by Homer Hickam
The company store, which Mr. Dantzler ran with a sure and benevolent hand, consisted of the Big Store in Coalwood, the Little Store on Substation Row, the Six Store near the Number Six shaft, and two stores in our sister town of Caretta on the other side of Coalwood Mountain. Not only could hardware of all types be bought in Olga Coal’s company stores, but also groceries, tobacco, clothing, patent drugs, candy, and the best milk shake anywhere to be found in West Virginia. When a miner was down on his luck or had overextended his credit, Mr. Dantzler took a personal interest and helped him manage his financial affairs until he was caught up. He was a man everybody respected, but you didn’t want to get caught stealing from one of his stores. When that rare event happened, Mr. Dantzler had no pity. He called Tag and Tag called the state police and then you went to jail in Welch where everybody in Coalwood agreed you belonged.
Mr. Dantzler’s wife, Mrs. Eleanor Marie Dantzler, was from Kentucky, where she had played the piano in the silent movie houses while going to the University of Kentucky. Mrs. Dantzler brought her love of music to Coalwood along with a big grand piano and, from the first day of her arrival, let everybody know she wanted to teach the children piano and voice. Coalwood’s parents, always glad to add to their children’s talents and skills, especially when it didn’t cost that much, took her up on it, and soon she had a thriving business. Mrs. Dantzler taught at home, her lessons beginning at 4:00 P.M. on a school day and at noon on Saturdays. She charged two dollars an hour and held four recitals a year. As it happened, there was a piano in my house. Dad had given it to Mom on their first wedding anniversary. Since she had never learned to play, I became the designated piano player in the house as soon as I was big enough to sit on the piano bench and reach the keys and the pedals.
For eight years, while I was in the second through the ninth grade, I arrived at the Dantzlers’ house each Wednesday afternoon after school, carrying my lesson books with me. Although I never cared much for playing the piano, I loved going to the Dantzler house. It smelled of light perfume and was cool even on the hottest day in August, the drapes and windows kept closed against the heat. There were fine Persian rugs laid perfectly over a polished oak floor, and the carved furniture seemed to me as if it belonged in a European castle. Sometimes, while I was waiting for my lesson to begin, the Dantzlers’ youngest daughter, Ginger, whose real name was Zanice Virginia, would come in and sit with me and we’d read comic books together. I always liked Ginger, but she was two years younger than me, a lifetime when I was in grade school, so I didn’t see her very much except when I came for my lessons. I always thought she was a pretty girl, though. She had the face of an alert pixie, a dimple in her right cheek, brown curly locks, and big amber eyes that always seemed to be a second away from mischief.
Mrs. Dantzler was the most glorious woman I’d ever met. She had hair the color and sheen of mercury and the figure of Marilyn Monroe. Her deep blue eyes were large and expressive, and her lashes were long and curled at the ends. She laughed a lot and she had fine, straight, very white teeth. I never saw her when she wasn’t wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes. She had beautiful, expressive hands, and her fingers were long and her nails always polished a deep ruby. She was how I imagined a queen would look. I often wondered if she wasn’t in fact some sort of royalty that had accidentally ended up in Coalwood.
On Sundays, Mrs. Dantzler played the piano at the Coalwood Community Church. She insisted on a good tempo, no long drawn-out hymns for her. Mom used to laugh and say that “once Eleanor Marie got the bit in her mouth, everybody had to ride or get bucked off.” Usually, Mrs. Dantzler didn’t sing with the choir, but every so often, at special occasions—Christmas, Easter, and maybe a wedding— she would don the maroon robe of the choir and step out for a solo. She was a glorious sight standing alone beside the pulpit, her face raised to heaven. Her voice was huge in our little church, rattling even the rafters, her great, pearly notes hit sure and strong like a hammer square onto a nail. Sometimes when she was singing, the sun would shine through the windows and her hair would glow almost like molten silver and it seemed to me she had turned into an angel. All she needed were the wings. When she finished one of her solos, I always felt breathless.
Although I had no talent for piano, Mrs. Dantzler kept at me until I at least had developed some playing skill. At her recitals, she always had me last on the schedule, since I was the only boy in her class. To make certain I was presentable for the recitals, which were considered important society events in Coalwood, she taught me to sit up straight on the piano bench and how to bow when I was finished, putting one arm across my stomach, the other across my back.
Although I was perfectly agreeable to taking piano, I hated practicing. “A little more time at your piano at home, Sonny, is in order before your next lesson,” Mrs. Dantzler would say routinely. “You know, two dollars doesn’t grow on trees.”
When I started to go to Big Creek High, I decided it was time to quit the piano. I had a lot of homework and rockets to build, and practicing the piano cut into my time. Mom said it was okay by her if I wanted to quit, but I had to tell Mrs. Dantzler to her face. I think she thought that would stop me, but I was determined.
I rehearsed what I would tell Mrs. Dantzler. I had myself quite a verbal concoction. It wasn’t that I was quitting, that’s what I was going to tell her. I was just going to play the piano more for myself, that’s it. I had learned so much, see, and now I needed a little while to just work on all that I knew. I would keep playing, you could bet on that, now and forever. So thanks a lot, Mrs. Dantzler, you’ve been grand. While riding my bike, I went over my tall tale all the way down to the Dantzler house, but as soon as she opened her door, my little lies flew out of my head like scared bats. I stammered a bit and then just blurted, “I can’t take piano anymore!”
Her big blue eyes opened in shock. “Why not, Sonny?”
“Because . . . because . . . I don’t want to!”
Mrs. Dantzler looked at me with disappointment and hurt while I shrank under her gaze, and then she silently led me back to her piano and sat beside me as she had done so many hundreds of times before. She turned on the meter and it ticked as I went through my compositions. She corrected me as if it were a normal lesson and that she would get to see the results next week as she had done for all those years. Finally, the excruciating hour was over, and she turned off the meter and got up and went to the window and looked out at the mountains while I gathered my books and manuals. I left two crumpled dollar bills on the piano bench. “I’ll keep practicing,” I told her back.
“No, you won’t,” she said quietly.
I fled, knowing she was right.
SHERMAN was the Rocket Boy I could always call on to help me mix up propellant. For some reason, he enjoyed spending time up to his elbows in chemicals. A day early in November 1959 found the two of us in my basement laboratory mixing the goopy gray gunk we called zincoshine. We followed a set routine, never deviating from what we knew to be safe. First a small amount of zinc dust was measured into a wooden mixing bowl, followed by an appropriate amount of sulfur. After that, we poured enough of John Eye’s finest into the mix to make a thick slurry. We’d mix the ingredients in the bowl with a wooden spoon or our hands until it had turned a uniform gray, and then scrape it out on a cookie sheet. A rolling pin was used to squeeze out excess alcohol. Each small batch we produced was enough for us to load a few inches of propellant into a casement. We mixed and loaded, giving a minimum of one hour between loads for the zincoshine to “cure” in the casement. It was a slow, tedious process, but Sherman and I loved to do it. We’d listen to rock and roll on the little Japanese radio I owned, or talk about girls, or gossip about the goings and comings of Coalwood people. We were never bored.
At no extra charge, Mr. Clinton Caton, the machinist who usually did our work, had come up with a slightly higher-carbon steel for the nozzle we were going to use on our next rocket. Luckily, just when we needed it, he’d had a few len
gths of the special bar stock left over from a company job. Quentin was certain we would lick the erosion problem with the new steel, but there was only one way to find out: launch a rocket using it. Sherman and I were loading what I’d designated Auk XXII-F, pretty much a copy of the last rocket we’d fired except for the new steel.
To mix our propellants and load our rockets, I had built a small laboratory in the basement of our house. It was just a piece of plywood across the washing machine, which sat beside twin laundry sinks over which shelves groaned with our chemicals and mixing utensils. I had liberated most of my propellant-mixing hardware from Mom’s kitchen. She’d never asked for any of it back. I think she was afraid of being poisoned or blown up.
For safety, Sherman was wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, a heavy woolen overcoat, and a ball cap with a piece of plastic taped to the brim to protect his eyes. I was pretty much dressed the same way, and we were sweating because not more than ten feet away was a coal-fired furnace. As long as we kept the grate shut, it was safe. We also kept the basement door cracked to the outside to make certain the lab was ventilated.
I heard the upstairs door creak open. “Sonny, what are you doing down there?” Mom asked from the kitchen.
“We’re loading a rocket, Mom,” I said casually.
Her response was just as casual, although there was a hint of resignation in it. “Well, don’t blow yourself up,” she said for about the millionth time since I had become a Rocket Boy. “You either, Sherman,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Sherman seemed to slouch under the weight of all his protective gear, but it was really because he always held one foot at an acute angle from the other and kept his weight on his good leg.
“The Women’s Club meeting is going to start in about ten minutes,” Mom continued from above. “How about not making too much noise while they’re here? Also, I’d appreciate it if you gave the place a little air.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, and screwed the top on the fruit jar of moonshine and then went over and opened the basement door as wide as it would go. Since we’d gotten into zincoshine, Mom had told every nose-wrinkling visitor to the house, “I’m not running a juke joint here. It’s just Sonny’s . . .” and then the visitor would chime in unison with her, “. . . rocket stuff in the basement,” nodding in sympathy.
There were still some people in Coalwood who believed the Rocket Boys were the town’s special burden. I guess we had caused more than a little uproar over the years. One of our first rockets had careened into Dad’s office at the mine, causing him to order me to never launch another rocket in Coalwood again. Under pressure, he later relaxed his sentence, but we were banished a mile below Frog Level to the slack dump we called Cape Coalwood. There, Dad expected us to stay out of sight and out of mind of Coalwood citizenry. In no time, however, we managed to send a missile on a ballistic arc from the Cape all the way to a field not more than one hundred feet from the houses on Middletown Row, a distance of three miles. A steel company official sent down to oversee the selling of Coalwood’s houses and utilities had observed the near miss and ordered our blockhouse torn down and launchpad bulldozed. Dad had taken up for us on that one and we’d kept our range. I guess the way he saw it was that if anybody was going to kick the Rocket Boys out of Coalwood, he was going to do it, not some steel company slicker. We’d also been falsely accused by the West Virginia State Police of starting a forest fire over in Davy. Miss Riley had saved us on that one, pointing out on a map that our rockets couldn’t quite reach out that far—not yet, anyway. In the last few months, we’d stayed pretty much out of trouble, although nearly every weekend, our rockets shook the ground from one of our spectacular successes or our devastating but always colorful pyrotechnic failures.
The basement was a good echo chamber, and I could hear nearly everything that happened on the floor above. I heard Mom cross the kitchen floor to the back porch. I supposed one of the women of the Women’s Club had arrived. Then the basement door opened again. “Somebody here to see you,” she said, and then I heard footsteps down the basement steps and then a pause at the last one. I knew whoever it was was carefully stepping over Lucifer. “Lucifer, I swan,” Mom said by way of a complaint as she got past him.
I turned to see who was with her. Much to my surprise, it was Mrs. Dantzler and Ginger. The furnace pipes ran along the ceiling and they had to duck them to get to us. Mrs. Dantzler was especially careful of her hairdo. “Hello, Sherman,” she said, giving him a quick smile that she lost when her eyes came to rest on me. “So, Sonny, this is what took the place of your piano lessons.” Her large blue eyes flitted across the cluttered shelves. “Elsie, how you keep your house on the ground is beyond me. And the smell of it!”
“I know, Eleanor Marie,” Mom sighed. “We do the best we can with what we’ve got to work with.”
“Sonny, take off those gloves and raise your hands,” Mrs. Dantzler commanded. “There, you see, Elsie? Long fingers, wide palms. Those are the hands of a pianist. If only Sonny had kept at his lessons . . . It’s a shame is what it is.”
I glanced at Mom and was rewarded with a twinkle in her eye. “Now, boys,” she said, “the ladies and I have some last-minute Veterans Day float issues to discuss today. All I ask is you keep it quiet down here. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sherman and I chorused.
Sherman said, “I hear our float’s going to be the best one yet.”
“That’s true, dear,” Mom agreed.
Ginger looked around her mother’s shoulder with a bright smile. She had grown up to be a pretty sprite of a girl, and she still had those curly brown locks and deep amber eyes. She had on a plaid skirt and a white blouse that was buttoned up to her neck, but Sherman and I were both aware that she was a budding, comely teenager. We exchanged smiles when she asked, “Can I stay and watch?”
“Sure!” Sherman said eagerly.
Ginger looked at me. “Is it all right with you, too, Sonny?” she asked.
“Just be careful,” I said, playing the big rocket scientist role to the hilt. “And watch what you touch.”
“I won’t touch a thing,” she said softly.
The way she spoke, so meek and mild, made me look twice at her. Then, while I was looking, I had the sudden opinion that Ginger Zanice Virginia Dantzler was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. It just came out of nowhere and slapped me in the face, don’t ask me why. It was like all of a sudden the only thing I cared about in the whole basement was her. Coach Gainer had once spent an entire hour in his health class trying to figure out how the brains of teenage boys worked. He’d finally given up. I sympathized. I had one of those brains all to myself and I couldn’t figure it out, either.
“Sonny?” Sherman said, smiling kindly. “If you’re finished looking at Ginger now, can we get back to work?”
“Sure!” I squeaked, tearing my eyes away from her. Embarrassed, I cleared my throat and made an attempt to lower my voice an octave. “Sure,” I rumbled in a deeper register, and began to stir zincoshine at a rapid rate.
It wasn’t long before I heard the scuffling of shoes on the back porch and a babble of voices as the women greeted one another. Mom was shepherding them into the living room. I wondered if any of them knew how Mom had been on her hands and knees all morning polishing the beautiful oak planks Captain Laird had laid down. The house, being company property, didn’t belong to us, but she treated it like it did and maybe better.
The McDowell County Veterans Day parade was a huge, patriotic affair. Bands from every high school in the county marched in it, and there was a competition for the best float. As far as anybody could remember, Coalwood had never lost the float competition. Winning it was a point of great pride to the town. The company over the years had spared no expense to keep the string going, providing not only money but machinists and carpenters to do a lot of the work. Mom’s design called for a live Statue of Liberty to stand on a revolving disk while soldiers from exotic foreign nations,
such as France, saluted her. Most other communities had something simple on their floats such as high school cheerleaders sitting on the lap of Old King Coal. Coalwood, everybody was confident, would win the prize yet again.
This year, the guest of honor at the parade was going to be none other than Harry S Truman, the former president of the entire United States of America. President Truman and Coalwood knew each other well because when he had been the president, Mr. Truman had seen fit to send the United States Navy in to occupy us, just as if we were a foreign country. It had happened back in 1949 when Mr. Carter had closed the mine to keep the union out, declaring he had no intention of sharing his company with the likes of John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America. When this subject came up at the kitchen table, Dad said Mr. Carter and “ol’ John L.” actually respected each other but they had a duty to themselves and their own principles. Mom said if they had any principles, they wouldn’t have caused so much trouble just to make themselves appear like big shots.
President Truman came in on the side of the UMWA. The next thing Mr. Carter knew, there was a convoy of gray military trucks rolling into his town and saluting sailors pouring into the Club House. The first thing the sailors did was order the Club House cook to boil their navy beans and bake their bread. Then, they started marching up and down the road, telling the miners to get back to work. The navy commander in charge told Mr. Carter it was time to sign a union contract. While the old man dithered, the commander settled into the biggest room in the Club House and hosted lavish sit-down dinners there, inviting all the bigwigs in the county to join him. He acted pretty much like the king of Coalwood, the way I heard it. The engraved silver cutlery, plates, and bowls used at those dinners were the stuff of Coalwood legend. I knew it was true because, over the years, I saw a lot of it in Coalwood homes. Most of them had pretty daughters in 1949.