From the book

By the time the mine was quiet again, the clocks above ground had kept going.

They moved past five o’clock, past six, past the hour when the men should have come home dirty and hungry, complaining about the shift and asking what was for supper. They moved through the night at Brookwood and into the next morning, while wives stood by telephones and children were told to stay inside. They went on while men in hard hats spoke in low voices beneath the floodlights, and while the road to No. 5 filled with pickup trucks, deputies, preachers, company people, reporters, and those who had come because they did not know what else to do.

Years later, there would be names.

Names in newspaper columns. Names on plaques. Names spoken at churches and union halls. Names remembered by men who had worked beside them and could still tell, without looking up, who wore his cap low, who carried peppermint in his shirt pocket, who could fix a piece of equipment with wire and bad language, who always took the long way out of the mine because he wanted to be the last man to leave his section.

But at five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, September 23, 2001, they were not names yet. They were not anything yet that a plaque could hold.

They were men going underground.

The mine lay two miles north of Brookwood, beneath the ridges and red Alabama clay, beneath roads and trees and yards where dogs slept in the shade. From above, there was little to explain what existed below: miles of entries cut through black coal, belt lines and power cables, ventilation doors, machines, roof bolts, and chambers where a man might be two thousand feet beneath daylight and still hear another man laugh.

No. 5 was deeper than most people could imagine. It had its own weather, its own rules, its own darkness. Men said a mine could talk if you listened long enough. It creaked. It ticked. Water dripped where water had no business being. Steel complained under weight. The earth settled itself one grain at a time.

That Sunday, thirty-two men rode down for an afternoon maintenance shift.

They had no production to make. No coal had to be cut. They were there to repair, inspect, move equipment, keep the place running. It was the kind of shift that could feel almost easy compared with a regular day—though no man who worked underground would have called it easy. Some had traded shifts. Some had hoped to be home before dark. Some had told their wives they would not be long.

At 5:20 p.m., the mountain broke its silence.

Fifty-five minutes later, thirteen men were dead.

This is the story of the time between.