I sat down on the corridor floor. I put my face in my hands and I laughed once and then I cried. Then I just sat there, feeling the cave’s breath move past me like a river of air that had been waiting all this time for someone to open the door.
When Jonah arrived that morning, I was still sitting there. He stood in the corridor doorway and looked at me, then he looked at the thermometer he had hung on the wall, and then he smiled.
“53 degrees,” he said. “Your granddaddy was right. He was right. And you built it. You finished what he started.”
I looked up at him, this old man with his 1 clouded eye and his hands white with lime and his son buried under a quarry blast, this man who had come out of nowhere because he saw my smoke and remembered a friend who never finished anything.
“We built it,” I said.
He nodded slowly. Then he sat down beside me on the corridor floor, and we sat there together in the mountain’s breath. For the first time since I had arrived at Mercy Gap, I felt like I might not die there.
Part 2
But I had not found the water yet, and the real test, the winter that would prove whether this corridor could do what Silas had dreamed, was still 2 years away.
