My uncle did not fall down. I want that understood, because in my head I have seen it a hundred times, and in my head he falls. He stood very still instead, with one hand on the picnic table and one on the arm of a young woman named Celeste, who was married to his oldest son and who had just learned that her own grandfather, Walter Stallard, the owner of the Big Laurel mine, had paid for a lie that killed twenty six men. She took her hand out of his. She did it gently, like putting down something that might break.
Mr. Caudill did not raise his voice. He said he had waited fifty years for a man to say it out loud, and that he would wait a few more minutes. The pavilion was so quiet I could hear the creek beyond the trees. Then Clayton sat down heavily on the bench, and I saw my uncle, who had never in his life said he was sorry for anything, put his face in his hands and begin to shake. “I did not know,” he said. “God help me, Hiram, I did not know what it was for.”
He told it slowly. In December of 1971 a man from the company office had given him two hundred dollars and a script, and told him to call the inspectors and say the dust had been cleaned up. He was twenty seven years old with a new baby. He believed it was a paperwork matter. Three weeks later the mountain shook, and when they brought the men out he stood in the crowd at the portal and understood what he had done, and he said nothing then, and nothing for fifty years.
The truth does not expire, and a man who tells it late has still done a better thing than the man who never does.
“I took the pension,” Clayton said. “I took the brick house. I told myself it was the reward for being a good supervisor. And every time I saw you, Hiram, I made a joke about somebody else, because I could not stand to be looked at.” He turned toward my son. “That was why I went after you, Jason. You are the best man in this family, and I could not bear to have one near me.” Nobody laughed. Even the children had stopped chewing.
Jason did something I have thought about every day since. He walked around the table, took the paper plate from the ground, and set it in the trash. Then he sat on the bench beside his uncle and said, in his quiet underground voice, “Uncle Clayton, you have to tell the families.” Clayton nodded. “All of them,” Jason said. “Not a lawyer. You.” And my seventy eight year old uncle, who had never done an honest thing he was not paid for, said that he would.
The Sunday after the reunion, in the basement of the Methodist church in Hyden, Clayton stood in front of sixty people, the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the men lost in Big Laurel No. 4. Mr. Caudill sat in the front row with his cane. Clayton read the telephone log aloud, and then a letter he had written, and he did not skip a single word. Some of them wept, and some stayed silent, and an old woman in the back stood up and left. But nobody threw anything, and nobody shouted.
A reporter from the Lexington paper heard about it, and the story ran on a Sunday. The federal government has no law that reaches back that far, and the Stallard family, who still owned timber in three counties, said nothing. But the names of the twenty six men were printed in the paper, one by one, in a box on the front page. Clayton had paid for it with his own money, along with the plot behind the church where the memorial now stands, a plain stone with every name cut into it.
He gave away the brick house. It was sold, and the money went into a fund for the grandchildren of the miners, for school and for trade certificates. He moved into a small apartment above the hardware store, and every Saturday for the rest of his life he drove to the memorial and swept the leaves off the stone. His sons stopped speaking to him for a year. Then they began coming along, carrying their own brooms, and Celeste came too, and stood a long time reading the names.
Mr. Caudill died that winter at ninety two, in his sleep, with a Bible on the nightstand and the old telephone log beside it. At his funeral Clayton was a pallbearer, which no one would have believed. Afterward he found me in the line for sweet tea and said, “Donna, I have not earned the right, but I would like to apologize to your boy.” I told him he had done it already, on the bench, and that my son had heard every word.
Jason still manages the night shift at the dollar store on Route 15. Last month the fund Clayton started offered him a scholarship to finish a degree in safety engineering, the thing his granddaddy always wished somebody in the family would do. He is taking classes two nights a week. At the reunion this August, under the banner that says Fletcher Family, a seventy nine year old man in a clean white shirt stood on a bench and said, “I want to talk about my nephew,” and this time everybody listened.
