Course, by then, we’d been listenin’ to her hillbilly drawl so long that we were talking that way too, crackin’ each other up.
“Let’s jes set up a bed he’ar on the floor,” Dad said.
“That’s a right fine idea,” Mom replied.
“I sure is tir’d,” I said. “Ma, I got me a hankerin’ to snack on some o’ yer corn pone. They any left?”
“Law’ no, I gave it to the pigs. They hain’t had nothin’ but leather britches and cornhusks since fall. I figgered to give ’em a treat.”
“Well that were plum good of ye,” I said. “But I sure is hungry. Maybe I’ll go outside and chew on a tyre.”
“You leave my wagon alone, y’hear?” Dad said. “It done nuthin’ to ye.”
We were in tears, laughing so hard. But all that talk of corn pone really did make me hungry, and Mom had some cornbread left over in the kitchen. I danced across the cold floor and raced back with a piece of cornbread, which I shoveled down too fast to taste.
It was too cold to sleep in our bedrooms, so we stoked the fire and piled the blankets and pillows into made-up beds on the floor. We’d just settled in to sleep when the power came back on. The whir of the heater smothered the sound of the crackling fire, and lights popped on like camera flashes.
I squinted and blinked against the sudden glare. Mom frowned.
Dad got up, turned off all the lights, turned the heat down, and came back to the den with a wide grin on his face. “Make some room fer yuh pa ther’.”
I fell asleep wishing things could stay just like this, happy and warm.
Chapter 16
Seeds
The miners stayed on strike through the rain, the ice, and the cold. They built a small shack just outside the main gate for when the weather got really bad and kept a fire going in a metal barrel to keep warm.
Every day, Dad returned home cold and depressed and went straight to his metal shop, where he made charms and model cars for Grandpa to display in his bait shop. Sometimes Grandpa would sell one to someone passing through and we’d have meat with dinner to celebrate.
Mom spent more and more of her time over at the Ledfords’. Mrs. Ledford’s lung cancer had grown worse, and the miners’ wives took turns helpin’ out until somebody was there nearly round the clock. Sometimes I went with her, but I mostly just got in the way.
Being the only one in the house meant I answered the calls from the bill collectors. One day one of ’em yelled at me, “You’re lying to me, son. I know your parents are home! Put your father on the phone right this minute!”
I hung up on him and leaned against the counter. Don’t cry, don’t cry. The phone rang again, but I ignored it as best I could.
We needed money. The stipend from the Union obviously wasn’t enough. But what could I do to help my family? I felt so useless.
I asked Mom if I could get a job, but she said, “You have a job—to go to school and learn as much as you can.”
That didn’t stop me from lookin’ around. But even the few part-time jobs were scooped up by out-of-work miners. I asked Grandpa if I could help in his store. He let me move boxes around on the weekends sometimes, but it was winter—his slow season. It wasn’t nearly enough money to make a difference, and he couldn’t afford to give me more.
I had to do something.
Watching my dad’s shoulders sink lower and lower each day was driving me crazy. And I could have sworn his hair was turning gray.
About that time, Miss Post gave me a book on greenhouse gardening, which finally gave me an idea.
“Mom, do you have any leftover seeds from last year’s garden?” I asked one night over yet another dinner of beans and rice.
All those summers in the mountains had turned her into a farmer, so every year she tried to grow a garden. It never worked. Farming in Coppertown was like working a man-made desert. But that didn’t stop her tryin’.
“I could try to get the seeds started in paper cups and then they’d be ready to plant come spring,” I said, then lowered my voice. “Since the Company hasn’t been runnin’, maybe they’d stand a chance this year. What do you think?”
Mom looked at me like she’d just found a lucky penny—heads up. “I think that’s a great idea, Jack.” She put down her fork and dove deep into the pantry. Dad and I exchanged a look, trying not to laugh. Our only view was of her rear end wiggling as she dug behind the last of the preserves on the bottom shelf.
She surfaced with several mason jars full of seed packets. “Ta-da!”
Mom and I went through them while Dad finished his dinner. Snow peas, carrots, collard greens, corn, tomatoes!
“They’re old seeds, but some might work,” she said. “By God, this family could use some vegetables.”
Mom gave me a cookie sheet and I lined up small paper cups like I wanted the plants to be in the garden. With a permanent marker, I wrote on the sides what each one was going to be. Dad brought in some leftover manure and potting soil from last year’s garden from the shed. I mixed them together and spooned a little into each cup, patting it down tightly.
“The carrot seeds are so tiny,” I said as I punched a hole into the soil with my finger and sprinkled some in.
“I know,” Mom said. “It’s hard to believe those little things turn into big orange carrots, isn’t it?”
“Hand me the corn and I’ll get those going,” Dad said.
When the cups were done I gently poured a little water over each one.
“Now, where to put them.” Mom chewed on her lip. “They need to be right against a window for light.”
“I know the place,” I said. In my bedroom, I removed my baseball trophies and my cast from the top shelf of my bookcase. Mom laid down a kitchen towel and I put the cookie sheet on top.
“It still needs more light, though,” Dad said. He grabbed the swing-arm lamp from my desk and positioned it so it would shine right on the seed cups.
“Dad, I don’t think regular light bulbs will work.” I frowned and flipped through my book. “Fluorescent lights would work okay, but what we really need are grow lights.”
“Hmm… I’ll see what I can do about that,” he said. “But at least you’ve got a start.”
We stood and looked at the little cups of dirt as if they’d sprout right in front of us. As simple as those paper cups were, they looked a little bit like hope.
I watered my seeds a tiny bit each day. Dad had added two more lights from his metal shop with grow light bulbs he bought at the hardware store way over in Murphy. My bedroom turned into a mini lighthouse every day when I switched them on before leaving for school. It made me wonder about the light bulbs Eli’d had. Was he growing somethin’ too?
A few weeks later, while I was doing my homework, something green flashed in the corner of my vision. I had to stare close, but there it was, a tiny green thread poking up through the soil. I ran to get my parents.
“Your babies are waking up!” Mom pointed at another cup. “Look, there’s another one there.”
“And there,” Dad said and patted my back. “An artist and now you’re a farmer too?”
“Gotta start somewhere.” I smiled.
Chapter 17
Frog Eggs
Eventually winter wore itself out and spring crept in. The rain turned to thunderstorms. I could tell they were coming from the west because they rolled in over the smelters. Even sittin’ unused, they made the air stink like rotten eggs.
Some nights I’d sit in bed and watch the light show on Tater Hill. The Company used the waste from copper mining to pave the parking lot up there, and the iron-rich slag attracted lightning like a magnet. I had a great view from my bedroom.
The storms still caused flooding, but they were farther apart now so it wasn’t as bad. My arm ached a little less, and as February turned to March the days grew slightly l
onger. It had been gray for so long, I couldn’t wait to leave my cave and go outside.
“Let’s go exploring,” I said to Piran one Sunday. I squinted at the bright glowing ball of sunshine that now lit the sky.
There wasn’t much else to do. Baseball season had begun, but so many folks had moved away over the winter that we didn’t have enough players to form an official team anymore. The Miners were finished. Turned out, the final game with the Rockets last spring had been my last.
Piran and I played catch, but it wasn’t the same thing.
Swack, swack, swack, we tossed the ball back and forth.
“I wish I could go back and warn myself that baseball was dead,” I said.
“What would you say?” Piran asked. “Enjoy it while it lasts? Too bad, so sad?”
“I dunno.” I frowned. It was rotten news, no matter when I learned it. “Let’s do something else.”
We were about restless enough to walk the entire Appalachian mountain chain, so we followed the railroad tracks upstream. Before we knew it we were cutting north to the Old Number 2 Tailings Pond. We hadn’t even agreed to go there. It was like our feet were in charge.
“Whoa,” Piran said as it came into view.
“Unbelievable.” I gaped.
The tailings pond had flooded over the winter, forming an actual lake. I don’t know what was stranger looking, its usual weird appearance or seein’ it look like something sort of normal.
We hiked around to the northeast side. The river had flooded so much that there were several new feeder creeks cutting through to the main pond.
“Think it’ll stay this way?” Piran asked. “We could get a boat and water-ski.”
“I bet when things dry up this summer, the pond will be cut off again,” I said, staring into the shallow water. Something caught my eye floating just under the surface. “What are those?”
Clinging to a branch stuck in the mud were dozens of clear slimy balls with little black dots inside.
I leaned down to get a better look. “No way.”
“What?”
“Those are frog eggs!”
“What? Where?” Piran asked.
“See those little balls, they kinda look like jelly?” I pointed. “Remember we studied them in school?”
Piran looked at me like I had three heads.
“Well, I do anyhow, and those are definitely frog eggs.”
Back in town, as we walked by the closed Company store, Piran stopped so suddenly, I bumped right into him. “Hey, what the…”
I wished I hadn’t seen what he’d stopped for. Hannah was making out with Eli Munroe next to the loading docks. She was pressed up against him with her arms thrown over his shoulders. His hands were on her…
“My dad is about ready to kill her for going out with that moron,” Piran said. “It’s been like World War Three in my house lately.”
“How come she can’t see what an idiot he is?” I frowned. “I mean, the guy is five bricks shy of a load.”
Just then Hannah noticed us standing there. She stared right at me as she took a drag from a strange, skinny cigarette and kept kissing Eli. Heat rose up from the soles of my feet and spread all over my body. Anger, disgust, or embarrassment—I wasn’t sure. I had to look away.
Piran and I sulked home. Neither one of us spoke, but probably for different reasons.
Chapter 18
Garden
“Happy birthday, Jack!” Mom said as she came into my room and gave me a big, sloppy kiss on my forehead before I could stop her. “Fourteen, I can’t believe it! You’re gettin’ so big.”
“Ugh!” I complained but smiled anyway.
She looked at my seedlings and rubbed a leaf carefully between her fingers. With constant light and water, they’d grown several inches tall—my own mini-forest.
“Jack, I know it’s your birthday and a Saturday and all, and you can do anything you want today, but I think it’s time to transfer these to the garden. Would you like to do that this morning?”
“Yeah!” I smiled and hopped out of bed.
“We’ll just need to get the garden ready first,” she said.
After breakfast, we grabbed two shovels from Dad’s metal shop and walked out to the small fence that ran along one side of the garden in the backyard.
“We need to turn the soil, loosen it up so the roots will have an easier time spreading out,” Mom said. “Watch how I do it.” She stuck her spade into the ground and jumped on the head with her feet on either side of the handle. It sank easily into the earth. Then she leaned back on the handle, scooped up a big chunk of soil, and flipped it over into the hole she’d just created.
“Not bad,” she said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to turn.”
I tried to jump on my shovel but landed on my rear end instead. “Ow!”
“Try it again.” Mom laughed. “I fell the first time I jumped on a shovel too.”
Three more tries and I finally landed squarely on the head. I fought to keep my balance as the spade slid into the ground beneath me. It was kind of like a little amusement ride. Once I’d gotten the shovel blade deep enough, I levered the handle like Mom had, but I couldn’t fill my shovel as full as hers for nothing. I had no idea she was so strong.
Once I dug too far outside the garden and scraped up red clay, completely different from the garden’s black soil and hard as a brick. “Hey, Mom, look.”
“Yup. You can tell where I’ve been working cow manure into the ground for years now, can’t ya? The darker soil is full of nutrients for your little seedlings, like a gourmet meal. The red ground is dead.”
The garden wasn’t very big, but it was hard work. How much work would it take to change all the ground in Coppertown?
After we raked the soil into even rows, the garden was ready. I ran to get my seedlings, but then walked out slowly with them like I was carryin’ china. I set them down and then took a deep breath—a clean breath. Without the Company running, the air didn’t have that acrid smell to it anymore. I smiled. My seedlings might have a fighting chance.
We lined up the cups in the same order they were on my cookie sheet, setting them on top of the dirt rows. They looked much smaller spread apart and I tried to imagine how they’d fill in as they grew larger—at least I hoped they would.
I carefully turned each seedling over, loosened the cup off its roots, and then turned the plant into a small hole I dug with my hand. They were so delicate—each one a small treasure waiting to transform into somethin’ grand.
We slid the seed packets over bent hangers, which we stuck in the ground at the end of each row to remind us what was what.
Then I dragged the hose from the house. Mom put a special showerhead on the nozzle that she’d been using all the years the garden never made it. Sunlight reflected on the water beads like stars as I sprayed a gentle arc from side to side, back and forth over the tiny seedlings and dark soil. Back and forth, back and forth. The soil turned black as it absorbed the water—like the ground was supposed to do in Coppertown but didn’t.
I imagined I was one of the seedlings stretching up to the water and the warm sun. Were they humming with joy? I could almost hear ’em. I smiled at the idea that I could bring things to life like that.
“How long before they take off, do you think?” I asked Mom as we stood back to admire our work.
“I’d give ’em a few weeks to settle in and get going,” Mom said. “You’ll need to water them every day, okay? Just like you been doin’—it’s your job.”
“Yes, ma’am!” I nodded.
Dad leaned in the doorframe. “They’re outside planting Jack’s garden,” he said into the phone receiver, the cord stretched across the kitchen.
I looked at Mom. It had always been her garden. Would she mind the slip? Obviously not. She shot me a huge smile.
&
nbsp; “Grace,” Dad shouted. “Your dad wants to know what time he should come over for Jack’s birthday dinner.”
“Tell him five o’clock and that we’re having macaroni and cheese, Jack’s favorite.” She turned to me. “And we’re having Mrs. Markley’s chocolate cake too.”
“Oh yum!” It was a tradition in our family, a recipe from way back, and it was the best chocolate cake on the planet. For all our slim meals of late, I was going to eat like a king that evening!
“You did good work, Jack. Hand me the hose and I’ll finish up watering. Go find Piran and be home in time for your birthday dinner.”
My birthday dinner.
I knew Mom and Dad still couldn’t do much in the way of presents, but I wondered what Grandpa would give me. Maybe Mom had told him about the dirt bike? A voice whispered in the back of my mind that he couldn’t afford it either, but I ignored it. Dreamin’ was free!
When I got home from hanging out with Piran (who gave me a baseball card with bubblegum that he bought himself at Dilbeck’s Pharmacy), Grandpa’s truck was pulled up out front of the house with a tree—an entire tree, roots and all—standing up in a bucket in his truck bed with a blue bow tied around its trunk.
I barely had time to hide my disappointment.
“Happy birthday, Jack!” Grandpa said as he strode out to the yard. “What do you think? Grace told me about yer garden, and with that art you did for me at Christmas, I figured this’d be the perfect thing to get ya. It’s a dogwood tree. I dug it up from the woods outside Coppertown. You can start that forest of yours.”
Not a bike, a tree. A tree that Grandpa dug up himself?
And from the size of it, that was no easy task.
I looked at my grandpa—really looked. When did he stop standing up straight? Was he hurting? I couldn’t believe he’d dug up an entire tree for me.
“You think it’ll live?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“I think it’s got a better chance than it ever might’ve before. And I think it has a better chance with you.”
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