by Homer Hickam
I shut my mouth so hard my teeth clicked.
“Maybe he’s never seen a girl engineer before, Rita,” Victor said. “I mean an enginette, of course.”
“Be careful, Victor,” the girl said. “You’re going to find your tail jerked up between your ears.”
Victor grinned and went into a very bad Humphrey Bogart impression. “I’m yours anytime you want me, sh-weetheart.”
“Victor,” she said coldly, “you couldn’t handle it. Trust me.”
I kept trying to figure out what was plainly in view. I’d heard of women engineers, of course, even guessed there were plenty of them, but I never figured to see one in Coalwood. Just by being there, she was challenging one of the strongest of all coal-mining superstitions: A woman in a mine caused death, desolation, disaster, and destruction, and that was just for starters.
“You ready for your day at the office, girl?” Ned asked in a needling tone. He looked over at me and gave me a wink. “Rita works in the office, shuffling paper and whatnot.”
“I do what they let me do, snot-for-brains,” she retorted. “I’m working on the design of the new preparation plant. What are you doing? Following a foreman around and getting in his way, no doubt. Very important work.”
Ned’s lip went out. “At least I’m underground.”
Floretta came out of the kitchen, saw what was happening, and put her hands on her hips. “You children still here? Sonny, I’m telling you—get to work! You can’t be late the first day. You’d embarrass your daddy all to heck.”
“Who’s your daddy?” the girl-engineer wanted to know.
“He’s Homer Hickam’s son of a bitch,” Victor said.
Ned rolled his eyes. “He’s his bastard, you moron. A son of a bitch is somebody whose mother is a dog.”
Victor looked confused, but then, after a moment of reflection, he blurted out, “Boy, around here, you learn something every day!”
Floretta glared at the two young men. “Sonny Hickam is nobody’s nothing except he’s the second son of Homer and Elsie Hickam what’s home from college and has ended up working in the mine just like any common miner—only if he don’t get his tailbone moving, he’s going to be out of a job on his first day. Sonny, this is Miss Rita Walicki, who is ten times the engineer than these two put together, only she’s a woman and that means she’s trying to do something nobody in this old place is ever going to let her do. Miss Rita, Sonny. Sonny, Miss Rita. Now everybody get out of my Club House and get to work! Except you, Miss Rita. Got your breakfast ready, honey. Set yourself down.”
“Miss Rita” gave me the hard eye. “If I could get past your father,” she said, “I could go into the mine.”
“Good luck” was all I knew to say, and so I said it. I hefted my bucket, the water sloshing in the lower pan.
She wasn’t through with me. “Do you have something against female engineers, Sonny Hickam?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I like women and I like engineers so I guess putting them together doesn’t trouble me.”
“Then how about putting a word in for me with your father?”
“I’d be the last one he’d listen to,” I confessed. It was true, but what I didn’t say was that I had no intention of helping her. My entire life, I’d heard about the evil of women in the mine. I didn’t believe it, of course, but then again, maybe I did. Somebody said one man’s superstition was another man’s religion, and I think he was on to something.
I plopped on my helmet and tipped its brim to Miss Rita Walicki, but she had already turned toward the breakfast table. Victor and Ned were watching her walk, wicked grins on their faces. It was a walk that was indeed something to admire, but I had no time for it. I had taken the company scrip and it was time to earn it. I struck out for the mine.
11
MARCHING IN THE LINE
HOW MANY times had I watched the stream of men going to and from the mine? When Dad took the Captain’s job and we moved into his house, I claimed an upstairs bedroom that gave me a clear view of the mine and its tipple. Every day, three shifts of men marched from their homes up the Coalwood hollows to the man-hoist and back home again. At night while I lay in bed, the sound of clumping boots, clunking lunch buckets, and the low note of voices during the exchange of the hoot-owl and evening shifts were a comfort. I figured as long as the men of Coalwood were going to work, all was well.
Now I was one of the men trudging up Main Street. I swung my bucket with each step, getting the feel of it, the water in the bottom of the tin sloshing and pulling at my arm. My helmet felt heavy and tight, so I stopped to adjust it. I loosened the band inside, then plopped it back aboard. That made it too loose, so I worked on it some more. Men passed me by, grinning and elbowing each other. “Supposed to wear that thing, boy, not diddle with it,” I heard someone say, but he was swallowed in the line before I could look up to see who it was.
I passed the vacant house that had been Tuck Dillon’s. Its windows were dark, its porch empty. There had been a time in Coalwood when a house wouldn’t have been left vacant for more than a day. That had been when the company owned all of the houses. Now, I supposed, there were mortgage companies to deal with and that slowed things down.
At the Captain’s house, Poteet came racing to the fence, her long red tongue wagging. Dandy waddled behind her, his nose in the air. I detoured to say hello, but at the sound of my voice Poteet started barking. The men going past me laughed. “We’re going, Poteet!” one of them said.
Barking was Poteet’s way of encouraging Coalwood’s men to get to work so she could spend the day lounging around the yard. I guess she was giving me the same message. Dandy stood back, his head cocked as if puzzled, perhaps because the sound of my voice was coming from outside the fence. I ached to open the gate and give the old boy a pat, but I felt the pressure of the line going past, almost as if it were a strong current, so I rejoined it, going single file up the narrow path that led to the mine. Poteet kept barking us on our way. When I walked past Dad’s office, Mr. Woody Marshall came out on the porch. “Hold up, Sonny,” he said.
I’d always liked Mr. Marshall, an easygoing man when he wasn’t worrying about the mine with Dad. I guess he liked me well enough, too, although I’d almost drowned his daughter Sue about ten years ago. Just as soon as I’d gotten Huckleberry Finn under my belt, I’d built a raft and floated it down the creek, managing to turn it over with Sue on board. She had taken turns laughing and crying all the way home. I had dearly hoped she’d be in one of her laughing turns when she made it back home, but no such luck. Mrs. Marshall gave me a well-deserved swat on the seat of my pants and then Mom added another later for good measure. I heard later Sue’s brother Billy was considering beating me up, too, but he never did. He probably forgot.
“Get on over to the lamphouse, Sonny,” Mr. Marshall said, “and collect your tag and your lamp. Then get with Richardson. He’ll be your foreman today.” When I nodded and started to go, Mr. Marshall held me by my sleeve. “I think you should know your daddy’s going to cut you off after this shift.”
I was astonished at the news. “What for?”
Mr. Marshall patted me on my back and nudged me in the direction of the lamphouse. “Because he wants to,” he said.
I refused to be nudged. “Then why’d he let me get this far?” I demanded. “I know he had to sign off on my papers.”
Mr. Marshall shrugged. “He said he wanted to see how far you’d go.”
I looked at Dad’s open office door and started to head toward it. I was being picked on, in my opinion, and I wanted to say it out loud. “He’s not there,” Mr. Marshall said patiently. “He’s already gone inside.”
I stopped, frustrated and angry. I felt like bouncing my bucket off his wall the way one of my rockets had done so long ago. “This isn’t fair,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew “fair” didn’t matter, not at my father’s mine.
“Just go get your day in,” Mr. Marshall urged, “then it’ll all be
over.”
When I wheeled around, I found Bobby Likens standing there. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans tucked into his boots and a gray sweatshirt. He had a battery pack on his belt and a lamp clipped to his helmet. He might have been dressed up like a miner, but he still looked like Joe College to me. “I guess I’d better help you,” he said.
“I don’t need your help,” I snapped. I was pretty much mad at the world.
He acted like he didn’t hear me. “Let’s get you a lamp and a tag,” he said. “I’ve already been through the drill.”
“You’d better go on, Sonny,” Mr. Marshall said, this time putting his hand firmly in my back and gently prodding me in the proper direction.
Still so mad I could spit, I followed Bobby to the lamphouse, a grubby brick building just up the hill from the shaft. Inside was a rude wooden counter, and behind it were rows of batteries and helmet lamps. The odor of quietly fusing electricity hung in the air. “Sonny needs a lamp, Mr. Filbert,” Bobby said, and the clerk behind the counter went down the line until he found one fully charged. He handed it over, saying, “You got a tag, Sonny boy?”
I confessed I didn’t, and he pointed at a big board hanging on the wall. It was painted black and had rows and columns of numbered hooks. “You’re going to be number fifty-three,” Mr. Filbert said. “You get two tags with that number. When you get your helmet lamp in the morning, I’ll give you a tag and you should put it in your pocket. I’ll hang the other number 53 on the board beside that number. When you come back out and turn your lamp in, give me your tag and I’ll take the other one off the board.”
“Can you remember that?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know,” I snapped. “It’s so complicated.”
Bobby apparently didn’t recognize wit when he heard it. “Well, try your best,” he said fussily. “It’s so a foreman can check the board and see who’s in the mine. In case of an accident, they can identify you with the tag in your pocket. Do you understand?”
I didn’t answer. I had just remembered again that I was going to get cut off. The more I thought about it, the madder I got. Cut off! I thought suddenly of Lonnie Huddle. His daddy had been killed, and then he and his mama and his sisters had been cut off without so much as a thank-you from my dad and the company. For the first time, I realized how much I hated those two words. Cut off! Not me, I swore. Not me!
Bobby gave me a once-over. “Look, Sonny, I’m just trying to help you out here,” he said reasonably. “You and me, we’ve got to look out for each other, that’s the way I see it. And since I’m older than you . . . well, I guess it’s up to me to keep you straight.”
I decided at that moment that Bobby Likens was really about the most arrogant fellow I’d ever known.
“I see you bought a new lamp belt,” he said. “Why didn’t you borrow an old one like I did?”
“I didn’t buy it,” I said. “I found it in the trash.”
Bobby gave me a doubtful look and then showed me how to clip my battery pack on the belt and how to thread the power cord up through a loop on the back of my helmet. “I knew how to do that,” I said, even though I didn’t.
Mr. Richardson, a pleasant-faced man, called me out of the crowd of miners by the man-lift. I was delighted to see him, anything to get away from Bobby Likens. Bobby said, “See you later, Sonny.”
I turned my back on him. I hope not was my thought.
Beside Mr. Richardson stood a slump-shouldered giant of a man. The smell of his sweaty clothes reached me before he did. “You know Big Jeb?” Mr. Richardson asked.
I sure did. How could I not? Big Jeb was famous for being the strongest man in town, white or colored. It was said he could hold up the mine roof with his back and had done it a few times, too. He was married, so I’d heard, to two women up Snakeroot Hollow, and had two sets of kids, too. Big Jeb was wearing a ragged coverall underneath a coal-caked denim jacket. It looked as if he’d worn those same clothes for the last decade. He stared at me, his tiny eyes puzzled. I supposed he was trying to figure out who I was.
“You’ll go with Big Jeb today, Sonny,” Mr. Richardson said. “Setting timbers, ain’t you, Jeb?”
Big Jeb’s eyes flicked toward Mr. Richardson and then came back to me. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice a rumble from somewhere about a mile deep.
“You take this boy with you, you understand? Go back to where you were yesterday on West Main D. The hoot-owl shift should have left you a pile of timbers and shims to work with.”
Big Jeb’s eyes never left me. “Yes, sir,” he said with about as much enthusiasm as a bear coming out of hibernation.
“Good,” Mr. Richardson said, and then he was off running, barking orders to various men. I looked around and found Bobby Likens watching me. A miner I didn’t recognize came up beside Bobby, slapped him on the back, and said something. Bobby laughed, and then the two of them turned and got on the man-lift. Big Jeb grunted something, and I followed him to walk out onto the lift platform, too. A bell rang twice, and the big bullwheel on top of the man-hoist tower began to turn. Although my stomach stayed where it was, the rest of me began to drop down the shaft.
12
BIG JEB
AS THE lift dropped, I kept hearing a wheezing noise that sounded like a broken accordion. After a while, I realized it was coming from Big Jeb each time he breathed. Then Bobby started yammering, talking about college and how much he was looking forward to medical school. When he was asked, he allowed as how he made pretty much straight A’s all the time. He also said this was the second time he’d ever been in the mine, the only other time being a field trip when he was in the ninth grade. I just wished he’d shut up. My knees were quivering, and they might have even knocked together a couple of times. It was a long way down that shaft. I’d been down it twice before, once with my dad, another time with my friend Jake Mosby. This time, maybe because I was coming as a miner, not a visitor, I was scared, and Bobby’s chatter punctuated by Big Jeb’s wheezes weren’t helping me any.
When we reached the bottom, I started to get off the lift, but before I could do it, nearly every miner on it said: “Turn your light on, boy!” They seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of saying it. Sheepishly, I turned the knob on my helmet lamp. Bobby came over and shined his light in my eyes. “Sonny, you’ve got to pay attention or you could get hurt down here.”
“I can take care of myself,” I muttered.
“You’d better.”
I’d just about had enough of Bobby Likens. “What’s it to you?” I demanded.
He kicked the dirt. “I guess I have to tell you. Your mother called the house last night and asked me to keep an eye on you.”
“What?”
“Your mother called—”
“I heard you.” So Mom knew what I’d done. That explained for sure why Dad was going to cut me off. Mom must have burned up the telephone line to him and then called the Likenses. But why hadn’t she called me at the Club House? If she knew I’d signed up to go to work, surely she knew I’d taken a room, too. The more I thought about my parents and their incessant battles and intrigues and manipulations, and how they tended to use me like a kickball, the madder I got. I contemplated jumping on the lift and going straight back up, but the men going off shift beat me to it. It rose out of sight.
“Look, Sonny,” Bobby said earnestly. “We’re not together today, so try to keep yourself from getting killed. Your mother would have my hide if you did.”
I glared at Bobby and then stomped off looking for Big Jeb. He was pretty easy to find, since his back was about as wide as the mine. When I saw him climb headfirst into a man-trip car, I climbed in next to him. Though the car was built for four men, it was a tight squeeze for just the two of us. Big Jeb opened his lunch bucket, withdrew the top part, and tipped the bottom to his lips, taking a deep gulp of water. He then let loose a wheeze so long that I wondered if it would ever end. Then, as soon as he had his bucket back together, he smacked his vast black lips
and promptly fell asleep, each breath a rumble. Then I remembered I’d left my own lunch bucket in the lamphouse.
The man-trip lurched once, the wheels squealing, and we were off. No matter what else happened this day, I had sentenced myself to a shift without food or water.
At least I didn’t have to be with Bobby Likens. I could imagine what he’d have to say about my forgotten bucket. It would have been just like him to offer to share his lunch with me, too. I started a long, slow mental burn, and pretty soon I’d managed to transfer the worst qualities of mankind over to Bobby Likens, the conceited med school, straight-A’s creature that he was.
The man-trip rumbled on into the darkness, its wheels squealing and grinding every time it turned. I could smell the heat coming off its powerful electric motor. After a while, we stopped to let men get off, but Big Jeb kept sleeping. How was I supposed to know when we got to wherever we were going? If Big Jeb stayed asleep, maybe we’d keep going and going and . . .
I worked to get hold of myself. It was all so crazy. What in God’s good earth was I doing in the mine! We were picking up speed, really flying now. Shapes flicked by, wooden timbers white with rock dust. The man-trip rattled and squealed and lurched. At any moment, I expected it to jump the track and roll over and smash us all. I sure didn’t see how anybody could sleep aboard it, but Big Jeb never stirred.
A half hour or so farther down the track, we stopped again. My tailbone felt like somebody had just spent that half hour kicking it. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. Coach Mams back at Big Creek had once said, “It’s better to do nothing than the wrong thing.” At the time, I thought his advice made a lot of sense. I was always pretty capable of doing nothing. But as I sat in the darkness stuffed inside a steel cage with a man who was not only the size of a grizzly bear but pretty much smelled like one, too, I began to wonder if doing nothing might sometimes be the wrong thing, after all. Philosophy seemed to come easy to me inside a man-trip, especially since my mind was the only thing that could move.