Chapter 13: The Table

The door in the far wall of the First Drift had not been there the night before.

Seok-hyun saw it at ten past six on Tuesday morning, a black rectangle a hundred meters past the last lamp.

He had come down alone on the first cage after the bell.

Da-hae stayed at the platform with the cage gate in her hand, because he had asked her to.

"If I'm not up by the two o'clock bell, you come," he had said.

"I'll come at one," she had said, and written the hour on the back of her left hand.

He had not slept.

He had sat on the lamp house bench until five with the tenth tag in his fist, and the tag had never once gone cool.

Now the Ledger lay in the corner of his eye, and its last line from the night before had not faded.

[The Heart asks the keeper: will you come down and eat?]

The sixty crawlers of the six o'clock turn had risen out of the floor behind him.

He heard them settle and scrape, and he stopped walking, because the dark ahead was theirs and he carried one lamp.

Then small lamps came up out of the black floor, one every three steps, in a line toward the door.

The line was not on the Ledger and he had hung none of them.

The crawlers drew back from it on both sides and turned their flat heads away.

Seok-hyun thought: she cleared the road.

He caught himself on the pronoun, and for a moment he stood with his boots on the black stone and refused to think it again.

He walked the line.

The door stood in a frame of squared pit timber, the kind the old crews had set in every drift of Hwangji Pit Nine.

Someone had painted a white 4 on the lintel and the paint had flaked.

Number Four, he thought; the drift on no map.

Beyond the frame was a room four paces square, cut from coal and swept clean.

It held a table of pine boards, two chairs, an iron stove with a ring of embers burning in it.

A single lamp hung from a wall hook.

On the table stood a pot with its lid off, and steam rose from it into the lamplight.

Two bowls were laid out, two spoons, and a dish of rice under a cloth.

One chair had a folded cushion on it, flattened in the middle by twenty years of the same man sitting down.

His father's thermos stood by the cushion, and his reading glasses lay on a folded newspaper dated the fourth of November.

The second chair had no cushion, and it was pulled out a little from the table, as if somebody had just stood up from it.

Seok-hyun did not sit.

He read the wall first, because the wall behind his father's chair was covered in pencil.

His father's square hand ran in columns from the floor to the height of a standing man.

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