The gymnasium at Mahanoy Area High School smelled, that Saturday in March of 1987, like floor wax and burned coffee and the wet wool of two hundred winter coats, and Calvert Beckwith had been standing in it since a quarter to seven in the morning with a roll of masking tape around his wrist like a bracelet. He had come in the side door by the boiler room because the custodian, Mr. Saylor, owed his grandmother a favor from some year before Calvert was born, and he had carried his display board in from the back of his grandmother's Buick in three pieces, because it did not fit any other way.
Now it stood on table forty-one, in the second row from the bleachers, between a model of the Liberty Bell made out of sugar cubes and a trifold about Amelia Earhart with a plastic airplane glued to the top, and Calvert was pressing the last strip of tape along the back of the hinge and trying not to look at it too hard, because when he looked at it too hard he saw everything wrong with it.
The title ran across the top in letters he had cut out of black construction paper with his grandmother's sewing scissors, one at a time, over four nights at the kitchen table. THE BEAR RIDGE SLOPE: MARCH 9, 1961. Underneath, in smaller letters, the subtitle he had argued with himself about for a month: What the Town Remembers, and What the Logbook Says.
He was wearing the cardigan. He had known he would wear it since January, and he had known since January that it was a mistake, and he had worn it anyway. It was a heavy thing, oatmeal colored, knit in a thick cable that ran down both sides of the front in a braid and broke apart at the bottom into two separate ropes, with five leather-covered buttons and a hole near the left cuff that his grandmother had darned with yarn that was almost but not quite the same color. It came down nearly to the middle of his thighs.
The shoulders sat out past his own shoulders by an inch. It had belonged to his grandfather, Thurlow Beckwith, who had died the April before, in the hospital in Pottsville, of the lungs, the way men in Schuylkill County mostly did, and Calvert had found it folded in the cedar chest at the foot of his grandparents' bed with the logbook wrapped up inside it like something being kept warm.
He was fifteen years old. He was in tenth grade. He was not a person who wore his dead grandfather's sweater to school, ordinarily, and the first day he had done it, back in January, Mick Kostka had looked at him across the cafeteria and said, loud enough that it carried, "Hey, Mister Rogers. You lose your trolley?"
That had been January. It was March now. The regional judging for History Day started at nine.
Calvert stepped back from the board and made himself look at it the way a stranger would. On the left panel, the town's version: a copy of the front page of the Shenandoah Evening Herald from March tenth, 1961, which he had paid eleven dollars to have photostatted at the library in Pottsville, with the headline FOUR DEAD IN BEAR RIDGE FALL and a smaller headline underneath, FOREMAN'S ORDER QUESTIONED. A photograph of the breaker at Bear Ridge, black and enormous, like a church built by people who had never seen one. A list of the four names, typed on his grandmother's Smith-Corona: Andrew Dombrowski, 41. Francis Gallagher, 29. Peter Yurkanin, 33. Stanley Wychulis, 52. Under that, the transcript of a quote from the county inquest that ran three weeks later, a quote from the mine superintendent, a man named E. W. Prendergast, that Calvert had copied out exactly: The decision to advance the gangway into the old Mammoth workings that shift was made at the face by the section foreman on his own judgment. The company had no knowledge.