by Homer Hickam
I chose not to argue anymore with her about it. I knew I wouldn’t get very far, anyway. I resolved to hide my list, though, as soon as we got home. I also reviewed all the other things in my desk and concluded there wasn’t anything in there I cared if Mom saw, anyway, even the dozen or so never-finished love letters to Dorothy Plunk. Finally, I just shrugged. For all I knew, as outlandish as it seemed to me at the time, she might be right. If I had wanted privacy, I should have been born an orphan. Considering what else I got out of the deal, I’d take my folks, thank you very much, nosey mother and all.
We finally reached the last turn on the back side of Welch Mountain, coming out at the Welch High School football field. To make enough level ground to build it, they had bulldozed out a place in the side of the mountain. The next obstacle was Davy Mountain, but, thankfully, we only had to skirt it. We climbed it a little ways and then there was a straight run before we reached the car dealerships in a place everybody called Coney Island. As we passed the parking lots of shiny, chrome-laden cars, I thought of Ginger’s boyfriend. I was faintly jealous, but I also thought it must be quite a challenge to sell all those cars to men who were never quite sure if they’d have a job the next day or not. I turned left and drove along the road built above the Tug River. We would soon be in downtown Welch. “Mom, where exactly are we going?” I asked.
“Do you know how to find Welch High School?”
“I think so.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
WELCH High School was a rambling brick building built up on the side of a mountain that overlooked the bustling county seat that gave it its name. To me, it was a school for rich kids, all of whom went off to college to become doctors, lawyers, bankers, car dealers, and politicians. I parked in front of the school alongside a couple of big trucks that had cloth covers over their backs. Their doors had SALVATION ARMY painted on them. “Do you know where the gymnasium is?” Mom asked.
I wasn’t exactly certain. I had only been to Welch High once before, back in the eighth grade when I had taken the Golden Horseshoe test for West Virginia history. I’d come within a whisker of winning the countywide examination. There was no greater honor for a West Virginia student than winning a Golden Horseshoe.
Mom held my arm as we climbed the steep stone steps to the entrance. It didn’t take long to find the gym. I heard the echo of voices and just followed my ears. When we entered it, I saw stacks of boxes, bundles of cloth bags, and what were obviously colorfully wrapped Christmas presents in a pile. Teenage boys and girls were working among the boxes and bags. They seemed to be sorting them into squares marked by masking tape on the floor. Each one had a name—Kimball, Keystone, Iaeger, Elkhorn, North Fork, all the names of the little coal towns in the county. Mom spotted a woman dressed in a navy-blue dress and walked across the gym to her. “I’m Elsie Hickam,” she said.
The woman was wearing a Salvation Army uniform, the insignia glittering on her lapel. She looked up from a clipboard. “Oh, Mrs. Hickam! How’s your dear husband? I’m Sergeant Martin.”
“A bit busy these days, Sergeant.” Mom rummaged in her handbag and produced a check. “Here’s the money.” I peered past her and saw the amount. Five hundred dollars! That was a lot of money, and it was a personal check out of Mom’s account at the Welch First National Bank. I recognized it because Mom’s checks were green. The checks from Mom and Dad’s joint account were white.
“A very generous donation, Mrs. Hickam,” Sergeant Martin said. “Do you have the list of families and what they need?”
Mom took a sheet of paper from her handbag and unfolded it. “Here you go. When do you think you’ll make the deliveries?”
“We’ll be making our rounds on Christmas Eve,” she said. “Will you be guiding us?”
Mom nodded. “You know where I live. Stop, toot the horn, and I’ll come out.”
I was astonished. The Salvation Army was coming to Coalwood? That had never happened before. What else had never happened before was my mom using her money for much of anything. She had been saving it for a long time.
Sergeant Martin talked some more to Mom about what the Salvation Army did across the county, and I wandered off, intrigued by the kids who were helping to put the boxes in their squares. I thought maybe they were Welch High students, although I couldn’t imagine it since they weren’t dressed in tuxedos or formal gowns or anything. They were all dressed pretty much the same as if they were Big Creek students. One of the girls saw me watching. “You want to help?” she asked. She stuck out her hand. “My name’s Don Juan Collins.” She pronounced Juan with a hard “J.”
When I looked at her, she said, “Don’t ask. I don’t know why my parents named me that but they did. Where are you from?”
When I told her, she warmed to me. “My dad used to work in the Coalwood mine. Is your daddy Homer Hickam? He talks about him all the time.”
I confessed my father was none other. A boy came up beside her. “I’m Bill Phipps,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“We call him Preacher,” Don Juan said. “His daddy’s a minister over at Davy.”
Other boys and girls came up, introducing themselves. Benny Chaos from Davy said his father was a miner. The Davy mine was just scraping by, he said. A girl with a cheerful grin shook my hand—Fredda Horne was her name. She said her mother worked at the Sears and Roebuck store. Brenda Conn was a majorette. She was tall, with long, honey-colored hair and snapping brown eyes. I instantly wondered if she had a date on the night of the Christmas Formal but I didn’t get a chance to ask her. Sergeant Martin came by and suggested we all get to work. I followed Don Juan and helped her move boxes. “We’re volunteers,” she said when I asked her why she was there. “It’s a way to help a lot of our classmates.”
“I thought all you Welch kids were rich,” I said.
She laughed. “You ever been up Twin Branch? You won’t find poorer kids in the whole state.”
I looked at the Welch students with new respect. They knew how to have fun, too. Brenda came over and asked if Big Creek students could dance. It was a challenge I took up. “I reckon we can,” I said.
Preacher ran to the principal’s office and turned on a radio over the loudspeaker in the gymnasium. WLS in Chicago was playing rock and roll. After we finished our work, I showed Brenda that a Dugout-trained boy had a move or two. We danced until Mom came to get me to drive her home.
MOM was quiet as I steered us back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth again through the steep curves of Welch Mountain. I didn’t question her or make any comment at all about her donation. I had a feeling it was too painful a subject. I decided to compliment her about something else. “I saw Dreama’s new tooth the other day. It’s just a temporary but it looks good. You did a good thing there, Mom.” I didn’t elaborate further. I knew that she knew everything else that had happened on the day Santa Claus Clowers had come to the Big Store.
“I wish now I hadn’t done it,” she replied.
Her response surprised me. “Why?”
“Because it’s wrong to try to make right what can’t be made right, that’s why,” she said firmly, and then fell silent.
I decided to tell her something I was pretty sure she hadn’t heard, about what Dreama wanted to be. “She can’t be a Coalwood girl,” Mom snapped. “It wouldn’t matter if she lived there a million years.”
“Because she’s with Cuke?” I asked.
“She’s not with Cuke,” Mom replied. “She’s moved into the Club House. Dr. Hale asked me if she could stay there until he got her the new crown. I played like I was your dad again, said that would be fine, but as soon as her tooth gets fixed, she has to go.”
I absorbed the news. “I’m glad she’s not with Cuke anymore.”
“Sonny,” she said, sighing, “with a girl like that, it’s going to be one Cuke after another. Or worse. Look at what she’s done. She’s managed to get a free place to stay. She’s gotten free work from both Dr. Lassiter and
Dr. Hale. She’s got Dr. Hale even giving her money for food. Next thing you know, she’ll be asking for the government to send her money. That’s not the way we do things in Coalwood. It’s okay for people to help out people, like the Starvation Army does, but you don’t want to get it started where people expect everything to be free without working for it. No, Coalwood will be better off without her.”
I wanted to gnaw some more on what Mom had said about Dreama, but I instinctively knew she had said all she was going to say. I asked her again about the Christmas tree. “Jim and I will put it up, decorate it and everything,” I said. I figured she would like that.
She didn’t, though. “I don’t think I could stand to look at it,” she said sadly. “It would make me think of Chipper.” Her voice nearly cracked. “He so loved to play in the Christmas tree.”
I cringed. I had managed to get her on the very subject I had tried to avoid all evening. I just decided to shut up. “So how did you like the Starvation Army?” Mom asked as I slowed the Buick at the sign marking the start of Coalwood.
“The Salvation Army, you mean?”
“That’s what I said. It’s your dad’s favorite charity. I guess it’s mine now, too,” she added grumpily.
“I liked the Welch High kids I met tonight,” I said.
“Did you think you wouldn’t?”
“I always thought they were a snooty bunch.”
Mom laughed. “When I went to Gary High, we always thought kids from Big Creek were the snooty ones. When we played them in girls’ basketball, we beat the tar out of them. I was the top scorer of the game. I thought I was really the cat’s meow because I had shown those rich Big Creek girls what a poor Gary girl could do.”
I drove on, thinking how every time I thought I knew all there was to know about my mother, she surprised me in one way or another. She was one interesting lady. Mother or not, I figured I was just lucky to know her.
25
THE CHRISTMAS FORMAL
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up and thought: It’s Christmas Formal day and I am a senior and I don’t have a date. Then I thought: Things could be worse. I could have a date with a girl I didn’t want to take. I could look on the bright side of things if I put my mind to it.
I heard sounds outside, men on the day shift walking to the mine. There was no strike, not yet. After breakfast, I reviewed the nozzle calculations I’d made the day before. I was fresher and could concentrate on them. I had them done in short order, and then I worked on the engineering drawing. I wasn’t satisfied with the result, but it would have to do. I didn’t have time to make it any better. I hoped Mr. Caton could make sense of it. I borrowed the Buick for a quick run down to the machine shop. Mr. Caton looked over my drawing. “The curves don’t look right,” he said.
“I had to freehand draw them,” I said by way of apology.
He nodded. “Well, I’ll give it my best shot, but interior curves like this are going to take some time to get right. If the strike happens, I’ll have to stop.”
“I understand, sir,” I assured him.
“Got something for you,” he said, and reached under his workbench. It was a nozzle. “I made another one like the last one and then smoothed it out some. You might want to test it to see if smoothing helps before I add in the putty.”
“Yessir,” I said. “I’ll do it today.” And I did, even though the other boys moaned and groaned about it. They had things to do to get ready for the Christmas Formal, they said. They needed to wash cars, go to Welch to get corsages for their girls, and shine their shoes. I took no pity on them. They’d pushed me to get things done and I’d done it. Now, I guessed I could push a little, too. If they didn’t want to go to Cape Coalwood with me, I’d go by myself. At that threat, they gave in. They were too afraid I might have fun without them.
I used Mr. Caton’s smoothed nozzle in a preloaded casement I hurriedly named Auk XXIV. As it would turn out, I came to regret the day’s launch, teaching me again that nothing much good ever came out of something not carefully planned. First the cork holding the igniter fell out; then some miners led by Pooky Suggs, a local ne’er-do-well, yelled catcalls at us. Finally, we got the launch off. There was less erosion in the smooth nozzle, but I knew the real test wouldn’t come until we tried the one with the putty liner. All in all, I thought the launch was mostly a waste of effort. I was sorry I’d put the boys through it. When I reflected on it, I knew I’d done it mostly because I was jealous they were going to the Christmas Formal and I wasn’t.
“We’re just going to go and do it,” said Sonny Hickam, leader of the Rocket Boys, this past weekend as your intrepid reporteronce more made the journey to Cape Coalwood to watch the latest creation of the Big Creek Missile Agency. True to his word, the boy scientist pressed the button and Auk XXIII-A blasted off with a whoosh of fire and smoke. A cry of joy erupted from the mouths of the assembled multitude as the silvery missile flew heavenward. Oh, Rocket Boys, thy fleet creations are like spears thrown by the Gods! Exult, exult!Exult at the dazzling brilliance of these, our Rocket Boys of Coalwood. . . . And a Merry Christmas to all from the staff of this newspaper and the happiest of new years as we begin the certain to be grand decade of the sixties.—The McDowell County Banner, Christmas 1959 issue
I finished reading Basil’s latest and then shook my head. Roy Lee laughed. “Every time I read something Basil wrote, I feel like I’ve been sprinkled with pixie dust.”
“Peter Pan,” I said. “Great book.”
“I liked the Walt Disney version better,” Roy Lee replied amiably. “Except I still can’t figure out how anybody could stick a shadow on with soap. Since when is soap any kind of glue?”
We were on our way to the Christmas Formal. Roy Lee had come to the house and insisted I go. “You’re a senior and I say you should be there, even if nobody wanted to go with you.”
I felt his last statement was a misreading of history, but I kept quiet. I dressed up in what I had, a brown sport coat, white shirt, tan pants, and loafers. Roy Lee looked over my plan for the Christmas Pageant while I dressed. “Man, oh, man, why don’t you just build the Taj Mahal?”
“If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right,” I said. “Not that we’re going to do it. I didn’t see any of the boys— including you, I might add—up here asking how they could help.”
Roy Lee shook his head. “We can get started on the blame thing tomorrow. Now stop stalling and get ready.”
We first went to Cucumber to pick up Roy Lee’s date, a friendly and buxom cheerleader named Holly Faye Reed. It was the first time they’d gone out together. He went inside her tiny little house—her father was a coal miner, of course—and returned quickly, with Holly Faye holding up her dress to keep the hem out of the mud. She was wearing a low-cut lime-green formal gown with lots of ruffles. On her wrist was the pink carnation corsage Roy Lee had given her. Roy Lee held the door open for her. “Hi, Sonny,” she said in a surprised voice as she climbed in.
After Roy Lee settled in behind the steering wheel, she pondered him. “He needed a ride,” he said, feeling her gaze.
She turned. “Who’s your date?” she asked me.
“I don’t have one.”
She pondered Roy Lee again.
“I asked him to come along,” he said.
“Why don’t you have a date?” she asked me.
“I couldn’t get one.”
She pondered Roy Lee once more, a little harder this time.
“I didn’t want him staying home all alone, all right?” He tried to find first gear. He found instead several others at the same time. The gearbox sounded like somebody was inside beating on it with a hammer.
“Do you go on all of Roy Lee’s dates?” she asked me.
“Pretty much,” I answered, just for the heck of it.
She pondered Roy Lee as hard as she could. He had turned on the radio. The Monotones were singing “The Book of Love.” “I wonder, wonder, who, do-do-do, who wrote the book of lov
e?” Roy Lee sang along with them, about as off key as you could get, and pretending not to notice that he was getting hard-pondered.
“I don’t think that’s what they’re really saying,” I said from the backseat.
Holly Faye stopped pondering Roy Lee long enough to frown at me. “What do you think they’re saying?”
“Well, listen. It’s ‘I wonder, wonder, who, do-do-do, who let the moo cow out?’ ”
“Oh, that’s silly,” Holly Faye said, but listened intently. “You know what? You’re right. They are saying ‘who let the moo cow out’!”
“You’re both nuts,” Roy Lee griped. “My God, can’t a boy enjoy a song anymore without people making fun of it?”
Holly Faye and I ignored Roy Lee and sang together. I wonder, wonder, who, do-do-do, who let the moo cow out? She nearly collapsed with laughter.
“You’re really funny, Sonny,” Holly Faye said. She was on her knees, half hanging over the front seat to face me. In that position, the tops of her breasts were completely exposed, not that I noticed.
I grinned at her. “I think you’re the best cheerleader on the squad,” I said. “You’re the loudest one.”
“Gee, you really think so?” She was chewing gum, and I could smell its fruity sweetness coming from her ruby red lips. “Well, I think you’re the cutest, toughest little drummer in the band.”
While Holly Faye and I continued to admire each other, Roy Lee’s foot kept getting heavier and heavier on the accelerator. We were tearing through the curves. “Hey!” Holly Faye yelped when he slid around one. She nearly fell in his lap.
“Oh, baby,” Roy Lee said. “Talk to me, baby. I’m having trouble staying awake on this dark road.”