Tribal-patterned heart design

Your great-grandad Emrys cut timber at Caddon for thirty-one years. Every prop he set, he marked with a little chevron, point up, so the next shift knew which ones he'd tested with his own two hands. Those marks were his name, see, the way you'd sign a letter. He used a gouge he'd ground down himself, and he put a spiral at the end of every run, like the coil of a winding rope, because he said a rope never gives you a straight answer. Then he filled the spaces with dots, one for each shift he'd come up safe. By the time he was fifty his props looked like the lace on my mother's good collar.

The winter the roof came down in the Low Level, he was the one who'd set the last six props before the fall. Nobody thought he'd come up. He came up anyway, with the dust in his lashes and a dent in his helmet the size of a teacup. The first thing he did, before he'd even washed, was walk to the timber yard and cut a heart into the board nailed to the gate, a heart built from all his marks, the points of the chevrons turned inward so they met in the middle.

Nobody asked him why. The men read it the way you'd read a telegram. Some of them went down the Low Level again in spring with a fresh gouge in their pockets.

So when you wonder why we never let the coal dust off the mantel, that's why. Put your finger on the tin, go on. Count the dots.