The Baker's Tale (15 page)

Bodies were pulled up from the pit. Each time, there was a cry. “Alive or dead?”

Then a hush.

“Some dead. Some alive, but badly hurt.”

Night came again. The work of rescue went on. Most of the bodies were scorched, some beyond recognition.

“My dear sweet boy had bright blue eyes and a handsome smile,” a grieving mother told the undertaker. “Is he among them?”

“It would be best if she stay away,” the boy's father was told. “Let her remember her son as he was before.”

The parents of a young man still not accounted for looked at each other with thoughts that they dared not speak.

A father stroked the hand of his dead boy, eleven years old. The suffering mother, her heart breaking, threw herself to
her knees and pled with the Almighty to release her from her misery.

Two doctors worked round the clock, amputating crushed limbs of the living and struggling heroically but often in vain to close arteries that their cruel knife had severed.

The local preacher walked among the bodies. It was the business of his life to do so. Sometimes, he was able to go back to a family and say, “I have found him.”

Edwin helped in the rescue effort, carrying bodies and stones. Never before had he been present at the precise moment when the breath of life left a living soul. With two others, he carried a man to the hovel that was his home. The room smelled of rot. The walls were dark with soot and grease. A coarse tallow candle cast feeble rays of light.

The man was put on the bed that he and his wife had shared for years. His breathing was thick. He had bitten nearly through his lower lip in the violence of his suffering. The blood that flowed from the wound had trickled down his chin and stained his shirt. It was plain that death was upon him.

His wife sat at his side.

“There is no air here,” the man whispered, his voice barely audible. “This place pollutes it. If I could get clear of this dreadful place, even if only to die, I would thank God for His mercy.”

“We have breathed together for a long time,” his wife told him.

She reached out and held his hand in her own.

His eyes were barely open.

“I am worn out. I have been wearing out since the age of ten when I first entered the mines. Thirty years, my love. Thirty years in this hideous grave.”

He spoke so faintly that she bent close to hear the sounds his pale lips made.

“It is hard to leave you. But it is God's will, and you must bear it. Promise me that, if you should ever grow rich and leave this dreadful place, you will take me with you to be buried beneath green grass and a blue sky by glistening water. Promise me that you will, so I may rest in peace.”

“I promise.”

The man relaxed his grasp of his wife's hand. A deep sigh escaped his lips, and a smile played upon his face. Then the smile faded into a rigid ghastly stare.

She spoke his name, but there was no reply. She listened for his breath, but no sound came. She felt for the beating of his heart, but there was none. He was dead, past all help or need of it.

The town reeked with misery and wretchedness. Night after night, death carts filled with rude coffins rumbled by. Children cried, grown men grieved, women shrieked.

The smoke serpents that rose from the chimneys were indifferent to who was saved and who was lost.

Julian White had authorized the payment of five shillings for the bringing up to the surface of each body and transporting it to the undertaker. He and Albert Diamond stayed apart from the suffering as best they could. But they spoke often with the overseer, Jonathan Hunt. And they were plotting.

The first burials were on a Sunday. There had been rain the day before and all through the night. It was hot and muggy. The leaves were soaked and heavy upon the trees.

The bodies of one hundred twenty men, women, and children had been recovered. Nineteen were still unaccounted for. Mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters had all been lost. To supply the heavy demand for coffins, the undertaker had called upon several of the surviving miners who were handy with tools to assist him.

Murd's mining company paid for the coffins, each one having a velvet pall. The church vicar gave the burial ground free.

There was a funeral service in a mouldy old church. Rain fell upon the stained glass windows with a constant weary sound. The preacher spoke of God's love and redemption through Christ.

Edwin was not a believer. He comforted himself now by holding to the faith that nothing innocent or good is forgotten. Those who die continue on in the better thoughts of those who loved them and, through the living, play a part in the redeeming of the world.

His eyes drifted to an elderly woman, who sat with a church Bible open before her.

“She cannot read,” Edwin thought. “No one who can read looks at a book like one who cannot.”

After the service, the coffins were borne slowly out of the church on men's shoulders. A dead silence pervaded the throng, broken only by lamentations of grief and the shuffling steps of the bearers.

A miner stood in the graveyard, readying the marker for his son's grave. He had just enough learning to be able to spell it out.

A miserably dressed woman sat upon a pile of stones, seeking no shelter from the rain, letting it fall on her as it would. “Lay me by my poor boy now,” she wailed.

A weazen little baby with a heavy head that it could not hold up and two weak staring eyes seemed to be wondering why it had been born.

Unidentified bodies were buried in separate coffins, with four coffins in each grave. The undertaker had numbered each body and listed its characteristics in a register. A corresponding number was written on each coffin, and all four numbers were placed on a marker above the grave.

All the while, Albert Diamond and Julian White were gathering evidence for what lay ahead.

Alexander Murd was a man who favored cunning over decency. He practiced trickery within the bounds of the law and more trickery when the law looked the other way. Aided by clever practitioners, he made hard use of his power. Now he was readying for the coroner's inquest.

The duty of the coroner after a mine disaster is to inquire into the causes of the accident and to ascertain whether the pit was worked in a manner that endangered human life.

“We had best get it done quickly,” Diamond told Julian White. “Before there is time for misunderstanding to spread.”

The inquest began before the last bodies had been raised from the pit. The inquest room was on the ground floor of the courthouse. The furniture was solid with an official look. Several dozen miners were in the spectator pews.

Albert Diamond sat at a table with a bundle of papers consisting of legal documents and notes that he had compiled during the previous week. Julian White and Jonathan Hunt were beside him.

A representative designated by the miners sat at an adjacent table.

Edwin chose to sit in the spectator pews with the miners. “The Queen's gentlemen came here once and said that they would mend things,” one of the miners told him. “But they have not. We think that the Queen was not told.”

The coroner was a man about forty years of age named Samuel Shaw. He had a fat sallow face and false teeth. Unsightly hair sprouted from his ears. His slovenly attire warranted the inference that personal appearance was low on his list of priorities. Most of us have derived an impression of a man from his manner
of doing some little thing. The way he smiles or nods his head or greets another man. Edwin disliked and did not trust Shaw.

The coroner selected twelve jurors for the inquest and stated the case to them.

“Gentlemen; you are impaneled here to inquire into deaths that occurred as a consequence of an event in the Lancashire mine. Evidence will be given to you regarding the circumstances attending that event. After hearing the evidence, you will give a verdict regarding the cause of the event based solely on the evidence heard by you and not according to anything else.”

The coroner then read aloud a list of the dead, making a short pause after each name.

The giving of testimony began.

Jonathan Hunt was sworn and examined by the coroner. As the overseer spoke, Edwin put his forefingers together pointing upward and rested his chin on the point.

“Are you the overseer of the mine where the event happened?” Shaw asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Please describe the conditions in the shaft and tunnels.”

“We have worked there for about two years, and I always considered it a safe place to work. There was good air. I had no idea of any danger. All ordinary caution was used to prevent any accident.”

“So to the best of your knowledge, was the pit clean of inflammable air?”

“Yes, sir. I considered it in perfect safety. The ventilation was good. Fresh air was going round as usual. The misfortune appears to have arisen from the sudden appearance of gas that touched a careless man's open lamp.”

“Were the men working with the tops of their lamps on or off?”

“They are ordered to always work with them on. But some men do not listen to what they are told.”

The miner's representative rose to cross-examine the witness.

“Is it not true, Mr. Hunt, that, if the colliers do not mine a certain amount of coal each week, they are fined a given amount per basket? And that this penalty, as you are aware, encourages them to work with the tops of their lamps off?”

Albert Diamond rose to his feet.

“I object, Your Honour. The purpose of this coroner's inquest is to determine when and how the deceased met their death, not to instruct an ill-prepared questioner on the workings of the mines.”

“The question is foolish,” Shaw concurred. “I will not allow it.”

The coroner addressed the miner's representative.

“It is not necessary to ascertain how the colliery worked. All that this inquest is charged to determine is how, when, and where the miners died. You are precluded from asking any questions of the witness that do not address these issues. Mr. Hunt has testified that the deaths were ascribable to accident. Pure accident. It is unnecessary for you to imply by your questions that there was some other nefarious cause.”

It was clear that the coroner intended to belittle any evidence that did not support a verdict of acquittal. The inquest was a sham, making a pretense of justice as players on a stage might act out, while knowing full well that an unwholesome hand had corrupted the proceedings.

The miners were then allowed to call a witness, a young man named Jermaine Truitt, who had been at work in an adjacent tunnel when the explosion occurred.

“We were at work about two hours,” Truitt told the jurors. “Then a rush of wind cut by us and there was a rumbling noise. We put out our lamps and ran toward the shaft. Others came rushing out upon us from the side workings, and all of us ran in the dark in the direction of the shaft. Then we got a sudden giddiness and gasping, and knew we had met the choke-damp. It is a sleepy sickness you feel and sinking at the knees, only it is not the breath of sleep. You are breathing death. I called to those ahead of us to stop. Some of them went on, and down they went. The rest of us hurried back until we came to a place where the air could be breathed. The older ones among us tried to keep order by telling us that our friends on the surface would come soon to help us. But all of us feared another explosion or the advance of the choke-damp that would bring us death. Every minute was torment. After the first hour, I gave up hope and was as bad as the others. I knowed our friends would help us if they could. But could they? I sat there praying and making my last peace with God. And God spared us. Part of the roof of the tunnel we were in fell after the explosion. This shut off the fire and the advance of the choke-damp from us. On the next day, our friends made their way through the ruin and saved us.”

“A heartrending story,” Shaw declared when Truitt concluded his testimony. “But it is not dispositive in any way with regard to the cause of the incident.”

The miner's representative asked to call his next witness.

“How many more do you have?” the coroner demanded.

“Quite a few, Your Honour.”

“Mr. Truitt was in the pit. He has spoken for all.”

“Your Honour, if you please—”

Shaw cut him off. “I will allow for the testimony of one more miner. That is all.”

Ethan Crowl took the witness stand.

“I have sat here and listened to Mr. Hunt tell the jury that the ventilation in the pit was good,” Crowl began. “By this, I suppose he means that it was as well ventilated as the rest of Alexander Murd's pits, which is good enough to enable him to get his coal out of the ground but not so well ventilated as to enable us to mine the coal with a tolerable degree of safety.”

Albert Diamond objected to the witness's remark. The coroner ordered it stricken from the record.

Crowl went on.

“On the day of the explosion, we were ordered by Mr. Hunt under penalty of losing our employment to work with the tops of our lamps off. We heard a fall of stones in the pit and put the tops back on. Sometimes, we blow out our lamps all together when we hear stones fall. At the very least, when we have concerns, our lamps are locked and made safe. But soon after we heard the fall, we were ordered—”

“Your Honour,” Diamond interrupted. “I have endeavored throughout this proceeding to treat the miners with the respect due to them because of their grievous loss. But my patience is being sorely tested by irrational testimony such as this.”

“Mr. Crowl,” the coroner admonished. “The full, fair, and impartial testimony of Jonathan Hunt has made it clear that . . .”

Ethan Crowl slammed his fist down upon the witness table with full force.

“Keep a watch on your conduct, Mr. Crowl.”

“I shall not,” Crowl shouted. “I have been dragged over burning coals for twenty years. I was a good enough tempered man once. Some people say they remember me that way. But these bloody mines have forced a change.”