The Essay A Novel (2 page)

I stare at the sad enclave, not answering until it is well in our rearview mirror. “Actually, Fritz, it's not too hard for me.”

“What's that mean?”

“I grew up in Vinton County.”

“Are you kidding me?”

It's a delicious little nugget for Fritz. It isn't gossip, per se, but it is inside information. He has a glimpse into my past, a little tidbit he can drop during his next gossip session back in the photo department.

I nod and point to a rusty white and black street sign peppered with buckshot. “I grew up right there, on Red Dog Road.”

Fritz hits the brakes as we are flying past the dirt and pea gravel lane. We are the only car on County Road 12, so he puts it in reverse and turns onto Red Dog Road. “I can't believe this is where you grew up. Why didn't you tell me?”

I shrug. “I just did.”

We drive up the road a quarter-mile to where a two-story home clings to a hillside of foxtail and milkweed. Many of the asphalt shingles that had previously covered the walls of the house had rotted off or blown away, creating a gray and black checkerboard effect. I point again. “There's the old homestead.” Across from the house stands the gob pile, a man-made mountain of red dog, the sulfur-laced red ash that remained after the mining companies burned their coal dumps. A short distance up the road, just beyond the next crest, is a reclaimed dump generously called the Turkey Ridge Wildlife and Nature Preserve. In my childhood, killing rats at the dump made for a fun afternoon.

Fritz parks the car at the bottom of a steep, rutted incline that would be accessible only with a four-wheel drive vehicle. “Want to take a hike up and check it out?” I ask.

Silly question. He won't pass up the opportunity for anything.

We climb the hill, following the path between sticker bushes that hook our pants and rip away. Fritz is out of breath halfway up the hill. He points to a snake sunning itself on a rock. “What kind of snake is that?”

“A milk snake.”

“Are they poisonous?”

“Extremely,” I say.

He hurries up the path, occasionally glancing back at the harmless reptile.

The house appears to be slipping off its foundation and the front porch sags under its own weight. The front door has been torn off its hinges, and every window is busted. It's been years since anyone lived here. We walk through the downstairs, the floor boards groaning under our weight, glass crunching under our shoes. A soiled mattress is on the living room floor amid empty beer cans, reefer nubs, and spent condoms. Fritz snaps photos along the way.

When we return outside, he says, “It must have been a lot different when you were living here.”

It seems like another lifetime ago, but the memory is clear. “No, Fritz, not really.” I look around. The garage has burned down and the storage shed has collapsed upon itself. “Come on, let's get back to the hotel and get something to eat.”

Six weeks later I had completed the series of stories. I was in the photo department with Fritz and our editor, Art Goodrich, reviewing a selection of Fritz's photographs that were to run with the stories.

“Did he tell you he grew up in that part of Ohio?” Fritz asked Art.

“That's not germane to the story,” I said.

“It might be,” Art said. “I didn't know you were from southern Ohio? How come I didn't know that?”

“That's what I asked him when he told me,” Fritz said, anxious to let Art know that he had inside information. “We'd been roaming around those damn hills for an entire week before he said anything about it. He showed me the house where he grew up. It was this little thing stuck back on a dirt road in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.”

Art Goodrich and I had worked together at the
Daily Herald
for more than ten years. He had been a reporter on the political desk before his meteoric rise to editor of the paper. We'd always gotten along, but aside from playing on the newsroom softball team together, we'd never had a particularly close relationship. “Come over to my office when you're done,” he said.

It was after 5
PM
when I walked into Goodrich's office. He popped up from behind his desk and said, “Let's go grab a beer.” It wasn't a request. We walked across K Street to the Longhorn Bar & Grill and took seats at the corner of the mahogany bar.

“Do you know what stuck with me about your series of articles?” he asked. I shook my head. “It was the fact that no one ever seems to leave that region. No matter how bad things get, no matter how long they've been out of work, people just stay put. That one family has three or four generations of men working alongside each other in the mine and not a one of them has any desire to leave.”

“People get comfortable with what they know, I guess.” I sipped at a beer. “You live in this little cocoon and you're not really aware of what's going on outside of southern Ohio. Most of them were content to work in the coal mines like their dad and grandfathers.”

“Was your dad a coal miner?”

“No. He worked in a sawmill mostly. Timber was a pretty big industry.”

“How come you didn't end up there?”

“I got lucky, I guess.”

“What's that mean—you got lucky? I don't think that someone who grows up in abject poverty and ends up on the projects desk of the Washington
Daily Herald
is just lucky.” I smiled and shrugged. “How does a kid from southern Ohio end up a writer and not a coal miner?”

“I don't know, Art.”

“Of course you know. You were there. I want to know how you got from there to here. I want to hear your story.”

“That would take a while.”

He signaled for another round of beers and asked for two menus. We ordered steaks and I told Art Goodrich how I had escaped the hollows of southern Ohio and ended up on the special projects team at the
Daily Herald.
When I had finished, the grease on our steak plates had congealed and he was downing the last of his carrot cake. “That's a great yarn,” he said. “You should put that down on paper. In fact . . .”

He pulled his cell phone from the inside pocket of his suit coat and pounded out a sequence on the keypad. Art's brother-in-law was an editor with a New York publishing house, and within a month I was offered a contract to write my story. Art suggested I take a sabbatical to write it, but I declined. It was, after all, my story, and I didn't need to do a lot of research.

My story is not unusual. People escape poverty every day. We live in a country where freedom makes that possible. What makes my story different is the fact that I didn't do it alone. I was fortunate enough to have met someone who had both faith in me and the patience to show me I needn't be constrained by my environment or my surroundings. I was shown a path that I could not have discovered alone. And for that, I am forever grateful.

Chapter One

I

t was never easy being the class dirty neck, the derisive term used for those of us unfortunate enough to have grown up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. I accepted my social status early in life. After all, it doesn't take long for a kid to realize that he's the outcast. A few days in school are all it takes, really. The exclusion is obvious and painful.

My classmates didn't accept my offers to come over and play. Parents ordered their kids inside whenever I showed up in their yard. I was never invited to birthday parties or sleepovers. When party invitations were passed out in class, I pretended not to notice, or care, when the little white envelopes were placed on desks all around mine. Usually, my classmates were considerate enough to at least pretend that I didn't exist. The exception was Margaret Burrell, an invidious little brat with an untamed mane of black hair that hung around her head like a hoop skirt, a pronounced underbite, and a lisp, who in the second grade waved a handful of invitations in front of my face and said, “I'm having a theventh birthday party, Jimmy Lee, and we're gonna have ithe cream, and cake, and gameths, and pony rideths, and
you
. . . ain't . . . invited.” She shoved her nose in the air, spun on a heel and strode off, confident in her superiority. It was not unusual treatment. When I was paired with someone for a science project or square dancing in gym class, they would shy away, trying to create distance between us, as though the mere touch of my skin might cause the onset of poverty and body odor.

In our society, you can no longer ostracize the black kid, or the fat kid, or the mentally retarded kid, but in Vinton County, it is still perfectly acceptable to ostracize the ones who are poor, white, and dirty. That was me. Like my brothers, who walked out of Red Dog Hollow before me, I quietly accepted my role as class dirty neck with no small amount of anger and frustration.

When you are the outcast—white trash—your mistakes are more pronounced and open to ridicule. Or, worse—laughter. Such was the case with the erection I threw every morning in Miss Singletary's first-period, junior English class.

This cyclical eruption was purely the product of adolescent, hormonal rampages that I was no more able to control than man can control the tides. I would think about dinosaurs or football, envision myself as a tortured prisoner of war, or review multiplication tables in my head. Nothing worked. Every day, precisely at eight forty-five, exploding like a damn party favor in my shorts, I sprouted a pulsating erection that stretched the crotch of my denims and left me mortified.

Across the aisle, Lindsey Morgan would stare at my lap with rapt attention, as though it were the season finale of her favorite television show. If I looked her way, she would avert her eyes and choke back laugher. Occasionally, if my erection was especially pronounced, she would tap the shoulder of Abigail Winsetter, who would pretend to drop a pencil to steal a glance at my crotch before bursting into uncontrollable giggles.

“Something you would like to share with the rest of the class, Miss Winsetter?” Miss Singletary would ask on each such occasion.

“No, ma'am, sorry,” she would eke out, her face turning crimson and the vein in her temple pulsing like a freeway warning light as she vainly fought off the laughter.

I failed two six-week periods of junior English primarily because it is impossible for a seventeen-year-old to focus during such eruptions. When the bell rang at nine-thirty, I would get up holding a notebook over the protrusion and make three quick laps up the stairs, through the second-floor corridor, and back down, working off the erection before American history.

I knew, of course, that Lindsey was telling all her friends about my problem and they were having a grand laugh at my expense. It was just one more thing that Lindsey and her clique of uppity friends had to laugh about. Even by the modest standards of Vinton County, Lindsey's family had money. She also had friends and nice clothes, a smooth complexion, and straight teeth. My family had no money, and I had none of the accoutrements. This made me a pariah in her eyes. It wasn't that Lindsey was openly mean to me. It was simply the way she looked at me, as though my presence in her world was merely for her amusement.

Lindsey's father owned the Vinton Timber Company, a sawmill where my dad worked as a chain off-bearer. By all accounts, Mr. Morgan was a benevolent man and a good employer. My dad was a perpetually unhappy soul with the disposition of a chained dog, and there wasn't much about life that suited him, particularly his job at the sawmill and Mr. Morgan. During his many drunken tirades at the Double Eagle Bar—a redneck place where the toilets never worked and pool cues were more often used as weapons than instruments of sport—my dad called Mr. Morgan everything but a white man and told anyone who would listen that Mr. Morgan locked the door to his office every afternoon and got head from his secretary, a plump divorcee named Nettie McCoy, who had hair the color of a pumpkin and a mole the size of a dime above one corner of her mouth. I don't know if the story was true or not, but I desperately wanted to repeat it to Lindsey just to see her get hurt, but I never did.

My name is James Leland Hickam, and I was born with a surname that was synonymous for trouble throughout southeastern Ohio. I hail from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hard-scrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. My ancestors came to this country from Wales in the 1880s and into Ohio from Kentucky just after the turn of the century. I am not privy to why they emigrated from England or migrated from Kentucky, but given the particular pride Hickam males take in their ornery nature, I can only imagine that my kin crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Ohio River just slightly ahead of angry, torch-carrying mobs.

My namesake and grandfather was an expert car thief and career moonshiner who died in prison when I was in elementary school and of whom I have only a faint memory. He had a thicket of gray chest hair that sprouted over the top of his T-shirt, walked on the cuffs of his pants, and smelled of liquor and dirt and testosterone. Years before my birth, he lost an eye in a still explosion and wore a black patch over the empty socket. When my mother wasn't around, he would flip the patch upward and treat me to a peek at the void, which was rank and dark and sunken, rimmed with a yellow, pustulant discharge that both repulsed and intrigued me to where I never passed up the opportunity to look.