Chapter 5: Every Stone

My father came home from the hospital on the first of October to die in his own bed.

The doctor said weeks.

My father said, "I'll decide," and the doctor, who had known him thirty years, did not argue.

I moved the kitchen table into the front room so he could watch the street.

I set up an iron cot beside his bed and slept on it with the shovel under the frame.

Every morning before light I went up to the cemetery, and every evening I came back to the pack.

I had not expected that part.

The Culm Bank pack grew by one or two every week.

The word went down the valley that a woman with a shovel was taking in the ones Black Diamond had dropped.

They came to the old company row on foot, with their coats on and bags in their hands.

A widower from the Number Nine patch.

A girl of seventeen with a bad knee, sent over by her own mother, who cried in the street.

A man who had lost two fingers in the pit and his job at the bank.

None of them said what they wanted.

I put them in the empty doubles on the row, two to a side, and the parish women brought pots of soup.

The old foreman appointed himself quartermaster and kept the pack's ledger in his lunch pail.

On the third Sunday of October we ran the strip pit at midnight.

It was the first time all of us had shifted together.

There were black wolves and brown wolves and one gray, and a dog among us who thought he was a wolf.

We swam the flooded pit under a half moon, the diver leading, sleek in the black water.

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