“But that’s my aunt!” I shouted. “It must be Uncle Amon! What happened to my uncle?”
“Amon Hicks? Don’t know yet.” He looked at me closer. “You Ray Hicks’s son?”
“I’m Jack,” I croaked and nodded. I couldn’t catch my breath.
He stepped aside and I ran to Aunt Catherine. She looked at me like a scared rabbit and my first instinct was to run away, but she hugged me hard, bending my cast against my body at a strange angle. It pinched and I inhaled from the sharp pain, but I didn’t say nothin’.
The yard grew quiet as everybody stopped and waited.
Aunt Catherine and I sat on the hood of her car until the engine cooled and grew metal cold. She rocked back and forth, twisting the ring on her finger. She and Amon had only been married a year.
I couldn’t think of anything to say to make her feel better, so I just kept my mouth shut, even when her hair whipped around from the wind and stung my cheeks.
A miner handed her a cup of coffee and she passed it to me, but I didn’t want it either. I didn’t mind the taste, but the few times I’d drunk coffee it had torn my stomach up worse than usual, so I didn’t care for it. Besides, it seemed too calm a thing to do—sip a drink—when who knows what was going on a hundred feet below us. I wanted to throw the cup across the yard and shout, Hurry up already! But there was nothin’ to do but wait.
I poured the dark liquid out next to the tire, where it stained the gravel like blood.
After what was probably an hour, the lift chugged back into motion. It was coming up. Finally. And yet, now that it was happening I decided I could wait a while longer—maybe forever if it meant avoiding bad news.
The metal gates pushed open with a clang. Folks outside the gate rushed in and everybody started shouting, “Out of the way! Give ’em room!”
Aunt Catherine ran to the stretcher and grabbed the hand that lay limp over its side. Uncle Amon’s hand—dirty and…gray.
The crowd swallowed me up as I stood there, frozen.
“It’s Amon Hicks,” whispered around me like a Sunday prayer.
The paramedics loaded my uncle into the ambulance and my aunt climbed in with him. Suddenly my dad was there too, covered in more dirt and grime than I’d ever seen on him.
“Not enough room,” the paramedics yelled to him.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital, Amon. You’re gonna be okay!” Dad shouted. He stumbled to his Company truck as if he couldn’t see his way clearly, as if his world was rocking beneath him.
I waved my good arm and chased after him to pick me up. “Dad, Dad!” But he didn’t notice. My eyes stung with angry tears as Piran grabbed my arm.
“C’mon!”
We took off running again—this time cross-country toward the hospital. Up and down through the erosion ditches we climbed and slid. The wind kicked up dirt devils that blew into my eyes and nose, but going that way was faster than the road.
Piran couldn’t make it. About halfway there, his asthma stopped him flat. “Go on,” he choked out as he bent over coughing. “I’ll catch up.”
“But, but…” I stammered. I was used to waiting for him to catch his breath.
“I’ll be fine!” He wheezed and pulled his inhaler from his pocket, wiggling it as if to say, See, I didn’t forget it this time. “Go!”
I nodded and kept runnin’.
My arm throbbed under its cast as I burst through the emergency room doors. The waiting room was already full of miners and their families—word traveled fast in our town.
Aunt Livvy, Uncle Bubba, and Buster stood near the check-in desk with my mom, whose eyes were filled with tears. She reached out a shaky hand and pulled me close.
Suddenly, a gut-wrenching scream echoed from deep inside the building. All the air left the room in one gasp as everybody faced the silver double doors. A short time later, the doctor pushed through, scanned the crowd, and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, there was nothing we could do.”
I tried to swallow back the pressure growing inside—I didn’t want Buster to see me that way—but it didn’t work. I was crying for real now. We all were. My tears joined in with the groans, wails, and cursing that spread through the room. Mom hugged me tight, and though I usually would have pulled away, I didn’t complain when the buttons of her shirt pressed into my forehead and her tears melted into my hair.
Aunt Catherine’s parents frantically wrestled their way through the crowd. “Catherine! Where’s our Catherine?” Mrs. Maddox shouted.
Just then Dad appeared through the silver doors. “She’s with Amon,” he mumbled and held a door open for them. As soon as they passed through, he fell into Mom’s arms and sobbed.
I’d never seen my dad cry, and it dried up my own tears real quick. He’d lost his dad and now his brother to the mine. How could he stand it? Mom held him close, just like she’d held me, as she rubbed his back and whispered, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”
“I told him to stop sometimes, to listen to the rock,” Dad said. His face was puffy, streaked with dirt and tears. “If only I’d been there. He probably didn’t even notice the roof was givin’ way…”
Roof fall then. It was always something like that. And now my uncle Amon was dead.
Three days later I stood between Mom and Grandpa Chase by Uncle Amon’s grave. Dad and Aunt Catherine stood on either side of Father Huckabay, our Episcopal minister. The rest of the town surrounded us. Grandpa pointed out the Union leaders who drove in from the big city. They stood toward the back, away from the crowd with Sheriff Elder.
Everybody wore black, but dirt whipped around our ankles and turned us red up to our knees. I looked down at my own big feet, which seemed to melt right into the ground. Mom squeezed my hand and my eyes watered up again.
It had been a closed casket at the wake the night before—it gave me shivers to think why. But it felt strange that I didn’t get to say goodbye, or somethin’. Amon and my dad never did get along real well. They’d been in the middle of another row when the accident happened, so it had been a few weeks since I’d seen Amon…alive.
They lowered the casket into what looked like a small sinkhole in the red earth—much like the collapse where Grandfather Hicks had died. Was I the only one who thought it strange? It was being underground that killed Uncle Amon, and here we were puttin’ him right back under.
After it was done, Aunt Catherine went to stay with her sister out of town. She said she couldn’t stand being around Amon’s memory everywhere, said she needed a fresh start. I hoped it made losing Amon easier for her, because it sure weren’t easy at home. My home.
Dad didn’t sleep for days, it seemed. He kept switchin’ between being sad and mad at Amon. According to him, Amon never should have been down there in the first place.
After Grandfather Hicks had been killed in that collapse way back when, my dad had gone to work in the mines to keep the family going. His mother had insisted Amon stay in school. She said both her boys weren’t gonna lose out on a chance at a better life. After she died a few months later from a broken heart, Amon quit school and went to work in the mines anyway. The money was too good, I guess.
If it had been me, I wouldn’t have done what Amon did. I would have stayed in school and studied. I don’t know what I would have studied—something, anything to keep me out of those mines.
But Dad had my future mapped out for me. I was supposed to be a miner too. Would Amon’s dying change his mind? Maybe Dad wouldn’t want me to be a miner anymore. Maybe he wouldn’t want to be a miner anymore.
It could have easily been him killed in the roof fall. In my dreams that gray hand hanging over the side of the stretcher didn’t belong to my uncle Amon. It belonged to my dad.
Chapter 3
Castoffs
Two weeks later, I awoke to the sound of Dad’s Company truck engine turnin’ over.
His new tires, the third set so far this year from the acid eating ’em up, crunched over the gravely dirt yard. I sat up in bed, groggy, and watched out the window as he drove across the bridge.
Usually I could watch him drive all the way to the Company, but today he disappeared into thick fog.
I rubbed my lucky rabbit’s foot and tried to settle my stomach as I prayed like I did every day. Please let him come home safe, please let him come home safe. I knew it was silly, but I’d been chanting that prayer since I was a little kid. It made me feel like I was doing something to help my dad. Maybe if I’d been doing it for my uncle too… I added a prayer for all the other miners.
I got my lucky rabbit’s foot when I was eight and went to Rock City in Chattanooga with my grandpa and grandma Chase, before she died of lung cancer. There were so many signs to “See Rock City” painted on barn roofs along the way, I couldn’t wait to hike through the caves with their crystal-lined walls and diorama scenes of fairy tales and gnomes at work tucked into nooks and crannies. I wanted to wind through the “Fat Man’s Squeeze,” a path between two rock faces, and see seven states from the overlook.
It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how strange it was that Grandpa had wanted to go into caves for his vacation after a lifetime of mining. After all, he’d been in the same mine collapse that killed Grandfather Hicks.
They were best friends when it happened. Grandpa Chase made it out with a back injury and couldn’t mine anymore, which is why he opened the Bait ’n Beer, but my dad’s father didn’t make it out at all. Grandpa Chase said he didn’t miss the mining, but he did miss being underground. Despite the bad things that had happened, he said it was like being in the womb of Mother Nature.
If I’d felt that way about being underground, it woulda made things easier with my dad. Even as far back as that trip to Rock City, I knew my heart was someplace else.
It was one of my first trips out of Coppertown and I’d never seen so much green. I couldn’t stop gaping at all the trees that towered over our car. It was so seldom I had to look up to see anything in Coppertown, other than the sky. When I finally saw the caves, I couldn’t have cared less—I’d seen plenty of rocks in my lifetime. What I fell in love with were the trees.
I rubbed my lucky rabbit’s foot and remembered standing outside Rock City, under the shadow of a tree—Grandma had called it a maple—and having to crane my neck all the way back and strain to see the top through a thick canopy of paper-thin leaves. They looked like stained glass as the light cut through their layers in a million shades of green. I’d placed my hand on the trunk to brace myself and swore I could feel it hum. I felt like I was in church—experiencing something holy, like the tree was talking to me somehow.
About a month after that trip, I found a poster of trees, just trees, in National Geographic magazine and I put it up on my bedroom wall. Sometimes I dreamed I was a bird flying above that thick forest, breathing in all that green.
Dad loved everything underground, and I guess Grandpa Chase did too, but I loved everything above. Well, everything that was supposed to be above anyhow.
The poster reminded me of what Miss Post had said on the day Uncle Amon died. Tree roots hold the soil together. But we didn’t have any trees in Coppertown. If we did, would Uncle Amon still be alive? Could trees somehow save my dad?
How long would it take to grow a forest?
I imagined seedlings sproutin’ and spreading their roots underground while up top they reached toward the sun, at first no larger than twigs, then with trunks growing wider and taller. Their branches stretched every which way, leaves popping out along them in green waves. They made shadows across our Red Hills, where no shadows had fallen before. The air cooled, birds nested, and me and Piran climbed tree limbs higher and higher, breathing deeply without any dust in our lungs.
Even in my imaginings, though, a forest took a long time. And considerin’ we could never get anything to grow in Mom’s garden, let alone anywhere else in Coppertown, it would be longer still. I sighed.
Then I remembered what day it was—Friday. Not only was it the last day before the weekend, but my arm cast was coming off. Finally!
I got out of bed and dressed in record time. The smell of sausage frying up in the iron skillet wrapped around me as I walked down the hall. My stomach growled.
“Biscuits and gravy for breakfast,” Mom said. “Pour yourself some milk.”
“No eggs?” I could’ve eaten the eggs and the chicken too.
“I gave your dad the last one. I’ll pick up some from the Company store later today.” She looked out the window. “It’s foggy this morning. Can’t do laundry.” She sighed. “The fog ate up my stockings last time and I can’t keep buying a new pair every time I need to wear ’em.”
Our fog was like sticky acid rain, and it burned holes in Mom’s stockings in a matter of hours. “I closed my bedroom window,” I said. It kept the wet out.
“Good. I hope it doesn’t get as hot today, though,” she said. “Law’ me, it gets stuffy in here all shut up tight.”
She started singing “As the Sparrow Goes” by Anita Carter. She’d been singing that tune since I don’t know when. I don’t think she even noticed she was doing it. Like a bird, she yodeled, “As the sparrow flies, my heart flies, bringing my love to you.” It was the sound of my mother.
I stuffed myself silly with two biscuits smothered in gravy.
“Jack, you’re gonna choke yourself. Slow down,” Mom said.
“In my opinion, biscuits are the world’s most perfect food,” I said with a grin. It took an entire glass of milk to wash that brick down to the bottom of my stomach, where it sat warm and happy.
Mom handed me my lunch in a brown paper sack. “Now remember, I’ll pick you up after lunch and we’ll head to the hospital.”
It had to be the only time in history those words had ever sounded good. “I won’t forget!”
“Kiss.” She tapped her cheek as I was about to leave.
“Awww, Mom. I’m gettin’ too old for all that mush.”
She grabbed my face and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You are never too old to love on your mama.”
For days after Uncle Amon died, the kids at school had avoided me like I was stained with bad luck or something. They’d stare and stop talking whenever I was near. But today they weren’t—maybe because I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Will you quit it?” Piran said as we walked down the hall. “Everybody is lookin’ at you.”
“I can’t help it,” I said as I nearly danced out of my worn sneakers. “I’m getting my cast off after lunch!”
“Well, that’s good.” Piran’s ears turned red, a sure sign he still felt bad about it. “But maybe you could stop bouncing so much? You’re makin’ a scene.”
“Hey, at least they’re not whisperin’ anymore,” I said and my stomach relaxed a little.
I had a hard time focusing on the tree identification quiz, so I only got an A minus. Piran got a C, which he was pretty happy with.
“It’s impossible to study at my house,” he said. If I was around Piran’s older sister, Hannah, all the time, I wouldn’t have been able to study either. But it wasn’t Hannah he was talking about. “My sisters and brothers are always runnin’ around screaming,” he added. I’d seen and heard it too many times to doubt him—the volume got louder there every year. Dad said Mrs. Quinn spit out babies like a Pez dispenser.
Once, I asked Mom why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. She said they’d tried two times before me, but lost ’em both. The way she teared up, I decided not to ask any more questions about it. I liked thinking I had a brother and sister up in heaven somewhere, though. Add them to Grandfather and Grandmother Hicks, Grandma Chase, and Uncle Amon, and I had an army of guardian angels up there lookin’ out for me.
As promised, Mom was at s
chool after lunch, her car kicking up a cloud of dirt as it pulled up to the front steps. I didn’t want dust in my teeth so while I waited for the cloud to settle before I got in, I yelled to my cousin who was still playin’ catch in the yard. “Hey, Buster, next time I see you I’ll be able to play ball!”
“’Bout danged time!” he shouted and fake pitched the ball at me. I ducked and he laughed. But he mighta really done it. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
Talking about removing my cast and doin’ it were two different things, though. We had to go back to the same place where Uncle Amon died just two weeks before. Walking into the hospital’s waiting room brought that afternoon back like a bad dream. I could almost hear Aunt Catherine’s scream still echoing off the seafoam-green walls—the color of my least favorite crayon. When we’d seen Aunt Catherine’s parents in town a couple days before, they’d said they didn’t know when she’d be back from visiting her sister, their faces tightening up like they were wondering if she ever would come home.
My arm tickled like it knew something was up and my feet wanted to head the other way. I tried not to fidget while we waited for the nurse to call my name. I watched the clock tick, tick, tick and stared at the walls. Who decided that sea-foam green was a calming color anyhow? It made me nauseous.
“Jack Hicks?” the nurse said. It was time.
She led us back through the two large silver doors to a row of beds divided by curtains hanging from the ceiling.
“Go ahead and get yourself settled,” she said and patted a bed. “Dr. Davis will be with you in a minute.”
Dr. Davis had been my doctor since I was born. Mom said he moved to Coppertown straight out of medical school and never left. Something about our town got under people’s skin, in a good way. Didn’t surprise me none—we were full of good people. Although if we had trees, I bet even more folks would stick around.
A Bird on Water Street Page 2