Supper

The lamp on the face came round and found me.

I knew the feeling by now. Warm, on the side of my face, and patient. One. Two.

A cart came rolling along the rails beside the desk and stopped against my hip.

Gus. He'd pushed it the length of the gallery with his good arm and his shoulder, and now he stood at the back of it, breathing hard. He didn't say anything. He didn't tell me to push, or hold, or move. He took my hand off the edge of the desk, and put it on the cold iron rim of the cart, and let go.

I pushed it an inch. And back an inch.

The lamp on the face stayed a moment longer. Then it went back to the coal.

Gus stood at the other end of the cart with his hand on it, rocking it when I rocked it. He was looking at the desk, at the name above ours, and I don't think he'd looked anywhere else since we came in.

The Foreman had his hands folded again. The box was open in front of him. He was waiting.

I'd thought he was waiting for us. He wasn't. He'd put that box out at ten to six, and at ten to two, and at ten to ten, every shift for sixty years, and folded his hands, and waited. And up on the face the men worked, because the lie said they were still working, and a man who's still working doesn't come down the steps to ask for his money. None of them had, in sixty years.

And nobody had ever come down and asked for them.

I took Tobin's tally out of my pocket and put it on the desk in front of the Foreman.

It made a small sound on the wood. Brass on oak.

"T. Ashe," I said. "He's my mate. He can't come down and ask. So I'm asking." My voice wasn't steady. I kept rocking the cart. "Paid off. Finished. You can't keep back a man's pay."

The Foreman looked at the tally for a long time.

Then he turned the book a little toward the bulb, and ran his finger along the line, and stopped at the end of it, the way he had at roll call.

"T. Ashe," he read.

It came up the slope from a long way down. The same low, grinding voice as all the others. Coal going down a chute.

"Here."

Through the bars of the gate, far down in the dark where the deep gallery was, one lamp left the face and started to climb.

It came slowly. The slope was long and steep, and for a long time it was only a light, getting bigger, swinging a little with each step. Then there was a shape under it. Then a shovel on its shoulder.

Pim had stopped pushing his cart. So had Mags. Bea had a lump of coal in her hand and wasn't picking anything out of it. Nobody's lamp came to look at them for it. Every lamp in the gallery had turned to the desk, the way they had at roll call.

The gate swung open on its own, without a sound, and Tobin came through it.

He was small. I'd forgotten how small. He came round the end of the desk and stood in front of it, between me and the Foreman, with his lamp on the book and my old shovel on his shoulder, the handle split all the way down where it had always been split. His tin hung from his belt.

The fingers of his free hand were moving against his leg. One, then the next, then the next, then back to the first.

He was right there. I could have touched his sleeve. I didn't.

The Foreman dipped his pen and drew a line through T. Ashe.

Then he reached into the drawer, not the box, and took out a small brown envelope, the kind wages come in. He put a coin in it, and folded the flap down, and wrote on the front in his small neat hand. He put it on the desk beside the tally, and pushed them both across to me.

The envelope said: T. Ashe. Paid in full. Home for supper.

Behind me I heard a sound from Ansel. Just one. Then nothing.

I picked them up with my free hand, the tally and the envelope, and kept the other on the cart. My hands were shaking.

Tobin's fingers had stopped.

He stood there with his hand flat against his leg. Then he took the shovel off his shoulder, my old shovel, and leaned it against the end of the desk, by my hand.

He reached up with both hands and took off his helmet. The lamp on it was still burning. He held it a moment, and then he set it on the desk next to the book, with the lamp pointing at nothing.

Without it there was only the coal dust where his face should be.

He turned round and walked away from the desk.

He didn't go up the steps to the face, or back to the gate. He walked down the middle of the gallery, between the carts, toward the mouth of the drift and the long way up to the pit bottom, where the cage was. He walked like a man at the end of a shift, in no hurry. His tin swung on his belt. Gus took his helmet off and held it to his chest. Pim stood with his hand on his cart and his mouth shut tight. Bea had both hands over her face.

Every lamp in the gallery went with him, the way Pim's had on the slope. He went past Pim's cart, and past Bea and Ansel, and past Mags, and on toward the mouth of the gallery.

At the mouth of the gallery he stopped.

He turned his head and looked back.

He didn't have eyes. He didn't have a lamp any more. I don't know what he looked with. But he looked back down the whole length of the gallery to the desk, to where I was standing with my hand on a coal cart and his pay in my other hand, and he stayed like that while I counted three.

"Tobin Edward Ashe," I said. Not loud.

Then he turned back to the drift.

The coal dust came off him the way it comes off a shovel in a draught, all at once and very gently, and for a second it hung in the air at the mouth of the gallery in the shape of a boy, small and skinny, with his weight on one foot.

Then the air from the drift took it, and it was gone.

Something dropped onto the rails where he'd been standing, and rolled a little way, and stopped. His crib tin.

The lamps came back from the mouth of the gallery, one by one, to the coal. Pim put his hands on his cart again. Bea found the lump of coal in her lap. Mags pushed.

On the desk, his helmet sat beside the book with its lamp still burning. The Foreman looked at it. Then he closed the book.

I put the tally and the envelope in my coat, in the inside pocket, the one that does up with a button. I did the button up.

Then I took my old shovel from the end of the desk, because it was mine, and he'd given it back, and I walked down the gallery with it scraping the floor, and picked up the tin.

It was dented, and warm, and there was nothing in it.

Something of mine. So she's got something.

Gus put his helmet back on. He'd followed me down with the cart. He came round it, and stood next to me, and looked at the mouth of the gallery where there was nothing to look at now. He opened his mouth once, and shut it.

"I know," I said.

He nodded. That was all either of us said about it.

Up on the face, the miners were still working. The picks went up and came down. It was the last minute of the last shift.

The Foreman took out his watch.

He looked at it. He put it away. Then he lifted his head, and for the first time since I'd known him, he looked at the whole gallery at once, the way a man looks round a room he's about to leave.

The whistle went.

Not one long shriek. Not three. It started low and kept going, and kept going, and didn't stop, and under it, from somewhere deep below our feet, the whole of Pit Nine began to groan.