The big man in the mine rescue jacket stood at the head of the casket of my grandmother with the old switchboard headset in his hands, the cord wrapped around it so many times that it looked like a nest. He was six and a half feet tall and as broad as a doorway, with a gray mustache, and his eyes were red. “My name is Ray Dillard,” he said, in a deep slow voice. “I am the captain of the Southern West Virginia mine rescue team. And on the eleventh of March, 1989, I was a hundred and ninety feet underground in the number four mine, with a roof fall behind me, and no way out.”
The room had been warm and noisy, full of miners in clean flannel, but now it fell absolutely still. In the front row, my aunt Carol, the older sister of my mother, sat with her purse in her lap. She had told me that morning that Mamaw Nell only answered phones for the coal company. “There were fourteen of us in the dark,” said Ray. “The mine telephone was the only line. It rang through to the switchboard on the surface. The operator was a woman named Nell. She was fifty three, and the whole company had gone home for the night except her.”
“She stayed on that line for nineteen hours. She never left the chair. She connected us to the rescue crews. She connected our wives to us, one by one, so they could hear a voice. And between the calls, when it was just the line open and the water dripping, she talked to us. She sang. She told us about her tomato garden. She said, Boys, I am right here. I will not hang up. And I will not hang up until you walk out.” Ray stopped. His shoulders shook. “She kept her word. We heard her breathing the whole time.”
A switchboard headset with its cord wound tight was carried in by a mine rescue captain and gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her aunt back to the voice on the line.
“When the rescue team broke through, they pulled us out one at a time. I was the sixth. The first thing I saw in the daylight was the superintendent, crying, and the second was a little gray haired lady in a cardigan, standing at the portal with a headset still around her neck. She had driven to the mine mouth herself, in the middle of the night, because she wanted to see our faces. She had not slept. She looked at me and said, Ray, you are a good boy. Go home and kiss your mother.” He lifted the headset. “She gave me this the next week.”
I was thirty six years old, and I had never heard the story. Not once, in thirty six years of Sunday dinners. Mamaw Nell had a way of changing the subject when anyone mentioned the mines. She would fuss about the cornbread. I looked across the aisle at Aunt Carol. Her hand was pressed flat against her chest, and her mouth was open, as if she had forgotten how to close it. All week she had said it was a small funeral for a small life. Now she looked as though the walls had fallen outward, and the sky was in the room.
Ray raised the headset. “There are one hundred and thirty one men alive today who would not be, if a switchboard had gone quiet that night. I know some of them are in this room.” A murmur went through the miners in the back. Hands rose. One, two, ten. Men with scarred faces and cracked hands, in the plaid flannel of the coalfields, standing quietly in the pews, one after another, until there were thirty. “I have carried this for thirty five years,” Ray said. “The mine rescue association voted last week to name its new training center for Nell. And we have a gift for the family.”
He opened a leather folder. “The company, which has changed hands more times than I can count, has agreed to pay the full pension that Nell was denied when they closed the switchboard in 1996. Back pay, with interest. Eighty one thousand dollars.” There was a gasp. “It goes to her daughters. It goes to Carol.” My aunt rose from the pew. She was shaking. She walked down the aisle on stiff legs, took the headset gently from his hands, and held it against her cheek, the cord trailing, the way you hold a child that has been lost and found.
“Mama,” she whispered, “I told Ashley you only answered the phone.” She began to weep. “I was so ashamed that my mother sat in a little room with earphones, and I never once asked what she was listening to. You were listening to the whole mountain.” Ray Dillard put his huge hand on her shoulder, and the two of them stood there together at the head of the casket for a long minute. Then the miners began to sing. It was an old hymn, one that Mamaw Nell used to hum while she hung the wash, and I had not known that it was sung in the mines.
We buried her on the ridge above Bluefield, in a plot beside my grandfather, under a sky the color of pewter. Every miner in the room carried the casket, taking turns, eight at a time, passing her hand to hand up the steep slope. At the grave, Ray placed the headset on the lid, and then, after a long moment, he took it back. He wound the cord around his hand. He said, I think she would want it kept ringing. Carol nodded. She said, Give it to the girl.
So now the headset hangs in the front window of the training center, in a glass case, beside a very old switchboard donated by a museum. At the end of every rescue drill, the young trainees line up and one by one put the earphones to their ears and speak into the little microphone. They say the same four words. Nell, I am right here. I have stood at the back of that room and heard it a hundred times. And every time, I could swear the line hums, very softly, as if a woman in a cardigan were still listening.
