Sky of Stone (16 page)

“Set up a route along the new north track,” Dad said. “It’ll take a little longer, but not much more than it does now.”

“What if there’s a problem and the miners have to get out in a hurry?” Mr. Nordman asked. Mr. Nordman, another one of my former scoutmasters, was the company safety man.

“Set up an alternate route for every section and make sure each foreman is briefed,” Dad replied. “Make some practice runs.”

Everybody bent over their notebooks and scribbled Dad’s orders. Then Dad nodded to Mr. Strong. “Dwight, I’m putting you in charge of changing out the track. Get with Rita, figure out the logistics of this thing.”

At the mention of her name, Rita turned around. I could see her eyes glistening. She’d been near tears. The pointer tapped again against her leg, this time an eager movement.

“Got it,” Mr. Strong said, nodding to Rita, then scribbling furiously in his daily notebook. “We’ve already got a good stockpile of ties. If it’s all right with you, we’ll get the hoot-owl shift to start moving them in tonight.”

“Since it’s my plan, I’ll need to directly inspect the work,” Rita interjected.

Dad smiled. “Nice try, Rita.”

“Who’s going to be my track layers?” Mr. Strong asked.

“A three-man team on both ends,” Dad said. “I want Johnny Basso in charge on the Coalwood side. He’s the best track-laying man we’ve got over here. He can pick any other two men he wants.”

Bobby and I traded glances. It seemed as if we were going to get another boss. But Johnny quickly said, “I’ll take Bobby and Sonny, Dwight.”

I was amazed that nobody saw fit to argue with him, not even Dad. Bobby winked at me. I had to admit to feeling sort of proud, while being a little worried, too. I’d walked along a track or two in my boyhood, and one time we rocket boys had dug cast-iron pipe out from beneath an abandoned spur to sell as scrap. But laying track was something I’d never done, or imagined doing. I’d heard it was a pretty hard job, too, maybe the toughest in the mine.

“How about the Caretta end?” Mr. Strong asked.

“Use the same team that just put down the north track,” Dad said without a moment of hesitation. I knew then he’d already thought through the entire thing, even before Rita’s presentation. “Garrett Brown and those two boys.”

“Delmar Crouch and Chinky Pinns,” Mr. Marshall said.

“That’s them,” Dad said. “They’re strong boys and they’re fast.”

They were, indeed. Both of them had been star players on the Big Creek High School football team the same year I’d graduated.

Dad turned to Rita. “This is your project, Rita. You ride herd on it. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I know very well,” she said.

“Then that’s it,” Dad said, reaching for the black phone. “We’ve jawed enough. Get to work!”

Rita, her eyes still on Dad, reached quickly for her posters and knocked them all to the floor. When everybody started to laugh, I pushed inside and helped her gather them up. I didn’t say anything, just stacked them on her easel, and went back to my place. When I turned back around, I found her eyes on me, saying thanks.

Bobby tugged my arm. “Come on, Sonny. Johnny’s already on the man-lift.”

On the way down the shaft, Johnny explained our new job. We’d be pulling up the old rails, inspecting them, digging out the old ties, then after the bed was properly prepared, putting the ties and track back in place, all under the low roof of the main line. “We’ll do it, boys, better’n it’s ever been done before, or my name’s not Johnny Basso.”

“It sounds hard.”

“You’ll earn your pay, that’s for sure,” Johnny said. “You boys game or not?”

Bobby narrowed his eyes. “I’m game.” He looked at me. “Sonny? How about you?”

“I was born game,” I said. I also figured it would be good to work on Rita’s project. It would give us something to talk about.

Johnny nodded. “Boys, prepare to sweat buckets like you’ve never sweated before.”

J
OHNNY
’
S PREDICTION
turned out to be pure truth. The next day, we descended on the main line like we were going to war. Johnny was the general and Bobby and I were the raw recruits. He gave us a quick run-through of our tools, the spike pullers, the rail carriers, and the sledgehammers. “Listen to me, boys!” he demanded fiercely. “This is serious work. Once we pull up a track, we’ve got to put it down just right or the man-trips could wreck and somebody could get killed. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Bobby and I nodded uncertainly.

“All right, then. Set to.”

We set to. We pulled the spikes, then pushed the heavy rails off into the gob. Then we grabbed picks and shovels and pry bars and dug out the old ties until we hit draw rock.

Johnny said it wasn’t enough to go down to the rock. We had to keep shoveling until every particle of dirt was gone. Only then could we set a tie in place. We learned to manhandle a tie into the groove we’d dug, then stomp it down until it was as level as we could make it. Then, while Johnny used a bubble level on the tie to get it perfectly flat, Bobby and I grabbed our pry bars and shovels and got after the next tie. It was slow going, made all the harder by the low roof. We couldn’t just throw the dirt over our shoulders. It would bounce back into our faces. Everything was done at an awkward angle. More hidden muscles, apparently dormant for the entire history of life, started complaining.

After the ties and rails were set in place, Johnny showed us how to drive spikes. We had to work on our knees to avoid hitting the low stone slabs overhead. The first time I took my turn, I threw the hammer up and it bounced off the roof right down on top of my helmet. It nearly drove it over my ears. Johnny laughed and Bobby did, too, though he denied it later.

Another hazard was much more serious. A trolley cable stretched down the main line, and it carried a powerful electric charge. When we got on station, Johnny called on the mine phone to get the wire turned off. But there was no way to look at it and tell if it was dead or alive. If it was alive, one touch with our hammer and “Katy, bar the door,” as Johnny put it to describe the pile of smoking flesh we’d become.

All day, we fought the track with Bobby and me learning as we went along. At the end of the shift, I fell into the man-trip,
whupped
in a whole new way. Bobby looked done in, too. Johnny didn’t seem at all any worse for wear. In fact, he was whistling and talking about doing some gardening that night with his son.

When we got off the man-lift, a cluster of men stood in front of the lamphouse, eyeing us hard. Bobby and I must have looked like prisoners of war—haggard, slump-shouldered, our boots dragging in the gob. When Johnny noticed the stares, he said, “These boys have been laying track.” I caught a glint of respect in their eyes and managed a bit of stiff-legged swagger. All the way down the valley, I walked proud and then I got a little prouder when I recalled that John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man himself, had been a West Virginian. How had the ballad gone?

John Henry told his captain
A man ain’t nothin’ but a man
But before I let your steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord!
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand.

After a while I took on the opinion that the women who were at their fences were there to watch me go by, as were their open-mouthed children. I couldn’t much blame them. I deserved their honor and awe. I had taken on the roughest, toughest job in the coal mine. I made up my own song and sang it to myself all the way to the Club House:

Sonny Hickam told his daddy,
I’m not a boy but a man
Your old mine ain’t never gonna beat me down
I’ve become a track-layin’ man, Lord, Lord!
I’ve become a track-layin’ man!

21

BOBBY’S ADVICE

N
EARLY EVERY
evening, Rita, still dressed in her work clothes, joined me for supper in the Club House dining room. Usually, she’d arrive straight from the engineering office. I’d visited her there once, just to see what kind of place the company had made for her. She was in the hall with a drawing board, a stool, and a filing cabinet. The top of the cabinet was stacked with her books. She kept an olive-drab canvas bag at her feet. When she opened it to pull out her slide rule, I saw only a hairbrush and some tissues in it. Just down the hall from her station, Ned and Victor shared a cramped closet of an office, but at least it was their space. They even had their own black phone. If Rita wanted to make a call to one of the foremen to talk over a project, she had to use the black phone in the meeting room. Usually, she said, either the phone was busy or the room was being used. Sometimes, she’d sneak up front to Mr. Bundini’s office and Carol would let her use her phone there. She also had to go all the way up front to go to the bathroom.

At supper, Rita always wanted to know about my day. I told her how Johnny would yell
Praise God!
when he swung his hammer and Bobby would call out
And pass the spikes!
I told her how Johnny had thrown his hammer up and hit the trolley line and then fallen, shaking like he’d been electrocuted, and how Bobby and I had run around in circles trying to figure out what to do, until Johnny sat up and laughed at us.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about being electrocuted,” Rita said.

“He was
pretending
to be electrocuted,” I explained. “It scared us, but when we saw he was only fooling, it was funny.”

Rita crooked her mouth and shrugged. “It must be a man thing,” she said.

Maybe it was. I told Rita how Johnny had sent me and Bobby running back down the line to the tool car to find a rail stretcher after a rail was found to be too short. Dwight Strong had chanced along to find us there, pawing through the equipment and arguing on what a rail stretcher looked like. Mr. Strong laughed so hard when we told him what we were after, I thought he was going to bust a gut.

“I can’t imagine how anybody would think there was a hand tool to lengthen a rail,” Rita said. “Surely you must have had some inkling Johnny was pulling your leg.”

“Johnny knows everything, so we trust him!” I explained. “I mean, Bobby and I both just charged off, determined to find that tool.”

She looked blank. “And this was funny?”

“You had to be there,” I said weakly.

I told her how we had gotten back at Johnny by getting Mr. Bolt to make us a wooden spike. “Johnny reared back with his hammer and let fly and all you could see was a cloud of sawdust. His eyes were as big as saucers! Then Bobby said, ‘Gol, Johnny, you must be the strongest man in the mine!’ ”

Rita blinked once, then sighed. “And then all three of you laughed over this . . . this prank?”

“Johnny and Bobby did,” I said. “Not me.”

“Uh-huh” was her skeptical response.

After my daily dose of anecdotes, none of which seemed to amuse her much, Rita got down to cases and quizzed me closely on technical matters—such things as the quality of the ties and spikes, whether Johnny was getting a proper level on the track, or how many rails we were putting down each day. “I’ve got everything perfectly mapped out,” she said, gnawing on her lower lip. “All Dwight Strong has to do is follow my list.”

Since she seemed to need reassurance, I told her that all seemed to be going along just fine. Every morning when we got on shift, the hoot-owl boys had stacked fresh ties where we’d left off and provided new kegs of spikes. We were going as fast as we could, which, truth be told, wasn’t all that fast. Bobby and I still had a lot to learn about laying track.

One night, after I’d told her yet another funny story she didn’t bother to laugh at, she asked, “Have you seen your dad? Do you think he knows how well things are going?”

“I haven’t seen him,” I said. “But I’m sure Mr. Strong keeps him up-to-date on how things are going.”

“It would be better if I could brief him personally,” she fumed. She picked through her food. “This has got to go perfectly.”

“I’ll make sure it does,” I told her.

Rita provided me with a smile, the first one in some time. “I’m counting on you,” she said. Then her smile faded. She took a memo pad from her shirt pocket and jotted down a note. “I just had an idea for a simplified application of the Hardy cross-ventilation algorithm,” she said in an urgent tone.

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I kept it to myself. Rita wasn’t a patient teacher. She’d started talking one evening over dessert about a plan she had for pulling pillars to avoid converging zones of pressure and I interrupted her to say I didn’t understand a thing she was saying. She’d put down her fork, muttered something to herself, then refused to talk about it or anything else the rest of the meal. I’d learned my lesson, at least about asking her questions.

After we finished eating, Rita excused herself, saying there was a project back in the drafting room she had to finish. “I’m charting a new approach to multiple face advancement,” she said, picking up her still-unmarred white helmet. “I intend to prove that shuttle loading and conveyor belts can work in tandem to simplify the echelon driving sequence.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I said, though I’d only understood every other word—at best. I watched her from the dining-room window as she walked across the road. She stopped once, got the memo pad out of her pocket, made another note, then kept going. I admired her anew. As soon as I could figure out a plan to make it happen, I was sure it was going to be so much fun to have such a smart and good-looking woman as my girlfriend. Maybe we could even go see a movie together at the Starland Drive-in Theater in Welch. Floretta’s admonition about Rita being a serious woman too busy for a boyfriend drifted up into my brain and just as quickly went out of it again.

I was pondering the door through which Rita had disappeared, when Victor and Ned came up to my table. “We’re heading over to Cinder Bottom again,” Victor said. “Going to get our ashes hauled.”

“Have fun.”

“You got to ease up, boy,” Victor said. “Come on with us.”

“We don’t usually take long,” Ned said. “In and out, that’s us.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, could you loan us forty bucks?” Victor asked.

“No!”

Victor and Ned left, shaking their heads. Floretta came over and swept up my empty plate. “You should have gone with ’em.”

My mouth dropped open. “You think I ought to go to Cinder Bottom?”

“Don’t get persnickety with me, young man. I ain’t saying to go whoring. I just think it would be a good idea for you to keep Victor and Ned company, that’s all. Be good for you to see how silly they act around those girls.”

“Why?”

“It never hurts to look in the mirror even when it ain’t exactly you looking back.”

She had lost me with that one. She shook her head, mumbled something about a boy and his brains and gonads getting all mixed up, and headed back to the kitchen.

Late that night, Ned and Victor returned, clambering up the stairs with exaggerated shushing sounds. I heard them a full five minutes before they thumped up against my door. I threw it open. “What now?”

“We got one for you, Sonny boy,” Ned said, leaning against the doorjamb. His breath almost knocked me down. It smelled like pure Keystone rotgut.

“Her name is Sucrose,” Victor said. His shirt was buttoned one button off all the way down.

“Sucrose?”

“Yeah, sweetest little girl you ever seed. We told Sucrose all about you.”

“Sucrose?”

“Well, hell, she wanted a name that told her customers how sweet she was, but one of the other girls already took Sugar,” Ned said.

“She asked us for help, us being college graduates and all, so we named her,” Victor slurred, though proudly. “We know our chemistry.”

“But Sucrose is an awful name,” I said. “Why didn’t you name her Candy? Or even Cookie?”

Victor frowned. His lower lip started to tremble. “You rat bastard! If you’d have gone with us, that pretty little girl wouldn’t be stuck with that awful name!”

“You really are a lousy friend, Sonny,” Ned said, tearing up. “You know we ain’t creative. We’re engineers! Now poor little Sucrose is gonna hate us her whole hussy career.”

I closed the door in their ruddy, sweaty faces. Shortly afterward, I heard twin thumps in the hall and crawling sounds.

D
URING THE
man-trip ride inside one morning, it occurred to me that Bobby was four years older than me and might, as a result, have a tad more experience with girls. Of course, that wasn’t too difficult. Any experience was pretty much more than I had. Maybe that was what Floretta was getting at, that even an experience in Cinder Bottom was better than nothing.

I decided to question him during lunch. We were sitting on a stack of ties. Floretta had packed me three sandwiches, and I was already worrying they wouldn’t be enough. Fortunately, she’d also thrown in two Twinkies, a banana, an apple, and two boiled eggs with a wax paper packet of salt. The way my stomach growled all the time, I figured I’d need every bit of it to get through to supper. It was occurring to me lately that maybe I had some kind of disease. I’d read about them, where men ate all the time but still faded away to nothing. I’d have gone to see Doc Lassiter, but I was always too hungry to take the time.

“So, Bobby,” I said. “What do you think about Rita?”

Bobby wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a slimy smear of black streaks around his lips. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “She’s a fine-looking woman.”

“But what do you think about her and me—together, I mean.”

“You and Rita?”

“Me and Rita.”

“You really want my opinion?”

“I really do.”

He shrugged. “Not likely. She’s got experience in places you don’t even have places.”

He might as well have slapped me in the face. “What does that have to do with her falling in love with me?” I demanded.

Bobby frowned behind his mask of gob dirt and sweat. He took off his helmet and ran his hand through his sandy hair. “Are you saying she loves you?”

“Not yet,” I said, “but all I need is a plan. I thought maybe you could help me figure one out.”

Bobby slumped against the ties and shook his head. “Love’s not the same as laying track, Sonny. Or building rockets, for that matter. You can’t make it happen by working hard. Forget it and find yourself a girl your own age. That’s my advice.”

Johnny had gone off behind a crib on down the line to eat his lunch. I guess he needed to get away from Bobby and me every so often, don’t ask me why. We heard his footsteps coming back and then the sound of spikes being pulled. “Gaw,” Bobby moaned. “Where does he get his energy?”

I didn’t know. I squashed my sandwiches into my mouth and then stuffed in my Twinkies, too. I’d eat the fruit and eggs when it wasn’t my turn on the hammer.

On the way to the track, Bobby asked, “Are you going to take my advice?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why did you ask me for it?”

“I hoped you’d tell me something I could use.”

“No,” he said. “You hoped I’d tell you something you wanted to hear.”

“I just need a plan.”

“If there was a plan that would win over a woman, every man in the world would pay you good money for a look at it.”

“So I should just quit?” I complained. “That’s your advice? Just give up?”

Bobby stopped and dropped his chin on his chest. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You’re not going to listen, anyway.”

“Boys!” Johnny bawled. “Time’s a-wasting! You say your prayers? Lunch would be the right time for the onliest one
you
know, Bobby! God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food! Haw! Come on, let’s get the lead out!”

Bobby groaned. “He isn’t human,” he said.

“Boys!”

“On our way!” we chorused.

T
HE NEXT
day before we got going on the shift, Johnny drew me aside. “Something I heard in the union meeting last night, Sonny. There’s going to be open testimonies in the Tuck Dillon investigation.”

“What does that mean?”

“Anybody can attend.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“You should come to the union meetings. You might learn something.”

“I meant to come but I fell asleep.”

Johnny nodded tragically. “Jake Mosby was there and made the announcement. He said the decision had been made so that the men would know the mine was still safe.”

“Does that mean my dad will testify in front of God and everybody?”

“It does.”

A flash of anger surged through me. It wasn’t right that Jake should have such power over my dad! “Did he say when the testimonies were going to be held?”

“Nope, but he said where. The Club House parlor.”

That, at least, explained why Floretta had been in a dither that morning. I’d heard her muttering something about “new drapes.”

“Thanks, Johnny.”

“What are you going to do?”

I mulled his question over. “Attend the testimonies, I guess. And then call my mother to tell her what I heard.”

“I wish your mama would come home,” Johnny said. “Don’t seem right in Coalwood without her.”

I agreed with him and said so. But the more the summer wore on, the more I was convinced she never would. She’d painted her fox on the kitchen wall, a declaration of her independence, and headed south. If there was anything that could bring her back, I surely didn’t know what it was.