The Coalwood Way (34 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOMER HICKAM is the author of the #1 New York
Times
bestseller
Rocket Boys: A Memoir
, which received a National Book Critics Circle nomination and was the basis for the critically acclaimed movie
October Sky
. He is also the author of Back to the Moon, Torpedo Junc
tion
, and
Sky of Stone
, a sequel to
Rocket Boys
and
The
Coalwood Way
. A retired NASA engineer, a scuba instructor, and a consultant on a variety of aerospace projects that interest him, he lives with his wife in Huntsville, Alabama—Rocket City, USA.
Also by Homer Hickam
TORPEDO JUNCTION
ROCKET BOYS
BACK TO THE MOON
SKY OF STONE
Published by
Bantam Dell
a division of
Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
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Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information
address: Delacorte Press, New York, N.Y.
Dell® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-35884
September 2001
eISBN: 978-0-307-42332-0
v3.0