by Homer Hickam
Jim chose to ignore my question—it was only me asking, after all—and just kept silently eating everything but the tablecloth. But my words were still hanging in the air, accomplishing their purpose. “Do you think you’ll play, Jim?” Dad asked. I felt the contentment of the natural-born agitator.
Jim took a big swig of iced tea. He looked down at his plate. “I could,” he allowed, and then scooped up a mound of peas on his fork. I pushed the pea bowl closer to him. I thought to save time maybe he should just eat right out of it.
Dad frowned. “Well, what does Coach Claiborne say?”
Jim hunched his shoulders. “He doesn’t say much.”
“Will you play offense or defense?”
Jim stabbed a slice of turkey. “I played mostly defense on the freshman team,” he said.
“So you’re going to be a defensive lineman,” Dad said. “You’ll be the best one VPI ever had.”
Mom shifted in her chair, giving me a look I couldn’t decipher. Then the black phone rang and Dad went after it, his napkin barely hitting the chair before he had the receiver in his hand even though the telephone stand was twenty feet away. “Keep going!” he said after a moment of listening.
“Can’t you ever do anything without stirring up trouble?” Mom hissed in my direction. The doorbell rang while I puzzled over her accusation. Mom went to answer it, and Jim threw down his napkin and got up, following her. I just sat there, mystified. Me? Stirring up trouble?
It was Woodrow and Mildred Duncan. Woodrow was the town plumber, and he and Mildred had always been good friends of my parents. For some reason, they were about the only adults I could call by their first names. Mildred was an energetic woman, always with tales to tell. “Gawdalmighty, Woodrow, looky here!” she declared when she saw Jim. She grabbed Jim around the waist. “Jimmie Hickam, ain’t you turned into a good-looking man! That college food been going to all the right places!”
Jim said a few words to them and then excused himself to go up to his room. This was no surprise. Jim wasn’t much for socializing with people who came to the house. His attitude always disappointed Dad. I suspected he liked to show Jim off. I went in to see the Duncans, offering myself as a consolation prize. Mildred patted me on the cheek, and Woodrow gave me a friendly grin, but I was otherwise of little interest to them. I guess they already knew all there was to know about me.
After the Duncans had finished their visit and gone, and after I had silently helped Mom clear the table, my curiosity got the best of me. I knocked once on Jim’s door and then cracked it open. “What’s with you?” I said straight out.
Jim was sitting on his bed. He’d put on his green Big Creek letter sweater. “Go away,” he grunted.
I brazenly stepped in and closed the door behind me. “There’s something going on with you. What is it?”
Jim looked at the mirror on his wall. It was a full-length mirror, but since he’d gone away, Mom had moved a storage cabinet in and blocked the bottom half of it. If he needed it, it was a reminder that it wasn’t completely his room anymore. I had a flash of intuition. “Are you homesick?”
“I’m leaving college,” he said.
I was so thunderstruck by Jim’s announcement that it took a moment before my brain could begin its usual sifting. How could Jim leave VPI? He had a football scholarship, the one thing Dad was forever bragging about. Then I thought, Dad doesn’t know. “Why are you leaving college?” I asked, striving to keep my voice casual. I sensed if I pushed too hard, Jim would clam up.
To my surprise, he seemed eager to talk. “Because it’s too big,” he said.
“But you said you wanted to go to a big school,” I said, remembering back to when all the colleges had tried to recruit him.
He shrugged. “Well, I was wrong. In a big school, the coaches don’t pay much attention to you. They just use you. I need to go somewhere where the coaches take care of their players, teach them stuff.”
“Where would that be?” I wondered.
I had never seen him so talkative, at least to me. “When we played Wake Forest, I met their freshman coach, Beattie Feathers. He told me I was good enough to play pro ball but only if I got the right kind of coaching. He said if I transferred down there, he’d make sure I got it. So that’s where I’m going. Wake Forest. I’ll have to go out as a walk-on, but I know I can make their team, no sweat.”
I didn’t know who Beattie Feathers was and I didn’t care. “You’re going to lose your scholarship,” I said, surprised that it bothered me. I guess, deep down, I’d been a little proud of Jim’s scholarship, too.
Jim just looked at me, and for the first time in the history of my entire life, I almost felt sorry for him. It was a novel emotion, not entirely unpleasant, although I didn’t much think it would last. “When are you going to tell Dad?” I asked.
I had landed on a tough question. He looked away. “Soon.”
As I had predicted to myself not more than a few seconds before, my sympathy for my brother wafted away to be replaced by a sense of satisfaction over the entire matter. All that bragging Dad had done over the years about Jim and none about me was going to come back at both of them now. “Dad’s going to have a cow,” I said. And then, even though I wished I could have avoided it, I smirked. “You’re going to finally know how it feels.”
A crack like that was usually enough to make Jim jump up and try to break my neck. I tensed, ready for action, but he just sat there, looking vulnerable. I couldn’t stand it. I was back to feeling sorry for him again. I wanted my big brother back, no matter how obnoxious he was!
“Just go away, Sonny,” Jim said miserably.
I moved my hands around in little mixing motions like I was going to box with him, but it did no good. Jim just wasn’t interested in fighting with me. He was through talking to me, too. I gave up and went to my room. Mom soon visited me. She opened the door. “Leave your brother alone,” she said. Then she closed the door. A second later, she opened it again. “And I want my turkey roaster operational in one week.” She closed the door again.
After she left, I got my list out. Jim quitting college, I wrote. Then I wrote, Fix Mom’s turkey roaster. I contemplated that one and then crossed it out. I figured Mom would forget her roaster until she needed to cook another turkey. I didn’t see that happening real soon.
14
SNAKEROOT HOLLOW
WE FLEW Auk XXIII the weekend after Thanksgiving using a De Laval nozzle based on the calculations Quentin and I had made. It didn’t have a ceramic liner. Mr. Caton and I hadn’t been able to figure out how to layer the water putty inside the nozzle. The problem was the stuff was sticky and tended to clump up. Mr. Caton tried using one of his wife’s butter knives to smooth it, but it still made a mess. Nothing else he tried worked any better. Until we solved this problem, we would have to continue to use nozzles built of raw steel.
Since we wanted to see how well the new “scientific” De Laval nozzle worked, we decided to go ahead and test, putty or no putty. Auk XXIII tore off the pad, then streaked out of sight in a few seconds while we danced beneath it. As elated as I was at the success of the new nozzle, I was deflated when I figured out the rocket’s altitude, much less than my calculations predicted. Our inspection revealed that nozzle erosion was even worse with the new design. Somehow, we had to get the putty to work.
“Sonny, you must pursue this!” Quentin moaned. “Tell me you will!” I told him I would, but I was discouraged. Maybe we just didn’t have the knowledge to defeat erosion in our nozzles. That meant we would never have a “great” rocket. Since it was automatically scientific and logical by definition, I had resisted putting a rocket problem down on my list. I did now. Erosion! Maybe, I thought, I had a mental barrier to overcome before the solution for erosion could be found.
It would be December 7, 1959, Pearl Harbor Day, before I got to look through Jake’s telescope again. Actually, I had hoped to see Jake at the Club House, but when I came down from the roof, Mrs. Davenport
, the housekeeper, cook, and manager, informed me that he was rarely in his room. “The boy spends all his time up at the mine,” she said. “I swear, Sonny, he’s starting to act more like your daddy every day. I say that with no lack of respect for Homer, of course, but— say, why don’t you just eat with us tonight? I’ll call on the black phone, let your mom know where you are.”
I thanked her and, after I heard what was on the menu, gratefully agreed. Mrs. Davenport made the best stuffed pork chops, mashed potatoes, and gravy in town. The Hickam kitchen table wasn’t much fun these days, anyway. Dad was rarely home for supper and Mom didn’t even bother to set a place for herself. I ate alone, mostly. Sometimes, against strict Elsie Hickam rules, I would let Daisy Mae get up on the table and eat her food out of a bowl while I ate. She loved being there. After she finished eating, she could crouch down and watch the birds at Mom’s kitchen window feeder. I kept an ear cocked for Mom’s footsteps. Cats didn’t belong on the kitchen table in her universe. They could get up on the dining-room table and lounge around all day, but they were never, ever allowed on the kitchen table. It was just her way.
In the big, high-ceilinged dining room of the Club House, I sat down to a table of two junior engineers. I anticipated some entertaining conversation. Coalwood’s junior engineers, sent down by the steel company to get a little seasoning, were usually an interesting bunch. Mom said their tour of duty in town was about the last time they would ever get to kick up their heels. After their excursion with us, she said, they had to go back to the steel company, get married, have children, learn the business of draining West Virginia of all our money, and never ever have any kind of fun again.
The way I heard it, Dad tried to keep them from having any fun in Coalwood, too. He made sure their initial week in Coalwood was hell. The first day in the mine for a junior engineer meant trudging behind Dad for miles under a low roof. That could kill even the youngest back. During the journey, Dad yelled out coal mining lore over the roar of machinery. They poked into every crevice in the mine. The first day usually lasted sixteen hours.
The next day he jolted their already sprained backs in his truck at breakneck speed over fire roads through the hollows, visiting every slack dump, ventilation hole, and fan that belonged to the company, all the while barraging them with facts and figures they were expected to repeat back to him anytime he asked. Another sixteen-hour day.
The third day was used to visit the preparation plant in Caretta, where the men who ran it gave the junior engineers a thorough description of everything they did. They were shown how to mix up the chemicals and “wash coal” to see how much rock was in it. If it floated in the solution, the coal was pure. If it sank, it had too much rock and was pushed to the side to be dumped at one of the slack dumps. Another two-shift day.
The next two days were spent in the offices with the engineers learning how the mine was laid out, how the maps were made, and something of continuous mining strategy. Dad picked them up as they came out of the office at the end of the day shift and sent them into the mine to follow a foreman around during the two night shifts. These were twenty-four-hour days.
By the weekend, a junior engineer was either going to stick it out or not. The ones that stayed had at least a chance of becoming decent mining engineers, and Dad farmed them out to his foremen to use as they saw fit. The ones who couldn’t take it went back to Ohio with their tails well tucked. What happened to them, I didn’t know. What does any engineer do who fails? Maybe they become lawyers.
I was jolted from my ponderings about the fate of junior engineers in general when I realized the two at the table were staring at me. One of them was named Rollie and the other was named Frank. Coalwood gossip had informed me that Frank was an Ohio boy. He looked about my age but he had to be older, having graduated from college. Rollie was a big, heavyset young man, originally from Kentucky. He had round, rosy cheeks and an earnest look about him. I figured him for the type who’d break wind in a scout camp at night and think it was funny. I’d seen both of them around town, but they’d apparently missed my shining face.
“Which one of the Hickam boys are you?” Frank asked. Mrs. Davenport had apparently informed them that the boss’s boy was going to be in attendance.
“I’m the one who plays football,” I said smartly. “I’m just home from college to rest up for the day.” Besides being clever with the junior engineer, I didn’t “sir” him. Junior engineers didn’t rate a “sir” from anybody in Coalwood, even me.
Frank looked at me and said, “Your father . . . your father . . .”
“I know,” I said. “He’s tough as a tank.”
“He sure is,” Rollie said, whistling. “I never seen a man move so fast in a crouch. That day I followed him around, I bumped my head on the roof so many times my ears didn’t stop ringing for a week.”
“You’re not really the football player, are you?” Frank asked suspiciously.
Seeing as how I was only about five feet, nine inches tall, weighed on the light side of 140 pounds, and was wearing thick glasses, even a junior engineer could eventually put two and two together, given time. “No,” I confessed. “I’m the Rocket Boy.”
“I heard about that!” Frank cried. “Rollie and I would like to build rockets, too! Could you show us how?”
“That depends,” I said. “How much money do you have?”
“We’re pretty tapped out,” Rollie said sadly. “We were at Cinder Bottom last weekend.”
“Cinder Bottom” was the notorious row of houses of ill repute in the town of Keystone, four mountains away from Coalwood past Welch. Coalwood’s junior engineers often made pilgrimages to see the girls there, or so I’d heard. I’d also heard that the women of Coalwood considered such sojourns a blessing and a protection to their daughters.
“Those sweeties sure know how to go through a wallet,” Frank added, sounding every bit as remorseful as a drunk at a revival.
“Then I guess you’re out of luck,” I said. I was actually relieved. I didn’t see either of these two nitwits as rocket builders.
Before we could discuss my dad, rockets, or fallen women anymore, we were joined by Gerhard and Dieter, obviously released from 11 East duty for the evening. I noted they wore the same garb as the junior engineers: khaki shirts and pants tucked into high-top brown lace-up hard-toe leather mining boots. I wondered if Dad had put them through his grueling school of mining, too. They looked tough enough to take it.
Mrs. Davenport, a plump and pleasant-faced widow, brought in plates of food, piping hot, and then bustled back into the kitchen for more. She was pretty much a one-woman show. It wasn’t long before the four young men had piled up what looked like miniature Mount Everests of pork chops, potatoes, and green beans on their plates. I had created a little mound myself. During the whole time we were stacking up our plates, Frank couldn’t keep his eyes off Gerhard and Dieter. “Well, boys,” he said finally. “This is the first time I have had the pleasure of sharing supper with you. What brings you to this fair town, eh?”
“A contract,” Dieter said, holding his knife in his right hand and his fork upside down in his left. I’d never seen the like but it seemed to work just fine. I watched as he cut a piece of pork chop and then jabbed the piece with his fork, ready for eating. His method looked efficient. I couldn’t wait to try it out. I wondered if Quentin knew about it.
“A contract for what?” Frank asked suspiciously, gnawing on a pork chop bone. He wiped his greasy fingers on his pants.
“I think it more proper for the company to say,” Dieter responded discreetly.
“Aw, Frank,” Rollie said. “These two old boys been working down on 11 East. You know, where we ain’t allowed to go.” He eyed Gerhard. “Why ain’t you talking?”
Dieter looked at Gerhard and shrugged. “His English is not so good,” Dieter said.
“You boys ever get a chance to travel around the county, see the other sights?” Frank asked.
Dieter managed a cu
rt “Nein.”
Rollie raised his eyebrows and elbowed Frank. “So, I guess that means you’ve never been to Cinder Bottom, eh?”
Dieter took the bait. “What is Cinder Bottom?” he asked.
Frank and Rollie grinned. I allowed a smile myself. After looking around to make sure Mrs. Davenport wasn’t in the room, Rollie enthusiastically described the houses in Keystone and their purpose while piling up more pork chops and mashed potatoes on his plate. He picked up a big serving bowl of thick, brown pork gravy, pondered the spoon in it, shrugged, and then tipped the whole bowl to pour a lake of gravy over everything. His plate almost brimmed over. “Frank and I would be happy to escort you boys over to the Bottom any old time,” he said, his eyes sliding toward Frank, who gave him a surreptitious nod. “I don’t think them girls would hold it against you much, you being foreigners and all. They might charge you a little bit more, that’s all. Of course, what you might do is let us hold your money. Then we could make sure you didn’t pay too much.”
Dieter frowned. “We would give you our money?”
Frank leaned forward. His face had taken on a feral look. “Just to make sure you got a fair deal,” he said wolfishly.
Dieter’s frown went deeper. “We would give you our money?” It was as if he had to say it twice, the concept being so utterly alien to him. It was clear he hadn’t been born yesterday. Frank and Rollie I wasn’t so sure about.
Rollie put his hand on his cheek, as if he’d suddenly remembered something. “My God, boys. You know what? I’d almost forgotten. We got to celebrate today which, by God, is Pearl Harbor Day!”
“What is that?” Dieter politely questioned.
Rollie looked shocked, in a theatrical way. “Why, it’s a celebration of when the damn Japs came over and bombed the hell out of us Americans, that’s what!”
“You celebrate getting bombed?” Dieter asked.