Canary in the Coal Mine

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “How do you mean?” said Preach.

  “The mine’s the only place to go in this town, and that’s if we’re lucky.” Jamie stared outside, through his bedroom window, and started walking toward it. The canaries and Clarence, who were sitting on the ledge again, scattered, just in time.

  BANG!

  Jamie threw open the window, as wide as it would go.

  Then he unlatched the door of the cage. Bitty could hear Aunt Lou squawking and Mrs. Campbell’s voice saying, “Jamie? You sure, now?”

  “I am,” Jamie said. “Go,” he told the birds.

  One by one, the canaries of the Big House lit out of the cage, then out of the window, joining Bitty and his friends in the open air.

  “Mission accomplished!” Bitty wanted to yell, but he didn’t want to provoke Uncle Aubrey, who landed on Jamie’s roof and stayed there, sulking, while the rest of the birds flew in circles, as if the freedom had made them drunk. The humans followed them outside and watched as the birds wove patterns of color across the sky.

  Finally, the canaries followed Bitty to the cedar tree. Uncle Aubrey gave in and came with them, though he muttered the whole way. “Forced retirement. Displacement. It’s better than being fired, but not by much.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” wheezed Old Bird Crockett when they reached the tree. From a distance, they looked like lemons on the branches.

  “Florida might be nice,” Aunt Lou said. “Good for our joints, don’t you think? And your lungs, too, Crock. I would so love to see the ocean.”

  “They use canaries in England, too, you know,” Uncle Aubrey said. “Bet no one over there’s been replaced.”

  “I want to see the ocean,” Aunt Lou said. “I don’t want to fly over it.”

  “If they can take a train,” Uncle Aubrey said, glaring at Bitty, “then we can take a boat. This is our work we’re talking about here.”

  “We could go back to Charleston,” Bitty said. Clarence bobbed and nodded, but Uncle Aubrey fixed the pigeon with a cold, hard stare.

  Bitty was about to jump to Clarence’s defense—it looked as if the pigeon was the one who needed a bodyguard—when the tree trembled. For a split second after that, all of nature seemed to freeze. Then a sparrow came speeding through the coal camp. He shouted something to a squirrel, who shouted to the canaries as he ran past the cedar. Bitty scarcely needed to translate, but he did, just before the warning whistle blew: “It’s the mine. Something’s gone wrong at the mine.”

  Chapter 21

  “You can bet those gas detectors were responsible,” Uncle Aubrey said. “Using machines to do a bird’s job. Hmmph.”

  Bitty looked around, wildly, though there was nothing to see. If the new gas detectors were responsible, that meant he was responsible. He’d brought them here. He’d gotten the canaries out of the mine, but what had he done for the men? Plan E: help the miners, ergo the miners will help the birds. He seemed to have skipped the first part of that equation. He shuddered and said aloud what they all were thinking: “I hope Jamie’s pa is safe.”

  Jamie and his mother were still standing in the yard with Preach. They looked toward the mine as if the answers to their questions would be written in smoke above it. A siren wailed, and they took off at a run. Bitty followed them. When he looked back, he saw the whole flock, a swarm of color, right behind him with Clarence, gray and reliable, in the rear. The Campbells kept running with Preach until they reached a pile of timbers near the entrance of the mine. The birds landed on top of it. Above them, the tipple was still and silent. Men had already risen from the shaft, their faces black, their eyes bloodshot, their hats in their hands. From the houses the women came running, their own faces as white as the moon. Jamie’s mother clutched her apron strings as if they were holding her together.

  “Bo?” she yelled, and Bitty recognized Bo Collins, the mine’s foreman. Mr. Collins shook his head and kicked over a metal lunch pail. He walked to a square board where eleven silver disks—called checks—hung from nails. It looked like a child’s game, but Bitty knew what it meant: eleven men were still inside. Mr. Collins reached for one of the disks and handed it to Jamie’s ma. Twenty-seven, it said: Clayton Campbell’s number.

  Jamie’s mother squeezed the disk so tight, it must have made an imprint in her hand. “I’m sorry, Mary,” said the foreman. “I don’t have anything else to tell you yet.”

  “Darn Steve and those cigars,” one of the miners muttered.

  “Slow down, Vincenzo, he’s not stupid. He’s never lit one before. Let’s not go pointing fingers. Storm’s brewing. It could just as well have been lightning. Or a rockfall.”

  “It could have been a spark from one of those mechanized canary doohickeys,” said Rusty. The humans and canaries stood, together but apart, waiting for movement and answers.

  “Where’s the rescue team?” Jamie asked. His mother closed her eyes. Jamie stood next to her for a minute, then walked deliberately toward the mine. “I’m going to find them,” he said.

  “Jamie! You get back here this instant.”

  Mary Campbell’s voice was drowned out by a Ford crunching over the gravel road, honking as it came. Two ambulances pulled in behind it, and a truck full of rescue workers with a baying bloodhound behind that.

  “He’ll probably get all of the headlines,” Uncle Aubrey muttered. “Just watch.”

  Mrs. Campbell turned away to embrace Mrs. Albini, a neighbor, who stood taller because her husband was safe.

  Jamie kept walking.

  “He’s going,” Bitty whispered.

  “What?” Clarence said.

  “Jamie,” Bitty said. “He’s going into the mine.”

  “He’s nuts,” Chester said.

  “It’s still dangerous,” Alice said, understanding.

  “I’m going in,” Bitty said. “If there’s bad air in there, I can warn him. He can run.”

  “I’m going with you, Bitty,” Alice said. It didn’t bother him anymore that she hadn’t found a nickname for him. Bitty. That was who he was.

  “I’ll come, too,” Chester added. “It’ll be better if there are three of us. I think.”

  Clarence cocked his head toward Jamie’s mom. “I’ll stay with her,” he said. Uncle Aubrey looked at the pigeon. It was a warmer look than he’d given the bird earlier, but still full of suspicion.

  “Good,” Bitty said. He felt as if he should say something more, but he didn’t know what.

  “You don’t have to go, you know,” Clarence said.

  “Yes,” Bitty said. “I do.”

  “Well. If we’re going, we’d better—” Chester began.

  “Go now,” Bitty finished. They flew together to the entrance of the mine. Jamie had already hit the lever on the elevator, which started its descent. Bitty and his friends ducked inside before it disappeared completely into the bowels of the mountain. They lit on a railing, as if it were their old perch.

  It was strange, being in a cage again, even one as big as this. Bitty wondered if the others felt it, too, as Jamie turned on them with a light he had snagged from the coal yard.

  “You want your old jobs back?” he asked. “Is that it?”

  The elevator continued down the shaft. Finally, it hit bottom.

  “If you’re sure about this,” Jamie said, stepping out of the lift, “stick close.” The canaries took the lead, hovering just ahead of the boy. Down the main corridor they went. But there were so many turns and bends—the miners could be anywhere. They pressed on. The only sound was the dripping of water and the run-stop-stagger of Jamie’s feet. And then they heard it. Tink, tink, tink. A tapping sound, muffled, as if it were coming from deep within a wall. “That’s them,” Jamie said, running. Then he stopped. His light shone on a pile of coal, rock and timber that reached from the ground to the mine’s low roof. “The ceiling must have caved.”

  Jamie yelled: “Pa? Hello. Anyone? Can you hear me? Hello?”

  The tinking sound stopped for a minute, the
n started again, faster.

  “I can hear them!” Jamie yelled. “I found them! I can hear them!”

  In time, they heard the distant shouts of the rescue crew, and Jamie kept yelling until the crew reached them.

  “Son, what in the blazes are you doing here?” one of them asked. “You should be—”

  “I hear them,” Jamie said. “Listen.”

  They quieted. Tink. Tink.

  “We’ll have to dig for them,” another man said, a mask covering his face and giving him air. “But we can’t start now. You need to get out of here, son. Look: your birds.”

  Chester fell first. Bitty and Alice saw him drop to the ground like a dead leaf, his beak wide open. Alice opened her own beak to sound the alarm, but her lungs, too, filled with invisible, deadly gas. Bitty fell last. He kept his eyes open long enough to see the flame on Jamie’s lamp glow orange, then blue. Jamie reached for him. Then Bitty saw nothing but black.

  He awoke to find himself jiggling in Jamie’s arms, just outside the mine’s main entrance. A rescue worker was with them, holding the bloodhound by the leash.

  “How in the Sam Hill—?” shouted Bo Collins, the foreman.

  “Bad air,” Jamie said, panting. “They’re trapped. Rock fell, a lot of it, but they can’t start digging yet.”

  The rescue worker nodded and lifted his mask.

  “How long until you can get them?” Mr. Collins asked, but the man couldn’t say.

  Mr. Collins apparently forgot that Jamie shouldn’t have been in the mine in the first place. “How are they?” he asked. “Could you tell?”

  “They were tapping,” Jamie said. “They’re walled in. I don’t know how much air they’ve got. I don’t know if . . .”

  Mr. Collins put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “Just find your mother,” he said. “They were tapping, you said?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “Hold on to that, then. Those taps.”

  Jamie walked to the edge of the coal yard and placed the three canaries in a patch of weeds.

  Bitty still felt far away, as if it were all happening to someone else. Jamie’s mother came to them, looking half-asleep. Clarence waddled behind her, double-time.

  “You okay?” Clarence asked Bitty.

  “I think so.” Bitty’s voice echoed inside his head.

  “Are they?” Clarence asked.

  Jamie leaned over Chester and Alice, massaging their tiny chests.

  “Course we’re okay,” said Chester, though his voice was weak. “Just another day in paradise.”

  “Tough job you guys have here,” Clarence said.

  “You’re heroes,” Jamie whispered. “You know it?”

  The words seemed to clear Chester’s head. “Hear that?” he crowed loudly. “Heroes.”

  The word made Bitty itch. “No one’s made it out yet,” he said.

  “Jamie did,” Chester told him. They all turned their attention back to the mine.

  “How many lives?” Uncle Aubrey called. “How many lives did we save?”

  “We don’t know.” Bitty’s head was still throbbing. “We’re waiting.”

  “Excellent job, my boy,” Uncle Aubrey said, flying closer. “Good work. And you.” He turned to the pigeon, standing at attention at Mrs. Campbell’s feet, and cleared his throat. “Clarence,” he said, using the bird’s name for the first time. “Good work.”

  An hour passed. Two. Five. Women arrived carrying stew and pumpkin bread, but the food brought little comfort. Even the ambulance drivers, who stood away from the rest, only had coffee. The birds didn’t eat, either—not even Clarence.

  Mr. Finch arrived, along with Virgil Smith, who twisted a small piece of wire in shaky hands. “If it was my invention,” he said. “If it caused a spark, if there was some kind of malfunction . . .”

  “Then we’ll both be ruined,” Mr. Finch finished. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  Darkness fell and people prayed, their many voices merging into one.

  Mr. Finch walked among them, talking and listening as the miners spoke of weak support beams, thick coal dust, long hours and lousy ventilation. Mrs. Polly was there, the widow of the man who’d died with Boggs. She’d received no compensation and just a sliver of his last paycheck. The mine hadn’t even paid for his burial. She gave Mr. Finch an earful.

  “When this is over,” Mr. Finch said, “I’m going to see what we can do to improve this situation. I am.” He was speaking to the miners, but Bitty thought he was speaking to the canaries, too, even if he wasn’t using his bird whistle this time.

  More praying. Rescuers moved in and out. There was noise, but it was hard to tell what was happening. Every small truth turned into a wild rumor. Bitty doubted any sparrow would be capable of getting a reliable report, even Walter.

  Dawn brightened the landscape. The mood stayed dark as night. A few people slept on the ground, but most stood, their arms linked, their eyes closed.

  “Ay!”

  At last there was a shout.

  Then? A cheer as rescuers led a stumbling miner out of the shaft and into the coal yard.

  “Dear God,” Jamie’s mother said. Two more rescuers came out. They carried, between them, a stretcher, and Jamie’s tall father took up every inch of it. His face was black with dust. His body was covered with a blanket.

  “Is he dead?” Clarence asked.

  “No, look,” Bitty said. “His hand!”

  Mr. Campbell’s right hand dangled from the stretcher, free of the blanket. With his thumb and index finger, he formed a circle; the other fingers stood above it like rays of sunlight.

  “Okay,” Bitty said. “He’s saying he’s okay!”

  “Yes!” Clarence cried.

  Another stretcher came out, but the man upon it didn’t move. More stretchers followed.

  In the near distance, the church bells rang, celebration and sorrow clanging in harmony. When they stopped ringing, Bo Collins cleared his throat and wiped sweat from his forehead.

  “There’s five that didn’t make it,” he said.

  Uncle Aubrey counted; that meant they’d saved one, two—seven humans, counting Jamie. Even more if you counted the rescue crew. But five lives lost. No one made a sound as the foreman announced the names of the fallen men. Bitty knew all of them. One name he knew better than the others: Hurley, Steven J. The Gap-Toothed Man.

  Chapter 22

  The sky was dark the day of the funeral, filled with flat clouds that matched the gray stones in the human cemetery.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Uncle Aubrey as he flew toward a sturdy oak a good distance from the stones, “Florida’s starting to sound like a mighty fine idea.”

  But even on that sad day, and even though he kept claiming that his joints ached as bad as Aunt Lou’s, Bitty knew Uncle Aubrey was enjoying his freedom. Couldn’t he feel the wind in his wings? Couldn’t he see the honeysuckle, in knots and tangles along the railroad tracks? The world could be sad and scary, sure. But it could be thrilling, wondrous and beautiful. The world could be anything they wanted to make it. Bitty was on the verge of pointing this out when he heard his uncle say softly (for it wasn’t like him to utter such things out loud): “Even in sorrow: joy.”

  And so the canaries landed, wrapped in their own private thoughts, on a solid branch of the oak. Bitty thought about Clarence, who’d left for Charleston amid tears and promises and a firm salute from Uncle Aubrey. He thought about the inventor and the politician, who’d just returned to town for the funeral, even though the accident report determined that a roof fall started it all, caused by a weak support beam. He thought about all the funerals he had never been able to attend. And he thought about Mr. Hurley.

  The Campbells passed by the tree on their way to the cemetery. Jamie looked up at them and waved. “Ducks on a pond,” he said.

  “No,” said his mother. “They look more like a row of paper dolls.”

  And what did the humans look like, from
where the canaries sat? Eck would have found just the right word for it. Bitty had a jumble of words as he watched the Campbells join the others by the open graves: sad, angry, respectful, proud.

  The men blew their noses. The women wept openly. Preach, by his father’s side, helped lead the readings. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The whole sky felt heavy.

  “If only . . .” Bitty started to say, “if only we’d been quicker,” but he never finished his sentence. Anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Six miners had lived. Five had not. They would have to accept that and move on.

  “He was a good man, even if he did squeeze a little hard,” Alice said.

  The others nodded. Hadn’t Mr. Hurley been the first one at work every morning, risking his own life along with theirs? Hadn’t he saved Chester when the gas knocked him cold?

  “I’m sorry I made fun of the way he ran,” Chester said. “Only . . . only, he really did look like an elephant.”

  “He was a miner,” Uncle Aubrey said. “Like us.”

  The service ended. The mourners milled about, squeezing hands and clapping shoulders. The canaries bowed as the humans passed again under their tree.

  But Alice lifted her head.

  On the back of his neck, Bitty felt the sort of prickle that told him something was about to happen. Alice opened her mouth and sang—the way canaries used to sing, before the mines and the coal dust and the cages.

  Sing, little songbird, safe and sound.

  Fly, little songbird, glory bound.

  The song wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t slow, either. It was about the end of life, but it was about new beginnings, too. Bitty found that he knew all the words and joined in. The sweetness of his own voice surprised him. All traces of frogginess and coal dust were gone. Uncle Aubrey joined them with his deep, rich bass, and then every bird in the tree was singing.

  Feathers float on yonder wind.

  Pain and sorrow now rescind.

  Night has fallen, black as coal.