My brother-in-law gave me the helmet when I started at Maloma and it wasn't new even then, it already had another man's sweat inside it and the yellow mark where the lamp had rubbed for years, and I put it on, and from that day for eleven years that helmet was the first thing I touched in the morning and the last thing I set down at night, and I always set it down on the same nail behind the door, and my wife knew that if the helmet was on the nail I was home, and if it wasn't I was down below.

On the thirteenth of July we all set it down, the helmet, and not on the nail, we set it down on the road in front of the mine gate, in a row, one beside the other, the way you set down the things of a man who has died, and no one had died, it was us, alive, sitting on the ground beside our helmets because the pay packet had been the same packet for two years and they were saying five per cent this year and four the next, and we counted the bread, and the bread did not fit inside the five per cent.

And for ten days we stayed out, and out there it's cold in July where we are, it's winter, and we lit tyres and stood around the fire and Sipho brought tea in a bucket and we passed it from hand to hand, and no one went below, and the coal sat still in the belly of the hill and for the first time in eleven years it wasn't us bringing it out, and that frightened me and did me good, both things at once.

Then the paper came from the court.

The paper said the strike was illegal, and the paper didn't shout, the paper was typed, with stamps, and it said we had to go back in and stop obstructing the entrance, and obstructing the entrance was us sitting on the ground with our helmets, and the law had a name for us sitting on the ground and it was obstruction, and I didn't know that word before and now I know it.

And the shift boss came out with the paper in his hand and read us the part where it said that whoever didn't go back in was no longer covered, and not covered means they can send you away and nobody says anything because the court's paper is on their side, and he read and didn't look at us, he read the paper as if the paper were stronger than all of us put together, and maybe it was.

And that night at home my wife didn't say go back and didn't say stay out, she put the plate on the table and there was less on the plate than before, and the less was the answer and it wasn't an answer, it was just the plate, and the children ate and one of them asked if I was going below tomorrow and I said sleep.

And on the morning of the twenty-fourth I went to the gate before the others, still in the dark, and the helmets were still there on the road, ten days of rain and frost on them, and I knew mine by the yellow mark from the lamp and by the strap I had mended with wire, and I bent down and took it in my hand, and it weighed what a wet thing weighs, it weighed more than usual, and I stood there with the helmet in my hand and the gate in front of me and the hill behind the gate full of coal that was ours to bring out and was not ours in any other way.

And behind me I heard the others coming, footsteps on the gravel, a few footsteps, not all of them, never all of them again, and each of those footsteps stopped where its helmet was, and nobody said anything, and there was only the sound of straps and of wire and of hands picking up from the ground a thing they had set down ten days before so as not to betray anyone.

I held the helmet in my hand a long time. The night's water ran from the strap onto my wrist and down inside my sleeve, cold, and I felt it reach my elbow and I didn't move, and I thought of my wife who could tell from the helmet on the nail whether I was alive or below, and I thought that now the nail no longer meant that, now the nail meant something else and I hadn't learned that thing yet.

Now time has passed and the helmet is back on the nail in the evening, and the packet is the one they wanted, the five and then the four, and the bread is what there was before, and the children have grown by ten days and then by all the other days, and every morning I take the helmet off the nail and put it on and go down, and I carry the question below with me, into the dark, where it is no use to anyone: that day at the gate, with the cold water running down inside my sleeve, did I put it back on because I had no choice, or did I just put it back on, and tell myself afterwards that I had no choice?