The Gray Valve

The rain started on a Thursday and didn't stop for eleven days. It fell on the hills above Hollow Creek like a judgment, steady and unfeeling, washing away the topsoil and filling the creek to a point where it was no longer a creek but a river wearing a creek's name. Jack Morrow knew what that meant. He had seen it before, back in '51, when he was still a sergeant in the Army Engineers and the hills above the Paekryong tunnel had collapsed under similar rain. Seventeen men. No bodies ever recovered.

He lived in Hollow Creek now, a town of eight hundred souls strung out along Route 19 between two mountains that blocked the sun for half the year. He worked odd jobs — fixing fences, clearing fallen trees, whatever someone would pay him for in cash. His hands were scarred from twenty years of mine work before the mines started closing, one by one, like eyes going shut. He spent his evenings at the bar, drinking whiskey that tasted like gasoline, listening to the other men talk about nothing.

Doc Whitaker called him at midnight on the fifth day of the rain. The phone rang in Jack's small house — one bedroom, a kitchen, a living room with a mattress on the floor because he didn't own a bed frame — and he let it ring four times before picking it up.

Morrow, he said.

You need to come down to the Number Seven shaft, Doc said. His voice was thin, reedy, shot through with the wheeze of black lung that would kill him before winter. The water's rising. The gas is moving.

Jack sat up in the dark. What gas?

The old workings up in the upper seam — they filled with methane when the mine flooded. If the water pushes it through the fault line into the lower tunnels, and those tunnels connect to the drainage system that feeds the town's wells — Jack, you understand me? Three thousand people drinking that water when it's got gas dissolved in it. They won't even know. They'll just stop breathing one morning.

When did this happen?

I just found out. The mine surveyor called me. He's scared, Jack. He's a bookkeeper, not an engineer. He needs you.

Jack hung up and stared at the wall. Rain ran in rivulets down the windowpane. He got dressed in silence.

The mine owner's office was a modest building on Main Street with a sign that read Hollow Creek Coal Company. Jack pushed through the door and found the owner, Mr. Calloway, sitting at his desk with a lamp burning low. Calloway was a small, precise man with thinning hair and a mustache that looked ironed flat. He looked up as Jack entered, and his expression closed like a safe.

Morrow. It's past midnight.

There's gas in the Number Seven shaft. If it gets into the water table, Hollow Creek stops being a town and starts being a graveyard.

Calloway picked up a pen and set it down. The shaft's been sealed since '42.

It wasn't sealed tight. The rain undermined the entrance. I saw it.

We'll send a crew in the morning.

There is no morning. The gas will reach the water table by dawn.

Calloway set the pen down with deliberate precision. Mr. Morrow, I appreciate your concern. But the Number Seven shaft is on our property, and we will handle it in our own time. You are a private citizen. I would suggest you return to bed.

Sheriff Hargrave appeared in the doorway. He was a big man with a big face and a big gun, and for twenty years he had been Calloway's shadow. You heard the man, Morrow. Go home.

Jack looked at Calloway. You're choosing between a sealed mine and three thousand people?

I'm choosing between a sealed mine that costs us sixty thousand dollars to reopen and three thousand people who will continue to breathe just fine because Doc Whitaker has been smoking too much of his own medicine for forty years. Now leave my office.

Jack left. Hargrave followed him out into the rain. You're making a mistake, Morrow. Calloway owns this town. Not me. him. You go against him, you're not just going against him. You're going against the sheriff, the bank, the mill, and every man who gets his paycheck from Calloway's hand.

Jack didn't respond. He walked through the rain to his house and sat in the dark for an hour, listening to the sound of rain on the roof. Then he picked up his coat and his pipe wrench and walked back to the rain.

He went to the miners' union hall first. The door was locked. He went to the homes of the men who had worked with him at Number Seven before it closed. One by one, they answered the door in their underwear, bleary-eyed and hostile. When he told them what was happening, they listened, they understood, and they told him no.

Old Man Henderson said his son was in the Army and his pension depended on Calloway's recommendation.

Tommy Briggs said his wife was sick and they couldn't afford to be blacklisted.

A man named O'Leary said, Morrow, I love Hollow Creek. I was born here and I'll die here. But my mortgage is at the Calloway bank. I love my family more than I love your opinion of me.

By three in the morning, Jack had visited twelve houses. Every man gave him the same answer in different words: no. He drove back to his house and sat in his truck in the parking lot of a closed grocery store, staring at the dashboard. His hands were on the steering wheel and his knuckles were white. Rain drummed on the roof.

He drove to the mine at four.

The Number Seven shaft was a hole in the side of the mountain, choked with brambles and topped with a collapsed wooden headframe. The seal — a heavy iron door bolted to a stone arch — was cracked. Water seeped through the crack in a steady trickle. Jack could smell it now — the faint rotten-egg stench of hydrogen sulfide, sweet and poisonous, the smell of a thing that kills you before you know it's happening.

He pushed through the crack in the door and entered the mine. The tunnel was dark, flooded to shin depth, the water black and cold. He waded forward with his oil lamp held high. The tunnel sloped downward at a steep angle — forty feet per hundred, old mine grade — and after fifty yards the water was waist-deep and the ceiling was low enough that he had to stoop.

He found the main ventilation wheel in a small chamber about two hundred yards in. It was the size of a wagon wheel, made of iron, and completely seized. Rust had welded it to its axle. The water around his waist was rising — the rain was pushing through the fault lines faster than he'd estimated.

He wedged his pipe wrench onto the wheel and pulled. Nothing. He repositioned and pulled harder. The wheel gave a metallic shriek — a sound like a woman screaming — and moved a fraction of an inch. He pulled again. Another fraction. The rust fell from the wheel in flakes like bloody snow.

He worked for three hours. The water rose to his chest. His hands blistered and bled. The wheel turned perhaps three degrees — a crack in the rust seal, nothing more. He could feel the gas now, a thinness in the air, a pressure behind his eyes. He coughed and the cough tasted like sulfur.

He stopped. He leaned against the tunnel wall and slid down into the water. He closed his eyes and thought about Korea. The tunnel collapse. The men he couldn't dig out. The colonel who told him to stop and go home. He had gone home. And now here he was, back in a mine, back in water, back with men who were dying and he couldn't save.

He stood up. He pulled the wrench from the wheel one last time. The wheel broke free — not open, not enough, but free enough that the gas pressure pushed it. The rush of air hit him like a wall. The mine groaned. Water surged through the opened channel, carrying debris and sludge and something he didn't want to identify.

He moved to the wheel and grabbed it with both hands. The gas was thick now — he could feel his mind going fuzzy at the edges, a tingling in his fingertips, a pressure behind his eyes that made the world look yellow. He turned the wheel as far as it would go. He pushed it with his shoulder. He fell against it and lay there, his body weight on the wheel, holding it in the open position.

The water rose to his neck. He didn't let go.

The gas rushed through the opened channel and up the ventilation shaft, away from the water table, away from the town. Below him, the water rose to his chin, then his mouth, then covered him completely. He kept his hands on the wheel. The current pulled at him. The tunnel ceiling crumbled around his head. He held the wheel in place and let the water take him.

Hollow Creek lived. The water table tested clean. Three thousand people woke up the next morning and went to work and to school and to the store and to the bar, none of them knowing that a man had died in a flooded mine two miles beneath their feet, holding an iron wheel open so that the air could flow.

Calloway gave a press conference to the Gazette on Saturday, praising the mine's safety record and announcing a $5,000 donation to the Hollow Creek fire department in the name of community relations. Hargrave drank at the bar all Saturday and told anyone who asked that there had been no emergency, just some old pipes acting up.

Jack Morrow's body was never found. The floodwaters had collapsed the lower tunnel completely, sealing it under tons of rock and mud and water. His sister Maggie applied for a job at the textile mill in Fairmont and got it. She never talked about Jack. She bought a small house on Ridge Road, married a man named Frank who was nice but not interesting, and had two children. She died in 2001, and at her funeral, her daughter found Jack's pipe on a shelf in Jack's empty house and threw it in the trash because it smelled like smoke and grief and there was no place for either of those things in a life that had moved on.

Six months after the flood, the state mining inspector filed a report with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. It listed one line item under Unresolved Incidents: Unknown male, 40s, mining accident, Number Seven shaft, Hollow Creek. Recommended: no follow-up. The report was stamped, filed, and forgotten in a metal cabinet in a state office in Charleston, where it sat behind a door that only opened once a year for archiving.

The rain eventually stopped. The creek returned to its normal size. The mountains stayed where they were. The town continued, as towns do, in the long slow direction of forgetting.

Author Note & Copyright: