Brady shook his head. “Nothing. The way they tell it, water came rushing down the tunnel, sweeping away everything in its path. Heard men yell, “Water! It’s water!” and it filled their room ankle deep before it washed on down the passage. Thought they could wade out, but there was a low place at least a hundred feet long and filled to the top with water. So they stayed put till the rescuers got to ‘em; but that tells us just how deep the water is.”
The little group of relatives was silent. The jubilation that they knew was taking place back at the mine made their grief that much sharper. Jessie had come that morning and stayed with Mammaw throughout the day, and she gently massaged the elderly woman’s neck and shoulders as they listened to Brady. The grayness in the church was getting darker. The Red Cross was still there. Food kept arriving; the table was full. But the faces of the waiting relatives were heavy with fatigue, and their voices were almost inaudible.
“They trying to tell us there’s no hope?” one woman asked, but the others glanced at her sharply.
Brady sighed. “It doesn’t look good.”
“When … will we know?” asked Mammaw.
“Well, they’re pumping out three thousand gallons a minute, but it’ll be another day or two before they can get the rescue team in that part. Even got some skin divers standing by, but some of those tunnels aren’t more’n thirty inches high, water up to the roof. Divers can’t get their equipment through there.”
“But the rescue team will go in, won’t it?” Jessie said. “They won’t just …?”
“They’ll go in regardless, if I have to go in there myself,” Brady promised. “No miner leaves another in the hole if there’s any way in the world to get him out.”
Ivy June lay down on a cot early that evening and slept as long as she could the next morning, even though the cot was not much more comfortable than the wood pew where she’d been camped out.
“What day is it?” she asked her grandmother when she opened her eyes at last.
“Sunday,” Mammaw said. “Preacher here says to just stay put—the service this mornin’ will be for ministerin’ to others.”
The little congregation took Pastor Gordon’s message to heart, for all morning people arrived with bowls and baskets of food. They offered to take relatives to their nearby homes to shower and freshen up. Take a nap in a real bed if they liked. Brought soap and toothpaste and still more blankets for those who refused to leave. Ivy June and Catherine went once to Shirl’s aunt’s house to bathe, then came back to the church, still sleepy-eyed, but clean. They listened while Shirl chatted softly with other friends from school who came to sit with the family, but it was hard for Ivy June to concentrate.
Jimmy Harris came too. He sat awkwardly on the low step by the altar, arms resting on his knees.
“Anyway,” he said finally, his glance taking in the platter of large brownies someone had just delivered to the food table, “I sure hope they find the men soon.”
Ivy June nodded, but she hated this. She did not want all this attention. Did not want to be the girl who was pitied, the one with her stomach aching because she could not eat, her throat rejecting any thought of food. She did not want to have to stay here after her friends had offered their sympathy, and could not stand the haunting thought that she might have to go through all this again at a funeral.
When Jimmy Harris left, he veered slightly toward the food table, then must have thought better of it, for he went on outside, where his buddies were waiting.
Four different ministers stopped by the church that day to visit with families. But every now and then, Ivy June and Catherine went outside to do their silent walk around the perimeter of the church grounds, down the road to the mine and back.
“Is it still Sunday?” Ivy June asked once, hardly feeling her feet take the steps. She concentrated on Catherine suddenly: “Cat, you were supposed to go home yesterday!”
“I wanted to be here,” Catherine told her. “I’d like to stay until they find the men, but I’ve got to go back by Wednesday. Mom’s coming home the next day.”
“Of course! You’ve got to be there then!” Ivy June agreed. “Oh, Cat, how do you stand this—all this sadness?”
Catherine just slipped an arm around her. “How do you?” she asked.
Monday. School buses rattled by on the road as though life were going on same as always. The white petals of the bloodroot plant spotted the hillsides, their bright yellow centers like little sunbursts. The gardenia-like anemones had come to life along with the new green of spring. Wildflowers popped up here and there, even between rusty pickups deserted by the side of the road and old tires resting in ditches.
Mammaw slept long and deeply, rolled up in a blanket on a pew, and Daddy drove Papaw’s car home from the mine to check on Ma and Grandmommy and the boys. When he came back, he brought Howard, who had ditched school.
“I shoulda been here all along!” Howard protested. “I’m old enough.”
“It’s that you’re as old as you are, we wanted you home in case your ma needed you,” Daddy told him. “If you can keep your mammaw company, you can stay till Jessie comes after work, but then you got to go home again with her.”
Howard obediently settled next to Mammaw and asked if she wanted something to drink. Then he noticed the table with all the food. “That for us?” he asked.
Mammaw gave him a small smile as she took the comb out of her hair and tried to rebraid the bun. “Help yourself, Howard, but don’t be touching anything you’re not planning to eat,” she said.
Ivy June was half asleep and Catherine was reading a book that Miss Dixon had left for them when suddenly the man named Charlie came dashing out of the Bible study room in back.
“Someone’s been heard!” he called out, astonished.
Heads turned.
“What?” said Daddy, getting to his feet.
“Brady just called. The rescue team is down there and they think they heard somebody!”
Stunned, people turned toward each other.
Another old miner shook his head. “Could be anything,” he said. “Could be water sloshin’ against an oil drum or somethin’.”
“No! Voices. A voice, anyway,” Charlie said.
“Oh, Lord, make it true!” a woman cried.
“All I’m saying is, don’t get your hopes up, but we think someone else is alive,” Charlie told them.
“Remember Sago,” the old miner murmured, referring to an accident at a mine in West Virginia. “Told ’em all thirteen men was alive, and folks started dancin’ before the news came that they was all dead but one….”
But he was shouted down now by the others.
“I’m going to the mine and see for myself,” said someone, and suddenly people were reaching for their shoes and their jackets, setting down their cups of coffee and fumbling for car keys.
The Red Cross volunteers buzzed among themselves, chattering about what to wrap up and take to the mine, in case there should be another long wait there. A car engine started up out front, then another.
Mammaw hastily jabbed her comb back in her hair, one piece of braid dangling. Daddy thrust his long arms into the sleeves of his old sweater, then into his jacket. Ivy June was already on her feet, Catherine dropped her book, and Howard was at the church door calling, “Hurry! Come on, Daddy! I want to go!”
Now vehicles were streaming toward the mine entrance—Ford pickups, Dodge minivans, Toyota Camrys—and after parking, relatives hurried toward the low aluminum-sided building with the weathered OFFICE sign on the door.
Fifteen minutes before, rescue workers had mostly stood about waiting for the water to go down. Now men were running, yelling to each other, their voices tight with excitement. Miners were heading for the conveyor belt opening, slipping and sliding in the mud.
Brady came running over. “There’s somebody down there,” he yelled, “and men are going through. Water’s about eighteen inches, and they think they can make it, if they don’t hit
a swag. Can’t tell yet who’s back there, but Pete Osler says he heard a voice. He yelled and there’s an answer from somebody.”
“Who? Who?” people screamed.
“Too far away to make out any words, but Pete says it’s no fool echo.”
More news was coming through, being relayed to the rescue worker at another voice-activated phone deep in the tunnel. That phone connected to the man at the mine entrance, who passed each message on to the officials standing nearby. And because the determined crowd was converging on them, the officials passed on to Brady and the other miners as much information as they could. Reporters pressed forward, and another ambulance entered the mine gate, light blinking, siren off.
“If one’s alive, it might mean there are more!” Ivy June told Catherine, tightly squeezing her fingers around the little rock in her jacket pocket. “It could happen!”
Now there were shouts from the men at the mine entrance. The crowd murmured expectantly, waiting for the man by the conveyor belt to repeat what was coming to him by phone. Whatever the official was hearing, he wasn’t telling, but Brady wound his way over and soon came back with the latest:
“It’s slow going. There’s a real low place, and looks like the water’s blocked the tunnel, but I don’t think they’d have heard voices if it was roofed.”
Ivy June shivered. Hope rose and fell in her chest like water surging, then receding again.
One of the men at the tunnel entrance gave a little laugh and looked about: “Pete says a sandwich bag just floated by.” And when people stared at him, he added, “Not that it means anything, but it’s empty.”
The line was repeated again and again, the news traveling from one little cluster of relatives to another. A sandwich bag … an empty sandwich bag …
Now Ivy June could not see the man at the entrance any longer, for more officials had come out of the office and were asking the reporters and photographers to move back. Fifteen more minutes … twenty … Mammaw leaned against Daddy, and he asked if she wanted to go back to the car and sit down.
“I’m stayin’ right here till my Spencer walks up to me,” she said.
And then, despite the caution of the officials, the rescue workers there by the conveyor belt gave a shout, a cheer.
“We got ’em!” came the cry.
“Who? Who?” people yelled.
“All of ’em!” was the reply.
The crowd screamed. People fell into each other’s arms the way they did on New Year’s Eve on TV, Ivy June thought. She was engulfed in her daddy’s arms, then Mammaw’s, then Catherine’s, and—she discovered in astonishment—she was even hugging Howard.
Ivy June remembered the day Danny was born because he’d been born at home, and she had helped. She remembered a blizzard that had started up one afternoon when she and Howard were halfway home from school, and how they’d fallen down twice in the snow. She remembered another time when the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River had flooded and they hadn’t gone to school for a week, and she remembered the Christmas she’d gotten the red jacket she’d seen at Walmart.
But no day, no moment, was as fine as the sight of Papaw, his clothes covered with mud and slime, his face so dirty she could only make out the whites of his eyes, when he came out of that dark black hole, one hand holding on to the conveyor belt, the other holding on to his rescuer.
The crowd, swollen now to several hundred, cheered for every man in turn. Reporters crowded the entrance; cameras flashed. The Red Cross was there with towels and hot coffee and sandwiches, and a doctor gave each man a quick check to see who needed a hospital. Hospital or home, each miner, dehydrated, his legs shaky and unused to standing, got a shower if he wanted, and then a ride all the way home in an ambulance. Mammaw joined Papaw inside.
Mammaw was too exhausted to cook, but she didn’t need to. Ivy June’s ma had a dinner all ready for them. People had been driving all the way back into the hollow to give her the news and to bring a dish of their own for Papaw’s supper.
Papaw sat in his old recliner chair by the coal stove, his stubbled face lined with weariness, eyes half-closed, but smiling nonetheless. But it wasn’t until he’d slept for two hours and the family had gathered for dinner that he found the energy to tell them what had happened that day in the mine.
“Lord, look at all this food!” Mammaw exclaimed as the family took their heaping plates into the parlor and perched on every available table and chair. “Pie, cake, cookies—I-don’t-know-what-all.”
And Papaw said, “Just bein’ home is all the sweets I need for the rest of my life.” And Mammaw kissed him on the mouth, making even Ezra stare.
The question they all wanted answered was how had the men survived? The number two room, where they had been found, was even lower down than the number one room, where the auger had cut through to water. And the number one room, the rescue team had discovered when they drilled, was filled to the roof with water.
“Must have been a great big air bubble that saved us,” Papaw said. “That’s all we can figure. Two of the men, the one workin’ the machine and the man who was with ’im, were washed away. But the rest of us heard a yell, and we turned around to see a third man tumblin’ head over heels into our room.
“I grabbed his arm with one hand, my lunch bucket with the other, and all of us scrambled to the highest part, roof not thirty inches above our heads. We’re squattin’ up there, looking down at that water rising below us, and you don’t know fear till you’ve lived with that, I tell you.”
Ivy June tried to imagine her grandfather, all six feet two of him, crouched on that ledge for six days.
“Our best guess is that water rushed in so fast it pushed all the air into the top of the number two room, but we didn’t know how much water there would be, how far up it would come before it stopped. We turned off our helmet lamps to save the batteries, but every so often one of us would turn his on just to see how high it had come.”
“How deep did it get?” asked Daddy.
“Twenty inches, maybe. But we knew that was deep enough to swamp the low places in the tunnel and there was nothing to do but wait for the rescue and pray they knew where we were. At least we knew we had a chance. Then we took stock of how many lunch buckets were saved, and between the five of us there were six sandwiches, a quart of milk, three quarts of water, a piece of cheese, a handful of cookies, and two candy bars.”
“Oh, Spencer, if I’d known, I’d have packed you a feast that morning!” exclaimed Mammaw, and somehow that made people laugh. All but Grandmommy, Ivy June noticed. Jessie had parked her great-grandmother’s wheelchair right up next to Papaw’s recliner, and every so often Grandmommy reached out her thin fingers and grasped at Papaw’s arm, and he stroked her hand in reassurance.
“We knew that if the water went down some, we could probably crawl out,” Papaw said. “What worried us more than whether our food would hold out was whether we’d have enough air for as long as we were there. And cold … oh, but we were cold. Slept belly to belly and back to back, and didn’t seem like our clothes would ever get dry.”
“Did you ever check to see if you could get out yet?” Howard asked.
“Couple times, but all it did was get our clothes wet all over again. We’d send somebody out, and he’d get to where the whole tunnel was underwater and have to come back. When we heard that rescue team, old Pete’s voice hollerin’ for us, we were singin’ and shoutin’ and arm-dancin’ with each other—sweetest sound in the world to hear a yell when you think they’ve given up on you.”
“We would never give up on you!” Ivy June declared. “They said they drilled holes, Papaw, and hammered and pounded, but nobody pounded back.”
“Well, they drilled and hammered in the wrong place, then, because we never heard ’em,” Papaw said. “If they had drilled into the number two room, the air would have gotten out, and like as not, the water would have risen and drowned us before we could even let them know we were there. But we were ready to craw
l out, we got the chance.” He winked at Catherine. “When you go back to Lexington, you tell ’em we’re a tough lot down here. You don’t work inside the earth without a part of you turnin’ to rock.”
“But not your heart, Spencer,” said Mammaw.
“No,” he said. “Not my heart.” He rubbed the back of his neck and moved his head from side to side. “Don’t know that I’ll ever get this crick out of my neck. One part of that roof was so low up over the ledge we had to lie down under it. Had to turn on our sides to drink water.”
“I bet I could do it!” Howard said. “If I had to live for a week not able to sit up, I bet I could do it if I had enough food.”
“Don’t you be talkin’ like that!” Ruth Mosley snapped. “You get into enough mischief here without doing your nonsense down in a mine.”
“Then I’ll get me a truck and help Daddy pick up scrap metal,” Howard said, wanting to see some kind of future for himself. “Get a big enough truck, we could pick up twice as much.”
“Howard, you mind your studies and stay in school, you won’t have to do either one,” said Mammaw. “Now where’s that celebration cake Mrs. Hedges brought down?”
She got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a coconut cake. “Guess this will serve as the welcome home for your granddaddy and our goodbye to Catherine,” she said, “’cause I ’spect she’ll be wanting to go home soon as she can, see her ma.” Everyone turned to look at Catherine, as though she had suddenly reappeared after a long absence.
“I’ll go back tomorrow if I can,” Catherine said. “Mom’s coming home Thursday, and there’s a lot to do.”
“Miss Dixon said she’ll drive you the very minute you want to go,” Mammaw told her. “Now, who gets the first slice of this coconut cake?”
Papaw closed his eyes, still smiling. “Just slice it, Emma, and let everyone have a piece. This old stomach of mine has to get used to having food in it again.”
The girls got up half an hour early the next morning because Ivy June knew that Catherine would never get out of the house with just a short goodbye.