by Homer Hickam
“I’ve missed your stories, sir.”
O’Dell told him what we needed. “Love to help ya, I really would,” he said, “but I don’t have enough for my roof as it is.”
I looked up. “But your roof is shingled.”
He nodded. “If I had shingles, I’d use ’em. But I don’t. I’ve got tin.”
“Emmett Jones has a bunch of shingles stacked up next to his coal box,” O’Dell said. “Almost the same color.”
“Do tell,” Little Richard said, suddenly interested. “I reckon I’d be up for a swap if you could manage it.”
We were starting to figure out how to trade, Coalwood-style. We found Mrs. Jones pushing a lawn mower. “Emmett’s at work,” she said, eyeing the garbage truck, “but if you’ll bring me a load of good plantin’ dirt, those old shingles are yours.”
The best “plantin’ ” dirt was down at Big Branch. We went by O’Dell’s house, picked up two shovels and a pick, and kept going down past Cape Coalwood to where the road turned back up into the mountains. Beside a mountain stream, O’Dell and I worked at a clear place, picking and shoveling rich, black West Virginia loam into the truck. We were covered with dirt and sweat by the time we finished. Mrs. Jones was thrilled when we arrived with our load of dirt. “Oh, my flowers are going to be glorious!” she said as if she could see them already.
Just as the sun dropped below the western ridges, O’Dell dropped off our tin at the Cape beside the lumber and the nails. The next morning Quentin hitched over the mountains in time for breakfast. Mom made him eat an extra stack of pancakes. When he was done, he was so stuffed he could hardly walk. I raided the basement for hammers and saws and threw them in the back of Roy Lee’s wreck of a car. We picked up Sherman and O’Dell on the way.
O’Dell had drawn up a plan for our blockhouse on a scrap of notebook paper. “I’m not the carpenter or the carpenter’s son,” he chanted as we sawed and drove nails, “but I’ll do the carpentryin’ until the carpenter comes.”
The sun beat down on us, the slack yard a caldron of focused heat. To keep our morale up, we sang with discordant enthusiasm. We went through the parts we could remember of “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” “The Great Pretender,” “Blueberry Hill,” and “That’ll Be the Day.” If we didn’t know all the words, we just repeated the ones we knew over and over again. Roy Lee had a good voice. With a sly eye in my direction, he gave us a solo rendition of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” with modified lyrics:
“Dream, dream, dream,
all Sonny does is dream, dream, dream.
When he wants Dorothy in his arms,
when he wants her and all her charms,
whenever he wants Dorothy,
all he does is dream …
Only trouble is, gee whiz,
he’s dreaming his life away …”
I laughed off Roy Lee’s song, but it stung just the same.
When we got too hot, we went to the muddy little creek that ran behind the slack dump and sat down on the rocks and let the cool water run over our feet. Quentin, so hot he was feeling dizzy, stretched out in the creek, and we left him and went back to work. “We’ve got to have a launchpad too,” O’Dell told us.
“Anybody here ever pour concrete?” I asked the group.
“I’m not the concrete pourer or the concrete pourer’s son …” came back the cheerful chorus of replies as Quentin, staggering a little, wandered up from the creek to join us, complaining that a crawl-dad had bitten him. I declared the day’s work at an end. We were all pretty exhausted.
When Mom saw Quentin, she admonished me for being heartless and cruel to the poor boy. She made him drink enough water to sink the battleship Missouri, fed him corn bread and beans, and then sent him to sleep in my bed. I got some spare blankets out of the hall closet and bedded down on the living-room couch for the night. Dad came in late and found me there. He switched on a lamp. “Heard you’ve been raiding my shops,” he said.
I peeked above the blankets. “You said I could have scrap.”
“I guess I did,” he acknowledged absently, and then seemed to take note of where I was. “Why are you sleeping on the couch?”
“We spent all day building our blockhouse, and Mom said Quentin was too tired to go home. He’s sleeping in my bed.”
“You’ve already got your blockhouse built?”
“About halfway. You want to come see it?”
He yawned. “Just remember your promise. No sight or sound of any rockets in Coalwood.”
“Yessir,” I replied glumly. If Jim was a member of the BCMA, I thought, Dad would have been down there nailing boards with the rest of us.
“I saw Ike at the face today,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “He said something about teaching you to work around a machine shop. I said okay, as long as it was on his own time and no company materials.”
Mr. Bykovski had remembered! I grinned at Dad. “Thank you, sir!”
My enthusiasm took him off guard. “Don’t get out of control now,” he said.
“No, sir, I won’t.”
“No company supplies,” he reiterated. “You understand? You can use the machines, but you’ve got to buy your own aluminum and steel.”
“I’ve still got money from my newspaper route,” I said. I was still grinning.
Dad looked at me with some confusion, almost as if he had never really looked at me before. “Good night, little man,” he said finally, switching off the lamp.
“Good night, sir,” I replied happily.
I cuddled back under my blankets and listened as he tiptoed up the steps. The living room was underneath my mother’s bedroom. I heard the boards creaking beneath her feet as she crossed the room to her door as Dad crept down the hall. There were a few moments of silence, and then I heard her walk back to her bed and the sound of her mattress taking her weight. I heard Dad’s bedroom door close. I guess I was starting to grow up, because for the first time I understood at least a little about the loneliness and frustration that often seemed to fill our house.
9
JAKE MOSBY
Auks V-VIII
EVERY YEAR, THE Ohio mill chose some of its young engineers and sent them down to Coalwood to a kind of coal-mining boot camp my father ran. The first thing Dad did with a junior engineer, as they were called, was to take him inside the mine and tramp him around for miles. The average height of the mine roof was five feet. To walk under it required a bent-over, head-up, forward-lunge kind of posture. The miners could always tell when Dad had one of his youngsters in tow, because they could hear them coming, Dad giving his running commentary on how the mine worked and the junior engineer’s helmet bap-bapping off the roof. After a couple of days of Dad’s torture, more than a few of them packed their bags and headed back to Ohio. One of them who stuck it out was Jake Mosby. Jake was to become important to the BCMA.
I first met Jake when I was in the ninth grade. Some of my newspaper customers lived at the Club House, the neo-Georgian mansion that sat on a small mount across from the Big Store. The Club House had been built for Mr. Carter’s son after he returned from World War I. A housing shortage during a mine expansion in the 1920’s had caused it to be converted into a boardinghouse. Since then, it had been gradually expanded until it had dozens of rooms for single miners or transient families.
Mrs. Davenport, the Club House manager, told me to go on up to Mr. Mosby’s room. He had been there for a week, she said, so she guessed he was going to be around long enough to take the paper. I found Jake sprawled on his face in front of the door to his room. He wore the typical junior engineer’s uniform: a canvas shirt with baggy khaki pants tucked into brown leather miner’s boots. A foot away from one of his outstretched hands was an empty fruit jar. One sniff and I knew it had contained some of John Eye Blevins’s moonshine. John Eye had lost a foot in the mine, and the company looked the other way when he supplemented his tiny pension dealing out fruit jars filled with the clear, fiery liquid. I placed
an extra newspaper by the jar and started to leave, but Jake stirred. “Who are ya?” he demanded, his eyes still closed.
“Newspaper boy, sir,” I answered. “Would you like to subscribe?”
Jake rolled over and sat up and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He pushed the newspaper away and went for the jar, then threw it aside when he saw it was empty. “Dammitto-Christhell.” He blinked at me and ran a hand through his sandy hair. “What time is it?”
“About ten after six, sir.”
“A.M. or P.M.?”
John Eye’s stuff had really done its work on this one, I thought. “It’s morning.”
He cursed again and tried to rise, managing only to get to his knees before dropping like a sack of potatoes. He curled up and held his stomach. “I’m dyin’,” he announced with a groan that trailed off into a deep sigh.
“You want me to get Doc?” I asked.
He held up his hand and limply beckoned me closer. “No doctor. What’s your name, boy? I’d like to know who I’m with when I go to the angels.”
I told him and then shook his damp hand when he stretched it out to me. When he let go, I wiped my hand on the back of my jeans.
“No kin to Homer Hickam, are you?”
I told him.
“Your dad …” he began, “your dad …” He searched his scorched brain for just the right words and rolled over on his back and flopped an arm across his eyes. “Your dad …”
“I’ve heard my dad’s a sonuvabitch when it comes to you Ohio junior engineers,” I finished for him, as dryly as my age and the hour allowed.
Mosby laughed. “Oh, oh, that hurts.” He raised his head, only one eye open. “You’re right, Sonny. He is one mean SOB.”
“Welcome to Coalwood,” I said. “Want to take the Telegraph?”
He didn’t, said he couldn’t afford it, and I took the complimentary copy with me. I mentioned him to Mom afterward. She laughed. “You want to know something else about your Jake Mosby? His daddy owns about twenty percent of the steel mill that owns us. He’s got more money than Carter’s got little liver pills.”
I next saw Jake at the company Christmas party at the Club House. It was the first time I’d actually seen him standing. He was leaning on the mantel of the fireplace in the big hall on the first floor, a drink in his hand, talking to Mr. Van Dyke’s new secretary, a pretty, pert blonde imported all the way from New York City. Mosby was dressed splendidly, in a tuxedo, the first one I had ever seen. He was tall—loose-limbed, as my mother would say. She and some other ladies were in a corner, eyeing him. “He looks just like Henry Fonda,” I heard one of them say. The secretary was also part of the ladies’ conversation. “Have you heard that accent?” one of them tittered. “Nyah, nyah, nyah. How do they understand each other up there in the north?”
Later that night, Jake enticed the secretary outside for a ride in his Corvette. Even over the loud, discordant music being performed by Cecil Sutter and the Miners, I heard her delighted shrieks as he spun the car around on the ice-coated road that ran down beside the church. By the time the two of them made it back to the Club House, they were, as my mother sniffed, “drunk as Cooter Brown.” Jake and the secretary proceeded to the dance floor and did a dirty dance, people falling back from the pair in shocked silence. The band wound down and the accordion player’s mouth fell open when Jake wiggled down behind the secretary, coming close to smooching her behind right there in front of God and everybody. He stood up. “Why’d you stop the music?” he slurred. He leaned on the table loaded with desserts, but it collapsed and he fell with it, everything sliding down on top of him. He lay there, his face covered with a stupid smile and red and green cake icing, until my dad ordered him dragged out by his legs. He was left semiconscious on the porch steps, the new snow covering him, until I convinced Jim to help me get him upstairs to his room. Mr. Van Dyke’s imported secretary left town the day after New Year’s. Jake stayed on because, as Dad explained to Mom, Mr. Van Dyke thought he “had promise.”
“Well, of course, Homer,” Mom replied, not entirely successful at stifling a laugh. “I’m sure it couldn’t have anything to do with who Jake’s daddy is, now, could it?”
Jake was a hiker, and since I knew every nook and cranny in the surrounding mountains, he occasionally called me up and paid me to guide him and whatever girlfriend he had at the time. Jake had been a fighter pilot in Korea and had been all over the Orient. “Oh, man, we blazed through the wild blue yonder over there,” he told me one time up in the woods while his girl was behind a bush watering the daisies. “Almost got me a MiG. Missed the sonuvabitch by that much. I don’t know how many whores back in town it took for me to get over that.”
I was more impressed by the reference to women than his nearly bagging the MiG. “How many women have you been with, Jake?” I asked him.
He howled with laughter. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me.”
I held my fingers to make a zero.
“Well, gawdalmighty, Sonny,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought the definition of a West Virginia virgin was one who could outrun her brother. What’s your problem?”
“It’s ’cause he’s a little gentleman, Jake,” his girl called out from behind the bush. “Unlike you, I might add.”
“Wisdom from the outdoor toilet,” Jake laughed, rolling his eyes.
I envied Jake and his ease with women and wondered if I would ever learn to be the same. I sincerely had my doubts, considering how tongue-tied I got around them sometimes. “Don’t worry about it, Sonny,” Jake said when I expressed my lack of prospects as far as women were concerned. “There are two things every woman really wants: one, she wants to know that a man really loves her, and two, that he isn’t going to stop. Unlike me, more’s the pity, you got the makings to be that kind of man. When they figure that out, the girls are going to be after you.”
For all our differences in age and outlook, Jake and I became friends. He unfailingly sought me out at the Big Store when he saw me to ask me how I was doing and, lately, what was going on with the rockets. When I told him about our progress, he flattered me by promising to come down to Cape Coalwood and have a look for himself. I hoped that he would.
THE summer of 1958 came, and with it, floating ships of clouds that lazily drifted by, docking sometimes in the afternoon to produce a shower to loosen the dust off the houses and the cars. Katydids sang their repetitive song in the evenings, and rabbits came down from the mountains to investigate the dozens of little tomato and lettuce farms along our steep hillsides, taking their chances with Daisy Mae and Lucifer. At night, as the stars unfurled, cool air cascaded off the hills into the valley. I often went out into the yard after dark and lay down on the grass and looked up into the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of a satellite going over. I didn’t see any, but I had fun looking all the same.
In May, the company announced that its big new coal-preparation plant in Caretta was complete, and all the coal from both the Coalwood and Caretta mines would henceforth be loaded into coal cars over there. It took a while before everybody realized what exactly that meant. Coalwood was in for a major change. The Coalwood tipple would no longer lift coal out of the mine, and no more trains would go chugging through town or spewing dust off the coal cars. Dad said to Mom at supper one night that even the tracks were to be taken out. This announcement was not greeted with overwhelming joy. Some Coalwoodians saw a conspiracy in the whole thing. Roy Lee said the union was afraid this was the start of the end of the Coalwood mine. If everything could be done at Caretta, who needed Coalwood?
At Cape Coalwood, we needed concrete for our launchpad. O’Dell scoured the town and came up empty. That meant I had no choice but to go ask Dad for his help.
Mr. Dabb, his clerk, said he was inside the mine, so I waited at the shaft as miners went up and down on the lifts. There were two lifts, or cages as they were sometimes called, side by side. When one went up, the other went down. The one that was up was kept a
bout six feet above ground level. That was so nobody could get on without the hoist operator knowing about it. Miners wanting to go down the shaft pushed a brass button beside the cage, which rang a bell. One ring told the operator to lower the cage into place. Two rings meant the miners were getting aboard. Three meant to “Bail ’em out,” or lower the cage.
Mr. Todd took care of the lamp house, where the batteries for the helmet lamps were charged. It was also his job to inspect each man before he got in the cage and make sure he didn’t have any matches (the Coalwood mine was notoriously gassy), had his helmet on, and was wearing hard-toe boots. While drinking a bottle of pop Mr. Todd brought me, I watched the miners go through their routine of coming and going. Each miner had two brass medals with a number stamped on it. To get a lamp, a miner presented one of his medals, which Mr. Todd hung on a board. The other medal went in the miner’s pocket. A glance at the board told my dad or anyone else who was in the mine. The medal the miners carried with them provided identification in case they were hurt or killed. It was no secret in Coalwood that injury and death was always a possibility for every man every day in the mine, no matter how hard Dad and his foremen worked to keep things safe.
When I was in grade school, every so often one of my friends would be called from class and not return, and I would learn at supper that my friend’s father had been killed in the mine. This fact was normally presented matter-of-factly by my mother. My father rarely told us any details. I’d get those later, from my friends at school. Once, when I was in the fourth grade, a little girl with golden curls named Dreema was called out of class. I never saw her again. Her dad had been beheaded by a sharp piece of slate when the tunnel he was working in collapsed. Dad came home from work that night with his hands bandaged, bloodied from removing the rock that trapped the men. He fired the foreman responsible for failing to properly support the roof of his section. After that, no one said any more about the incident. The company required the dead miner’s family to move within two weeks of the accident that killed him. Perhaps deliberately, there were almost no widows in Coalwood to remind the rest of us what could happen in the mine.