The section foreman was named in the next paragraph. Calvert had not put that paragraph on the board. He had thought about it for a long time and he had not put it up.
On the right panel, the logbook. Or not the logbook itself, which was in a Ziploc bag in a shoebox under the table, because Mrs. Agard had said that you did not put original documents where people could touch them, but photographs of its pages that Calvert had taken with his grandmother's Kodak and had developed at the Thrift Drug on Centre Street, and his own typed transcriptions next to each one, because his grandfather's handwriting looked like a fence that had been knocked over in a storm. The logbook was a fire boss's book. Every morning before a shift, the fire boss went down ahead of the men with a safety lamp and checked the workings for gas and water and bad top, and wrote what he found in the book, and signed it, and the section foreman countersigned it before he took his crew in. Thurlow Beckwith had been the fire boss on the Bear Ridge second level from 1955 until the slope closed in 1963. This was not the company's copy of the book, which according to the inquest record had been lost in the confusion after the fall. This was a book Thurlow had kept himself, a second book, a pocket notebook with a green cloth cover gone black at the edges, in which he had written down, every morning, the same thing he wrote in the company book, and then sometimes more.
In the middle panel, where the two sides met, Calvert had put the page from March ninth.
He had read it so many times that he did not need to look at the transcription. Mar 9. 5:10 AM. 2nd lvl west gangway. Water making at old Mammoth breakthrough approx 3 in. over Fri. Top working, heard it. Told T.K. not safe to advance. T.K. agreed. T.K. phoned up top. Prendergast says advance, ore cars waiting, tonnage. T.K. refused. Prendergast says then he will send the crew in with Gallagher in charge & T.K. can go home & not come back. T.K. went in with them so they would have somebody who knew the top. I went too.
And then, below that, in a different pencil, pressed so hard it had come through onto the next page, written at some later hour that day or that week: T.K. carried me out. He went back for Stan. Top came.
T.K. was Tibor Kostka. Section foreman, Bear Ridge Colliery, second level. Mick Kostka's grandfather.
Calvert had figured that out in February. He had sat at the long table in the back of the Mahanoy City public library with a microfilm reader humming in front of him and the inquest report from the Herald scrolled up on the glass, and he had read the name, and he had sat there for maybe ten minutes without turning the knob. Everybody in Mahanoy City over the age of forty knew the name. It was one of those names that a town keeps in a drawer. He had heard it himself, once, when he was nine or ten, at the Sunoco on Main Street, when an old man in a Phillies cap had said to another old man, about something Calvert never caught, Well, that's a Kostka for you, and the other old man had laughed in a way that was not really a laugh. He had not known what it meant. He had not thought about it again until the microfilm.
Tibor Kostka had not died at Bear Ridge. He had come up out of the slope with burns on his hands and two broken ribs, and the inquest had found that the fall resulted from an unauthorized advance into hazardous workings ordered by the section foreman, and the company had fired him, and no other company in the Southern Field had hired him after, and he had worked the rest of his life driving a bread truck for Stroehmann's out of Pottsville. He had died in 1979. Mick would have been nine.
Calvert pressed the tape down along the hinge one more time, though it did not need it.