Vigilant

I snapped my teeth at her hand. She didn’t flinch — Ly

She shrugged. The shrug made her lap bounce a bit beneath my head. She said, "I remember his beard shrinking, instead of growing…"

"That was my Ma’s fault."

"It’s still what I remember. I was fifteen. Deathly conscious of appearances." She grabbed my hand and gave it a quick kiss… as if something else had just crossed her mind, God knows what. "Let me think," she said. "I remember how he was so much shorter than you."

"Everyone was shorter than me."

"True." Ly

Took me a while to realize she really meant it.

"What’s the last thing you remember about Dads?" The question had just popped into my head.

"The last thing?" Ly

I sat up right sharp. "What were you doing at the mine?"

"We’d been shopping together when somebody beeped Sharr. Said Mother Crosbie had been in an accident, hurt her leg. So we caught a ride up to the mine; Sharr wanted to see that her mother was all right, and I went for moral support." She eased me back onto her lap. "Don’t wrinkle your brow, dear one — you liked Sharr too, once upon a time. Before you decided to blame her for everything."

I started to protest, then stopped. The blasted link-seed wouldn’t let me lie to myself. I hated Sharr; I had no reason to hate Sharr; I blamed her for things she didn’t do. "Go on," I told Ly

"We got to the mine infirmary, and your father was already there, looking at Mother Crosbie’s ankle. Saying it was only sprained, not broken. He put it into a foam-cast just to keep it safe for a few days, then gave her a talk about staying off the leg, making sure she had good circulation to the toes, blah, blah, blah."

"This was in the infirmary?" I asked.

"Where else?"

The infirmary was a single-room dome clustered in with Rustico’s other outbuildings, all above ground. "How did Dads end up in the mine when the cave-in happened?"

"You don’t know?" Ly

"Which he gave to my mother. Who went into shrieking hysterics and tried to scratch my face to ribbons." I closed my eyes, remembering. "She screamed it was all my fault for leading a life of sin. God’s revenge or something like that… not that she spent much effort believing in God, but she devoutly believed I was utter dirt."

"You believed it too," Ly

Not a direction I wanted the conversation to go. "The point is," I said, "I never heard the exact details of Dads’s death."

"You actively avoided finding out. Because you knew it would be more fun having Freudian episodes thirty years later."

"Twenty-seven years. I could tell you the number of days, but that would be showing off."

Ly

"Yes, Mom-Ly

"Then here’s what I know… and I was on the spot through the whole thing. Not underground, of course, but I was plunk there in the infirmary when they started bringing up survivors. I heard all the details…"

Ly

Dads was talking Mother Crosbie through the care and maintenance of sprains, when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence. "Damn!" he said. "They’ve hit a…"

("Hit what?" I asked. "And who’s they?"

"He must have meant the miners," Ly

"But how did Dads know?"

Shrug.)

The next thing Ly

Ly

Mother Crosbie shouted, "Damn it!" and tried to hobble out of the infirmary — scrambling to help whoever’d got trapped down the mine. Sharr made it to the door first and barred the way: "No, no, too dangerous"… which was just a scared daughter talking, because Sharr didn’t know bugger-all about what’d happened, any more than anyone else did at that point.

Mother and daughter squabbled for a bit, Sharr in panic, her mother going on about how other miners might need her; then the company nurse barreled into the room and said everyone was deputized to help him get ready to receive wounded. Sharr’s mother let herself be persuaded she’d be more help in the infirmary than limping underground, slowing down the rescue teams. They all began to set up cots, break out medical supplies, that sort of thing… as if they were doing bed duty at the Circus again.

When everything was ready, they waited.

The first survivors arrived half an hour later. "Like a bomb going off," one said: a tu

"Did you see Dr. Smallwood?" Ly

A gashed-up miner told her, "Smallwood was down there before anyone else. Checking us over. Making sure we were safe to move."

The ground shook again. Precious lightly. A tiny settling in the earth, nothing more. Down in the mine the rescuers backed off fast, pulling well up the tu

Clearing away that rock took at most ten minutes. They found the man Dads had been working on, out cold but still alive. They also found my father: dead as haddock, though there wasn’t a mark on him. The official diagnosis two days later said his heart failed from stress… all keyed-up, and when the roof came down, the jolt of fear must have been too much for him. Still, the miners told everyone he’d died in the cave-in. Call it tribute to a man who’d been right there with them, doing whatever he could.

One last thing the rescue team found when they broke through the baby cave-in: all the missing miners. The ones who’d been on the other side of the big cave-in, trapped behind to

"Somehow they’d passed…" I sat bolt up again.

"Faye," Ly