I met my sister Ann,

I broke her neck and drank her blood

And let her body stand.

“That hain’t the way I heered it,” I said.

As I went through the guttery-gap

I met my Uncle Davy,

I cracked his skull and drank his blood

And left his body aisy.

Fletch was anxious for his riddle, fearing we would know the answer.

First green and then yaller,

All guts and no tallow.

Euly and I smiled, knowing what this thing was, but we guessed wild.

“A parrot-bird?”

“A corncob?”

“Johnny-humpback?”

“Now, no,” Fletch said.

Fletch got down from the table and crawled about, blowing the whistle Uncle Samp had made for him. “I’m an engine pulling sixteen coal gons,” he said. While Mother washed the dishes we played crackaloo, pitching beans at a floor seam. Mother lifted her hands out of the dishpan. They hung like dripping leaves. Her face became grave, her eyes dulled. “Pity it can’t be like this every night of the world,” she said. “Living apart, having our own.”

Father became thoughtful, cracking his knuckles one by one. “I wonder what sort o’ rusty Harl and Tibb are up to?” he said.

Mother wakened me in the black of the morning, standing over the bed with a lamp. I saw the fright in her eyes, and her trembling hands. The glass chimney shook inside its ring of brass thumbs. She told what had happened to Harl and Tibb—the little she knew, all not yet being known.

“Living or dead, there’s no telling,” Mother said. I jumped out of bed, and into my breeches. I jumped out thinking of Uncle Samp and the pennies. “Two eyes, two pennies,” he had said, and now both Harl and Tibb might be stretched cold, and there would be nothing to hold their eyelids down. I was good and scared.

Uncle Samp’s bed was empty, the covers thrown back from the trough his heavy body made in the mattress. He and Father had hurried to the mine when the word first came. Harl and Tibb’s bed hadn’t been slept in, and I thought how they had been buried all these hours, deep underside the earth, with nobody knowing whether they still drew breath. A chill fiercer than the cold of the room crept under my shirt.

Drawing on my red coat, I went barefoot into the yard. The road was alive with folk shaken out of Sunday morning’s sleep, trudging over frosty ruts toward the mines. Daylight grew on the ridge. A smoky coldness hung in the camp. Men had their hands almost to elbows in breeches pockets; women clasped fingers into balls against their breasts. Voices rang in the air, arguing. “Hit’s like it was with Floyd Collins. Recollect? Buried in that sandstone cave, yonder in blue-grass country.” “What, now, would them fellers be doing in a mine, middle o’ the night, I ask you that?” “Them Logans hain’t caught in that tunnel. I figger hit’s jist a general fall, the ground a-settling down of its own accord.”