Sporty Creek

by James Still

  Winter came before I could go to the Hack. Snow fell late in November and scarcely left the ground for two months. The cockfights were halted until spring. I recollect the living river of wind pouring into the hollow. For folk beyond the camps, it was a lean time, but the Low Glory miners fared well. The three rows of empty houses were reoccupied, and four of the seven which had burned were rebuilt. A doctor set up practice one day a week in a room adjoining the commissary.

  I recall the warm coats, the woolen gloves, the high-top boots on men other than Pap. Pap bought the both of us cheap shoes from a pack peddler. I remember the full pokes of victuals going into houses, the smell of ham and sausage frying. Children wore Sunday clothes to school, and Mama Bear wore better to match them. Youngsters bought spin tops and pretties at the commissary. Even boys’ pockets clinked money.

  Only Tavis Mott and I had to wind our own balls from worn knitted stockings and whittle our tops. I hoarded the nickels Mother gave me, telling Tavis I might buy a shirt when enough had been saved. Tavis never had a penny. He spoke bitterly of it. “My paw wouldn’t fetch the turpentine if I was snake bit.”

  Mother spent little. We hardly dared complain, having more than we had ever known. Once, in January, Pap tried to calculate the amount of money Mother had stored in the draw sack. He marked with a stub of pencil. “My wages have been upped three times,” he said hopefully, “though I can’t calculate how much.” Pap couldn’t much more than count his fingers, although he wouldn’t have admitted it.

  “I’ve no idea of the total myself,” Mother said. “I opened two pay packets, and we’re living out of it. The rest I’ve kept sealed.”

  Pap asked, “How’s a person to know when enough has been gathered? The men on my shift are beginning to claim the buffalo bellows when I spend a nickel.”

  “If you want something bad enough, you’ll give up for it,” Mother said. “You’ll sacrifice. The coal famine is bound to end someday. Come that time, it’s back to Sporty Creek for us, and in good financial shape.”

  Pap began to wheedle. “What say we count the greenbacks? Curiosity is eating me raw.”

  “Now, no. It would be a temptation to spend.”

  The baby sat up, threshing the air, puckering his lips. We looked, and he had bitten the rubber tip off the pencil.

  “Hain’t he old enough to say words?”

  “What he’s old enough for is to have a name,” reminded Mother. “Past due.”

  Pap said, “I’m still thinking on it.” He stuck a finger in the baby’s mouth and retrieved the rubber tip. He plucked its chin. “By golly, if he’d just speak one word I might name him Noah—Noah Webster.”

  The baby lifted his arms, mouth wide, neck stretched. He crowed.

  “There’s your rooster.” Pap chuckled, setting his eyes on me.

  “I aim to own a real gamer,” I said, irked by Pap’s teasing. “I aim to.”

  “This zero weather is a good thing in one particular,” Pap drawled. “It has driven the poker players and the chicken gamblers indoors. But they’ll be at it again come April. Hit’s high-low-jack and the fools lose every button cent.”

  “I call the boom a gamble,” Mother said. “It’s bound to be over eventually. We’ve had them before.”

  I told Tavis of Mother’s prophecy as we sat by a fire on the creek bank. We were fishing through holes in the ice.

  “I’m in be-hopes the boom lasts until I git me a glass eye,” he said. “My heart is set on it. I’d better have me a batch of garden seeds ordered and start selling.”

  “You couldn’t stick a pickax in the ground it’s so froze,” I told him. “Folks won’t buy seeds in winter.”

  Tavis rubbed his hands over the blaze. His breath steamed. “Winter hain’t going to last forever either,” he said.

  I recollect thinking the long cold spell might actually be eternal. January dawdled. February crawled. March warmed a bit, and at last the ground thawed.

  Tavis got his seeds, though when he should have been peddling them, he would climb the ridge to the Hack. When a rooster was slain, they would often give him the dead fowl. Pap forbade my going along, but next to seeing was Tavis’s telling. I came to know the names of the bravest cocks. I knew their markings and the style they fought.

  Tavis whistled for me on a Saturday evening at the edge of dark. I heard and went outside. He stood beyond the fence with a flour poke bundled in his arms. He seemed fearful and anxious, yet proud. His lone blue eye was wide. Packets of seeds rattled in his pockets.

  “How much money have you saved?” he inquired. “How much?” His voice was a husky whisper.

  I guessed what the bundle held, scarcely daring to believe. I grew feverish with wonder.

  “Eleven nickels,” I said. “I couldn’t save all.”

  The flour sack moved. Something threshed inside. It was a fowl beating its wings.

  “I’m of a mind to sell you half ownership in my rooster,” he said. “I will for your eleven nickels and if you’ll keep him till I find him a hiding place. My pap would wring its neck did I take him home.”

  I touched the bundle. My hand trembled. “I’ve been saving to buy me a shirt,” I said. “A boughten shirt.”

  “You couldn’t save enough by Kingdom Come.* Fork over your eleven nickels, and we’ll go halvers.”

  I brought my tobacco sack bank and Pap’s mine lamp. We stole under my home and penned the rooster in a hen coop. Pap’s voice droned above in the kitchen. Tavis lit the lamp to count the money. The rooster stood blinking, red-eyed, alert. His shoulders were white, reddening at the wing bows. Blood beads tipped the hackle feathers. His spurs were trimmed to fit gaffs.† It was Cleve Harben’s Red Pyle.

  “How’d you come by him?” I questioned.

  “He fought Ebo, the black Cuban, and got stumped. He keeled down. There was a slash on his throat, and you’d a-thought him dead. Cleve gave him to me, and before I reached here, he come alive. The cut was just a scratch.”

  We crawled from beneath the house. Tavis quenched the light. “Don’t breathe hit to a soul,” he warned. “Cleve would try to git him back, and my pap would throw duck fits. Bring him to the schoolhouse at two o’clock tomorrow.”

  He moved toward the gate, my nickels in his pocket. I went into the house and sat quietly behind the stove, feeling lost without my money, though happy about the rooster.

  Pap spoke, trotting the baby on a foot. “With warm weather here seems to me the Low Glory operators ought to pare down on production. Yet they’ve hired four extra miners this week, fellows from away yonder.”

  “I know a boy from Alabama,” Dan said. “I bet hit’s yon side the waters.”

  “It’s United States, America,” Holly said. Holly knew everything.

  “Sim Brannon believes something will bust before long,” Pap went on. “A mine boss might know something we don’t. Says it’s liable to come sudden. I’m in hopes it won’t be like the last time.”

  Pap reached the baby to Mother. “I’m going to bed early.” He yawned. “Last night I never got sixty winks of sleep. Every tomcat in the camp was trying to outmiaow each other on the back porch.”

  “The fish draws cats. You keep buying kits of them.”

  I waited at the schoolhouse gate, holding the rooster by the shanks. He snuggled against my jacket, pecking at the buttons. He stuck his head up my sleeve to see what was there. After a spell Tavis came, his eye patch trembling and the garden seed in his pocket as noisy as crickets.

  “Why didn’t you keep him covered?” he asked crossly. “He might be seen.”

  “He flopped the flour poke off,” I said. “Anyhow, he’s been discovered already. Crowed this morning before daylight and woke up my pap. If I hadn’t cried like gall, he’d of been killed. Now it’s your turn to keep.”

  Tavis bit a chew of tobacco. He spat into the road and looked up and down. “If I took him to my house, he’d be in the skillet by suppertime.” He closed his eye to think, and there was only
the black patch staring. “Reckon we’ll have to sell him,” he said presently. “I figure Cleve Harben will buy him back. He’s yon side of the commissary, playing draughts.* Are you of a notion?”

  The cock lifted his head, poising it left and right. I loosed my hold about his legs and stroked his bright saddle. He sat on my arm.

  “This chicken is a pet,” I said. “When I took him out of the coop, he jumped square onto my shoulder and crowed. I’ve taken a liking to him.”

  “I just lack selling fourteen seed packets getting my eyeball. If Cleve will buy them, I’ll let him have my part. I’ve nowhere to hide a rooster.”

  “I hain’t of a notion to sell.”

  Tavis tramped the ground where he stood.

  “You stay here until I git Cleve,” he said. He swung round. “You stay.”

  He went in haste, and suddenly a great silence fell on the camp. The coal conveyor at the mines had stopped. It was so still I could hear the per-chic-o-ree of flax-birds. I held the rooster at arm’s length, wishing him free as a bird. I half hoped he would fly away. I perched him on the fence, but he hopped to my shoulder and shook his wattles.

  Back along the road came Tavis, Cleve Harben with him. Cleve wore a shirt like striped candy, and never a man wore a finer garment.

  Tavis said, “I’ve sold my half. Now it’s you two trading.”

  Cleve said, “Name your price.”

  I gathered the fowl in my arms. “I hain’t of a mind to sell,” I said.

  We turned to stare at miners passing, going home long before the shift’s end, cap lamps burning in broad day.

  Cleve was anxious. “Why hain’t you willing?” he asked. “Name your price.”

  I dug my toes into the ground, scuffing dirt. “I love my rooster,” I said. But I studied Cleve’s shirt. It was very beautiful, and it had a right collar.

  “If you’ll sell,” Tavis promised, “I’ll let you spy into my eye pocket. Now, while you can look. Before long I’ll have a glass eyeball in.”

  I kicked a lump of slate into the road. “I’ll swap my part of the rooster for that striped shirt. It can be cut down to fit.”

  Cleve unbuttoned the shirt, slipped it off the frame of his shoulders, and handed it to me in a wad. He snatched the rooster and lit out, the miners going the road glaring at his bare back.

  Tavis brushed his cap aside and caught the eye patch between forefinger and thumb. I was suddenly afraid, suddenly feeling no desire to see.

  The patch was lifted. I looked and reeled back, squeezing the shirt into a ball. I turned and ran with the sight burning in my mind.

  I ran all the way home, going in the kitchen door as Pap went, not stopping the cat that stole in between us. Mother sat at the table, a pile of greenbacks before her, the empty pay packets crumpled.

  Sighting the money, Pap gasped, “Hell’s bangers!” and dropped heavily into a chair. He caught up the baby from the floor and straddled it on a knee. When he could speak above his wonder, he chuffed, “The boom’s busted. Everybody has been laid off. Fired. The big hawk’s done lit.”* But he laughed, and Mother smiled.

  “I’ve heard already,” Mother said. She shuffled the money bills, flicking them under her thumb like a deck of cards. “There’s enough here for a plow and wagon and a horse to pull them. Enough for boots, a boughten shirt, a factory dress, and a few pretties. Enough to tide us over until a crop and a garden can be raised.”

  The baby opened its mouth, curling its lips, pointing a stubby finger. He pointed at the old nanny sniffing the fish kit.

  “Cat,” it said, big as life.

  *gob pile: mine refuse

  *Frankfort: governor’s chair

  †gin: work as handyman

  **Irishmen: white potatoes

  ‡crown: whorl of hair

  §miner’s asthma: pneumonoconiosis—caused by inhalation of coal dust oginseng: aromatic medicinal plant

  †on his honkers: (squatting) doing nothing

  *head mark: victory

  ‡clodhoppers: cheap shoes

  *brogans: rough work shoes

  †mumbly-peg: mumble-the-peg—game played with pocket-knives

  *checkweighman: miner’s agent to assure honest weights

  *’F’ad die : If I had to die

  *Kingdom Come: end of time

  †gaff: metal spur

  *draughts: game of checkers

  *big hawk’s done lit: it’s over

  4

  the moving

  The mines shut down. The operators pulled out the machinery and dismantled the tipple. Thieves stripped the copper wiring. The iron rails threading the tunnels to the coal face were removed, and all else which could be taken apart or pried loose. The scrap metal was salvaged: rusted piles of spikes, augers, discarded mine car wheels, tangles of cable. Low Glory was picked clean. Even the road into the Houndshell hollow vanished. A spring tide turned it into a gully.

  Families with a place to go sledded their plunder to the highway where a truck could reach it. Some went without certainty where they would wind up, Hebron Dunford exhorting them to remain and tough it out, recalling that Low Glory had a history of resurrections. A childless man and wife walked away, leaving their household goods, taking with them only a budget,* and were not seen more.

  Among the first to move were some who had endured the panic years in Houndshell. Sim Brannon left, as did the men who matched game fowls in the Hack, and Tavis Mott and his glass eye. Three unoccupied houses burned. An empty dwelling had its windows shattered the moment of abandonment. The county closed the school, and the schoolhouse burned the next night. The law arrived, pondered, and departed. No longer did the doctor appear on his appointed Thursdays.

  Carpenters tore down four houses and stacked the lumber against the day the road might be repaired. Word flew the whole camp was under the crowbar* and thenceforth moving was accounted desertion. An occupied house would not be touched. Several families set forth at night to avoid sullen onlookers and Hebron Dunford’s sermon. The operators’ watchdog† hung out in the empty commissary and did not show his face save to accept house keys of departers through a grating.

  We stayed on for six weeks. Pap played for time on the off chance Cass Logan might beckon him and we could move to Plank Town instead of Sporty. “Someday when I get my ducks in a row,” Pap promised, “we’ll settle at the Old Place for all hereafter. Ay, not just now.” Yet a quick trip by Pap to see Cass proved there was nothing else to do but to turn farmer forthwith.

  In my mind’s eye I was already swinging the rafters of the water mill on the stream below our house. Many a secret and dark corner the mill had for hiding and imaginings. Built before the Silver War** for grinding wheat, it had fallen into neglect. Nobody raised wheat anymore. The grindrock was in place, but who knew how to sharpen the burrs? A lost skill.

  Pap bought a wagon and a hillsider† in Thacker, a plow horse and a rig at a stock sale in Letcher County, and a milk cow from Crate Thompson. Crate was a penhooker** who had driven herds past Old Place in other years. Pap purchased the cow naked,‡ and Mother chided him for not also buying a heifer to come fresh when the animal went dry. As for the horse, Pap said there might be a colt coming along some fine pretty day, and it would be mine.

  There happened no high-top boots for Pap, no better shoes for me. The pretties were passed over. As Houndshell had gone from ease to poverty within the batting of an eye, my shirt with candy stripes was too loud for the times.

  The day came when the wagon was loaded with our plunder,* and there only remained the nailing down of the doors and windows and delivery of the key to the watchdog. Pap had spent two days patching the road out of the hollow, with no offers of help. Only Sula Basham had been told where we were headed. Holly and I would take turns driving the cow, and she was bound to be first. Holly’s nature.

  Holly started, the cow on a leash, Dan at her heels. The nanny cat followed, of her own free will. Nobody in their senses would move a cat.

&n
bsp; Mother and I stood by the wagon while Pap hammered on the windowframes and spat into the keyholes to make the locks turn. He did what he believed was his duty, useless as he knew it to be. The baby nestled in a wad of quilts in the wagon bed. We waited, restless as the harnessed mare, anxious to hasten beyond staring eyes. Idle miners stood in the yard and scowled; boys tramped the black dust before our gate.

  The boys kept glancing at the windows, pockets bulging with rocks. I knew them all, although they had not been playfellows. Five sat in the schoolroom with me under Mama Bear. Two I had known from early days in the camp. I looked into their faces and they were as strangers. Rejection swelled in me like a gorge, for only Tood Magoffin, the man with a child’s mind, was heavyhearted at my going. One boy leaned and jerked loose the strings of Tood’s shoes.

  Though women regarded us from their porches, only Sula Basham came to say a good-bye to Mother. She came walking, tall as a butterweed, her gold locket swinging from her neck like a clock weight. She was higher than anybody.

  Sula towered over Mother, and the locket dropped like a plumb to the end of its chain. Mother, barely five and a half feet, tilted her head and gazed upon the locket. Never had she owned a grain of gold, neither broach nor ring nor pin. Cutting scornful eyes at the men, Sula declared loudly to Mother, “You’re in luck to have a husband not satisfied to rot in Houndshell, a man who’ll knuckle to facts.”

  The men stirred. Hebron Dunford raised his arms, spreading them as might a preacher. “These people are moving to nowhere,” he said. “Why make gypsies of a family? I say as long as folks have a roof overhead, let them roost beneath it. Stay put until things rally.”

  Men grunted in agreement, and the boys lifted their rock-heavy pockets and sidled toward the wagon. The boys placed hands on the wagon wheels. They fingered the mare’s harness. They hoisted the lid of the toolbox to see what was in it. Fonzo Asher crawled under the wagon, rear axle to front axle, and I watched out of the tail of my eye, thinking a caper might be pulled.