The first page carried the company seal and a line in bold print: The Mitchell Coleman Mine Safety and Rescue Training Center. Below it was an approval for three million dollars to build a facility in Beckley where every new miner in the state would learn underground rescue. The man looked around the bar. “Starting next year, nobody goes down in this county without learning what Mitch knew by instinct.”
Dale laughed nervously. “For a guy who crawls in the dirt?” The man turned to him, and the whole bar went quiet. “My name is Kevin Rhodes. I’m the superintendent of that mine now. In 2010, I was twenty-two years old, and I was one of the two he went back for.” He tapped the edge of the table. “The roof was coming down. Mitch pushed me through a gap I’d never have found and stayed behind so the other kid could go next. He was down there nine hours, in the dark, alone.”
Mitch was staring at his beer. He never talked about that day, not even to me. I only knew what the newspaper said, and the newspaper didn’t say he was the one who stayed. Kevin pulled one more sheet from the folder: a photo of two men in hard hats with their arms around a third, covered in black dust. Mitch, between them, was the only one not smiling.
“The other kid is my brother-in-law,” Kevin said. “He has three daughters now. They call your husband Uncle Mole, Dale. Because he digs people out.”
Dale didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. Around midnight, after most people had gone home, I saw him sitting at the bar next to Mitch, both of them looking at that photograph. He asked his brother how long nine hours felt in the dark. Mitch thought about it and said, “About as long as twenty-five years, if you’ve got someone to come home to.” Then he finally finished his beer, and Dale paid for it.
