Digging Out (10 page)

We listen to the broadcast of the funeral. “Lord Jesus Christ, we tenderly commit the bodies of our dear children to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All in all, one hundred sixteen little hearts …”

I keep my eyes glued to him, missing most of what Reverend Land says —except for the bit about “No one knows why some are taken and some left behind, and though it seems useless and without meaning, God works in mysterious ways. We must, in the face of tragedy, above all else, keep faith and, more importantly, hope. Especially for all of us left behind, in particular the children who were spared.”

Da looks up at me then, and with the back of his hand, he wipes away the tears. “Sorrier than I’ve ever been about anything, ever, I am about this, Alys. Please believe me.”

I don’t know what to say.

Da closes his eyes.

It is so quiet. The arguments making the noise of our house for so many months, over. Nothing the same. Mam, Gram, Parry not painting and thrown out of the house now. Hallie gone forever. Everything ruined.

But he is my da. I look at him. The deep lines on his face. The dark under his eyes. He is my sad da.

And then finally I say, “I do, Da. I believe you.”

He raises his head, looking surprised. He reaches out his hand and touches my foot. “Ta, Alys. Ta, very much.”

F
EBRUARY 1973

A
lthough Da goes to the mine, he hasn’t been out in the village for a long time, months and months. He is a ghost, coming up behind me, scaring me with his own silence.

Mrs. Elwood stops by to see Gram and I hear her say, “Keep him away for as long as you can. They are vicious about him. Can’t see that he will ever be forgiven. Not in this village, with so many families having lost children, him being the tip manager and all.”

Parry, too, coming round early one morning. So quiet, like a low growl, he says, “You killing bastard. All of them dead because of you.”

“Did you come round just to spread your hate?”

“And my germs,” Parry says, spitting on the ground near Da’s feet and turning to walk away.

From then on, the house, except for the telly, is even quieter. Mam and Da hardly speaking, me tucked up in the parlor, a mangled mess, inside mostly, a stomach injury, my pancreas, and a broken leg. But nothing as bad as the memories.

I miss Hallie. I miss everyone. Peter, Emma, all of them. There is no one left who knows me. Even Evan can’t help.

“Up in the cemetery,” he describes the way the white arches standing next to each other look above each grave. “Touching each other as if they’re holding hands. So many of them, side by side, it stops your breath. The silence of them all there together is overwhelming.”

* * *

Closing my eyes, I can still see Hallie, just there. Next to me. She is mad because I’ve knocked the shilling from her hand. She is bending down to fetch it. “Look what you’ve done now, Alys!” she shouts. When I squeeze my eyes shut tight, Hallie is still there with me. Alive. And then I imagine what would have happened next. She would pick the shilling up. She would pretend to be angry. “Now / will get our milk. You give me your shilling right this moment, Alys.” And I would smile and give it to her, because she is the strong one, she is the one who always gets her way. And I would back up and the roar would start and I would duck and the muck would flow over me. Not Hallie. It would be me gone, and Hallie saved.

Each night after dinner, Mam does up the dishes and Da sits at the far end of the kitchen reading his
Echo,
all duty between them.

“Going to bed, Rita,” he says when he’s finished reading. Mam nods, her back to him as she dries the dishes. She tidies up the house, has a conversation with Gram, sees me off to bed before she goes to their room.

One early morning when I am needing Mam, I find her asleep on the daybed at the foot of their bed. It is too short for her, so she is curled up like a cat. Somehow I know that this is where she sleeps now. I lie down on the floor next to her and watch her. I wouldn’t mind staying there all day, forever. The floor is cool and hard. It doesn’t move.

It takes me six months to recover the full use of my arms and legs. I am in the wheelchair for at least two months. In school no one wants to push me in the chair. Mr. Odell has to tell someone to do it, else I would just stay in one place all day.

There are others left from the middle and junior schools, about fifty in all but only five from my class. First we are shuttled to Mount Pleasant, where we share space with the middle and infant school there. Then a new school in Aberfan is built down the road. All of us go there, different ages but in the same one room. There is a darkness like someone spread a black cape over the whole town.

One evening after supper, a rock comes sailing through the window of our parlor. A crumpled paper is wrapped round it, and when Mam smoothes it out, she reads, “’You better look after your daughter. Why is she alive when ours are dead?’ “

Mam drops the rock like it is on fire and grabs the paper up in her hand, scrunching it back into a crumpled ball. She shakes her fist at Da and says, “What have we left? My Cod, where have our lives gone? Whatever will become of us?” She glares at me like I have done something awful, too.

But what have I done?

“Alys, it’s not your fault,” she says, but she is still glaring at me. “They are just mean and jealous because you are alive and theirs are not.” Mam turns her head, her hand over her mouth. I know she is crying. Could she know about me grabbing Hallie’s shilling? Maybe that’s why she can’t look at me, or hold me. Maybe she thinks it’s all my fault, Hallie dying?

“Please, Mam, will you sleep with me? I am so scared.”

“Go on now, Alys. You’re fine on your own, you are. Pull yourself together. You are lucky to be alive.” If that is so, then why do I feel like I am down a dark tunnel, all by myself?

Some nights I awaken and don’t know where I am: the hospital, the parlor, or Gram’s bed. “Mam!” I cry out. Finally Cram puts a small night-light in my room. But even with the light on, I cannot close my eyes for long.

At school, some of us talk about the trouble our parents are having. Most everyone left has lost either a brother or a sister. In one case, Gwynth, who stayed home ill that day, has lost two brothers and her father, who had walked the boys to school.

We are the only family to lose no one. It seems like Mam should be glad. But she never smiles. And she never touches me.

Nine weeks after the funeral, there comes a knock on the door. It is a man from the National Coal Board, who says he has a check for fifty quid. “Fifty quid?” Mam asks. “What for?”

Turns out to be it is a sympathy payment from the coal board. Even those who have been spared get it.

Mam shouts at him, “You son of a bitch. You take your money and stuff it if you think the price of a child’s life, or any life, is worth only fifty quid! Take your fifty quid and bury it under the tip. Buried alive is what the death records should show. Buried alive by the National Coal Board is what I want written on those death certificates!”

And then she is down on her knees, pounding the floor, the man from the coal board standing there with the check in his hands. I want
to help her. I want to kneel down and hug her, protect her. But I can’t. I am too afraid she will tell me to go away.

In April, Gram leads a woman into the parlor. I am still using it as a bedroom during the day. Her hair is curly. I can see through it when she stands in the light of the open door.

“Alys, this is Dr. Kowal. She’s come to talk.”

Dr. Kowal smiles at me.

“You sit down, Dr. Kowal, and make yourself comfortable. Are you chilly? D’you want me to turn on the electric fire?”

I don’t know why this doctor is here, but she is making Gram nervous.

“No, no. I’m fine. I’m warm enough, really.” Dr. Kowal unbuttons her cardigan. “Don’t you worry a thing about me, then, Mrs. Davies. I’ll be fine as I am.”

“I’ll just go make us a cup of tea, then.” Gram winks at me and backs out of the room.

“Now then, Alys, you’re looking fine. How d’you feel? Some of the other children are complaining of headaches and nightmares. D’you have any of these complaints or any others?” She pulls the heavy rocker up next to my bed and takes a pad of paper out of her bag. “Anything at all?”

I’m not sure what she means. Is she talking about my body aches? Her breath smells like sour milk. I don’t know how to answer her, so I say, “Well … it’s my leg, mostly.”

“That’s to be expected, though, isn’t it? You were seriously hurt. Your body is still recovering. What I’m talking about right now, Alys, are your feelings about everything that has happened. Is there anything that you need to speak of that you haven’t been able to talk about yet? Something that might be giving you nightmares or making you uncomfortable in the daytime even, or causing you worry and keeping you up?”

One side of Dr. Kowal’s lip is higher than the other. The more I look at her, the more I want to be able to tell her something, but nothing comes out. I can’t say anything about the way I feel. In fact, I don’t really know what I feel. How can I explain about the roar that builds in my ears just before I fall off to sleep? I move my lips and take a breath in, but nothing comes out about Mam and Da, and how the
shouting ‘tween Parry and Da has stopped now, and how he is gone mostly from the house, and I am more worried about that than I was about the hollering.

I can’t say a thing about how I won’t let myself rest too long on thoughts about Hallie, ‘cause if I do, I feel my chest filling up with so much sludge I know I will never be able to breathe again, and what I want, really, is to be as stone-cold as Hallie. I can’t say anything about how heavy every muscle in my body feels all the time.

“No.” I smile. “Everything seems okay, now.” That’s what I tell Dr. Kowal. “I’m fine, now.”

She reaches out and pats my hand and then she digs in her bag and pulls out a blue notebook and a new black felt tip.

“Well,” she starts, “I hope you won’t mind me saying something that helped me back a while ago, after I lost someone close. She was older and all, and I was older, too. But it was still a terrible loss for me. My friend and I talked every day the whole of our lives. Forty years.” She hands me the notebook and then the pen.

“Sometimes there’s just too much to say about what you’re feeling. And if you try to say it out loud it doesn’t cover all that you are feeling, really, because your mind gets overloaded and it all wants to come out fast —in a flash—and perhaps it won’t make much sense to someone else. But if you were to write it down—just a thought, here and there, or a whole mouthful when you feel like it—then it will be out of your body, and somewhere safe where you can look at it and see it and maybe understand it better. Sometimes if you write down the things you’re feeling it even makes it easier. Easier to feel those hard things.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder. Firmly. I want to tell her how nothing she has told me is the same as losing Hallie. Nothing. She doesn’t know at all how I feel.

“You’re a brave little girl, Alys.” She looks at me for a long moment, waiting, I suppose, for me to say something. I don’t. Then she looks at her watch. “I have to go now, but I’d like to come back and talk some more if you’ll let me.” She reaches into her bag again and pulls out a small card. “I’m on the telephone. ‘Tween now and when I come again, if you ever want to talk, just ring me.”

Later, when Da’s out, Parry and Evan come round. Evan’s furious about what’s what at the tribunal.

“It’s horrible. Horrible! All of them talking about it again like when it first happened. What can they be thinking, to bring the surviving children in front of them, to tell them what? So cruel. What does their presence do besides tear our hearts out again?”

Parry leans up next to him. “Doesn’t matter, Evan. It’s done —don’t you see? Da. The NCB. They’re to blame. No amount of white-washing’ll ever cover it up. We’re all together on this, man. We’re all together.”

“But it’s not your da, Parry. It’s the NCB—period. Get it straight, man. You got to take the high road on this one and stop pointing the finger at your old man. Your da couldn’t make that final decision. It wasn’t up to him.”

Parry shakes his head. “Sure, Evan. It’s all bullshit at this point, anyway. Most of the children in this village are already dead. Can’t get them back, can we?”

Parry’s voice has an edge now all the time. Beti told Gram that he’d been drunk in the village on Sunday.

Evan puts his arms around him. Parry’s head goes back and he sucks in some air. The vein in the middle of his forehead stands out.

“I want that time back. Before. I would be stronger, fight harder, convince them. If only I could have done something different. Da.”

Evan and Parry are the same age, seventeen, but Evan’s been on his own for two years, since he came to Aberfan, and he seems so much older than my brother, who cries all the time now.

“I can’t stop, Evan. I think about it over and over, what I could have done differently. Maybe I just should have killed him?”

“Don’t talk nonsense.” Evan pulls Parry to him again.

“Maybe I just should have got myself a gun and killed him.”

A week later, Evan tells me, “They’ve decided to move the tribunal to Cardiff.”

“Surely my brother won’t be able to go now.” I knew none of the men Parry and Evan’s age could afford cars, and Cardiff was a long way. I was thinking that was probably a good thing.

“That’s the point. And we need his fire more than anyone’s, we do, and his loud, strong voice. Parry has become the spokesman for the village. Angry as he is at your da, if he’s not at those tribunal meetings, the blokes from the NCB will smooth things over, try to make it look like your da didn’t give them proper information.”

My eyes narrow. I don’t understand.

“Your da’s the one who was communicating with the NCB. They are going to try and make it look like it was your…”

I put my hands over my ears.