Sky of Stone (11 page)

I didn’t mind one bit. “Did you run all the way from the engineering office?”

“Sure. I like to stay in shape.”

“You look like you’re already in great shape to me!” I blurted out.

She laughed, and I noticed anew that she had a wonderful smile. “Thanks. I ran the mile in college. Held the women’s collegiate track record for a couple of months.”

I started to tell her I had been on the track team, too. Intramurals. I’d come in third place in the hundred-yard dash. Of course, there’d only been four runners in the race, so I had second thoughts about telling it.

We walked along. “How long have you lived in Coalwood?” she asked.

“All my life,” I said, “not counting this past year in college.”

She looked past me, to an abandoned house on School Mountain. All the glass had been busted out of its front windows and its porch sagged. “Who used to live in that house?” she asked.

I considered saying I didn’t know. It was a sad story, and I’d had a part in it right before the last Christmas I’d spent as a Coalwood boy. But she seemed genuinely interested, so I gave her a condensed version of the story. A man named Cuke Snoddy had once lived there with a young unmarried woman. Dreama was her name. Because she was living with a man out of wedlock, and also because she was from Gary, most of the townspeople had rejected her as unworthy. Dreama wanted, more than anything in the world, to be a Coalwood girl, and, as it turned out, she’d gotten her wish. She was now a resident of our town forever, the only white woman buried in the colored cemetery on the mountain behind the Mudhole Church of Distinct Christianity. Cuke Snoddy had murdered her. “Coalwood has its ways.” I shrugged as I wrapped up the story.

“It sure does,” she said. “For one thing, there seems to be a history of mistreating women around here.”

I glanced at her. “I don’t know about that. Women pretty much run Coalwood. The teachers tell everybody what to do, for one thing, and the wives keep their husbands on a short leash, for another.”

“Sure,” she replied bitterly, “as long as they stay teachers and wives. But you let one of them try to break out of that mold, and see what happens.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I fell silent. So did Rita. After a moment more of walking, she said, “How about taking me for a hike?” She nodded toward the mountains. “I’ve been thinking about going up there and having a look around but I’m not sure where I’d go. How about it? Floretta told me you know these hills better than just about anybody.”

I considered her offer and couldn’t find anything wrong with it. As long as I was stuck in Coalwood, I might as well do it in good style, especially with such pretty company. “We’ll see,” I said, but I was actually already thinking about where we’d go.

At the tipple, I pointed at the little machine shop. “You asked me about my rockets. That’s where we first built them. A man by the name of Mr. Bykovski lost his job helping us.”

Rita seemed interested, so I told her the rest of the story, how Mr. Bykovski had been banished to the mine after Dad had discovered what he’d done. “But Mr. Bykovski said he didn’t mind. Helping us was the right thing to do.”

“Does he still work here?” Rita asked.

“He was killed,” I answered. “A mountain bump.” There was a lot more to it, but I had settled that tragedy in my mind and didn’t want to go any further. Mr. Bykovski’s death had nearly made me stop building rockets, and nearly driven me to quit studying in school. Only Miss Riley had been able to pull me out of my dive to personal destruction. When I’d seen her in Welch, she’d reminded me of what she’d said then, that when I had a job to do, it didn’t matter whether I wanted to do it or not. That was when a thought popped into my head. Maybe my real job this summer was to help my dad, even if he didn’t want it! Mom had said I was supposed to keep him company, but that had never been a serious possibility, considering our history. How to help him, though, completely eluded me, except to be curious and find out all I could.
That
I could always do!

At the tipple office, Rita gave me a wave and went up the steps and inside. I watched after her. “You going to work?” Hub Alger asked as he went past. “Or are you going to just stand there and wait for that girl to come back out?”

“I know which one I’d do!” Pick Hylton crowed. There was general laughter from the crowd of miners streaming past. I was beginning to wonder what Coalwoodians did for laughs before I’d come back to town.

15

THE KETTLE BOTTOM

M
R. RICHARDSON
, a big chaw swelling his cheek, was waiting for me at the lamphouse. “You’re not working for me today, Sonny. You’re with Johnny Basso.”

“What about Big Jeb?” I asked.

He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the gob. “Big Jeb has a quota of posts he has to change out every week. It’s his lungs, you know. He can only do so much. He got a week’s worth done yesterday. I don’t know how he did it, what with you slowing him down.”

“Big Jeb is a true whirlwind,” I said.

He wrinkled up his nose. “What’s that smell?”

“Floretta’s special liniment,” I confessed.

“I’ve heard it works if you can stand it,” he said, moving upwind.

I set about finding Mr. Basso. He and his missus—Goldie was her name—lived up on Substation Row in one of the duplex houses above the Little Store. When we’d lived in our old house across from the Substation, he was one of the line of men who used to walk past our yard to and from the mine. Sometimes, he’d stop and ask me what I was doing, and I’d often confess to be acting out some scene in a book I’d read. I had a clear memory of telling him one time when I was about eight years old that I was Jesse James, and Roy Lee Cooke was my brother Frank, and we were trying to figure out how to rob the Big Store. Another miner, Bato Patsy, had joined us at the fence and we’d all put our heads together on the plot. As best I could recall, we decided we needed horses, which slowed our life as criminals down considerably.

Some years back, the Bassos had adopted a boy, the only adopted child, as far as I knew, who lived in Coalwood. It had prompted a lot of gossip across the fence-line as to why it had been necessary for them to go to an orphanage for a child. Mom said Cleo Mallett had been the one who’d started tongues wagging about it, and that she might’ve served Coalwood better had she visited the orphanage for her children, too. Since her boys tended to beat me up, I agreed.

Mr. Basso had also been one of our assistant scoutmasters. At the meetings, he liked to talk mostly about the garden he’d planted on the side of Sis’s Mountain. Apparently, he was a pretty good farmer. During the summer, he’d swing by our house once or twice to offer Mom his surplus tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. She usually took him up on it, and though she always invited him in for coffee, he’d usually tip his hat and say he had other deliveries to make. Only once that I knew of had he come inside, and then only to admire Mom’s famous unfinished mural of Myrtle Beach. Chipper had bit him twice before he’d taken three steps inside the kitchen.

I spotted Mr. Basso, all alone near the shaft. With his wide Italian face, majestic nose, and paunch that lapped over his battery belt, he reminded me of Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers. I went up to him and said, “Hey, Mr. Basso,” and then, “I’m supposed to work with you today.”

He looked me over and said, “Sonny, how do.” He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. I could smell hot peppers on his breath. I saw that he was reading a small Bible, which he tucked away in his hip pocket.

A lot of coal miners were deeply religious, some of them “Holy Rollers,” who thought it took wrestling with the Devil every day to get into heaven. I’d heard Mr. Basso was one of these.

Bobby Likens walked up. His helmet was shoved cockily on the back of his head as if he were the most experienced miner on the tipple grounds. “You smell like a locker room,” he said to me.

I ignored him. “Where are we going, Mr. Basso?”

“East Main D,” he said, and then, “Call me Johnny. I ain’t no foreman.” The man-lift warning bell rang and he walked onto the lift, fiddling with a sawed-off piece of broomstick he pulled from his belt. “It’s a roof thumper,” he said when Bobby asked him what it was for. “I can check on the rock over our heads with it. Good or bad, this old stick will tell its tale.”

I merged into the men getting aboard the man-lift. The wooden floor rang hollowly under our boots. Beneath us was seven hundred feet of nothing. We were halfway down the shaft when Johnny turned to me and said, “Turn your light on.” While I hastily fumbled with the switch, he went on to say we were going to change out posts all day.

“That’s what Big Jeb and I did yesterday,” I said.

“I got a tour of the mine,” Bobby volunteered.

“I hope you didn’t wear yourself out,” I said caustically.

“I’ll try to keep up with you today,” he replied.

I stared at him. “You’re going with us?”

“Sure am,” he sang.

Mom’s designated nursemaid was going to be watching after me every minute. “Wonderful,” I grumped.

After we climbed aboard the man-trip, Johnny apparently got his first whiff of me. “Floretta’s liniment?” he asked, and then nodded gravely when I replied in the affirmative. “Stuff stinks but it works, I swan.”

It took about twenty minutes for us to get where we were going. Bobby turned out his lamp and lowered his head. Johnny kept his on to read his Bible. When the man-trip ground to a stop, he tucked the little book back into his pocket and hopped out and took off down a dark tunnel like somebody was chasing him. Bobby charged after him and I was close behind. Before we’d gone three steps, Bobby’s helmet hit the roof, the familiar
pop
of plastic on rock, and he fell backward, causing me to trip over him. It took a few seconds to get ourselves untangled. We might have said a few curse words in the process, I shouldn’t wonder. Johnny loped back and spotted us with his light. “Don’t ever take the Lord’s name in vain, especially in the mine,” he said angrily. “It’s terrible bad luck.” Then he took off again, the spot of his light bouncing and weaving. Bobby and I scrambled to our feet and did our best to keep up. Finally, he stopped. “You boys get over here!”

Panting, we gathered around him while he patted a post. “Looky here. This post’s rotten. See how it’s splintered at the top?” He rapped on it with his knuckles. “Hear that? It sounds hollow because there’s holes all through it. There’s a bunch of posts on this section that are just like this one. We’re going to find and change out every one of them today. But first, we’ll say our prayers.”

Johnny sank to his knees and turned out his lamp, lowered his head, then started mumbling something I couldn’t hear. Then he looked up abruptly, saw Bobby and me staring at him, and said, “Turn off your lamps and get down on your knees.”

“I don’t believe in showing off my religion,” Bobby said smartly.

Johnny glared at us and said, “Boys, there are only two things that are going to keep you alive in this coal mine. Me, and the tolerance of God.”

I couldn’t resist showing Bobby up. I went down on my knees and pressed my hands together. “Amen!” I said after pretending to fervently pray for a couple of seconds.

Bobby switched off his lamp and went down on one knee and said, “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.”

“That’s a supper prayer,” I said.

Bobby stood up, smacked his helmet against the roof, and was knocked back to his knees. I laughed out loud. “I tried to tell you,” Johnny said. “Tempt not thy Lord.”

I carefully rose, wedging my helmet against the rock ceiling. “Here’s how you stand up in the mine, Bobby,” I instructed merrily. He was almost as much fun to mess with as a junior engineer.

Bobby got up slowly, then bent over and rubbed his head. He’d really cracked it.

“All right, boys, let’s get to work,” Johnny said.

I quickly discovered that what Johnny considered work was going as hard and fast as possible and then a little harder and faster on top of that. We quickly fell into a routine. Johnny would knock down a bad post and Bobby and I would manhandle a new one into place. Then he’d shim the new one while Bobby and I hauled the old one back to the rising stack of discards. The whole time, Johnny kept yelling at us to hurry up or spouting a sermon about how we’d better learn to listen to the Lord and how the Lord God Jesus should be in our every thought. I didn’t know about Bobby, but I was having trouble thinking of much of anything past keeping my head low and trying to catch a breath.

“I wonder if he handles snakes in that church of his,” Bobby said grumpily.

“He’d probably yell at it to bite him faster,” I replied, and Bobby and I shared a laugh, the first one together. I was starting to think he wasn’t such a bad old boy, after all, even if he pretended to be my nursemaid way too often.

When Johnny saw that Bobby and I had thrown the old rotted posts into a pile, he demanded that they be stacked into a nice square.

“How come, Johnny?” Bobby argued. “They’re just going to get hauled away.”

“Dwight Strong likes to keep his section neat as a pin,” Johnny said. “And so do I.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Bobby said, his back bowed beneath a piece of low rock.

“It does to me,” Johnny replied with narrowed eyes.

As the day wore on, I would occasionally allow myself a little moan. “What’s wrong with you?” Bobby finally demanded.

“I’m sore and I’ve got blisters on my feet.”

“You want me to look at them?”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I don’t want you to look at them.”

“You really need to change your attitude,” he said.

“Work, boys! No talking!” Johnny bawled.

“We weren’t talking,” I said. “We were arguing.”

“About what?”

“Sonny’s bad attitude,” Bobby said.

Johnny worked his way over to us and squatted, the first time all day that he’d stopped. “Sonny, Olga Coal pays us to work. Do you understand that?” I opened my mouth to protest, mainly because I couldn’t recall not working for more than a minute since the shift had started, but Johnny went on. “I don’t cheat Miss Olga for my pay. That’s something you boys got to understand right now if you want to work with me.”

Bobby nodded. “I understand,” he said grimly.

I didn’t reply. Yet another thought had popped into my mind, as they tended to do. There was something going on that was just a bit off-kilter. Then it came to me in a flash. “Johnny, did somebody tell you to get rid of us?”

Johnny drew a red bandanna from his back pocket and mopped his face, leaving greasy black smears behind. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he said.

“I knew it,” I said. “I thought I smelled a rat.”

“What rat?” Bobby demanded.

“My dad, unless I miss my guess. I’m right, aren’t I, Johnny?”

Johnny tucked his bandanna in his pocket, then rubbed the back of his neck, twisting his head around. His neck bones popped and it hurt to hear it. “Homer and I had a little talk last night,” he allowed. “He said he was really worried about you boys, said he was afraid he and the union had made a mistake letting you down here. He asked me to watch you two close. If I thought you weren’t worth anything, I’m supposed to chase you off.”

Bobby’s jaw dropped. I guess he’d been gone from Coalwood so long he’d completely forgotten how the place really worked. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“I’d be happy to explain it to you,” I said smartly.

He ignored me. “What about the union?” Bobby demanded of Johnny. “We can’t just be fired, can we?”

Johnny said, “If you boys can’t cut the mustard, I’m supposed to report it to Dwight Strong. He’ll tell Homer and then you’re both gone for cause. Homer said Dubonnet won’t likely fight it because a union member—that would be me—said you boys were a danger to yourselves. So it’s up to me whether you go or stay, I reckon.”

Bobby took off his helmet and rubbed what must have been a sore spot. “Johnny, I need this job,” he said. “Don’t take it away from me, please.”

Johnny poked his light at Bobby and then at me. “I’ve seen a few worse miners in my days than you two boys.” He swiveled his light back to Bobby. “But both you boys got to do exactly what I say when I say it. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Bobby replied between gritted teeth.

“How about that morning prayer?”

Bobby hesitated, then nodded. “I can say a prayer with the best of them.”

“Praise God. How about you, Sonny?”

I shrugged. “Praying’s always a good thing.”

“I meant about doing exactly what I tell you.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Then let’s get back to work.”

Johnny raced back to the next post to be changed while Bobby and I picked up a new post and, bent beneath the roof, waddled after him. For the next two hours, we didn’t talk, just changed out posts as hard and fast as we could go.

When it looked as if we were about to run out of rotten posts, Johnny decided he didn’t like the piled-up rock and coal—gob—on both sides of the track and flagged down a passing man-trip to send a message up the line about it. Soon afterward, a locomotive brought in an empty car and left it on a siding. We started shoveling gob into it, an exercise that quickly identified some muscles I hadn’t yet abused. We’d hardly sat down to eat lunch, it seemed, before Johnny was up again and yelling at us to come help him. Bobby and I threw down our buckets and scrambled to find him.

“How does he do it?” Bobby demanded when, just for an instant, he and I stopped to catch our breath and gulp some water.

“He can’t keep it up,” I said confidently. “He’s got to be forty years old, at least. And that belly of his . . .”

“More like fifty,” Bobby said. “And he might have a belly but I’m guessing there’s some hard muscles underneath. Adipose tissue isn’t necessarily an indicator of sloth.”

“What’s adipose tissue?”

“Fat.”

“Why didn’t you just say fat, then?”

“I’m trying to learn how to talk like a doctor.”

“How would you like it if I started talking like an engineer?”

“I’d be impressed,” he said.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t oblige him.

Later in the day, Dwight Strong, the foreman, showed up. Bent over beneath the roof, his hands behind his back, he watched us for a few minutes. I mostly kept my head down, but once I flashed my light in his direction. His round, friendly face was distorted by a big chaw in his cheek. He gave me a nod. Mr. Strong was one of Dad’s favorite young foremen and had often visited our house to talk mining. I’d been impressed when he’d learned to keep Chipper at bay by picking up one of our cats for his lap. “Take it easy, boys,” he said after watching us for a while. He knocked at the roof with his roof thumper, then walked away.