Thomas Bradshaw stood at the head of the freight yard with the rope of his pale mare Banner held in his fist while the April rain came down the hollow and the coal company's train sat ticking on the switch line like a black thing that had been waiting all winter to be fed, and he watched his nephew Isaiah climb up into the open mouth of the cattle car where the other boys of Chadds Hollow were already pressed to the door, their faces bright and wrong the way faces are in a photograph taken too close, and all up the cinder path the mothers and sisters and sweethearts stood with their bundles and their wet handkerchiefs, and not a one of them said the word death aloud, but Thomas could feel it waiting inside the boiler like the last station on a line nobody ever rode back from.

The mare leaned her pale neck into his shoulder, and through the warm flesh of her he felt the ground under the yard give its long shiver, and the dead of the hollow came up out of the wet dark where they had been laid down for fifty years, the drowned miners and the typhoid children and the scab the company hanged for burning the weigh house, and they stood behind the living with that patience of people who have nowhere else to go, and the seeing came over Thomas hard and sudden so that he dropped to one knee with his hand braced on Banner's withers, and what he saw was not the freight yard at all but a field in a country he had never heard of, all churned to gray soup and strung with wire, and a pale banner lying fallen in the mud with the staff snapped clean, and under the fall of that banner lay his nephew Isaiah with his eyes open to a rain that would never wet him again.

He said nothing, because to speak a thing of that kind was to fetch it down on the head of the boy he had raised from a bantling, and he only got up and let Isaiah find his hand in the press of the crowd and squeeze it once, a boy's hard squeeze that was meant to be a man's, and then the engine gave its long hoot and the train pulled away through the rain with the boys singing something ragged and brave that the mountain swallowed before the last car was past the crossing, and Thomas stood holding the mare while the mothers stood holding themselves, and when Margaret Holloway came up beside him and asked him, quiet, whether he had seen anything, he told her no, he had seen nothing, and she looked at him with the flat knowing eyes of a woman who has buried two sons and a husband in this ground, and she said she hoped the lie sat easy on his soul, and he said it did not, and that was the first time he ever spoke a falsehood about the dead.

That summer the mine claimed the men the draft had left it, one crushed on the tipple and two smothered in a drift that was supposed to have been timbered and was not, and Thomas Bradshaw walked the wet galleries with his hand out flat to the coal and found them one by one with the water dripping somewhere in the dark making the only sound there was, and the widows came to his door with their store-checks and their children and asked him what their men had said before the dark took them, and he told them what the dead told him, which was mostly that the dead wanted only to be let down into the ground the way they had been let down in life, and the town took that for comfort and fed him for it, and for a while he thought the gift was a kind of justice, a thin voice in the black that could not be bought off, and that thought was the first of his mistakes.

When Edward Ashworth ran, it was October, and the whole hollow knew why he ran and pretended not to know, because Edward's father had been one of the two smothered in the drift and the company had paid his widow in scrip that only the company store would take, at the company's own prices, and the draft board had reviewed her case and found her able-bodied and cut her relief to a bag of cornmeal a week, and Edward was the only one left to carry the slack and feed his mother and sister, so he ran into the mountain with a blanket and a skinning knife and the kind of hopeless stubbornness that makes a good man a criminal in a county where the law is written by the men who own the coal, and James Whitmore, who chaired the draft board and ran the company's law, sent for Thomas and told him, in that voice that was always reasoned and always terrible, that a town that could not find its deserters was a town that would have to be searched, house by house, and that charity, like cornmeal, had a way of running out at the edges.

So Thomas took Banner up the old wagon road to the head of the mountain, not because he meant to give the boy up but because he meant to find him first, and Banner stopped at the ruin of the old breaker above the sump where the slate had come down years ago and left a hole like a mouth frozen in the middle of a word, and Thomas went down into that dark and found Edward Ashworth sitting on a fallen timber with the blanket around his shoulders, coughing the coal cough that was already settling into his chest, and Edward looked up at him and said the thing he had said to no one else, that he was not running from the war, that he would have gone to the war glad if his mother had been a woman who could eat a soldier's death, but the law had drawn its line through his father's grave and called it an accident, and if he went to France the law would drawn a line through his mother and sister and call that an accident too, and it would be true, because the law was the only thing in Chadds Hollow that never lied and never broke its word, and Thomas heard the boy out and then he did the thing that would be his undoing: he told the boy to stay where he was, and he came back down the mountain with Banner and told no one where he had been.

For three weeks he carried rations up the old road in the dark of the morning, and Margaret Holloway knew without being told and left out sacks of potatoes on her porch that Thomas collected on his way past, and two of the miners who had worked with Edward's father began leaving old timber and a lantern and a box of matches at the foot of the slack dump where it would not be noticed, and the women of the hollow, who had learned long ago how to keep a thing from the company, kept their mouths shut and their eyes lowered when the deputies came through, and Catherine Pemberton, who taught the little ones and had lost her own husband to the mine eighteen years before, took Thomas aside one evening in the churchyard and told him that she knew where he went of a morning and that she would stand with him, whatever came of it, because it was the first just thing she had seen done in this town since the war began, and he believed her, and that belief was the second of his mistakes.

What he uncovered next came not through Banner but through his own hand laid flat on the wage books in the company office, where James Whitmore had summoned him, not to ask about Edward Ashworth but to ask whether the dead could be made to testify in a dispute about a cargo of coal that the company had sold to the army, and Thomas laid his hand on the books to steady himself against the smell of the place, and the dead came up through the ledger in a wave that bent him over the desk, and what they showed him was not the cargo but the drawn-out accounts of the relief fund, the money that was supposed to have fed the families of the drafted boys, moved month by month into a column marked administrative and from there into the company's own hands, and the inquest on the two smothered miners with the verdict bought beforehand and the scrip that was good only at the company store where the company's own prices ate the difference, and he lifted his head and told James Whitmore, in front of the clerk and the deputy, that the law of this town was a thief that stole from the mouths of the poor and called its thieving justice, and Whitmore listened to him with a patience that should have warned him, and then said, quiet, that the dead were welcome to their opinions but that the living would have to answer for them.

The town took sides in the way of a town that has always been poor, with the families of the drafted on Thomas's side and the families of the mine captains and the storekeepers and the deputies on Whitmore's, and the war news from France grew worse and worse through that dark fall, with the lists of the dead and the maimed and the missing coming up the line on yellow paper that the postmistress would not touch with her bare fingers, and it was in that season that Catherine Pemberton had her son Franklin reported missing in the Argonne, and James Whitmore sent for her and showed her the telegram and told her, in his reasoned and terrible voice, that he could have her boy found on the living side of the record or the dead side, depending on what she could tell him about the whereabouts of one Edward Ashworth, and that a mother's love, properly directed, was the strongest power in this county, stronger even than a faithless horse witch and his pale mare, and Catherine Pemberton, who had stood with Thomas in the churchyard and promised to stand with him whatever came, went home and wrote out a map of the old road to the breaker and left it in the church door where the deputy would find it in the morning, and the whole of her grief did not keep her from sleeping that night, which will tell you what the war had done to the people of that hollow.

The hearing was held in the draft board's rooms above the company store on the first Friday of November, and it was a community hearing in the sense that the whole community was allowed to stand on the street below and listen to the windows, and James Whitmore stood at the head of the table with the clerk and the deputy behind him and asked Thomas Bradshaw, before all of them, to demonstrate for the record that the dead spoke through him, and if the dead could not be made to answer for him then the law would be forced to conclude that a certain prophecy delivered in the churchyard had been the raving of a man who wanted to protect a deserter, and Thomas, who had spent the morning on his knees in the wet grass asking the gift to stay quiet in him, stood up and said he would not be used to sanctify a lynching, and Whitmore answered that there was no lynching in the county, that there was only the law, and that the law was very patient but it was not infinite, and then someone in the crowd below shouted the name of Edward Ashworth, and then another voice took it in, and before the hour was out the street was calling for the deserter like a war all its own, and Thomas felt the gift rise in him unbidden, the way it had risen in the freight yard the morning Isaiah left, and he put both hands flat on the table to hold himself against it and heard his own mouth open and speak in a voice that was not his voice and was not any one dead man's voice but the long low voice of the whole hollow gathering itself, and that voice said the words the crowd had been waiting to hear, the old breaker above the sump, the boy with the blanket around his shoulders and the coal cough in his chest, and Thomas heard himself give up the one thing he had sworn to protect, and then the crowd broke up the street and the deputies were through it with their coats flapping and somebody fired a shot that went into the mountain and whined away into the wet trees.

They brought Edward Ashworth down the mountain before dark, and they did not bring him to the jail on the main street but to the empty weigh house at the edge of the tipple, and James Whitmore stood in the rain and read out the law of the desertion, and the deputy took the boy past the end of the rail fence where the old boiler sat, and the shot that came after was explained by the inquest the next morning as the justifiable act of an officer preventing an escape, and the company paid for the verdict the way it paid for everything and folded the cost into the price of the coal, and Thomas Bradshaw walked through the crowd that had flowed back down the mountain and stood at the fence where the rain had washed the blood into the cinders, and there was no one left to say a word about it except Margaret Holloway, who came out of her house and stood beside him and said that he must not bear it alone, that he had not spoken the words, that the town had spoken them through him, and Thomas looked at her and said that was the worst of it, that the town had spoken through him and he had let it, because some part of him had wanted to be the instrument, wanted to be the beloved mouth of the hollow, and that want was a hunger he had never confessed to himself until that hour, when he was so full of it he could taste the boy's blood on his tongue — and this was the third and deepest of his mistakes, the mistake of loving the world that fed on him.

Then came the business with Banner, and it was his own doing and the shame of it never left him, because James Whitmore, still patient, still terrible, let the word be passed through the town that the prophecy had not been a prophecy at all but the trick of a pale horse trained to stop above the hidden places, a witch's familiar that had fooled the town into hearing God where there was only an animal, and Thomas, in the black of that winter, thinking he could save the only living thing that still loved him, stood in the yard of his own house and told the people who had gathered there, the men and women of the hollow he had served all his life, that Banner was nothing, that she was a common horse off a common patch of pasture, that the seeing was his alone and always had been, a man's gift and a man's sin, and that they were to leave the mare out of it — and by those words he broke the thing that the town understood better than he did, the old pact between a gifted man and his familiar, and he watched them take Banner by the rope and lead her up the road with her pale head turning back toward him once, and he stood in his yard and let them take her because he thought he was being merciful, and the mercy of that betrayal was the coldest thing he ever did in his life.

Banner came back to him in March, in the thaw, and she came back the way a broken thing comes back to the place where it was broken, lame in the foreleg where the coal tram had caught her on the switch line and dragged her through the cinders, and the night watchman had shot her that morning, not out of cruelty but out of the ordinary efficiency of an industry that has no use for a horse with a shattered leg, and her body had been taken to the lime pit, but someone, one of the boys who had watched her all her life and knew what a pale horse had meant to this town, had cut her mane and her tail and hung them on the wire fence where the old road met the mountain, and there they hung in the wet wind for anybody to see, a pale banner of horsehair frayed at the edges, and when Thomas came up the road and saw it he went down on his knees in the mud and stayed there until the dark came in over the mountain.

The Armistice came in November of that year, a year later to the week that Isaiah had climbed into the cattle car, and the town hung out its flags and rang the Mine Deeds bells and burned the conscription notices in a barrel in the middle of the street, and the mothers who had boys coming home wept and the mothers who did not stood in their doorways with their hands at their sides and let the celebration wash around them, and Catherine Pemberton had gone away to the city in the spring and no one in the hollow had written to her, and Thomas Bradshaw walked up the old road in the rain of that November morning, not to join the celebration but to stand at the wire fence where the pale banner hung, thinned by weather to a few white strands and a knot of gray, and he put his hand on that fence and he let the dead go, or rather he let them know that he was done with them, that he was no longer their mouthpiece or the town's mouthpiece or the instrument of any justice that killed boys and called it law, and the hollow went quiet around him as the dead drew back into the wet ground, and he was a common man then, a man with cold hands and no more visions, and he knew that the peace he had bought had cost him everything he had ever been, and he stood there a long while with his hands open, and then he came down the mountain to the town that did not know him anymore, the town that was raising its flags and singing in the street, and behind him the pale banner hung on the wire, a ghost of a horse, a ghost of a war, a ghost of a justice that had never once in all its long life stood beside a poor man, and he did not look back.