Braxton went into the mine entrance alone with his flashlight in his hand, and I heard his boots on the wooden boards for a long minute before they stopped. When he came out, the light was off, and his face was the color of the ash in a woodstove. “Mr. Ratliff,” he said, “the name painted over the empty hook is Walter Ratliff. Shift boss.” I am Clyde Ratliff, eighty three years old, and I sat on the bench in the shade with my keys in my lap and my grandson standing beside me. The old man in the tie with the pickaxes had come all the way out of the museum doorway.
On the ninth of February, 1968, the roof of Number Four mine came down in the long section east of the main haulage, and thirty one men were on the wrong side of it. My father, Walter, was the shift boss. He went back in three times with a lamp and a rope. He got every man out, one by one, in the dark and the dust, and the last one out was him. At the check board that evening, every tag but one was turned in. His hook was empty. The company clerk thought he had never come out, and by the time anyone corrected him, the tag was gone.
It was in my pocket. My father had pressed it into my hand in the bathhouse that night, when I was twenty five and working beside him for the second year, and he had said, “Keep this, Clyde. I never want to see it hung on a hook again.” I had carried it on my key ring for fifty eight years. I had never told anyone, because he never wanted to be thanked, and I had not wanted to be the one to do it for him. The director of the museum, whose name was Mr. Bevins, lifted the tag with both hands.
A brass tag on a key ring gave one old school bus driver the Saturday morning to bring a young guide back to the story of the mine in Beckley.
I gave my terms to Braxton when he stood trembling in front of me. “Son, you did not know. I am not going to scold you for that. But I would like you to do three things. You will take this tag inside and hang it on the empty hook yourself. You will learn the name of every man on that board, and you will say them out loud to your tour at the start of every tour. And you will sit with me one Saturday and listen to the story of that night, the whole of it, because you are a miner grandson, and you ought to know.”
Braxton wept openly, on the bench, in front of twenty people in hard hats. “My granddaddy worked Number Four,” he said. “He told me stories when I was little, and I grew up and started telling the story of the mine like a cartoon. Hard hats and flashlights. I forgot there were men.” The mother of the family held her husband arm, and an old woman in the tour group, in a Sunday dress, was crying quietly into a handkerchief. “That was my brother Eddie,” she said. “Your daddy carried him out on his back.”
But Braxton, in a flash of panic, could not bear to be the boy who had insulted the son of Walter Ratliff, and he did the worst possible thing. He snatched the key ring out of my hand and bolted into the dark mouth of the mine entrance, with the tag swinging, as if he might hang it on the board himself before anyone could stop him. He had gone twenty feet into the tunnel when the beam of a flashlight swung across his path. Mr. Bevins, with the whole tour group behind him in a line, stood in the light, shoulder to shoulder.
Twenty hard hats and twenty flashlights made a wall across the tunnel. The old woman in the Sunday dress stepped to the front. “Young man,” she said, with a voice like a church bell, “you are not going to hang that tag in a hurry. Clyde is going to do it himself.” Braxton lowered the keys. His shoulders shook. Mr. Bevins reached out and gently took them, and handed them to me, and I stood in the cool damp of the mine for the first time since 1968.
The consequences were a long time coming, and then they came all at once. I walked the tunnel with my cane, and in front of the board of tags, with every eye in the museum upon me, I took the brass tag off my key ring and hung it on the empty hook. It swung once and stopped. The museum put a plaque beneath it that afternoon, hand lettered by Mr. Bevins, telling the story of the thirty one men. Braxton read it to every tour for the rest of the season, and then the next season, and he never skipped the names.
In the name of my wife Ruth, who passed in 2020, I started the Ruth Ratliff Fund. It pays for transportation to the black lung clinic for retired miners and for scholarships for the grandchildren of miners, in Raleigh, Fayette and Summers counties. In the first year we drove four hundred and ten retired miners to their appointments and sent eighteen students to college. One was a girl from Oak Hill whose grandfather had worked Number Four, and who is now a nurse at the very clinic that served him.
On a Saturday in October, I sat on the bench outside the museum in the shade with Braxton beside me, his hard hat off, listening to the story I had never told. He asked small questions, the way you ask a man who might stop. I answered every one. A crowd gathered around us, quietly, and no one took out a phone. When I got to the end, with my father coming out of the dark with a lamp, Braxton took off his name tag and put it in my hand. It said, Braxton, Apprentice. I gave it back.
