In keeping with my personal tradition, a Christmas-themed short story. From previous years, A Christmas Encounter, about an old man and his faithful companion, is here. And The Christmas Gift, about the lesson that it is more blessed to give than receive, is here. Both those tales were based on true stories from our region. Christmas at Mine No. 12 isn’t. Brimstone was a coal-mining community, and it was an extremely poor community in the first half of the 20th Century, and there were some mine tragedies that occurred there. This one, though, is completely fictional, and comes only from the presence of an unseen spirit I feel each year at about this time as I make many hunting trips up the Indian Fork Creek Valley. The coal has played out and the valley is deserted. But the spirit remains.

I jerked up my collar against the wind and braced myself against the cold as I made my way across the yard to the barn. A few snowflakes danced on the air as the wind whipped through the valley.

It had turned off cold the day before, but the chores wouldn’t wait until the cold had passed. As the oldest kid at our house, most of the outside chores fell on me.

Oh, my name is John Wentz, by the way. Most folks back then called me Johnny. It was December of nineteen and thirty-three, and I was thirteen years old.

The chores consisted of gathering eggs and milking Nettie, our cow, before school. After school, I scattered some feed for the chickens, threw down hay for Nettie and Sally, our mare, and swept out the barn stalls.

Dad would’ve taken care of the chores, but he worked in the coal mines. There weren’t many cars in the hills back then, and it was a two-mile hike from our house to the mines. In the winter-time, he would be up and gone before daybreak and not return home until darkness had settled across Indian Fork Valley.

It was hard work for him, but he was happy just to have a job. Many men didn’t. The newspapers in those days were talking about The Depression, but we couldn’t really tell a difference up on Brimstone Creek and Indian Fork Creek. We were poor to start with.

Our family was lucky, though. Dad had his job in the mines, and we had a sizable chunk of property, with good pastureland. We had the eggs, and sometimes we could sell fresh eggs to the store at Robbins—the closest town—for a few pennies. Like most women of our day, Momma didn’t work. But she was a noted seamstress, and folks would bring their torn garments from all around the valley to have Momma sew them up. She made some extra money that way.

As I set off for the barn, I whistled for Sam, my old hunting hound. He reluctantly pulled himself from his warm bed of rags on the rickety old porch and fell in behind me as I walked across the frozen yard.

It wasn’t much warmer inside the barn than out. The wind whistled through the spaces between the slats. I hung my oil lantern on a peg and set about my work, while Sam went about his nightly ritual of sniffing around the darkest corners of the old barn. He was looking for varmints that had gotten in. The chickens roosted in the barn, and a fox or some other critter that managed to sneak into the barn could wreak havoc in a hurry.

I could smell supper, the odor carried from the house on the wind that whipped about my shoulders and made me wish I had a heavier jacket. Momma had a kettle of white beans on the stove. There would be squirrel dumplins, too. Me and Sam had hiked to the top of the mountain two days earlier and shot the squirrels. It wasn’t easy to find the little bushy-tailed tree rats in the valley by the time winter rolled in. They preferred the top of the mountain, where there was less competition from deer for the acorns.

On the way back down the mountain, with six squirrels in a sack that was slung over my shoulder, I stopped and chopped down a small evergreen on a mountain bench a couple of hundred feet above the valley floor. It was Christmas, and time to decorate a tree for our living room.

Later that evening, when Dad had returned from the mine, we would go about our ritual of decorating the tree. There were paper chains, made of pages cut from the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, to hang on the branches. Momma would pop some corn to mix with molasses for Christmas popcorn balls, and the extra popcorn would be strung onto thread to decorate the tree, too. We sang Silent Night, O Holy Night and other carols as we decorated the tree. The final touch was Dad lifting Mary—my younger sister—onto his shoulders to place a paper star atop the tree.

Decorating the tree was our Christmas Eve tradition. After the tree was finished, Momma would put on a special smoked Christmas ham to cook, while Dad tuned in Christmas music on the old AM radio. If the night was clear, we could just barely pick up the evening shows on the radio box. The ham would be our Christmas dinner. Rawlin, my older brother, and his wife, Becca, would come over for the meal. Rawlin worked in the mines with Dad, and he and Becca lived across the pasture, on the other side of the farm. Dad and Rawlin had built the house when Rawlin and Becca had gotten married two years earlier.

Finishing the chores at the barn, I leaned my rake in a corner, grabbed the lantern and headed back to the house, almost at a run. I may have been in a hurry, but when I got to the porch, I took care to stomp the mud from my boots before opening the door. Momma had scrubbed the floors earlier in the day, and she would have had my hide if I had tracked up her floor. Folks today wouldn’t have thought much of our wood floors, but Momma insisted that cleanliness was a virtue. You could tell a lot about a body if there was dirt under their rugs or behind their ears, she insisted.

“Make sure you ain’t trackin’ mud in here on my floors,” Momma said as I opened the door, not bothering to turn around from her position at the old wood stove, where she was tending to the beans. I grinned, having anticipated what she would say.

I hung my hat and coat on a peg by the door and sat down on a wooden bench fastened to the table. Mary was cutting catalog pages into strips for the tree decorations.

“You know, if you don’t get them strips cut just so, Santa ain’t comin’ tonight, don’t you?” I teased Mary. She was just five, old enough to help Momma around the house but young enough to indulge in such childhood fantasies as Santa Claus.

Momma frowned as she set a bowl of beans in front of me. “Don’t antagonize your sister, Johnny,” she said. “Eat up. Your father will be home soon and I need the table to make my popcorn balls.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“And don’t slurp your beans,” she added, as she turned back to the stove.

“Yes ma’am,” I repeated.

Kids in those days weren’t lavished with gifts at Christmas as kids are today . . . at least not in the hills. When an adult considers it a luxury to own a bicycle to get to and from work more easily, that should tell you something. But Momma and Dad always made sure that “Santa Claus” left a little something for us kids on Christmas morning. There would usually be a doll of some sort for Mary, a new pair of gloves or some boots for me, and a little something for Rawlin and Becca. Other than that, we had fruit—apples and naval oranges, usually—and some hard candy. Fresh fruit and candy were unusual back then, so we considered those things pretty good Christmas gifts. And, of course, Christmas was the only time of year that Momma made her popcorn balls and candied sweet potatoes. So, all in all, we lived like kings on Christmas Day.

But this year was going to be different. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I did. There was a shiny Winchester rifle in the catalog that I had been drooling over. That was no exception; Mary and I were always drooling over things in the catalog, even though we knew we would never get them. A few weeks later, I saw the same model show up in Wilbur Castleton’s store in Robbins, and I had stood there, gazing longingly into the display case, until Dad had to practically drag me out the door.

I had overheard Momma and Dad talking a few nights later. Mary and I were supposed to be asleep, but I had trouble sleeping that night. I overheard them through the thin walls as they sat in the yard and talked beneath the light of the moon.

“I don’t know, Paul, that’s an awful lot of money,” I heard Momma say.

“I know. And God knows there’s lots of things around here we could use it on. A new mare, for instance. Who knows how long it’ll be before ol’ Sally gives out? But, doggone it, Cassie, that boy’s almost a man now, and it’s time he had a man’s gun. We ask him to do a lot around here. Gather food for the table, go out and cut firewood in the hills where he’s liable to happen up on a snake or a bear at any time. He’s been totin’ that single-shot twenty-two rifle around too long.”

They had continued to discuss it, and finally agreed. Momma had been sticking back a little extra egg and sewing money, and they figured they had enough to buy the rifle for me and something special for Mary, as well.

I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep that night, or for several nights after. I couldn’t wait to show the gun to the guys when school started back after Christmas. They would all be jealous.

So I was excited that Christmas Eve as I plowed through my beans, dumplins and cornbread. So excited that I even obeyed Momma’s orders to not tease Mary, and that was always a difficult task to obey. Mary was still working on the paper chains, humming Away in a Manger as she did so. Momma was quietly singing along with Mary’s off-key tune as she worked at the stove.

“Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay, close by me forever, and love me I pray.”

There was a racket outside as someone opened the rusty gate to enter the yard.

“Your daddy’s home,” Momma said, relief visible on her face as she wiped her hands on her apron and moved to the door. She always worried about him walking home in the dark on cold nights.

But she stopped short of the door as she heard someone running across the porch. The door burst open, and Becca crashed into the room. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and was out of breath as she hugged her arms around her body, shivering from the cold.

“Mister Jones . . . come straight over . . . said it happened . . . about thirty minutes ago . . .”

“Settle down, child,” Momma said, pushing Becca towards the stove. “You’ll be lucky you don’t catch your death of pneumonia.” But she was already reaching for her coat and gloves as she talked. It was apparent in Becca’s appearance, if not her words: there had been some sort of accident.

“Johnny, I want you to hook Sally up to the wagon,” Momma said quietly. I didn’t need to be told twice. I was curious and wanted to know more about what happened, but I sensed in Momma’s voice that a delay might earn me a switching when Dad got home. It didn’t occur to me at the time that Dad might not be coming home.”

I grabbed my coat and gloves and headed out into the cold. I didn’t take time to whistle for Sam, but he had already climbed out of his box, noticing something was wrong. I quickly hitched Sally to the wagon and drove her to the house. As I climbed off the wagon seat, I saw a light bobbing up the road. It was the Rosses, from further down the valley. Only nine families were settled on Indian Fork Creek, but news traveled quickly. Franklin Jones had brought the news by our place, and had apparently hurried on down the creek to get the word out to our neighbors.

Becca was starting to get some color back in her cheeks by the time I got back into the house—not taking care to stomp the mud from my boots this time—but Momma’s face had gone white in the meantime. “There’s been an accident at the mines,” she said, matter-of-factly. “An explosion. Maybe a cave-in. We’ll drive over right away.”

The Rosses came in the door, out of breath. “Cassie, Becca, we just heard,” Mrs. Ross said. “What can we do?”

“Sit with Mary, please?” Momma said. Mr. Ross nodded. “Of course.”

“No!” Mary yelled. “I wanna come with you!”

Momma wrapped Mary in a hug. “Listen, child, you’re too young. You’ll catch your death in that cold. Stay here with Mr. and Mrs. Ross and we’ll be back soon.”

I saw Momma wipe a tear from her cheek as she turned around. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. And I was afraid.

Becca had taken one of Dad’s old coats and wrapped it around her shoulders. Momma grabbed some spare blankets from the small bedroom off thee end of the small main room.

“But, Momma, we don’t have the tree decorated,” Mary called as we started out the door.

“We’ll do it when we get back,” Momma called back as she hurried to the wagon. Then the door shut, closing out the light that was spilling into the yard. “Take the reins, Johnny,” Momma said as we climbed into the wagon. She and Becca pulled the blankets over themselves as we began the bone-chilling ride through the cold, towards Mine No. 12 on Brimstone Creek.

As Sally struggled to pull the weight of the wagon down the rutted and muddy road through the valley, we saw oil lamps bouncing through door yards at some of the other homes, as others prepared to make the trip to the mines. Of the nine families who lived on Indian Fork Creek, five had men folk who worked at the mine. Somewhere, I thought I heard a woman’s shriek, faint but carried on the bitterly cold air. It could’ve been my imagination. Or a screech owl. We passed Mr. Jones, who was on horseback and spreading the word from family to family.

Soon, we reached the gravel of the main road up Brimstone Creek. We were better than halfway to Mine No. 12. It was four miles from our house by road. Daddy and Rawlin and some of the other miners from the creek cut the distance by walking along the grade of what once had been a narrow-gauge railroad line. I was too young to remember when trains had broken the peaceful silence of Indian Fork Creek Valley, but Dad said they had built the short line into the valley when they were cutting the virgin timber at the turn of the century.

We found a bustle of activity around the mine opening when we arrived. A large fire had been built in front of the mine, and several smaller fires dotted the perimeter of the clearing. A number of oil lamps were hanging from tree limbs or posts. A few horse-drawn wagons and a couple of automobiles were sitting in front of the mine. A crowd of forty or fifty, mostly women, with a few kids my age or a little older, were milling around outside the mine, looking helpless. A group of about a dozen or so men were crowded around the mouth of the mine, holding up lanterns as they appeared to look inside.

An elderly man standing beside the mine hurried over when he saw our wagon pull up. I recognized him as George Willingham. I had seen him talking to Dad at company picnics. He lived near the mine and had been a life-long miner. While he was too old for his body to handle the physical rigors of mining, he considered the workers at the mine his responsibility, and would often check in on them several times each day.

“Cassie. Becca,” he said, nodding his head grimly.

“George,” Momma said, “What happened?”

The old man shook his head, his white mane waving in the wind. When he spoke, his voice shook. “The furnace went down before lunch. The men wanted to push on anyway, so they didn’t have to come back to the mine tomorrow, it bein’ Christmas an’ all. I seen the dust comin’ out the openin’ there right about quittin’ time. I had come over to wish the men a merry Christmas.”

George’s voice choked. Momma put a hand on his shoulder. “George, the men . . . is there any word?”

George shook his head, then cleared his throat as he attempted to regain his composure. “No word, Cassie. No word at all. We figure the gas must’ve built up enough durin’ the day that somehow it caused the explosion. We don’t know where the men were at down there. We got down so far, but there’s still too much dust in there. We gotta wait fer it to clear. The good news is that the explosion prob’ly weren’t too big, ’cause there wouldn’t have been that much gas build up in there in that short a time. So there’s hope there, anyway.”

Momma nodded. “But if the cave-in cut off circulation . . .” She didn’t finish; she didn’t need to. George nodded. “Yeah. Even them that survived wouldn’t have long.”

There didn’t seem to be much else that could be done. I sat on the wagon with Becca, who was crying softly. I felt like crying, too, but had resolved myself not to. Momma moved around to the circles of people who were huddled around fires outside the mine, talking to each one. Dad had served as foreman at the mine for a while before taking a sick leave a couple of years earlier, and Momma knew most of the families. She often said that the other miners respected Dad and would vote him back in as foreman if they had a vote, which of course they didn’t.

Eventually, Reverend Johnson arrived at the mine in a buckboard. He was pastor of the Baptist church near the mouth of Brimstone Creek, where many of the families attended Sunday services. Carrying his Bible, he made a round through the worried women and teenagers who were gathered outside the mine, some praying, many crying and all worried, as they awaited word from inside. A couple of times, men would venture into the mine, only to come back out a few minutes later, shaking their heads.

An hour after we arrived, a couple of automobiles rolled up, and several men got out of each. “Company men, from Knoxville,” muttered George, who had walked back up to the wagon. “Bastards can’t bother comin’ up here to get payroll out on time ev’ry other Friday, but you let ‘em be worried ’bout some kind of liability and they can make it in less than two hours.” He punctuated his disdain of the men with a spit of tobacco onto the frozen ground between his muddy and tattered boots.

A short time later, two more cars arrived. “Speakin’ of bastards,” George said, as men carrying cameras climbed out of the cars and began to hurriedly snap their flashbulbs and write notes in pads they pulled from their back pockets.

“Big city press don’t have no respect for grievin’ people, do they?” another man said quietly as he walked up beside George, watching as the men in suits hurried through the crowd. George later said that the man talking to us was editor of the Scott County News, the local newspaper, while the men who had arrived in cars were stringers from newspapers in Knoxville and Nashville.

“Ever since Fraterville, those guys are like vultures,” George said, referring to the 1903 disaster at Coal Creek, just across the mountain, which killed more than two hundred miners. He spit again, wiping his mouth on his coat sleeve. I noticed the tan sleeve was stained brown, as if he had made a habit of wiping that way.

As the evening wore on, I noticed that the group of men gathered around the mine had gotten smaller. The rest of the men had disappeared into the mine. Finally, one came back out. “It’s completely blocked,” he yelled. “We’re tryin’ to get through now.”

A man in the crowd yelled back, “Y’all hearin’ anythang in there?”

The man from the mine shook his head. “Nothin’ yet,” he said before ducking back into the mine entrance.

George sighed. “Well, I guess that’s somethin’.” I had no idea what he meant, and didn’t ask. Beside me on the wagon seat, Becca appeared to be stunned, sitting quietly. On the ground, the crowd had instinctively pushed closer to the mine when the men had brought the announcement of the collapse. After a while, they drifted back to their fires as they resigned themselves to a long night spent waiting for news.

More trucks arrived just before 9 p.m. George wandered over to talk to the men, who were climbing out with tools and other gear in hand. I heard him tell Mrs. Jenkins, who I recognized but didn’t really know, that the men were work crews from Mine No. 6 in neighboring Campbell County. “Awfully kind of ‘em to come out on Christmas Eve to help people they don’t know,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “Miners is like brothers, ma’am,” George replied. “Ain’t nobody gonna leave their brother out in the cold, ’specially at Christmas.”

We were left alone as George wandered up to the mine, probably to see if they would let an old man help. Becca finally spoke. And I realized why she had been so silent. “Rawlin didn’t realize he was gonna be a daddy,” she whispered. A tear slid silently down her face, but she was apparently finished crying. That seemed to be the case with most of those gathered around the fires. The tears would doubtlessly return later, but exhaustion and the cold seemed to be staving off the tears at that time.

“I was gonna tell him tomorrow,” Becca continued. “It was gonna be his Christmas present.”

“You’re gonna have a baby?” I asked. She nodded. “The signs have been there for a while. I went to see Mrs. Simms, the midwife, earlier this week. She said near as she could tell, I’m pregnant.”

“Wow,” I said. I was thirteen. It was all I could think of to say. Becca nodded. “Rawlin always wanted to be a daddy.” She smiled as another tear slid down her cheek. “You’re gonna be an uncle.”

I always thought being an uncle would make a body feel grown up. But I didn’t feel very grown up right then and there.”

A while later, I was nodding off when shouting jerked me from the grasp of sleep. A man was standing atop a bank above the mine. “We got knockin’ up here!” he yelled. “Knockin’ comin’ from the ventilation shaft! Somebody’s alive down there!”

A cheer went up from the crowd, which had swelled to nearly a hundred as neighbors and interested bystanders joined the wives, parents and children huddled outside the mine.

For the next few hours, the mood at the mine was almost cheerful. But as midnight approached, the reports coming from inside, where crews were fighting to get through the collapse, were consistently negative. The mood quickly began to grow somber again. A new convoy of trucks arrived at around midnight, carrying a group of women. Somebody said they were church ladies from Robbins and Oneida. With the assistance of some of the men, they set up makeshift tables and began broiling coffee on the fires and laying out sandwich stuff. A few ventured over for sandwiches and cookies, but most just wanted the coffee. Nobody felt much like eating.

Momma and George had been talking to the side of the crowd, and they wandered back over to our wagon. The worry was evident in Momma’s eyes, and it looked as though she had been crying again. She climbed onto the wagon seat and wrapped her arms around Becca.

“Becca,” she said. “No matter what happens here tonight, you’re always welcome in our home. I want you to know that.”

As the two women sat crying and wrapped in embrace, I wandered over to the table, grabbing two slices of bread and a slice of roast beef. I found a spot next to one of the fires and sat down on a stump someone had carried over. George ventured over, too.

“Momma’s awfully worried,” I said. “Isn’t the tappin’ a good sign?”

George nodded. “It’s better than no sound at all, that’s fer sure.”

“So?”

George cleared his throat. “One of the men from the work crews knows Morse code. He climbed up there and listened to the knockin’. He says they’re tappin’ out the number five.”

“Five? What’s that mean?”

George shrugged. “Could mean any number of things. But the most likely thing is prob’ly that five men are alive.”

“How many are in there?”

“There was more than forty in there when she collapsed,” George said.

“Oh.”

George put his hand on his shoulder. “It doesn’t mean that’s bad news. The rest of ‘em could be in another part of the mine, cut off from the others.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying but failing to sound encouraged. “What happens if the ventilation was cut off?”

“Well, the guys workin’ down in there right now say it’s shut off good. So they ain’t no doubt that the ventilation is cut off, you ask me. But if some of ‘em is alive right now, it’s ’cause they found a pocket of air that they can breathe. They’ll have until whenever that runs out.”

“And then what?”

“Then they’ll suffocate.”

I wished I hadn’t asked. “Sorry, son,” George said, patting my shoulder again. “But I know you’re old enough that I can shoot straight with you.”

George was silent for a minute. Then he pointed up at the sky. “See that?” A star to the north was shining brightly. “Most folks would tell you that’s the north star,” George said. “Don’t you listen to ‘em. It’s the Christmas star. Any other time of year it might be the northern star. But tonight it’s the Christmas star, same as what led them wise men to Bethlehem back in the day.”

I nodded, not sure of what to say. A man from on top came back to the edge of the bank and announced that it was midnight and that the tapping was still being heard. George headed back to the mine to find out the latest from the work crews. I wandered back to the wagon, where Becca had laid her head on Momma’s shoulder. Momma was rocking and humming silently. I recognized the old hymn she was humming as Blessed be the Name of the Lord, a song we often sang at Sunday services.

Lying down in the back of the wagon, I pulled one of the blankets over me and soon fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was still dark. Becca was crying softly. Around the fires, I heard some of the others crying, too. As I sat up, Momma informed me that the tapping had stopped at around two o’clock, a little more than two hours earlier. Two hours had passed since any sound had been heard from inside the mine. George had reported that the crews inside the mine were making some progress,but there was no sign that they were anywhere close to the end of the collapse. It could be hours or even days before they managed to battle through all the debris that had clogged the passageway, he said.

The company men were huddled in a small group away from the rest of the crowd. They appeared to be talking in quiet tones. Some of the onlookers had gone home, but most had stayed. None of the family members had left, of course.

George wandered back by the wagon at five o’clock. The men on top had been banging on the shaft, he said, hoping to hear a response from inside, but they had gotten none. It had been more than three hours since the last sound had been heard.

“Could they be tryin’ to conserve their energy?” Momma asked. George shrugged. “Could be. But most likely if they hear tappin’ from outside and know somebody’s tryin’ to communicate with ‘em, they’ll tap back, ’cause knowin’ there’s someone alive inside will make the rescue workers work all that much faster to get in to ‘em.”

At six o’clock, reports from where the men were working to get through the collapse reported that gas levels were building, with the furnace down and no proper ventilation inside the mine.

“If the gas is buildin’ on this side, I hate to think what those fellers on the other side is havin’ to deal with,” George said, shaking his head sadly.

As dawn approached, a man I didn’t know came by the wagon. “Reverend Johnson is askin’ ev’ryone to come t’gether for prayer at sunrise,” he said. George nodded. “That seems reasonable. I think most everbody has been prayin’ all night, but a little more sure can’t help.” Momma nodded her agreement as well.

As the lightening sky began to show hints of orange in the east, everyone moved in on the large fire at the center and took the hand of their closest neighbor, forming a large circle, more than one hundred strong, around the fire. The first peek of the sun began to show over the mountain. It was Christmas morning.

“Ordinarily, I would read something from Psalms 23,” Rev. Johnson began. “But on this morning, the Gospel of Luke seems more appropriate.” Opening his Bible, he began to read. “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”

The preacher closed his Bible. “Let us pray,” he said. A hundred heads simultaneously bowed, as Rev. Johnson lifted his eyes towards the heavens.

“Lord, you gave us a miracle on this day more than nineteen hundred and fifty years ago,” he said. “You gave us the life of your son so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. Now we come before you as humbly as we know how to ask you for another miracle: Another miracle of life.”

He prayed on, but I couldn’t tell you what he prayed. I’m ashamed to say that the years have erased my memory of the reverend’s exact words. But when he finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the circle, and a hundred other prayers had been lifted as he prayed his prayer.

After the sound of a heartfelt “amen” echoed through the head of the holler where the mine opening was located, no one broke the circle. To a person, every man, woman and child in the circle continued to hold the hand of his or her neighbor. No one spoke. That might have been awkward in most circumstances, but it didn’t seem awkward at the time. It was if the desperate hopes of a coal-mining community were being silently exhibited.

Then, from somewhere on the other side of the circle, someone began to sing. “Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright.”

More voices began to join in. “Round yon virgin, mother and child. Holy infant so tender and mild.”

By this time, every person gathered in the circle had joined in. “Silent night, holy night. Son of God, love’s pure light. Radiant beams from Thy holy face, with the dawn of redeeming grace. Jesus, Lord at Thy birth; Jesus, Lord at Thy birth.”

As the song ended, the sound was still echoing down the holler when another voice began another old hymn, one that I had heard my own mother singing from the stove just over twelve hours earlier, though it seemed as if an eternity had passed. “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. The little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head. The stars in the sky looked down where He lay. The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.”

It was in the middle of the third song—O Holy Night, if memory serves me right—when shouting emerged from the mine opening. “We’re through! We’re through!”

The singing ended, as everyone turned abruptly towards the mine opening. I saw a woman clasp her hands together beneath her chin in a silent prayer of hope. A child, who couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, clung to her leg with one arm, holding a teddy bear with the other. I hoped for the sake of the child that her father was one of the five who had survived . . . assuming any had made it through the night.

Minutes stretched on for what seemed like forever as the crowd watched the mine entrance expectantly. An entire community awaited news of their loved ones. We were greeted only by silence. Then, from somewhere inside, we heard shouts of joy.

“Praise be to God,” I heard someone cry in the crowd. “Some of them must still alive in there!”

Moments later, two of the rescue workers emerged from the mine. Between them, with an arm thrown over each of their shoulders, was a man whose leg was obviously broken. His clothes and face were smeared black with coal dust, and I didn’t recognize him as one of the men from the work crew. The woman with the child clinging to her leg screamed and surged forward. Five or six men crowded around the man, slapping him on the back, but the woman fought through them, throwing herself upon her husband.

Another miner stumbled out of the entrance, then another. Then one of the men from the work crew emerged. “All of ‘em!” he shouted. “All of ‘em are alive and accounted for!”

A roar went up from the crowd, as women and children crowded close to the mine. I heard Rev. Johnson laugh. “It’s a miracle!” he shouted. “A Christmas miracle!”

As the miners continued to pour out of the mine and greet their waiting loved ones outside, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see old George, who was plugging a new chew of tobacco into his jaw with his other hand. “I knew there was somethin’ goin’ on when I seen that big ol’ Christmas star up there in the sky last night,” he said with a grin. “We’ll sure be celebratin’ Christmas today, won’t we son?” I grinned back. “We sure will!” And then Dad and Rawlin emerged from the mine.

We were soon loaded in the wagon and headed back to the farm. Six of the miners had suffered broken arms or legs. Several others had injured their backs or bumped their heads in the explosion. Dad and Rawlin were among the lucky ones who had escaped unscathed. Everyone was talking and laughing at once, and Becca couldn’t wait until we made it back to the house to break her big news to Rawlin. I wasn’t sure who was more excited—Rawlin, at the prospect of being a father, or Dad, at the prospect of being a grandfather. Even ol’ Sally seemed to be in the Christmas spirit, pulling the extra weight in the wagon as if it were no burden at all.

“I’m gonna get home and warsh some of this coal dust off and then we’re gonna celebrate Christmas like we ain’t never celebrated Christmas before,” Dad said. “I hope you all got that tree decorated last night.” Momma slapped his arm. “You know better’n that.” He laughed. “Well, let’s get on home. We got a tree to decorate and a Christmas ham to eat, and then I believe me and Johnny are gonna have a good excuse to go huntin’.”

When you think back to the good ol’ Christmases of days gone by, it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s been so long. We had a lot of good Christmases to come in that old house on Indian Fork Creek in the years that followed, but that one in nineteen and thirty-three is the one that stands out, for obvious reasons. Everyone thinks back to the Christmases of his childhood with fond memories, of course, but I think our Christmases back then, back when we could hardly even afford to have Christmas at all, were just a little more special.

Dad lived for thirty years after his close call in Mine No. 12 that year. He never went back in the coal mines. He and Rawlin went to work in the log woods, instead. And when I was old enough, I joined them. Dad died in nineteen and sixty-three. Momma died fourteen years later. Rawlin and Becca are gone, too. Mary, and even little Paul Rawlin—we called him Paulie—have passed on. Paulie, who came to the valley six months after the collapse at Mine No. 12, was the last to go, just four years ago. All of them are buried in a small cemetery atop a hill near the head of Indian Fork Creek, where me and Sam once roamed for squirrels and deer with my shiny new Winchester lever-action rifle.

And, soon, I’ll join them. I’m eighty-nine now. I know I won’t live forever, and I wouldn’t want to, anyway. Christmas has changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better. It’s too commercial now. My great-grandkids are asking for video game systems like Xboxes and DS’s. I think back to the day when we could barely afford a little fruit and hard candy for Christmas. When ol’ Sally was pulling us up and down the muddy road through the valley and our real trees were decorated with paper chains and strings of popcorn. When our Christmas carols were faintly streamed in by the old AM radio. We could’ve done it better, I guess. But I wouldn’t have done it any other way.