Ike continued his rhythmic recitations, barely audible. I studied those around me in the scant light. Mother Deborah, the other two Monacans, and Ruth’s kinswoman. Hard expressions. Lips set in thin lines. Ike was not going to make it, and we all knew it.

  Everyone but Ruth.

  I looked away. I wanted to focus on anything else. I took in our immediate surroundings. If the slide weren’t just behind me, I’d have had no idea where I stood. This was once the largest chamber of the mine. Somewhere, buried under all this rubble, was the rail where miners emptied their pails into mule carts. White oak banded with black iron. Now, I found myself in a jagged-walled tunnel. Two men couldn’t have walked abreast without scraping cloth and skin on the walls. The ceiling remained high and pitched toward the center. Cathedral-like.

  All along, I heard Ike’s steady prayer as an undercurrent.

  In a single chaotic moment, several things happened at once. Cracks appeared in the floor, and suddenly the grade changed, just enough to make everything feel wrong. Ike cried out in sudden pain as the boulder pinning him shifted. We were forced to catch ourselves against the walls as the entire mine tilted disorientingly.

  After the tumult came a deep rumble. Stone grinding against stone, drowning out every other sound. It was followed by a long, dragging scrape. I thought of my dog Hewey, pulling up the stake he was affixed to in the yard and dragging the iron chain across the stepping stones leading up to the parsonage porch. It was like that, but infinitely louder and lower in pitch.

  I looked at the others and knew their wide-eyed staring mirrored my own. As one, we looked ahead, where a sharp elbow in the tunnel obscured what lay beyond.

  Still Ike ticked on under his breath. Oblivious.

  I lifted my hands from where I’d stablized, and crumbles of black coal fell to the ground. I had steadied myself on what trapped Ike. It wasn’t stone. It was the largest fracture of coal I had ever seen. What force could do that, I didn’t like to dwell on.

  Deborah knelt beside Ruth. The rest of us edged closer, leaning in to catch the whispered exchange. Even the faintest scrape of a boot on stone sent a wave of panic through me.

  I saw Ruth’s jaw clench tight. “I ain’t leaving him. We’ll think of some way to get him out,” Ruth hissed through her teeth.

  “We can’t. The load transferred when that timber gave,” one of the Monacan men said softly. He paused, hovering his hand just above the beam we had lifted from Ike’s chest. He looked Ruth dead in the eye. “We will never move it under that much weight. Even if we could, this rib would come right over on us.” He gestured along the jagged wall.

  He frowned. “I’m sorry,” barely above a whisper.

  He spoke sense. Listening closely, I noticed his voice carried a higher pitch than the one I had heard earlier, when I grabbed that boot in the dark of the rescue tunnel and near jumped out of my skin. I’d have pegged him for that deep voice, given him being the heavier of the two men.

  I itched to put names to everyone for sanity’s sake, but now did not seem the time for introductions to be made.

  Suddenly, I became aware that Ike had stopped his mutterings.

  “Ruth,” he exhaled his wife’s name like a prayer.

  His eyes opened and seemed to clear as he looked up at her.

  Ruth wiped at her eyes, smearing black coal dust down her quivering brown cheek. We were all covered in the stuff. “Ike, what you got yourself into?” she teased through tears.

  “You got to leave me here now.”

  “You hush!”

  Her raised voice made us all flinch. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Something passed through that strange, sourceless light. It moved away from us like ripples across a pond.

  Despite her anger, Ruth felt it too. I could see it in the sudden tension of her shoulders.

  She drew a breath and spoke again, carefully measured. “Don’t talk foolishness. I came in here to get my husband and bring him home, and that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  She looked around at each of us, daring anyone to object.

  Ike shut his eyes tight and let out a deep, rattling cough. As he labored for breath, the rattle persisted. Ruth’s shoulders sagged. She bit down on her lip.

  “Our Father,” she began falteringly.

  I knew the words well. Lately, hearing my own father quote scripture felt like a betrayal, but this was different.

  At first, hope swelled in me. I half expected something to happen. Some kind of miracle.

  When she finished with “forever, amen,” nothing did.

  I clenched my fist. I felt a crack run through the dam in my chest.

  “Lord, please,” she cried out, and slapped her hands, palm down, on Ike’s chest.

  Too hard.

  I heard the crack of bone, and Ike screamed. Then I saw his chest expand. Sharp. Unnatural. It didn’t make sense. A slight, middle-aged woman couldn’t have struck him that hard. Ike’s eyes rolled back in his head. One by one, his ribs corrected themselves, popping back into place. Beneath the boulder came a secondary snap of bone.

  Ruth leapt to her feet, eyes wide, her silent scream mirroring her husband’s very audible one.

  All at once, Ike sat straight up and slapped his palm against the coal that trapped him.

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  It glowed.

  At first faintly, then with rising intensity until it burned white-hot. Impossible to look at. I shut my eyes and shielded them with my arm.

  The air in the mine changed. It rushed past me as a gale, tousling my hair. I smelled sulfur, and beneath it something subtler.

  After a moment of stillness, where I dared not open my eyes, the air moved again, this time in the opposite direction. Coalescing in our midst.

  The shelf of fallen coal was gone.

  In its place stood a perfect, translucent object. Enormous, but far smaller than the coal break that had pinned Ike. I followed its length to where it supported the semi-collapsed rib.

  Ike was free.

  We were not crushed.

  For a moment, we all just stared at the impossible thing. Behind it Ike sat blinking. His hair stood on end, and a trickle of blood ran from his nose and sank into his thick salt and pepper beard. He swayed, but caught himself.

  The object was clear. When I shifted my gaze at certain angles, it refracted the light. Little rainbows.

  Mother Deborah made the first move. She reached out her hand, rising slowly. She nearly touched it. Drew back. Reaching again, she fully extended her hand this time and palmed it, the column, I’d already begun to think of that way, as functional as it was impossible. I saw her hand strangely mushed up against it from my vantage, roughly opposite her. Her palm looked washed out, the way skin does when it’s submerged in water.

  “It’s real,” she stated flatly.

  That somehow broke the spell. I felt everyone start breathing normally again.

  “Ike!” Pastor Ruth collapsed tearfully next to her husband, bending at the waist to embrace him. The gray cast was gone from his face, though his jaw hung slack and he just patted his wife’s arm bemusedly, like all of us, this strange phenomenon still commanded his attention.

  Deborah withdrew her hand and leaned her shoulder against the column casually. She stared at me appraisingly for a long moment. I returned her gaze. I had the sneaking suspicion that she knew something the rest of us didn’t. Maybe that was the way a young man always felt about a particularly striking woman.

  I had to ask myself what I really knew about this unsettling person anyway. Why had I thrown in with her on this rescue venture?

  I had spent some time amongst the Monacans. I liked to hear their stories. I climbed to their ridge when I had a mind to trade and stayed when they had a mind to share some tobacco or a tale round the fire after. I could tell my father I was heading up to do missionary work and he wouldn’t put up too much of a fight. Really, I was there to listen, not preach. Perhaps that’s the true mission work.

  You couldn’t call their settlement a village, more a handful of log cabins and barns. That’s where I’d first seen Mother Deborah. I couldn’t say I met her. I just noticed her.

  She had a kind of magnetism. A quiet confidence. I saw it in how she just stared into people’s eyes like she was reading their secrets. When she did it to me, it felt invasive, but I must admit I liked it in a way.

  I asked Henry, a Monacan I’d spent some time with on trading days, who she was. “Mother Deborah,” he said solemnly. Strange. She couldn’t be more than a year or two my senior. I didn’t know if it was an honorific or some other kind of title peculiar to the Monacans, but I didn’t inquire further. I just took the information in. Ingested.

  I thought about how it suited her somehow. She deserved a mantle.

  I noted that she plainly had no husband or children. The Monacans had adopted our simple custom of wedding bands to eliminate confusion amongst the other folk in town. She bore no ring.

  “Hale’s boy, Tom, is it?” The husky Monacan held out his hand to me. Shaken suddenly from my reverie, I accepted the help to my feet. “I’m David, and this is John.” He nodded to the thinner man behind him.

  Up close now, I suddenly realized I recognized John. I’d never spoken to him much, because he struggled with English and I knew a bare handful of words in the Siouan of his people.

  “You’re Henry’s brother,” I blurted.

  He grimaced.

  My smile faded. It hit me all at once. Henry worked the seam last night. He was in here somewhere. Maybe under all this rubble.

  “I’m sor-” I began, but stopped as David put his hand on my shoulder.

  “S’ok.”

  “I bet he’s alright,” I rushed to add. Lying.

  “Tank. You.” He paused between the words with effort, not emphasis. He forced a smile. I think he was trying to be grateful for the lie.

  I looked back to the mysterious new object. Deborah was no longer there, I saw her just behind it, speaking with Ruth’s kinswoman.

  I felt something brush across my mind, like the feeling of a cold draft across my neck.

  “It’s a diamond,” John said.

  I jumped, “What?”

  “Sorry, that thing, that pole or pillar stretching up from the floor. It’s bearing the load of the rib. Ike… he made that, you know? It’s the biggest diamond ever discovered. Must be. It’s beautiful, and did you notice? At the top and bottom. Shaped like a courthouse column.”

  I hung on John’s words, fascinated at first, though as he continued, his cadence sped and I felt something heavy form in my stomach.

  I named what I was sensing. Avarice.

  “This thing would be worth a fortune, even if it were made of quartz.” He stopped suddenly short and frowned. “I guess it belongs to Crowe. He’d say it’s his mine, and Ike made it from his coal.” He shrugged.

  I saw an empire of wealth and opportunity die in his eyes. I felt myself relax.

  I looked back at the thing appraisingly. I hadn’t noticed the shaping. It did have a top and bottom with a rounded, then square termination on each end. Indeed, much like a courthouse column. I looked about me, everyone had leaned into John’s impromptu lecture.

  “But, you didn’t make it, couldn’t have. Right, Ike?” Ruth belatedly argued, prompting her husband.

  “I did.” He held her gaze for a long moment. “And you healed me. Set my bones.”

  I became aware that we had all gathered around the pillar unconsciously, like we were sitting around a campfire to hear a story.

  “No, no… that must have been the Lord,” she said reflexively. Falteringly.

  Ike studied her for a long moment, then looked around at all of us, leaning closer to his wife.

  I sensed the rest of us were invading this familial moment.

  “Maybe. But even so, you were the vessel of whatever power did that healing.” Ike nodded sagely and put his arm around Ruth.

  I felt my heart beat faster. As I looked around beyond our small circle, I felt my pulse quicken, that sense of dread, like some danger was just ahead, but maddeningly I could not confirm it with any of my bodily senses.

  “Well, we got you safe now. That’s what matters. Now we can get you home.” Ruth crossed her arms.

  A stir. David shook his head and rose to his feet, turning his back to the circle and striding a few steps away. John opened his mouth as if to speak, but caught sight of Mother Deborah shaking her head at him, and he promptly closed it.

  Ruth’s younger kinswoman grasped the crook of Ruth’s elbow gently but firmly. She tried to whisper, but the words carried clear to all of us, as though floated upon a breeze. “I didn’t just come here for Ike.”

  She studied Ruth as if seeking a particular recognition there in Ruth’s face.

  “Esther, honey…” Ruth trailed off. She held Esther’s gaze. Gave the slightest shake of her head.

  I looked up, voicing what I sensed even as the thoughts solidified. “Somethings listening, or… studying us. I don’t know how to say it.”

  Everyone fell still.

  Deborah locked eyes with me. Her eyes were dark pools. I saw what I somehow knew was not surprise, but recognition. Maybe more than that.

  Approval.