In the early hours of a Tuesday in November 1971, Wifred Kums woke in a small bedroom at the back of a clinic building in Corass Fork, West Virginia, to the sound of a teaspoon tapping three times on the rim of a coffee cup. There was no coffee cup in the room. There was no teaspoon. She was alone, and the room was silent except for that sound, three even taps in an unhurried rhythm she had not heard in eight years.
She sat up and spoke her dead brother’s name aloud. From beneath the floor, in response, came the same three taps, one octave lower and closer. Wifred Kums had come to Corass Fork six weeks earlier, in September 1971, to run a satellite health clinic for the state. She was forty-two, a public health nurse with eighteen years of experience, and she had accepted the post because the village held the mine where her brother Halden had died in 1963.
Halden had been an electrician, killed when a roof fell in the number three drift of the reclamation operation at Corless Fork. Four men walked out that day; two did not. Wifred had sat through six days of vigil without weeping, and had carried her brother’s memory quietly ever since. Corass Fork was a leftover company town, built in 1890 by the Whipple Consolidated Coal Company of Baltimore.
The coal had run out by 1931, and the company had sold the houses back to the miners for a dollar apiece. By 1971 the village held forty-one households and eighty-three people, all living on ground that the state had twice tried to buy them out of, in 1964 and 1969, because the land was considered unstable. Both times, no one accepted the offer. A state engineer had noted that the residents seemed to feel an obligation to remain in place, the nature of which he could not clarify.
On her first afternoon in the village, Wifred stopped at Rabby’s store. The owner, Nolan Rabby, recognized her as the sister of the electrician who had died in the mine. He gave her three warnings: do not sleep with the window open, do not pull the iron nail out of the clinic doorframe, and if you ever hear something calling you by a name only one person ever used, do not answer it and do not go looking for the source. Then he said he would not speak of it again.
Wifred drove to the clinic, a two-story frame building that had once been the company office. She inspected the doorframe and found the nail, a small handforged iron spike driven into the wood four and a half feet up on the right side. She went to bed that night at ten. At three eleven in the morning, she woke to the taps.
She wrote down what she had heard in a nurse’s notebook, underlined the words not dreaming, and stayed upright in the dark until dawn. Over the following weeks, the pattern held. There were ground tremors, small shudders that ran through the village, after which the iron nail in the clinic doorframe would have backed out of the wood by a quarter inch. Wifred would drive it back in with a hammer she found under the kitchen sink, always in three taps, never a fourth.
She noticed that every house in the village bore nails in its doorframe. Some had one, some had six. The highest count was on the house at the top of the lane, belonging to an old woman named Iva Belchure. Wifred also began to sleep well for the first time in eight years.
She dreamed of her brother sitting quietly across a kitchen table, saying nothing, just present. The dreams left her warm and rested. She did not understand until later what was happening: the thing in the ground beneath the village was filling the hollow grief had left in her, night after night, to keep her there. On the ninth of November, Wifred heard a slow ticking from the floor of the paymaster’s room.
She knelt and put her ear to the boards. She later described it as the sound of something very large breathing slowly in the ground beneath the building, each breath ending in a small dry click. On the sixteenth of November, the taps began again, and this time a voice spoke from under the bedroom floor. It was her brother’s voice, exactly, in the small easy tone he had used all his life.
It said Freddy, the name only Halden had ever used. Wifred sat in the bed with her hand over her mouth and gave no answer. In the morning she walked to Rabby’s store, and Nolan Rabby sent her to Iva Belchure. Iva was eighty-two, the last of an old family in the hollow, and she told Wifred what the village knew.
The ground under Corass Fork was caves, and in the caves was something old, a listener that put its ear against the underside of the world and kept the voices it heard. It could not cross cold iron, which is why the nails were driven into the doorframes. It had taken Halden’s voice when he died in the mine, and now it was using it against his sister. It wanted her to go to the door, to walk up the lane to the plugged mouth of the mine, and to lay herself down on the concrete seal.
Iva taught Wifred a ritual. Every night, at the front door, she was to say her own name and her brother’s name, in that order, twice. This told the door which voice belonged to the living and which to the dead. Wifred performed it faithfully.
She also drove nails into every opening in the clinic, including the frame of a trapdoor in the kitchen floor that concealed an old pay safe dug into the earth. On the third of December, the voice under the floor said Freddy and told her to wait, then said all right and fell silent. Wifred wrote in her notebook that it knew the ritual. On the twenty-first of December, a woman’s voice hummed in her kitchen and asked, in a slow country accent, if she was her little Winnie.
It was the voice of a grandmother Wifred had never met, a name she had used only as part of the ritual. Two nights later, her brother’s voice spoke again from under the floor, telling her that their mother was calling for her. Wifred caught herself holding her own leg still to keep from getting out of bed. On the third of February, 1972, she woke to the sound of her own voice humming a hymn she had not hummed since she was twelve.
She got out of bed, stood in the kitchen doorway, and said I know what you are. Her own voice answered calmly, I know what you are, too. Wifred closed the bedroom door, walked to the trapdoor, and descended into the hole beneath the kitchen floor. She drew a chalk square with an X through it in the dirt.
She folded a piece of red flannel into a glass jar, buried it in the center of the square, and drove a long iron nail into the earth above it. Then she spoke the words Iva had given her: I have named it and I have named it my own. She climbed out, closed the trapdoor, and drove three nails into its frame. She slept through the night for the first time in five months.
In the spring she filed her recommendation that the clinic be closed. On the first of June, 1972, Wifred Kums drove out of Corass Fork. Nolan Rabby raised his hand from the porch of his store. Iva Belchure had given her a small package: a single handforged iron nail wrapped in red flannel, with a note that read, for your door, and to remember me by.
Wifred drove the nail into the frame of her apartment door in Charleston that same day, said the ritual aloud, and repeated it every night for the next forty-six years. She worked for the state board of health until 2001. She never married. She kept a jar of iron nails on her bedside table for the rest of her life.
She told no one about Corass Fork until 2014, when her great-niece Ruth Anne recorded her oral history on tape, with the condition that it not be used until Wifred was dead. Wifred died on the twenty-first of November, 2018, at three minutes past three in the morning, in a nursing home in Charleston. The night aide, Brenda Combs, heard her speaking the ritual from her bed. Then she heard a voice, in Wifred’s own voice, from the far side of the room, calmly say Freddy.
She went for help. By the time she returned, Wifred Kums was dead of a sudden cardiac event. The nails are still in the doorframes of Corass Fork. The village is all but empty now, down to four quiet residents.
Iva Belchure died in 1979. Nolan Rabby in 1988. The clinic still stands, its doorframe bearing the twenty-two nails driven there over the years. Ruth Anne Kums Blevins keeps a jar of her great-aunt’s nails on her own bedside table in Huntington.
She does not know the ritual. It was never passed to her.