canaries

Someone had hit a pocket of fire damp after the vents shut down. Every methane monitor in the south section was screeching for a good two minutes before the boom came. Then the gunite shattered and fell from the roof just before the timber broke off the sides of the cage and sealed off the door to the tunnel we were working in. The nearest escape shaft was two levels up.

We’d been waiting for someone to come and dig us out for three days. Spirits weren’t exactly high.Someone started humming. It was the first noise anyone had made in at least an hour. It was Porter. No one else down there would hum. He was a real glass is half-full kind of guy. He was undoubtedly smiling. Best had told everyone to put their lights out when the ruckus died down. He didn’t want us wasting the batteries. Even though, it was the dark, not the silence that messed with you.

“Does humming waste oxygen?” Marion said.

“Not as much as talking does,” said Best, through clinched teeth.

Porter kept humming, just quieter than before. Someone coughed. This was no coal cough. Whoever it was doing the coughing, spit after he was finished. The slaver was mean sounding and slammed into the coke dust with an unhealthy thud. We were getting sicker with every passing hour. The smell of awful hung so thick in that lightless hole, that it seemed like flowers were just made up things in kid’s stories.I unscrewed my canteen and soaked up a little of the moisture from the nozzle with my shirt sleeve. I rubbed the damp fabric on my lips, both of which felt like ragged pieces of jerky. It was more of a tease than I could afford at that particular moment. The ghost of water never saved anyone from dehydration.

“Hey, David.” It was Judd Geice, the 18-year-old. “How’s about a sip of that water.”

“Someone will be here with all the water you can drink real soon,” I said.Best didn’t scold us for talking. Maybe it was Best who’d been coughing.

“My dad’s worked in at least eight different mines since we moved to West Virginia,” said Geice, reading Best’s silence as permission to ramble. “Just in district three he’s worked in Gilmer, Doddridge, and Preston. He ain’t never been caved in once.”

“I guess that gives you bragging rights next time the two of you are havin’ beers,” I said. Maybe I was a trying to be a glass is half-full kind of guy.One by one the men who weren’t talking started snoring. It sounded like fake snores at first, loud and whistling like cartoon bears. The fans started up above. They were ventilating the shafts. That didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to us, though. We were too isolated, too shut off from the rest of the mine to get any air. We had the cap on real tight down there. Nothing was getting in without a percussion drill.The snores got louder and the hours turned into another inky day. Rescue clamber got closer, but closer wasn’t getting us any oxygen. There had been no reserve tanks down there. We were working without a net, and we never said one word to one another about how foolish we felt about that.Just as the chorus of snores reached a crescendo, it began to widdle itself down, one man at a time, until the room was completely silent except for the eighteen-year-old’s new found passion for song. I could feel myself fading in and out.

“The B-I-B-L-E,” Geice sang, “yes that’s the book for me. I stand upon the word of god, the B-I-B …”

We both fell silent just as the pressure drill punched through the earth and gunnite at the door.