The Essay A Novel

  “See you in the morning,” Edgel said.

  “N-n-night,” Luke said.

  We got into the Rocket 88 for the short ride back to Red Dog Road. Edgel had been tinkering with the car. It was still covered in primer and needed some serious work on the interior, but its engine sounded like it had just come off the showroom floor. Edgel Hickam was not without his shortcomings, but he was good with his hands and a wizard under the hood of a car.

  Edgel pulled the Rocket onto the gravel pad in front of the shed. Once he had killed the engine, we could hear my dad scream, slurring his words, “Do you think it makes me happy, woman? Huh, is that what you think?”

  Edgel looked at me and blew air from his mouth. “Good God, not again,” he moaned.

  Through the torn screen of the storm door we could see my parents in the living room. Mom was crying and holding both hands to her cheeks. Dad was struggling to pull on a jacket that had gotten hooked under an elbow. The television news was on, something about the president and Watergate. Both parents turned and looked when they heard the squeak of the opening storm door. When we were both inside and the door closed, Edgel asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Mom held out an open hand toward Dad, her lips clenched shut and jaw quivering as she tried to fight back tears. She had a streaked red spot on the side of her cheek, the evidence of a Hickam backhand. Her eyes were red and her chest heaved. She looked exhausted and ready to collapse, and I assumed they had been at it for a while.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, that cocksucker Morgan, that’s what’s wrong,” Dad yelled.

  “He wouldn’t give you your job back?” I asked.

  Dad looked at me with a familiar look of disgust. “No, college boy, he didn’t. I got in there and was ready to practically beg for my job back and he had me thrown off the property. He called the cops and said if I ever set foot on his property again, he’d have me arrested.” He looked for a moment as if he would cry, then he raised an index finger and pointed it at my mother. “This is all your fault, bitch. You’re the one who made me go down there. ‘Ask for your old job back, Nick. Please. Mr. Morgan will give it to you; he’s a nice man,’” my dad mocked my mother. “Well, you see what he gave me, didn’t you? Jack shit, that’s what.”

  After being rejected by Mr. Morgan, I assumed that the old man had gone straight to the Double Eagle Bar, drinking away whatever cash he had in his pocket, and then mooching drinks for the rest of the afternoon. Like an ember that smolders in a couch for hours before erupting in an intense fire that quickly consumes everything around it, the old man had done the slow burn at the Double Eagle so that his temper could be in full rage by the time he got home.

  He walked to the foot of the stairs and reached for a suitcase three times before finally latching hold of the handle. “What’s the suitcase for?” I asked.

  “What do you usually use a suitcase for?” he sneered.

  “A trip?”

  “Nothing gets by you, does it, college boy? I’m out of here. I’m done. I’ve had enough of all of ya. Virgil said he’s got good work for me down in Florida. I’m leavin’.” He looked at my mother and said, “I’ll have work and I won’t have to listen to you bitchin’ at me all hours of the day and night.” He looked at me and said, “And I won’t have to hear any more of this hocus-pocus about you goin’ to college.”

  “Nick, I don’t want you to leave. I don’t . . .” Her words trailed off.

  Anger was at the root of nearly every decision Nick Hickam ever made. Alcohol was his propellant, but anger was his engine. There was no reasoning with my dad when he had been drinking or when he had his mind made up, and both factors were currently at work. It was the third time to my recollection that he had left home. When I was in the sixth grade, he left for a month and shacked up with a divorcee in McArthur that he met at the Double Eagle and who apparently found beer breath and an eighth-grade education attractive. When I was in junior high, he left for a week. No one ever found out where he went that time. Edgel told me that he left home once or twice before I was born, but he always found his way back, broke and meaner than when he left.

  He stomped down the front steps and threw his suitcase in the back seat. “Dad, don’t you think you should at least wait until morning, maybe sober up a little?” Edgel asked.

  Dad didn’t answer. He gave Edgel a hateful look and climbed into the driver’s side of his 1963 Plymouth Belvedere, a former police car he had bought at an auction. It still had red lights in the grill, rusted fenders, and the faint outline of a badge on the driver’s door. He slammed the door shut and after a moment of fumbling with his keys, twisted hard on the ignition.

  And it wouldn’t start.

  It whined and backfired twice, and then started the slow woo, woo, woo, woo as the battery exhausted itself. He pounded twice on the dashboard, cursed, and tried the ignition again. Nothing but click, click, click.

  The dramatic departure of Nick Hickam was halted by the failure of yet another of his two-hundred dollar junkers. The three of us, even my tear-streaked mother, choked back grins as my dad climbed out of the car and began kicking the door. “You sonofabitch,” he yelled with each of a half-dozen kicks.

  “Give me a ride to Route 50,” he yelled to Edgel. “I’ll hitchhike, goddammit.”

  “You’re going to hitchhike to Florida?” Edgel asked.

  “You’re goddammed right I am.” He didn’t wait to see if Edgel was agreeable. Rather, he grabbed his suitcase from the back seat of the Belvedere and threw it in the back of the Rocket, then got in on the passenger side, arms folded over his chest and looking straight ahead.

  Edgel was resigned to his job. “I’ll be back in a little bit,” Edgel said as he started down the steps. “I’ll try to talk some sense into him on the way over.”

  The last time Edgel saw my dad he was standing along the berm of Route 50, thumb out, walking backward toward Athens.

  “Did he say if he’d call when he got there, or anything?” Mom asked over a dinner of pancakes and fried eggs.

  “Mom, he didn’t say one damn word the whole ride. When I stopped at the stop sign at White Road and Route 50, he got out, grabbed his bag and started hitchhiking. He wouldn’t even look at me. I watched him for a minute, then turned around and left. What the hell. He’s like a damned mule; he wasn’t going to listen to reason.”

  I didn’t like the look on Edgel’s face. It was suddenly dour and his eyes distant, not unlike the face I had seen so many times before in the prison visiting room.

  “God damn that Mr. Morgan,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “He’d been a good worker for twenty years. Why didn’t that bastard just give him his job back, for Christ’s sake?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  T

  here was not much to cheer about in southern Ohio in the autumn of 1973. Along the Ohio River, the steel mills and electric generating plants, long the faithful consumers of Vinton County coal, were crumbling under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency for cleaner smokestack emissions. The culprit of the pollution was the high-sulfur coal that was pulled from the mines in our area. The river industries began buying coal from Wyoming and other Western states, even South America, that met the new governmental standards.

  As the demand for Vinton County coal dwindled, the mines began to close. The big mining companies—Hudson Mining, Sunday Creek Mineral & Coal, Gem of Egypt Mining, Big Muskie Mines— all closed operations. None of the communities that speckled the Appalachian foothills had ever prospered. They were poor towns that scratched out an existence like the miners who lived there, but once King Coal was gone, death came quickly. The coal mines were simply the first to fall in a long line of dominoes. The stores and bars and businesses that relied on the paychecks of the coal miners began to struggle. Some closed. Others changed hands a few times, but eventually they all met with a similar fate.

  But that fall, the East Vinton Elks had given the folks in those destitute hollows and dales som
ething to cheer about. It had been years since East Vinton’s football team had recorded a winning season, and decades since its last conference championship. We went from conference doormat to conference contender in three years. In the tiny communities of Creola, New Plymouth, Wilkesville, and Zaleski, porches were decorated in navy and gray crepe paper. “Go Elks” signs that the booster club had printed were taped to windows throughout the school district. The cheerleaders painted spirited words on car windows in the school parking lot with white shoe polish and passed out ribbons that read, “Crush the Crusaders.”

  The students at the Zaleski Elementary School made a six-foot-tall good-luck card that was signed by every student in the school. It was great fun to be pivotal to such excitement. When I walked down the hall, kids were patting me on the shoulder and telling me good luck. It was a far cry, I thought, from my freshman year when I was virtually invisible in the same hallway except for looks of derision.

  No one was talking about the essay competition, except for Miss Singletary, of course, who was relentless with her drills. Actually, it was probably good for me. It gave me time to clear the McArthur Central Catholic Crusaders from my brain. “You know, Coach Battershell always lets up on us a little right before a game,” I told her, hinting that I was prepared for the essay contest.

  “That’s nice, but I’m not Coach Battershell,” she said, handing me another blue notebook to fill. “I’m Coach Singletary and we’re going to work right up until kickoff.”

  Thursday night practices were called our “socks and jocks” workouts. We wore no pads other than helmets and ran through the plays a final time before the game. It was by far the easiest practice of the week. Afterward, the Athletic Mothers Club had a spaghetti dinner for us in the school cafeteria. “We’re proud of you, no matter what happens tomorrow night,” said Carroll Ullrich, the president of the club and mother of our split end and kicker.

  She was being nice and expressing a sentiment that was close to the surface of every parent and fan. Outside of the players and coaches, no one thought we had much of a chance against Central Catholic. We were the upstarts, the team that put a nice season together once every two decades, and the Crusaders were a perennial state power. Most of our fans silently harbored the belief that we would be soundly defeated, but they would be proud of us nonetheless, as though trying to soften the blow of the inevitable loss.

  After the spaghetti dinner, I got a ride home with Coach Battershell, who used the time to drill me on the McArthur Central Catholic running scheme. Mom was sitting in the living room in her nightclothes, a worn and faded terrycloth robe that held little of its original blue and a pair of open-toed slippers that had worn through under her heels. Her brown hair was still damp from the shower and clinging around her face, and she sat with her dime-store reading glasses on the end of her nose and a tabloid from the truck stop in her lap. She looked remarkably at peace, as though my dad’s departure had relieved her of a terrible weight. I realized that there is a look of weariness worn by people who are always scared. It’s not caused by fear, but by the anticipation of fear and the knowledge that it cannot be avoided. When my dad wasn’t home, Mom could never totally relax because he was always out there, drunk and mean, angry at life, and ready to come home and take it out on his family. When he was home, the slightest misstep could send him into a fury.

  “Did you hear from Dad?” I asked.

  Mom shook her head and looked back down to the tabloid. “No. Maybe he’ll call when he gets to wherever it is he’s going.”

  “Where’s Edgel?” The Rocket 88 had not been in its usual place.

  “He’s off working.”

  “This late?”

  “He said something about having to make an overnight run for the Farnsworth boys—over to West Virginia, somewhere, to pick up some parts.”

  “It couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning?”

  She looked back up, blinking twice and staring at me over the top of her glasses. “I didn’t ask him, Jimmy Lee. I’m glad he’s got the work. I’m going to need a little extra help around here.”

  “Okay. I’ve got some homework. I’ll see in you the morning.”

  “Good night, sweetheart,” she said, already back to her reading.

  I stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned back. “Mom, you know that tomorrow night is Senior Night? You and Dad were supposed to walk out on the field with me before the game. You think maybe Edgel will come with you instead?”

  “I expect he’d be tickled to do it. I’ll ask him in the morning.”

  I went on up the stairs and read two chapters of world history and made a half-hearted attempt to write the last assignments Miss Singletary had given me before the competition. As I wrote, my chin kept falling to my chest and my pencil ran off the page. Finally, I gave up, set the notebook atop my history book and crawled into bed.

  At a few minutes before 3 AM on Friday, the day of the big game, I was awakened from a hard sleep by my mother, who was standing at the foot of my bed, rolling her hands upon one another. “Get dressed and come downstairs,” she said.

  It took me a minute to get my bearings. “What’s wrong?”

  She was already heading out of the room. “Just come downstairs.”

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and an “Elks Football” T-shirt and followed her down the stairs. She was standing at the railing on the front porch, the radio that was usually on the counter in the kitchen was at her feet, the electric cord stretched through the torn screen door and plugged into an outlet in the living room. The placid look that had been on her face a few hours earlier was gone. Her eyes were red-rimmed and a damp tissue was balled up in her fist.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  She nodded to the southwest. I looked over a moonless sky, unsure of what I was looking for until I spotted an orange glow that reached over a distant hill line. It was not unlike the flicker of a television in a dark room with staccato bursts of light flashing off the cloudy sky. Mom dabbed at her eyes. I didn’t understand. Somewhere, deep in the hills between the deserted mining town of Moonville and McArthur, an inferno raged. It took a baritone newscaster at WCHI in Chillicothe to make things clear.

  Good morning, this is Chet West at WCHI, your southern Ohio news leader. And this is your three o’clock report. Firefighters from four area departments are fighting a raging fire at the Morgan Lumber Company outside of McArthur. The blaze was spotted shortly after 1 AM by Vinton County Sheriff’s Deputy Dewey LaMarr, who was on patrol in the area. LaMarr told WCHI that flames were already shooting out of the roof of the building when he spotted the fire. We have Deputy LaMarr on the phone. Deputy, thanks for joining us . . .

  Without looking at my mom, I asked, “Are you sure Edgel went out of town for the Farnsworths?”

  “That’s what he told me he was doing. He called me at the truck stop yesterday afternoon and said he had to make a run to West Virginia. That’s all I know.”

  That was Vinton County Deputy Dewey LaMarr. Again, four area fire departments are fighting an inferno at the Morgan Lumber Company, which you heard Deputy LaMarr say is fully engulfed and destined to be a total loss.

  Tears were now rolling down my mother’s cheeks. She was biting the first knuckle of an index finger. “They’ll put him in prison forever, Jimmy Lee. They won’t fool with him this time. He’ll never get out.”

  “Mom, you don’t know that it was Edgel.”

  She looked at me as though she had conceived, birthed, and raised the most ignorant human being on earth. “Oh God, Jimmy Lee, he’ll never breathe free air again after this.” I hugged Mom and she sobbed a wet ring on my shoulder.

  After a while, I released my grip and she dabbed at her eyes while the tears continued to flow. I went back inside, slipped on a pair of shoes and a jacket, and went back to the porch. “Where are the keys to the pickup?” I asked.

  “Why do you want them?”

  “I’m going to drive over to the Farnsworths’ jun
kyard and see if Edgel’s car is in the lot and the truck is gone.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  A few minutes later, Mom came out of the house wearing a nightgown extending below her beige raincoat, a pair of white, thick-soled shoes that she wore at the truck stop diner, and carrying her purse. “That’s a good look, Mom.”

  She hit me in the arm, glad for the moment of humor. We got into the pickup truck and headed down the drive. It was only a little more than four miles to the Farnsworths’ junkyard, but it was a fifteen-minute drive over Township Road 3 as it snaked over Ingham Hill. “It could be a fluke, Mom. It might not have been Edgel.”

  “That boy has a good heart, but a temper like a firecracker and the good sense that God gave a goose. I love him to death, but I swear he has never made a rational decision in his life.”

  “I think you’ve been listening to Dad for too long. I’ve gotten to know Edgel since he came home. He’s not as bad as Dad always made him out to be. Edgel’s got a lot of common sense. And he told me he doesn’t ever want to go back to prison. He wouldn’t risk that by doing something like this.”

  “They’ll blame him, no matter what. I know they will.”

  No amount of consoling was going to calm her down. We drove past the old entrance to the Gem of Egypt Mining Company’s No.9 mine and down the grade to the Farnsworths’ junkyard, which consumed a plateau of a strip-mined hilltop. I eased the pickup onto the rutted, gravel parking lot that surrounded a cinder block building with milkweed growing from the cracked foundation. A ten-foot chain link fence with concertina wire extended from both sides of the building. I swung the pickup around so the high beams could scan the yard beyond the gates. Edgel’s Rocket 88 was nowhere to be found, but sitting just inside the gate and alongside the south side of the building was the flat-bed Ford. My heart and lungs felt as though they would explode and I was suddenly chilled.

  “What?” my mom asked. I didn’t answer. “Jimmy Lee, what?