by Homer Hickam
I had to challenge him. “Come on, Sherman. You don’t think you’ll come back to visit your parents at Christmas?”
“Sure I will,” he said, “but I won’t be a Coalwood boy. You know how it is. When somebody leaves here, they can come back but they’re not part of the town anymore, not really. This is our last Christmas.”
Roy Lee piped up. “Hell, if we can build a rocket, we can put on some little Christmas Pageant.”
“Is that right, Roy Lee?” I asked, taken aback that he, of all people, wanted to do this thing. “And how do you propose that we do it?”
“You can do it, Sonny,” Sherman said. “You have a talent for planning.”
I had sensed that was coming. “No way,” I said. “You’re not going to put this on me.”
“I’ll help and so will my mom,” Ginger said as if I hadn’t said a word. “The teachers will pitch in, they always do. And we can get the Community Church choir.”
O’Dell came over, Quentin with him. Tug and Hug brought up the rear. “Heck, yes,” O’Dell said when Sherman told him what we were talking about. “It wouldn’t seem like Christmas without a pageant, would it?”
“What are you talking about?” Quentin asked. Since he wasn’t a Coalwood boy, he’d never seen one of our pageants.
“We sing carols!” Sherman said.
“There’s a manger scene,” Billy said.
“Everybody plays a role like an angel or something,” Roy Lee said. “Hey, can I be an angel?”
“How can the Big Creek lovemaster be an angel?” I asked sarcastically.
Roy Lee looked hurt. “We’re talking about acting, Sonny.”
“It sounds prodigious!” Quentin fairly exploded. “Can I help?”
“No, you can’t,” I said, “because there’s not going to be any pageant. Like I said, to pull one of these things off takes company support. I mean the Club House lawn is company property, for one thing.”
“So’s Cape Coalwood,” O’Dell said. “It hasn’t stopped us from using it.”
“We have permission, O’Dell,” I said. “I’m the one who got it, remember?”
“So get it for the Club House.”
“Another thing,” I said. “It takes weeks to plan one of these things. Today’s December 19. If we start tomorrow, we’d barely have five days.”
“Then start today,” Sherman said. “Plan it out, tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”
“The union’s going out on strike,” I said, still trying to head the thing off. “We get miners and foremen together, there’ll be a riot, not a pageant.”
I was wasting my breath. Sherman said, “All in favor say aye!”
“Aye!”
“Nays?” he asked.
“Nay,” I said, but my heart wasn’t into it. The truth was I was starting to catch some of their enthusiasm, but I wasn’t about to admit it. For one thing, Mom wouldn’t be around to see our pageant, and that would be pretty sad. For another, I truly doubted our ability to pull such a thing off in the short amount of time we had. I didn’t want to get excited over nothing.
“The ayes have it,” Sherman said smugly.
Ginger laughed. “This is going to be so much fun!”
I sincerely doubted the accuracy of her statement but kept my opinion to myself. “Can we just launch our rocket now?” I asked the assembly instead.
I stabbed the launch button and Auk XXIII-A took off smoothly, climbing swiftly on a towering funnel of zincoshine smoke. Our audience applauded and hooted with joy. Zincoshine-propelled rockets seemed to have that effect on most people. They were exuberant rockets, and they brought out exuberance in everybody who watched them go.
After it hit downrange, we stampeded over to the Auk. A quick calculation revealed that we’d flown under my altitude projection by a thousand feet. I rolled the casement over a couple of times with a stick to help it cool. When it did, I turned it on its end and peered inside the nozzle. “Not as much erosion,” I reported, “but we’ve still got some and it’s at the worst place. Right at the throat.”
Quentin groaned. “If we don’t solve this puzzle, we can just kiss the science fair—and our futures—good-bye.”
Dean put his finger inside the nozzle and swiped it around, his finger coming out covered with metal filings and soot. “Maybe this edge right at the throat is so sharp the putty can’t stick to it very well.”
Mr. Bolt and Mr. Caton came walking up. Mr. Caton inspected the results. “I think Dean’s right,” he said. “That edge is probably a hot spot, too. How about I smooth it out, make it curved rather than have that sharp angle?”
“Better hurry,” Mr. Bolt said. “I hear the strike’s not more than a day or two away. A strike will close the machine shop, too.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Mr. Caton said. “If Sonny will get me a drawing.”
“Sure,” I said. “Back to the drawing board. What else do I have to do besides plan a Christmas Pageant? It’s a good thing I’m not going to the Christmas Formal.”
“I am!” Quentin said, to my surprise.
Roy Lee raised his eyebrows. “Too bad,” he said. “I was going to suggest you and Sonny go together.”
“Who are you going with, Quentin?” Dean asked.
“Mary Kay Yates.”
“Tug and Hug’s sister?” Roy Lee whooped.
Now I understood the new honorary members of the BCMA. “I hope you have fun, Quentin,” I said sourly.
Roy Lee’s eyes were aglow. “With Mary Kay Yates, he’s going to have trouble mostly keeping his pants on.”
Quentin blushed severely. Tug and Hug grinned proudly. I thought of my lack of a date and the Christmas Pageant that had been dumped on me and my list and everything else. Then I recalled the snow goose that had accidentally landed on Cape Coalwood so many months before. She’d looked around, then spread her wings and taken off for a better clime. Overwhelmed and oddly disheartened, I wished with all my heart I could do the same.
23
THE LONG WALL
I REPORTED TO Jake on the Club House porch at 1:00 P.M. that afternoon as directed. I gave him Miss Riley’s message. “Good deal,” he said. He threw me a pair of coveralls and a miner’s helmet. “Put these on.”
“I thought we were going hiking in the mountains.”
“Nope. Whole different direction.”
I did as I was told. “Where are we going?” I asked while I laced up my hard-toe boots. I’d tucked my coverall pants in them as all Coalwood men did.
Jake ignored my question and walked toward his Corvette and I followed, but we didn’t get in. Instead, he went to a red Jeep on the other side of the street. OLGA COAL COMPANY was painted on its hood and rear hatch. “Get in the back,” he said. “We’ve got another passenger.”
“Jake, what’s going on?”
“Company business,” he said brusquely. He didn’t sound like the old Jake, the happy, carefree Jake. This Jake was all business. Trained to obey adults at least until I could see what direction they were going, I subsided into the back of the Jeep and waited to see what I would see. That proved to be none other than one Mr. John Dubonnet.
Mr. Dubonnet came out of the union hall, dressed in mine clothes. He climbed in the passenger seat of the Jeep. “Jake,” he greeted. He looked over his shoulder at me. “Sonny.” He looked questioningly at Jake.
“Because,” Jake said, throwing the Jeep in gear. We sped up Main Street until we reached the mine. We walked up to the cage, and the lamp-house attendant brought out lamps for our helmets. Jake and Mr. Dubonnet picked up their identification tags, circles of brass with a number stamped on it. “I can’t do this,” I said when the attendant handed me my own tag. “Mom will kill me. You too, Jake.”
“This is not a time to worry about your mother,” Jake said grimly.
“Where are we going?” I asked anew.
“11 East. I thought you should know why everybody wants to beat you up.” He looked at Mr. Dubonnet. “And
why some people want to cut and run.”
“This better be good, Jake,” Mr. Dubonnet growled.
Jake pushed the warning bell at the lift gate. “It won’t be good. It’ll be business. Let’s go.”
The rock walls crept by as we descended down the shaft. Layer after layer passed, whole geological ages, millions of years of sediment. Jake and Mr. Dubonnet were silent, lost in their own thoughts and purposes. The rectangular opening at the top of the shaft gradually shrank until it was just a twinkling star. Then it disappeared altogether. We were at the bottom of the shaft.
“Turn your light on, boy,” Mr. Dubonnet said, and I reached up to my helmet and clicked the battery-driven lamp on. We stepped off the lift, the operator swinging open the gate for us. A train of cars waited, a motorman squatting on the locomotive in front. I recognized him as Mr. Bradley, the father of Miss Liberty on the Veterans Day float. We crawled into a man-trip. Jake slapped the top of the car. “Let’s go,” he gruffly ordered Mr. Bradley.
The locomotive lurched forward with a shriek, found its traction on the rails, and began to pick up speed. Soon, timbers and cribs on the main line were blurring past. The walls were white, thoroughly dusted down by the rock-dust crews on the hoot-owl shift.
“You’re not afraid, are you, Sonny?” Mr. Dubonnet asked over the rush of air past the man-trip and the anguished wail of the steel wheels on the track. “A West Virginia boy is born for these deep places. There’s something that just feels right about being here for us. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that even a Rocket Boy would like it.”
“I wouldn’t say I like it, sir,” I told him, feeling suddenly vulnerable to his thoughts. “But I’m not afraid.”
He pondered me. “When he took you down here, what all did your daddy say to you?”
I recalled that Mr. Dubonnet had seen us on that day last spring. Of course, it was none of his business what Dad had said, but it irritated me enough—Mr. Dubonnet trying to wheedle personal stuff out of me—that I gave it to him both barrels. “He said he knew the mine like he knew a man. He said he knew it because he came down here every day, breathed the air, felt it on his face, went back into the gob and poked around. He said if he didn’t come down here, men might get hurt or the coal wouldn’t get loaded. He said coal is the lifeblood of the country, and if coal failed, steel failed, and then the country failed. That’s what he said.”
Jake was grinning, about what I didn’t know. That irritated me, too. Mr. Dubonnet fell silent, then turned out his lamp and settled down, apparently for a nap. I knew I’d gotten his goat but I didn’t know how. The man-trip rattled on, deeper into the bowels of the vast mine.
Many minutes later, nearly an hour, I estimated, the man-trip finally slowed and stopped. Jake aimed his light out the side hatch. “This is it,” he grunted, and climbed out. Mr. Dubonnet switched his lamp back on and climbed out behind him. I clambered out, too, and stood up, cracking my helmet against the roof, jamming it nearly down around my ears. Jake, Mr. Dubonnet, and Mr. Bradley all laughed. “I been trying to make that old roof higher for a long time myself, Sonny boy,” Mr. Bradley said.
I lurched into a piece of machinery, cracking my shins. I shined my light on it. It was a conveyor belt. “The coal will come out here,” Jake said, pointing at the end of the belt. He waved us on. Mr. Dubonnet hesitated, had a word with Mr. Bradley, and then followed.
The roof of the tunnel we were walking through kept getting lower. I kept trying to straighten up, but my helmet would hit the rock and knock me back down. We had nearly been forced into a duckwalk when the tunnel suddenly opened into a large room. I shined my light on the roof, a rough dome, and saw it was studded with roof bolts. The room was stacked with equipment, yellow devices that looked like huge car jacks. “This is the staging area,” Jake said.
Mr. Dubonnet swung his light around. “Long wall,” he said. “So that’s the big secret. I thought so but I couldn’t tell for sure by the reports from my men. Jake, this is a violation of the union agreement.”
“That could be debated, John,” Jake said, “and I guess it will be, if it comes to that.”
“It won’t come to that,” he growled. “I got strike approval from headquarters this morning. I’m going to shut this operation down.”
Jake made no reply, just waved us on. There were three tunnels leading off from the domed room. He chose the center one. “This is where the advance will begin,” he said. “If we can get through the header.”
We walked for some time. I lost track. The tunnel seemed to slope downward, and my ears kept popping, the air getting heavier. A breeze touched my face. Lights flashed far ahead. A conveyor belt along the sides of the tunnel was running continuously. It was carrying chunks of rock, not coal. We emerged in another domed room with more stacks of equipment. A huge rock slide blocked our way, but a dozen men swarmed over it, hand-loading rock on the belt. Four men stood watching them, holding massive drills attached to what I took to be pneumatic hoses. An electric compressor whined nearby. “The header,” Jake said. “We get through there, we can start the advance.”
Mr. Dubonnet swung his light around the pile of rock. “You’ll never get through it. The Captain couldn’t do it and neither can Homer Hickam.”
At the mention of his name, I anxiously looked around for Dad, but there was no sign of him. Then an ugly, be-whiskered face suddenly appeared in the spot of my light. It was Cuke Snoddy, grinning. He shined his light in my eyes, and I put up my hand to shield the glare. “Well, well, little Sonny the Rocket Boy. Haw, haw! You kind of lost, ain’t ya?”
His breath stunk of tobacco. There was a big lump in his cheek and brown trails of chew spit and rock dust ran down from the corners of his mouth. He kept grinning at me, as if trying to figure me out. I didn’t say anything, lest I provoke him in some way. Jake and Mr. Dubonnet shined their lights on Cuke. “You gonna be ready, Cuke?” Jake asked.
“You get me up to it, I’ll have that header moved, Mr. Jake. Don’t you no never mind,” Cuke said.
“Cuke’s our powder man,” Jake said to Mr. Dubonnet. “The best one Olga’s got.”
“You’re going to blast in here? You can’t do that in this mine. It’ll blow the whole place up.”
Jake shook his head. “You feel that air pressure when you came in? This is a pressure mine, John, and we’ve got this whole area with more holes in it than a pincushion. We’re blowing the methane right up to the surface.”
“You hope you are, you mean,” Mr. Dubonnet said. “This coal is so gassy you could get a pocket of methane and never know it. You can’t blast.”
“I’ll do it, slick as chicken shit, Johnny boy,” Cuke interjected, and then spat a huge stream of juice in between Mr. Dubonnet’s boots. “Ain’t nobody better with powder than ol’ Cuke and I can sniff out the black damp.” He tapped his nose. Black damp was what the miners called methane.
“You’ll do what I tell you to do, Cuke,” Mr. Dubonnet shot back. “You’re going out on strike with everybody else.”
Jake pointed up at the overhead dome. “See the roof? Thin-bedded. Perfect for long wall, John.”
“It’s weak is what it is,” Mr. Dubonnet grumped. “This whole section is a death trap. It always has been.”
“Long-wall mining is the future,” Jake said.
“That may be, but not in this mine,” Mr. Dubonnet spat.
“What’s long-wall mining?” I asked, but Mr. Dubonnet tramped off, going back down the tunnel. Jake hurried to catch him. Not wanting to stay alone in the company of Cuke, I charged off behind them. Jake and Mr. Dubonnet had some words I couldn’t hear and then turned into an entry I hadn’t seen on the way down. I struggled to keep up with them. They were moving fast, bent almost double. My neck was killing me, trying to hold it up at an awkward angle to keep my light on them. If I lost them, I was certain I would wander around for the rest of my short life, lost under Coalwood Mountain.
I saw lights up ahead and heard the guttural
howl of a great beast, apparently being tortured. When I rounded a curve, I saw it was a continuous mining machine, tearing away at a coal face. The roof had gradually risen until I could stand up with my helmet barely scraping it. I put my fist in my back, rubbing. I was sixteen years old, but miners twice, three times my age could take the low roof better than I could. It was a matter of practice, I guessed.
Some men were watching near a pillar of coal. One of them came over. His face was coated with black dust. It was Dieter the German. “Guten Tag,” he said to each of us in turn. “Ah, Sonny the telescope boy.”
“Hi, Dieter,” I said as he grinned at me, his teeth showing white through his coal-black lips.
Apparently, Dieter knew he was supposed to inform Mr. Dubonnet of what was going on. “Here we drive one of two head entries,” he explained. “Gerhard is supervising the bleeder and panel entries across the way.”
Mr. Dubonnet took a moment to look around. “Why are you bothering with the rock header?” he asked.
Dieter reached up under his helmet to scratch his head. “We believe on the other side is the high coal. If it is there, it will be our primary face. Within days, we will be loading twice as much coal out of 11 East than any other section.”
“You’re gambling,” Mr. Dubonnet said.
Dieter shrugged. “It is where I was told to begin the long-wall mining.”
“What is long-wall mining?” I asked again.
Jake answered. “You cut a wide face or wall between entries and then you mine across the entire wall, letting the roof fall in behind you as you back out. Retreat mining, some people call it. The coal comes out either end, is put on conveyor belts, and dumped into cars to be hauled out. It’s quick and it’s efficient. Germany’s pioneered the method, and Dieter and Gerhard are here to show us how to use the equipment we bought from their company.”
“Don’t let Jake fool you, Sonny,” Mr. Dubonnet interrupted. “It’s not that simple. First off, you’ve got to hope the roof caves in the way you want it to. Secondly, mountain bumps—they call it rock bursts in this kind of mining—can be huge. Thirdly, you’d better ventilate the hell out of your mine. With that long face, methane comes out in buckets.”