The Essay A Novel (3 page)

I was barely six years old the day the sheriff's deputies and agents from the state department of liquor control led my grandfather away in handcuffs. He had spent the morning at his still, which was tucked into a ravine and hidden deep in the woods behind our home. I was playing in a dirt patch near the porch when I heard the clinking of glass and looked up to see him walking out of the tree line pushing an old wheelbarrow that he had lined with a quilt and loaded full of quart canning jars of moonshine. That's when an armada of sheriff's cars charged up our hillside and liquor-control agents swarmed out of the weeds, materializing like locusts on the wind. The wheelbarrow tipped and quart jars exploded on the craggy hillside as Grandpa Hickam turned and made a futile attempt to escape. He had taken only about four steps before he was tackled and mauled by a half-dozen law officers. As they led him to a waiting cruiser, his pants falling down to mid crotch, Grandpa's eye patch dangled like a necklace and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead, snaked around the open socket and disappeared into a three-day growth of beard. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.

In the years to follow, none of the Hickam males fared much better than my grandpa. My dad was a wiry, banty rooster of a man who never in his life walked away or backed down from a fight. While he delivered plenty of beatings, he earned as many in return, evidenced by a needle nose that pointed off toward Cincinnati and a patchwork of white scars that danced across his jaw. Nick Hickam liked to drink, shoot off his mouth, and attempt to prove his worth as a man by picking fights with men twice his size, usually with predictable results. Every deputy and police officer in Vinton County knew my dad and had laced him upside the head with a blackjack at least once. He had more public intoxication and disorderly conduct arrests than anyone in the county, and Nick Hickam was never one to go peaceably.

My oldest brother Edgel was eleven years my senior and serving a stretch in the Mansfield State Reformatory after being convicted of burglary and arson. The middle boy, Virgil, who was four years younger than Edgel, shared my father's penchant for alcohol and worked for Barker Brothers & Sons Amusements, traveling the South and Midwest setting up and tearing down rides at street festivals and county fairs. My male role models consisted of a moonshiner, a belligerent drunk, a convict, and a carnie. I also had an assortment of ne'er-do-well uncles and cousins occupying prisons and halfway houses around the state. These were the Hickams of Vinton County, Ohio.

Physically, I took after my mother, a squat, thick-chested woman of Dutch descent who worked the breakfast and lunch shifts at Hap's Truck Stop on U.S. 50 near Prattsville and whom everyone knew as Sis, though her real name was Mildred. Mom was no stranger to hard work, having grown up working on her family dirt farm in Scioto County. She had strong forearms and a pair of thick hands that could hold four breakfast platters at once. Two afternoons a week she drove over to the county seat of McArthur and cleaned houses for a couple of elderly women who couldn't get around very well and the wife of a county commissioner who claimed to be allergic to dust, though Mom said the only thing she was allergic to was work. I think Mom knew she made a mistake of titanic proportions when she married in with the Hickams, but she seemed resigned to her fate. Mom had a pretty face, eyes the color of a Carolina sky, and a sweet temperament, and when a trucker who had taken a shining to her asked why she stayed with a man who liked to drink and brawl and occasionally rake the side of her face with a backhand, she shrugged and said, “I'll be the first to admit that being married to Nick Hickam is not all sunshine and kittens, but when he's not in jail he goes to work regular, and that's more than you can say about a lot of the men who live on Red Dog Road.”

Red Dog Road followed Salt Lick Creek for a half mile into the hills until it buried itself into the township dump, which was nothing more than a gash of scarred earth left behind by a long-forgotten strip mining company. There was no trash pickup for much of Vinton County and thus there was a constant parade of pickup trucks kicking up dust and heading past our place to dump trash and dead appliances and motor oil and God-only-knows-what-else into a rat-infested pit that reeked on hot days and was surely leaching chemicals into our wells. Before he went off to prison, Edgel took great sport in going out to the dump to shoot rats with Dad's .22-caliber rifle, usually to the great annoyance of Chic McDonald, who scavenged the dump for scrap metal and still-good items that he could drag back to his perpetual yard sale.

The houses that lined Red Dog Road were paint-starved and frail, looking as though a strong wind would splinter them across the hillside. More often than not, the roofs were corrugated steel and turned into sieves during a heavy rain. Wringer washers stood by the front doors, outhouses were not uncommon, and running water came from wells laden with iron oxide that stained sinks and tubs and toilet bowls a bright orange. Children, barefoot and dirty, played with mangy dogs in dusty yards strewn with trash and rusting cars.

Beauty was rarely a part of my youth. The exception was the visits to my grandfather Joachim's farm in Scioto County. Papaw Joachim died when I was in the fourth grade, and when he was breathing, like almost everyone else in Appalachian Ohio, he didn't get along with my father, so my trips to the farm were few. But the beauty remains engrained in my memory. It was a magnificent piece of land that ran from a bluff nearly to the Ohio River, where the morning fog rolled off the shoals and snaked around the tobacco plants on its uphill creep toward the white farmhouse, which stood in stark contrast to the dense green of its surroundings. The Silver Queen corn he raised was so nourished by the unctuous soil that it towered along his lane and created a cavern of green that by the end of July could only be penetrated by the noonday sun. The stone outcroppings in the pasture above his home stretched into a plateau lush with trees and full of deer and rabbits. It was like much of southern Ohio in its beauty. There was, of course, the exception to this natural splendor, such as the godforsaken stretch of Vinton County land on which we lived.

Our house was built into a steep, rutted slope on the tallest hill lining Red Dog Road on land so rocky and thin with soil that honey locust trees and foxtails struggled for footing, and copperheads sunned themselves on the exposed stone. The hills were once like those in Scioto County, lush with dense groves of oak, shagbark hickory, buckeye, eastern cottonwood, black walnut, and beech trees. But in the 1920s, the hills along Red Dog Road were timbered out, the tree trunks cut to ground level. The erosion that followed swept away the topsoil and left precipitous, moonscape slopes of rock and clay. The sun baked the surface and created dust as fine as talcum powder that swirled in the slightest breeze, often creating mini twisters that skittered over the rocks and covered your teeth and nostrils with a fine, brown film.

A quarter mile beneath our house stretched the abandoned Hudson Mining Company's No. 2 mine. It had been more than three decades since the mine closed, yet its spider web of shafts continued to collapse upon themselves with such force that our windows and water pipes rattled with each implosion. The natural resources above and below the ground had been stripped away, and it was unsuitable for farming. It was worthless, and thus the only property my family could afford. In 1961, my dad paid twenty-three hundred dollars for the dilapidated mining company house—a two-story, brown, asphalt-shingled home with a metal roof and a slight list to the west. The window trim and porch were painted an industrial gray, which blistered and shed with each passing summer until it had the parched feel of driftwood. The wooden gutters were full of dirt and maple saplings sprouted from them each spring, sometimes growing nearly a foot high before performing a death bow when the gutter could no long support the roots.

The only access to our house was a dirt drive gouged by years of runoffs that made a treacherous descent from below our front porch to Red Dog Road. The rusting corpses of every two hundred dollar car my dad had bought in the previous fourteen years lined the drive; saplings and thistles pushed up through engine blocks, and vacated trunks provided refuge for families of raccoons and possums. Each year, the junkyard grew and the drive became steeper and more dangerous as the spring rains washed away another layer of clay, pushing stones and mud flows across Red Dog Road and into the Salt Lick Creek.

Across Red Dog Road from our house was the man-made mountain of red dog—a “gob pile,” in miner parlance—from which our road got its name. For dozens of years, before going out of business in the early sixties, the Hudson Mining Company dumped its red dog on the marshy plains that served as the headwaters of Salt Lick Creek. Long before I was born, Salt Lick Creek was a cool, clear-running stream that made a shaded trek through a canopy of poplars, oaks, and weeping willows. Trout and crawfish and freshwater clams thrived in waters that traversed eastern Vinton and Athens counties, emptying into the Hocking River two miles north of its confluence with the Ohio. The gob piles were full of sulfuric acid and eroded iron. As rain water seeped through the red dog, it collected its contents and carried them to the Salt Lick Creek, turning the pristine stream into an ecological nightmare. The runoff from the mountain of red dog caused the stream's waters to run orange, killing off the fish and plants. The massive roots of the willows drank in the poison and slumped into the waters. The mud flats and stones and tree trunks near the waters all became stained in dirty, muted orange. As a young boy, I watched dump trucks haul loads of smoldering ash up the hill. When they dumped the still-hot loads, plumes of white smoke seeped out of the hill, giving it the ominous look of a volcano primed to erupt. Even so, local boys still took sheets of cardboard or food trays and slid down its slopes of red dog like volcanic bobsledders, sucking red dust into their lungs and leaving their teeth covered with a powdery, red scum.

On a cold February afternoon—I couldn't have been older than ten—I was playing on the banks of Salt Lick Creek, when I looked down to find a maple leaf lying in the shallows of the stream. All around me were the colors of dead winter—browns and grays and shades of straw. Yet the leaf was a bold russet, a reddish-brown that should have fallen from an October sky, not the limbs of February. I reached into the frigid water and grabbed the leaf by the stem. It extended in front of me as rigid as a frying pan, fossilized by a patina of iron oxide from the contaminated water.

The massive hill of red dog was the source of a derisive nickname for the rednecks who lived in view of the giant red dog pile on the poorest road in the poorest county in the poorest part of the state. We were known as “doggers,” and people around Vinton County used the term “dogger” with the same ease and contempt that the word “nigger” rolled off my dad's tongue. Oddly, those of us who lived in penury and filth around the giant mound of ash took particular pride in the “dogger” designation.

Although I looked like my mother, there was no mistaking me for anything but a Hickam, and that was poison in Vinton County. It wasn't unusual for me to overhear someone say, “That's one of Nick Hickam's boys—the youngest one, I think. They're all trouble.” In the privacy of their home or in hushed tones when they saw me on the street, parents would say, “Don't let me catch you hanging around with that Hickam boy.” Even when adults whispered, I knew what they were saying; I could read it in their eyes and in the sideways glances they gave me. I never stole anything in my life, but if a classmate lost a dollar, I was the first one to get pulled into the hall and accused of stealing it. Teachers would make me turn my pockets inside out, then go through my gym bag and tear everything out of my locker.

I was “one of them Hickams” from the day I entered the first grade. On days that it rained, Mrs. MacIntyre would keep us inside for recess and play a game called “Seven-Up.” Seven kids would line up in the front of the room and the rest of us would put our heads on our desk and hide our eyes in the crease of our elbows. If you got tapped on the head, you raised your hand. When the seven tappers had returned to the front of the room, you would try to guess which one had tapped you. If you guessed right, you got to change places with them. During one such game, I had not gotten to play once. As recess was nearly over, Mrs. MacIntyre said, “We have to let everyone play; next time, someone needs to tap Jimmy Lee.”

Margaret Burrell blurted out, “My momma said not to touch him on the head because all them Hickams has lice.”

Mrs. MacIntyre looked at Margaret and then at me with a wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of astonishment, as though Margaret had just busted loose with a barrage of profanity that would make a millwright blush. I didn't even know what lice were, but I knew by the look on Mrs. MacIntyre's face that it was bad and I started crying. She told us to get out our coloring books as she was dragging Margaret into the hall by her collar. I could see her shaking a finger in Margaret's face and they both came back into the room all red-faced; Margaret was sniffling and teary-eyed.

That night, I asked my mom, “What's lice?”

“Little bugs that dirty people get in their hair,” she said. I frowned, pondering her answer. “Why do you want to know, Jimmy Lee?”

“Margaret Burrell's mom said I have lice. She said all us Hickams have lice and that's why Margaret's not allowed to pick me during Seven-Up.”

My mom picked through my hair, inspecting for the bugs, and said, “Some people's ignorant, Jimmy Lee. Don't pay them no mind.” The next day, as soon as she left her shift at the truck stop, Mom drove down to school to get the story directly from Mrs. MacIntyre, then she paid a visit to Mrs. Burrell, who stammered around and said she had no idea where Margaret had heard of such a thing and it certainly wasn't from her, then she quickly shut and locked the door.