The Coalwood Way (9 page)

Startled, he frowned at me. “Who made you king?”

“We’re already late,” I muttered.

Sherman put down his screwdriver. “Sonny, I’m working as fast as I can. Now, unless you want to get in here and do it yourself, go away.”

Sherman had taken my measure. Roy Lee and Billy were at the pad, checking the launch rod. Billy was whistling. He always seemed to have a good time at the Cape. I walked over and, without a word, knelt to inspect the wires leading into the rocket. There was a heating element inside, a piece of Nichrome wire I’d borrowed from my mother’s new turkey roaster. As far as I could tell, it had been inserted properly. I stood up and slapped the black slack dust off my knees. Roy Lee and Billy were looking at me. “You don’t trust us?” Billy asked.

“I’m just inspecting,” I said. “That’s the way they do it at Cape Canaveral.”

“How do you know how they do it?” Billy snapped, his mood turned as sour as mine.

I was puzzled. I wasn’t used to Billy griping. In fact, I couldn’t remember Billy Rose ever being anything but agreeable. “What’s stuck in your craw?” I asked.

Billy gave me a sharp look. “What’s stuck in yours?” The color had risen in his face.

We stared at each other. I couldn’t figure out if I was picking a fight with Billy or he was picking one with me. We were both in an odd mood, that much was certain. I blinked first. “Sorry,” I grumbled. “Forget it.” I stalked away and fumed by the blockhouse until Sherman announced the ignition system was ready. Then I got O’Dell’s report that the theodolites were set up. Roy Lee and Billy slouched back from the pad and hunkered down in the blockhouse. I gave a short countdown and pushed the launch button. At least that was something I could do right.
Auk XXII-F
jumped off the pad in a burst of fire and smoke and whistled aloft, a dot against the sky. I’d packed in some high-sulfur propellant at the top of the casement, and, as designed, the rocket began to smoke heavily, allowing us to track it easier. Billy called out that the Auk was wobbling a bit, but the new clamped-on fin design I’d come up with was apparently doing its job. The rocket landed downrange on the slack, and we ran off to begin the inspection process. O’Dell called out the time, and after a mental calculation I determined the rocket had not performed up to snuff. After it cooled, Quentin put his eye up to the nozzle end. “Erosion,” he groaned.

He was right. The higher-carbon steel hadn’t helped a bit. We all stood around looking at it. I couldn’t think of a thing to do to solve the problem.

Finally, Roy Lee said, “Why don’t we line the nozzle with some kind of clay or something?”

Quentin stared at him. “You mean, of course, a ceramic of some kind,” Quentin said. “A very good idea, Roy Lee, a very good idea, indeed, prodigious and rigorous.”

Roy Lee jammed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the slack. “Well, I just thought . . .”

Quentin looked at him suspiciously. “You came up with this on your own?”

Roy Lee shrugged. “Well, sure . . .”

“Will wonders never cease?” Quentin asked the group at large.

All the other boys nodded their heads, and O’Dell socked Roy Lee in the shoulder, the ultimate compliment. “Oh, hell, guys,” Roy Lee said.

“Not bad for the Big Creek lovemaster,” I said, giving him a smile. I agreed it was a really good idea, although I had no clue how to do it.

“I shall put on my thinking cap,” Quentin said. “It will require rigorous thought.”

By the time I got back uprange, Ginger and her parents were in their Buick, just pulling out. Roy Lee caught me looking longingly her way. “Melba June Monroe,” he said.

I saw Billy coming up the slack, carrying Quentin’s theodolite and his telephone wire around his shoulder. Quentin was crouched by the rocket, his chin in his hands. I supposed his “rigorous thought” had begun. Either that or he was using it as an excuse to get Billy to carry his stuff. I crossed the slack to intercept Billy. “Hey, if I said something wrong, I apologize.”

“You didn’t say anything wrong,” he said. He kept adjusting the wire on his shoulder and wouldn’t look at me.

“All I meant—”

Billy walked past me. “Sonny, just leave it alone, okay? Just leave it alone!”

AT the supper table that night, Dad chewed his corn bread and kept looking at Mom out of the corner of his eye. I knew he had something to say and I think she knew it, too, but she wasn’t about to make it easy for him by asking him what it was. Finally, he cleared his throat, then took another drink of milk. “Well, Elsie, I got a call from Ohio today,” he said.

She sipped her coffee. “Do tell.”

He shifted uneasily in his chair and cleared his throat again. “Yes, well. You see, they’re on an economy wave this year as you already know and . . .” His mouth stayed open but his lips were moving as if he were having trouble wrapping them around what he had to say. Mom looked at him, her eyebrows raised. “I’ve been ordered to stop underwriting all nonmining activities.”

Mom waited. When he didn’t say anything more, she asked “Such as . . .?”

He took a deep breath. “The Christmas Pageant, for starters.”

Mom slowly put her cup down. It landed in her saucer with a soft clinking sound. “What?”

Dad’s lips went flat. “I’m sorry.”

Mom sat back in her chair. “Homer, this isn’t right. You know how everybody looks forward to the pageant.”

Dad said, “I fought this decision, Elsie, but they said if I wanted money for the Christmas Pageant, all I had to do was cut off a couple more miners. They knew I wouldn’t do that.”

Both my parents fell silent while I reflected on how I’d hoped that the Christmas Pageant would get canceled. I’d gotten my wish and it shamed me.

Later that night, while I was studying, Mom opened the door unannounced and came in and sat on my bed. She had Chipper on her shoulder. The little rodent jumped off and swung on the window curtains, stirring the interest of Daisy Mae. She moved underneath and got ready to pounce just in case he lost his grip. He spotted her and moved to the precise spot that was just out of her reach, no matter how hard she jumped. One of her ears went down, a sign of frustration. Chipper giggled. Frustration of all living things save my mother was his ultimate game.

I turned from my books to see what Mom wanted. She seemed to be weighing what she had come to say. That made me pretty nervous. I started going through all the things she could have possibly caught me on. I was pretty sure she still hadn’t tried out the turkey roaster Dad had bought her for her birthday. On the sly, I’d pretty much stripped out its guts for our rocket-ignition system. I figured there’d be a problem over that around Thanksgiving time, but I’d worry about that then. And then there was that garden spade she’d bought down at the Big Store to use on her rose bushes. I’d taken it down to the Cape a month or so ago to use to dig out our rockets when they buried themselves in soft ground. I figured I had until spring before she missed it. Then there was . . . “Sonny, let’s talk,” she said, interrupting my criminal litany. “I know we don’t do much of that in this house, but I need to talk to somebody and I guess you’re it.”

It was about the last thing I expected. “Ma’am?”

“Just listen to me, okay?”

I nodded. What else could I do?

“Do you remember how we lived before your dad took the Captain’s job?”

I did, pretty much. It had only been about five years ago. “Was it any different than now?” I asked. Answering one of Mom’s questions with a question was sometimes the safest thing for me to do. Sometimes I could get her way off track that way. But not this time.

“Maybe not for you,” she said. “But do you remember the women who used to come to the house? Louise, Virgie, Rodie, Naomi, Charlotte? A bunch of women. They were all my friends. How many of them come to see me now?”

I gave it some thought. “Sometimes Mrs. Keneda comes,” I said.

“Naomi’s the only one,” she agreed. “But not the rest. And you know why? It’s because of who your father is. Either the other women are mad at him because of something he’s done at the mine, or they’re afraid somebody’s going to accuse them of playing favorites for their husbands. Since your dad took the Captain’s job, I’ve lost almost all of my old friends, Sonny, and that’s the truth of it.”

I noticed that her eyes had taken on nearly the same expression they had when I’d looked into them at the broken-down float. But it was more than despair. I could see that now. There was loss there, too. I had been with my mother, Mrs. Elsie Gardener Lavender Hickam, nearly every day for going on seventeen years. I’d seen her under almost every situation there was. I’d seen her happy and I’d seen her sad. I’d seen her mad, too, and grieving. I knew her every look and every move. She could crook a finger and I knew what it meant. “I don’t blame your dad,” she went on. “It was right for him to climb as high as he could go. And,” she sighed, “I guess if I worked at it, I could be really good friends with Mrs. Dantzler, or Doc’s wife, or maybe some of the Coalwood teachers. But they’re all college-educated women. Who am I to push myself off on them?” She shook her head. “You want to get down to it, I guess I’m like a kitten that’s been thrown out of the litter. I can’t go ahead and I can’t go back.”

She fell silent, her eyes on the floor. My heart was thumping in my chest. My mom had never, ever told me anything so personal about herself, and I was pretty uncomfortable with it. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I didn’t try. I just sat there while the seconds passed. Finally, she took a deep breath, and then her face settled into a mask of determination. “I’m going to talk to the club ladies about the Christmas Pageant. Even if the company won’t help, we can figure something out. I may not have many friends left in this town, but I’m just not going to let it be said that Elsie Hickam lost the Veterans Day parade and then gave up on the Christmas Pageant, too.”

There was something about my character that, every so often, made me as spiteful as a blue jay spying a cat. This was one of those times. I guess it had to do with the resentment I couldn’t shake over how Mom had forced me to be with Dad and Poppy the previous Christmas. Whatever it was, her proposal instantly got my feathers ruffled and I wanted no part of it. Rather than confess how I really felt, I just frowned and drummed my fingers on my books, showing her I was trying to study. She saw what I was doing and rose to leave. “I just needed somebody to listen,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”

I wanted to say it was no bother, but I couldn’t manage even that. Sometimes, the pique that I was capable of surprised even me. Mom plucked Chipper off the curtain and started to leave. She stopped before closing the door. “Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to help me. I know you’ve got more important things to do.” Then she eased the door shut. I would have felt better if she’d have slammed it. How had Coach Gainer put it in one of his famous boys’ health lectures? “A woman’s mildness,” he’d said, “will provoke a man’s guilt far better than ever her wrath.” It apparently worked just the same for mothers and sons, too.

Daisy Mae came over and jumped up on my lap, asking to be consoled because Chipper had escaped her again. I scratched her head, but I don’t think it consoled her much. I didn’t feel very consoled, either. I felt mean and nasty because that’s exactly what I was. Selfish, too. What was with me, anyway? Mom had tried to do a good thing by sending me with Dad to see Poppy. It hadn’t worked out, but that wasn’t her fault. So why was I punishing her? Maybe just because I could? Was this a part of growing up, wanting to hurt the people who loved me the most? If so, I wanted no part of it.

I stared at my bedroom door. I wanted to chase after Mom, tell her of course I’d help her with her Christmas Pageant if that’s what she wanted. But I didn’t. It just wasn’t in me to do. Daisy Mae nuzzled my chin and then curled up on my lap, tucking her nose between her paws. I envied her ability to find tranquillity after disappointment. I doubted, at that moment, I’d ever be able to do the same.

9

THE COALWOOD SKY

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Quentin asked me to sit down with him in the auditorium before classes. He looked loaded for bear, and I was the bear. When I sat down beside him, he cracked his knuckles, something he often did when he was preparing to lecture me about something. He leaned forward in his chair and I leaned in, too. “Sonny, I must say I am disappointed in you,” he said.

I started to say “Join the crowd,” but I didn’t. I just listened. “Have you honestly given a moment’s thought to Roy Lee’s idea of the ceramic-lined nozzle? No? I thought not. Really, my boy, it seems to me you’re dragging your feet these days. And when are we going to do the calculations according to Miss Riley’s book? All it takes is a little calculus.”

“Quentin,” I said fiercely, “I had a lot of homework to do over the weekend. Remember, I’m trying to make all A’s this semester. Don’t ask me why, but I just want to do it because I never have. I know that doesn’t mean much to you. You’ve always made A’s in all your classes, not counting phys ed.”

“Studying is your excuse?” He sniffed. “I cannot accept such a proposition.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Dammit, Sonny. You must work harder. There’s not a day to waste.” When I just sat there and looked at him, he shook his head and sighed deeply. Then he performed a little archeological dig into his briefcase and excavated a torn piece of notebook paper. “While it’s clear to me that you are losing your ardor for our entire enterprise, perhaps this will get your attention. I hitched to the county library after our rocket launch on Saturday and researched the various methodologies for applying ceramics to metal surfaces. I believe I have identified just the thing we need. It’s called water putty but don’t let the name fool you. It comes in powder form and all you have to do is add water to it and—
voilà!
— you get a supple, moldable ceramic.” He crossed his ankle over his knee to prop up his paper. I noticed one of his socks was blue. The other one was plaid. “My research further shows that it is a very easy material to apply, hardens rapidly, and sticks quite well to metal surfaces. Of course, when and if you ever get around to it, you’ll have to make your calculations such that the ceramic layer will not cause inefficiency within the gas flow. Water putty, Sonny. Find some and let’s get going! Here, I’ve even written it down for you. Water putty!”

I took Quentin’s grimy scrap of notebook paper with the tips of my fingers. I didn’t have any water putty or the slightest idea how to make such calculations and told him so. “Let’s wait until after semester exams,” I suggested. “Then I’ll get right on it. The water putty, the calculations from the book, everything.”

Quentin looked aghast. “Sonny, we can’t wait!” He looked at his wrist (although there wasn’t a watch on it) and then shook his head in despair. “The county science fair is in April, practically tomorrow in cosmic terms! A ceramic lining in our nozzles will be just the thing to distinguish our work. Water putty, my boy! Find some and then get going with your calculations. I can see it in Basil’s paper now.
Big
Creek boys solve nozzle erosion problem! Wernher von Braun asks for
their help!
Our missile program will be by far the most rigorous in the nation!”

Quentin was referring to Basil Oglethorpe, a writer for the
McDowell County Banner,
a grocery store newspaper. Basil had begun to regularly feature us in his column in 1958. “Rocket Boys Vault into the Heavens” was one of his tamer headlines.

“Quentin,” I replied, sighing, “if you’re so hot to get all this done, why don’t
you
get rigorous and do it yourself?”

“And how do you expect me to do that?” he asked, his frost-blue eyes narrowing. “I could do the calculations, certainly, but you’re the one who needs the mathematical practice, not me. And as for the required machine-shop work and the acquisition of water putty, clearly that is for you, the Coalwood superintendent’s son, to accomplish.” He spread his hands. “A poor Bartley boy, the son of a poor, itinerant miner, could hardly be expected to do more than I do already.”

At his mention of being poor, I noticed the white shirt he was wearing had a frayed collar. A closer look showed a patch on one of its sleeves. The mismatched socks I had earlier noted were easily observed because the faded khaki pants he wore with his heavy brown brogans were about an inch too short. Except for Roy Lee, the Big Creek lovemaster, none of the Rocket Boys cared much about the clothes we wore, but Quentin had gotten it down to a science. Still, in Quentin’s defense, the fact was his dad had been cut off from the Bartley mine for months and there were a lot of mouths at his house to feed. And I was, indeed, the superintendent’s son, from whom all riches flowed. He had me dead to rights. “All right, Quentin,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

A grin cracked his thin face. “Prodigious, Sonny! You see what a little pep talk can do?” Now that he’d gotten what he wanted, he turned friendly. “Say, how about that problem of yours—your mental manifestation? The inordinate sadness? Ever get a handle on that?”

“I might have part of it,” I said, and then I told him about Poppy and Dad last Christmas. He listened with his head cocked, his eyes quizzical. That was one thing about Quentin. When he listened, he really listened.

He made a fist and rested his chin on it in the classical thinker’s pose. “Let us break it down,” he said at length. “Because you thought about your problem logically as I suggested, you have perhaps figured out a portion of what is upsetting you. Good! We’re making progress! Now perhaps, you may want to consider that your manifestation is so complex that your particular mind simply cannot deal with it.”

I sorted through his words. “You think I’m going nuts?”

Quentin shrugged. “I suppose that is a possibility. But what I really believe we have here, Sonny, is a complex mental situation. That is why it is nearly impossible for you to discern it.” He leveled his gaze on me. “I have noticed something about you that I am loath to admit but I will tell it to you now. You have a keen mind. When there is a problem with our rockets, I usually come up with the most complex solution possible to resolve it. You, on the other hand, nearly always come up with the simplest solution. Your new fin design is an example. I would have never in a million years come up with the idea to take two rectangles of metal and bend them so as to make four fins. My advanced brainpower can’t handle such simplicity!” He shook his head tragically. “But your thought processes are defeated when the problem actually does require a complex algorithm. That is why you can’t figure out what is bothering you with standard thinking. The answer is complex! I think, therefore, you must break it down into its simplest forms.”

He’d lost me, and I guess my look told him that. “Here’s the way to think about this,” he said patiently. “Consider that there is no simple answer, or single cause. Review your past and propose to yourself all the issues that might be affecting your psyche. Write them all down. Then every time something else happens that bothers you, write that down, too. Get yourself a nice little list going. After a while, you’ll reach a critical mass with all your complaints and be able to make some intellectual and logical sense to them. I’m certain, in your simple way, you will then find the solution to your occasional bouts of depression. If that doesn’t work, I’ll check out a psychology book and put you into analysis.”

That sounded like a potential cure worse than the disease. “I’ll make a list,” I promised. “I’ll make a bunch of lists.”

He slapped his hands on his knees. “Good! I’m glad we had this little talk. Say, there’s something else I’ve been thinking about. Do you like orange juice? Yes? Well, what if you were going to hike in the woods and didn’t want to carry juice or fresh oranges around? Got you stumped? Well, what if before you went in the woods you took a bunch of oranges and put them in the sun and let them dry out? And then you ground them up into a fine powder? Then, anytime you wanted orange juice, no matter where you were, all you’d have to do is add water to the powder!
Voilà!
Orange juice! What do you think?”

What I thought was it sounded pretty revolting and started to say so, but the bell to classes rang before I got the chance. Quentin, never one to be late, picked up his briefcase and made his way out of the auditorium. I sat there, letting all the students file by. Quentin had given me a lot to think about, and I wanted to get started on it. Then I saw Billy coming up the aisle. I caught his eye, but he looked away and kept going. I thought to chase after him, maybe find out what was bothering him, but then I got to thinking about what Quentin had told me. A list. I needed to make a list. Of course, if it was supposed to include all the things on that list that were bothering me, I’d have to put Quentin on it, too. That thought made me laugh. I loved it when I made myself laugh. It made me feel clever. Of course, Reverend Lanier used to say when a man thinks himself clever, he’s but a temptation to God’s sense of humor.

IT was not in the nature of the people of Coalwood to look up at the sky. For most of the years while I was growing up, a drifting cloud of coal dust and grit from the mine hung in the air, obscuring what sky there was squeezed between our mountains. But when the railroad tracks were taken out in the spring of 1959, and the tipple operations moved across the mountain to Caretta, the dust cleared. For the first time I could clearly see the velvety blackness of space. I found the stars bright as fireflies and the moon like a giant glowing wheel, and I was fascinated. It was almost as if I could reach out and touch them. About that time, I started to go up on the roof of the Club House to look through a telescope Jake Mosby had provided us boys. Jake was one of the junior engineers and had become a special friend of the Rocket Boys. Not only did he attend almost every one of our launches, but he had also provided us an old trigonometry book so we could figure out how high our rockets flew. Sherman was with me the first night Jake set up his telescope for us. When Jake fell asleep, a jar of John Eye’s best whiskey spilling out of his hand, Sherman and I continued to marvel at the wonders of the stars and planets. When I got home past midnight, my mother confronted me in the upstairs hall. “What now, Sonny boy?” she asked in the tired but resigned voice she often used in dealing with my escapades as a Rocket Boy.

“Mom, you’ve got to come see,” I told her, and then described Jake’s telescope and the stars he had shown me along with Jupiter’s bands and Saturn’s rings.

My dad came out of his bedroom, blinking from the hall light. “Was Jake drunk?”

“He was asleep when I left.” I answered. It was a nimble response, I thought.

“Drunk,” Dad concluded, knowing nimbleness when he heard it.

“We’re going there,” I said, entirely too loud for the hour. “All of us. Into space!” At that moment, I was as certain of that as anything in my whole life. I could already imagine what I’d look like in a space suit walking around on the moon.

Mom was eyeing my dad as he stood there in his pajamas and she in her robe. “Let me know when you’re ready to go,” she said. “I’ll be the first one on the rocket.” Then, as if on cue, my parents turned their backs on each other and went into their rooms, leaving me standing alone in the dark hall wondering what had just happened.

Jake had left us the past summer, finishing his stint as a junior engineer under Dad’s hard tutelage. Jake’s father owned a fairly large percentage of the steel company that owned us, and I guessed he was back there, learning how to squeeze dimes or something. He’d at least left us his telescope to wander our eyes around the heavens. But still I missed him. Jake was a man of the world, the only one I knew, but mostly he was my friend. Every time I went past the Club House, I looked for his bright cherry-red Corvette, but it was never there. I asked Mom if she’d heard anything of Jake, if there was any chance he’d come back. “Jake Mosby?” She laughed merrily. “Oh, yes, that boy will be back.”

“How do you know?” I wondered.

“Because he loves that mine as much as your dad.”

I was thunderstruck by such an idea. Jake was always in trouble when he was in Coalwood. If it wasn’t his incessant womanizing, especially with the company secretaries, it was his drunken, outrageous conduct at company parties. His mining engineering could use some improvement, too. Dad had said so out loud.

Mom watched my face as I sorted through all of Jake’s misdeeds. “I know what you’re thinking, but I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Jake Mosby and Homer Hickam are two peas in a pod. Where Homer leaves off, Jake picks up. He won’t stay gone from his hero for very long.”

I just couldn’t fathom it. “Dad his hero?” I exclaimed. “I always thought Jake hated Dad.”

“Trust me,” Mom said. “We’ll see our boy Jake in these parts all too soon.”

It was time that I looked at the stars. For the first time in weeks, the clouds had blown away, so I figured I had better take advantage of it. Dad had gone off to the mine after a phone call, Mom was down Tipple Row to see Naomi Keneda and her new baby granddaughter. I grabbed my bike and headed off for the Club House. I parked beside the big double doors on the vast front porch and started to go inside, only to be met by two men, just coming out. They were wearing long leather coats that almost reached the ground. I had never seen the like. Then I heard them speaking and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I stared at them. They were both young men, and at first I thought maybe they were a couple of the junior engineers trying out their college Latin or whatever it was they studied, but even their haircuts were odd, severely cut around the ears and swept straight back. The taller of the two had hair the color of wet straw, the other a deep coal black. They took note of me. “Guten Tag,” the straw-haired man said to me.

“Good day to you,” the other said, and gave me a curt nod.

I just stared. What kind of foreigners were they? Then I thought—wait a minute—they sounded just like Wernher von Braun on television! They were Germans! I had never actually seen a real live German before and a question just leapt right out of my mouth. “Do you know Wernher von Braun?”