by Homer Hickam
I pushed Roy Lee away and stood to look around for Ginger, spying her in a knot of other tenth-grade girls. It looked like they were doing homework, so I resolved to catch her later, maybe on the bus ride back to Coalwood. I decided to seek out Quentin, instead. I wanted to see what he knew about the ancient Athenians. I figured to ask him about Mom’s seagull wings, too. “Look!” I heard Roy Lee slavering behind me as I made my way down the aisle.
That afternoon, Ginger wasn’t on the bus. Betty Jane said Mrs. Dantzler had picked her up at school to go shopping. She was going to buy a dress for the Christmas Formal, Betty Jane said, studying my face. I couldn’t help but let it sag a bit. “Who’s she going with?” I asked acidly. “That guy from Welch?”
Betty Jane nodded. “You should have asked her. I think she’d have gone with you.” She eyed me. Betty Jane was a pretty girl, too. What Coalwood girl wasn’t? Her father was one of our machinists. Her mother worked as a nurse for Dr. Hale. “How’s your brother?” she asked.
“I guess he’s okay,” I said. “Why?”
She smiled a faraway smile. “I wish he’d ask me to the formal.”
I thought You and about a million other girls to myself but didn’t say it. I was feeling too miserable to make anybody else feel that way. I said, instead, “He couldn’t take a nicer girl,” and meant it.
17
THE GATHERING OF THE GREENS
I GOT UP at sunrise on Saturday morning, ready to go get the greens. “I left the hatchet and bags for you on the back porch,” Mom said, back at her kitchen-table station. Her real estate books were stacked by her arm along with her usual paint cans and brushes. I quickly finished my toast and hot chocolate and rose to go. “Did you ask Quentin about the shape of gull wings?” she asked.
“He said they were cantilevered airfoils,” I reported.
“Oh, good,” she said. “All my artistic problems are solved.”
I washed my dishes and then went upstairs to my closet and dug out my miner’s boots. I usually wore them up in the mountains. I tucked my pants into them. Then I pulled on Uncle Joe’s old navy pea-coat, added a scarf, put on a pair of old leather miner’s gloves, and I was ready to go.
As Mom had promised, a hatchet was on the back porch along with two big cloth cotton sacks. Everybody in Coalwood owned a hatchet to cut the kindling for starting the fires in the Warm Morning coal heaters. We boys also thought it was a wonderful tool to carry around the woods, especially if my friends and I were into one of our Indian warfare periods, pretending we were Coalhicans or some such made-up tribe and Jim and his older, bigger boys coming after us were the United States Cavalry or maybe another bunch of Indian warriors. Our hatchets were just for show. We never hit each other with them, at least not on purpose.
Sherman was just arriving, parking his bike by the garage. He had his mountain-climbing clothes on—jeans and a heavy woolen plaid jacket, making him look a little like a lumberjack. He was bareheaded, caps being out of style, his thin brown hair fluffed by the bitter breeze. Dandy, his stub tail wagging, stood beside him. Poteet ambled over, too. “You want to take the dogs?” he asked.
I sure did. Dandy and Poteet always enjoyed a romp in the mountains.
Before we could get going, a white Cadillac pulled in behind the house. It was Dr. Hale. When he got out, I saw that he was wearing a fur coat. I remembered that he owned a chinchilla farm somewhere in Virginia and wondered if that’s what the fur was. “Hello, Sonny, Sherman,” he greeted us. I unlatched the back gate for him. “Your folks home?” he asked me.
“My mom is,” I told him.
Mom had come out on the back porch. “Hello, Eddie,” she said.
He tipped his hat to her. “Elsie. Do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Sure,” she said, pushing the screen door open. “Come on in.”
We watched Dr. Hale go inside. “I wonder what that’s about?” Sherman wondered.
“Not a clue,” I said, but I was already considering my tactics to get it out of Mom. “Let’s go get us some greens.”
I let the dogs out of the yard and we all headed up the street to Substation Row. There was a big stand of pine trees and a cluster of rhododendron on the mountain there that I thought would make easy pickings for our greens. I’d been raised in a house on Substation Row, one of the old bachelor boardinghouses that had been converted into duplexes. We’d start from there, where Mom had built a bridge over the creek.
As we walked, I saw coal smoke coming out of nearly every chimney. Since we sat on about a billion tons of pure bituminous coal, it was pretty cheap. When we went past Roy Lee’s house, he was at his coalbox, shoveling coal into a shuttle bucket. When he spotted me, his lower lip went out about a foot. “Sometimes I just hate you,” he said.
“Why?” I demanded.
He threw the shovel back into the coalbox and picked up the shuttle, carrying it to his front porch. He left it there and came to the fence. “Melba June’s going with Holder to the Christmas Formal. She wanted to go with you, you freak, but old walleye finally wore her down. I hope you and little Miss Innocent Ginger are going to be very happy. Have you asked her to go with you, by the way?”
“She already has a date,” I confessed. “Some boy from Welch.”
Roy Lee rolled his eyes and then stomped inside, taking the shuttle with him. “Hopeless” was his final word before he shut his door.
There was no use dwelling on Ginger. Jake had once told me, “Until you get knocked down, you don’t know how good it feels to stand.” But just as soon as I gave myself a little pep talk, I got the blues. I checked myself as we walked. It wasn’t about Ginger. It was something else. It was so close I could almost touch it. I tried to think of something to dispel the feeling and lit on my good grades. All A’s. I was so proud I could bust. The odd feeling of being sad passed, but its mystery remained.
Dandy and Poteet raced ahead until Dandy skidded to a halt in front of what had once been our house. I guess he still remembered it. We cut through the yard to the creek. Mom’s bridge over it was actually just a couple of thick planks thrown across a place where the creek narrowed. Roy Lee and I had done a lot of fishing in that old hole under Mom’s bridge during our lazy summers. It was a good place for crawl-dads, too, especially the big red ones we liked to scare the girls with. I’d put one down Teresa Anello’s back one time and, to return the favor, she’d pushed me into the water. Everybody said Teresa and I were destined to grow up and get married. Teresa had a football player for a boyfriend now, so things hadn’t quite turned out as predicted.
Since I knew this mountain well—Mom called it Sis’s Mountain after an old mama cat who liked to lie on a rock in the sun on it—I led the way up the trail. Dandy and Poteet angled on down the creek. I paid them no mind. They’d be back. Dandy couldn’t stand to be away from a Hickam for long and he’d bring Poteet with him.
Although Sherman had to contend with a weak leg, he kept up. I’d hear him grunt as he worked hard to get his leg up over a rock, but he never complained. At the top of the clearing was the first major obstacle on the mountain, a crag of rocks we called Big Cliff. There was a path beside it that went up an easy slope to the top, but that was for girls and sissies. If a boy used it, he was immediately and forevermore a “sister.” Sherman and I, of course, went up the hard way even though there was nobody there but us. Sherman had to use mostly his arms to pull himself up. It was amazing to watch him do it. He had the strongest arms of any boy I knew. At the top of Big Cliff, we caught our breath and turned to look down on Coalwood. The town was quiet, not even a car moving down the road. Sherman glanced up. “Look at that!”
I looked where he was looking and saw, miles above us, something marking a white line across the wispy blue of the sky. “It’s a jet!” I said, marveling.
“I bet it’s a bomber,” Sherman said. “Strategic Air Command!”
I studied the contrail. It was thick, meaning it had to be more t
han one engine. That meant Sherman was probably right. It was most likely a multiengine jet nuclear bomber such as a B-52 or maybe a B-47. “Wonder where it’s going?” I said more to myself than to Sherman, scarcely willing to breathe at the wonder and glory of it.
“Wonder where it’s been?” Sherman replied.
“I’m going to ride in a jet someday,” I said as sure of it as anything there was in the world.
“Me, too,” Sherman said. “I might just own me one, too.”
I couldn’t top that, so I silently kept watching until the white streak had completely disappeared behind the edge of a fluffy cloud peeking over the mountains to the east. Luckily, only one jet flew over. If there had been more, likely Sherman and I would have sat down and watched every last one of them go past.
Above Big Cliff lay Picnic Rock, a natural stone formation that looked like a large flat table. Around it were perfectly spaced rock chairs. Several clefts behind it formed shelves. We boys could stay all day on the mountain without eating anything other than birch bark and teaberry grass, but we’d always stop and eat at Picnic Rock when girls brought us lunch. They’d bring real food—sandwiches and apples and bottles of pop. As a reward, sometimes we’d even let them join in our games. The only trouble was they took it all too seriously. To us boys, our mountain wars were fun. To girls, it was war, and they played too rough and held grudges.
Dandy and Poteet caught up with us at the top of the mountain where there was a ridge called Fort Hill. There, the remains of more than a dozen log forts attested to the multitude of battles fought among generations of Coalwood kids. Poteet spotted a rabbit and took off after it. It escaped when it zigged and Poteet zagged, losing her footing in a big pile of leaves. She climbed out, sneezing at the leaf sticking to her nose. Dandy trotted over and nuzzled her and Poteet grinned, even though she’d lost her rabbit. Snorting, she put her snout to the ground and started looking for something else to chase.
We moved close to the hollow I had in mind for our Christmas greens and went inside it. I knew the place well. I’d spent a lot of time there over the years, just sitting on a log and listening to nothing except my heartbeat. The old familiar pines arched around me and dusted me with their sharp, fresh perfume. I was looking up at them when I tripped over something in the leaves. It was a deer fawn lying on its side, its thin legs sprawled.
I stared at it and it looked back at me with one huge brown eye, the only one I could see since its head was on the ground. Its legs trembled, then stilled. The eye slowly closed, then opened again. I saw terror in it.
The dogs ran over, Poteet bounding with her tongue hanging out, Dandy waddling behind. They stopped short of the fawn and sat down and stared. Sherman caught up with me. “Poor thing,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, trying to find my breath.
Sherman shrugged. “Starved. Look at its ribs.”
The little fawn was quivering. A small pink tongue hung from its mouth. A drop of saliva fell into the leaves. “We can’t just let it suffer,” Sherman said.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” I replied in a near whisper. My voice wasn’t working right. I knelt beside the fawn and felt its neck. It trembled at my touch. “I don’t think it’s long for this world,” I said.
“We can’t just leave it,” Sherman said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not?”
“You should never let anything die by itself. That’s all I know.”
I thought of Poppy and the night I ran from his death. “Okay, Sherman,” I said. “We’ll stay with it.”
We took up station on a nearby log and watched the fawn and waited. It lay there, its big eye staring at the sky and occasionally blinking. It gulped a couple of times, too. After a while, Sherman got up and limped over to the fawn and draped his jacket over it. “What are you doing?”
“I think it’s cold.”
“So am I.” I shivered. “You’re going to freeze without your coat.”
“I’ll be okay,” he said quietly, and sat back down on the log beside me. “I wish we could feed it.”
I looked around. There was nothing, not even a blade of grass, just a sea of brown dead leaves and some moss on the rocks. “O’Dell said the drought this summer killed all the stuff the deer usually eat,” I said. “I think this little guy’s too far gone to eat, anyway.”
We kept our vigil on the fawn. After a while, Sherman said, “I heard you have something bothering you and you can’t figure out what it is.”
It didn’t surprise me that he knew. There were few secrets between the rest of the Rocket Boys. I guess I was the one who tended to harbor mysteries. “Yeah. I’ve got part of it figured out now.” I didn’t go into the details. I got up and took off my pea-coat and covered the fawn’s speckled head. “Maybe if it thinks it’s night, it won’t be so scared,” I said.
“That’s a good idea,” Sherman said. Then he said, “I get scared sometimes, too. I get scared that maybe there’s not going to be enough time in my life to do all the things I want to do, or go to all the places I want to go. I mean, my whole life I’ve hardly ever been out of Coalwood but I’ve read so many books and seen so many movies about other places and things, I just want to see them all before I die. I wake up sometimes and think about that. Do you ever do that, Sonny?”
“I guess so,” I said. “Mostly when I wake up, it’s because I hear Dad coming up the steps past midnight. The first thing I think about is ‘I hope he doesn’t start coughing!’ He almost always does.” I looked away from Sherman, embarrassed. I’d told a family secret.
We sat quietly, letting our thoughts wander. Sherman was in a philosophical mood. “I love Christmas,” he said. “I just feel something in the air this time of year, a sort of resting up, kind of. Christmas really is a holy time.”
It didn’t surprise me to hear Sherman talking that way. He could get deep every so often if you didn’t keep your eye on him. Still, I couldn’t let his comment go by. “Mr. Jones in history class said Christmas is really a pagan winter festival. Jesus was probably born in the spring.”
“I know,” Sherman replied. “But I don’t think God has to pay any attention to what really happened. He’s bigger than history.”
Sherman’s thoughts wandered on. “You remember that time we got eraser-dusting duty in the third grade?”
I remembered. I’d just finished reading a book about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all the other men who got the U.S. of A. started and decided that having a powdered wig was what must have made them so smart. Sherman and I were outside to slap the erasers together to get the chalk dust out of them, and seeing all that white powder flying around gave me an idea. I talked him into letting me pat one of them on his hair. After I finished with him, he returned the favor. It was so much fun, we managed to dust ourselves white from head to toe. Then, one thing led to another, and we had an eraser fight, leaving a few of them a bit ragged. Mr. Likens, the school principal, made sure we understood that we had not performed our eraser-dusting duties in the proper manner. He had a paddle that could take the joy right out of you. It could take the powder off, too. A few swipes of it and his office turned into a chalk snowstorm. He might still be whacking us if he hadn’t gotten into that sneezing fit.
“How about that time we were the only two boys left in the spelling bee?” Sherman asked.
“Second grade—Mrs. Brown’s class!”
“Yep. She finally had to go into fifth-grade words to stump us.”
“Stumped you,” I said. “I won.”
“No, Linda Bukovich won. We just tied for second.”
We chuckled together. “I hope you get all the time you need, Sherman,” I said.
He shrugged and I thought of Little Richard’s wheel. It kept turning for all of us. Then Dandy made a long, low moaning sound and Poteet got up, turned around three times, and lay back down, her head on her paws. “I think the fawn just died,” Sherman said.
We
crept up to it and removed our coats. The fawn’s eye was wide open, staring, covered by the dull film of death. “Should we bury it or something?” I whispered.
Sherman pondered. “No. There might be something up here that needs to eat it, a bobcat or something.”
For the next hour, Sherman and I cut off low boughs on the pine trees, and leaves from the rhododendron until we had our sacks well filled. Then, the dogs cavorting around our legs, we headed down the mountain. Sherman took his sack and headed down Main Street for home while I went down into the basement to get the wire and pliers I would need to put the greens up. I bustled around looking for what I needed, but then I remembered the fawn. Without Sherman to make me stay brave, I leaned on the washing machine and held my face in my hands. I really felt bad about that little fawn.
I heard a soft thump on top of the washing machine. Old Lucifer, who usually made a habit of ignoring me and everybody else except when he was hungry, sat before me, cocking his head as if pondering my grief. He was a wreck of a cat. His broad nose was slashed with scars, and both his ears were split. One of them wouldn’t stand up straight at all and just flopped over. Lucifer knew the mountains. He went up there all the time. What had he witnessed among the animals while we humans in the valley went about our lives? The rabbits Lucifer brought home weren’t much more than fluff, grist, and marrow. He was a hunter and a killer, a warrior cat. “Good old Lucifer,” I said, petting him. He purred, kind of a stuttering rumble, as if he wasn’t sure it would work. I petted him some more, feeling the scars and scabs on his head. Then, as if he was satisfied with whatever he’d tried to convey, he jumped down and went back to his bed at the base of the stairs. What a mystery it all was.
I got the ladder and went to work, setting up under the kitchen windows to start. The first thing to be done when putting up your greens was stringing the wires around the window frames, then tucking in the pine boughs and rhododendron leaves under the wire to form a solid line. After that, you had to weave through the electric lights. It didn’t take long before my hands were covered with sticky pine tar. It would stay on for days, no matter how hard I tried to scrub it off. I liked the smell of it, though. I moved to the living-room window and set the ladder up there.