by Homer Hickam
I lost my smile. “What’s wrong with my attitude?”
“You’re a pessimist. And nearly a cynic, unless I miss my diagnosis.”
“I thought you were going to be a doctor, not a psychiatrist.”
“I hope to be a general practitioner, but I wouldn’t mind some psych work.”
“Don’t start with me.”
Johnny’s light caught us. “You boys stop leaning on those shovels and use them!” he barked.
We got back to shoveling. When Johnny returned, he said, “I told Dwight you boys are a mite slow but you’re catching on.”
For a second, I thought Bobby was going to hug Johnny. I was less enthusiastic but still pleased that I was going to keep my job. For the first time ever in the history of my entire life, I was making my way without help from anybody. It was a pretty good feeling.
When Johnny announced the man-trip was on its way, I squatted on my haunches and took a deep breath. Thank the good Lord this shift is over was my thought. All I could think about was a hot shower, that and wondering if I could convince Floretta to layer on some of her special liniment again.
But Johnny hadn’t announced the man-trip to tell us we were done for the day. He just wanted us to know we needed to hurry and clean things up. “It ain’t right to leave a workplace dirty, boys.” He pointed out the trail of chips and splinters we’d left, hauling the posts.
I squinted at the debris. “Who’ll care if we leave a bunch of splinters in the gob?” I asked.
Johnny said, “I will.” Then he said, “You should.”
There was no use arguing, so Bobby and I pushed the gob car along and shoveled debris into it until Johnny announced he was happy with the result. I couldn’t see a bit of difference but kept my opinion to myself. After Bobby and I pushed the gob car into a siding, we returned to find Johnny had used spit and his bandanna to polish our shovels and the sledgehammer until they gleamed. He fussed around our work site until finally the grimy yellow man-trip ground up beside us, its brakes squalling. I was sure glad to see it.
Johnny and Bobby got into a car together, but I jumped into another one where I could be alone. I wanted to take inventory of the new set of bumps, bruises, blisters, and aching muscles I’d obtained. Then I thought about the kettle bottom. My second day in the mine and I’d nearly been killed. I had a hunch I’d see that kettle bottom in my nightmares for a while.
At the lift, I thought to ask Johnny a question that had been lurking in the back of my mind all day. Bobby was off talking to somebody else, so it was a good time to get my question in. “Mrs. Dooley wants me to come by and help her give Nate a bath,” I said. “But I can’t figure out why she asked me.”
Johnny took his helmet off, scratched around his ears, then peered upward into the darkness of the great shaft. “Nate can be a handful, so I hear.”
“But why would she ask me to help her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, who’s been helping her until now?” I demanded.
Johnny pulled on his nose, coughed into his hand, wiped it on his pants leg, and lowered his voice. “Tuck Dillon,” he said. “He was Nate Dooley’s best friend.”
I felt a chill go up my spine, don’t ask me why.
16
IN THE GRAVEYARD
WHEN I limped back to the Club House, any hope I had for another therapy session with Floretta disappeared when I heard a commotion in the kitchen and saw another aproned lady go through its swinging door with a tray of utensils. I recognized her—Lula Pearl Carpenter, a lady from up Snakeroot Hollow. She was apparently helping Floretta get ready for a function of some kind. I poked my head inside the kitchen, and Floretta shrieked at the sight of me. “Get your dirty coal miner self out of my kitchen, boy! What are you thinking?”
She was stirring a pot with one hand and shaking a pan with another. The delicious aroma of chicken-fried steak wafted over. “What’s all the excitement?”
“Mr. Bundini sent Carol over to tell us he had guests and wants to bring them here tonight for supper. Waited until the last minute, that rascal, so I had to rustle up Lula Pearl to come help me. Your mama called.”
It took me a second to process her last nugget of information. “She did? What did she say?”
Floretta paused long enough to wipe her hands on her apron and consult her memory. “Let’s see. Something about you’d better call her tonight if you knew what was good for you but not too early because she’s got some no-good roof contractor she has to yell at first.”
I gulped. “That’s it?”
“We talked some but not for your ears. Now get out of my kitchen!”
I got out and headed for the shower. I was in a sweat. I’d waited too long to call Mom. Now she’d tracked me down, probably built up to a fury for all my shenanigans. For all I knew, she’d hired someone, maybe one of the Mallett boys, to pop me a good one. I ventured back downstairs after I got cleaned up. Lula Pearl, a tiny woman who had burn scars down half her face from a kerosene lantern explosion years ago, drew me aside. “Reverend Richard sure would like to see you, Sonny,” she said, tugging my shirtsleeve.
“I sure would like to see him, too,” I said, regretting that I hadn’t already gone to see him since my return. It seemed as if everywhere I turned, there was old Mr. Regret standing there, grinning at me. The Reverend had given me counsel and advice a lot of times while I was growing up in Coalwood, and I knew I could stand a little more right now.
I ate supper off the stove and slipped out before the Bundini family and their guests arrived. I liked Mr. Bundini a lot. He was a good general superintendent and had fit in well with Coalwood citizens. My dad admired him, too, had said more than once he was one of the best overseers Coalwood had ever had. Still, I thought it wise to avoid him, just in case his guests were from the steel company. I suspected Dad hadn’t advertised that one of his sons had joined the union, and Mr. Bundini was sure to introduce me if I was seen. It was sad to have to think of myself as an embarrassment to my father, but I was, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
I headed on down the road to see the Reverend Julius “Little” Richard. His Mudhole Church of Distinct Christianity was just past the old mule barn at the mouth of Mudhole Hollow. The church was a tiny wooden building with a stumpy steeple, and round windows in front. The Reverend had designed the windows himself, saying they represented the potter’s wheel written about in the book of Jeremiah, a wheel that God used to shape us any way he liked.
The church was empty, so I limped up the hollow between the row of little wooden houses that lined the dirt road until I reached the Reverend’s place. There was no answer to my knock at his door. A huge woman dressed in a vast blue dress and a snowy white apron came out on the porch of the house next door and hailed me. I recognized her as Mrs. Pauline Faye Anderson, the piano player at the Reverend’s church. “He’s up there, Sonny,” she said with a nod of her head toward Mudhole Mountain. When I looked blank, she pointed to the fence behind his house. “Go through the gate, honey, and follow the path.” She spoke kindly and carefully, as if talking to someone rather slow. Colored people often did that with me, I’d noticed over the years.
I thanked Mrs. Anderson and trod the path that I found starting at the gate in the backyard. It plunged into a mass of thick green rhododendron and then went nearly straight up. I grabbed roots and trees to help me along, noting as I went how dry the dirt was. It hadn’t rained, now that I thought about it, since the night I’d come back to Coalwood.
The trail flattened out after a bit, then wound through some shagbark hickories before coming upon a grove of pin oaks twisted by age. I passed through them and then entered a clearing that went all the way up to the ridge. I climbed until I emerged into a small meadow of
sweet-smelling wild sage, wilted flower patches, and tombstones. A number of cats, their tails hanging down like furry vines, were lounging on top of the tombstones. A few of them jumped down at my appearance, but most of t
hem just gave me a solemn glance and then went back to what they were doing, which was nothing.
The Reverend Richard, dressed in his black frock, was sitting on one of the tombstones, his pointy shoes drawn up to press against the front. In his hands, he held his old, cracked Bible. “Hello, Reverend,” I said.
The Reverend was deep in thought or prayer, I couldn’t tell which because, I suppose, sometimes there isn’t much difference. His eyes cut in my direction. He blinked, then his mouth fell open. “Sonny Hickam. In all my borned days. Is it really you?”
I agreed that it was, indeed. He climbed down from his marble perch and opened his arms and I gladly fell into them. His thick black hair, smelling of pomade, brushed past my cheek, which was, to my surprise, suddenly damp with my tears. When he released me, his cheeks were wet, too. “Sweet Jesus, how I’ve missed you,” he said as another tear slid down past his nose and into his thin mustache. “Let me look at you.”
I let him look, all the while drinking him in, too. All of a sudden, there was nobody more important in the whole world to me than Reverend Richard. During my entire year at VPI, I had not deigned to write him so much as a letter. Now I regretted it—Hello again, Mr. Regret—and I think he saw it in my eyes.
“You and me, Sonny, we don’t need to see each other because we know how we feel, eh?” He put his hand on my neck and drew me in again. “I am so proud of you, Lord, so proud, even if you nearly flunked out of college, rolled your daddy’s car, and went to work in the mine against everything your mama ever stood for.”
“Thank you, Reverend,” I said, happily accepting his absolution. He’d already pretty much given me everything I’d come for. “I’ll try to do better.”
He released me. “I know you will, Sonny. The Lord has always had a special plan for you, don’t you think He don’t. Did you go to church down there in that college?”
“Yes, sir, some Sundays.” It was even the truth.
He nodded. “The Lord likes to see you in His house every so often. Don’t need to be all the time but enough so He can count you amongst the flock.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Reverend beckoned me to two tombstones close together. I sat on one and he sat on the other. I told the Reverend about my job at the mine and how Dad had first let me take the job and then had tried to fire me. Of course, the Reverend knew all about it, since the Mudhole Church of Distinct Christianity was another stop on the gossip fence-line. “You did a proud thing, Sonny,” he said. “As long as you remember to go back to college this fall.”
I told him that Dad had cut me off from college funding. “Mr. Homer will do right,” he said. “I wouldn’t be too worried.”
“I’m too sore to worry,” I replied, which was nearly the truth.
The Reverend grinned, his gold tooth flashing in the light from the sun just as it set behind the mountains. Orange and pink spokes of light emanated from the point behind the ridge where it had gone, and a drifting cloud looked to be made of spun gold.
“It sure is pretty up here,” I said, petting the calico cat who occupied my tombstone.
“That’s why we put these fine folks to rest in this place,” the Reverend replied. He eyed me. “So what else you got going on, Sonny?”
I filled the Reverend in about the kettle bottom and my near miss. I could tell by the way he raised his eyebrows that he hadn’t heard about it. “I’ll say a prayer of thanksgiving,” he said. “And give God special thanks for Johnny Basso. He is a most humble Christian man.”
“Being with Johnny was my dad’s idea,” I said. “He was supposed to chase me and Bobby Likens off.”
“Your daddy’s got a lot on his mind these days, I swan,” the Reverend said.
I knew the Reverend was referring to Tuck Dillon. “Dad just acts like there’s nothing happening,” I said.
“That’s the way innocent people are supposed to act,” he replied while petting a black cat that had just jumped up on the stone beside him.
“But he needs to fight what people are saying, doesn’t he?”
“Maybe he just needs to pray.”
“Dad’s never been much for praying.”
“Then I shall pray for him—and also that your mother will soon return. Homer’s just not Homer without Elsie.”
“I don’t think she’s coming anytime soon,” I said.
“You’ve talked to her lately?”
“I’m supposed to call her tonight,” I said. “She’s going to blister me good for going to work in the mine.”
“And you’re afraid?”
I thought the question over. “Not afraid, just sorry I’ve disappointed her and Dad, too. I figured to really vex them by showing how I’d grown up and could do anything I wanted to do. Now I feel bad about it. So I’ve really gotten myself into a crack, Reverend.”
The Reverend pursed his lips. “You have, indeed,” he said. “Anything else?”
I told him the reason why I’d come back in the first place—Mom’s directive for me to be with Dad during his time of trouble. “But I can’t figure out how to help him or even what’s happening,” I confessed. “All I see is a tangle.”
“Let me give you a line from Proverbs, Sonny,” the Reverend said. “‘It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the honor of kings to search it out.’”
I contemplated the eloquent ancient words. “So it is an honor for me to be curious and look into all this?”
“An honor often comes disguised,” he said. “It might just as soon be a harlequin tramp as the president of the United States.”
“I’ll take the tramp any day. Presidents seem more trouble than anything. President Truman tore up Coalwood with the navy and now President Kennedy is heading for the moon before I can get ready to help him. That’s got me worried.”
He shook his head. “Don’t you concern yourself about that old moon. You’ll get there on God’s own good time and not before.”
Since I was unburdening myself, I decided to complete my list. I told him Mrs. Dooley had asked me to come help her with her mister’s bath.
“You should do it,” he replied.
“But why me?”
“Maybe Mrs. Dooley just likes you,” the Reverend answered. “Some people do, you know. Take Miss Dreama sleeping over there beneath the willow tree. She liked you a great deal, Sonny. She trusted you, too.”
The Reverend climbed off his tombstone and led me to Dreama’s grave. She was, as I had told Rita, the only white person in the colored graveyard on Mudhole Mountain. Dreama had finally become the Coalwood girl she had wanted to be, and for all eternity.
I bowed my head in front of her grave. Red clover surrounded it, their scarlet blossoms waving in the mild breeze. A half-dozen cats lounged nearby. One of them got up and rubbed its head in a clump of woolly green plants that grew beside Dreama’s stone. I plucked off a leaf, rubbed it between my fingers, and put it to my nose. “Catnip,” I said, recognizing its tangy scent.
The Reverend reached over to pet one of the cats, which set it to purring. “The Mudhole kitties love to come up here,” he said. “They get drunk on the catnip, then sleep on the graves in the sun. They’re keeping the folks up here company, Sonny. That’s a blessed thing.”
Dreama’s view stretched all the way up the valley to Coalwood Main. She could watch the town going and coming, something I knew she’d like. “You did good for Dreama, Reverend,” I said.
“I did my best,” he said. “As you will do yours.”
Beside Dreama’s grave, the Reverend and I talked more of many things, of the people of Coalwood, and of my mother, and my father, and even, when I mentioned the addition to Mom’s mural, the little fox named Parkyacarcass, whom he remembered. “Your father did not kill it, that much I know,” he said. “He’s not a man who would do such a thing.”
“I sometimes think that was when all their troubles started,” I said. “The stories of their life together are wonderful and happy until they get to Mom’s
fox. Then there aren’t any more stories at all, just arguments.”
The Reverend gave me a nod. “To your father, it was a fox of trouble. To your mother, it was a fox of joy. But what did the fox think of itself?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he just thought he was a fox.”
Reverend Richard laughed his slow laugh and put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s leave the kitty cats to mind the graveyard,” he said, “and go back to the living. There is much for us to do, according to the expectations of others.”
I nodded agreement and, together, in the gathering darkness, Reverend Richard and I walked down the path to the small houses in the hollow, just beginning to glow with the first lamps of the evening. Along the way, I kept thinking of the Reverend’s proverb. The truth of what had happened with Dad and Tuck Dillon was well hidden, whether by God or, more likely, what Mr. Dubonnet called Coalwood business. Honor or no, I suspected it would take a squadron of kings to penetrate even the smallest of the secrets that ran like a murky river through Coalwood. If it was truly my job to do, I sure didn’t see any way to do it.
17
SQUARED AWAY
I PEEKED in the dining room from the Club House porch and saw Mr. and Mrs. Bundini and a man and a woman I didn’t recognize seated at a table laden with silver serving trays of chicken-fried steak, butter beans, mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and corn on the cob. Floretta appeared out of the kitchen with a bottle of wine and topped off their glasses all around. She smiled serenely at something Mr. Bundini said to her, no doubt a compliment on the food and drink.
It was a warm, lazy evening, so I decided to stay out on the porch, selecting the wood-slatted swing as a good place to listen to the gentle eeping of crickets in the yard punctuated by the low thrum of frogs in the creek behind the machine shop.
I heard the door open and close in the company office building across the road. In a moment, boots thudded on the concrete steps to the porch. It was Rita, in her junior engineer outfit, complete with shiny white helmet. She peeked in the window, then spotted me. “Do you want some company?”
