Free Clay Hand by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

his suitcase down and took off his overcoat. It was a cosy hodgepodge of a living room—oak furniture, leather-seated with hand embroidered pillows flung about, lace curtains, a pendulum clock. A large bay window was piled high with ferns, African violets, delphinium, and plants he had no notion the names of, a jungle of hanging, creeping vines and stalwart blades.
    “Whatever’s bad in them, there’s a bit of kindness in all gardeners,” she said. “You’ll find that about me.”
    He smiled and moved to the stove, its glass door glowing. She was following his eyes to take in every item they rested on. He looked up then to a picture that hung over the sofa. This was the instant in his observation she had been waiting for.
    “There’s not been a man like that one walk the earth since he left it,” she said, gesturing with her cane. The mild-faced O’Grady looked down upon them from the faded picture, a little uneasy about the eyes. It might have been the first picture he ever posed for. Or the uneasiness might have come from the tightness of his high celluloid collar.
    “A fine looking man,” Phil said.
    “You’re wondering how an old hag like me could ever engage a man like that.”
    Indeed he had been wondering the other way about. O’Grady hung there without a line of worry in his placid face. Phil turned and met the dimming eyes of O’Grady’s wife—fifty years later. “I imagine you were a very beautiful girl,” he said, meaning it.
    “You’ve a fine imagination then,” she said. “Sit down there a minute. She’ll put their supper up to them.”
    She lowered herself into a rocker. Instinct told him not to attempt to help her. The little peh of pain escaped her. Then she smiled, showing good teeth for an old woman. “Tim was killed in the great cave-in in nineteen-one, and us married three weeks. There was seventy-one men lost that time. The farmers brought their wagons from all around, and you could hear the hammers on the coffins all night long.”
    These were the stories told in Winston, Phil thought. They were sung out by the firesides like sad songs, or told like the beads of a rosary, over and over again.
    “We laid them out ourselves in them days. And if you could have heard the sermon Father Duffy preached, God rest his soul! He was a fine man, and not like the one we have now who wouldn’t bend over to brush a fly from a baby’s face… I can still hear Father Duffy that morning.” Her own voice rose, but the harshness was gone out of it, and the sound was like keening:
    “‘Their faces are blackened and their eyes streaming red tears, but their souls are white as the morning…and at last they go marching, hand in hand. Would God they walked that way on earth…’”
    She rocked to and fro, an old childless woman, approaching childhood herself again.
    “There’s a long and bloody history to Number Three,” she continued more naturally. “They say there’s near the size of the streets of New York down there, and some of them not traveled for fifty years.”
    “And there’s trouble there again,” Phil said.
    “Trouble, and maybe no trouble at all. Kevin Laughlin, the poor soul. We all knew he was a bit daft, but nobody had the notion where he’d go wandering through the mine. It was the safety men going through found him. He was away off in a part hasn’t been worked for years.”
    “Was he a miner?”
    “Once he was, and he knew the diggings from a long time back. They say he went in an entry hadn’t been used for years, and there’s some say he went in thinking to die. The things you can remember at my age. I remember when he was married, the girl just coming off the boat. They were kids, the both of them, and they had one of their own in no time at all, and before that one was crawling, another was on the way. Well, the baby took terrible sick one day, and the wife went down to look for Kevin. The foreman wouldn’t send down for him, for his shift was due up in an