Sky of Stone (21 page)

Rita raised her face and took a deep, satisfied breath. “We’re almost there. I can smell it!”

I could, too. The air billowing up from the mine below was distinctive, the odor of wet gunpowder, cool and biting and dangerous. It gave me another attack of nerves. “Rita, we’ve got to go back up,” I told her urgently. I fumbled for some way to reach her. “You said one time you wanted a good report from Dad, said it was the main reason you were in Coalwood. This isn’t the way to get it. He’ll cut you off at the neck.”

She gave me a condescending smile. “Oh, Sonny, no he won’t. Your dad will respect what I’ve done. In some ways, I think I understand him better than you do. He’s a pure engineer. He’ll know why I had to fight this superstition and put it to rest, once and for all.”

“Trust me on this,” I begged her. “You’re not going to like what’s about to happen. We’ve got to go up!”

She kept her confident smile. “What’s the worst thing that can happen? We’ll get yelled at, then people will laugh it off.”

“You don’t know Coalwood,” I said miserably. “And you sure don’t know my dad.”

“I bet your mother would understand. From everything I know about her, she’s been fighting the same battle for years.”

I realized that arguing with her was hopeless. This was Rita’s chance and she was taking it. But there was one thing I had to get straight with her. “If we still have jobs after tomorrow, Rita, I’m asking you now—please don’t ever cheat for me again.”

She frowned. “Those Caretta boys are experienced track layers. It wasn’t a fair bet from the beginning. I didn’t cheat for you. I just evened the score a bit.”

“You
did
cheat, Rita. I knew the score before I took the bet. Anything you did to help me isn’t right. Don’t you see that?”

“But you’ll lose, otherwise,” she said. “Surely you don’t want that!”

I gave up. “Just don’t help me anymore, okay?”

Rita gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged as the
man-lift platform dropped into the vast open room that housed the landing at the base of the shaft. Then the boards beneath our feet shuddered once and stopped twenty feet above the bottom gate. “What’s wrong?” Rita demanded, squinting up the shaft at the frozen cables.

“I don’t know.” I looked up as condensed water came down the shaft, splattering on my glasses and misting them up. “This doesn’t usually happen.”

There was no one on the landing. A motor sat there, all ready to carry anyone who needed it back into the mine. Then the bell rang twice and the man-lift started back up the shaft. “Dammit!” Rita snapped.

Rita was silent all the way up, but I could feel her seething. As the cage rose past ground level, I saw the problem.

There stood Victor.

He had on a white shirt, one side of it hanging out, and there were very definite signs of lipstick on his collar. He was more sagging than standing. Wherever he’d been, he’d had a rough night of it, and apparently it had recently gotten rougher. Mr. Caulder came outside and opened the gate. “Sonny, this ain’t right,” he grumbled. “You could have cost me my job.”

Rita stormed off the man-lift. “Victor, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“When I got in, Floretta told me about the call,” he said. “So I went over, saw the drawings gone. I figured out what you did, Rita. You’re not going to get me fired, no way, lady.”

Rita hit him on the chin with her fist so hard he turned around once before falling like a rag doll into the gob. He never even made a sound. I’d never seen a man collapse like that. She stepped over him. “You bastard. Why couldn’t you stay in Keystone with your whore?”

“I guess because I ran out of money,” Victor said, still facedown in the dirt. He made no move to get up.

Rita turned on Mr. Caulder. “Send me down!” she ordered. “Benson needs these drawings! I made them! I have a right to take them!”

“I can’t do that, ma’am,” he said, taking a step back from her.

She looked at me, then shook her head. I thought she was going to kick Victor, but he groaned and maybe she took pity on him, though I doubt it. She turned back to the man-lift. At first, I didn’t realize what she was doing, and then I saw she was going for the steps.

I knew those steps. They scared the bejesus out of me. The first thirty feet of them were made of concrete and were covered with a wet slime. What followed was seven hundred feet of steel steps that went back and forth all the way down to the bottom of the shaft. In some places, there wasn’t even a handrail. The steps were for emergency use only. I couldn’t imagine a situation that would ever get me on those rickety old things.

“Don’t, Rita!” I yelled, but it was too late. She started down the steps and then I heard her boots slip and a thumping sound, then the clatter of her helmet hitting the side of the shaft, then nothing.

I ran to the steps and looked down. To my everlasting relief, Rita was sitting at the bottom of the first landing. I carefully stepped down to her, pressing myself up against the stone wall as far away from the shaft as I could get. “Are you all right?”

“Do I look all right to you?” She got to her feet and looked down the steps.

“Don’t try it,” I told her. “You’ll fall.”

I watched as her shoulders sagged. Then she turned around and climbed past me. I followed, my heart rattling my chest. I saw that Victor had crawled to his feet. “Give me the drawings, Rita,” he said, holding out his hand.

She turned and tossed the bag into the shaft. “You want them, go get them.” She took off her helmet, threw it down, then unbuckled her belt and dropped it into the dirt. Then she walked away, down the hill to the road.

27

A QUESTION FOR MOM

M
R.
C
AULDER,
Victor, and I watched Rita go. Mr. Caulder’s jaw was unhinged from all that he’d seen, and Victor was rubbing his chin from Rita’s blow. I was the first one to speak, mainly because I could. “I hope you boys will keep all this to yourself,” I said.

Mr. Caulder closed his mouth, chewed a bit on his tobacco cud, then spat. “I wouldn’t even know what to say,” he allowed. “Craziest thing I ever seen. Naw, I’m not telling nobody.”

“Same here,” Victor said, tucking in his shirt. “I’d never live it down. But you’d better talk to Floretta. She fielded the phone calls.”

Victor was right, one of the few times I’d ever known a junior engineer to figure something out pretty much on his own. Strapping on his battery, he headed for the man-lift while Mr. Caulder went back into the hoisthouse to lower him down. Victor would have to scramble around in the mud under the man-lift, but I thought he’d find Rita’s bag without too much problem.

I looked around the grounds in the darkness and then at my watch, illuminated by the tipple lights. It was nearly three
A.M.
, about the same time Dad and Tuck had gathered in front of the man-lift on the night Tuck had been killed. I took a moment to imagine what it must have been like that night. Low clouds and spitting rain were surely left over from the great storm that had just swept through the county. The tipple would have been dripping water, a constant staccato of drops plopping onto the packed gob below, and there would have been steam caused by the warm air rising from the shaft, curling into the sky. In the distance, there must have been the low rumble of thunder and flashes of far-off lightning as the storm pounded up through Mingo and Logan counties. It would have been eerie, a place filled with shadows, and frightening.

But then I thought—no, neither Dad nor Tuck would have thought that way. They were professional mining supervisors. Shadows wouldn’t bother them, and there would have been no foreboding, just a job to do.

I turned and saw the glow of the Tipple Row streetlights that illuminated our house. It was then I thought—
Mom was home that night!
It was the first time that had occurred to me. It was nothing new to her to have the black phone ring in the middle of the night. That was, after all, the reason she had a separate bedroom. But I’d never believed she could sleep through Dad getting up at all hours. Often, when we’d lived under the same roof, I would hear her pull her blinds up in her bedroom to watch Dad heading in the dark to the mine. Now I wondered what Mom had seen or heard that night, or what Dad might have told her. Had anybody even asked her?

When Mr. Caulder came out of the hoisthouse, he walked over to stand beside me. I was still studying the Captain’s house, the house where my dad now slept. Or was he lying awake, wondering what was coming at him down the track?

my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
—just emptys cuming back.

Maybe, I thought, they aren’t going to be empty this time, but filled with broken dreams,
his
dreams. I found myself troubled, more than I might have believed, over that concept. I had always spent so much time worrying about
my
dreams. But what about Dad’s dreams? Weren’t they as important as mine? What right did I have to think otherwise?

“Crazy times, Sonny,” Mr. Caulder said, interrupting my churning mind.

A question came, nearly unbidden. “Mr. Caulder, when you gave your testimony, did you leave anything out?”

“Not that I can think of,” he said. “God knows I been asked enough about that night. Now, don’t
you
start!”

I ignored his protest. I’d always known Mr. Caulder to be a man who liked to talk. “Tell me what happened again.”

Mr. Caulder hemmed and hawed a bit, but I could tell he was going to get to it, so I waited him out. “Tuck and your dad came up and I issued them their lamps,” he said finally. “Then I saw them put their tags on the board. It warn’t nothing unusual.”

“Did they say anything?”

“Just that they were going to go down to 10 West and check for methane before the day shift arrived.”

“Nothing else?”

“Well, I heard your dad talk about where they were going to park the motor and then walk in. I guess Tuck wasn’t listening. That’s what got him, driving that locomotive into the fire damp.”

“Do you have any idea why he would do that?”

Mr. Caulder shook his head. “I don’t know, Sonny. I’m not an inside man. Most men say Tuck probably figured the gas buildup was near the face, rather than back in the drift. That’s usually the case. He just probably wanted to get a little closer so he didn’t have to walk so far. He bet his life on it and lost.”

“You believe that?”

Mr. Caulder pursed his lips, then slowly shook his head. “Not really.”

“What happened after you heard Dad and Tuck talking?”

He shrugged. “I went in the hoisthouse, waited for the bell, and then let them down.” He paused, squinting into the darkness. “Or I thought I had. When I came out, they were both gone, so I figured they were down there. Your dad’s tag was on the board, so I was sure of it.”

“Dad didn’t go in the mine, but he left his tag on the board?”

Mr. Caulder nodded. “Yep. I noticed it when he arrived with Mr. Nordman and Doc Lassiter a couple of hours later. His tag was still hanging there—number thirteen, who could forget it?”

“Did you say anything to him about it?”

“I started to but then I thought I’d better not. Your daddy ain’t one to mess around with. I figured he’d just forgot it after he’d decided not to go down in the mine.”

“How about his helmet lamp?”

Mr. Caulder thought it over. “Nobody ever asked me that. He didn’t leave it on the counter that night. I guess he took it with him when he left.”

“He took mine property with him? Doesn’t sound like my dad.”

“Naw, it don’t,” he said, thoughtfully munching on his chaw. “It surely don’t.”

My mind was clicking along. I could sense I was close to something even though I didn’t have a clue what it was. “How long were you in the hoisthouse before you heard the man-lift bell?”

Mr. Caulder ran his hand up under his helmet and gave his head a good scratch. He spat a stream of tobacco juice. “It was a good, long time. I was about to come out and ask what was going on. Then I heard the bell. Maybe ten minutes.”

There was nothing else Mr. Caulder could think to tell me and I had run out of questions, so I thanked him kindly, asked him again to keep what Rita and I had done to himself, and then walked back to the Club House. Along the way, I tried to let all the night’s events sink in. It had been a peculiar and eventful one, that much was for certain.

In the foyer, I halfway considered going up and knocking on Rita’s door and seeing if maybe she’d want to talk. But good sense somehow got the upper hand, and I went inside the parlor instead. I couldn’t sleep, not after all that had happened, and anyway, I wanted to chew a bit more on what Mr. Caulder had told me. I sat on the couch, and that’s where Floretta found me, fast asleep, a couple of hours later.

“Miss Rita done told me all what happened when she came back,” she said when I told her where I’d been. “If I’d only known, I’d of never told Victor about that call. And no, I won’t be telling a soul. It’s too sad, breaks my heart, for that woman. She tries so hard and all she gets is the back of the company’s hand. Now get on upstairs and get yourself ready to work. You got some track to lay, young man, and I got ten dollars on you to do it faster than those boys from Caretta.”

“You put a bet down?”

She looked proud. “Walked up to John Eye’s myself and handed him a ten-dollar bill, said put it on my boy! Did you know Mr. Alexander Hamilton himself is on that bill?”

I didn’t, which surprised me. It was a rare gap in my Coalwood education. “I haven’t seen many ten-dollar bills in my life, now that I think on it.”

Satisfaction crossed her face. She was going to get to teach me something. “The reason for that is because the coal companies like to pay in two-dollar bills. That way all the businessmen over in Welch know where the power comes from in this county when they see old Tom Jefferson staring back at them. I heard tell there’s more two-
dollar bills in McDowell County than anywhere in the whole country. But a ten-dollar bill? Rare as a grin on a blue jay.”

I absorbed her history, sociology, and ornithology lesson and then said, “I hope you don’t lose your money, Floretta.”

She waved my concern away. “I already won more from John Eye Blevins than he’ll ever win from me. I bet him twenty dollars Cecil Underwood would be governor back in 1956. Just because Cecil was a Republican, the odds were about a hundred to one. I still ain’t got around to spending all the cash money I made!”

A
FTER BREAKFAST
, I tried to call Mom but got no answer. In the evening I tried again, still with no luck. Finally, I called her contractor’s office and was lucky to get the secretary just as she was locking up. I had one question I needed answered and begged that the work crew might carry it to Mom. The secretary agreed and wrote it down:

When did Dad come home the night Tuck got killed?

Rita didn’t come to supper the next night, nor the next. I finally got up the nerve to go into the kitchen and ask Floretta about her. “She asked if she could have her supper in her room for a while, Sonny,” she told me. “She’s had it with all you men right now.”

Even though I’d come to a new understanding of Rita, I still found my heart wasn’t satisfied. I wanted her to know how much I cared but I also sensed it wasn’t the time to do anything but wait. That night, I put aside my worrying about Rita, and Dad’s trial, and worked on the time study instead. One thing I could see right off the bat was that Johnny was taking a lot of time measuring levels and making adjustments. Bobby and I were too often idle waiting for him to finish. I doubted the Caretta crew was doing as much measuring, but I also doubted if I could talk Johnny into doing less. He was a stickler for it.

But I spotted some other things that would help us go faster. We could position the new ties so they’d be ready to go while Johnny was measuring and we could also put the spikes where they were needed in advance, saving us time going back and forth to the kegs. I worked out a few more things—combining work, prepositioning our supplies—all designed to keep us fully occupied with as little slack time as possible. I presented my work to Bobby and Johnny on the man-trip as we rode in to work.

“First-rate work, Sonny,” Bobby said. He got a stubby pencil out of his shirt pocket and worked on the sheets some more. “How about we get ahead by taking off the fishplates from three tracks at once? That way instead of needing the wrench about twelve times a day, we’d only need it maybe a half dozen.”

I considered his suggestion. “Yes,” I said, and Bobby lit up like a thousand-watt bulb.

I handed over my work to Johnny. He studied it. “You college boys,” he said, but the way he said it was almost proud.

All day, we tried our new efficiencies. They appeared to be working. I sensed we were coming together even more as a team, too. When Bobby was on a pee break, Johnny said, “Your dad would be proud of your work.”

“I doubt it,” I replied sadly.

“Why do you say such a thing?”

I shrugged. “How many times have you ever heard him brag on me, Johnny? But how about Jim?” I mimicked Dad. “
My boy is the best football player in this state!
I bet a lot of people who know Dad would be surprised to learn he has two sons.”

Johnny swung his hammer, knocked in a spike with three solid blows. “Bragging don’t measure the way your father feels about you,” he said, flipping the hammer over in his hand with the ease of a majorette tossing a baton.

“Then what does?”

Johnny pounded another spike home. “That he gave you to me.”

“Because he thought you’d run me off!”

“Is that what you think?”

“That’s what
you
said.”

“I know better now.” The beam of light from his helmet filled my eyes. “He gave you to me because he knew I’d make you work harder than you’d ever worked in your life. He gave you to me, not because he thought you’d quit.” His light flashed away. “But because he knew you wouldn’t.” His hammer fell, driving the spike deep into the tie. “Praise God!”

After our shift, aboard the man-trip, I kept thinking about what Johnny had said:
Because he knew you wouldn’t.
I savored those words. And I hoped they were true.

When we stepped off the man-lift, we looked on the chalkboard and saw the Caretta team had laid eight sections of track that day. Johnny got the chalk, paused dramatically while the other miners pressed around us, then wrote our number down—nine.

For the first time, we’d beaten Garrett and his football boys.

“We’re on our way,” Bobby said.

“Johnny’s team,” I said.

Johnny grinned, then ducked his head. “Glory be,” he offered while those men who’d bet on us slapped us on our backs.

When I got back to the Club House, I found a message tacked to my door. It was written down by Floretta but it was from my mom. At first I didn’t understand it, but then I remembered my question to her. When had Dad come home the night Tuck was killed?

It was a typical Elsie Hickam answer, short and to the point. In its entirety, it read:

He didn’t.