How could I trust my father less than you
Believe yours? Or conversely, how could I
Demand that you should charge your ancestors
With lies to avoid contradicting mine?
—G. E. Lessing, Nathan der Weise

STAN WORTHSON was thinking of his wife again. She’d been dead for ten years, but Martha’s face was always there. It was her scent that was with him. A warmth in the air.

He opened his eyes slowly, and was not surprised when he saw that slow grin of hers. He wondered what she made of him now. He’d never been much to look at, but now his hair was mostly gone, his skin blotchy and wrinkled. She understood. She’d gone on ahead. She’d gone when her hair was still there, when her color was still good.

It came to him that if someone talked to her, God would keep her here. So he opened his mouth, to ask Martha to stay. But the words slurred, and she disappeared. The hot tears sprang to his eyes. God was too tricky for him, he didn’t let people tell his secrets.

“Pop, I’m here. Is everything all right?”

Stan looked to his right and was surprised to see his son sitting in the place that Martha had been, moments before. It was as if she’d brought him there, just then, to hear him say what he had to say. As if she knew she had to get his attention first.

“Matty,” he gasped. “I gotta talk to you.”

“Sure, Pop, just take it easy. Do you want a glass of water? Something to help you calm down—I can get the nurse in here for you. Is everything all right?”

Stan nodded wordlessly. Matt settled into his chair again, watching his face anxiously. Stan thought of words he should say. It was hard, after so many years.

“I have something to tell you too,” said his son. “Something important. That miner you recognized on that poster—the man named Curtis Siwood—we found him dead in the lake. We positively identified his body. So I thought I’d let you know. God rest his soul.”

So this is where Martha wanted him to start the story. With Curtis. He would have started elsewhere, but when you’re telling the truth, it all runs together. You can’t pick and choose, separating the bits you don’t like from the bits you do, the silver from the dross.

“Christ be with him.” Stan raised his fingers, making an awkward sign of the cross in the air. It was hard to talk, but not as hard as he’d expected. “Curtis was a good man.”

“You really know everyone around the Valley, Pop. So I got a question for you. You know anyone in Wallace named Leonard—or Leo? You know anyone by that name?”

Stan squeezed his eyes shut again. He remembered the blur of a face handing him a drink, the blue fug of cigarette smoke, the click of pool balls, the neon-lit glow of a bar. “Bar,” he finally said. “Albi’s Bar and Grill. That’s him.”

Comprehension dawned across his son’s face. “Oh, I’d forgotten that. Albi’s real name is Leonard, isn’t it? Bartender at Albi’s—Jesus Christ, I’ve known him for years.”

“Yup,” said Stan. “So have I.” Again, he saw the hardened face that had seen everything, and the solicitous tenderness in the expression every night as Leonard handed another one over the bar to his regular drunks. For a long, long time that was his son.

But Matty was talking more. He’d missed half of it. “So this guy, Curtis, you worked with him at the Sunshine, right? What was he like?”

There was a twinge in Stan’s chest at that old name. Sunshine. But he could answer this one too. “Sure, sure,” he said evenly. “Young guy, sharp little Herrick brownnoser, that was Curtis in the mines. Always suckin’ up to the big boss.” It was an old habit, avoiding his own part in it. And if Curtis had lived, he would have told this story himself, and he would have told it different.

But Curtis wasn’t around now. No one knew how it had been. No one except him.

His son spoke confidently, as if he had any idea. “I know how it worked back then. The bosses—Old Man Herrick and his friends—they owned the Sunshine, the Bunker Hill, the rest of them. And they hated each other—constant competition.”

Stan gave a brief little nod. So far, so good. His son continued. “I’ve read that it was vicious—the competition, trying to outdo one another, recruit the best guys. Undermine the union. A whole lot of infighting, betrayals, backstabbings. What did you do?”

Stan hesitated, and then he avoided the whole question. “Well, Curtis . . . and his friend . . . got paid under the table by the Bunker Hill. Even while he was supposed to be working a regular mine shift at the Sunshine. Of course, often enough Herrick was doing things I didn’t approve of—but I couldn’t open up Curtis’s business without letting people know about the sabotage he did at the Sunshine, which actually helped the union.”

“And you cared about the union?”

Stan nodded slowly. How much could he keep back? “Curtis was real up-and-comer for the big boss—made things happen. Usually bad things.” Stan shook his head from side to side. “I hated that bastard. Still do, I guess. He caused no end of grief to us, day after day, week after week, and I guess he’s still taking the piss out of us today, huh?”

“Well, he’s caused no end of problems in the Silver Valley recently.” Matt sighed, his face seemed drawn and pained. Something had happened to him. But what?

Stan knew now how he could make Curtis pay for this, after all the years. He could make him pay for all of it. Just change the story around. “So, one afternoon, Curtis tells me that we’re supposed to take a bunch of files deep into the Sunshine. It’s another of his little shady jobs from Old Man Herrick, he tells me, but of course I never am supposed to know about these jobs. Since I’m his partner on shift though, I get roped into helping him out from time to time—whenever he thinks it’s something I’ll stoop to, something that I won’t consider reprehensible. You know how I feel . . .”

“Right.” His son nodded. No question about it, for him. “You wouldn’t do anything wrong.”

Stan nodded his head solemnly too. If only he knew. “Right,” he repeats. “So Curtis tells me that they’re just papers. So I give him a hand. Carrying papers can’t be too bad, and we get to carry them in a mine train. Turns out we’re supposed to put all these boxes of files in a mined-out stope. They’re gonna get covered by two hundred feet of sand.”

“What kind of papers were these? What was in them?”

Stan shook his head slowly. Could he play dumb convincingly any more? He’d bought a moment of silence, and then he tried, “Well, I snuck a look while Curtis was taking a leak. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Lists of numbers and chemical readings—you know, typical crap from mine engineers, all gobbledy-gook to a guy like me.”

Then he moved forward quickly, before more questions could arise. “The only problem was that we screwed up. I don’t know who actually picked the stope that we were putting them in—it was near the old Number Five mainshaft, which was hardly touched any more. Heck, the air was turning bad in there, you could taste it. So we figured we were in the right stope, and we dumped all the papers down, and then we filled it all with sand, and into the tunnel too. We were done, the papers were gone.”

“So what was the problem? I’ve been near some of those old shafts—they haven’t been touched in decades. I think they’re filling with water now.”

“Right, it would have been fine—only I helped him put ’em in the wrong shaft. Turned out that particular shaft had a bunch more high-grade ore in it. The ventilation hole had been closed that week, that’s why it smelled stale, but it was the next tunnel over that was due to be plugged up with sand. Anyway, Curtis was there with . . . . with some other guy he uses for dirty work. Not me. Anyway, it’s a few days later, I guess Curtis is walking by the Number Five shaft, and he and his friend sees that there’s hoses going down the hall to that stope, there’s equipment and lights in there.

“And down there, at the stope we thought was safe to fill up, is a guy named Larry Clark. Good hoistman, from time to time. It’s a lunch break, and all the guys are out of the tunnel, except for Larry and another guy. These guys are sitting down there alone with their muck slusher, working like eager beavers, digging out all the stuff we’d put in there.

“I got upset—then Curtis, I mean, he got upset—and shit, what happened then, I just . . .” Stan blinked his eyes, they were full of water.

“What?” said his son. Stan shifted gears. Pull it together. Back to something safe.

“See, turns out the reason those papers are deep in the Sunshine Mine is that Herrick needs to get them off-site. There’s a group of federal inspectors coming through—and Herrick must have thought these documents were too hot to remain over at the Bunker Hill.”

“Pretty damn sensitive documents. So why didn’t he just destroy them outright?”

“I dunno—this was before those newfangled paper shredders, of course, so maybe it’s just that it would have been too obvious that he was destroying documents before the inspectors arrived. There was file box after file box—a whole man-train full of them, I swear.”

“We checked in on the stope later in the day, to make sure they hadn’t been found—but of course they had been. I mean there were reams of files, boxes and boxes of documents.” Stan lifted his arm—but there was a needle tying it down, so he used the other arm, wiped it across his sweating face. “What happened next, I wish I didn’t even know . . .”

But he kept talking, the memories flooding out of him. Stan had made his choice. He would follow the vein of ore wherever it led, as close to the truth as he dared go.

Stan’s headlamp spotlighted Larry Clark and Karl Avery in their dust-covered clothes, stacks of white office paper clutched in their grubby hands. Larry looked up at them as they came around the corner: “I got all the high-grade stuff out of that stope—don’t know who filled it with sand. Look what I found too—some technical stuff ...”

“Shit,” snapped Stan, pushing past Curtis. “What are those lousy guys doing?”

“What?” said Curtis. “What’s the big deal?”

Stan whirled around in the mineway, to face that dumb-ass Curtis, his face shadowed in the weird gleam of the worklights, the flash of the headlamp sliding over the dark stone. “Jesus, Curtis, you just don’t get it. What the devil do you think Herrick is going to say when our friends Karl and Larry here start wagging their tongues all over town? Larry might not understand ’em, but he knows someone hid a shitload of papers.”

At that moment, both of them shuffled forward in the darkness. “What’s this stuff, guys?” said Karl. “I can’t read, I can’t read at all, but Larry here said it looks like something from the Bunker Hill. Right, Larr? You know anything about this here stuff?”

“Yeah, I know that,” muttered Stan. “I put ’em in there.”

Larry looked back and forth between them, holding the pages in his fists. “Well, hell, then you know there’s stuff in here about the Bunker Hill that they wouldn’t want to get out. So it looks like someone finally got proof of your dirty work for Herrick, Stan.”

Larry grinned, a gap-toothed smile. “This proves you work for Herrick don’t it? I got you dead to rights. C’mon, Curtis, Karl, you gotta back me up on this one—he’s worked against the union for Herrick for years, I know it. Finally, we got the proof.”

Karl looked at them both, uncertain as to what was going to happen next.

“C’mon, are you with us, or with Stan?” said Larry. “If you don’t help me out, who cares how many years seniority you got, Curtis? Your hide will go up on the wall!”

Then Stan pulled back his arm, made a fist and hit him. He didn’t go down at first.

“What the hell are you doing?” Larry reached up, and felt where the blood was trickling off of his ear. “What—”

Instinctively, Larry swung back at Stan. It was too late for him though.

“Wait a minute, guys,” said Karl nervously. “Wait a minute—what are you—”

Stan lifted the heavy power drill off the floor, swinging the buzzy into both of the men. Karl collapsed backward against the wall. Larry’s helmet popped off his forehead on impact. Stan would always remember the ringing sound of it hitting the floor, something final in it, the lid being pulled off of a man.

Stan sighed, his voice breaking. He looked around at the white walls of the hospital room. Behind him, there was a soft beeping, like a mine train running underground, the constant blinking light. It was faster now though, as if it accelerated along with his heart. He looked at the concerned look on his son’s face, and he realized he couldn’t tell the rest. It would hurt him too much—it would wipe all the rest of the innocence out of him. And dammit, his son had already been through too much in life. Matt didn’t need this burden.

But he kept talking. “Only one man was injured, of course. No one else was there.”

“Right,” said his son. “So this guy Larry was the only witness to Curtis . . .”

Stan sighed again, his voice breaking. “Yeah, and Larry paid for it. I don’t know what the big deal was—it was all scientific stuff, so why did it matter to anyone? But like I was saying, he just blew a gasket. It was Curtis. He did it. He hits Larry, hits him with a buzzy, with one of them heavy drills, knocks him right back down the stope. It was all Curtis’s fault. And I feel guilty still about it because—”

“But you didn’t do this thing, Pop, you didn’t—”

“No, you’re right, I had nothing to do with hurting him. But I’ve felt responsible.”

Stan hadn’t said anything about the other man. Karl’s eyes were closed. He was down for the count. But the agonized look that Karl gave him as he fell had burned into Stan’s memory, something he could never forget. A questioning look, like he didn’t understand what was happening to him, he could never understand again. And Larry beside him, he staggered and fell as his neck shattered, broken by the weight of the buzzy.

“Jesus,” Curtis whispered in the darkness of the mineshaft. “Look at ’im lying there. I think Larry’s dead, Stan—what’d you do to him?”

Stan reached down, feeling at Karl’s throat. The man’s eyes were fluttering, a weak rasping breath still in his chest. “Karl here ain’t dead though. He’s banged up, but he’s still breathing. Get him back around the corner. Make sure he’s far enough away he won’t come back here, if and when he wakes up. I’ll take care of Larry.”

Curtis stood up to him then. “What the hell are you doing? I won’t stand for this.” That’s what he said. Stan didn’t even pay him a moment’s notice though. He took the unconscious Karl down the mineway himself. Then he came back and began to riffle through Larry’s pockets. The body was already losing heat, getting cold in his hands.

Finally, he found it. “Here’s Larry’s damn mine ID. We’ll need that.”

Then Stan took the body by the belt and pulled it back along the mineway. He could see the wet streak of blackness on the dusty rock, the leak coming out of Larry’s head.

Curtis said it again, yelling the words, as if he were trying to wake up from the nightmare: “What the hell are you doing?”

“Hand me the acetylene torch, wouldja?” said Stan calmly.

Mechanically, Curtis handed him the torch he was holding. Then, Stan lifted Larry’s limp body and shoved him forcefully into the open stope. They could both hear the man falling down the thirty-foot shaft, his body striking the sides of the crib as he fell.

Stan stood up and wiped his hands off, as if he’d just finished a job. “Okay,” he said. “Give me your wallet.”

Numbly, Curtis reached in his pocket, handed over a dirty canvas wallet.

Stan put it in his own pocket. “Listen to me now. You don’t exist anymore. You look enough like him, no one will ever know. And you never saw me here—after all, I’m not clocked in on any shift. See this ID?”

Curtis glanced over at the stope where Larry had fallen. It had all happened so quickly.

“Pay attention, Curtis!” Stan shouted. “See this ID, this one here in my hand? You’re gonna become Larry now. I’m gonna clock out as you today, and then I’ll throw your ID away—that way there’s no connecting us on the shift or this level to these two. Hell, no one can tell who we miners are anyway, underneath all the damn dirt an’ our rotten clothes. When we’re dirty from working, we look enough alike, both brown hair, lil’ bit of a beard. You understand? After we get outa here, you’re gonna disappear forever, and anyone asks you, I’ll say I never met you. We’ll go our separate ways.”

Curtis shook his head numbly, he didn’t understand, and now he seemed afraid.

“Dammit, pay attention, Curtis. Here’s the deal. Now you’re Larry. You came into the mine with me, you came out of the mine with me.”

Curtis gasped, as if he had just begun to grasp what had taken place. “What about—what about Karl?”

“I don’t know if he’ll ever come back and bug us. After all, his head is pretty banged up, especially after those rocks I piled on top of him fell down so naturally.”

“You piled what?”

“Now shut the hell up and listen!” said Stan. “You can’t ever forget this part of the story. Throw your ID down here, right above where he went down the shaft, and they’ll be sure to think you’re the dead guy. The guy who’s down there, he’s nobody now. He’s down a mineshaft now, and no one’s gonna ask about him, right?”

Curtis gasped, and stuttered. “What—what if someone finds Larry? What if Karl turns out all right, and he can tell them who did this? He knows who you are. Who we are.”

Stan grimaced, something between a grin and a frown. “Karl is not gonna be all right. I hit him already with the buzzy, you saw his damn head. And Larry here is never gonna be recognizable again. See?” Then Stan tossed the acetylene torch into the hole. There was a wet sick sound as it struck the body far below. He gathered the rest of the files off the floor of the manway and threw them into the depths of the stope. Stan could still see them, papers drifting down, white and gray in the headlamp’s glare.

Stan flipped a switch then, and the gas hissed suddenly in the line. “Got a light?”

Curtis shook his head. “What the hell!”

“Never mind,” said Stan. “You’re a pansy.” He ripped a blasting cap open and shook the contents into the stope. He held up the empty red cap in the light. How close they’d come to being caught. After all the jobs he’d pulled, this one was too damn close. Worth remembering. Fuckin’ nosy guy. He threw half of the cap to Curtis. A souvenir.

Then he tossed in a pack of wrapped dynamite, hooking it to a fuse line. “Might want to back up a little,” he said. “Fire in the fuckin’ hole.”

Then Curtis ran back up the mineway like the coward he was. Stan bent down and lit the end of the fuse. He stood there, watching the fuse sparking, popping, hissing and burning, all the way down into the stope where Larry was. Stood there like an idiot for a moment too long. There was a sick feeling in his gut. Something in him wanted to get blown to kingdom come.

His feet moved on their own then. Without thinking about it, he had dashed around the corner, back where Karl was lying half covered by rock. Just in time.

A rushing sound like an air blast filled the tunnel as the gas went up, but the explosion wasn’t immediate. He thought it was a dud. They both looked around the corner. So when the place blasted apart, it sent Curtis flying against the wall. Broke his nose, it turned out later. Stan waited, thinking. They were filling the stope next week, and no one would ever find it again, the stope filled with two tons of sand.

When he looked at Curtis again, he was holding his dripping nose. Stan could hear a continuing crackle as the papers went up in flames. The smell came to him a minute later. Something roasting. Larry. Or the man who would be known as Curtis Siwood on the brass monument of the Sunshine Mine Memorial.

Stan coughed at the memory, the smell still sticking in his throat. He choked in his hospital bed, and his son was beside him in an instant, handing him a glass of water. “Goddamn,” muttered Stan. “Goddamn, I thought I’d gotten over it. I thought . . .”

After Stan had caught his breath, he found his son was talking. “So what happened then? Was Larry Clark ever found? Were murder charges ever filed against Curtis?”

He looked up at his son, his eyes empty and dark. “What do you think?” he said.

Unexpectedly, Matty stood up. He reached slowly into his pocket and lifted out a blackened silver chain. On the end swung a familiar thing, the twisted red plastic end off a four-second blasting cap. Stan felt surprise sweep across him, his head was suddenly light.

Matt spoke as he held it up. “So I wonder why Curtis left this behind—left it with the body, for Valerie Herrick to find? What was in those damn papers that was so bad about Old Man Herrick?”

“I don’t know,” Stan muttered. “I just don’t know.”

“Hell, and you said you weren’t even down there when this happened! Who told you about all this?”

“I don’t know.” Had he really said he wasn’t even there? Fear shuddered over him. The web of lies tightened. Then a sudden flash of possibility came to Stan. “Karl. He was the one who told me. Ol’ Karl was down in that shaft with Curtis.”

“Jesus Christ,” said his son. “Karl Avery?”

Stan nodded sorrowfully. “Poor guy’s never been the same since . . . I guess Curtis took revenge on him later. Hit him with a mine drill, that’s what I think happened to Karl.”

Frantically, his son scribbled notes. “So Curtis did all of this. Where did the other half of the blasting cap go—what did Curtis do with it?”

Again, that fear nearly overwhelmed Stan’s thoughts, freezing him tight in his bed. He breathed deeply, and finally he could speak again. “I think it was split between the two guys who murdered Larry. I think Curtis gave it to the other guy who killed Larry too . . .”

Stan could not say anything else, there was a pain coming into his temples, draining his thoughts away. He turned and closed his eyes, the pain worse in side than it was outside. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep going. He sighed, trying to get it out.

“Then we went on a mine strike.” He held up two fingers, to keep going. “Two weeks we were out of the mine, before we got a chance to fill the stope back up with sand. After those weeks of the strike, we all came back, just in time for the Sunshine fire.”

The next part would be the hardest thing he’d ever done. He could already see in his son’s eyes that the fortress that had been his life was breaking apart. His heart was pounding, he could feel the pulse throb in his head. The rock that had been Stan was turning into sand. Goddamn, how could he wash the rest of it away? What would his son have left to stand on? His whole history was a lie, and they hadn’t even got to the worst yet.

How could he tell Matt about what they knew had happened when they checked on the Number Five shaft after those two weeks were over? The seeping smell, the smoldering miasma, something more profoundly wrong in the mineway than the sharp stink of the rotting, burned body that had come up from the abandoned stope when they got too close. They covered their faces, and filled the stope up with sand. But that smoky smell stayed in the shaft, regardless of the fresh sand tamped down into the hole, sand that eventually filled the entire mineway. He couldn’t say anything about that.

Stan shook his head, an inarticulate moan coming out.

“Don’t worry about it,” said his son. “I know what happened next—you helped a lot of men get out of the Sunshine Mine fire. You must have felt tremendous guilt over Larry’s death—but I think you made up for it, Pop. You saved a lot of lives that day, a lot of ’em.”

Matt gripped his shoulder with a strong hand, and Stan knew tears were falling down his cheeks. He could almost feel them carving furrows across him, cutting through the mine dust on his cheeks, he could see eyes gleaming at him under the headlamp’s glare. They were all around him now, every miner he’d known. Stan knew it was true—he got them all out. He saved them. Yet now it was too late to save himself.

“It’s all right, Pop,” said his son. He bowed his head, pulling Stan toward him. “It’s all right. I forgive you—and it wasn’t your fault, really. And you saved a lot of folks.”

Stan tried to pull away, his face streaming like a little kid’s. “I gotta tell you . . . ,” he stuttered. “I . . . I . . . gotta tell you . . .” He sighed. He’d let it wait a bit, settle in. The next day he’d have more strength. Maybe the overpowering need to tell the truth would go away, maybe he’d never have to talk about it. He sighed again, a sound from the depths of his being. That was unlikely. He wiped his face with the back of his trembling hand. “I’ll tell you the rest of it tomorrow, Matty, all right? I want someone to know. I’ll be stronger tomorrow.”

He could feel his son’s grip loosen, letting go of him, allowing him to take his time. But Stan didn’t know if he’d ever have the strength to take away his son’s faith in him. He could hope. He’d come to the brink of it. Tomorrow was another day.

“All right,” said Matt. “All right. Now you rest, okay? We’ll get the nurse in here, check you out. Sall and I will check in on you first thing in the morning. You rest now.”

When he opened his eyes, things were somehow askew. Martha’s sheets at home were always patterned faintly with small flowers, and the sheets in his room were a gentle cream color. But these sheets—they were bright white. There was a strong scent of antiseptic, something urgent in the scent. Faintly, on the edge of his hearing, there were beeping and humming machines. Hoses running into him, needles in his arms.

“Do you know what happened?” they asked him.

He turned his head, as if he could not hear them. But their words came through the fog anyway.

“It was another stroke,” they said. “A week ago. A larger one. Doctors don’t know for sure, but it might have hit your brain harder than your body.”

Finally, he tried to say something. He thought he asked for Martha.

They looked at each other, like frightened children keeping a secret. Stan twisted his mouth in frustration. Half of it worked. The other half didn’t seem to belong to him anymore.

His son, Matt, continued. “They think it could happen again, at any time. The next one could be fatal. So they’re going to keep you in the ICU here. Under observation.”

Stan tried to move his mouth another direction, but his throat didn’t move right either anymore, and he began to choke. People in white and blue rushed into the room. And by the time the nurse got his airway straightened out, he’d forgotten the question.

He was getting shot full of holes, each stroke a bullet. Incoming fire, just like when he fought the Japanese—but this time, he had no idea who was shooting at him. It sure as hell wasn’t a little Jap sniper in the trees. Maybe it was God, shooting little rips of heat and pain and death into him? Every time a stroke hit him, it took him longer to recover. Maybe God wanted to kill him slowly, for what he’d done.

Now that his son was here again, Stan knew what he had to say. The difficulty was in getting the words together. He had thought of how he would admit what he’d done for a long time. Decades. But now that he had the courage, the language wouldn’t form in his mouth. He began to cry from frustration and motioned for a pen. His arm didn’t move right either, the scribbles illegible. Yet there was still strength in his arms. It occurred to him that he might be able to reach the side table. He wished he hadn’t given up the notebook—that would have told the story for him with no effort at all. But that was gone, he’d given it away.

There was something else in the side table though. He’d put it in there, smashed flat at the bottom of his wallet, hidden for all these years. He could show Matty. Then his son would know. Beyond a doubt, he’d know.

Stan moved his arm again. An inch. He could get there. He would, even it if took him all night. Sall reached out and took his hand from off the cover. “Stan, are you worried about us? I want you to be at peace.” She looked at Matt, who just nodded.

Stan shook her hand off. He would get closer to the truth before the end, if he could just figure out how.