by Homer Hickam
“Off to college. He played first string on the freshman football team. Dad’s mighty proud of him.”
“Your rockets?”
“Pretty good. We’ve got some problems with our new propellant, but I’ll figure it out.”
“Your mom?”
“Same old mom.”
“You say your prayers every night?”
“Yes, sir. Unless I fall asleep over my homework.”
“What do you pray for?”
I thought about it. “I just ask for blessings. God bless Mom and Dad and Jim and the cats and dogs and the Rocket Boys and Miss Riley and all the soldiers, sailors, pilots, and marines.”
“Who’s that Miss Riley?”
“She teaches physics. She got us a rocket book, but I haven’t figured it out yet. She’s my favorite teacher and she’s real pretty.”
“You don’t pray for yourself?”
“No, sir, that wouldn’t be right, would it?”
Little raised his eyebrows. “A boy that don’t ask for a blessing on himself must be pretty proud, figure maybe he don’t need no help from heaven or nowhere else. Put yourself in your prayers, son, ask to see if God will tell you what’s making you sad. You know it might just be Him trying to tell you something. Won’t hurt to ask. Will you do that?”
I said I would and Little looked pleased. “Don’t forget to ask your daddy about the glass and lumber and tar paper, too,” he said as I left to get back on my bicycle. He waved from the door of his church until I was out of sight.
That night, as I began my prayers, I considered what the Reverend Richard had told me to do. I tried but I just couldn’t do it. The truth was I didn’t hold with it. I’d been taught in the Coalwood Community Church that prayer was for laying on blessings for others, not for asking God questions. Whatever was bothering me, even if it was God, would just have to come out in its own good time.
IN early October, Dad was scheduled to go up to Ohio to give a presentation to the steel company on the state of the Coalwood and Caretta mines. Ordinarily, this presentation was given by Coalwood’s general superintendent, but when it was announced that the houses were going to be sold, Mr. Van Dyke, our general superintendent for years, had gone to Ohio to protest. As a reward for his sincerity and honesty, the steel company summarily sacked him and sent down a Mr. Fuller to make sure the houses got sold. After that was done, Mr. Fuller went home. Then a Mr. Bundini was assigned the position and made an inspection trip to Coalwood that lasted several weeks. But he had gone back to let his daughters finish out the school year in Ohio. The plan was for Mr. Bundini to return, but until he did, Dad was temporarily wearing the hats of both the mine superintendent and the general superintendent. Mom noted that even though Dad was doing two jobs, at least he didn’t have to worry about an increase in his salary.
Dad had been toiling over his pitch to the steel company for days and often worried about it over the supper table with Mom. I caught him working on it when I walked up to the tipple and knocked on the open office door in the grimy brick building that served as his headquarters. His head was in his hands and he was pondering an ancient Underwood typewriter and the sheet of paper rolled into it. Dad looked up, caught sight of me, and said “No,” as a general statement.
“Telephone wire,” I said, confirming his supposition as to the purpose of my visit. Cape Coalwood needed telephone wire for a new communications system. Despite his greeting, I came inside and stood before his desk, taking on my usual pitiful expression when I was on a scrounging maneuver. “And, if you’ve got any, some glass, lumber, and tar paper for the Mudhole church,” I said brazenly.
Dad cocked his head and made what I supposed was a quick mental inventory of every last scrap of mine supplies, its condition, and likely disposition. “There’s a spool of old telephone wire up by the back gate. I asked Filbert to carry it off to Matney’s junk yard a month ago and he still hasn’t gotten to it. It’s yours if you want it. As for the Reverend Little Richard, I am aware of his needs and, even though the company no longer owns his church, I will see that the company provides.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I nodded toward the typewriter. “Is that your speech?”
“If you can call it that.” He fingered the sheet of paper and pushed a single key. He did it with such finality I hoped it was a period.
“I like speech class,” I said. “Miss Bryson, my teacher, thinks I’m pretty good.”
He pondered me. It seemed to me every time Dad gave me a look, it was like the first time he’d ever seen me. “She’s not available for consulting work, is she?”
I guessed she wasn’t, seeing as how she was the daughter of the county school superintendent, and probably pretty busy.
Dad waved me out of his office. That night at the supper table, he and Mom had another exchange concerning his upcoming trip to Ohio. “I could make a hash of it, Elsie,” he said. There was uncommon worry in his voice.
“So what?” was my mom’s unsympathetic reply.
“So what I’ll not get what the mine needs,” Dad replied.
Her sigh filled the kitchen. “Do you think they really care what you say up there in Ohio, Homer? Seems all they want from you is more coal with less men to do it. You can talk until you’re blue in the face and that won’t change.”
Dad crumbled a wedge of corn bread into his glass and poured it full of milk, his standard dessert. “They have their own problems,” he said morosely, digging his spoon into the glass. “The steel business is in decline. Damn cheap imported steel is going to send us all into ruin.”
Mom shrugged. “Go to Ohio, have your say, and then come home. Nothing will change in this old place if you do it standing on your head.” Then she added: “And stop thinking everything you do is so important. Knowledge puffs up but charity edifies.”
“What in Sam Hill does that mean?”
“Just something the preacher said in his sermon this past Sunday. Too bad you missed it.”
Dad was notorious for missing church. “Thank you for your support, Reverend Lavender,” he said, using Mom’s maiden name. That made her laugh into her coffee cup, and Dad looked proud that he had made her do it. I went back to my supper of chicken, corn bread, and beans, Mom’s specialty, while secretly mulling Little Richard’s story of the potter’s wheel. I wondered if God had had any kind of hand in shaping my parents. He’d had his hands full, in that case.
The next day, Dad went off to Ohio. Two days later, he returned and reported the results to Mom while he was still holding his suitcases in his hands. “I was just too nervous,” he said, his shoulders down. “I’m lucky they didn’t laugh me out of the room.”
Mom was at the kitchen table working on her plans for the Veterans Day float. She pointed at the kitchen floor and Dad put the suitcases down, but his shoulders still slumped. “For starters, they spelled my name wrong on the agenda,” he said miserably. “Hickham, it said. Then the president of the steel company introduced me and proceeded to call me Homer Hickman. For God’s sake, Hickman! I’ve worked in this mine for thirty years, they’ve owned the mine for ten, and they still don’t know my name!”
Dad was wound up, no doubt about it. When he got that way, he would often start coughing, but Mom had her ways of winding him down. “The sun came up this morning, Homer,” she said patiently. “I reckon it’ll set later on, too.”
Dad absorbed Mom’s solar activity report and got her point. “There’s a present for you in one of the suitcases,” he said. “Perfume.”
“What kind?”
“It’s orange color. You like oranges.”
“I like to eat oranges, Homer,” Mom said, suppressing a smile. “I don’t know about smelling like one.”
Dad shrugged and went off to change his clothes to go to the mine, where at least they knew how to spell and pronounce his name and nobody wore perfume. I was surprised when he came back within an hour. I heard him down in the basement hacking, and then a long, strangled silence followed by
another horrible wet coughing fit. Finally, it quieted and I heard him come slowly up the basement steps as if he were carrying a ton of rocks on his back. I guess in a way he was. I came down to see what was going on. When he opened the door into the kitchen, his face was pale. “What the good Lord, Homer?” Mom asked, her voice faintly atremble. “Do you want me to call Doc?”
Dad ignored her question. “They didn’t even wait until I got home. Message waiting for me at the office. I either get the tonnage up by ten percent or I’ve got to cut off thirty more men,” he said. “That’s not news for anybody but family,” he added, giving me a dark look.
“You ran all the way home to tell me this?” Mom asked. “With your lungs, Homer, you’re lucky you didn’t have a stroke.”
“Don’t you understand, Elsie?” Dad demanded. “There’s no way I can increase production by that much. Thirty good men . . . they have to go by seniority. That means young men with families. I’ve got to do something about this, come up with a different plan.”
Mom slowly put down her pencil. “Buddy, let’s get out of here while we still can,” she said. When she was looking to calm my dad, Mom often called Dad “Buddy.” I never knew why. “Let’s go to Myrtle Beach. Peabody Real Estate would hire us both in a second. We’ll work together, sell property, get rich as kings. Every day, we’ll go down to the ocean, breathe in nothing but fresh, clean air. Coalwood’s had its day. We’ve had a good life here, I swan, but it’s over.”
Dad brushed past me, heading to the black phone. Soon he was on it, talking to a foreman. “Run East Main as hard as you can tonight, Cecil. Do you hear me?” He stopped to cough into a bandanna, then said, in a strangled voice, “We’ve got to get that tonnage up!”
I trudged back upstairs. That night, when I heard the evening shift being replaced by the hoot-owlers, I got to thinking about Little Richard’s potter’s wheel again. If God was shaping us, he was doing it powerfully hard.
4
THE STOOP CHILDREN
THE CHANGES THAT had come to Coalwood arrived at our front door on Halloween. I was doing the answering for the trick-or-treaters. Dad, an adviser to the county Salvation Army Post in Welch, had gone to a meeting. Mom was at the kitchen table worrying over her plans for the Veterans Day float along with her first thoughts for the Christmas Pageant.
To keep me supplied for the trick-or-treaters, Mom had made up a batch of candied apples and popcorn balls. All I had to do was drop them into the outstretched paper sacks of whatever ghouls or goblins came knocking. The kids who showed up reminded me of myself, just four or five years back. I had usually gone out on Halloween nights with Roy Lee because he had a knack for causing excitement. Occasionally, we’d trick our treaters just for the fun of it. It was innocent stuff—knocking on doors and running, or soaping windows. When we were in the fourth grade, we got caught soaping windows at Bunky Smith’s house on Substation Row. After he reported us to the authorities, which meant our mothers, Roy Lee and I spent the next day washing every one of Bunky’s windows. “Boy, we had fun, though,” Roy Lee had snickered while we worked under the close supervision of Mrs. Smith. I told Roy Lee to shut up. Mrs. Smith rewarded my snottiness by giving my behind a good swat with a folded newspaper. When I told Mom on her for doing it, Mom just laughed and said, “She should have used a board.”
For years, the Coalwood school had held an annual company-sponsored Halloween party where nearly everyone in town showed up. There were always prizes, usually cakes and cookies, given for the best costume. It was part of the family legend that, before I was born, Mom had gone as a hillbilly, complete with red long johns. She’d pranced around the stage singing about Mountaineers being always free (it was our state motto: Montani Semper Liberi) while she received a long, careful appraisal from the judges. She’d also gotten some whoops from the men in the crowd until their wives shushed them, principally because no one had instructed Mom that she might need to button the trap door in her men’s underwear. She won the judging, of course. Two years ago, our Ohio owners had ordered the company not to support the carnival any longer, and a Coalwood tradition had died.
A few children came to our door early, dressed in a variety of homemade costumes. Witches were popular with the little girls—a black dress, a glued-together cardboard pointy hat, an old broom, and a painted nose wart was their standard costume. The boys were mostly cowboys—plenty of cap pistols and cowboy hats around town—or ghosts in bedsheets or devils in cardboard horns and dyed-red pajamas. The little kids were cute, but they were also sparse. Coalwood was getting older. In the rest of the United States, the so-called baby boom was still in grade school, but in Coalwood ours was just about busted. The school classes younger than mine were all smaller. A lot of the young men back from World War II and Korea hadn’t come home to West Virginia to work in the mine. Once they were out, they had stayed out.
It was around 10:00 P.M., a time when Coalwood’s trick-or-treaters were usually home safely in bed, that I heard a nearly inaudible tapping on our aluminum storm door. When I opened it, I found on our front stoop a half dozen or so children dressed as ragged urchins. I didn’t recognize any of them. “Trick or treat!” they yelled. Their voices were shrill and oddly anxious. Then, when I took a second look, I realized they weren’t wearing costumes at all.
I gave them all the candy and apples I had left and then went into the kitchen. I got a big grocery sack and emptied out all the cookies Mom kept in the drawer beside the sink. She looked up from her drawings and lists. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked tiredly.
“More kids than we thought,” I mumbled.
“At this hour? Well, I’ll bet they’re just coming around again. I made plenty of treats. Let me take a look.” She went to the front door with me close behind. The huddled kids shrank away from her. “Oh, my,” she said. Her hand strayed to her heart. The children backed down a step, their eyes wide. “Don’t you move!” she ordered, and they froze in place.
I followed Mom back into the kitchen and watched her open up the refrigerator and begin tossing baloney and ham slices and cheese into a sack. When it was filled up, she got another sack and put a loaf of bread in it and then opened up her pantry and tossed in cans of soup and a jar of peanut butter. She pointed at the sacks. “Quick, before they get away!”
I did as I was told, handing over the groceries. “Thank you!” the children said over and over, and when I looked out at the gate, I saw for the first time that they’d been accompanied by a woman. She had been just out of sight, hidden behind Mom’s rose arbor. The woman wore a thin coat and had a kerchief pulled around her head. She looked tiny and frail, what I could see of her. She waited for the children to come through the gate, and then, whispering amongst themselves excitedly, the family disappeared into the night.
“I wonder where they’re from?” Mom said. “Couldn’t be from Coalwood. They must have come in over the mountain.” She went to the telephone and called Mrs. Sharitz next door. “Rosemary? Did some raggedy kids just come to your house? They did? Did you know them? No, I didn’t, either.” Mom phoned each lady on Tipple Row, but the answer was all the same. No one recognized the children.
When Dad came in late from his Salvation Army meeting, I was in the basement, contemplating my latest approach to fin design. I thought maybe it would be quicker to just cut two rectangles and bend them around the casement and clamp them together. That would give us four rectangular fins for about what it now took to make two of them. Dad came down the basement steps, and I heard Lucifer, our old tomcat, growl. When Lucifer came into the basement to get warm, he always chose the bottom step of the staircase that came down from the kitchen to make his nest. “I’m not going to step on you, you crazy old thing,” Dad said. “Sonny boy—what are you doing up so late?” He had a blue suit on, an unusual sartorial event for Dad, but going to a meeting in Welch apparently demanded it. Although he was forty-seven years old, his hair was as black and full as I guess it had ever been. He an
d my brother Jim shared the same faded blue eyes, but Dad had a sharper face, his nose thin and triangular.
I showed Dad the drawing of my fin design, and he reached inside his coat for some reading glasses to peruse it. After a moment, he handed it back to me. “You need a sharper pencil” was his only comment. He looked at the furnace and said, “Throw a shovelful of coal or two in there before you come up.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. He turned to go but stopped at the base of the stairs, straddling Lucifer, who gave him an irritated, heavy-lidded look. Dad pondered me and I thought he was about to say something, but then he went on up the steps. I heard him cross through the kitchen and the dining room, and then he stopped. I knew it was to sort through his mail stacked on the dining-room table. I heard Mom’s footsteps on the stairs and then their muffled voices. I was quiet, so I could hear what they were saying.
She told him about the children on the stoop. “Buddy, I talked to everybody on Tipple Row and nobody knew who they were. They couldn’t be from Coalwood, could they?”
“I don’t know, Elsie,” he said. “I hope not but—”
She interrupted him. “Buddy, let’s get out of here while you’ve still got breath left in your lungs.”
“It’s going to be all right, Elsie,” Dad said, his voice low. “I have a plan. We’re going to go into . . .” But I couldn’t hear what else he said.
I heard Mom well enough. “I won’t let this place kill you, Homer.”
“For better or for worse,” he said.
“Your better, my worse,” Mom replied, and then I heard her footsteps going up the stairs.
5
THE COALWOOD WOMEN’S CLUB
MR. DEVOTIE DANTZLER was Coalwood’s company-store manager. He was from Mississippi, and he had the soft, courtly drawl of an educated man from a more southerly and genteel clime. He wore three-piece suits and carried in a pocket of his vest a fine railroad watch that had a gold chain attached. In the summer, in a time of no air-conditioning, he took off the coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves in the office in the back of the Big Store, but I never saw him without his vest.