by Homer Hickam
Her meaning eluded me. When had Dad ever needed anybody other than his foremen when it came to things at the mine? And why would he need me, of all people? Why couldn’t Jim go to Coalwood? He was the first son and Dad’s favorite, anyway. It was true Jim was going to summer school, but it hadn’t started yet. I took a breath, preparing my defense, but before I got a word out, she said, “Sonny, don’t argue with me. Just go.”
I realized that I wasn’t in a debate but in the midst of a typical Elsie Hickam discussion, which meant she was telling me whatever she wanted to tell me and then I was supposed to do exactly what she said. I fumbled for a response but only managed a feeble question. “How’s Chipper?” I asked. It was the best I could do while I tried to think of some way out of her box.
“My little boy? He loves it down here. I’ve got a big cage for him on the back porch so he can look at the
bay.”
“Has he bit anybody yet?”
“Nobody important.”
Chipper was the meanest squirrel who ever drew breath. Even so, I liked him, mainly because he usually took great care to bite my brother before he got around to me. “How’s the beach?” I asked, still flailing.
“Beautiful. Sun’s out, water’s blue, the house is going to be great once I get it fixed up.”
I decided to try for a simple reduction of my sentence. “How about I go to Coalwood for two weeks?”
“One more thing,” she said.
I braced myself.
“There’s something wrong with Nate Dooley.”
“The secret man?”
“Don’t call him that!” she snapped. “Just go see Mrs. Dooley and find out what you can. You owe Nate that much.”
“I owe him?”
“If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be dead.”
And with that, perhaps thinking of the money she was spending on the long-distance call, she hung up. I sat in the booth for a while, the receiver still in my hand. When I looked up, I found Butch watching me with a worried expression. “Trouble?” he asked.
“The worst kind,” I confirmed.
“What is it?”
“I have to go . . .” I started to say “home” but caught myself in time. “To West Virginia,” I said instead.
“What’s there?” he wondered.
A fragment of Dad’s poem popped into my mind:
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
—just emptys cuming back.
“What’s there?” Butch asked again.
“Coalwood,” I said, and to me that said it all.
3
THE SECRET MAN
A LOT of people in Coalwood said I was lucky to be alive, considering the close calls I had growing up. I liked to act out scenes in every book I read, and sometimes I suppose I carried my little productions to the extreme. After I finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front, I started digging shallow trenches on the side of Sis’s Mountain and Roy Lee Cooke and I and a couple of other boys in my grade challenged the older boys to a fight. They complied, dug their trenches, and then we started throwing corn stobs at each other. One of the stobs, thrown by my brother, managed to knock me all the way down the hill. I had blood running into my eyes, but I climbed back up to our trench line and kept fighting until finally Mom declared an armistice. I had a bump on my head for a week, but I was still alive.
I came my nearest to dying back in 1948 when President Harry Truman decided to show Mr. Carter he was in charge of everything, even Coalwood. After John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers had battered every other coal operation in southern West Virginia into submission, they had turned their attention to our little town like a salivating dog spying a bloody bone. Union agitators were dispatched to Coalwood in droves and, very soon, wildcat strikes were hitting the mine every day. On top of that, President Truman and John L. were allies, and Mr. Carter the younger—his father having passed away in 1936—never stood a chance. The postwar economy was booming and the nation needed steel and steel needed coal. On the pretext of keeping the coalfields calm, President Truman called out federal troops to go in and occupy Coalwood. For a reason nobody could ever quite figure, he sent in the navy. I was five years old at the time. Just as the sailors began to roll into town in their gray trucks, I came down with something that made me feel like I was going to catch on fire and go up in smoke. I was just running along, trying to chase down Teresa Annello to convince her to be my Maid Marian (I’d just read Robin Hood), and all of a sudden, it was like somebody had knocked me up the side of my head with a poleax. I fell down like a half-empty sack of potatoes. Jim carted me home and dumped me on the porch, complaining to Mom that I’d embarrassed him all over Substation Row.
Even though it had the navy to worry over, Coalwood’s gossip fence quickly spread the story of my ailment. Most people predicted I was going to die. Coal camp youngsters with high fevers usually did, after all. Prayers started going up to heaven, propelled from both the white and colored churches, but they were mostly for my soul, since it was figured I was pretty much a goner. If I didn’t have the consumption, a known killer, it was probably scarlet fever, a true murderer.
Coalwood was in between company doctors at the time. My mom decided that since the navy had upset everything in town, their doctor was fair game. The morning after the arrival of the sailors, she appeared at the hastily established navy dispensary that had been set up in the Club House. The doctor, a young lieutenant junior grade, heard my mom out and then, his hands forming a little steeple, coolly advised her that he was there to tend to his sailors, not coal camp children. She could, however, take it up with his commanding officer, who would be in his office in, oh, maybe a few hours. Mom thanked him kindly and went outside, caught the morning shift going to work, and told the miners about the kindly doctor within and his generous attitude toward Coalwood’s children. The men stared at her until one of them, a man by the name of Nate Dooley, stepped up to her. “I’ll help you, Elsie,” he said. And he did, by accidentally kicking in the doctor’s door in his haste to welcome him to town.
The navy doctor, firmly escorted by Mom and Mr. Dooley, arrived at our house and sat on the chair opposite the couch in the living room, where Mom had encamped me. I was too sick to care. Every bone in my body felt like it was broken, and my brain swam in a molten lake of fire.
While Mr. Dooley sat on the stairs with his arms folded on his knees, the doctor felt my brow and stuck a thermometer under my tongue and frowned at me. He had straw-blond hair and a wisp of a mustache that didn’t look like it would ever amount to much. Mom sat on the chair across from the couch while he pondered what he was about to say. After he inspected the thermometer and made me say “ah” about a dozen times, and felt around my throat, he said, “The boy’s got scarlet fever, Mrs. Hickam.”
The intake of my mother’s breath was like a nearly missed note on a flute. It was quick, and half air. “Whooping cough, I thought maybe,” she said in a voice as quiet as I’d ever heard it. “Or strep throat at its worst.”
“No. Scarlet fever. Classic case,” the doctor said, fastidiously wiping off the thermometer with alcohol and placing it back into his big black navy medicine bag. “If it doesn’t kill your son outright, it’ll probably turn into rheumatic fever and attack his heart.”
“What about penicillin?” Mom asked, having heard of the new wonder drug from her brothers, who were veterans of World War II. She glanced at Mr. Dooley, who nodded encouragement.
The navy doctor released a great sigh. “May I point out to you that I was ‘persuaded’ to come here? I have made a diagnosis but I can’t just give out medicine. Any penicillin I may have is federal property. Besides that, I’m not licensed to practice in this state except on federal employees.”
Mom leaned forward, her nose just a few inches from that of the doctor-sailor. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You have penicillin in that bag of yours which might cure my son?
”
The doctor blinked. “Mrs. Hickam, I just said—”
Mom moved her nose an inch closer, her hands turned into fists. “And you won’t give it to him?”
The doctor grabbed his bag to his chest and scrambled to his feet. “Mrs. Hickam, I have my orders to not treat civilians!”
Mr. Dooley had heard enough. He stood up and very gently eased Mom aside and grabbed the doctor by the lapels of his navy suit, lifted him right off the ground, his polished brown shoes swinging. Sick as I was, I still admired it. “You’ll be giving the boy all the medicine he needs, won’t you?”
The doctor nodded eagerly. “Of course!”
And so, after he got let down, the doctor gave me my shot, the first of many he would give me over the course of the next few weeks. I would get well, but Mr. Dooley was another case.
After he left our house, Mr. Dooley went to work. Too late to catch the regular man-trip, he went down on the man-lift and started to walk into his section along the main line. He hadn’t gone far before a line of coal cars came rocketing around a turn so fast he couldn’t get out of the way. The first car hit him and flung him headfirst against a crib support. Although he woke up some days later, he was never again the same. His mind was pretty much gone.
When it was determined that Mr. Dooley wasn’t going to get any better, everybody up and down Coalwood’s fence line said it was a shame, but it was also a problem. Mr. Dooley fell between Coalwood’s rules. As far as his usefulness to the mine was concerned, he might as well have been dead. By all rights, he and his wife should have been cut off.
The company, still dealing with the naval occupation, ignored Mr. Dooley and let him lie in his house with his missus tending him. While Dad was inside the mine one day, Mom went to the Captain’s office and barged inside. Nate Dooley, she said, had saved her son and he wasn’t going to be cut off, not now, not ever, not if the Captain wanted to ever see her face in Coalwood again. She’d also do everything she could, she said, to take her husband with her.
When Dad came home from work that night and heard from Mom what she had done, he was mortified at her brashness, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Captain had agreed to Mom’s demands, one of the very few times he’d given in on anything. Mr. Dooley had been assigned the job of bathhouse attendant for the rest of his days. He was kept on full pay, just as if he worked the hardest, dirtiest, meanest job in the mine. When Mr. Carter gave in to President Truman and sold out, and the Ohio steel company that bought the mine took over, Mr. Dooley stayed right where he was, even though nobody bothered to tell the men from Ohio about it.
It could be rightfully said that because of me, Nate Dooley had become the town’s secret man. By the time I grew up and went off to college, he still was.
4
HOMEBOUND
I STOOD at my favorite hitchhike site in Blacksburg, just past Doc Roberts’s Shell Service Station, and stuck out my thumb in the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. It was the morning after I’d received the phone call from my mom ordering me to go back to Coalwood to be with my father. I was resigned to do what she’d told me, but there was also a plan percolating in the back of my brain. I didn’t know its particulars, not yet, but in general it consisted of getting in and out of Coalwood in a hurry.
After only a few minutes, a beat-up Chrysler came along. Its driver was a milling machine salesman who proceeded to talk my ear off, something to do with a legend about an Indian boy named Falling Rocks who’d gotten lost somewhere along the New River. “Do you see that sign?” he asked as we crossed a mountain. I did. It said LOOK OUT FOR FALLING ROCKS. “They’re still looking for him!” the salesman said, and then slapped his knee and laughed heartily.
I joined him with a chuckle, that being the polite thing to do and also because the car was going too fast for me to jump out.
“Where you headed, son?” the salesman asked after his guffaws petered away.
“Coalwood, West Virginia.”
He frowned thoughtfully. “Seems like I sold a milling machine there one time. Who’s the boss of the machine shop?”
“Bill Bolt.”
“Big guy, tough as a rock?”
“That would be him.”
“Small world.”
I agreed and said so out loud. If conversation was what it took to get my ride, I was paying full price.
We cruised along until we reached the town of Narrows, where the salesman had a client. I stuck my thumb out again, and soon an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer driver picked me up and carried me across the West Virginia state line. There was no sign announcing I was back in the Mountain State, but I didn’t need one. On the Virginia side were smooth, meadowed ridges, green dimpled valleys, healthy fields of corn, and contented herds of plump cattle. On the West Virginia side were humpbacked, rock-strewn hills furrowed by hollows choked with tangled masses of rhododendron. My nose picked up the drifting pungent odor of a nearby coke oven, too. Such ovens were built back into the sides of mountains and used to bake raw coal into the hard, dry stuff—coke—that was needed to make steel. I’d been away from them long enough that now they seemed to stink to high heaven.
Thankfully, the driver of the truck was quiet as we bumped along, my mind gradually turning dark with uncharitable thoughts about my spoiled summer plans. To add to my dour mood, it began to rain. The road we were on paralleled a set of curving railroad tracks filled with endless lines of coal cars, the heavy locomotives chuffing past, straining to pull their heavy loads. The air was filled with black soot, mixing with the rain to form a gray scum on the windshield, which the wipers only smeared. On the sides of the surrounding mountains were dingy little wood and tar-paper houses, some of them hardly more than shacks, their wet tin roofs glittering in the wan light. The people sitting on the porches looked thin and poor and ill clothed. West Virginia politicians liked to say we mountaineers might be poor but we were proud. Hearing that, my mother liked to say that if there was anything more pitiful than a proud poor person, she didn’t know what it was. Since she’d grown up about as poor as anybody could get, I guess she had the right to her opinion.
The truck wound its way into Bluefield, a city in the hills where railroad tracks converged from all around the southern end of the state. Bluefield was a prosperous town, its downtown of narrow, winding streets lined by busy shops and majestic banks.
The driver finally spoke. “Where you heading, boy?”
“Coalwood, sir.”
“Where’s that?”
“McDowell County.”
“That’s a rough place.”
“I grew up there,” I said.
He looked me over. “You don’t look like somebody who’d come out of a hellhole like that.”
I didn’t know whether to thank him or take offense, so I did neither. I just said, “I’m a college boy now.”
“I’ll be letting you off just a piece more down the road,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
We turned southerly onto Highway 52 and drove over a high bridge that spanned a dozen railroad tracks clogged with coal cars as far as could be seen. The economy was picking up, or so I’d read in the newspapers, and that meant more people were buying automobiles, which meant more steel was being made and, to make the steel, more coal was being dug. I had the sudden thought that maybe Tuck’s death was connected to the improving economy. As a Coalwood boy, I knew very well that the busier the mine got, the more dangerous it got, too.
Outside Bluefield, the grade increased rapidly and my driver fought the gears until he found the right one. As we trundled past the campus of Bluefield State College, I studied its low brick buildings. Bluefield State was where we rocket boys had won the Southern West Virginia Science Fair. It seemed to me now like it was something that had happened a century ago, not just the year before. The man was right who said if you take your eye off time, it’ll jump down a hole like a scared rabbit.
The truck driver let me off in B
luewell, a small community just past Bluefield. The rain was coming down faster and there was no traffic, so I started hiking. By the time I reached a small punch mine—one dug into the mountainside to get at a shallow vein—I was dripping wet. I ducked inside a tin shed in front of the mine, stripped off my shirt, and wrung it out. As it happened, one of the miners just off from work took pity on me and offered me a ride all the way to Welch. We talked a little, exchanging names until we found one in common. He knew Jack Burnette, one of Dad’s engineers. Mr. Burnette was also another one of our scoutmasters. Coalwood men competed for the honor of being our scoutmaster—all of them, that is, except my dad. He didn’t like going into the woods very much. Maybe if the Boy Scouts could have held camp-outs inside the mine, he might have taken the position.
In Welch, I walked around the county seat’s tilted streets looking for a Coalwood citizen who might give me a ride the rest of the way to my fair hometown. I found, instead, and to my great delight, Miss Freida Riley, my most wonderful teacher of chemistry, physics, and rockets at dear old Big Creek High. She was just coming out of the Flat Iron Drug Store. “Is it really you, Sonny?” she asked, her eyes lighting up.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” I said, grinning. Miss Riley was as gloriously beautiful as ever except she was thinner, probably because of her Hodgkin’s disease cancer. She’d let her glossy black hair grow out a bit, too. I felt like hugging her, but I held back, such familiarity not being the West Virginia way.
“How’d you get so wet?” she wanted to know.
“I’ve been hitchhiking in the rain,” I told her. “I’m just in from college.”
“Tell me everything!”
We went inside the Flat Iron and sat down at a tiny wrought-iron table and ordered chocolate milk shakes. Even when she’d been my teacher, I could always talk easily to Miss Riley, so I told her in some detail about the deans who thought I might be less than pure engineering material, and about my mom going off to Myrtle Beach, and about my dad’s situation, at least as best I knew it. She heard my stories and then said, “Sonny, when I was your teacher, I used to worry about you all the time. When your dad got hurt in the mine, and your friend Mr. Bykovski got killed, I was certain that you were going to stop your rockets and just give up. I gave you some advice then. Do you remember what it was?”