The mine had been closed for three months when I finally stopped going every day.

Three months of sitting in the living room, watching the light move across the floor. Three months of Shirley packing boxes and talking about Pittsburgh and how she could get a job at a supermarket if she could just find a place to rent that was close to the bus line. Three months of Dale saying he was going to Canada and then actually going and then writing one letter and then not writing at all.

I used to walk to the mine gate every morning anyway. Just stand there and look at it. The gate was chain-linked now, with a sign that said CLOSED in yellow paint that was already peeling. The buildings behind it were gray against the sky, the headframe silhouetted like the skeleton of something that had been alive once.

I am Ray McCullough. I am forty-two years old. I worked at the Oak Creek Mine for twenty years, and for twenty years I went down into the earth every morning at six and came up at six in the evening, and for twenty years the work was the same: cut the coal, load the conveyor, repeat. I was good at it because I was not very good at anything else.

The mine closed on a Thursday. The notice had come two weeks earlier, printed on company letterhead, in language that was careful and impersonal. The company had made a decision based on market conditions. Effective immediately, all operations at Oak Creek Mine were suspended. Severance pay would be distributed according to company policy.

I stood in the parking lot and read the notice three times. Then I put it in my pocket and went home and sat in the living room and watched the light move across the floor.

Shirley and I had been divorced for five years but we still lived in the same house because that was what you did in a town like this when there was nowhere else to go. She worked at the convenience store on Route 6, ringing up gas and cigarettes and frozen dinners for people who needed something between dinner and bedtime. I helped her sometimes when she was short-staffed, which was always.

"We need to talk about the boy," she said one evening, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that had gone cold.

"What about him?"

"He asked me today if he could call you 'Dad.' I told him no. I told him you're not his dad. His dad is Mark, who lives in Harrisburg and sends money every month. But Ray, he's nine years old. He needs—"

"I send money too," I said.

"Every month. Forty dollars. I know you try, Ray. I know."

She was right. I tried. Forty dollars a month from a man who worked odd jobs for whoever would hire him was all I had. I gave it to her on the first of every month, folded bills from a envelope that said McCullough in her handwriting.

Dale left in April. I helped him pack his truck—two suitcases, a cooler, a shotgun he hadn't fired in ten years. His wife Carol was sick, cancer, and the hospital in town said they couldn't handle it. They needed to go to Pittsburgh or Toronto or somewhere that had equipment that wasn't from the fifties.

"I'll write," he said, shaking my hand at the edge of town, where the road turned from pavement to gravel.

"I know."

He drove east. I stood there until the dust settled. Then I walked back to Oak Creek and stood at the mine gate for an hour. Then I went home.

The town went quiet after that. Not silent—there was always wind, and the occasional car on Route 6, and the hum of power lines—but quiet in the way that matters. The kind of quiet that means people have left and are not coming back.

Peters' General Store closed in May. The post office shrank from two clerks to one. The church stopped Sunday school. The high school merged with the district in Connellsville because there weren't enough kids left to field a basketball team.

I kept going to the mine gate. Some mornings I went twice.

Peters was seventy and had been a miner for forty-five years. His lungs were shot—black lung, they called it, though the doctors at the VA said the official name was coal workers' pneumoconiosis. He didn't care what it was called. He couldn't run up a flight of stairs without stopping halfway, and he slept with an oxygen tank beside his bed.

But he wouldn't leave. His father had been a miner. His grandfather had been a miner. This town was in his blood, he said. You don't just walk away from your blood.

"I'll see you out, Ray," he told me once, sitting on his porch with a bottle of whiskey between us. The porch was the only piece of furniture he had left outside—the rest was inside, in a house that was too big for one man.

"You don't have to keep doing that," I said.

"Doing what?"

"Buying me whiskey. You can't afford it."

He smiled. "That's the point, ain't it? Can't afford it. But I'm doing it anyway."

He died in November. I found him on a Saturday morning. He was in his bed, under the blankets, with the oxygen tank still running beside him. His face was peaceful. He had been dead for hours—I could tell by the cold—but he looked like he was just sleeping.

I called the funeral home. They came in the afternoon. I signed the papers. I paid for the simplest casket they had, the one that cost eight hundred dollars, which was almost everything I had.

The funeral was on Wednesday. I was the only person who came. The minister did a short service—three verses, a prayer, a line from Paul about resurrection—and then we walked to the cemetery together, which was just me and two men from the funeral home who lowered the casket into the ground and covered it with dirt and put a marker on top.

TOMAS PETERS 1901-1931 Beloved Father, Grandfather, Miner

I stood there for a while after they left. The wind was cold. The sky was gray. I thought about putting a shovel of dirt on the grave myself, the way his father had done for his father, but I didn't have a shovel. I just stood there in my coat and listened to the wind.

After Peters died, I stopped going to the mine gate. There was nothing left to look at. The gate was still there, the sign was still there, but the place felt different, like a body without a soul.

In December, the last family left. A young couple with a baby in a car seat, driving south in a used Ford. I watched them go from my window. The woman was waving to somebody on the porch, I think Peters' neighbor, an old woman named Mrs. Kowalski who had known them from church. The baby was asleep. The Ford disappeared down the road and did not come back.

I went outside and stood on the street and watched the place where the car had been. Then I went inside and locked the door and sat in the living room and turned on the television.

The news was on. Some politician was talking about jobs, about bringing manufacturing back, about how places like this would not be forgotten. He had a nice suit and a nice smile and a list of promises he would not keep. I turned it off.

The silence was different now. Before, it had been the silence of waiting—waiting for the mine to reopen, waiting for Dale to write, waiting for something to change. Now it was the silence of knowing that nothing was going to change.

I opened a bottle of whiskey—Peters' bottle, actually, that I had taken from his porch after the funeral. It was good whiskey, the kind he had been saving for a special occasion. I figured this counted.

I sat in the living room, the one where Shirley and I had eaten breakfast for twelve years, where the boy had learned to walk, where Shirley and I had fought about money and nothing ever seemed to work. I sat in the same chair I had always sat in, in the same house I could not sell because nobody in town had money to buy houses, and I drank Peters' whiskey and watched the light move across the floor.

Outside, the wind moved through the empty streets. It passed through the gaps in the boarded-up windows of Peters' General Store. It whistled through the chain-link fence at the mine gate. It moved through the town like something looking for a body to inhabit and finding nothing.

I finished the whiskey. It was warm in my stomach and cold in my hands.

Tomorrow I should go to the supermarket. They might still have bread. Maybe milk too. I would see what was on the shelves and buy what I needed and come home and sit in the living room and watch the light move across the floor and wait for tomorrow.

That was all there was. Wait for tomorrow. Buy bread. Drink whiskey. Sit in the chair.

Nothing else.

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OTMES CODE: OTMES-v2-LDE-03-3C9E17-E05.5-5-T180-A7D3 E_total: 5.5 | Dominant Mode: M5 (Politics/Power) | Theta: 180° | TI: 55.0