by Homer Hickam
He’d lost me, and I guess my look told him that. “Here’s the way to think about this,” he said patiently. “Consider that there is no simple answer, or single cause. Review your past and propose to yourself all the issues that might be affecting your psyche. Write them all down. Then every time something else happens that bothers you, write that down, too. Get yourself a nice little list going. After a while, you’ll reach a critical mass with all your complaints and be able to make some intellectual and logical sense to them. I’m certain, in your simple way, you will then find the solution to your occasional bouts of depression. If that doesn’t work, I’ll check out a psychology book and put you into analysis.”
That sounded like a potential cure worse than the disease. “I’ll make a list,” I promised. “I’ll make a bunch of lists.”
He slapped his hands on his knees. “Good! I’m glad we had this little talk. Say, there’s something else I’ve been thinking about. Do you like orange juice? Yes? Well, what if you were going to hike in the woods and didn’t want to carry juice or fresh oranges around? Got you stumped? Well, what if before you went in the woods you took a bunch of oranges and put them in the sun and let them dry out? And then you ground them up into a fine powder? Then, anytime you wanted orange juice, no matter where you were, all you’d have to do is add water to the powder! Voilà! Orange juice! What do you think?”
What I thought was it sounded pretty revolting and started to say so, but the bell to classes rang before I got the chance. Quentin, never one to be late, picked up his briefcase and made his way out of the auditorium. I sat there, letting all the students file by. Quentin had given me a lot to think about, and I wanted to get started on it. Then I saw Billy coming up the aisle. I caught his eye, but he looked away and kept going. I thought to chase after him, maybe find out what was bothering him, but then I got to thinking about what Quentin had told me. A list. I needed to make a list. Of course, if it was supposed to include all the things on that list that were bothering me, I’d have to put Quentin on it, too. That thought made me laugh. I loved it when I made myself laugh. It made me feel clever. Of course, Reverend Lanier used to say when a man thinks himself clever, he’s but a temptation to God’s sense of humor.
IT was not in the nature of the people of Coalwood to look up at the sky. For most of the years while I was growing up, a drifting cloud of coal dust and grit from the mine hung in the air, obscuring what sky there was squeezed between our mountains. But when the railroad tracks were taken out in the spring of 1959, and the tipple operations moved across the mountain to Caretta, the dust cleared. For the first time I could clearly see the velvety blackness of space. I found the stars bright as fireflies and the moon like a giant glowing wheel, and I was fascinated. It was almost as if I could reach out and touch them. About that time, I started to go up on the roof of the Club House to look through a telescope Jake Mosby had provided us boys. Jake was one of the junior engineers and had become a special friend of the Rocket Boys. Not only did he attend almost every one of our launches, but he had also provided us an old trigonometry book so we could figure out how high our rockets flew. Sherman was with me the first night Jake set up his telescope for us. When Jake fell asleep, a jar of John Eye’s best whiskey spilling out of his hand, Sherman and I continued to marvel at the wonders of the stars and planets. When I got home past midnight, my mother confronted me in the upstairs hall. “What now, Sonny boy?” she asked in the tired but resigned voice she often used in dealing with my escapades as a Rocket Boy.
“Mom, you’ve got to come see,” I told her, and then described Jake’s telescope and the stars he had shown me along with Jupiter’s bands and Saturn’s rings.
My dad came out of his bedroom, blinking from the hall light. “Was Jake drunk?”
“He was asleep when I left.” I answered. It was a nimble response, I thought.
“Drunk,” Dad concluded, knowing nimbleness when he heard it.
“We’re going there,” I said, entirely too loud for the hour. “All of us. Into space!” At that moment, I was as certain of that as anything in my whole life. I could already imagine what I’d look like in a space suit walking around on the moon.
Mom was eyeing my dad as he stood there in his pajamas and she in her robe. “Let me know when you’re ready to go,” she said. “I’ll be the first one on the rocket.” Then, as if on cue, my parents turned their backs on each other and went into their rooms, leaving me standing alone in the dark hall wondering what had just happened.
Jake had left us the past summer, finishing his stint as a junior engineer under Dad’s hard tutelage. Jake’s father owned a fairly large percentage of the steel company that owned us, and I guessed he was back there, learning how to squeeze dimes or something. He’d at least left us his telescope to wander our eyes around the heavens. But still I missed him. Jake was a man of the world, the only one I knew, but mostly he was my friend. Every time I went past the Club House, I looked for his bright cherry-red Corvette, but it was never there. I asked Mom if she’d heard anything of Jake, if there was any chance he’d come back. “Jake Mosby?” She laughed merrily. “Oh, yes, that boy will be back.”
“How do you know?” I wondered.
“Because he loves that mine as much as your dad.”
I was thunderstruck by such an idea. Jake was always in trouble when he was in Coalwood. If it wasn’t his incessant womanizing, especially with the company secretaries, it was his drunken, outrageous conduct at company parties. His mining engineering could use some improvement, too. Dad had said so out loud.
Mom watched my face as I sorted through all of Jake’s misdeeds. “I know what you’re thinking, but I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Jake Mosby and Homer Hickam are two peas in a pod. Where Homer leaves off, Jake picks up. He won’t stay gone from his hero for very long.”
I just couldn’t fathom it. “Dad his hero?” I exclaimed. “I always thought Jake hated Dad.”
“Trust me,” Mom said. “We’ll see our boy Jake in these parts all too soon.”
It was time that I looked at the stars. For the first time in weeks, the clouds had blown away, so I figured I had better take advantage of it. Dad had gone off to the mine after a phone call, Mom was down Tipple Row to see Naomi Keneda and her new baby granddaughter. I grabbed my bike and headed off for the Club House. I parked beside the big double doors on the vast front porch and started to go inside, only to be met by two men, just coming out. They were wearing long leather coats that almost reached the ground. I had never seen the like. Then I heard them speaking and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I stared at them. They were both young men, and at first I thought maybe they were a couple of the junior engineers trying out their college Latin or whatever it was they studied, but even their haircuts were odd, severely cut around the ears and swept straight back. The taller of the two had hair the color of wet straw, the other a deep coal black. They took note of me. “Guten Tag,” the straw-haired man said to me.
“Good day to you,” the other said, and gave me a curt nod.
I just stared. What kind of foreigners were they? Then I thought—wait a minute—they sounded just like Wernher von Braun on television! They were Germans! I had never actually seen a real live German before and a question just leapt right out of my mouth. “Do you know Wernher von Braun?”
The two young men looked at each other and then shook their heads. “ Nein. Herr Doktor von Braun is in another line of work, eh?” They both laughed and then each stuck out their hands to me to shake. “Gerhard,” the straw-haired man said.
“Dieter,” said the one with the black hair.
“Sonny Hickam,” I said.
“The son of Homer Hickam?” Dieter asked. His English seemed much better than Gerhard’s.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ach, your father is a man who sees.”
I didn’t understand. “Sees?”
“Sees,” Dieter said mysteriously.
I guessed Dad saw, but what he was seeing these days I had no idea. Gerhard held up two envelopes and mimed mailing them.
“Oh, the post office.” I pointed it out, just across the street, lit only by a streetlight. “But it’s closed.” They nodded, although a bit uncertainly. I led the two over to the post office and showed them the slot to put their letters in, but then I noticed they didn’t have any stamps on them. I pointed that out and we walked back to the Club House. “You sure you don’t know Wernher von Braun?” I asked.
“Nein, nein,” Dieter answered, acting a little put out. He looked around. “What is there to do?” He waved his hand at the street. Downtown Coalwood was as quiet as a graveyard.
“I’m going up to look at the stars,” I said, and when they gave me an uncomprehending look, I walked to the edge of the porch and pointed at the first twinkling pinpoint of light in the black sky. “Stars,” I said again. Dieter and Gerhard came over and looked up, too, but it was clear they didn’t understand what I was talking about. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
I led them up to the third floor, stopping to get Jake’s telescope out of the broom closet where it was stored. I motioned to them to follow me, and we climbed up the rude wooden ladder. We emerged in the total darkness, but I knew the roof as well as my own room and led them over to the telescope base, covered by a canvas. I took the canvas off and attached the telescope to the base. I proudly patted the assembly. “We use this to look at the stars and planets,” I said.
I showed them how to manipulate the telescope, and they looked with interest at each planet I pointed out, beginning with reliable Venus, our dazzling, cloud-shrouded, and closest planetary neighbor. “Nobody knows what’s under those clouds,” I explained as they each took turns at the eyepiece, Dieter translating what I was saying to Gerhard. “Could be the whole place is covered by an ocean or maybe a big jungle.” Then I showed them Saturn. “See the rings? Go ahead,” I told them as they swiveled the telescope from planet to planet, and star to star. “Look all you want.”
While Dieter and Gerhard took turns looking and chattering in German about their various discoveries in the sky, I sat down on the edge of the roof. Sometimes when my eyes got tired of squinting through the telescope, I would gaze down on Coalwood, looking at it with almost the same wonder and curiosity as the sky. After living there my entire life, I suppose I should have learned all that there was to know about the place. Yet I suspected there were many things about my town of which I knew little, including the contest my parents had waged for as long as I could remember as to what my future should be, and my brother’s, and their own. The stars were complex and deeply mysterious. Coalwood and its people, it often seemed to me, were vastly more so.
Past the church, I saw the Dantzler house, a big, white two-story box nestled in a stand of pine. What was Ginger doing at that exact moment? Studying, I supposed, or playing the piano or practicing singing the scales. The Dantzlers were about as cultured and fine a family as I guess had ever graced Coalwood. Maybe I was too crude to ever aspire to their level. “Grace, Sonny Hickam,” Mrs. Dantzler had told me one time when I’d stumbled over a lesson and sat there beside her, my head hanging in mortification because I had been so clumsy. “Head up,” she’d said brightly. “Curve your fingers. Now play. You can do it. Let’s go.” She put her hand under my chin and physically raised it, then took my hands, curved my fingers, and placed them on the keys. “Play,” she commanded, and I had. “Good,” she said, and because she’d said it, I knew it was.
I wondered what life was going to be like without Mrs. Dantzler and all the other townspeople I had known my whole life. By next fall, I would be gone from Coalwood, probably to college. Mom had promised I could go if I showed my dad I was capable of something more than just dreaming. I’d already shown him with my rockets and I was going to show him soon with my grades. Still, even though it was what I wanted to do, I felt frightened at the prospect of leaving. And then I thought—wait a minute—is this what makes me sad? Did I need to put “Leaving Coalwood” on my list? My thoughts were interrupted as Dieter and Gerhard joined me on the edge of the roof. Dieter lit a cigarette while Gerhard sat down beside me and kicked his feet over the ledge. “It is a very nice place, Coalwood,” Dieter said.
“Um,” I grunted noncommittally.
“You are here your whole life?”
“Yes, sir.” I looked over at him. “Why did you say you’re here?”
Dieter flicked his ashes over the edge while Gerhard hummed a tuneless song. “I didn’t say.”
I nodded. It was a West Virginia custom to be curious but to never go past a rebuke. I was just passing the time, anyway. I didn’t much care why the two Germans were in Coalwood, since they didn’t even know Wernher von Braun. I looked out over the Club House lawn. The machine shop across the valley was dark and quiet. I could even hear the gurgling of the little creek that ran behind it.
“We help your dad,” Dieter said, flicking his cigarette over the roof. I watched it fall, a tiny meteor that bounced on the lawn, sparks flying.
I looked in his direction. “How do you help him?”
Dieter was quiet for a moment and then got up. Gerhard did as well. They made their way to the hatch in the roof. “We help him at 11 East,” Dieter said, and then they went below.
At the mention of 11 East, the autumn air seemed to get suddenly chillier. I thought Dieter surely must have told me wrong. 11 East? How could that be possible? Ever since I was old enough to know what it meant, 11 East conjured up disaster, death, and doom all rolled up into one deep, dark place.
10
11 EAST
OVER THE NEXT few days, the two Germans became the main topic of fence-line gossip. Some people even made up excuses to go to the Club House just to look at them. Dieter and Gerhard kept pretty much to themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before people heard what they had come for, at least to an extent. The Germans had come under a special contract to do some unspecified work at the section named 11 East, which my father had decided to reopen. There was grumbling all over town. Homer Hickam had surely lost his mind on this one. 11 East was a known killer.
I knew the story of the section as well as anybody, having heard it from my parents at the supper table. The Captain had first opened 11 East in 1941. There was supposed to be a huge seam of pure bituminous coal there, seven to nine feet thick, easy to work—prime “high coal” as such was called. The Captain, after a careful engineering analysis, had assigned the new section its number—every section had one—and pointed a crew in that direction. It didn’t take long before 11 East turned into the Captain’s and Coalwood’s nightmare. There were rockfalls, runaway cars, gas flare-ups, flooding, and some men were hurt and a few were killed. A lot of Coalwood miners from the very start said the place was jinxed, but others said the problem was the roof, a jumble of massive slabs of razor-edged rock. “Just get through this bad roof, boys,” the Captain was purported to say, “and we’ll all be rich as Croesus.”
“Okay, Cap’n, but I guess we’ll have to spend our money in the hereafter,” one miner was supposed to have retorted, although I couldn’t imagine anybody ever truly talking back to the Captain. He stood nearly six and a half feet tall, a huge, slump-shouldered, big-footed man who often walked around with a pistol tucked in his belt. Dad said the pistol was never loaded, but Mom said one time the Captain used it to shoot a cigar right out of the mouth of a man who lit it up in the presence of a lady. I’d have paid real money to have seen the Captain make that shot.
Dad had been a day-shift construction foreman at the time when 11 East was opened, but the Captain reassigned him to take the lead foreman’s job on the evening shift of the new section. Day after day, the Coalwood men on all three shifts assaulted 11 East like an army at war, trying every way possible to get through the bad rock. Then, to compound their problems, they discovered that the coal seam sloped downward and became narrower. Before it was over, men had to crawl o
n their hands and knees to get to the face, but the Captain kept urging them on, believing the high coal was always just a few more yards away. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stopped the combat at 11 East. With the demand for coal from the War Department, the Captain had to quit and go after the easier coal. Before the Captain closed the section down, so I’d heard, some 11 East miners had volunteered for the army, figuring they’d be safer storming beaches than working under that deadly roof.
In later years, “11 East” became a phrase used in Coalwood for a close-run thing that was a bit too close. Some mothers even warned their unruly kids that, if they didn’t behave, they were going to be “sent down to 11 East.” Then, in the early 1950’s, a few miners going back into the gob near the old section to eat their lunches claimed they had witnessed miners wearing striped, full-bib coveralls and corrugated helmets, the kind that had been worn before the war. The old-timers had said nothing, just kept walking back into the abandoned tunnel that had been the entry to 11 East. After that report, most people believed the old section was haunted. Every mine had such stories, but this one had the ring of truth to it. I couldn’t imagine why Dad would want to go back in there.