Sky of Stone (2 page)

Mom’s fox story was one of her best. I loved to hear it, except its ending. She got her fox in 1947 when I was four years old and Jim was six. We were living at the time on Substation Row, a line of company houses that ran down Wolfpen Hollow. The pup came from a passing hunter who’d unearthed a litter after killing the mother fox. When my father came home that evening, he went into the basement to find Mom on the concrete floor cuddling her new “puppy” in her arms. “Funny-looking little dog,” he said, only able to see its tiny face and big ears. Mom did not reply; she just kept holding her new pet.

Dad got into the basement shower and started the daily thirty minutes of hard scrubbing it took to get off the coal dirt. When he came out, he took a longer, closer look at the little creature now scuttling around on the basement floor. Whatever it was, he decided it was no dog. “Elsie,” he asked, as calmly as ever he could, “is that, by any chance, a wolf?”

“It is not,” my mom replied. “It is but a fox.”

Dad was staggered. “You have brought a
fox
into our house?” Foxes were known as killers of chickens and cats and anything else they could catch. They were not meant to snuggle on your lap while you listened to Jack Benny on the radio.

The little fox sat down and cocked its head, coolly appraising my father. “Look how cute he sits,” Mom said. “I’m going to call him Parkyacarcass, like the funny man on the radio.”

Dad argued with her, but Mom would not listen. She would have her fox.

At this point in the story, Mom and Dad would say some things as surely as the snow came in the winter. “I told your mom a fox should be free,” Dad would say.

“And I told your dad,” she would say, “so should a person.”

“Who’s not free?” Dad would demand.

“You,” she’d say, and then, “Me.”

Dad would start to say something else, then seem to subside. “Well, that’s the end of the story,” he’d say.

“No, it isn’t,” Mom would reply, and while Dad mopped in his corn bread and milk, she’d go on with it.

Mom said Parky grew quickly into exactly what he was supposed to be, a red fox with a big bushy tail, pointy ears, long snout, razor-sharp teeth, and a subtle mind. Though he was in nearly all things a typical fox, his tail was distinctive. Most West Virginia red foxes had a little silvery tip at the end of their tails, but Parky looked as if somebody had dipped his tail in a can of silver paint. It went nearly a third of the tail’s length. It made him all the more beautiful and glorious, at least in a foxy way.

I always laughed when Mom said Parky never walked on the floor but hopped around the house from chair to table to the top of my dad’s head. I could just imagine Dad flailing his arms as he tried to get a fox off his head. Sometimes, I would laugh so hard my stomach hurt, the way Mom told it. Dad always stayed silent.

For a while, Mom said, Parky contented himself with jumping around the house and patrolling the backyard even though it was dominated by a mother cat named Sis. When Sis arched her back and hissed like a snake, Parky would tuck his tail between his legs and slink. Nothing on this planet could slink like a fox, Mom said, except maybe a politician in a beer joint.

It didn’t take long before Parky took note of a little wooden shack up on the hill across the creek. It belonged to a neighbor and housed a few plump laying hens and the odd rooster. My mom’s first inkling of Parky’s interest in the chicken house came when she saw him racing low to the ground down the hill with a bundle of feathers over his shoulder and a hound dog baying at his hind feet. Parky, his tail straight out behind him like a red and silver flag in a stiff breeze, scampered across the plank that bridged the creek, then flew over the back fence and swished down the basement steps, leaving the hound dog moaning and pacing in frustration outside. When Mom ventured into the basement, she entered a snowstorm of feathers. Giving up on rescue, she sought out the owner of the chicken, confessed everything, and paid him a two-dollar bill for his trouble. That afternoon, Parky, with a feather still on his snout, sought Mom out and curled up on her lap for a quiet snooze. She said she forgave him instantly. He was, after all, but a fox.

Mom continued her story over the kitchen table, her coffee cup empty and Dad digging for the last crumb of milk-sodden corn bread in his glass.

“Parky lived free,” Mom would say proudly. “Even though he came back to me, I loved most of all his free spirit. If it cost me a few dollars for a chicken now and again, I loved that he came and went as he pleased, did as he wanted. How glorious it must be to be truly free!”

“You’re free, Elsie,” Dad would invariably retort.

Why he would say anything, I never knew, because it always gave Mom the opening for a little speech she practiced. “Homer, as long as we’re in this town, I’ll never be free. You have your work, but what do I have but to wait every day to see if you’re still alive? I want an end to it.”

And he would say, “It’s my job.”

And she would reply, “Yes, but it’s not mine.”

Their repartee changed a bit after X rays revealed smears of coal dust on Dad’s lungs. After that, she always added: “Your job is killing you, Homer, one spot on your lung at a time. I swan I won’t let it kill me.”

And then Dad would purse his lips thoughtfully and Mom would continue her story, getting to the part I didn’t like. I could tell Dad wanted to leave, but for some reason he never did.

As time went by, she said, Parky scrambled into the basement with his chicken dinner with ever more dogs after him. The chicken house owner had staffed up on canines. He could afford them because Mom kept paying out her two dollars per hen. Then one day, Mom looked out in the yard and didn’t see Parky and sensed that something was wrong. All day, there was no Parky. Mom suspected the worst, but the dogs at the chicken house were all lolling around, some of them on their backs to expose their pink plump bellies to the sun, too calm by far to have been finally successful against their little foe. At her intense questioning, the chicken house owner denied that he had done anything to Parky. In fact, he allowed he liked the little creature because Mom’s payments represented the only profit he’d ever made on his enterprise.

And then Mom would lean over the table on her elbows and give my father a significant look and say, “Homer, tell me the truth. You carried him off somewhere, didn’t you?”

And Dad would slowly shake his head and say, “No, Elsie. I’m sure Parky just went off the way wild animals do. He’s free, like you like to think.”

“I always know when you’re lying,” she’d say. “I can see it in your face.”

The strange thing about the windup of the Parkya carcass story was that I could see the same thing Mom saw. I guess my father didn’t have a face much good for lying. After a while, I started to believe with Mom that Dad had carried the fox off, too. Maybe he’d even killed him, although I couldn’t imagine it to be so. Dad was never a hunter, odd for a Coalwood man.

For long periods, Mom wouldn’t tell her fox story and I would nearly forget about it. But then it would come back, related over the kitchen table with my parents rehearsing their practiced lines yet again, straight to the ambiguous conclusion. The mystery of what had happened to her fox was one of the sorest things between my mother and my father, and one that even the salve of time didn’t ever seem to heal.

Sometimes, when neither seemed to have a story they wanted to tell, Dad would wait until Mom got a fresh cup of coffee, and then haul out his well-thumbed book of American poetry and read to her. It seemed to calm her and, for some reason, also gave him solace. I could see his face relax, all the lines of care dissolving as he read. The poem he most liked to read was one written by a man with the grand name of Angelo De Ponciano. To me, as much as he loved it, the poem seemed kind of sad:

Have you ever sat by the railroad track
and watched the emptys cuming back?

lumbering along with a groan and a whine—
smoke strung out in a long gray line
belched from the panting injun’s stack
—just emptys cuming back.

I have—and to me the emptys seem
like dreams I sometimes dream—
of a girl—or munney—or maybe fame—
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
—just emptys cuming back.

As a Coalwood boy, I had come to understand that God had determined that there was no joy greater than hard work, and that He made no water holier than the sweat off one’s brow; and I also understood that love is God’s gift to us that we might share it, and also the ache in our soul if it might be lost. But, like Dad’s simple poem, and Mom’s story of her fox, there was much I didn’t understand that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with Coalwood. There were secrets there, altogether as vast and mysterious as the black hole that sits at the center of our galaxy and as glorious as the light that it captures. To understand them, I would have to go away and come back again.

And so I did, in the summer of 1961, when once a president called a nation to greatness, and a town I had forsaken called me home.

2

THE CALL

I
N THE
fall of 1960, when I was seventeen years old, I left Coalwood and crossed the West Virginia state line to attend the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. My brother was already there on a football scholarship, but the reason I’d picked VPI was that it had one of the toughest engineering schools in the country. It was my intention to become as fine an engineer as ever existed upon this planet so that Dr. Wernher von Braun, the famous rocket scientist, would hire me the day I graduated. I had already gotten a head start in that direction in high school. When
Sputnik,
the world’s first earth satellite, had been launched in October 1957, five other Big Creek High School boys and I had decided to join the space race between the United States and Russia and build our own rockets. We launched them from an old slack dump we called Cape Coalwood and had done so well we’d even gone to the 1960 National Science Fair and returned to Coalwood with a gold and silver medal for propulsion. We were, for a little while, as famous as any boys from McDowell County were ever likely to be.

Upon my arrival in Blacksburg, I was a bit surprised to learn VPI had a military cadet corps in which I was required to serve. Jim, being a football player, had escaped the corps, but I found myself not only trying to cope with classroom work but also the regimen required of a “rat” freshman. Fortunately, the mysterious regulations and ancient military traditions of the corps intrigued me enough that I set out to master them. The most desirable quality for a cadet turned out to be standing up straight, which I could do, and knowing how to march, which I could learn, and polishing brass and spit-shining shoes, which I could tolerate. By the time my freshman year was done, I had even managed to get myself promoted to private first class.

VPI academics, however, proved to be more difficult, especially chemistry and mathematics. Without the incentive of building my rockets, I had trouble paying attention in those classes. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, but most of the time my mind simply wandered off on its own. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t focus on those blackboards filled with dull equations and tedious formulae. Where was the glory in it? Where was the adventure? Where were the rockets? I missed them and I missed the boys and I missed Miss Riley, the high school teacher who’d kept me on the straight and narrow during my years as a rocket boy. If it hadn’t been for English class, I might have even gone on academic probation. My shoddy work did not go unnoticed. After the winter quarter, Dr. Johnston, the dean of Applied Science and Business Administration, under whose auspices English was taught to engineers, called me into his office. He retrieved one of my themes from a pile on his desk. “Read this for me, Mr. Hickam,” he said.

I read where he pointed his finger:
The rocket was steaming like a teakettle.

“What is that?”

I sorted through my possible answers. “A simile?” I guessed.

“Yes!” He put my theme back on the stack and patted it. “Did you know, Mr. Hickam, that I’d warrant there is not a single other engineering student in this whole school who would know a simile if it jumped out of a bush and bit him? Or could invent one?”

I didn’t know that and said so.

“You have a rare talent for writing,” Dr. Johnston continued. “You ought to do something with it.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, still not fully comprehending what he was getting at.

He picked up another paper and turned it in my direction. “Do you know what this is?”

I recognized it quite well, although it was nothing I cared to study. “My grade transcript,” I said.

“Indeed it is,” he answered, “and based on it, I fear you are wasting your time here at VPI. Perhaps you should leave us and go to another college, one stronger in the liberal arts, for instance, where your writing talents might be better honed.”

Now I knew why I was sitting in front of the dean’s desk. “But I can’t leave, sir,” I said, coming close to whining. “I have to be an engineer.”

“Do tell,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a doubtful expression on his face. “And why is that?”

Since he’d asked me, I urgently explained to Dr. Johnston that I had to study engineering because I needed to go help Wernher von Braun. The great man had even sent me an autographed picture, I said. I owed him for that, and I also owed my high school teachers, especially Miss Riley. She had fought for me, for all the rocket boys, so we could build our rockets, and she had done that even though she had cancer, which kept her terribly weak. I also told him about the people in Coalwood who’d gone way out on a limb for me and the other boys. “You see, sir,” I concluded, “that’s why I
have
to stay here until I become an engineer!”

“It’s an interesting story,” Dr. Johnston said, “but the odds are still against you.”

Often when I found myself intellectually cornered, I tried to remember to quote somebody who was intelligent. “In the queer mass of human destiny, the determining factor has always been luck,” I said, quoting Mr. Turner, Big Creek’s principal.

“If that’s your belief, I predict you will also have trouble with statistics,” Dr. Johnston answered dryly.

The good dean dismissed me with the admonition to take my grade transcript and go instantly to see Dr. Byrne, the assistant dean of engineering. I did as I was ordered, finding this dean in his office working diligently behind a huge metal adding machine on his desk. He waved me into a chair, pecked in a few numbers, and then pulled the handle. Out flew a coil of paper, which he inspected, crumpled up, and tossed into a wastepaper can. “Someday,” he said, patting the huge steel contraption, “these things will be no bigger than a shoebox.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, handing over my grades and silently doubting the accuracy of his prediction.

Dr. Byrne reflected on my sorry document for a moment, then said, “Not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, Mr. Hickam. Perhaps you should save us the trouble of flunking you and leave voluntarily.”

I once again explained why I couldn’t quit. “I suspect Wernher von Braun will get along fine without you,” Dr. Byrne observed with some confidence. He eyed a stack of college catalogs on the corner of his desk. “Why don’t you just thumb through these catalogs, eh? You might find a nice little liberal arts college that would suit you just fine.”

I was cornered. “There’s another reason I have to be an engineer,” I said desperately.

“Let’s hear it.” The assistant dean yawned. He acted as if he’d heard everything to come out of a student’s mouth, which he probably had, except what I said next.

“The moon program,” I said.

“What about it?”

“I think I might be responsible for it.”

“This I really must hear,” Dr. Byrne said, and leaned forward, his arms folded on top of the adding machine.

So I told my tale. It had happened back in the spring of 1960, when then-senator John F. Kennedy was fighting for his political survival in the West Virginia presidential primary. I had come upon him standing forlornly on top of a Cadillac automobile over in Welch, the county seat, and it was my opinion he was in trouble. For one thing, his back seemed to be hurting him. He kept rubbing the small of it with his fist, and when he did, his eyes would squint in pain. He wasn’t doing very well with his speech, either. The miners standing around listening to him were pretty listless. Being a boy of the hills, I immediately recognized what his problem was, at least as far as his speech. The senator’s audience wanted a little entertainment. Why else would they come to hear a politician after a hard day’s work in the mines?

At the time, I was wearing a suit I’d just purchased to wear to the National Science Fair, and despite the fact that pride was the number one West Virginia sin, I was completely and utterly full of myself. I thought, as my mom would say, that I was the cat’s meow. The suit I had picked was a bright orange, all the better, I figured, to stand out at the fair. I decided to shake things up by asking a question. For some reason, as soon as I raised my hand, the senator took note of me. My high school pal Emily Sue Buckberry was with me and I heard her moan, “Oh, God, you’re going to embarrass the whole county!”

I did better than that. I embarrassed pretty much the whole state! “What do you think the United States ought to do in space?” I asked a man who’d just talked himself hoarse about unemployment and welfare and food stamps and the raw deal that coal mining was in general.

Kennedy stopped rubbing his back long enough to eye me for what seemed about a century. Then he turned my question back on me. From his lofty perch, he demanded, “What do
you
think we should do in space?”

So I told him, not because I had given it a lot of thought, but because I’d been looking at the moon a lot through a telescope a junior engineer named Jake Mosby had set up for us boys on top of the Coalwood Club House roof. It just popped out of me.
“We should go to the moon!”
I said with such vigor that I got applause and cheers from everybody still standing around. There was some laughter, too, but it was good-natured, since the entertainment value of the senator’s entire enterprise had gone up a notch.

The clapping and cheering and laughing seemed to surprise Senator Kennedy. He straightened a little, surveyed the crowd and their grinning faces, and then, as if he had a sudden inspiration, he said maybe I was right, that what we needed to do was get the country moving again, and if going to the moon could help that, maybe it was just the thing. Then he’d asked me what we should do on the moon when we got there, and I said we should find out what it was made of and go ahead and mine the blamed thing. That idea, too, had just popped into my head. Our audience responded with more whoops and hollers and cries that West Virginians could go and “mine that old moon good!” I got a benevolent smile from the senator before Emily Sue dragged me off to Belcher and Mooney’s men’s store to exchange my beautiful orange suit for something drab and awful.

After that, I’d gone on to win the gold and silver medal for propulsion in the National Science Fair, and Senator Kennedy had gone on to win his elections in West Virginia and the entire country, too. He’d done it by proposing to get the nation moving again, not only around the world but in space, too. To make good on his promise, he’d recently stood up before Congress and announced:
I believe this nation should commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

“You can see now, sir, why I have to be an engineer, can’t you?” I asked. “This is all my fault.”

Dr. Byrne perused my grade transcript a little longer, then rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you what, boy,” he said, reaching across the adding machine to take my hand and give it a good shake, “I still don’t think you’re going to get through my engineering school, but if half of what you say is true, which I sincerely doubt, then I can certainly see why you’ve got to try. Good luck to you. I think you’ll need it.”

I quoted my uncle Robert. “Luck’s a chance but trouble’s sure; I’d be rich if I wasn’t poor.”

Dr. Byrne laughed out loud. “Get out of my office, Hickam,” he said by way of summarizing our interview.

I got out and, since I knew the deans were watching, got to studying. I even stayed awake during chemistry class, at least a significant percentage of the time. During spring quarter, my grades climbed until I was a solidly average engineering student, not bad for a tough place like VPI, I thought.

On a Saturday in early May, I was told to go to the squadron lounge, that a visitor was waiting there for me. It turned out to be my mom, which was quite a surprise. “Sonny boy,” she said, smiling from her seat on the couch. “How nice you look in your uniform.”

Her hair had turned a bit grayer during the past year and her pretty, heart-shaped face looked a bit more drawn and there were a few more wrinkles on her forehead, but otherwise she was the same Mom. I sat beside her. “What are you doing here?” I asked anxiously. It had to be something terrible for her to have made the trip all the way to Blacksburg, uncountable mountains away from Coalwood.

“I’m on my way to Myrtle Beach,” she said. “I finally found a house down there that I can afford. I had to act fast to get it and I did. It just needs a little fixing up, and that’s what I’m heading down there to do.”

Mom had always said a house in Myrtle Beach was what she wanted more than anything in the world, and she’d kept on about it for years. Myrtle Beach, a coastal resort city in South Carolina, was the vacation destination of half the coal miners and their families in West Virginia every summer, including us, and Mom had fallen in love with the place. Still, she’d surprised me by actually following through with her dream, especially since Dad was still some years away from retirement. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“He went over to the football practice field to see Jim,” she said. “He’s going to drive me to the beach and then go back to Coalwood.”

That news didn’t surprise me. Somebody had once asked Mom what it would take to get my dad out of Coalwood, and she had replied, “Dynamite.”

I had a sudden idea. Usually, my best ones seemed to come without much thought, don’t ask me why. “Mom, could I come down this summer and help you fix the place up?” I was already thinking about making a run on the girls down at the beach, too, which I failed to mention.

Mom looked me over. “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.”

“We’d be a great team,” I said eagerly. I tried to recall the words Dad had used when he’d tried to convince the Captain to take him on. “You tell me what to do, don’t matter what it is, and I’ll do it.”

Mom gave me a wan smile. “Can I shoot you if you don’t?”

“You sure can.”

She nodded, then said, “Sonny, here’s the thing. It wasn’t just the house at Myrtle Beach I came by to tell you about. Tuck Dillon’s been killed in the mine.”

I let her message sink in. Tuck Dillon was one of Dad’s best foremen. He’d been Coalwood’s scoutmaster for a while, too. I’d risen all the way to the proud rank of Scout Second Class under his tutelage. I was instantly and naturally sad that he’d gotten killed, but I was wondering why she’d felt it necessary to drive fifty miles out of her way to let me know about it.