Sky of Stone (3 page)

“Your dad’s taking it pretty hard,” she said.

“Why?” My question just jumped out of my mouth. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but I could never remember Dad being particularly bothered by mine accidents. He did everything he could to keep them from happening, of that I was certain considering the hours he spent there, but when they happened, they happened and that was that.

Mom answered, “It’s complicated,” and I knew better than to follow up with another question. I could always tell when she was through talking about something. My survival over the years had honed this particular talent.

I walked Mom across the campus to the football practice field, all the while describing the school buildings and the drill field and the memorials and how I’d learned to march and all the funny things they made us do as cadets. Mom stayed silent the entire time, which was a bit worrisome. A quiet Mom usually spelled trouble. I suspected I hadn’t yet found out her complete purpose in coming to Blacksburg. She could have written me a letter about her Myrtle Beach house, and about Mr. Dillon, too. What was she up to? My whole life, my mom had always been up to something even when I thought she wasn’t.

We found Dad at the practice field, his fingers clawed into the wire fence, watching the team go through their spring drills. “He’s the best player out there,” Dad said of brother Jim as we walked up.

Mom looked at Dad and then at me. “Here’s Sonny,” she said. “Doesn’t he look good in his uniform?”

“Hello, little man,” Dad said, glancing in my direction. Then, after putting on his old snap-brim hat, “You ready to go, Elsie?”

“I thought maybe you and Sonny could have a little talk,” she said.

“What about?” Dad wondered.

I’m sure I didn’t know, either, but it always amazed me when Dad didn’t pick up on what Mom was after. It was clear as rainwater she wanted us to have a father-son moment, whether we wanted one or not. To save us both, I gave Dad a quick rundown of everything I could think of. “Engineering drawing’s my favorite subject this quarter,” I rattled on, “and I get to stop wearing the rat belt in another couple of weeks, and I’ve been asked to write a column in the school newspaper.”

Dad blinked thoughtfully while I made all my points. When it was probable that I had finished, he asked, “Are you going to write for the paper?”

“I think so.”

“You were always a good speller,” he allowed. Then he looked at Mom and asked, “
Now
are you ready to go, Elsie?”

Mom gave me a terse hug and climbed into the Buick. I noticed what appeared to be a small wooden and wire cage in the backseat. I looked closer and saw Chipper, Mom’s pet squirrel. I opened the car door and put my hand on the cage, and he threw himself against it, trying to bite me through the screen. “You’re taking Chipper to Myrtle Beach?” I couldn’t believe it. Chipper had never been outside Coalwood.

“I am,” Mom said, and once again I knew she was done with the subject.

Dad settled in behind the huge steering wheel and drummed his fingers on it. “Come on, Elsie,” he said. “Miles to go.”

“Love you, Sonny,” Mom said, giving me her hand. I grasped it and then let it slip away when Dad pushed the Buick’s accelerator, spinning wheels in the gravel. Off they went, man, woman, and squirrel, heading south.

I watched until they had disappeared around a curve, and then I walked back to my dormitory and went to my room and sat down at my desk and thought about all that had just happened. After a while, I hit on what I believed to be the real reason for Mom’s visit, and it came as a shock. She had come to tell me that not only was she going to Myrtle Beach, she planned on staying there. That’s why she’d taken Chipper with her. She might leave Dad behind in Coalwood, but she wasn’t going to abandon her beloved squirrel.

I went out that night and stood in the dim lights of the World War II Memorial, where I could worry in peace. I had known only one boy the whole time I grew up in McDowell County whose parents were divorced, and he was a sorry soul. Now, though I doubted they were going to go through the formality of it, my mother and father were getting a divorce, too, at least geographically. I worried about that for a while, came to no conclusion, then said a prayer for Tuck Dillon. I had really liked Mr. Dillon. He had been a good man and hadn’t deserved to die. Mom’s comment about Dad taking his death hard was still a mystery, though. What had that meant? At the practice field, he’d looked like the same old Dad.

A letter came from Mom the following week. She was having a wonderful time already, she wrote, and was getting the workers going on her house. In my letter back, I begged her to let me come to Myrtle Beach. Where else, after all, could I go?
Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach
became my new song. If Mom would agree to it, I was going to have a summer of fun in the sun like none I’d ever experienced. Then, to my joy, she wrote and said:
If you want to come down here, I guess I can’t stop you.
At the time I credited myself with the capability of being able to read between Mom’s lines. As far as I was concerned, she could hardly wait to see my bright, shining face beaming up at her from the sands of Myrtle Beach.

After the final parade at the end of the school year, the cadets of my squadron boxed up their uniforms, tidied up their rooms, and took off for wherever their summers led them. I said good-bye to everyone, including my roommate, George Fox, whose parents had come to pick him up. My plan was to spend one more night in the dormitory, then hitchhike down to Myrtle Beach the next day. In my room, I crawled on top of my bunk, pulled out a tattered paperback, and quickly became engrossed in
Starship Troopers.
It was at least the fifth time I’d read it. I loved everything Robert Heinlein wrote. Next to John Steinbeck, he was my favorite author. I liked the way he made me want to turn the page even when I knew what was going to happen.

I heard the phone ringing in the booth down the hall, and it kept ringing until somebody picked it up. I subsided back into my book until there came a knock at my door. It was Butch Harper, a fellow cadet who was still waiting for his father to pick him up. “Telephone, Sonny,” he said.

I had never received a telephone call during my entire time at VPI, so I was mildly astonished. Who could be calling me? It had to be bad news, that’s all I knew. I walked like a condemned man down the hall and crawled inside the booth. When I nervously answered, I heard Mom’s voice. “I was afraid you’d already started down here,” she said.

“I’m sticking my thumb out first thing in the morning,” I told her.

She was silent, as if she was chewing something over in her mind. “No,” she said finally. “You have to go home, to Coalwood.”

Her words didn’t entirely register. For one thing, I’d stopped thinking of Coalwood as my home. I’d put that old place behind me, just as she had. And as far as going to it now, why ever would I want to do that?
Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach!
I started to tell her my opinion, but she interrupted me before I could get a word out of my mouth. “It’s the Tuck Dillon accident,” she said. “They’re blaming your father.”

I struggled to understand. Somebody was blaming Dad for a mine accident? I couldn’t recall anybody ever getting blamed for somebody getting killed in the mine. If you got killed, it was because you didn’t follow the rules, or because God had booby-trapped the place with too much methane or loose slate or some-such a million years ago. Nobody could do much about that, not even my dad.

“There’s going to be a big investigation,” she continued, breaking through my thoughts, “and who knows what’s going to come out? Your dad’s alone. Somebody in the family needs to be with him.”

Her meaning eluded me. When had Dad ever needed anybody other than his foremen when it came to things at the mine? And why would he need me, of all people? Why couldn’t Jim go to Coalwood? He was the first son and Dad’s favorite, anyway. It was true Jim was going to summer school, but it hadn’t started yet. I took a breath, preparing my defense, but before I got a word out, she said, “Sonny, don’t argue with me. Just go.”

I realized that I wasn’t in a debate but in the midst of a typical Elsie Hickam discussion, which meant she was telling me whatever she wanted to tell me and then I was supposed to do exactly what she said. I fumbled for a response but only managed a feeble question. “How’s Chipper?” I asked. It was the best I could do while I tried to think of some way out of her box.

“My little boy? He loves it down here. I’ve got a big cage for him on the back porch so he can look at the
bay.”

“Has he bit anybody yet?”

“Nobody important.”

Chipper was the meanest squirrel who ever drew breath. Even so, I liked him, mainly because he usually took great care to bite my brother before he got around to me. “How’s the beach?” I asked, still flailing.

“Beautiful. Sun’s out, water’s blue, the house is going to be great once I get it fixed up.”

I decided to try for a simple reduction of my sentence. “How about I go to Coalwood for two weeks?”

“One more thing,” she said.

I braced myself.

“There’s something wrong with Nate Dooley.”

“The secret man?”

“Don’t call him that!” she snapped. “Just go see Mrs. Dooley and find out what you can. You owe Nate that much.”

“I owe him?”

“If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be dead.”

And with that, perhaps thinking of the money she was spending on the long-distance call, she hung up. I sat in the booth for a while, the receiver still in my hand. When I looked up, I found Butch watching me with a worried expression. “Trouble?” he asked.

“The worst kind,” I confirmed.

“What is it?”

“I have to go . . .” I started to say “home” but caught myself in time. “To West Virginia,” I said instead.

“What’s there?” he wondered.

A fragment of Dad’s poem popped into my mind:

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

“What’s there?” Butch asked again.

“Coalwood,” I said, and to me that said it all.

3

THE SECRET MAN

A
LOT
of people in Coalwood said I was lucky to be alive, considering the close calls I had growing up. I liked to act out scenes in every book I read, and sometimes I suppose I carried my little productions to the extreme. After I finished reading
All Quiet on the Western Front,
I started digging shallow trenches on the side of Sis’s Mountain and Roy Lee Cooke and I and a couple of other boys in my grade challenged the older boys to a fight. They complied, dug their trenches, and then we started throwing corn stobs at each other. One of the stobs, thrown by my brother, managed to knock me all the way down the hill. I had blood running into my eyes, but I climbed back up to our trench line and kept fighting until finally Mom declared an armistice. I had a bump on my head for a week, but I was still alive.

I came my nearest to dying back in 1948 when President Harry Truman decided to show Mr. Carter he was in charge of everything, even Coalwood. After John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers had battered every other coal operation in southern West Virginia into submission, they had turned their attention to our little town like a salivating dog spying a bloody bone. Union agitators were dispatched to Coalwood in droves and, very soon, wildcat strikes were hitting the mine every day. On top of that, President Truman and John L. were allies, and Mr. Carter the younger—his father having passed away in 1936—never stood a chance. The postwar economy was booming and the nation needed steel and steel needed coal. On the pretext of keeping the coalfields calm, President Truman called out federal troops to go in and occupy Coalwood. For a reason nobody could ever quite figure, he sent in the navy. I was five years old at the time. Just as the sailors began to roll into town in their gray trucks, I came down with something that made me feel like I was going to catch on fire and go up in smoke. I was just running along, trying to chase down Teresa Annello to convince her to be my Maid Marian (I’d just read
Robin Hood
), and all of a sudden, it was like somebody had knocked me up the side of my head with a poleax. I fell down like a half-empty sack of potatoes. Jim carted me home and dumped me on the porch, complaining to Mom that I’d embarrassed him all over Substation Row.

Even though it had the navy to worry over, Coalwood’s gossip fence quickly spread the story of my ailment. Most people predicted I was going to die. Coal camp youngsters with high fevers usually did, after all. Prayers started going up to heaven, propelled from both the white and colored churches, but they were mostly for my soul, since it was figured I was pretty much a goner. If I didn’t have the consumption, a known killer, it was probably scarlet fever, a true murderer.

Coalwood was in between company doctors at the time. My mom decided that since the navy had upset everything in town, their doctor was fair game. The morning after the arrival of the sailors, she appeared at the hastily established navy dispensary that had been set up in the Club House. The doctor, a young lieutenant junior grade, heard my mom out and then, his hands forming a little steeple, coolly advised her that he was there to tend to his sailors, not coal camp children. She could, however, take it up with his commanding officer, who would be in his office in, oh, maybe a few hours. Mom thanked him kindly and went outside, caught the morning shift going to work, and told the miners about the kindly doctor within and his generous attitude toward Coalwood’s children. The men stared at her until one of them, a man by the name of Nate Dooley, stepped up to her. “I’ll help you, Elsie,” he said. And he did, by accidentally kicking in the doctor’s door in his haste to welcome him to town.

The navy doctor, firmly escorted by Mom and Mr. Dooley, arrived at our house and sat on the chair opposite the couch in the living room, where Mom had encamped me. I was too sick to care. Every bone in my body felt like it was broken, and my brain swam in a molten lake of fire.

While Mr. Dooley sat on the stairs with his arms folded on his knees, the doctor felt my brow and stuck a thermometer under my tongue and frowned at me. He had straw-blond hair and a wisp of a mustache that didn’t look like it would ever amount to much. Mom sat on the chair across from the couch while he pondered what he was about to say. After he inspected the thermometer and made me say “ah” about a dozen times, and felt around my throat, he said, “The boy’s got scarlet fever, Mrs. Hickam.”

The intake of my mother’s breath was like a nearly missed note on a flute. It was quick, and half air. “Whooping cough, I thought maybe,” she said in a voice as quiet as I’d ever heard it. “Or strep throat at its worst.”

“No. Scarlet fever. Classic case,” the doctor said, fastidiously wiping off the thermometer with alcohol and placing it back into his big black navy medicine bag. “If it doesn’t kill your son outright, it’ll probably turn into rheumatic fever and attack his heart.”

“What about penicillin?” Mom asked, having heard of the new wonder drug from her brothers, who were veterans of World War II. She glanced at Mr. Dooley, who nodded encouragement.

The navy doctor released a great sigh. “May I point out to you that I was ‘persuaded’ to come here? I have made a diagnosis but I can’t just give out medicine. Any penicillin I may have is federal property. Besides that, I’m not licensed to practice in this state except on federal employees.”

Mom leaned forward, her nose just a few inches from that of the doctor-sailor. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You have penicillin in that bag of yours which might cure my son?”

The doctor blinked. “Mrs. Hickam, I just said—”

Mom moved her nose an inch closer, her hands turned into fists.
“And you won’t give it to him?”

The doctor grabbed his bag to his chest and scrambled to his feet. “Mrs. Hickam, I have my orders to not treat civilians!”

Mr. Dooley had heard enough. He stood up and very gently eased Mom aside and grabbed the doctor by the lapels of his navy suit, lifted him right off the ground, his polished brown shoes swinging. Sick as I was, I still admired it. “You’ll be giving the boy all the medicine he needs, won’t you?”

The doctor nodded eagerly. “Of course!”

And so, after he got let down, the doctor gave me my shot, the first of many he would give me over the course of the next few weeks. I would get well, but Mr. Dooley was another case.

After he left our house, Mr. Dooley went to work. Too late to catch the regular man-trip, he went down on the man-lift and started to walk into his section along the main line. He hadn’t gone far before a line of coal cars came rocketing around a turn so fast he couldn’t get out of the way. The first car hit him and flung him headfirst against a crib support. Although he woke up some days later, he was never again the same. His mind was pretty much gone.

When it was determined that Mr. Dooley wasn’t going to get any better, everybody up and down Coalwood’s fence line said it was a shame, but it was also a problem. Mr. Dooley fell between Coalwood’s rules. As far as his usefulness to the mine was concerned, he might as well have been dead. By all rights, he and his wife should have been cut off.

The company, still dealing with the naval occupation, ignored Mr. Dooley and let him lie in his house with his missus tending him. While Dad was inside the mine one day, Mom went to the Captain’s office and barged inside. Nate Dooley, she said, had saved her son and he wasn’t going to be cut off, not now, not ever, not if the Captain wanted to ever see her face in Coalwood again. She’d also do everything she could, she said, to take her husband with her.

When Dad came home from work that night and heard from Mom what she had done, he was mortified at her brashness, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Captain had agreed to Mom’s demands, one of the very few times he’d given in on anything. Mr. Dooley had been assigned the job of bathhouse attendant for the rest of his days. He was kept on full pay, just as if he worked the hardest, dirtiest, meanest job in the mine. When Mr. Carter gave in to President Truman and sold out, and the Ohio steel company that bought the mine took over, Mr. Dooley stayed right where he was, even though nobody bothered to tell the men from Ohio about it.

It could be rightfully said that because of me, Nate Dooley had become the town’s secret man. By the time I grew up and went off to college, he still was.