The Tally at Nantglas

Idris Vaughan is eighty-nine years old, writing from an armchair in nineteen eighty-two, and he tells you plainly that he is the last man left alive who went down Nantglas Colliery in the November of nineteen-oh-nine — and that he has decided, with his own death close enough to smell, to finally tell it the way it happened rather than the way he has let people believe it for seventy-three years. He explains the lamp-token board the way he'd explain anything ordinary: every collier takes a numbered brass check off a peg before he goes down and hangs it back up when he comes up, so the colliery always knows, to the man, who is under the ground at any hour. He mentions, almost fondly, a lifelong habit of patting his coat pocket and counting under his breath — at chapel, at his own wedding, holding his grandchildren at the seaside — and lets you assume, for now, that it's nothing more than a superstitious old man's tic.

The week Idris is finally ready to tell you about starts ordinary and stays ordinary right up until it doesn't. On the Monday the board and the ledger agree, same as always. On the Tuesday they're one man short at evening count, and it resolves itself inside the hour — a haulier asleep in the stables, having gone up early and forgotten to hand in his check, laughed about by everyone before supper. On the Wednesday it happens again, differently: a check turns up hung back on its peg with no man attached to it at all, no hand seen to put it there, and an apprentice takes the blame and the overman's open palm for it though he swears on his own mother he never touched it. An old collier says something that gets a laugh at the time and none afterward — that the seam keeps its own count before the office ever does, and takes what it's owed whether the book agrees or not.

Idris is nineteen that week, more interested in a girl named Non Ellis Pughe than in a mismatched ledger, and he tells you as much — an ordinary, forward-looking boy, not yet anyone in particular. His butty, a boy named Emrys Pryce three years his junior, is proud that his own check is numbered nineteen, the same number as his mother's chapel pew, and jokes that it's lucky on account of it. On the Thursday morning, before a single man has gone down, the board and the ledger disagree by one again — and this time there is no sleepy haulier, no apprentice to blame, no explanation Dai Rhys Howell can find no matter how many times he counts the pegs in front of the queued, lamplit men. He sends the shift down anyway, because a colliery that stops for arithmetic doesn't pay its rent.