by Homer Hickam
After we finished mucking out the stalls, put down fresh straw, and saw that Trigger and Champion had their bucketful of oats, O’Dell invited me inside his house. The Carrolls were about to have supper, and Red asked me if I wanted to join them. The smell of ham and butter beans got my stomach to growling so I quickly agreed. Riding a pony can build a powerful appetite. O’Dell had two younger brothers and a sister. Everybody bowed their heads and Red blessed the food. Then, after he said “Amen,” he nodded to me and said, “Dig in, Sonny.” I didn’t need to be told twice.
Mrs. Carroll sat beside me. She had sewn our original BCMA flag, coming up with the design of an owl riding a rocket. “Sonny, O’Dell says your flag is getting kind of worn out,” she said, and handed me a folded cloth square.
I unfolded the cloth. It was another flag, completely hand-stitched. “Thank you!” I said, searching for something more to say to express how I felt. I was just so grateful. Mrs. Carroll had a ton of work to do every day with all her kids and her house. Yet, she had taken the time to sew us up another flag. I settled on Quentin’s vocabulary. “It’s prodigious!”
“Is it worth a hug?” she asked.
It was. I kissed her cheek, too.
WHEN I got home, it was after dark. I found Dad dragging a huge Christmas tree through the back gate. He had his miner’s lamp set on the fence so that he could see what he was doing. One of the branches had tipped off his hat and Poteet had picked it up. She sat, Dad’s hat in her teeth, her tail wagging furiously. “Your mother always likes a big tree,” Dad said, grunting with the effort. I hoped he wouldn’t start coughing.
Together, we propped the big pine against the back porch near Mom’s bird-feeding station. “She usually picks her Christmas trees out,” Dad gasped. “I thought I’d do it for her this year.” He gave a few coughs, as if testing his lungs, and then swallowed heavily. I didn’t mention the obvious to him. With Mom heading for Myrtle Beach, she didn’t need or want any tree.
Dad went back to the gate and held his hand out. Poteet trotted up to him with his hat. He took it, gathered up his miner’s lamp, and got back in his truck, driving off, I presumed, to the mine.
I looked at the tree. If it was going to fit in the living room, it was going to need to be trimmed by several feet. Mom, probably hearing the commotion, came out on the back steps and pondered the tree in the glow of the porch light. “And there it shall remain,” she said, and turned on her heel and went back inside.
It hurt my heart to hear her words. Never, in all my born days, had Mom ever been anything but completely, totally delighted with a Christmas tree. To my chagrin, I felt responsible for her new attitude. If only I had told her from the start I would work on her blamed Christmas Pageant, I thought. And maybe if only I hadn’t given her such grief over her forcing me to be with Dad and Poppy last Christmas. Then I went further to think that if only I hadn’t let Chipper out, then maybe . . .
But there was that blamed phrase. If only. I surely wished it could be banned from the English language.
I went upstairs and got out my list. I added Mom and Christmas Tree to it. It was an odd little list, no question about it, and it seemed to me that it was missing something very important, something so obvious that it should have just jumped out and hit me right between the eyes. Still, I believed that somewhere in that list, maybe actually in between the words, was the answer to that thing that, every so often, vexed me so. Then, finally, I remembered to put one more thing down. It was past time and I was proud that I did it: Billy.
20
SIX HOLLOW
I FOUND MOM looking at a suitcase on a chair in her bedroom. It was open but empty. “Can I borrow the car?” I asked. “I want to go up to Billy Rose’s house.”
She tore her eyes from the suitcase. “Why?”
“Because I’ve never been before,” I said. Then I told her about Billy quitting school and joining the navy.
She didn’t act surprised. “I’ve been hearing some bad things about Arnee Bee,” she said darkly. Arnee Bee was Billy’s dad. She pondered me. “What say I go with you? I could visit Henrietta Johnson. I haven’t talked roses with her in a coon’s age.”
I wasn’t sure who Henrietta Johnson was but I said okay. I aimed the Buick up the road past the mine and turned in at the Six company store. Mr. Dantzler had closed it the year before when many men up Six Hollow had lost their jobs and business had fallen off. The store’s vacant, dirt-smeared windows stared at us. Somebody had finger-written GO OWLS on one of the windows. Another message said HICKAM GO TO HELL. “At least they spelled it right,” Mom said grimly.
The road up the hollow had been built out of slack and cinders. It was potholed and rutted. We entered a row of sagging, dirty houses with peeling paint and knocked-out windows. “I don’t remember it looking like this,” Mom said. “Haven’t been up here in a couple of years . . .” And then her voice trailed off as she turned her head to look at a house that had burned down. Charred boards stuck out in crazy angles where the roof had collapsed. There was a plastic doll without a head in the front yard.
Scrawny chickens pecked at pebbles along the road. Runny-nosed children, playing in yards stripped of grass, stopped and watched us with big eyes. Their coats were dirty and torn. “This is where the trick-or-treat children came from,” Mom said. She seemed to be talking to herself. “I thought somebody had brought them in from some other town. . . .”
Every house seemed to get tireder and poorer as we drove farther up the hollow. Windows were busted out, fences drooped, trash lay in the ditches. I saw a rose trellis arching over a gate and it stirred a sudden memory. I remembered who Henrietta Johnson was. She was a colored lady who had helped Mom out when we’d lived up on Substation Row. It was when Dad had come down with cancer of the colon, and Mom was staying with him a lot at the hospital. She didn’t want Jim and me to come home from school and find the house empty, so Mrs. Johnson had started coming by every day. Besides making sure we boys got supper, she also did some light housekeeping. Mom had planted one of her first rose gardens in the backyard about that time, and Mrs. Johnson came to admire it, so much so she had planted a rose garden at her own house. Every so often, Mom would want to go see Mrs. Johnson’s roses, to admire them and have tea with a woman who had become her friend. I remembered the Johnson house being neat as a pin, its white paint gleaming, and the trellis covered with bright red roses. But now, as we passed it, I saw the trellis was broken down, a scraggly brown network of dead vines the only indication that anything had ever bloomed there. Mom looked at the sagging trellis and the ghostly house behind it. “Poor Henrietta,” she said, her fingers at her mouth. “Why didn’t she let me know she was leaving?”
I pulled up in front of the tiny crackerbox of a house O’Dell had described as being Billy’s. The front yard was a strip of black slack dirt. The porch sagged on cinder blocks, and one of the windows had a pane missing. A piece of brown cardboard covered it. When I stopped, Mom stayed seated. “Are you coming in?” I asked her.
“Will you be long?”
“I don’t think so. I just want to say good-bye. I’m not sure when he’s leaving, so I thought I’d better catch him while I can.”
“I’ll wait for you,” Mom said. “If you boys need to talk, you don’t need me around.”
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Johnson, Mom,” I said.
She shook her head. “I still can’t figure out why she didn’t let me know she was leaving. We were friends.”
“If Mr. Johnson got cut off, I guess Dad was the one who had to do it,” I said. “Maybe she got mad at you over it.”
“No better woman in Coalwood than Henrietta Johnson,” Mom said. “I always meant to come visit her. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I thought I understood how she felt. Neglecting a friend seemed the surest way to lose one.
When I got out of the car, I was hit by a foul odor coming from the ditch that ran in front of Billy’s hou
se. The coal company had installed indoor plumbing in all the houses in Coalwood, but when the houses had been sold off, the utilities had been sold, too. I wondered if Six Hollow was still connected to the sewer line. It didn’t smell like it.
A flimsy board lay over the ditch. I walked across it and climbed up on the porch and knocked at the screen door. The door was ripped at the bottom, as if it had been kicked in. It took a couple of knocks before Billy answered. His forehead lifted at the sight of me. “Sonny?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
Billy looked past me, saw Mom sitting in the Buick, and then opened the door. The odor of cigarette smoke filled the air. The door opened into the living room. There was a faded green sofa along the far wall, a wooden table sitting beside it holding a clear glass ashtray piled high with butts. A small, sour-looking man regarded me from the sofa. He was wearing a pair of old canvas pants and an undershirt. It was Arnee Bee Rose, Billy’s dad. When he saw me come through the door, he nervously jerked the cigarette from his mouth as if I’d caught him smoking when he wasn’t supposed to. He blew a purplish plume up at the ceiling, then narrowed his eyes at me. He slowly and painfully got to his feet, holding one shoulder higher than the other as if it hurt him to stand up straight. “Homer Hickam’s boy,” he said, by way of a greeting, and then glared at his son. “Billy, you comin’ up in the world, ain’t ya?” My eyes strayed to the couch where there was a big hole in one of the cushions. He saw where I was looking and said, “I fell asleep with a cig in my hand. Getting a new couch next week, all the way from Bluefield. Ain’t we, Billy?”
Billy shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Come on,” he said miserably, and led me to the back of the house. An open doorway led to a tiny kitchen, where two little girls sat at a card table, playing with some ragged dolls. They watched us go by but said nothing. There were three doors in the back. The one in the middle led to a tiny bathroom. As I went by, I could see there was no water in the toilet bowl. Billy opened the door to the left. “This is my room,” he said.
It was a tiny room, its floor covered with a sickening shade of yellow linoleum. Blankets and pillows were scattered about. A kerosene lantern sat on a rough wooden table littered with school books. “I share it with my brothers and sisters,” Billy said. He nodded toward the lantern. “The electricity got cut off last month.”
I tried to imagine the room at night, when Billy slept there with six children. It was also where Billy studied and did his homework. Billy made almost straight A’s every semester. I thought of my room in comparison and felt a twinge of shame. His father started to yell at someone, a stream of curses. Billy ignored it. “I still don’t know why you’re here,” he said.
“I heard you were going to join the navy.”
“That’s right.” He was subdued.
“Billy, I know you’ve been mad at me—”
“I’m not mad at you,” Billy said. “I’m just tired of you.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant. “Tired of me?”
Bill gazed through the grimy window. The light that pierced it looked cold and gray. “I’m tired of you talking about going down to Cape Canaveral and working for Wernher von Braun, tired of you building your rockets and people coming down and applauding you for doing it, tired of you being who you are and me being who I am.”
“They don’t applaud just me,” I said. “It’s for everybody in the BCMA. You, too.”
“Me? What’s my job with the BCMA? Did you ever invite me to help you calculate a nozzle? Or had me down to your house to help load a rocket? Not once. I chase after your rockets, find them for you. Hell, you could train a dog to do that.”
“I never knew you wanted to do anything more,” I said weakly.
He tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his faded jeans. “You never cared enough to know,” he said. “Why are you really here?”
The truth was I really didn’t know myself. “I guess I just wanted to see where you lived,” I said. It was the best I could do.
He swept his hand around the room. “This is it,” he said bitterly.
Mr. Rose was yelling at someone or something, or maybe he was just yelling to be yelling. A baby cried somewhere in the house. Billy grimaced when something crashed in the living room. It sounded like the ashtray. “Yeah, my daddy’s a drunk,” he said. “Guess he’s got a right to be with his pelvis crushed and not healed right. But he’s getting harder to control. . . . He hits my little sisters too hard sometimes and then he . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen. Only thing I know is the navy’s got a place for me and I’m going.”
“Billy, is there anything I can do?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You’re a little late. I’ve already signed the papers. There’s nothing anybody can do. It’s just the way it is.”
WHEN I came out of Billy’s house, the Buick was empty. I found Mom down the road at the old rose trellis. She was fingering the dead vines. A couple of dirty kids stood watching her. One of them kept sniffling and then wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“I asked”—she nodded toward the kids—“and they said the house has been empty for over a year.”
“There was no way for you to know.”
“Your dad had to know,” she said more to herself than me. “He knows everything that happens in this town. But he didn’t tell me. Maybe he didn’t think I cared. I guess the way I go on about Coalwood, he has a right to think that.”
It was getting dark. “We better get on home,” I said.
“Do you know why your dad is in 11 East, Sonny?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I heard you had a run-in with the Mallett boys because of it.”
I shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
She nodded. I suspected she’d already gotten a complete description of what had happened. “What do you and Jake Mosby have cooked up next Saturday?”
“I think he wants me to take him hiking or get some greens or something,” I said. “Why is Dad in 11 East, Mom?”
“Because he’s trying to save the world, as usual.” She fingered the old vines. “How’s Billy?”
“He’s signed the navy papers.”
“I could hear Arnee Bee yelling.”
“I don’t know how Billy gets such good grades in that place.”
“What else did Billy say?”
“He said he was tired of me.”
She frowned. “What did he mean by that?”
“He thinks I’ve got the world on a string. He makes straight A’s and nobody cares. I make an A in anything and everybody celebrates. That’s the way he sees it.”
“Maybe that’s because that’s the way you see it,” she said, smiling. “You’ve been known to get full of yourself from time to time.”
I was tempted to say that if that was so, I came by it honestly. Wisely, I stayed silent.
Mom’s smile faded as she looked back up the hollow, toward Billy’s house. She squared her shoulders. There were gears turning in her mind. I could see it in her eyes. But all she said was, “Gol, it stinks in this old place.” And then, “Sonny, take me home.”
21
A COALWOOD GIRL
IT WAS TIME for me to complete my Christmas shopping. I’d already gotten something for Jim and Dad. A subscription to Argosy was my gift to Jim. The only complication was whether to change his mailing address at Virginia Tech or wait to see where he was going. I dithered on it and then figured Jim would leave a forwarding address and the magazine could catch up with him. For Dad, I’d written to Charleston to see if I could get an autograph from Cecil Underwood, the state governor. Mom’s letter to Wernher von Braun last year in my behalf had been my inspiration. Governor Underwood was the first Republican governor in West Virginia in about a thousand years, and Dad thought he was the best thing to ever hit the state. I didn’t expect a reply but, to my amazement, the photograph arrived. I’d asked Mr. Varney, the postmaster, to keep an eye out for anything fr
om the governor’s office for me, and he’d done it, slipping a manila envelope with the governor’s seal on it to me one day in the Big Store. Governor Underwood had written: To Homer Hickam, the best (and maybe the only) Republican in McDowell County. I knew Dad would love it.
For Mom, I had something really special picked out. My plan was to give it to her just before she left for Myrtle Beach. I’d gone to the ladies’ department at the Big Store and found an enameled powder box that played “Love Me Tender” when you opened it. Mom always liked Elvis Presley’s slow tunes, and I sensed I had a winner. The only problem was it cost seven dollars. It took me a while to get up the courage to spend that kind of money on a present. It wasn’t that I didn’t have it. I did, but only if I dipped into the rocket-propellant money I’d saved up by washing cars and selling ginseng. After having a long conversation with myself on the importance of giving, especially to one’s only mother, and reminding myself that I’d gotten a free quantity of moonshine from the Germans, I decided to do it. I chose to slip on down to the Big Store to get Mom’s present on a special day, the day Santa Claus was coming to town.
The Big Store had set up Santa’s sleigh in the front near the drugstore counter. I recognized who was playing Santa despite his white whiskers and red suit. It was Mr. Clowers, a widower who lived up on Substation Row. Mr. Clowers, who was in charge of the bathhouse beside the man-hoist, had an ample belly and played the part well. He also had a bum leg, and the jolly old elf arrived with a noticeable limp. “Daddy, why is Santa limping?” a wide-eyed little boy asked worriedly. His father, a shuttle-car operator, said, “He’s been working 11 East.” It got a laugh and also reminded everybody how much the section was haunting all the thoughts of so many in Coalwood, even so near Christmas.