, mostly: granddaughters and great-nephews, people with the lost men's faces softened by a hundred years of other blood. Earl Whitaker, who ran the hardware store and had never once spoken to Marcus about anything but lumber, had driven to Charleston and back to fetch his cousin for this. She was ninety-one. She sat with a photograph of a young man in a frame on her lap, face up, the way you'd hold a plate you didn't want to spill.
Sheriff Prescott stood at the edge of the steps with her left wrist in a brace and her hat under her other arm. The two men from the state mine-safety office stood beside the clerk of court, who had the log book in a gray archival box and a typed transcript in a folder, and a face that said he understood this was not an ordinary Tuesday.
"All right," the clerk said, into a microphone that fed back once and settled. "We're going to enter this into the record proper, so I'm asking for quiet."
He read the log's last pages the way clerks read everything, flat and careful, and somehow the flatness made it worse. The gas reading, taken at the start of the shift and written down in Tomasz Marek's steady hand. The order that came down from Ambrose Kestrel's office anyway: Crew down. Gas or no gas, the seam won't wait. The watchman's own note under it, four words: I have rung it. Then the last entry, written later, in a hand that had begun to shake: that the bell had been heard too late or not believed, that the roof had come in at the deep face, that he was going down the vent shaft with a rope and a candle because the shaft was the only way left that air still moved.
Marcus had read those pages in the dark of the bell chamber with a flashlight going dim. Hearing them in daylight, in a clerk's level voice, with two hundred people listening, was a different thing. Earl Whitaker's cousin made a sound at I have rung it and pressed her hand flat over the photograph, holding it still.
"For one hundred and fourteen years," the older of the state men said, when the clerk had finished, "the official record of this county has said that the Kestrel Mine disaster was caused by the negligence of its night watchman. That record is wrong. It is wrong starting today, in writing, in the record, where records live." He looked out at the crowd. "The cause of the disaster was an order given against a recorded gas reading, by the mine's owner. The watchman warned his men, and then he went down after them. The state review is opened as of this morning, and the Kestrel file will be corrected in full."
Then Pearl came up the steps with her list.
She had written the names out longhand on a sheet of the archive's good paper, and she read them the way they'd been read at no funeral, because there had been no bodies to bury and the funerals had been paid to be small. One at a time. With the ages.
"Amos Odom, my grandfather. Thirty-nine."
"Ezra Callahan. Twenty-six."
"Silas Whitaker. Forty-one." Earl's cousin raised the photograph an inch, like a bid. "Stefan Duda. Twenty-two. Casimir Nowak. Thirty. George Tallis. Thirty-five. Robert Pemberton. Forty-four. Elias Grant. Twenty-eight. David Mulrooney. Thirty-three. Frank Deluca. Twenty-five. Joseph Harlan. Thirty-eight. Henry Kovich. Thirty-one. William Ransom. Nineteen."
Fourteen. Marcus counted them the way he'd counted them scratched into the inside of his cellar door, and when Pearl spoke the last one the courthouse bell — the little town bell, cast in another century for another purpose — stayed respectfully silent, and so did everybody else, for a count of ten that nobody organized.