Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (29 page)

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 crawl 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.

Mammaw insisted on packing a little bag with dried-apple pies in case Catherine got hungry on her way to Lexington that afternoon, and Grandmommy had to recount all that had happened in the past two weeks, as though Catherine hadn’t been here to see for herself. Grandmommy’s tale kept coming back to her son Spencer, however, and his rescue at the mine, which she attributed to the good life Papaw had led: “If you do what’s right,” she said, “then at the end of your life … you can lie down … and be peaceful with yourself.”

“That’s right, Iree, but Spencer’s not about to lie down. He’s got that garden to plant,” Mammaw said. Then she hugged Catherine as though she wanted her to stay forever—to help plant the garden and pick the beans and eat them with fatback and be still another girl to sleep in Mammaw and Papaw’s house as long as she wanted.

Daddy drove the girls to school in Papaw’s car, with Catherine’s bags in the trunk. He announced that he’d found a man who would trade him a six-year-old Chevy pickup for labor: Daddy would be putting a fence around the man’s two acres of land. The deal had been closed with a handshake, and Daddy was pleased.

“Guess you come at the worst possible time,” he told Catherine, “but you look at it another way, maybe it was for the best. If ever Ivy June needed company, it was now.”

The rescue of the five miners was the chief topic of conversation at school. Whose cousin had been on the rescue team, whose aunt had volunteered for the Red Cross, which ma had driven an ambulance?

There was an assembly of thanksgiving in the gym first period, and two minutes of silence for the two miners who had died. Ivy June bowed her head without guilt this time, grateful beyond words that Papaw had been spared, sorrowful for the families of the miners who had been swept away.

“You’ll have a lot to tell back in Lexington, won’t you?” Mary Beth said to Catherine as they walked back to their classes.

“To tell it’s one thing,” said Catherine. “To be here—that’s something else.”

Together, Ivy June and Catherine gave their mostly finished report about celebrations and festivals, city and country, and it was a relief to talk—to
think—
about anything else. The class laughed when Ivy June repeated the snipe-hunting story that Papaw had told them. She was surprised when Luke Weller spoke up, a one-sided grin on his face:

“I had that trick played on me once when I went to visit my cousins,” he said. “Only, I caught on to what they were fixing to do, and after they left me holding the sack, I hightailed it back to the house and got there before they did.”

Everyone laughed some more, and Ivy June felt that if she had done nothing else that day but make Luke Weller grin, it was something.

At lunchtime, Ivy June was surprised that a few of the other girls brought little going-away gifts for Catherine. They didn’t offer used clothes, as the girls in Lexington had offered Ivy June. Mary Beth gave Catherine a little bar of homemade soap with a real violet pressed in the top, and Angela gave her a pen with three different colors of ink.

Shirl’s gift was rolled up and tied with a pink ribbon, and Catherine unfurled a huge, triple-extra-large T-shirt with the words
One Big Happy …
on the front. Catherine shrieked with delight, and so did the others.

“He did it!” Shirl explained. “Fred Mason’s cousin ate the four-foot sub all by himself—had three witnesses—and he got the big T-shirt and gave it to me.”

“It’s big enough for two people!” Catherine said, holding it up.

“Well, let’s see!” said Shirl, and immediately, standing back to back, the two girls pulled the enormous T-shirt over their heads, two arms sticking out each sleeve, four legs out the bottom, and tried to walk together. They even had the eighth graders laughing, Jimmy Harris included.

When school was over, Ivy June walked out to the parking lot with Miss Dixon and Catherine. Mrs. Fields would be waiting for Catherine at the library in Hazard.

“Flora’s going to be at the house to help me get it ready for Mom,” Catherine explained. “I want to put up a Welcome Home sign on the porch. I’m going to have lunch ready for her too, and sort of be her nurse till she’s well.” She suddenly flung her arms around Ivy June.

“Goodbye,” she said into the side of her neck, and Ivy June could feel her swallow. “Thank you for everything. If we wrote a story about this, no one would believe it all happened in the same week, would they?”