by Homer Hickam
Elsie pressed her lips together, an expression Homer knew all too well meant she was not pleased. “He would freeze in the creek during the winter,” she said. “He has to go home to Orlando.”
This was an astonishing proposal. “Orlando? Good Lord, woman! It must be eight hundred miles to Orlando!”
Elsie defiantly raised her chin. “I don’t care if it’s eight thousand.”
“And if I refuse?”
Elsie took another deep breath. “I’ll take him myself.”
Homer could almost feel the earth shifting beneath his boots. “How would you do that?”
“I don’t know but I’ll figure out a way.”
Instantly defeated, Homer asked, “Does he have to go all the way to Orlando? Could we not drop him off in one of the Carolinas? It’s warm down there, so I hear.”
“All the way,” Elsie replied. “And when we get there, we have to find the perfect place.”
“How will we know the perfect place?”
“Albert will know.”
“Albert is a reptile. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Well, at least he has an excuse for that, doesn’t he?”
“You’re saying I don’t know anything?”
“I’m saying none of us do. I’m saying everything we think is true is probably not true at all. If I said a million things and you said a million and one things back, none of our words might even come close to what the truth really is.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s the most honest answer I can give you.”
After his wife had gone back inside the house, Homer sat brooding in his junkyard chair. For one of the first times in the entire history of his life, he felt scared. A week ago, the mine roof had cracked like a rifle shot and a giant slab of rock had missed him by inches but that hadn’t scared him at all. He’d never told Elsie about that but he knew she knew. She seemed to know everything he tried to keep from her. In contrast, Homer confessed to himself he knew very little about the woman he’d married and had now put the fear of God in him with her threat to head off for Florida whether he went along or not.
There was, he realized, only one thing to do. He would seek the advice of the greatest man he knew, the incomparable William “Captain” Laird, World War I hero, graduate of the Stanford University engineering school, and lord and master of Coalwood.
And so, although he did not know it, the journey began.
2
AFTER A FULL SHIFT UNDERGROUND, HOMER SHOWERED at the company bathhouse, dressed in a fresh pair of coveralls and town boots, and asked the office clerk to see the Captain. The clerk waved him to the door and the Captain roared “Enter!” to Homer’s knock. His hat held in his hands, Homer stepped up to the Captain’s desk. The Captain, a huge man with ears like an African elephant, looked up and frowned. “What the devil is it, son?”
“It’s my wife, Captain.”
“Elsie? What’s wrong with Elsie?”
“She wants me to take her and her alligator to Orlando.”
The Captain sat back and considered Homer. “Does this have anything to do with you running around your yard without your pants?”
“Yes, sir, it does.”
The Captain cocked his head. “Okay, son, I’m always up for a good story and I sense this might be a good one.”
After taking an offered chair, Homer told the Captain about Albert chasing him outside and then what he said and what Elsie said. The Captain listened intently, his expression gradually changing from bemusement to squinty-eyed interest. When Homer was finished, the Captain said, “You know what I think this is, Homer? It’s kismet or damn close.”
Homer had heard of kismet but he wasn’t sure what it was and said so. The Captain leaned forward, his bulk looming as if to smother Homer’s doubts. “There are times that come to us to accomplish things that don’t make sense but make all the sense there is in the universe. Does that make sense?”
“No, sir.”
“Of course it doesn’t. But that’s what kismet is. It makes us careen off in odd directions from which we learn not only what life is about but what it is for. This journey may be nothing less than your chance to discover these things.”
“You’re saying I should go?”
“I am, indeed. You are hereby granted your annual two weeks’ vacation and you have my permission to draw one hundred dollars from the company to finance the trip.”
“But that’s so much money! I’ll never be able to pay it back.”
“Yes, you will. You’re the kind of man who figures out how to pay a debt and then does it. Now, let us speak of Elsie. Have you made it clear to her that she is the most important person in your life?”
“I guess not, Captain,” Homer answered, truthfully, “but she surely is.” He scratched his head. “Trouble is I don’t know if I’m the most important person in her life.”
“Well, maybe that’s another reason you’ve been given this journey, so that the two of you can figure out what kind of couple you are meant to be. When are you leaving?”
“I don’t know. Until just now, I wasn’t sure I was going.”
“Go in the morning. A thing put off is a thing not done.” The Captain’s countenance turned gloomy. “Make no mistake. I’ll miss you. You have those goons on Three West running good coal and likely they’ll fall back into bad habits with you gone.” He shrugged. “But I’ll make do. A young man on his way to adventure in tropical climes! I wish I were you.”
“I will tell you truly, Captain,” Homer answered. “I sense this journey will be one of the most painful experiences of my life.”
“It may very well be,” the Captain agreed, “and perhaps that is all the more reason you should do it. That said, in two weeks, I want to see your bright and shiny face back on Three West.”
Homer rose from the chair, thanked the Captain, received a farewell salute, and walked outside into the dusty air, oblivious to the line of evening shift men tromping past to the manlift. In the sequential manner he’d been taught by the Captain, he made some rapid decisions. Getting to Florida from West Virginia with a wife and an alligator was a daunting task. His first decision was to eliminate going by train or bus. Neither of those conveyances would likely accept an alligator as a passenger. No, to get there, they’d have to go by car. Luckily, he had a good one, a 1925 Buick four-door convertible touring car he’d recently purchased from the Captain.
Homer’s next decision led him to walk to the company store, where he procured a large washtub on credit and then went to the pay window and got one hundred dollars in the form of two fifty-dollar bills. As he walked to his house, the tub hitched up on his shoulder, he caught the attention of several ladies sitting in chairs on their porches. Their husbands were evening shift miners and so they had a little time on their hands to sit and watch anyone and everyone who might walk by. Most of them spoke to him as he passed, and one, a new wife in town, even asked him if he might stop for some iced tea. Though he politely touched his forelock to all of the ladies in a gesture of respect, he kept walking. He was a handsome young man, Homer Hadley Hickam, nearly six feet tall, his straight black hair kept slicked back with Wildroot Creme Oil. He had the broad shoulders and muscles of a coal miner, and a lopsided smile and very blue eyes that many women found interesting. But he wasn’t interested in them, not since he’d met and married Elsie Lavender.
Homer stowed the washtub in the back seat of the Buick, which was parked in front of the house, then went inside to apprise his wife of the decisions he had made. After peeking into the bedroom and not finding her, he discovered Elsie—her full married name was Elsie Gardner Lavender Hickam—sitting in the bathroom on its cracked linoleum floor. Her back was against the bathtub and she was holding her alligator, who was looking at her in rapt adoration. She was also crying.
Not counting sad movies and onions, Elsie had only seriously cried twice before, to Homer’s recollection: once when she’d agreed to marry
him, and again when she’d opened the box holding Albert and read the accompanying card from a fellow she’d known in Florida named Buddy Ebsen. In both cases, he still wasn’t sure why. Uncertain what to say to this third bout of serious tears, Homer naturally said the wrong thing. “If you’re not careful, that thing will yet bite off your arm.”
Elsie raised her face and the sight of it hurt Homer’s heart. Her usually bright hazel eyes were puffy and rimmed in pink and her high, prominent cheekbones—which she said came from the Cherokee in her blood—were wet with tears. “He will do no such thing,” she said, “because Albert loves me. Sometimes, I think he is the only one in this old world who does.”
Recalling the Captain’s recommendation, Homer said, “You are the most important person in my life.”
“No, I’m not,” she shot back. “Not even close. First is the Captain. Second is the coal mine.”
“The coal mine is not a person.”
“In your case, it might as well be.”
Homer did not want to argue, mainly because he knew he couldn’t win. Instead, he said the thing he knew would either make her very happy or call the whole thing off. “We leave for Florida in the morning,” he announced.
Elsie pushed a tear-soaked strand of hair from her cheek. “Are you joking?”
“The Captain gave me permission to go as long as I make it back in two weeks. I bought a galvanized washtub at the company store for Albert to ride in. It’s in the back seat of the Buick. I also withdrew one hundred dollars from the company.” He dug into his pocket and displayed the two fifties.
Her astonished face told Homer all that he needed to know. She believed him now. After all, a man didn’t get two fifty-dollar bills from the company if he wasn’t serious about using them. “If you still want to go, I think you should pack your things,” he said.
Elsie pondered her husband, then stood up and put Albert in the bathtub. “All right,” she said, “I will.” She brushed past him heading for the bedroom.
When he heard her open the closet door followed by the rattle of coat hangers, Homer felt a little panic crawl up his back and perch on his shoulder. When he looked at Albert, the alligator seemed to be sizing him up. “This is all your fault,” Homer said. “And, damn his hide, Buddy Ebsen’s.”
3
EVERY MORNING WHEN ELSIE BLINKED AWAKE, SHE WAS always a little surprised to find herself a coal miner’s wife. After all, to avoid that very thing, she’d caught a bus to Orlando the week after she’d graduated from high school. As soon as she stepped off the bus, she knew she’d made the right decision. It was as if she’d entered a kind of beautiful and sunny wonderland. Her Uncle Aubrey was there at the bus station to meet her and regally placed her in the back seat of his Cadillac and drove her like she was some kind of queen to his house, as fine a house Elsie had ever seen even though there was a FOR SALE sign out front. Her uncle explained he had lost a lot of money in the Depression but was certain that, as long as Herbert Hoover was in charge, he’d be rolling in greenbacks again before long.
Elsie got a job waiting tables at a restaurant and enrolled in secretary’s school, and started meeting young people who were vastly more interesting than anyone she had ever known. She especially liked one boy, a tall, lanky fellow named Christian “Buddy” Ebsen, whose parents owned a dance studio in downtown Orlando. From the start, Buddy took a special interest in her. Unlike some of the others, who made fun of her for her West Virginia accent, Buddy was always kind and polite, always listened to her attentively, and was just so much fun. He even had her over to meet his parents and taught her to dance all the latest dances.
But Elsie had learned that good things didn’t always last and, sure enough, Buddy left with his sister to go to New York, there to make his fortune as an actor and a professional dancer. After a few months passed with not so much as a letter from him, Elsie had to admit to herself that Buddy probably wasn’t going to come back anytime soon. She found herself lonely and homesick, and after graduating from secretary school, took the bus back to West Virginia. It wasn’t to stay, she told Uncle Aubrey, but just for a visit, a visit that had now lasted three years and included, almost inexplicably, marrying a Gary High School classmate and coal miner named Homer Hickam.
The morning after Albert chased Homer into the yard, Elsie saw her husband off to work and then retreated to the bathroom, there to cuddle her alligator who mostly lived in the bathtub. Albert had been a surprise gift from Buddy, arriving a week after the wedding, inside a shoe box with holes punched in it and string holding it together. Besides a cute little alligator no more than five inches long, there was a note inside. I hope you will always be happy. Something of Florida for you. Love, Buddy.
So many times Elsie had dissected that message! She wondered if Buddy had hoped she would be happy because, without him, he thought she wouldn’t be? And why send something of Florida that would live for years if he hadn’t wanted her to think of him all the time? And, maybe more important, there it was in his looping cursive, that word: Love.
Absently, she petted Albert while she thought of the other man in her life, who happened now to be her husband. The first time she saw Homer, she was playing guard on the Gary High School girls’ basketball team. They were in the Gary gymnasium and the opposing girls were from the high school in Welch, the county seat. During a lull in play, Elsie’s eyes drifted to the top row of the bleachers and landed on a sharp-faced boy who was watching her in a way that made her feel a bit unsettled. A pass from her teammate bounced right off her and she had to scramble to get it. Then, without a thought, she threw the rules away and bounced the basketball between her legs, twirled about, threw an elbow into the girl guarding her, and dribbled in for a layup, every single move against the rules of girls’ basketball. The referee blew the whistle and the Welch coach nearly fainted at the audacity of a girl actually touching another girl and working the ball. Elsie ignored the hysteria. She was looking for the boy for whom she had shown off but was disappointed to see that he was gone.
The next day he was waiting at her locker. He said, “My name is Homer Hickam. Would you go with me to the dance this Friday?”
That was when Elsie noticed his eyes. They were the bluest eyes she guessed she’d ever seen and there was a kind of cold fire in them. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d said yes, which meant she had to tell the captain of the football team that she’d changed her mind.
Outrageously, come Friday, Homer didn’t show. Elsie went to the dance alone and was forced to dance with another dateless girl while watching the captain of the football team dancing with the head cheerleader. She was mortified. In the two months of school that followed, Elsie saw Homer in the school hallways and in a couple of classes but she ignored him. The worst part of that was he ignored her, too. Then three days before graduation, he stopped her in the school hallway. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
She drew herself up, clutching her books to her chest. “Why would I want to marry you, Homer Hickam? You didn’t even come to the dance you asked me to!”
“I had to work. Daddy got his foot broke in the mine so it was up to me to go pick coal at the tipple to tide us over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I figured you’d hear about it.”
Elsie shook her head in astonishment at his thickheadedness, then pivoted on her heel and walked away. “We will get married,” he called after her. “It is meant to be.” But Elsie kept her head up and didn’t turn around. She didn’t think anything was meant to be except that she was going to get out of the coalfields the very first chance she got, which was exactly what she’d done. For more than a year, she had lived the life she’d always dreamed about. She hung on a dandy fellow’s arm, and breathed clear air, and soaked up sunshine. But then it had all somehow gone wrong, and she found herself back in West Virginia. Before she could escape again, her brother Robert informed her that the superintendent of the coal mine in Coalwood wished to ent
ertain her in his office.
“Why does he want to see me?”
“Because he does. You shouldn’t question a great man like Captain Laird.”
Robert drove Elsie to the coal mine office and ushered her inside, leaving after the Captain gave him a wave of dismissal. “Please sit down,” the Captain said politely.
Elsie sat before the massive oak desk and the majesty of the grand man behind it. She said nothing because she didn’t know what to say. The Captain smiled at her. “I asked you to come today so that I might speak with you concerning a young man who works for me. He is a most enterprising man, bound to rise to the very pinnacle of the coal mining profession. I believe you know him well. Homer Hickam.”
Elsie was only a little surprised. She knew, because her brother Robert had told her, that Homer worked for the Captain. “I know him,” she confessed.
The Captain’s smile did not waver. “You are a lovely young thing. It is perfectly clear to me why Homer desires you but I fear you have broken his heart. This makes him somewhat inefficient in his work. Can’t you help him and me and this coal company by marrying the boy? It is a simple request. You have to marry someone.”
“Sir . . .” Elsie began.
“Please call me Captain.”
“All right. Well, Captain, I like Homer, I really do but there’s this boy in Florida. . . . He’s off chasing fame and fortune in New York right now but I think he wants me and he might come back.”
The Captain reared back in his chair, looking contemplative, and said, “A man who’d decamp to New York instead of marrying you must be a very unserious man! In fact, I would imagine he is so unserious that he is up there enjoying himself. I’ve been to New York many times. There are women there, Elsie, women like you don’t know. Some of them even have platinum hair.” When Elsie’s lips trembled and her eyes turned damp, the Captain gently asked, “Do you know how it is that I came to marry my wife?”