Sky of Stone (23 page)

“Damn!” I blurted.

“Don’t cuss in front of me, young man,” Floretta snapped.

“I’m sorry.”

She inspected me. “You going to put your boots on or are you going to lay track in your bare feet?”

I rushed back upstairs to collect my boots. Along the way, I reflected I had always been taught that to discover a truth was an end in itself, that only goodness and virtue could result. But now, for the first time in the entire history of my life, I had discovered a truth, or thought I had, and even though I knew it was probably an important one, I didn’t have a clue as to what it meant.

Was it possible,
I wondered,
that there were truths that meant nothing?

Questions, answers, lies, truth: In Coalwood, it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other.

30

COALWOOD BUSINESS

O
N MY
march up the road to the mine that morning, I saw Mrs. Dooley at the fence and went over to have a word. “Did Doc Hale set Mr. Dooley’s arm?” I asked.

She took a drag on her cigarette and regarded me with tight eyes. “Yes,” she said, blowing smoke above my head.

“Why?”

“Doc Lassiter was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why ask?”

I voiced the suspicions that had been slowly forming in my mind. “Did somebody deliberately hurt Mr. Dooley? Is that why you went to Doc Hale? Because he would keep it quiet, where Doc Lassiter would make a report?”

“All this is Coalwood business, Sonny,” she answered. “Let the adults handle it.”

“Did somebody hurt Nate?”

“Coalwood business.”

“Are you afraid of the man who hurt him?”

“Coalwood business.”

“My dad told me the same thing yesterday about his trial.”

“Then you should listen to him,” she said, and left the fence and went inside.

On one of our runs to pick up a tie, I told Bobby of my suspicions. “Coalwood people have always looked at Doc Hale as the emergency backup to Doc Lassiter,” he said. “He was probably out on a call and Mrs. Dooley just naturally went where she could.”

“Then why didn’t she just tell me that?” I said, picking up one end of the tie.

“Ask Doc Hale,” Bobby said, picking up the other end.

“He’s gone to Florida,” I said as we raced back, ducking the low roof.

“Okay. Ask Doc Lassiter,” Bobby said, grunting as he nearly tripped in the gob. “I’m sure he knows what happened.”

“I did the night we got sworn into the union,” I answered, wincing as a splinter from the tie jabbed through my glove. “He said he didn’t do it, then walked away. Anyway, he’s out of town until after miners’ vacation.”

We threw the tie down and stood for a moment, panting. “Then I’d say you’re out of luck,” Bobby observed succinctly.

“I guess I am,” I agreed, taking my glove off and sucking on my wounded finger. The splinter was still in it. I nipped it with my teeth and drew it out. “But I don’t like it,” I said, then spat the bloody splinter out. “God bless it, that hurt!”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in the mine!” Johnny yelled from down the track where he was working to level the new ties. “Stop jawing and get to work!”

We picked up our pry bars and starting popping out spikes. “You’re lucky I’m around this summer to help you through all your problems,” Bobby said amid the squawk of the spikes being drawn.

“It’s kind of funny,” I said, “but I’m trying to figure out how you’ve helped me, and I’m blamed if I can come up with anything.”

We pushed a rail off the old ties into the gob. “How about we work on your softball skills this weekend?” Bobby asked.

“Maybe.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun?” I asked. “What’s that? I’m not allowed to have any fun this summer.”

Johnny came over. “You boys going to talk or work?”

“Johnny, what do you know about Nate Dooley’s broken wrist?”

“I haven’t heard anything about it, one way or the other.”

“Are you sure? Nothing at all? With all the gossip—”

“I don’t listen to no gossip,” Johnny snapped. “Goldie tries to tell it to me and I just say, Woman, that ain’t none of our affair. Me and my college boys got a bet to win!”

Bobby and I caught each other’s eye and burst out laughing. We were so tired, we’d turned giddy. It didn’t have to make sense. Johnny threw his head back and laughed, too. “Keep going, boys! We’ll lick those rascals yet!”

When we came outside that day, we looked on the board and found the Caretta boys had beaten us again by one rail. Bobby saw fit to blame it on me. “I saw you slack off once or twice,” he said.

“When was that?”

“You took too long to pee.”

“I took the time I needed. Was I supposed to pee in my pants?”

“No, but you could stop being so shy. You must go halfway to Bradshaw. Just go behind a crib or something and pee.”

Our argument had gathered a little crowd. When I looked up, I was surprised to see Dad among them. “We Hickams have always had bashful bladders,” he said before a foreman grabbed him for a word.

I watched him go. “
We
Hickams?” At least Dad still saw me as a member of the family, even though the family trait he’d recognized wasn’t one I was particularly proud of. When I focused back on Bobby and the miners around the board, I found they were still debating my urological situation. “I’ll pee closer in,” I promised. Anything to make them stop talking about it.

T
HAT NIGHT,
I sat at my table and tried to concentrate on the results of my time study. I’d worked it as far as I knew how to do. If there were any more efficiencies that could be squeezed out, I couldn’t see them. The Caretta team was just bigger, better, and stronger. We were going to lose the bet. It was one of those inevitable mathematical certainties.

But then, I thought, there was nothing about Coalwood that was mathematical or certain. When I’d been a rocket boy, Quentin, the brains of the outfit, had come up with something he called a body of knowledge. It was a crude form of the scientific method where everything we did determined our next steps. Remembering how we’d approached problems back then, I tapped my pencil on the paper, making a number of tiny dots. I looked at the dots, then drew lines connecting them. The resulting jagged formation didn’t make any sense, but neither did some of the things I knew and didn’t know.

My intellectual curiosity, the one Jake had challenged me to rediscover, was taking hold about Dad’s trial, about Nate Dooley, about the secrets in Coalwood. I’d always been curious about things. Mom said more than once my tendency toward it was one of my major problems. She had often reminded me that curiosity killed the cat, and I had just as often reminded her that satisfaction had brought it back. It was curiosity that had gotten me stranded in the attic of the old Community Building when it was being torn down. I was eight years old. Jackie Likens, Bobby’s younger brother, convinced me there was a treasure of navy silver up there that had been hidden by Harry Truman’s sailors when they’d moved out. We built ourselves a pyramid of boards and boxes and climbed up it into the attic. There we discovered not silver but about a million startled bats, most of which did a dance in our hair before flinging themselves out through a broken window. Then our rickety pyramid collapsed and we were trapped. It took the entire mine rescue team plus my dad to rescue us. When Mom finally gathered me in her arms, she said, “Sonny, you keep this kind of thing up and you’re going to get yourself killed someday.”

Dad had suggested, since he’d almost been hit in the head by a collapsing wall of bricks during the rescue, that maybe the proper time for my death was more or less immediate. What was scary was that Mom actually seemed to consider the wisdom of his suggestion.

Curious Sonny, however, was still alive and well. I contemplated my dots and jagged lines.
What doesn’t make sense?

I turned the time study over and wrote my questions down on its back. Maybe by looking at them, I could see something I’d missed. I wrote:

Why didn’t Dad go inside with Tuck?
Where did Dad go instead?

Then I wrote down the other thing I was curious about:

Who broke Nate’s wrist?

Then I added into the equation my other major mystery:

What should I do about Rita?

I hadn’t caught sight of Rita since the night I’d seen her talking to Jake. She was still taking all her meals in her room, as far as I knew, and working long into the night at the engineering office. Jake had left town. Floretta said he’d gone back to Ohio. “He told me he didn’t want to go but he had a meeting he needed to attend.”

“Did he say what kind?”

“Something that’s supposed to help him keep from drinking is what he said.”

Jake had always been a drinker. In fact, the first time I’d seen him, I had to wake him up to get him off the floor since he was sloshed from John Eye’s stuff. I was delivering the morning
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
at the time, and there I’d found him, lying halfway in and halfway out of his room, his outstretched hand still holding an empty moonshine jar. Jake had kept himself in trouble his entire stay as a junior engineer in Coalwood because of his drinking. He’d even dated Miss Riley for a while, but the story I heard was she said it was the drink or her and he had apparently decided the wrong way. It was welcome news that Jake had decided to do something about it. I was glad for him, but I was still angry for what it looked like he was trying to do to Dad. Mixed emotions were the only kind I got to have, so it seemed.

I went back to my list and stared at it, my eyes flicking from one question to the next. I kept looking and thinking until I couldn’t stand to look and think anymore. Finally, I decided to take a chance. I looked up at the ceiling and mumbled a prayer.

Dear Lord, help me see what can’t be seen. Dear Lord, let me know . . .

“Coalwood business,” I said out loud to the ceiling and everything above it.

It was done, the request made. I sat back and waited, trying not to worry, while the angel that caught it got in the long queue to heaven’s throne.

31

KITCHEN TALK

I
PACKED
a duffel bag, left a note on Floretta’s door to let her know where I’d be, and walked up to the Likens’s house for my weekend of softball training camp. Mr. and Mrs. Likens greeted me enthusiastically. “It’s going to be so much fun having you, Sonny,” Mrs. Likens said. “I’ve been looking forward to spending some time with you,” Mr. Likens added. I think they actually meant it. They were just nice people.

Bobby and his brother, Jackie, came to the breakfast table still bleary-eyed and in their pajamas. Jackie and I were nearly the same age, although I’d started school a year earlier. He had always been one of my favorite kids in Coalwood, even though he’d almost gotten us killed in our navy silver-hunting caper. He had an easygoing attitude about nearly everything, and was always quick with a joke. He was also the only boy I knew who could sing “The Witch Doctor” song from end to end without missing a word, which wasn’t easy considering you had to know the whole
Ooo-eee-ooo-ahh-ahh-ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang
chorus.

Jackie was tall and slim, whereas his older brother was built like a fireplug. Despite their age and physical differences, though, it was easy to tell the brothers were friends. They came to the table hitting each other on the shoulder, trying to trip each other, and arguing about this and that. I envied them. Jim and I did all those things, but when we did them, we were serious, and sometimes somebody, usually me, got hurt.

“Jackie’s been standing on his head all morning,” Bobby reported.

“How come?” I asked.

He looked at his brother admiringly. “Just because he can, I guess.”

Jackie demonstrated his prowess and proceeded to walk on his hands all around the kitchen. “Jackie, come to eat, dear,” Mrs. Likens said.

Mrs. Likens dished up scrambled eggs and bacon. She was a pretty woman with high cheekbones, a set jaw, and an intelligent gleam in her eye. Many a girl had felt her wrath in home ec class for inattention or burnt apple pie. She acted more or less like the assistant principal at the school. I liked her mostly because one time she’d shown me how to slide down the playground slide using a sheet of wax paper. I’d slid so fast I’d sailed six feet past the end of the slide right into a mud puddle.

Mr. Likens sat at the head of the table, looking like a benevolent bulldog. He was a wide-shouldered man with twinkling blue eyes and a quick smile. “Well, Sonny,” he said, “been swimming much this summer?”

I had to confess I hadn’t. Mr. Likens had taught me how to swim, along with nearly all the other boys and girls in Coalwood. Every summer, during his vacation from Coalwood school principal duties, he drove a company-provided bus and twice a week reconnoitered the town, stopping to pick up any kid standing alongside the road with a rolled-up towel. Then he took us across Welch Mountain to the Linkous Park pool. I’d even gotten my Red Cross Junior Lifesaver’s certificate from Mr. Likens, a prized possession.

“You’re a good swimmer, Sonny,” he said, “one of the best I ever taught. I hope you don’t give up on it. Maybe you can be a scuba diver, too. You liked being underwater a lot, I remember.”

“
Sea Hunt
is my favorite program,” I said.

“There you go. I predict you will someday be a wonderful scuba diver.”

“So I understand you’ve decided to be an engineer
and
a writer,” Mrs. Likens said, sitting down at the table. Jackie had jumped up and helped her with her chair. “Thank you, dear,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be a good one, writer or engineer,” she said formally. “After all, you did receive the bulk of your education from our school.” She smiled lovingly at her husband, and I thought again how much I envied her family. They all just seemed to
like
each other. It was a remarkable thing to see.

After breakfast, I stowed my duffel bag in the Likens’s spare bedroom. Bobby came in behind me. “I’m sure glad you came, Sonny.”

“I decided eight hours a day with you Monday through Friday just wasn’t enough,” I replied. It was an attempt at humor, which failed even with me.

He nodded as if he really believed me, which he probably did. “If you like, we can talk over all your problems while we practice.”

“Let’s just concentrate on softball. If you and your dad can get me up a notch from awful, maybe I won’t embarrass myself too much.”

“You’re going to do fine.”

A limerick I’d just made up popped into my head. “There was a young man named Sonny. Everybody in
Coalwood thought he was funny. Bobby Likens said, Hey, I’ll teach you to play, and then we lost all of our money.”

“Very amusing,” he said. “Have you decided to become a poet, too? Be careful. Poets commit suicide.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. “They just don’t get published. But they get to live in New York City in garrets and wear black and drink lots of coffee and make out with lots of girls who also wear black, don’t ask me why.”

“You don’t even know what a garret is,” he said. “You read that in some book.”

It was true, although I couldn’t remember which one. “You hate it when I take up for myself, don’t you?” I parried.

“No, I hate it when you kid yourself,” he replied, and then left me to make up my own bed in more ways than one.

All weekend, I practiced softball with Bobby, Jackie, and Mr. Likens on the ball field in front of Little Richard’s church. The Reverend came out once to watch us and, of course, applauded me even though I was terrible. I couldn’t catch the ball and I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with my bat, either.

During a break, Mr. Likens and I sat down with the Reverend on the stoop of his church while Bobby and Jackie kept tossing the ball back and forth. Little said he had been asked to give the invocation at the Fourth of July celebration. “You’ll do a grand job,” Mr. Likens told the Reverend.

“It is very important that I do, sir,” he replied.

“What are you going to talk about, Reverend?” I asked politely.

“Well, Sonny, that’s been hard to figure,” he said. “At first, I thought I’d talk a bit about Coalwood, ponder a bit on all the goodness we have here. It is my belief that God just likes Coalwood, and the life we’ve built for ourselves here, and our mountains and hollows, too. But then I thought that sounded puffed up, and now I’m down a different track. As a matter of fact, Mr. Likens, I must confess my prayer has something to do with your profession.”

Mr. Likens took off his hat and used a bandanna to wipe the sweat from his nearly bald pate. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“I would, indeed, sir.”

I left them to their conversation and went back to dropping balls and swinging at air with my bat. Every so often, though, I was catching one, and hitting one, too.
Keep your eye on the ball, Sonny.
That’s what Bobby, Jackie, and Mr. Likens kept saying, over and over.
Keep your eye on the ball.
That seemed to be the main thing to remember. Everything else was just details.

On Sunday evening, Floretta met me in the parlor of the Club House when I came back from my training. “Mrs. Likens called me to say you were on your way back here. Did you have a good time? I’ve been worried about you all weekend.”

“The Likens house is only two hundred yards up the road,” I pointed out. “Why didn’t you just walk up to see me?”

“Even a mother eagle has to let her babies fly.”

“I didn’t fly very much, just practiced softball.”

“Your mama called.”

“Oh?”

Floretta gave me a look. “I hate to tell you.”

I shrugged. “Go on. I can take it.”

“She said she didn’t know if you were planning on coming to Myrtle Beach for miners’ vacation, but if you were, not to do it. She said for you to stay right here. Your dad’s coming to see her and your mama said she’d like some time with him by herself.”

My feelings were a bit wounded, but I could see why Mom would want it that way. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll stick around town, help the Dooleys, play with the dogs, help you, too, if you need it.”

Floretta startled me with a hug, nearly squeezing the air out of me. “Sometimes I’m so proud of you, Sonny Hickam! How about some blackberry pie? I picked the berries myself.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Floretta led the way into her kitchen, where I proceeded to chow down on her wonderful pie, hot out of the oven. I was working on my third slice when Tag Farmer strolled in. He nodded to me, then said, “Got some bad news for you, Floretta. No fireworks on the Fourth of July.”

“Why not?”

“Because it hasn’t rained in about a month,” he said, shoveling pie onto a saucer. “I just got the paperwork. State forestry department says no fireworks this year. I know you’ve got a closet full of Roman candles so thought I’d come tell you, before I have to arrest you.”

“Well, shoot,” she said. Then she squinted at him. “You came all the way down here to warn me off my Roman candles? My pies wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, hmmm?”

Tag chuckled and Floretta got busy elsewhere, leaving me and the constable together. It occurred to me that maybe Tag would know the answer to at least one of my questions. I laid it on him. “Tag, how did Nate Dooley break his wrist?”

Tag looked around. “Wonder if Floretta’s got any ice cream?”

“About a hundred gallons in the freezer there,” I said, pointing at the big chest along the kitchen wall.

Tag dug into it and lifted out a big carton of French vanilla. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

He ladled it on, one scoop, then two, then three. “Enough?”

“Doc Lassiter didn’t set Nate’s bone,” I said.

“Do tell.”

“I think it was Doc Hale.”

Tag put the ice cream away. “Doc Hale’s been known to set a few bones when Doc Lassiter’s out somewhere.”

“So where was Doc Lassiter?”

Tag shrugged. “Probably up Snakeroot Hollow or Mudhole or somewhere. What’s all this, anyhow?”

I didn’t see any harm in telling him my suspicions. “I think somebody broke Mr. Dooley’s wrist and Mrs. Dooley’s scared to tell who it was.”

Tag stopped eating, raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. A hunch, maybe.”

“What difference would it make if Doc Lassiter or Doc Hale set the bone?”

“I’m not sure,” I had to admit.

Tag wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Well, Sonny, I’m sure not going to ignore a hunch by a college boy. I’ll swing by and have a talk with Mrs. Dooley right
away.”

I peered at him. His broad face was open and sincere. That’s how I knew he was lying. “Thank you,” I said.

“You can count on me,” he said, setting his empty dish in the sink and running some water over it. “Floretta,” he called, “you still make the best blackberry pie in McDowell County!”

Floretta’s distant voice (it was a big kitchen) answered, “Thank you, Tag, honey. Go on now and catch yourself some delinquents.”

He laughed. “God knows there’s a bunch of ’em in this town.”

Tag clapped me on my shoulder and left. I watched the kitchen door flap shut behind him. It went back and forth on its spring, back and forth again, then closed tight. It was, I reflected, just like the conversation I’d had with the constable.