The enormity of the number had been hard to comprehend until that moment, as one small casket after another and another and another crept down the road. Gasps and soft cries seeped through the crowd. Mothers and grandmothers treaded in pairs, arms hooked to sustain the interminable walk.

Dozens of caskets had just gone by when, a few feet away, a pallbearer of mountainous build stumbled onto his knees. The rest of the carriers scrambled to keep the casket from hitting the ground. Immediately the man tried to stand but faltered, like a marionette gone limp from slackened strings. Or, in this case, a father who had lost all three of his children.

I’d seen him outside the assembly hall while Papa searched for a driver to the hospital. Bodies that had been laid out on the sidewalk were being carried across the street; the local theater had become a temporary morgue. But this man had pled for them to stop, to not take his son, his daughters. A swarm of onlookers had watched as he stroked his children’s faces, choking on his tears, broken.

Papa, now relinquishing my hold, moved to the casket. Wordlessly he grasped the abandoned handle and leveled the case. Another pallbearer gave a nod and the group continued on, leaving the grief-racked father to the supporting arms of his wife.

I might have stayed put for etiquette’s sake, but on that day, I refused to be left behind. Chin lowered, I trailed the group while avoiding the expanse of eyes. Among the tens of thousands of attendees were hundreds of iron miners who’d arrived by train. They had come as protectors should any trouble arise from pro-management brutes.

As I ambled through the center of it all, vulnerable again, I focused on my breaths, misty puffs of white; on my nose, chilled from frost; on my bruises, throbbing with every step. A backward glance affirmed that the scores of people lining the road had melded into a herd that tacked onto the procession.

In the cemetery awaited the rectangular communal graves. Two long ones for the Protestants, three slightly smaller for the Catholics. All had been dug by miners, a team of a hundred, I’d heard. They were strong men for certain, skilled at hammering through rock, but still. How many hours must that have taken? How many hands wrecked and backs strained to move that frozen dirt?

The ponderings slipped away as I followed Papa, still pallbearing, over to the Catholic trench. One by one, caskets were passed down into the earth to be aligned and neatly spaced. A choir in the background sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Somberness hovered like the thickest of smoke as the congregation amassed, the white ground eclipsed by the color of grief.

The day ahead wouldn’t be short.