Christmas came and went. A federal injunction halted mining at the Twelve. You didn’t speak of what would happen next. You knew Randazzo from the Knights, Kukla and Stusick from St. Casimir’s. You’d seen Quinn and Kelly playing cards at the Vets, the Yurkovich twins at the fire-hall dances, walking the Bakerton Circle. Kovacs’s wife ran a press iron at the dress factory. Angie’s uncle had buried yours. You knew them from the Legion, the ball field. There was no escaping all the ways you knew them. The ways they were just like you. Funerals were held all over town. Stoner and Bernardi drove their hearses back and forth, back and forth. Classes were canceled at the high school. Some people attended three masses in one day. The explosion had happened four days before Christmas, a fact the newspapers would emphasize. As though March or July would have been preferable, the timing a comfort: at least it didn’t happen at Christmas. For months afterward, mine investigators toured the Twelve.
