By my own hand I loosed thunder upon the holler.

  At sunset I scraped lead from white oak and cast it anew.

  The mine yields sulfur.

  Beasts give saltpeter.

  My hearth offers charcoal.

  The liturgy of my craft.

  At twilight I returned home through the trees. My revolver was no longer warm against my hip by the time I stepped inside.

  At night I descended into hell. I hollowed its foundations by the swing of my pick. I too was hollowed with each strike. The price of my trade.

  That night I would find no rest. I sat awake at my desk stacked high with books. Too much of my wages went to the book man on his rare visits. Most of Arno lay in slumber.

  My crew worked the evening shift six nights a week, and the seventh was meant for rest.

  The mine never slept.

  “Thomas Hale, you musn't work on Sundays. You’re to remember the Lord’s day and keep it holy.” So my father had instructed before I left for my first night’s toil under the earth.

  How swiftly the Reverend Josiah Hale abandoned this commandment. Mere weeks after my first shift, the Sabbath bent to the dollar. The mine owner, Bartholomew Crowe, decreed a Sunday shift and religion itself adjusted. Just once at first. Now Sunday turned up next to my name whenever Crowe saw fit. Not that Sunday mornings were now optional for this preacher’s boy. I sat there every week, fighting the fatigue of Saturday night’s labors. Every Sunday morning I listened for the poor carpenter. All I heard was “the powers that be are ordained of God.”

  I felt my hand tighten on the grip of the jeweler’s eyeglass I’d obtained from a passing carpetbagger. I took a deep breath and set the delicate instrument down carefully, for it was dearly bought. I looked down at the weapon splayed before me on my desk. I withdrew the barrel from the neatly disassembled pieces atop the leather mat consecrated for this purpose.

  I took a deep breath and bent to the work at hand.

  Candlelight set the bluish sheen of the steel to dancing as I turned the barrel in my hands. I traced the sharp octagonal lines with my thumb. Holding the candle close now, mindful lest the tallow fall where no tool could reach, I saw that black fouling streaked across the seven lands and seven grooves.

  Seven horns and eyes. Seven bowls of wrath poured out. St. John’s revelation spilling into my nightly practice. I supposed I should wrap up and try to find sleep.

  I set the light aside and bound the stiff hickory twig I had whittled with a strip of clean rag. This was my nightly ritual. I could have done it in the blackest hole of the mine.

  The pit bell shattered the silence. I jolted, nearly marring my work. I focused on the bell’s cadence.

  Fast. Relentless. Ice sank into my gut. In a company town, everyone knew what that constant toll meant. All hands.

  I looked down at my Colt laid open upon the table. I could have swiftly made it whole, but I had never rushed this work before and I did not wish to break with that tradition. How I'd live to regret that moment.

  I dressed as fast as I could, then blew out my candle. I left my room black as a coal seam.

  I heard a stir from my parents’ bedroom as I tore down the hall and burst out into the crisp autumn night.

  The mine’s the only reason Arno’s got a name on the map, and when it called, the town woke like a kicked anthill. Doors banged. Boots scraped across porch planks. The bell kept ringing without pause.

  As I ran up the dirt road, I had the fleeting thought that the ridges hunched over closer than usual, slouched over town like they wanted to peer into the shaft and laugh.

  Around me, the whole town was pouring toward the mine, lanterns bobbing and squeaking, faces pale. Some prayed. Some swore.

  Up ahead, Crowe’s mine guards and Sheriff Morrow’s men were already gathered around the bell, handing out lanterns, picks, and shovels.

  I joined the press of bodies surging up the steep hill toward the mine.

  “Collapse,” someone said. “Bad one.”

  Behind me, I heard a woman’s voice, though I couldn’t catch sight of her in the crowd. I heard names, Jack, Seamus, others.

  I felt gravel roll over in my gut. I knew some of them. Several older miners, men who’d been coughing too long, one or two who’d spoken up one time too many.

  The wind came up behind me and whistled a high keen as it collided with the mouth of the shaft. Everyone paused their arguing and exclamations in response to those screaming rocks. We all finished the final trek up the hill in grim silence, like a swarm of h’aints flooding through the dark streets.

  I slowed to a brisk walk as many reached the pit together and began to bottleneck. Tools were distributed. I took my place in line. Before me, the mine yawned. The outline was changed, but impenetrable darkness hid the extent of the cave-in. I’d seen the mine near every day of my life. I'd lost count of all the slides ranging from minor to major emergency. This felt different.

  Once, in the woods, I came upon a rat snake swallowing a bird. The serpent’s mouth opened wider than seemed possible. I remember the shiver watching it work it’s meal down.

  I was just a few places back from the tool line now. I looked at the fella distributing the implements. He had clean hands and oily hair. I marked him as one of Crowe’s men. A strikebreaker. I glared at him as I accepted a shovel and pail and moved forward. The shaft exhaled heat, but no light. I drew close and smelled sulfur, and something else I didn’t have a name for. Those in front crept forward cautious, lanterns held high, eyes lifted for signs of a secondary cave-in. Stone shifted now and then, folks scarce dared to breathe.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Pastor Ruth Turner was already among the gathered townsfolk, organizing. A sturdy middle-aged freedwoman. She held a chalk and slate out in front of her. I’d always wanted to hear her preaching, see if I could hear the carpenter. Thing was, white folks just didn’t go to the A.M.E. church.

  She was too far off for me to overhear any of the discussion as she moved from group to group, but close enough for me to see her constant glances at the mouth of the mine. My eyes stung. Her husband Ike worked night crew with me. He must've picked up a shift tonight.

  I pressed forward to move the debris that was already forming a heap behind the foremost laborers. I paused when something in the trees on the other side of the road caught my eye.

  Lanterns flickered. The Monacans, Arno’s original residents, emerged from the woods in clusters, coming from their settlement on the west ridge. At their head was Mother Deborah. I’d never known what to make of her. She didn’t hurry. She looked past the scrambling crowd and fixed her gaze on the fallen stone, like she saw something the rest of us couldn’t. The hair on my arms stood on end. Her eyes were dark and I saw lantern flame flicker there. There was no warmth in that glow.

  I settled into shifting stone. My mind going blank as a beast of burden for a time.

  The next thing I knew, my father arrived on the scene. He entered processionally. Reverend Josiah Hale, Bible tucked under his arm like he’d been preparing a sermon in the middle of the night. He took in the crowd. Dust. Anxious folk crowding the entrance. The confined space simply couldn’t accommodate all of the willing laborers at once. He stepped in among a knot of tear-streaked church women and began to pray.

  “Our Father, who-”

  I clenched my jaw, turned away, and set to.

  We worked slow and careful. Some dug while others hauled stone away in wheelbarrows. Whenever a team shifted a larger boulder, everyone froze and listened. One wrong move could trigger the unstable slide into secondary catastrophe.

  “Mind that pivot son,” I heard a dusty old voice mutter from further in the shaft beyond my lantern light.

  “Don’t rush it,” another snapped from further down. “You want us buried too?”

  The foreman barked orders until his voice went hoarse. Sweat soaked through shirts. Hours passed as backs grew bent and palms blistered.

  Old Jeb’s hand cramped up. Deputy Herriott took his shovel without a word.

  Bartholomew Crowe was notably absent throughout the night.

  Time moved slow and fast all at once. Sometimes we heard muffled sounds from the other side of the slide. Maybe they were digging toward us. Maybe they were all dead and the stone was still settling. Dawn crept into the holler before it felt like we’d made much progress.

  Above, some miners had carved a spot just stable enough to work the top of the slide. Time was short. Bad air was always among the chief dangers. They'd risked their own necks to open a narrow breach. Just enough.

  Pale light seeped through, sickly and cold, nothing like a warm lantern glow. Heat rolled out, followed by that smell. Sulfur and something musty. The crowd fell silent. I’d never seen the like.

  Signs of life were clear, if strange. I heard shouting, the familiar sound of iron ringing against stone, then something wet and heavy. My hand shot to my hip, where my sidearm should be.

  I scrambled up before I knew what I was doing and peered through the gap. Others withdrew at the small tumble I’d recklessly begun.

  Shadows writhed in the tunnel. At first I could make no sense of what I saw. Too many limbs, shapes like fur and moving roots or snakes, reaching and withdrawing. I felt my throat swell closed.

  I saw a man dragged screaming deeper into the dark. My God. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t shout. My mind locked up as if in a vise. At that moment, I couldn’t have looked away.

  “What is it? What’s in there, Tom?” Caleb the foreman shouted up at me.

  I had no power to answer.

  The roar of a man rang out, descending into something bestial. The whole mine shuddered like a tree before the final blow of the axe. Much of the chaos inside was invisible to my limited vantage.

  Below and behind me, I was dimly aware of screams which broke loose as the would-be rescuers routed. Tools clanged to the ground. Buckets and barrows overturned as people scrambled out of the mouth on pure instinct.

  The slide shifted beneath me, and I lost my purchase. My heart thumped wildly. I fell hard, my breath knocked out of me. I instinctively covered my head with my arms as the worst befell. The slide shifted and began to tumble. A boulder struck with a sickening thud inches from me. The air was opaque with dust.

  I gasped, trying to force air into lungs that refused to expand. I was right at the feet of Mother Deborah, who’d drawn silently near as the others retreated. She and I were alone in the immediate dimness, most of the lanterns gone with the townsfolk. It was as the dark of a tomb.

  Mother Deborah stepped into the path of that pale light. She stepped past me and her hands slammed into the slide sinking to the wrist. The slide shifted again, not falling, not rising, pressing into the earth like a stone stamped into wet sand underfoot. I glimpsed her shadow, too large, inhumanly sharp against the wall in that strange light. It was many-spiked, misshapen, and gone as quickly as the light flickered.

  That pale light through the shaft grew brighter as several heavy thuds shuddered through the slide.

  My chest cinched tight. I sprang to my feet, born upon a rising flood. I felt vast power reach down and whisper that it was going to change me.

  By God I wanted it.

  I no longer wanted to be the laborer leaving a little more of himself in the mine every day. Heat bloomed in the pit of my stomach. Ungentle. A reforging.

  I looked over at Mother Deborah and thought of the shadow she had cast and how it had shaken me. I saw the kinship at once.

  Not Sunday school goodness, spotless and holy.

  This felt ancient and bloody. Sin.

  My father’s voice burst through my skull. My mother’s. Scripture clipped neat for correction and slapped down like belt blows.

  “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child-”

  “The heart is deceitful above all-”

  “-Desperately wicked-”

  “-Deny himself-”

  “The Rod-”

  “Obey.”

  I clenched my fists so hard my knuckle bones cracked.

  I did as I’d been bred to. I resisted. Inside me I’d stacked ice upon ice since childhood. That dam, laid brick upon icy brick, was now mighty.

  My throat burned raw as a scream fought to escape my clenched jaw.

  “Tom.” Mother Deborah’s voice, husky and low with concern. I didn’t heed her. Could not.

  The flood of power struck the dam of ice I’d built since boyhood. The power froze.

  Mother Deborah weighed me with her eyes. She turned her head and a corner of her mouth raised, chasing something off her face I couldn’t name.

  My chest swelled. The flood of power rose behind the barrier even as it continued to freeze. Every moment it threatened rupture. Every moment the dam continued to hold.

  The bell had taken up ringing again. Looking back out the mine shaft, I saw it looming behind the crowd, swinging to and fro.

  No one was pulling the rope.