The Ghost's Grave by Peg Kehret

I get over my anger. He says before I get to be an angel, I must love someone so much that the love fills up my heart and pushes out my resentment.”
    Willie’s scowl deepened. “Ain’t nothing going to ease my anger,” he said, “and that’s a fact. So I’m trapped in limbo. Who would I love? Nobody, that’s who. The only ones I loved were my wife and my two boys, and they’ve already moved on without me.”
    â€œYou’re angry at your wife and sons?”
    â€œOf course not! None of it was their fault. They didn’t kill me. We had a good life together, me and Sarah. We had plans for ourselves and for our boys. Big plans! But I didn’t get to be part of them. Two years after I died, Sarah married a newspaperman from Tacoma. He raised my boys, not me. He bought my wife a house, not me. She had the daughter she wanted with him, not with me. All because of that Emil Davies.” He said the name as if he were spitting out rotten food.
    â€œThat’s who you’re angry at? Emil Davies?”
    â€œHis carelessness killed me! He struck a match to light his pipe and
BOOM!
It was the worst explosion the mine ever had. Emil Davies took my life as surely as if he’d held a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. I don’t want to see that wicked man ever again, in this life or the next.”
    â€œWhat happened to him? If he was in the mine with you, wasn’t he killed, too?”
    â€œHe perished and his son with him, and thirteen others besides, including me. The rest are buried in the Carbon City cemetery. All but me. The whole back row of gravestones has the same date of death: May ninth, nineteen-oh-five.”
    â€œYou weren’t buried with your leg?”
    Willie shook his head, the angry look still in his eyes. “Sarah told the coroner she didn’t think it seemly to dig up the grave where my leg was buried in order to bury the rest of me, but the real reason she didn’t plant me there was because she knew I wouldn’t want to spend eternity side by side with Emil Davies. Never liked him when he was living and liked him even less after he killed me.”
    â€œIf the mine blew up and all the miners died, how did Sarah know who caused the explosion?”
    â€œShe knew Emil Davies could never wait till he got out of the mine before lighting his dratted corncob pipe. She knew because I complained of it over and over. All of us miners did. We told Emil not to be in such an all-fired hurry for his smoke, but he never listened. When the mine blew, Sarah figured out what had happened. So did everyone else.”
    â€œI’m surprised you were still working in the mine with one leg missing.”
    â€œI had a peg leg—an uncomfortable chunk of wood that I strapped on every morning.”
    â€œWasn’t it hard to walk down into the mine—and back up again?”
    â€œWe didn’t walk; we rode on hoists. Most days I worked nearly five hundred feet below sea level. The peg leg slowed me down some so I didn’t take a rest break with the others. I worked my full shift, then rode the hoist back up. My company brought out ten thousand tons of coal every month.”
    Willie looked down at his pinned-up pant leg. “Sarah knew how I hated that peg leg so instead of burying it with me, she burned it.”
    â€œIf you aren’t buried with the others who were killed in the explosion, where are you buried?” Even as I asked the question, I realized how bizarre it sounded. Anyone eavesdropping on this conversation would think Willie and I were both crazy.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    W illie didn’t seem to find our conversation odd. He acted as if we met in the tree house every day for a pleasant chat.
    â€œSarah buried me by my favorite fishing spot. She got her brothers and mine to help her. They went to where the coroner had all of us dead miners laid out, wrapped in burlap, and when she said she’d come