by Homer Hickam
Poppy gasped out something between his twisted lips I couldn’t understand. Dad dragged up a white metal chair and sat near the bed. I sat down in another metal chair in a corner and watched. It was all I knew to do. The old man’s long, skinny hands lay unmoving by his side. Dad began to talk, very low. I understood occasional words and phrases— “cutting machine,” “fans,” “ventilation curtain,” “roof bolts,” familiar mining terms. When Poppy gasped and shuddered, Dad stopped talking and reached into his coat pocket and brought out a small paper sack. He tilted the small bottle inside it to Poppy’s lips, and in a moment the old man calmed and Dad put the sack away and started talking about mining again. When Poppy fell asleep, Dad rose, nodded to me, and we stole out of the room.
By the time we drove back through Welch, the Christmas bustle had subsided and the cheerful lights were turned out. When we got home, Mom had already gone to bed. She greeted me in the morning. Before I could bring it up, she said, “Yes, you’ll go again tonight and every night your father goes.”
“Why doesn’t Jim go?” I demanded. My brother was one year ahead of me in school. He was a senior at Big Creek and a football star and my father doted on him. It seemed like a reasonable question to me.
“Because I said so,” she said, and then she thought better of her answer. “You asked me one time if your daddy loved you. Do you remember that?”
I did and I said so. I’d asked the question on the night my first rocket had blown up her rose garden fence. She’d challenged me that night to build my rockets and show my dad what I could do. Maybe if I did, she said, he’d let me go to college instead of giving me some menial clerical job at the mine. Ever since, I’d built my rockets with a single-minded determination. I was going to college and then I was going to Cape Canaveral and work for Dr. Wernher von Braun, the great rocket scientist.
“I told you then he loved you just fine,” Mom said. “He was just too busy to show it. This is your chance to spend some time with him. Do you understand now why I want you to go?”
I thought I did but I wasn’t certain. As we moved deeper into the Christmas season, I helped raise the tree and put up the decorations, I wrapped the presents I’d bought for Mom and Dad and Jim, I did all the Christmas things there were to do, but my heart wasn’t in it. I only had one thing on my mind, that dreaded moment each night when Dad would stop yelling on the black phone and start gathering up his things and I knew it was time for me to appear in the kitchen, prepared to go to the hospital with him.
It seemed to me that Welch’s Christmas lights seemed less festive each time we crawled through the town on the way to the hospital. Dad’s nightly sessions with Poppy seemed endless as I sat on the cold metal chair in the corner and sullenly stared at them. Only once during all the nights I was there had Poppy taken any note of me at all. He’d raised a single finger and looked my way and then mumbled something I couldn’t understand. “He can be a good boy, Daddy,” Dad said, so I guessed Poppy had said something about me. I stayed in my chair. When Poppy fell asleep, Dad gathered up his things and, without a word, we again went across the cold, dark mountain to Coalwood.
All through the Christmas season, Dad and I visited Poppy. Each night, I stayed in the room with them until I couldn’t stand it anymore. There was just something about it that dug at me. Dad sat with Poppy, and even though Poppy didn’t say anything, it was clear they were enjoying each other’s company. For some reason, that irritated me. Dad would occasionally get a wet cloth and wipe Poppy’s brow and then smooth his hair. I had never seen him act so tenderly toward anybody. I knew it was a good thing he was doing, but I could hardly stand to watch him do it. I made a habit of coming up with some excuse to get out of that room, just to walk the halls if nothing else. That I needed to go to the bathroom was my most consistent excuse. I also invented a high school chum with a broken leg on another floor. Dad caught me at that one when I forgot my made-up name for my “friend” and made up another one. Dad remembered the first name very clearly. I think he knew exactly what I was doing even though he didn’t know why. I didn’t, either, for that matter.
“He likes to see that you’re here,” Dad said after I’d left the room under one excuse or another for about an hour. “Stop running away.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, but I couldn’t help myself. Whatever Mom’s plan was, it wasn’t working. It seemed to be driving a wedge between Dad and me.
On Christmas Eve, I begged Mom to let me stay home. Nearly everyone in Coalwood attended the annual Coalwood Christmas Pageant on Christmas Eve. The pageant, sponsored by the Coalwood Women’s Club, was conducted on the Club House lawn. There was caroling and sermons and good cheer, and the road in front of the Club House was usually clogged with joyful people. I explained to her reasonably that I hadn’t had a night of my own during the entire Christmas season. Sherman had organized a hayride before the pageant began, to be pulled by the two ponies Red Carroll kept in the barn behind his house. Couldn’t I have at least one night with my friends? Mom shook her head. “You’ll go with your father,” she said.
“It isn’t working, Mom!” I blurted. “I just make Dad mad by going over there!”
“Give it another night,” she said.
“What about you?” I challenged her. “When are you going?”
“Poppy is your blood,” she said. “He’s none of mine. Now quit stalling and get ready.”
On Christmas Eve, I returned to the horrible hospital room and sat, silently outraged and completely miserable, with my father and my grandfather. Outside it began to snow and I wished it would snow ten feet high so that everybody would have to stay home and not be able to go on a hayride or anything else. I could see the feathery flakes drift by, illuminated by the lights from the nurses’ dormitory. While I fidgeted, Dad talked on to Poppy, mining more coal. I was desperate to escape. When I could stand it no longer, I mumbled, “Going to the bathroom,” and made for the door.
Dad looked at me. “You need to stay.”
“I have to go!” I said, fairly shouting. I bolted from the room.
In the hall, I practically sang I was so happy to be out of that awful place. A nurse glided by and gave me a look. She stopped. “Sonny Hickam,” she said.
I looked closely at the plump, golden-curled woman. It took me a moment, and then I knew her. She’d put on some weight and grown up some since I’d last seen her, but I recognized her all the same. “Charlotte Sheets,” I said. She was a Coalwood girl, or had been, some years older than me. Her dad was a motorman in the mine, and her mother grew blackberries in the front yard. Charlotte had grown up and moved away, where I hadn’t known, but now I did. She’d become a nurse and returned to McDowell County.
She gave me a quick rundown of where she’d been, how she’d worked her way through nursing school. “I may go to Florida if Jesse gets that job,” she said vaguely, and I guessed Jesse was her husband. I looked at the name tag she wore and it said “Dawson” so I supposed that was her married name.
She nodded toward the room I had so joyfully exited. “Mr. Hickam is such a wonderful man,” she said. “Not the least bit of trouble. Gets right up on that bedpan and about all that comes out is blood. We don’t know how he stands it. We give him all the painkillers we’re allowed but it can’t be enough, all the cancer he’s got inside him.”
I didn’t reply. The Hickams were taking care of their own on that score, I thought, thinking of the bottle of paregoric in the paper sack Dad brought with him in his coat.
“I really admire you, Sonny,” Charlotte continued. “I heard you’ve been over here every night with your daddy to be with his daddy. A lot of teenagers these days, they wouldn’t do that. You’re a sweet boy. I remember you growing up that way, too. Always a sweet boy.”
And with that she headed down the hall, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the dark, waxed floors. I watched her go and then skulked back inside Poppy’s room.
Dad was holding Poppy’s hand and seemed clenched
up somehow, as if maybe his stomach hurt. I sat down in my chair and waited. After a few minutes, Dad let Poppy’s hand go and said, “I love you, Daddy.” Then he turned to me. “Let’s go,” he said gruffly, and then stood up and put his coat and hat on and went out the door. I was close behind, thankful to be done with Poppy for another night.
Again, we drove through Welch. To my surprise, Dad stopped at the Parking Building and, without comment, led the way up a street and into the Woolworth’s department store. It was staying open late for miners on the evening shift. I followed as he went to the ladies’ section and bought earrings and a bracelet for Mom and had them wrapped in pretty Christmas paper and ribbons. Then I followed him back to the car and we turned for home. Mom was still awake when we got there. Dad put her present under the Christmas tree. “Daddy crossed the bar tonight,” he told her.
A flush of guilt went straight through me. Tears sprang to my eyes. I stood there while Mom took Dad’s hand and they went upstairs. “We got some coal mined before he went,” Dad told her. “That man loved to mine coal.”
I stood alone beside the lit Christmas tree, feeling miserable. My Poppy had died and I had run from him. Chipper was inside the tree, asleep on one of its branches. I could hear him twittering with each breath as he dreamed. Daisy Mae, my little calico cat, was curled up with the presents, the cotton snow under the tree a soft bed. She purred when I reached down and touched her head. The house, in its silence, smelled of pine needles and wax candles and my guilt. I looked at the clock on the mantel. Christmas Day, 1958, had arrived but I could find no joy in it.
The next morning, Mom came in and sat on my bed and handed over a manila envelope. When I opened it, I was astonished to find an autographed photograph of Wernher von Braun. “I thought he’d like to know who’s coming to help him with his rockets,” she said, smoothing my hair with her hand.
Dr. von Braun had written me a note. It was filled with praise for my rocket work and suggested that I should go to college. It ended with: If you work hard enough, you will do anything you want. I hugged her. “Thanks, Mom. This is the best present I ever had.”
Downstairs, I found Dad sitting in the living room, reading the newspaper. I showed him the photo. He glanced at it and then went back to his newspaper. “I’m sorry about Poppy,” I said.
Dad made no reply, just rattled his paper.
“I did my best,” I said.
Dad let the paper down but he didn’t look at me. “Your Poppy loved you more than anything in the world, Sonny, and you couldn’t even stay in the same room with him.”
“I tried, sir. But I didn’t know he was about to die.”
“Maybe you didn’t care,” he said.
I picked up my photograph. “Merry Christmas, sir,” I said, not even bothering to disguise the bitterness in my voice. Dad said nothing in reply. Ten months later, he still hadn’t.
3
IN ALL MY BORN DAYS
IN THE FALL of 1959, just as I began my senior year at Big Creek High School, something very peculiar began to happen to me. I’d be doing something perfectly normal— studying at my desk, or drumming along at band practice, or loading a rocket in the basement, or even just walking to class—and, all of a sudden, for no reason I could figure out, I would feel sad. It wouldn’t last long, more of a twinge, then the feeling would pass. For weeks, I puzzled over it. When I mentioned it to Quentin, he said, with some impatience, “Sonny, as a budding scientist, you should understand that every question on this planet, including any nervous manifestation, can be ultimately determined by a certain application of logic.”
I took a moment to let his words register and then responded, “You’re saying if I just think logically, I should be able to figure out why I feel sad.”
“Quite right,” he sniffed.
Quentin was a darkly handsome lad with an aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, and severely straight black hair. His trademark was a battered old leather briefcase he carried around everywhere he went. It was always filled with books, chewed pencils, and the occasional half-eaten apple. Quentin also had a way of talking that sometimes defied translation, all delivered in a pseudo-English accent. I prided myself on being able to consistently figure out Quentinese.
He continued. “If, however, your mind cannot construct the proper scenarios based on the physical and mathematical realities of the material world, then it is hardly worthy of your concern.”
I sorted out his words and made a stab at their meaning. “If I can’t figure it out based on math and science, it’s not worth worrying about, anyway?”
“Of course!” he fairly shouted, slapping his fist into his palm. “Now you’re thinking like a true scientist!” A lock of his hair tended to fall across his forehead when he got excited. He shoved it back with the flair of a conductor waving his baton.
“Thank you, Quentin.”
“Anytime, my boy.”
Although I appreciated Quentin’s advice, it was clear I would have to go to someone else for what I needed. I therefore decided to seek out Reverend “Little” Richard, the pastor of the Mudhole Church of Distinct Christianity at the mouth of Mudhole Hollow. I wasn’t a member of Little Richard’s congregation—it was the church for the colored people in town—but the reverend had become a friend since junior high school when I’d been Coalwood’s delivery boy for the Bluefield Telegraph. When I had an extra paper, I always swung by the reverend’s church and gave him a free copy. In return, he had given me Bible stories off the cuff. I thought the reverend was about the smartest man I’d ever had the privilege to meet. He didn’t know much about science and math, but he knew a lot about everything else. I suspected my “nervous manifestation,” as Quentin called it, probably fell into the latter category.
It was a rainy fall day when I rode my bicycle down to the mouth of Mudhole Hollow and went inside the tiny steepled church. There I found the reverend, dressed in his black sermon frock, standing by the front pew, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t know what he was looking at until a big drop of water came down and landed with a plunk in a coffee can beside his shiny pointed shoes. When he saw me, his grin in my direction lit up the room with a flash of his gold front tooth. “Well, well,” he said. “Sonny the rocket boy. Got a newspaper with you?”
I had to confess that I didn’t, seeing as how I hadn’t delivered the paper for over two years. I’d stopped when I started high school. Little nodded and looked back up at the roof. My gaze followed his. There was a water stain on the ceiling, and as I watched another big drop of water hit square into the coffee can. “I saw your door open,” I said, “and I just thought I’d come in and say hello.” It wasn’t entirely the truth, but I couldn’t just come right out and admit I had a problem. West Virginians just didn’t do that kind of pitiful thing.
“Have to leave the door open for the light,” Little replied, his eyes still on the ceiling as if perhaps he could stare the leak away. Finally, he turned away from it. “This new electricity company is gouging us, Sonny. I can’t hardly afford the bills, and this old church is powerful dark. Could use some windows up front, let in God’s sun.”
Whenever anybody wanted building materials in Coalwood, their first thought was always getting it out of the coal company. My dad held company property to be strictly for the production of coal, but most people thought that was kind of a quaint idea. Dad usually unbent enough to let weekend carpenters who asked have the odd board or keg of nails. I think he had adapted the old teaching to read “ ’Tis better to give than to get it stolen.”
I fully expected to hear a request from Little for his windows, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Some glass and a little framing lumber would sure come in handy, all right,” he said. “Some tar paper for the roof, too. Don’t suppose they got any up at the mine, do you?”
I didn’t know if they did or not but I told Little I’d ask Dad, and that seemed to satisfy him. He beckoned me forward and scrutinized me. I was sure I was wearing my poker face, but
he said, “In all my born days, I don’t think I ever seen a boy look so troubled. What you got going on, Sonny?”
I told him then about the sad feeling I got that tended to bubble up without warning. Little pondered for a while and then put his hand on my shoulder. I wasn’t used to being touched—we didn’t do much of that in my family—so I twitched away. He gripped me tighter and looked into my eyes. “You ever hear the story of the potter’s wheel?” he asked. “It’s in Jeremiah of the old Bible.”
I hadn’t and confessed it. Methodists didn’t get into Jeremiah that much. Little released me and went behind his pulpit and brought out his ancient Bible, cracked with use. He knew every verse in the book by heart, but he chose to read the words he had in mind. That way, I suppose, he wouldn’t seem too proud, a prime West Virginia sin even for preachers. “Now, listen to this, Sonny,” the reverend said, and then he read:
Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on his wheel. But the vessel that he made was marred so he made again another, as seemed good to the potter to make. Then the Lord came to me, saying, cannot I do with you as this potter? Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine.
Little clapped the Bible shut and studied my face for understanding. I must have looked blank. “The Lord works us, Sonny,” he said patiently, “shapes us to his liking just like a lump of clay, even though He don’t let us know it.”
I absorbed the message. “Why does God keep it a secret?” I wondered.
Little thumbed the Bible as if thinking about where to open it, but he left it closed. “You and your daddy getting along?” he asked, deftly changing the subject.
I shrugged. “He hasn’t tried to stop me from building my rockets lately.”
“Schoolwork good?”
“I’m making all A’s so far, even in Miss Riley’s class. I’m going to try to make all A’s this semester. I’ve never done that before.”
He nodded. “A worthy goal. How’s your brother Jim?”