The night was episodic, rife with visions of the girl, her face clouding, her lip separating into a grotesque caricature of Laura Ann, her image crowded into the usual dreams of dark places and suffocating warmth, of tunnels, confinement, and blackness. And, as always, he would awake in fright, sweating and hyperventilating as if the seam had collapsed all over again, trapping him behind a wall of stone and coal. He had spent sixteen hours breathing coal dust, terrified in the tomb-black darkness of the hole, waiting for the sound of shovels and voices, fearing they would never come. Every night since they had pulled him to the surface, the dreams have come to remind him of the collapsing mine crushing his back just enough to keep him above the ground and to assure his poverty and his reliance on nature and a monthly disability check.

With the morning came the decision to drive into Pikeville, some thirty miles, to report the girl. Ermal pulled the blocks from the tires of his rotting Ford F-150, released the parking brake and rocked in the seat to urge the truck into a roll; it picked up speed quickly, and before he reached the road he popped the clutch and shocked the sleeping engine to life. The truck shuddered and hesitated for several minutes, black smoke pouring from the tail pipe, until Ermal worked his way through the gears and the machine began to remember its function.

It was a good twelve miles down the mountain, all impatient curves and switchbacks. Ermal sounded his horn around the corners, slowing just enough to prepare for fallen rocks and washedout and rutted shoulders. As it was, most of the road was one lane. Eventually it came out on 460, which would take him all the way into Pikeville, but it was slow going and gave him plenty of time to think about what to say. But the more he thought about it, the more he began to doubt himself. Reporting a dead, naked girl would surely attract unwanted attention, and the last thing he needed was some wiseass detective trying to connect him to it. If someone took the time and effort to dig in the right places, to mine the right vein, who knows what he might come up with? Junebug still worked for J. S. Southeastern, and the wrong memory planted in a fertile imagination could only lead to trouble. Ermal took the truck down 460 as far as the Chevron station, put five dollars into the gas tank with the engine running, and thought about placing a call into Pikeville. But he knew that unless he showed someone where she was, they'd never find her, so he pulled the truck around and turned back up the mountain.

The cardinal lay at the end of the drive, just at the juncture of the road. It was being crowded by metallic green bottle flies, bright and alien against the dusky red and brown feathers, its one visible eye black, reflectionless, its beak open in a silent cry against this violation. Ermal nudged the lifeless form with his foot, scattering the annoyed, buzzing flies. He picked the bird up by the tail feathers and carried it nearer the creek, where the earth was softer, and kicked a shallow grave with the heel of his cracked leather boot and covered the bird. Three days after Ermal had found the girl's body, he decided to bury her.

The dreams had not left him. If anything, they had become more frequent, more scarifying than ever. As he wound his way up along the tracks the images plagued him - entrapment, heat and closeness, the girl's body. Ermal walked with a short-handled garden spade slung over his shoulder; with his other hand he held the rope of the barrel-stave sled he used for dragging deadfall and firewood.

The girl lay as before, unmoved, but altered just the same. Her face had the look of marble, the eyes dry and sunken, the fear carved permanently into her features. Ermal looked away from her face and turned his eyes to her body instead. She had gone blue- white, and there was the smell of rot about her. Flies and some other, larger, parasite had been at her. Her entire backside was black, bruised from the pooling of her thickened blood. Ermal managed to lift her onto the sled a little at a time so as not to touch her with more than his hands. The corner of a stave broke the flesh of her back just above the shoulder blade, but, of course, the wound did not bleed.

It was not far to the edge of the ridge at the end of the field farthest from the track, but it was slow going; Ermal had to stop every few steps to rest his back. He wanted to put her there, beneath the scars of the abandoned mines, to bury her along with the rest of his past. The soil was rocky, less forgiving, this high up the mountain, and it took Ermal more than three hours, with frequent rests, to dig a hole six feet long, and two feet wide and deep. It was perhaps not as deep as it should have been, but it was the best that Ermal could manage; he already knew from the ache in his back that he would pay dearly for his labor.

Ermal filled the grave with the same methodical slowness with which he had dug it. He tamped the soil with the back of the shovel and then stood for a moment, listening in the silence, staring at the fresh scar. There was no ceremony. Ermal had never been good with words, and he had never been particularly close to God, who he figured gave as little thought to him as he did to God. He figured it was enough that somewhere there were bound to be people who missed her, hoped and longed for her, which was more than some could ever hope for. Ermal thought of leaving the sled there, the sole marker of the otherwise innocuous grave. He had no desire to have it around as a reminder of his task, and it would be less work to make another than to drag it down the mountain after his day of labor. But he knew it was better to leave no trace. He would drag it to the ridge, just beyond the tracks, and send it over the edge. He imagined it sliding down along the mountain, gaining speed as it went, until suddenly a stave caught a root and the whole thing somersaulted and spun out into space, where it could freefall a thousand feet to the Pike river below. Using the shovel as a cane of sorts, he turned his back on the grave and began the long, slow walk home.

That night it rained, a slow, lazy rain, filling the darkness with a damp, cave coolness that made Ermal think of phosphorescence and blind fish. Rain from the slow leak in the roof dripped and landed on the stovetop; he lay on his bed listening to the intermittent sizzle, like hair in a candle flame. He thought of water flowing into the earth, breaking things down, mixing things together, washing the dirt from the darkness, and forcing growth and newness to the surface. Ermal began to lightly tap a knuckle against the wall in time with the rain, only to stop and listen, thinking he heard a newer, stranger sound: the lonely, haunted sound of a train in the night, or the far off wail of a woman calling in the distance.