A Bird on Water Street

by Elizabeth O. Dulemba

  “I am not happy you were up there, Jack Hicks, and for that, you’re grounded until I say otherwise,” she said, then put her arm around me. “But you did a good thing saving Little Man here. What are you going to feed him?”

  I looked at my amphibian book. “Crickets, I think.”

  “Well, that’s easy enough,” she said. “You can pick some up from Pa’s bait shop tomorrow.”

  “I thought I was grounded.”

  “Well, mostly.”

  Chapter 31

  Nests

  The next day, after pickin’ out the smallest crickets I could find at Grandpa’s bait shop, I showed Piran my setup for Little Man.

  “They were all dead?” he asked.

  “All except for this guy.”

  “That really sucks.” He plopped down on my bed.

  “Yeah. I can’t wait until the Company is gone for good,” I said and placed a tiny cricket in the aquarium. Instinct took over, and it didn’t take long for Little Man to find it.

  “But the town needs the Company,” Piran argued.

  “It needs something,” I replied, “but not that.”

  Little Man croaked happily.

  “You should’ve seen those scabs the other day,” I said. “They looked mean.”

  “You’ll have a cool scar from the rock they threw at you,” Piran replied. His version of the story was already growin’. I grimaced and didn’t bother correcting him.

  “Dad hit the roof when he heard about Eli crossing the picket line,” Piran said. “I can’t imagine what he’d do if he knew about the pot.”

  “What about Hannah?”

  “She sucked up to my parents and moved back in. We’ll have another baby in the house soon. Can you believe it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you heard from your dad?” Piran asked.

  “He called last night, but it’s long distance, so I didn’t get to talk to him.”

  “Well, when are they comin’ home?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Supposedly, there’s a whole bunch of people waiting to talk to the supervisor.”

  Just then, the phone rang in the kitchen. Piran and I jumped. I ran down the hall. As I came around the corner, Mom was walking toward me with a huge smile spreading across her face. “Jack, your dad’s coming home this afternoon.”

  “Any news?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t say,” she replied, but she didn’t stop smiling.

  She grabbed her purse, riffled through it, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Here.” She handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you and Piran go see a movie,” Mom said and looked at the clock. “There should be one starting in about forty minutes.”

  Piran and I exchanged a strange look. “Really? But what about Dad comin’ home?”

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be here when you get back. Now go on, you two. Shoo.” She practically pushed us out the door. “Go have fun.”

  “Ever feel like you’re not wanted?” Piran said as we crossed the yard.

  “Yeah.” I laughed. “Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.” Still, I wasn’t going to complain. My parents hadn’t given me money for the movies in ages.

  Some of the other miners’ kids were already at the theater when we got there. Weird, I thought. They all oohed over the bandage on my forehead after Piran told them the story of the picket line—extremely exaggerated, of course.

  Since most of the kids were still in middle school and Piran and I were gonna be in high school soon, we took charge. We handled everybody’s ticket purchases and then bought ourselves an enormous bucket of popcorn. I inhaled the hot butter and salt as we entered the dark theater. I didn’t even care what movie we were going to see. I was just glad to be there.

  I’d eaten about half our bucket when Piran started the popcorn fight. Mr. Mabely tried to get us to settle down. “You kids hush up or I’ll kick you out!” But I saw a smile sneak across his face as he turned to leave.

  We drank our Cherry Cokes too fast and had a burping contest. Piran won by a mile.

  We missed most of the movie, sure, but we had a great time.

  It was late afternoon when we left the theater. I checked the lamppost for the sparrow, but it wasn’t there.

  All the way home I tried to brace myself for whatever news my dad might have. Did he get a job? Will we have to move?

  I ran into the house, slamming the screen door. “Dad!” I yelled, but it was dark and quiet, except for Bill Monroe’s “In the Pines” driftin’ from the kitchen radio. I hummed along with the chorus: “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines.”

  Nothin’ like that here, I thought. Not yet anyhow.

  I walked down the hallway looking for my parents. Dust motes drifted through the setting sun as it filtered through the windows. “Mom? Dad?”

  Still no answer.

  I went out back and finally found my parents smooching between sheets drying on the clothesline.

  “Ew!”

  Mom reached out and held my hand. “Jack, your dad got a job.” She beamed.

  I held my breath. “Do we have to move?” I asked.

  “It’s a long way to go every day,” Dad said, “but the men and I will take turns drivin’. We can do it.”

  I smiled so big, I thought my face would break in two.

  Just then, sunlight flickered across my eyes. There was the sparrow again, perched on the laundry pole with a twig in its beak.

  “What do you know,” Dad said.

  I blinked at the setting sun that framed the bird from behind and watched as it flew from the pole to my dogwood tree, where it wove the twig into its brand-new nest.

  “Maybe we could pick up a bird feeder at the Piggly Wiggly next time we go,” Mom said.

  “You’ll need birdseed too,” Dad replied.

  I nodded and smiled even bigger, if that was possible.

  While Mom made supper, Dad and I sat on the porch swing and stared at the Company. Its familiar silhouette was already startin’ to change. Some of the pipes stretched out and met nothing but air, and a few of the holding tanks were already gone. Parts were leaving by train and truck, never to return. I was thrilled it was coming down.

  “There was an article in the paper about what Tom Hill said—that they’re moving the whole thing down to South America. No unions down there. I imagine it’ll be much like it used to be here,” Dad said. “They’ll have to fight for fair treatment, just like we did.”

  “It’s not right.” I frowned and thought about what Grandpa had said: Life is like that sometimes.

  The red-and-white-striped smokestack still stood. I wondered if they’d leave it as some kind of memorial.

  “I suppose the mining days in Coppertown are officially over,” Dad said.

  I took a deep breath. It was time to tell him. “Dad, I know you wanted me to, and it was the family tradition and all, but… But I never wanted to be a miner,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I shut my lips tight and waited.

  He looked at me long and hard. “What do you want to be, then?”

  “A forest ranger,” I said. “I want to bring the trees back to Coppertown.”

  “A forest ranger, huh?” He sat staring straight ahead for the longest time. “Seems like you’d need to go to college for somethin’ like that.”

  “I suppose so,” I muttered.

  “You’d have to get scholarships and work your way through. I couldn’t afford to send you,” he said. “But you’d be the first one in this family to get past high school. You want it bad enough?”

  I gulped and smiled. “Yup. I want it bad enough.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. “I think you’d be real good at that, Jack.”

  I felt fifty poun
ds lighter.

  The miners picked Dad up early the next morning to go work at the new carpet mill.

  Mom and I stood in the yard to send him off right. Just before he left, Dad pressed the fairy cross into my hand.

  “It brought me luck, Jack,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Chapter 32

  Trees

  Piran was happy to hear the news too. “I guess I won’t be the last kid in Coppertown after all.” He smiled and punched my arm.

  We fished all morning, but my mind was someplace else. I was so happy, I was flying, just like that sparrow. We didn’t have to move. We weren’t going anywhere, but the Company was. With it gone, nature actually stood a chance. The trees could come back, but they needed help. I thought about my garden and wondered how hard it would be to plant a garden the size of Coppertown.

  “We gotta go to the post office this afternoon,” Piran said. “My dad’s gettin’ a big shipment of baby chickens in. The Miller family is gonna start farming. Can you believe it?”

  “That’ll be somethin’ to see,” I replied.

  When we got there, people were walkin’ out with wide smiles. The second we opened the door, we understood why. The sound of squawks and peeps was deafening.

  “What a madhouse!” Mr. Quinn said and threw up his hands. “It’s impossible to get any work done today.”

  Behind him sat stacks and stacks of short boxes. Little beaks and furry yellow wings poked out of the holes that lined the sides. The containers shook from the baby chickens shuffling around inside. Piran and I stretched over the counter as far as possible to get a better look.

  As I reached, I accidentally knocked a stack of flyers off the counter, sending them fluttering to the ground.

  “Oops, sorry, Mr. Quinn.” I knelt down to gather the mess. That’s when I noticed what was printed at the top of each paper in bold black letters:

  TREE PLANTERS WANTED

  for CERP

  (Coppertown Environmental Reclamation Project)

  Pay: 10¢ per seedling planted

  Call…

  I stopped breathing and my eyes watered. “No way,” I whispered. I could barely speak. “Mr. Quinn, are these for everybody?” I asked as I returned the untidy stack to the counter. I tried to straighten it, but I was so excited that my hands were shaking.

  “Sure, Jack,” he replied. “A man from some environmental agency dropped them off this morning.”

  “Piran, I gotta go,” I said.

  “What the…?”

  “I’ll talk to you later!” I called out as I grabbed a flyer from the top of the stack and ran out the door. I whooped and hollered and waved that flyer above my head like a victory flag all the way home.

  Author’s Note

  While A Bird on Water Street is fiction, Jack’s story weaves through a real time and place in American history. Coppertown is based on the real town of Copperhill, Tennessee, located in what’s called the Copper Basin, where Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina meet at the southern gateway to the Appalachian Mountains.

  Copper was discovered in the area in 1843, not long after the Cherokee and other Native Americans were forced to walk the Trail of Tears. Tin miners were brought in from Cornwall, England, as well as other countries, to apply their expertise to copper mining, which ran almost continuously until 1986.

  Life was crazier than the Wild West in those days. The remote area was cut off from most of civilization by rocky terrain and terrible roads. Before the railroad, wagons (pulled by teams of donkeys or oxen) typically took weeks to haul supplies and copper in and out of the mountains. Therefore, miners turned to the locally available fuel to keep the smelters running—wood.

  By the 1870s, more than fifty square miles of land had been stripped completely bare of trees. Toxic fumes of sulfur dioxide expelled from heaps of roasting ore created acid rain, which killed off everything else. The area remained devoid of vegetation for more than a hundred years. While some reclamation efforts began as early as 1929, most of the land was not successfully reclaimed until 1981. In the 1800s, the long-term effects of mining on the environment were considered acceptable.

  Sometimes that collateral damage included loss of life. But mining was lucrative, as, over time, Americans grew to rely on the products made from the mined materials—electrical wiring, roof shingles, pool cleaners, detergent, fertilizer, and even toothpaste.

  I have long been drawn to the Appalachian Mountains: as a child visiting my grandparents in Lexington, Virginia; at camp in Mentone, Alabama; as an instructor at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Murphy, North Carolina; and as a Professor at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. I can’t stay away. So, it was a dream come true when my husband and I moved to a cabin in the North Georgia mountains in 2001.

  We landed just south of Copperhill where I stood many times with a foot on each side of the state line in the IGA Grocery Store parking lot. Ironically, I’d driven through the area many times over the years while on the way to go camping. Back then, the devastation to the land was still visible. As we drove by, we’d wave our support to striking miners who sat in front of what we called ‘the rape of the land’—miles of bare soil and no other living things.

  Living in the Copper Basin, there was no avoiding the complicated history and the impact the mining had on the community. One night we were invited to a town hall meeting where they were discussing the possibility of opening a new scenic railway that would run north from the town, around an unusual corkscrew track, and then return to Copperhill. (One already existed going south of town to Blue Ridge, and it was a successful tourist attraction.) To fund the endeavor, the plant wanted to send out one shipment of sulfuric acid a week. It meant jobs, but it also meant a return of the toxins that had taken such a toll on the citizens.

  Former miners stood like gnarled oak trees in their plaid flannel shirts and denim overalls and shared horrendous stories of entire crews that died from cancers believed to be caused by the mines. They threatened to sabotage the tracks if plans moved forward. I couldn’t believe what I’d stumbled into.

  The story grabbed hold of me that night and demanded to be written—by me. But I wasn’t a local, I wasn’t a miner. I had to tread carefully on what was obviously hallowed ground. I immersed myself in uncomfortable research and learned the details of 150 years of mining history. A lot of it was ugly and disturbing, but I needed to know it to tell the story.

  I also did countless interviews. At first, people were wary of my inquiries, but when Grace Postelle and Doris Abernathy became my friends, they opened doors for me. Grace and Doris were eighty-year-old sisters who grew up in Copperhill, and they were somewhat legendary. It was Grace who told me the original story of Helen McKay who saw a bird on Water Street in the 1920s, inspiring the book’s title. And it was Doris who saw the story through to completion with so many of her own stories woven throughout.

  As people shared their history, I learned to keep an open mind. For some, the red-and-white-striped smokestack was a beloved symbol of the town. Others loved their “red hills”—imagine growing up in a place with no bugs, no snakes, no poison ivy, and no allergies! And yet, the acid rain stung and the air often smelled like rotten eggs. The wind was too corrosive for tin roofs (everybody had asphalt shingles) and, I was told, could eat up a pair of nylon stockings hanging on a clothesline in a matter of minutes.

  The entire town’s economy relied upon the Company—from the housing, to the grocery store, to the schools. Mining was considered good work with high pay and benefits, but it was dangerous work. The miners had to fight for unions, which helped improve health and safety standards for the workers. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowed for some exposure to toxins to be legal, and they often received reports that regulations were not being followed.

  Cancer was rampant. I was told a story about three men from the same mining cr
ew who all died from pancreatic cancer in the same year. While the connection between mining and poor health was never technically proven, it seemed too obvious to be coincidence.

  Life in the Copper Basin was challenging to both the land and the people. I wondered how I could take all that good and bad and wrap it into a story that people would want to read. I decided to compress the story into one year, as historical fiction told through the eyes of an innocent—thirteen-year-old Jack Hicks. Just as Jack questions his world, I hope you, as the reader, experience his confusion and wonder alongside him. It was through Jack that I was able to relay the extensive damage, and the strong and unified community that lived through it. Jack became the voice of everyman.

  The closing of the Company occurs quickly in A Bird on Water Street, but in reality, the closing of the mine took over a decade. In 1985, the Company announced copper mining would be phased out, and thousands of men were laid off over the following years. Mining operations halted completely in 1987 even though sulfuric acid production continued well into the 1990s. Some laid-off workers ended up striking for as long as ten years.

  Copperhill did experience a small boon during the 1996 Summer Olympics when the white-water competitions were held downstream on the Ocoee (Tohachee) River. It was a shining moment for the residents and changed the focus of the town, which now relies on tourist dollars to survive. Visitors enjoy the old scenic railway that runs south to Blue Ridge, the vacation log cabins, and what is now a beautiful vista.

  Eventually, the sulfuric acid plant was sold to a company in Brazil. Out-of-town contractors were brought in to start tearing the plant down just before my husband and I moved away in 2005. It seemed yet another slight against the local people who could have used the work.

  Although reclamation efforts began as early as the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal plan and the Civilian Conservation Corps (the CCC), they simply didn’t have an impact until the early 1990s when sulfuric acid production was finally halted. By the time my husband and I moved to the region in 2001, most of the area had been reforested, although signs of the previous damage were still visible in some places, especially around the tailings ponds.