The Coalwood Way (33 page)

When we reached the Big Store, I could see a small cluster of people gathered at its side. As we got closer, I saw that they were looking at a man standing on the loading dock. He had his head bowed and was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself. When he unwrapped them, I saw he was carrying a shotgun. It was Cuke Snoddy and, in the way of Coalwood, the light of the grand evening had given way to something of darkness.

Cuke was weeping, wiping at his nose and sniffling. He was swinging the shotgun around.

Tag stood on the concrete apron the trucks used to unload at the dock. He had his hands on his hips. His pistol was in its holster. “Cuke, you can’t be with decent people now,” he said. “Come down from there and let’s get you started on your way.”

Cuke said, “I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted to scare her a little. Then I got so mad at her, I didn’t know what I was doing. Don’t you see?”

“It isn’t for me to see,” Tag said quietly. “Come down, Cuke.”

“I won’t ever hurt nobody again,” Cuke sniveled. “Why can’t I just go home? Be like I always was?”

“Because you’ve crossed the line of decency, Cuke. A man who crosses the line of decency must leave us forever. It’s our way, you know that.”

Cuke stamped his feet in the snow on the dock. “What will become of me?”

“You will be locked up forever and we will think of you as dead,” Tag said without a trace of pity in his voice.

“I couldn’t stand that,” Cuke moaned. “Might as well end it now,” he said.

“Stop it, Cuke,” Tag said. “You’re scaring the ladies.”

“Tell them not to look, then,” Cuke said.

“Cuke, there’s been enough killing in Coalwood to last us a long, long time,” Tag said tiredly. He went slowly up the wooden steps to the dock as if his shoes weighed a ton apiece. Cuke backed away. Tag put out his hand. “Give me the shotgun and I’ll get you some food. You can sleep tonight in a warm place, too. You don’t even have to think. You can just sleep.”

Tag put his hand on the shotgun, then tightened his fist around it. Cuke let it go. Tag handed the gun down to someone in the crowd and then took Cuke by his arm and led him to the street. He looked over at Mr. Dubonnet. “I’ll lock him in the union hall, John, unless you got any objections.”

Mr. Dubonnet said, “He’s still a member of the union until we get around to kicking him out.”

“Will you help me, Mr. Dubonnet?” Cuke asked.

“No, Cuke. I will not,” Mr. Dubonnet replied grimly.

Mom and Dad and Jim and everybody else began to walk up Main Street while Tag led Cuke to the union hall. Cuke slipped once, went down on one knee, and Tag tenderly lifted him up. Then they went inside and the door was closed and a light came on.

I found myself alone except for the deer still grazing on the Club House lawn. I watched them for a long while. “It was a wonderful Christmas Pageant, wasn’t it?” Ginger asked, walking up the street from her house. “I saw you standing out here all alone,” she added.

“I’m pretty sure this one will go down in history,” I said.

She took my arm. “Are you all right?”

“Perfect. You?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going up on the Club House roof,” I said. “Do you want to go with me?”

“You can go on the Club House roof?”

I laughed. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I took her hand and helped her as she took the final step off the rickety wooden ladder onto the roof. Most of the snow had been cleared by people who had watched the pageant from there. “There’s where our telescope is set up,” I said, pointing at the telescope’s heavy base underneath its canvas shroud. “We keep the telescope downstairs and only bring it up when we need it.”

“You look at the stars up here?”

“I do when it’s clear. And sometimes, I just look at Coalwood.”

I led her to the edge of the roof. Beneath us, in the lights from the company buildings, the snow glistened as if a giant had scattered a billion diamonds across the ground. The air was fragrant with hay and Christmas greens. In the distance, I could hear the gurgling of the little creek that ran behind the machine shop, and up on the mountains the low note of the winter wind passing through the leafless trees. Coalwood’s industrial symphony had paused, just for a moment, to listen to the ancient things that someday would reclaim their places.

“I love coming up here,” I said.

“I’ve never seen Coalwood from this angle,” Ginger said. “It really is pretty, isn’t it?”

“I can’t imagine anywhere prettier.”

Then I realized it was past midnight, and it was Christmas, the last one I would ever know as a Coalwood boy. I stood, watching, and listening, and smelling the fragrances, and then I knew that it wasn’t so, that I would never leave Coalwood, not at Christmas or any other time. Coalwood was my potter’s wheel. It had shaped me into who I was. And no matter where I went or what I did, I would forever be a Coalwood boy whose father . . . I smiled . . . whose father, even though it was against his better judgment, respected his second son enough to give him drawing instruments and a slide rule to build his rockets. And whose mother . . . I broke out in a grin . . . whose mother loved him enough to give him the gift of inspired vexations so that he could rise above his own petty ones.

My parents, and all the people of Coalwood, had given me the only true gifts they could give, that of their wisdom, and of their dreams, and of their love. All fear, sadness, and anger inside me had vanished. I knew who I was and where I came from and who my people were. I was ready to leave because I could never leave.

Ginger leaned against me. “Sleepy?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“No.”

We sat down on the edge of the Club House roof and watched Coalwood together. Ginger put her head on my shoulder. She began to breathe slowly and rhythmically. I thought she was asleep, but then she said, as if from a faraway place, “I still think we would have made a cute couple.”

I raised my eyes from Coalwood and peered into the sky. It was covered by a dense layer of clouds, but I kept looking. Somewhere up there, I was certain there were stars as far as we could see.

Homer Hickam concludes his trilogy of
Coalwood memoirs with
Sky of Stone,
now available in paperback from Dell.

Sky of Stone
takes us back to the summer
of ’61, deep into the heart of the troubled West
Virginia town readers first came to know and
love in Homer’s #1
New York Times
bestseller
October Sky
.

Read on for a preview of
Sky of Stone
. . .

2

THE CALL

IN THE FALL of 1960, when I was seventeen years old, I left Coalwood and crossed the West Virginia state line to attend the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. My brother was already there on a football scholarship, but the reason I’d picked VPI was that it had one of the toughest engineering schools in the country. It was my intention to become as fine an engineer as ever existed upon this planet so that Dr. Wernher von Braun, the famous rocket scientist, would hire me the day I graduated. I had already gotten a head start in that direction in high school. When
Sputnik,
the world’s first earth satellite, had been launched in October 1957, five other Big Creek High School boys and I had decided to join the space race between the United States and Russia and build our own rockets. We launched them from an old slack dump we called Cape Coalwood and had done so well we’d even gone to the 1960 National Science Fair and returned to Coalwood with a gold and silver medal for propulsion. We were, for a little while, as famous as any boys from McDowell County were ever likely to be.

Upon my arrival in Blacksburg, I was a bit surprised to learn VPI had a military cadet corps in which I was required to serve. Jim, being a football player, had escaped the corps, but I found myself not only trying to cope with classroom work but also the regimen required of a “rat” freshman. Fortunately, the mysterious regulations and ancient military traditions of the corps intrigued me enough that I set out to master them. The most desirable quality for a cadet turned out to be standing up straight, which I could do, and knowing how to march, which I could learn, and polishing brass and spit-shining shoes, which I could tolerate. By the time my freshman year was done, I had even managed to get myself promoted to private first class.

VPI academics, however, proved to be more difficult, especially chemistry and mathematics. Without the incentive of building my rockets, I had trouble paying attention in those classes. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, but most of the time my mind simply wandered off on its own. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t focus on those blackboards filled with dull equations and tedious formulae. Where was the glory in it? Where was the adventure? Where were the rockets? I missed them and I missed the boys and I missed Miss Riley, the high school teacher who’d kept me on the straight and narrow during my years as a rocket boy. If it hadn’t been for English class, I might have even gone on academic probation. My shoddy work did not go unnoticed. After the winter quarter, Dr. Johnston, the dean of applied science and business administration, under whose auspices English was taught to engineers, called me into his office. He retrieved one of my themes from a pile on his desk. “Read this for me, Mr. Hickam,” he said.

I read where he pointed his finger:
The rocket was steaming
like a teakettle.

“What is that?”

I sorted through my possible answers. “A simile?” I guessed.

“Yes!” He put my theme back on the stack and patted it. “Did you know, Mr. Hickam, that I’d warrant there is not a single other engineering student in this whole school who would know a simile if it jumped out of a bush and bit them? Or could invent one?”

I didn’t know that and said so.

“You have a rare talent for writing,” Dr. Johnston continued. “You ought to do something with it.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, still not fully comprehending what he was getting at.

He picked up another paper and turned it in my direction. “Do you know what this is?”

I recognized it quite well, although it was nothing I cared to study. “My grade transcript,” I said.

“Indeed it is,” he answered, “and based on it, I fear you are wasting your time here at VPI. Perhaps you should leave us and go to another college, one stronger in the liberal arts, for instance, where your writing talents might be better honed.”

Now I knew why I was sitting in front of the dean’s desk. “But I can’t leave, sir,” I said, coming close to whining. “I have to be an engineer.”

“Do tell,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a doubtful expression on his face. “And why is that?”

Since he’d asked me, I urgently explained to Dr. Johnston that I had to study engineering because I needed to go help Wernher von Braun. The great man had even sent me an autographed picture, I said. I owed him for that, and I also owed my high school teachers, especially Miss Riley. She had fought for me, for all the Rocket Boys, so we could build our rockets, and she had done that even though she had cancer, which kept her terribly weak. I also told him about the people in Coalwood who’d gone way out on a limb for me and the other boys. “You see, sir,” I concluded, “that’s why I
have
to stay here until I become an engineer!”

“It’s an interesting story,” Dr. Johnston said, “but the odds are still against you.”

Often when I found myself intellectually cornered, I tried to remember to quote somebody who was intelligent. “In the queer mass of human destiny, the determining factor has always been luck,” I said, quoting Mr. Turner, Big Creek’s principal.

“If that’s your belief, I predict you will also have trouble with statistics,” Dr. Johnston answered dryly.

The good dean dismissed me with the admonition to take my grade transcript and go instantly to see Dr. Byrne, the assistant dean of engineering. I did as I was ordered, finding this dean in his office working diligently behind a huge metal adding machine on his desk. He waved me into a chair, pecked in a few numbers, and then pulled the handle. Out flew a coil of paper, which he inspected, crumpled up, and tossed into a wastepaper can. “Someday,” he said, patting the huge steel contraption, “these things will be no bigger than a shoebox.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, handing over my grades and silently doubting the accuracy of his prediction.

Dr. Byrne reflected on my sorry document for a moment, then said, “Not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, Mr. Hickam. Perhaps you should save us the trouble of flunking you and leave voluntarily.”

I once again explained why I couldn’t quit. “I suspect Wernher von Braun will get along fine without you,” Dr. Byrne observed with some confidence. He eyed a stack of college catalogs on the corner of his desk. “Why don’t you just thumb through these catalogs, eh? You might find a nice little liberal arts college that would suit you just fine.”

I was cornered. “There’s another reason I have to be an engineer,” I said desperately.

“Let’s hear it.” The assistant dean yawned. He acted as if he’d heard everything to come out of a student’s mouth, which he probably had, except what I said next.

“The moon program,” I said.

“What about it?”

“I think I might be responsible for it.”

“This I really must hear,” Dr. Byrne said, and leaned forward, his arms folded on top of the adding machine.

So I told my tale. It had happened back in the spring of 1960, when then-senator John F. Kennedy was fighting for his political survival in the West Virginia presidential primary. I had come upon him standing forlornly on top of a Cadillac automobile over in Welch, the county seat, and it was my opinion he was in trouble. For one thing, his back seemed to be hurting him. He kept rubbing the small of it with his fist, and when he did, his eyes would squint in pain. He wasn’t doing very well with his speech, either. The miners standing around listening to him were pretty listless. Being a boy of the hills, I immediately recognized what his problem was, at least as far as his speech. The senator’s audience wanted a little entertainment. Why else would they come to hear a politician after a hard day’s work in the mines?

At the time, I was wearing a suit I’d just purchased to wear to the National Science Fair, and despite the fact that pride was the number one West Virginia sin, I was completely and utterly full of myself. I thought, as my mom would say, that I was the cat’s meow. The suit I had picked was a bright orange, all the better, I figured, to stand out at the fair. I decided to shake things up by asking a question. For some reason, as soon as I raised my hand, the senator took note of me. My high school pal Emily Sue Buckberry was with me and I heard her moan, “Oh, God, you’re going to embarrass the whole county!”

I did better than that. I embarrassed pretty much the whole state! “What do you think the United States ought to do in space?” I asked a man who’d just talked himself hoarse about unemployment and welfare and food stamps and the raw deal that coal mining was in general.

Kennedy stopped rubbing his back long enough to eye me for what seemed about a century. Then he turned my question back on me. From his lofty perch, he demanded, “What do
you
think we should do in space?”

So I told him, not because I had given it a lot of thought, but because I’d been looking at the moon a lot through a telescope a junior engineer named Jake Mosby had set up for us boys on top of the Coalwood Club House roof. It just popped out of me.
“We should go to the moon!”
I said with such vigor that I got applause and cheers from everybody still standing around. There was some laughter, too, but it was good-natured, since the entertainment value of the senator’s entire enterprise had gone up a notch.

The clapping and cheering and laughing seemed to surprise Senator Kennedy. He straightened a little, surveyed the crowd and their grinning faces, and then, as if he had a sudden inspiration, he said maybe I was right, that what we needed to do was get the country moving again, and if going to the moon could help that, maybe it was just the thing. Then he’d asked me what we should do on the moon when we got there, and I said we should find out what it was made of and go ahead and mine the blamed thing. That idea, too, had just popped into my head. Our audience responded with more whoops and hollers and cries that West Virginians could go and “mine that old moon good!” I got a benevolent smile from the senator before Emily Sue dragged me off to Belcher and Mooney’s men’s store to exchange my beautiful orange suit for something drab and awful.

After that, I’d gone on to win the gold and silver medal for propulsion in the National Science Fair, and Senator Kennedy had gone on to win his elections in West Virginia and the entire country, too. He’d done it by proposing to get the nation moving again, not only around the world but in space, too. To make good on his promise, he’d recently stood up before Congress and announced:
I believe this nation
should commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the
moon and returning him safely to the earth.

“You can see now, sir, why I have to be an engineer, can’t you?” I asked. “This is all my fault.”

Dr. Byrne perused my grade transcript a little longer, then rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you what, boy,” he said, reaching across the adding machine to take my hand and give it a good shake, “I still don’t think you’re going to get through my engineering school, but if half of what you say is true, which I sincerely doubt, then I can certainly see why you’ve got to try. Good luck to you. I think you’ll need it.”

I quoted my uncle Robert. “Luck’s a chance but trouble’s sure; I’d be rich if I wasn’t poor.”

Dr. Byrne laughed out loud. “Get out of my office, Hickam,” he said by way of summarizing our interview.

I got out and, since I knew the deans were watching, got to studying. I even stayed awake during chemistry class, at least a significant percentage of the time. During spring quarter, my grades climbed until I was a solidly average engineering student, not bad for a tough place like VPI, I thought.

On a Saturday in early May, I was told to go to the squadron lounge, that a visitor was waiting there for me. It turned out to be my mom, which was quite a surprise. “Sonny boy,” she said, smiling from her seat on the couch. “How nice you look in your uniform.”

Her hair had turned a bit grayer during the past year and her pretty, heart-shaped face looked a bit more drawn and there were a few more wrinkles on her forehead, but otherwise she was the same Mom. I sat beside her. “What are you doing here?” I asked anxiously. It had to be something terrible for her to have made the trip all the way to Blacksburg, uncountable mountains away from Coalwood.

“I’m on my way to Myrtle Beach,” she said. “I finally found a house down there that I can afford. I had to act fast to get it and I did. It just needs a little fixing up, and that’s what I’m heading down there to do.”

Mom had always said a house in Myrtle Beach was what she wanted more than anything in the world, and she’d kept on about it for years. Myrtle Beach, a coastal resort city in South Carolina, was the vacation destination of half the coal miners and their families in West Virginia every summer, including us, and Mom had fallen in love with the place. Still, she’d surprised me by actually following through with her dream, especially since Dad was still some years away from retirement. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“He went over to the football practice field to see Jim,” she said. “He’s going to drive me to the beach and then go back to Coalwood.”

That news didn’t surprise me. Somebody had once asked Mom what it would take to get my dad out of Coalwood, and she had replied, “Dynamite.”

I had a sudden idea. Usually, my best ones seemed to come without much thought, don’t ask me why. “Mom, could I come down this summer and help you fix the place up?” I was already thinking about making a run on the girls down at the beach, too, which I failed to mention.

Mom looked me over. “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.”

“We’d be a great team,” I said eagerly. I tried to recall the words Dad had used when he’d tried to convince the Captain to take him on. “You tell me what to do, don’t matter what it is, and I’ll do it.”

Mom gave me a wan smile. “Can I shoot you if you don’t?”

“You sure can.”

She nodded, then said, “Sonny, here’s the thing. It wasn’t just the house at Myrtle Beach I came by to tell you about. Tuck Dillon’s been killed in the mine.”

I let her message sink in. Tuck Dillon was one of Dad’s best foremen. He’d been Coalwood’s scoutmaster for a while, too. I’d risen all the way to the proud rank of Scout Second Class under his tutelage. I was instantly and naturally sad that he’d gotten killed, but I was wondering why she’d felt it necessary to drive fifty miles out of her way to let me know about it.