Sky of Stone

by Homer Hickam

  Some years back, the Bassos had adopted a boy, the only adopted child, as far as I knew, who lived in Coalwood. It had prompted a lot of gossip across the fence-line as to why it had been necessary for them to go to an orphanage for a child. Mom said Cleo Mallett had been the one who’d started tongues wagging about it, and that she might’ve served Coalwood better had she visited the orphanage for her children, too. Since her boys tended to beat me up, I agreed.

  Mr. Basso had also been one of our assistant scoutmasters. At the meetings, he liked to talk mostly about the garden he’d planted on the side of Sis’s Mountain. Apparently, he was a pretty good farmer. During the summer, he’d swing by our house once or twice to offer Mom his surplus tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. She usually took him up on it, and though she always invited him in for coffee, he’d usually tip his hat and say he had other deliveries to make. Only once that I knew of had he come inside, and then only to admire Mom’s famous unfinished mural of Myrtle Beach. Chipper had bit him twice before he’d taken three steps inside the kitchen.

  I spotted Mr. Basso, all alone near the shaft. With his wide Italian face, majestic nose, and paunch that lapped over his battery belt, he reminded me of Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers. I went up to him and said, “Hey, Mr. Basso,” and then, “I’m supposed to work with you today.”

  He looked me over and said, “Sonny, how do.” He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. I could smell hot peppers on his breath. I saw that he was reading a small Bible, which he tucked away in his hip pocket.

  A lot of coal miners were deeply religious, some of them “Holy Rollers,” who thought it took wrestling with the Devil every day to get into heaven. I’d heard Mr. Basso was one of these.

  Bobby Likens walked up. His helmet was shoved cockily on the back of his head as if he were the most experienced miner on the tipple grounds. “You smell like a locker room,” he said to me.

  I ignored him. “Where are we going, Mr. Basso?”

  “East Main D,” he said, and then, “Call me Johnny. I ain’t no foreman.” The man-lift warning bell rang and he walked onto the lift, fiddling with a sawed-off piece of broomstick he pulled from his belt. “It’s a roof thumper,” he said when Bobby asked him what it was for. “I can check on the rock over our heads with it. Good or bad, this old stick will tell its tale.”

  I merged into the men getting aboard the man-lift. The wooden floor rang hollowly under our boots. Beneath us was seven hundred feet of nothing. We were halfway down the shaft when Johnny turned to me and said, “Turn your light on.” While I hastily fumbled with the switch, he went on to say we were going to change out posts all day.

  “That’s what Big Jeb and I did yesterday,” I said.

  “I got a tour of the mine,” Bobby volunteered.

  “I hope you didn’t wear yourself out,” I said caustically.

  “I’ll try to keep up with you today,” he replied.

  I stared at him. “You’re going with us?”

  “Sure am,” he sang.

  Mom’s designated nursemaid was going to be watching after me every minute. “Wonderful,” I grumped.

  After we climbed aboard the man-trip, Johnny apparently got his first whiff of me. “Floretta’s liniment?” he asked, and then nodded gravely when I replied in the affirmative. “Stuff stinks but it works, I swan.”

  It took about twenty minutes for us to get where we were going. Bobby turned out his lamp and lowered his head. Johnny kept his on to read his Bible. When the man-trip ground to a stop, he tucked the little book back into his pocket and hopped out and took off down a dark tunnel like somebody was chasing him. Bobby charged after him and I was close behind. Before we’d gone three steps, Bobby’s helmet hit the roof, the familiar pop of plastic on rock, and he fell backward, causing me to trip over him. It took a few seconds to get ourselves untangled. We might have said a few curse words in the process, I shouldn’t wonder. Johnny loped back and spotted us with his light. “Don’t ever take the Lord’s name in vain, especially in the mine,” he said angrily. “It’s terrible bad luck.” Then he took off again, the spot of his light bouncing and weaving. Bobby and I scrambled to our feet and did our best to keep up. Finally, he stopped. “You boys get over here!”

  Panting, we gathered around him while he patted a post. “Looky here. This post’s rotten. See how it’s splintered at the top?” He rapped on it with his knuckles. “Hear that? It sounds hollow because there’s holes all through it. There’s a bunch of posts on this section that are just like this one. We’re going to find and change out every one of them today. But first, we’ll say our prayers.”

  Johnny sank to his knees and turned out his lamp, lowered his head, then started mumbling something I couldn’t hear. Then he looked up abruptly, saw Bobby and me staring at him, and said, “Turn off your lamps and get down on your knees.”

  “I don’t believe in showing off my religion,” Bobby said smartly.

  Johnny glared at us and said, “Boys, there are only two things that are going to keep you alive in this coal mine. Me, and the tolerance of God.”

  I couldn’t resist showing Bobby up. I went down on my knees and pressed my hands together. “Amen!” I said after pretending to fervently pray for a couple of seconds.

  Bobby switched off his lamp and went down on one knee and said, “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.”

  “That’s a supper prayer,” I said.

  Bobby stood up, smacked his helmet against the roof, and was knocked back to his knees. I laughed out loud. “I tried to tell you,” Johnny said. “Tempt not thy Lord.”

  I carefully rose, wedging my helmet against the rock ceiling. “Here’s how you stand up in the mine, Bobby,” I instructed merrily. He was almost as much fun to mess with as a junior engineer.

  Bobby got up slowly, then bent over and rubbed his head. He’d really cracked it.

  “All right, boys, let’s get to work,” Johnny said.

  I quickly discovered that what Johnny considered work was going as hard and fast as possible and then a little harder and faster on top of that. We quickly fell into a routine. Johnny would knock down a bad post and Bobby and I would manhandle a new one into place. Then he’d shim the new one while Bobby and I hauled the old one back to the rising stack of discards. The whole time, Johnny kept yelling at us to hurry up or spouting a sermon about how we’d better learn to listen to the Lord and how the Lord God Jesus should be in our every thought. I didn’t know about Bobby, but I was having trouble thinking of much of anything past keeping my head low and trying to catch a breath.

  “I wonder if he handles snakes in that church of his,” Bobby said grumpily.

  “He’d probably yell at it to bite him faster,” I replied, and Bobby and I shared a laugh, the first one together. I was starting to think he wasn’t such a bad old boy, after all, even if he pretended to be my nursemaid way too often.

  When Johnny saw that Bobby and I had thrown the old rotted posts into a pile, he demanded that they be stacked into a nice square.

  “How come, Johnny?” Bobby argued. “They’re just going to get hauled away.”

  “Dwight Strong likes to keep his section neat as a pin,” Johnny said. “And so do I.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” Bobby said, his back bowed beneath a piece of low rock.

  “It does to me,” Johnny replied with narrowed eyes.

  As the day wore on, I would occasionally allow myself a little moan. “What’s wrong with you?” Bobby finally demanded.

  “I’m sore and I’ve got blisters on my feet.”

  “You want me to look at them?”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I don’t want you to look at them.”

  “You really need to change your attitude,” he said.

  “Work, boys! No talking!” Johnny bawled.

  “We weren’t talking,” I said. “We were arguing.”

&nb
sp; “About what?”

  “Sonny’s bad attitude,” Bobby said.

  Johnny worked his way over to us and squatted, the first time all day that he’d stopped. “Sonny, Olga Coal pays us to work. Do you understand that?” I opened my mouth to protest, mainly because I couldn’t recall not working for more than a minute since the shift had started, but Johnny went on. “I don’t cheat Miss Olga for my pay. That’s something you boys got to understand right now if you want to work with me.”

  Bobby nodded. “I understand,” he said grimly.

  I didn’t reply. Yet another thought had popped into my mind, as they tended to do. There was something going on that was just a bit off-kilter. Then it came to me in a flash. “Johnny, did somebody tell you to get rid of us?”

  Johnny drew a red bandanna from his back pocket and mopped his face, leaving greasy black smears behind. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he said.

  “I knew it,” I said. “I thought I smelled a rat.”

  “What rat?” Bobby demanded.

  “My dad, unless I miss my guess. I’m right, aren’t I, Johnny?”

  Johnny tucked his bandanna in his pocket, then rubbed the back of his neck, twisting his head around. His neck bones popped and it hurt to hear it. “Homer and I had a little talk last night,” he allowed. “He said he was really worried about you boys, said he was afraid he and the union had made a mistake letting you down here. He asked me to watch you two close. If I thought you weren’t worth anything, I’m supposed to chase you off.”

  Bobby’s jaw dropped. I guess he’d been gone from Coalwood so long he’d completely forgotten how the place really worked. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “I’d be happy to explain it to you,” I said smartly.

  He ignored me. “What about the union?” Bobby demanded of Johnny. “We can’t just be fired, can we?”

  Johnny said, “If you boys can’t cut the mustard, I’m supposed to report it to Dwight Strong. He’ll tell Homer and then you’re both gone for cause. Homer said Dubonnet won’t likely fight it because a union member—that would be me—said you boys were a danger to yourselves. So it’s up to me whether you go or stay, I reckon.”

  Bobby took off his helmet and rubbed what must have been a sore spot. “Johnny, I need this job,” he said. “Don’t take it away from me, please.”

  Johnny poked his light at Bobby and then at me. “I’ve seen a few worse miners in my days than you two boys.” He swiveled his light back to Bobby. “But both you boys got to do exactly what I say when I say it. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bobby replied between gritted teeth.

  “How about that morning prayer?”

  Bobby hesitated, then nodded. “I can say a prayer with the best of them.”

  “Praise God. How about you, Sonny?”

  I shrugged. “Praying’s always a good thing.”

  “I meant about doing exactly what I tell you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Then let’s get back to work.”

  Johnny raced back to the next post to be changed while Bobby and I picked up a new post and, bent beneath the roof, waddled after him. For the next two hours, we didn’t talk, just changed out posts as hard and fast as we could go.

  When it looked as if we were about to run out of rotten posts, Johnny decided he didn’t like the piled-up rock and coal—gob—on both sides of the track and flagged down a passing man-trip to send a message up the line about it. Soon afterward, a locomotive brought in an empty car and left it on a siding. We started shoveling gob into it, an exercise that quickly identified some muscles I hadn’t yet abused. We’d hardly sat down to eat lunch, it seemed, before Johnny was up again and yelling at us to come help him. Bobby and I threw down our buckets and scrambled to find him.

  “How does he do it?” Bobby demanded when, just for an instant, he and I stopped to catch our breath and gulp some water.

  “He can’t keep it up,” I said confidently. “He’s got to be forty years old, at least. And that belly of his . . .”

  “More like fifty,” Bobby said. “And he might have a belly but I’m guessing there’s some hard muscles underneath. Adipose tissue isn’t necessarily an indicator of sloth.”

  “What’s adipose tissue?”

  “Fat.”

  “Why didn’t you just say fat, then?”

  “I’m trying to learn how to talk like a doctor.”

  “How would you like it if I started talking like an engineer?”

  “I’d be impressed,” he said.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t oblige him.

  Later in the day, Dwight Strong, the foreman, showed up. Bent over beneath the roof, his hands behind his back, he watched us for a few minutes. I mostly kept my head down, but once I flashed my light in his direction. His round, friendly face was distorted by a big chaw in his cheek. He gave me a nod. Mr. Strong was one of Dad’s favorite young foremen and had often visited our house to talk mining. I’d been impressed when he’d learned to keep Chipper at bay by picking up one of our cats for his lap. “Take it easy, boys,” he said after watching us for a while. He knocked at the roof with his roof thumper, then walked away.

  “What do you think, Johnny?” Bobby worried as Mr. Strong disappeared into the darkness. “Is he for us or against us?”

  “I’ll handle Dwight Strong,” Johnny said.

  “Praise God!” Bobby said, and Johnny grinned approvingly.

  I was reaching for my end of a fallen post when I heard a sharp crack, like a rifle shot. I looked up and saw an oval slab, like the bottom of a big dirty egg, directly over my head. Johnny gave me a shove and then the floor shook with a solid thump as whatever it was came crashing down on the very spot where I’d been standing.

  “Not a thing in the world held it up save evil,” Johnny remarked while I crawled to my feet. “This is a kettle bottom, boys. It’ll come down on you like a hammer.”

  “Johnny saved your life, Sonny,” Bobby said unnecessarily. I knew it to be the truth.

  I stared at the kettle bottom. It was a big black funnel-shaped rock, oval on the bottom and tapering to a point at the top. If it had hit me, no helmet in the world would have done me any good. My skull would have been shattered like an eggshell. I stammered my thanks.

  “I should have seen the blamed old thing before you got under it,” Johnny said, craning his neck to look up into the hole in the roof. He got out his roof thumper and rattled it around inside.

  “It looks like an old tree stump to me,” Bobby said, kicking at the thing.

  “Can’t be,” Johnny said. “It’s made out of rock.”

  Bobby knelt and rubbed the kettle bottom with his gloved hands. “No, it’s a stump. You can see the corrugations of the bark. Millions of years of compression turned it into rock.”

  “The Bible says the world’s only about five thousand years old,” Johnny said, patting his pocket where he’d tucked his little book of gospels. “Praise God and all His wonders.”

  Bobby saw fit to argue. “You can’t believe that. Look at

  the evidence all around you. Coal is made up of plants that grew a hundred million years ago, even before the dinosaurs. Compression and heat from the weight of the rock overburden gradually changed the plants into coal. Isn’t that right, Sonny?”

  “Leave me out of this,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to get into an argument with a Holy Roller, especially one who had just saved my life.

  Bobby frowned. “I thought you were studying to be a scientist.”

  “An engineer,” I corrected him. “There’s a big difference.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I didn’t know for sure, so I made something up. “A scientist would care if it was a fossil. An engineer wouldn’t.”

  He went back to studying the kettle bottom. “Look here, Johnny. Growth rings. You can even count them. One-two-three—you see?”

  Johnny refused to look. “The Lord God made everything in six da
ys—coal, rock, kettle bottom, everything,” he said.

  While Johnny and Bobby were going at it, I took the opportunity to lean up against a rib of rock-dusted coal and rest my back. My cramped muscles sent a message of thanks. When they stopped arguing about the kettle bottom—pretty worthless, since neither of them listened to a thing the other one said—we got to work busting the nasty thing up. We took turns with the hammer. When it was my turn, I hit the roof on the upswing and the sledge came down on top of my helmet, almost knocking me silly. Johnny and Bobby tried not to laugh. At least, I think they did. It took me a while to get back my focus. When we’d finally finished breaking the thing up, we hauled its pieces back to the gob car. Getting rid of the kettle bottom took us nearly two hours. God, or the Devil, had booby-trapped the mine with one very dense chunk of rock.

  When Mr. Strong came by again, Johnny showed off the hole the kettle bottom had left in the roof and then the two of them moved off to talk. Bobby and I kept shoveling gob until he leaned on his shovel and worried, “What do you think Johnny’s telling him?”

  I couldn’t let him get ahead of me, so I leaned on my shovel, too. “Probably that you’re an atheist and ought to be fired for that reason alone,” I said.

  “I need this job, Sonny.”

  “Maybe you should stop arguing with Johnny about religion, then. Why do you want to be a doctor, anyway?”

  “So I can have tennis balls I can read.”

  “Is that supposed to make sense?”

  Bobby pushed his glasses up on his nose. “My whole life growing up here in Coalwood,” he said, “I never played a set of tennis except with used balls Doc Lassiter or Doc Hale gave me. They were so old, the writing was worn completely off them. I decided I was going to be a doctor myself someday so I’d be able to afford to buy new ones.”

  “I’m sure your patients will be glad to hear you’re their doctor because you want fuzzy tennis balls you can read,” I said.

  His light flashed into my face. “That’s not the only reason. I want to heal people, too.”

  “Uh-huh,” I replied with a doubtful smile.

  “You really need to change your attitude,” he said.