"He's not—" Butchie said. "He's not usually—I mean, he is usually, but—" He gave up, and picked up his chairs, and went after Mick.
Calvert stood in front of the board with his hands in his pockets. After a while he noticed that he was shaking, a fine shiver, all through his arms, and he took his hands out and looked at them and put them back. The Amelia Earhart girl's mother came over and asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, ma'am, thank you, and she gave him a Tastykake, a Butterscotch Krimpet still in the cellophane, without saying anything else, and went back to her daughter. He held it. He did not eat it. He did not know what else to do with it, so he put it in the pocket of the cardigan, and it sat there against his hip like a small soft brick.
The judges came at nine forty.
There were three of them, as Mrs. Agard had said. A woman with a clipboard and a Kutztown University lanyard, whose name tag said MS. GARRIGAN; a heavy, cheerful man in a sport coat who said he was a retired social studies teacher from Lehighton and that Calvert should call him Mr. Hufnagle; and, last, a tall thin man of maybe forty-five with a beard already gone gray trimmed close and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, who did not smile, whose name tag said DR. F. DOMBROWSKI, BLOOMSBURG UNIV., and who stood a little behind the other two with his hands clasped behind his back the way men in old photographs stood in front of the breakers.
Calvert gave the opening the way he had practiced it. He had practiced it forty or fifty times, in his bedroom, in the bathroom mirror, for his grandmother at the kitchen table while she shelled peas into a colander, once for Mrs. Agard in her empty classroom while she ate a tuna sandwich and did not interrupt. He said that the theme for National History Day in 1987 was Communication in History, and that his project was about a conversation that took place on a mine telephone on the morning of March ninth, 1961, three hundred and forty feet underground, and about who in the town got to tell the story of that conversation afterward, and who did not. He said that the Bear Ridge fall killed four men and injured six, and that a county inquest found that the section foreman had ordered an unsafe advance on his own authority, and that this was the version of events that had been printed in the newspapers and was taught, insofar as it was taught at all, in the local histories. He showed them the left panel. He said the names of the four men out loud, the way Mrs. Agard had told him to, because she said that names on a board were just ink until somebody said them. When he said Andrew Dombrowski, he did not look at Dr. Dombrowski, and he did not hear his own voice change, though he thought later it must have.
Then he showed them the right panel, and the logbook, and explained what a fire boss was, and that his grandfather had kept a personal book in addition to the company book, and that the company book had been entered in the inquest record as lost. He told them about the March ninth entry. He did not read it to them. He let them read it.
Ms. Garrigan wrote something on her clipboard. Mr. Hufnagle leaned in with his glasses and said, "Well, I'll be." Dr. Dombrowski did not move.
"Questions," Ms. Garrigan said, and looked at the other two. Mr. Hufnagle asked about the microfilm and how Calvert had found the inquest transcript and whether the library had let him take copies, and Calvert answered, and Mr. Hufnagle nodded and nodded. Ms. Garrigan asked how the project connected to the theme, and Calvert said it was about a phone call, a message from underground to the surface and the answer that came back down, and about how the record of that call had been lost, and how a second record, a private one, had stayed silent for twenty-six years in a cedar chest. "Communication isn't only the message," he said, which was a line he had written and crossed out and written again. "It's also who's allowed to hear it."