Winged figure hugging knees across a back

The pit at Cwm Hafod was dry as a biscuit that spring, and the men said the coal itself was tired of being dug. On the ninth of March the cage stuck at four hundred feet with eleven men on it. Idris stood at the top with his cap in his fists while his boy Dai was still below, because Dai had gone down for his father's tin and never come back up. The rescue men went down and came up again with nothing but dust in their hair.

Nobody saw the angel come. Mrs Gwen Lloyd swore it was there at the winding house at dusk, sitting on the wet timber with its knees pulled to its chest, its wings folded so tight they looked like a coat thrown over a chair. It had no face to speak of, only a pale smudge where a face should go, and when Idris walked up to it, it did not look up. It only held on to its own legs and kept its head down, the way a man does when the news is bad and he has decided to wait it out.

So Idris sat down beside it. He sat there all night, and the red glow of the brazier washed the wings the colour of a cut lip, and the angel said nothing, and neither did he. At first light the ground shook under the headframe and the cage came up with Dai in it, black to the eyebrows and singing a hymn he did not know the words to. When Idris looked round, the timber was empty, but there was a feather lying on the spoil heap, grey as slate, with a bright red edge.

Mrs Lloyd still keeps it in a jar on her dresser. Ask her, she'll show you. Now pass that cup over, my throat's dry as that pit used to be.