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By Root 2079 0

for she had never “known” Edward, who was too big to notice her. Petey, on the other hand. Petey. He was a year older than she was, and took after the mother, rather than the father, a slight little person, though wiry, with his mother’s fine mouse hair. (Olive’s raven abundance came directly from Peter.) He was a boy who wrote poems, and knew the names of flowers and butterflies, and said to Olive that he knew he must go down the mine, but it was not what he wanted. What? Olive whispered into his ear, in the dark, in bed, where they clutched each other for warmth and comfort. What do you want? And Petey said, it’s hardly worth me thinking to want anything, since I can’t have it. And Olive said, I would think, if I was a boy. And Petey said, isna that t’same thing, really? Tha knaws tha mun be a girl, an I knaw I mun go down t’pit.

Petey went down the pit, as he must, and because he was little, was set to watch a gate, as a trapper. The tunnels’ ventilation, and the containment of fire damp, depended on a series of low gates that were operated by small boys, squatting in holes scooped out of the pit-wall, holding a string, which they pulled, to let the trucks pass. They sat for twelve-hour shifts in the dark, under the low roof, waiting for the sound of approaching trucks. Petey told no one how frightened he was both of the dark, and of the shifting narrowness of his hole, with miles of earth, and coal, and stone pressing on it, and somehow on him. But the night before he went down the first time he gripped Olive tightly and said “What if I canna? What if I darena?”

And Olive had an imagination of herself, asked to go down there, and of how she would begin to scream and flail in the descending cage, howling to return to the surface. For she could not imagine bending her neck under that threshold, creeping willingly into that dark. They held each other and trembled, and there were tears on both faces, hot and wet.

When he came up, the first time, Petey said, it wer non sa bad. But the next morning, Olive could feel him rigid with terror.

He got used to it. He had been tugging his string in the dark just under a year, when far above, the bed of the River Gull trembled, quaked and boiled with bubbles, which were observed by an interested farmhand. This man saw, to his amazement, the river begin to pour away from both sides, through a gaping chasm under its banks. He began to run. He understood that the earth between the bed of the river and the roof of the mine had given way, and water was pouring into the workings. He ran two miles to the pithead, and men went down with messages, and others came back, who had managed to sidestep the rolling torrent, which was filling up tunnels and shafts, cutting off communications with outlying passages.

Petey’s little hole filled up. Olive did not know if it filled up fast or slowly, if he had tried to escape, or been immediately overwhelmed. Bodies of boys—six of them, and seven men—were sucked along and spat out by the coil of filthy black water. A rescuer fell into an unexpected pothole and was also drowned.

There was a service in the Chapel and a collection for a memorial stone near the site of the disaster. Peter Grimwith seemed smaller. He walked hunched, looking at the ground. He took Olive on his knee still, after tea—she was almost too big—but he had little to say, no stories, no pocketed secrets. Lucy did not weep in front of the other children. She was pregnant, she coughed perpetually, the rims of her eyes were scrubbed and red. She too, despite her swollen belly, seemed to be shrinking.

Six months later the whole village was shaken by a series of booms and cracking sounds. They knew what it meant, they lived in dread of it. Everyone left what he or she was doing—a pie half-covered, a boot half-cleaned, the newspaper squares torn up for the ash pits—and went quickly, a few running, most walking fast, very fast, to the head of the shaft, where flames and cinders and hot grit were flying in the evening air. Men came up, and tried to say where the damage was, where men