The Coalwood Way (10 page)

The two young men looked at each other and then shook their heads. “
Nein. Herr Doktor
von Braun is in another line of work, eh?” They both laughed and then each stuck out their hands to me to shake. “Gerhard,” the straw-haired man said.

“Dieter,” said the one with the black hair.

“Sonny Hickam,” I said.

“The son of Homer Hickam?” Dieter asked. His English seemed much better than Gerhard’s.

“Yes, sir.”

“
Ach,
your father is a man who sees.”

I didn’t understand. “Sees?”

“Sees,” Dieter said mysteriously.

I guessed Dad saw, but what he was seeing these days I had no idea. Gerhard held up two envelopes and mimed mailing them.

“Oh, the post office.” I pointed it out, just across the street, lit only by a streetlight. “But it’s closed.” They nodded, although a bit uncertainly. I led the two over to the post office and showed them the slot to put their letters in, but then I noticed they didn’t have any stamps on them. I pointed that out and we walked back to the Club House. “You sure you don’t know Wernher von Braun?” I asked.

“Nein, nein,”
Dieter answered, acting a little put out. He looked around. “What is there to do?” He waved his hand at the street. Downtown Coalwood was as quiet as a graveyard.

“I’m going up to look at the stars,” I said, and when they gave me an uncomprehending look, I walked to the edge of the porch and pointed at the first twinkling pinpoint of light in the black sky. “Stars,” I said again. Dieter and Gerhard came over and looked up, too, but it was clear they didn’t understand what I was talking about. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

I led them up to the third floor, stopping to get Jake’s telescope out of the broom closet where it was stored. I motioned to them to follow me, and we climbed up the rude wooden ladder. We emerged in the total darkness, but I knew the roof as well as my own room and led them over to the telescope base, covered by a canvas. I took the canvas off and attached the telescope to the base. I proudly patted the assembly. “We use this to look at the stars and planets,” I said.

I showed them how to manipulate the telescope, and they looked with interest at each planet I pointed out, beginning with reliable Venus, our dazzling, cloud-shrouded, and closest planetary neighbor. “Nobody knows what’s under those clouds,” I explained as they each took turns at the eyepiece, Dieter translating what I was saying to Gerhard. “Could be the whole place is covered by an ocean or maybe a big jungle.” Then I showed them Saturn. “See the rings? Go ahead,” I told them as they swiveled the telescope from planet to planet, and star to star. “Look all you want.”

While Dieter and Gerhard took turns looking and chattering in German about their various discoveries in the sky, I sat down on the edge of the roof. Sometimes when my eyes got tired of squinting through the telescope, I would gaze down on Coalwood, looking at it with almost the same wonder and curiosity as the sky. After living there my entire life, I suppose I should have learned all that there was to know about the place. Yet I suspected there were many things about my town of which I knew little, including the contest my parents had waged for as long as I could remember as to what my future should be, and my brother’s, and their own. The stars were complex and deeply mysterious. Coalwood and its people, it often seemed to me, were vastly more so.

Past the church, I saw the Dantzler house, a big, white two-story box nestled in a stand of pine. What was Ginger doing at that exact moment? Studying, I supposed, or playing the piano or practicing singing the scales. The Dantzlers were about as cultured and fine a family as I guess had ever graced Coalwood. Maybe I was too crude to ever aspire to their level. “Grace, Sonny Hickam,” Mrs. Dantzler had told me one time when I’d stumbled over a lesson and sat there beside her, my head hanging in mortification because I had been so clumsy. “Head up,” she’d said brightly. “Curve your fingers. Now play. You can do it. Let’s go.” She put her hand under my chin and physically raised it, then took my hands, curved my fingers, and placed them on the keys. “Play,” she commanded, and I had. “Good,” she said, and because she’d said it, I knew it was.

I wondered what life was going to be like without Mrs. Dantzler and all the other townspeople I had known my whole life. By next fall, I would be gone from Coalwood, probably to college. Mom had promised I could go if I showed my dad I was capable of something more than just dreaming. I’d already shown him with my rockets and I was going to show him soon with my grades. Still, even though it was what I wanted to do, I felt frightened at the prospect of leaving. And then I thought—wait a minute—is this what makes me sad? Did I need to put “Leaving Coalwood” on my list? My thoughts were interrupted as Dieter and Gerhard joined me on the edge of the roof. Dieter lit a cigarette while Gerhard sat down beside me and kicked his feet over the ledge. “It is a very nice place, Coalwood,” Dieter said.

“Um,” I grunted noncommittally.

“You are here your whole life?”

“Yes, sir.” I looked over at him. “Why did you say you’re here?”

Dieter flicked his ashes over the edge while Gerhard hummed a tuneless song. “I didn’t say.”

I nodded. It was a West Virginia custom to be curious but to never go past a rebuke. I was just passing the time, anyway. I didn’t much care why the two Germans were in Coalwood, since they didn’t even know Wernher von Braun. I looked out over the Club House lawn. The machine shop across the valley was dark and quiet. I could even hear the gurgling of the little creek that ran behind it.

“We help your dad,” Dieter said, flicking his cigarette over the roof. I watched it fall, a tiny meteor that bounced on the lawn, sparks flying.

I looked in his direction. “How do you help him?”

Dieter was quiet for a moment and then got up. Gerhard did as well. They made their way to the hatch in the roof. “We help him at 11 East,” Dieter said, and then they went below.

At the mention of 11 East, the autumn air seemed to get suddenly chillier. I thought Dieter surely must have told me wrong. 11 East? How could that be possible? Ever since I was old enough to know what it meant, 11 East conjured up disaster, death, and doom all rolled up into one deep, dark place.

10

11 EAST

OVER THE NEXT few days, the two Germans became the main topic of fence-line gossip. Some people even made up excuses to go to the Club House just to look at them. Dieter and Gerhard kept pretty much to themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before people heard what they had come for, at least to an extent. The Germans had come under a special contract to do some unspecified work at the section named 11 East, which my father had decided to reopen. There was grumbling all over town. Homer Hickam had surely lost his mind on this one. 11 East was a known killer.

I knew the story of the section as well as anybody, having heard it from my parents at the supper table. The Captain had first opened 11 East in 1941. There was supposed to be a huge seam of pure bituminous coal there, seven to nine feet thick, easy to work—prime “high coal” as such was called. The Captain, after a careful engineering analysis, had assigned the new section its number—every section had one—and pointed a crew in that direction. It didn’t take long before 11 East turned into the Captain’s and Coalwood’s nightmare. There were rockfalls, runaway cars, gas flare-ups, flooding, and some men were hurt and a few were killed. A lot of Coalwood miners from the very start said the place was jinxed, but others said the problem was the roof, a jumble of massive slabs of razor-edged rock. “Just get through this bad roof, boys,” the Captain was purported to say, “and we’ll all be rich as Croesus.”

“Okay, Cap’n, but I guess we’ll have to spend our money in the hereafter,” one miner was supposed to have retorted, although I couldn’t imagine anybody ever truly talking back to the Captain. He stood nearly six and a half feet tall, a huge, slump-shouldered, big-footed man who often walked around with a pistol tucked in his belt. Dad said the pistol was never loaded, but Mom said one time the Captain used it to shoot a cigar right out of the mouth of a man who lit it up in the presence of a lady. I’d have paid real money to have seen the Captain make that shot.

Dad had been a day-shift construction foreman at the time when 11 East was opened, but the Captain reassigned him to take the lead foreman’s job on the evening shift of the new section. Day after day, the Coalwood men on all three shifts assaulted 11 East like an army at war, trying every way possible to get through the bad rock. Then, to compound their problems, they discovered that the coal seam sloped downward and became narrower. Before it was over, men had to crawl on their hands and knees to get to the face, but the Captain kept urging them on, believing the high coal was always just a few more yards away. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stopped the combat at 11 East. With the demand for coal from the War Department, the Captain had to quit and go after the easier coal. Before the Captain closed the section down, so I’d heard, some 11 East miners had volunteered for the army, figuring they’d be safer storming beaches than working under that deadly roof.

In later years, “11 East” became a phrase used in Coalwood for a close-run thing that was a bit too close. Some mothers even warned their unruly kids that, if they didn’t behave, they were going to be “sent down to 11 East.” Then, in the early 1950’s, a few miners going back into the gob near the old section to eat their lunches claimed they had witnessed miners wearing striped, full-bib coveralls and corrugated helmets, the kind that had been worn before the war. The old-timers had said nothing, just kept walking back into the abandoned tunnel that had been the entry to 11 East. After that report, most people believed the old section was haunted. Every mine had such stories, but this one had the ring of truth to it. I couldn’t imagine why Dad would want to go back in there.

There was one other awful thing that had happened on 11 East, too, now that I thought about it. That was where Poppy got his legs cut off.

ONE afternoon after school, I rode my bike down to the Big Store to get a bottle of soda pop. Mr. Dubonnet was talking to some of his union men over by the cigar counter when I walked into the drugstore section. He came over and leaned on the counter beside me. “How about I buy you a pop?” he said, shoving his hand in his pants pocket after change.

“No, thanks, sir,” I said, showing him I had my own fifteen cents.

Mr. Dubonnet ignored my show of money and called Junior over and ordered me a Royal Crown. He took off his hat and laid it on the counter and ordered himself a Dr Pepper and a bag of peanuts, which he proceeded to pour into the bottle. Then he leaned backward with his elbows on the counter and perused the passing scene through the store windows. A couple of his men started to come up to him, but with an almost imperceptible shake of his head he sent them away. “How’s your mother?” he asked after a while. “I guess the Veterans Day float took some wind out of her sails.”

“You don’t know my mother if you think that,” I said. Of course, he did know her. He’d gone through Gary High School with her—and Dad.

Mr. Dubonnet drank his pop and peanuts and then rubbed his chin. He had something on his mind, no doubt about it. “Sonny, if there’s ever . . .” He hesitated. “. . . ever anything I can do for you and . . . your mother . . .” He looked around. I guess it was to see if anybody was listening. “. . . you’ll let me know?”

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything.

“So . . .” Mr. Dubonnet pursed his lips. “So, your dad’s opening up 11 East.”

Now I thought I knew why he was talking to me. “I don’t know anything about 11 East, sir!” I fairly shouted.

Mr. Dubonnet’s face clouded and he looked around again. Shoppers moved past, women intent on groceries with kids in tow. “No, I expect you wouldn’t,” he said after a bit. “Sonny, I’ve always thought your father was a good man. He isn’t a fair man, he’s too hard-shelled in what he believes to be fair, but he’s still a good man. I want you to know that I know that. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I guess.”

“Opening 11 East is going to cause trouble. Best you get ready for it.”

I was astonished a Coalwood adult could be so frank to an adolescent not in his family. “Sir?”

He shrugged. “Union trouble, surely, at my level. The men assigned to the section have already come to me. They’re afraid of it and I’ll make their case for them. These Germans come to work here, even if they are under contract, are breaking union rules. You have to be a member of the UMWA to work in this mine and I’ll shortly be reminding your dad of that. It’s not only me, Sonny. People in this town are going to get after your dad on this one. After your family, too, I expect.”

I thought then I knew what he was getting at. There had been boys, sons of union men, who over the years had cornered me at school and tried to beat me up because of what Dad had done at the mine. They had been wasting their time. Every boy in Coalwood could stomp me to a pulp and I’d never tell my dad about it, one way or the other.

“Just so you know,” Mr. Dubonnet said grimly. “Your dad’s out to prove something on this one, that’s what I figure. Maybe he’s just trying to show that the Captain was right after all these years. I don’t know, but just be careful is all I’m saying.” Then he put on his canvas snap-brim fedora, nearly identical to the kind Dad wore, laid his finger on its brim, and walked out of the store, leaving me with my pop to finish and another mystery to unravel.

AS the days counted down to Thanksgiving, Dad continued to stay at the mine until far into the night, going back to work before I got up. One morning, on the way to my rocket laboratory, I found him asleep on the basement stairs. Lucifer had climbed up beside him, his big black tomcat head on Dad’s leg. I woke Dad and he looked at his watch, got up, grabbed his white helmet, and headed back up to the mine. Lucifer and I watched him go.

As much as I wanted to, being fundamentally curious, I never asked Dad about 11 East. The mine was a subject I couldn’t talk to him about in any form. On a spring Sunday in 1958, he had taken me inside the mine while Mom was at church. On the man-trip ride to the face, he had explained to me what the mine meant to him, and how proud he was to be a miner and a leader of miners. At the face, he’d explained the mechanical choreography of the work there, how the continuous miners ate at the seam like great carnivorous dinosaurs, how the crablike loading machines moved in behind to scoop up the coal and scuttle back to the waiting trams. On the way out, he’d put the question to me: Did I want to become a mining engineer? Because if I did, he said, he’d see that I went to college. Jim was going to play football, maybe be a coach. He wasn’t coming back to Coalwood. But Coalwood needed its sons, he explained, and he needed at least one of his to get that “piece of paper” denied him, and then perhaps take his place to keep the good work of coal mining alive so that steel could stay alive and the country, too. I had never seen my dad so earnest, so hopeful, so ready to hear what I had to say. Everything he thought that was right and holy about what he did for a living, and his hopes for Coalwood, he had placed like a sacrifice before me.

On the lift back to the surface, I told my father that Coalwood wasn’t in my future, that I wanted to work for Dr. von Braun. It had been one of the hardest things I had ever done. Because of that, and because I had been a coward when Poppy died, Dad’s present opinion of me was something of a mystery. I had my suspicions, though. I was now, and probably forever, Sonny, the unforgiven son.