Chapter 12: The Knocks

Nobody in the council chamber moved.

Seok-hyun heard the gallery stop breathing around him, and the projector fan, and far away the clerk's pen.

His mother's death certificate was in a folder in his father's desk, in the lamp house, under a stack of electric bills.

He had seen it once at twelve, and he remembered only a stamp.

"Not here," he said.

"No," the Director agreed. "Not here."

They walked to the pit together, because the Director asked to walk, and the town came behind them in a long quiet line.

He was sixty-two, Da-hae said in a low voice, and had run the Association since the year after the Tower rose.

Before that he had been a mine safety inspector for the Gangwon Bureau, in the last years of the old pits.

He walked slowly, with his hands behind his back, and he did not look at the shop fronts.

At the lamp house he stopped on the threshold and took off his hat.

"Inspector Jo," he said. "The writ is withdrawn. You will not need to endorse it."

Da-hae's shoulders came down.

"And your suspension begins when the hearing ends," the Director added, gently.

"For obstructing a writ, and for an instrument report that read 'failure' where it should have read 'pulse.' We will discuss it after."

"Yes, sir," said Da-hae.

"Article 12 stands, Mr. Gwon. The assessment will be held at your site."

He sat on the bench by the stove, where the old miners sat, and set his hat on his knee. "By me, on Thursday."

Sun-ja came in with a tray of barley tea and set it down without a word.

She looked at the Director, and her mouth worked, and she turned and went out again.

"She remembers me," he said.

"Everyone here remembers you, I think," said Seok-hyun.

"Yes. That is what I deserve."

The tea steamed on the tray, and nobody touched it.

Seok-hyun sat across from him on the counter stool, with his bandaged hands on his knees.

He looked at the man who had signed a paper about his mother.

"You said you signed it," Seok-hyun said.

"I did."

"Then say what's in it."

The Director turned his hat a quarter turn on his knee.

"On the fourteenth of November, 2006, a roof fell in the Number Four drift of Pit Nine, with nine men behind it," he said.

"Your mother went down with an armful of lamps and brought out all nine by a side drift that was on no map."

"The Bureau sent me that night."

"I was six," Seok-hyun said.

"I know. You were on the lamp house bench in a yellow coat, eating a rice ball." He said it plainly.

"Your father dug for eleven days."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.