by Homer Hickam
We continued our hike, working our way to the end of the overgrown fire road where a narrow path began. It led into a wide clearing, a swath cut by Appalachian Power and Light to make room for the electric power lines that led down to the mine. The company had widened the swath even more when it had chopped down hundreds of trees, both hardwoods and pines, to use as posts, headers, and cribs.
Every time we stopped to catch our breath, we could see more of the valley and the encircling mountains. “It’s beautiful,” Rita said as we stopped beneath some crab-apple trees and drank some water out of my canteen.
“I just wish it would rain,” I said. “It’s been almost a month. It doesn’t take long for all this brush to dry out. If it goes on much longer, a little heat lightning, or somebody playing with matches, and the whole county could go up.”
Rita made no response. Then I realized she wasn’t admiring the mountains at all. Her eyes were on the Olga Number One tipple.
The tipple complex was a black scar in the valley. A huge brick chimney dominated it. A hundred feet high and long dormant, the chimney stood in a lake of coal dust and gob. Behind it sat Dad’s grimy office and the shabby lamphouse and bathhouse. The man-hoist, a black iron structure with twin bullwheels on top, was a forlorn skeleton against the green of the mountains. Up until 1957, the man-hoist had been part of a much larger and more active complex—properly called a tipple—used for lifting, sorting, and dumping coal into miles of railcars lined up on four sets of tracks. All that work had been moved across the mountain when a new tipple and preparation plant had been built in Caretta. The Coalwood tipple wasn’t really a tipple at all anymore, just a place for Coalwood miners to go in and out of the mine. “That’s Dad’s little slice of heaven,” I said of it.
She studied me. Our eyes met. “You resent all the time he spends there, don’t you?”
“I used to,” I confessed, looking back toward the mine. “From way up here, it seems pretty small and dirty. Not much for a lifetime of work.”
“Maybe you need to look at it a different way,” she said. “More like an engineer. Look at how the grounds are laid out. It’s easy to see the plan from this vantage. The lamphouse is perfectly situated to get the men in and out in a hurry. The bathhouse is set back so the shifts won’t be bunching up in front of it. Your dad’s office is placed so he can watch who’s going in and out of his mine. I can see where the old tracks used to be and also the foundation of the tipple. See how it’s angled perfectly to match the contours of the valley? And have you looked at the masonry work on the lamphouse and bathhouse? It’s very fine.”
“They were built by Italian stonemasons,” I said. “Mr. Carter brought them all the way from Italy. They put in the foundation of the Club House, too, and the wall in front of it. One of them was Johnny Basso’s father.”
“I’ve never been able to understand,” she said, “what some people think is ugly. To me, if something works according to its design, that’s true beauty.”
“Spoken like a true engineer,” I said.
“I’m proud to be an engineer, Sonny,” she said in a voice she could have used for praying. “I’ve always loved mechanical things. That’s not very girllike, I know, but that’s the way I’ve always been. Father came home one time from a trip to Europe—I guess I was about five years old—and I’d taken apart every mechanical and electrical device in his apartment. I just wanted to see how they worked.” She smiled at the memory. “Father and the housekeeper tried to keep radios and clocks and whatnot away from me after that. But I’d get to them when they weren’t looking. Sometimes I’d take them apart and put them back together and they never knew. I learned a lot doing that.”
“I never had that kind of curiosity about how machines worked, not until rockets came along,” I admitted. “I was more curious about people. Otherwise, I just liked to read.”
“Engineers don’t read,” she said, chuckling. “Except maybe technical manuals.”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t get by without a good book.”
“The last book I read was Moby-Dick in college.”
“You’re kidding!”
She shrugged. “I don’t like to be bored.” I fell silent, at a loss for words. Then she said, “I’m going inside the mine before this summer is out.”
“Good luck.”
Her eyes flicked toward me, then away. “You don’t think I will?”
“No.”
“Then you’re wrong,” she said.
We stayed on the path until we reached a clearing on the highest ridge. It held the two structures that gave the mountain its common name, a pair of cylindrical wooden tanks that held Coalwood’s water supply. The water in them was pumped up from a vast underground lake beneath the mine. There was no cleaner or apparently healthier water in the world. There was something in it—I’d heard about a natural fluoride—that kept Doc Hale a pretty happy dentist, even though the miner’s habit of chewing tobacco still gave him plenty of work.
Poteet and Dandy skirted the water tanks and then went over the ridge to the other side of the mountain. Poteet had picked up the trail of some animal, most likely a rabbit. I set my pack on a big flat rock that had boulders equally spaced around it. Years before, I had been one of a group of boys who had worked for days to position the big stones. Many the summer day I had sat there with Roy Lee Cooke, Benny Brown, Jimmy Evans, or Roger Lester, happily eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and swigging water from our old canteens. That had been a grand time. Every morning when I was a boy, I was eager for the new day.
While Rita spread the tablecloth on the rock and emptied the pack, I sat on a boulder and let myself admire her. I think she must have felt my eyes, because she looked over her shoulder and smiled. I looked away, but I’d been caught. I almost didn’t care. It was a warm, lazy day, and I’d brought a beautiful woman to a beautiful place to share it. There couldn’t be anything wrong with that, could there?
After we finished eating Floretta’s feast, Rita said, “I feel like lazing around a bit. Do you mind?”
It sounded good to me. We laid out the cloth on the grass and sat on it. I watched a few small clouds float by in the crystal-clear blue sky, then plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. Rita drew her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “What will people say when they hear about our hike?” she asked, her head resting on her knees.
“They’ve already said it,” I said. “I doubt if there’s a soul in Coalwood who hasn’t already chewed it over with their neighbors on both sides of the fence at least once, and maybe twice.”
She chuckled. “And what are they saying, Mr. Know-it-all?”
“They’re wondering what in the world Sonny Hickam is doing taking a full-growed woman up in the mountains. Some of the women will make something out of it, say we’re up to sinful things. The men will say it’s not so. They know you from the mine and know you’re way above me.”
“Am I? Way above you, I mean?”
“As far as Coalwood is concerned you are,” I said. “To them, I’m still a boy.”
“I thought there was nothing lower in Coalwood than a junior engineer.”
“I think you fall in a different category.”
“And I think you’re a bit more than a boy,” she said teasingly.
I shrugged. “I’m working on it.”
I felt oddly exhausted from our conversation. I couldn’t contend with all the things that were rattling around in my mind. Rita had to be at least five or six years older than me. She was a college graduate, and usually the junior engineers worked at the steel mill a year or two before they were sent off to Coalwood to learn something of mining coal. How did that song go? Born too late. I whistled a few bars of it and let out a long sigh.
“What is that you’re whistling?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, it’s something.” Then she giggled. “Wait, I know what it is.”
She sang, a bit off-key:
<
br /> Born too late for you to notice me
To you I’m just a kid
That you won’t date.
Why was I born too late?
“The Poni-tails sang that. Pretty stupid song.” She looked at me. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
“I’m mortified,” I said. And I was, too. My face felt hot. I was pretty certain I had turned as red as a beet.
She kicked her boots out and started laughing so hard she finally had to hold her stomach. “You’re cute.”
“Thanks.” Cute. That was me. Cute like a kid.
Her mirth subsided. She turned her face toward me. “Hey.”
“What?”
Her hand stole to mine. She had long, strong fingers that laced in between my own. At her touch, my heart started to race. “Look, Sonny. I don’t guess it matters how old you are. What matters is how you feel about somebody.”
I looked straight ahead, not daring to look at her. My heart was throttled up to a mile a minute.
“But right now,” she said, taking her hand back, “I’ve got to concentrate on my work. I’m here to learn everything I can about mining.”
I was intoxicated. Whatever it took, I decided I was going to win Rita Walicki. Everything else was just details.
“Are we okay, you and me?” she asked.
My thoughts were already in another solar system. All I needed was a plan to conquer her, a campaign. It would take careful thought to map it out. What should I do first? What did Coalwood boys ever do when they wanted to impress a girl? The answer was easy. First thing: show off.
“You ever swing on a grapevine?” I asked.
“A what?”
“Come on.”
MY MEMORY served me well, and we found the grapevine right where I’d last swung on it, years before. It was a two-inch-thick sinew of muscadine vine hanging from a stout hickory. At one time, the ground beneath it had been worn away by the feet of boys. I cleared the brush away to give us room for a proper swing.
“So this is how you spent your childhood,” she said, her hands on her hips.
“Every chance I got!” I boasted as I readied for a test swing. I gripped the vine with both hands and pushed off. It all came instantly back to me, the wonderful feeling of swooping out over the mountain, the trees all around a blur. I was instantly eight years old, yodeling like Tarzan. I swung back and pushed off again. I looked into the sky, laughing with my mouth open.
Rita eagerly grabbed the vine when I swung back and handed it to her. “Take it easy until you get the feel of it,” I advised.
“You don’t know me very well, do you?” she said, and then pushed off as hard as she could, whooping as she arced out over the mountain. She was an incredible athlete. She swung as far out as anybody I’d ever seen. When she finally handed the vine back to me, she was breathless with excitement. Our hands touched when she gave me the vine, and I felt nearly an electric shock. She bounded away, laughing. “That was so much fun!” she hooted.
I started really showing off. I went through all kinds of grapevine-swinging variations: one-handed, feet over my head, twirling.
I guess I shouldn’t have done the twirling. The old vine gave it up, broke with a sharp snap, and my jungle cry died in mid-yodel. I fell like a dead pigeon into a bush of hardscrabble thistles. Stunned, I sat for a moment while I mentally went through my body, searching for breaks and cracks.
Rita came after me, laughing so hard I saw she was actually crying. “That was soooo funny!” Tears were leaking down her cheeks. She finally covered her mouth to keep me from seeing her so joyful at my misfortune.
I shakily climbed to my feet, pushing my glasses up on my nose. Nothing seemed broken, amazingly enough. Then I lost my balance and nearly toppled over. Rita put her arm around my waist to catch me. I leaned against her, breathing in the sweet aroma of womanly sweat and perfume. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I put my arm around her waist. It was small, tight, smooth. I desperately wanted to put both my arms around it. “I am now,” I gulped.
She pulled away, gave me a serious look. “You know, you could be trouble.”
“I hope so,” I replied.
“But she didn’t do you any favors, did she?”
“Who?”
“Your mother,” she said. “I think she made you into a nice boy, Sonny Hickam.”
“I thought nice was good,” I replied a bit defensively.
“Usually it is,” she said, “but mostly it’s not.”
Apparently satisfied with her contradictory statement, Rita headed down the mountain. I watched her for a moment and then climbed up to where I’d left my pack. Poteet and Dandy ran past, then frolicked around a tree before chasing on. I could hear Rita calling far below. I hurried to catch up with her in every way I could.
20
A TRACK-LAYIN’ MAN
IT DIDN’T take long before getting my tag and my lamp and riding the man-trip into work seemed almost routine. Johnny, Bobby, and I mostly changed out posts in different sections of the mine, but one day we were sent up to the face to help the roof bolters. When the continuous miner stripped a gear and its crew stopped to work on it, Johnny found us some shovels. The shuttle car rumbled up next to us, and we started shoveling coal into it as fast as we could go. “Boys, you’re real coal miners now!” Johnny cried joyfully. After a while, we were so covered with black dust all I could see of him and Bobby were their teeth. That night, the shower drain got clogged with all the dirt that came off of me. I was proud of it.
As I started out the door to work the next morning, whistling and swinging my bucket like I was in charge of the world, I offhandedly asked Floretta where Rita might be. She gave me a long study and said, “Don’t be falling for that girl, Sonny Hickam.”
My face registered innocence. “I just wondered where she is.”
“If that’s all, she’s gone to Dehue to see some mining engineers about something.” She gave me another look. “Rita’s full-growed, boy. Don’t forget that.”
“I’m eighteen years old,” I said stoutly. “Since February the nineteenth.”
“That don’t mean you understand a thing about women.”
“Like what?”
Floretta glanced at the grandfather clock in the parlor and then pushed me through the screen door onto the porch. “Sonny, you’re just like every other man when you’re around a good-looker. You see all those curves and start thinking about a play-toy. But Rita’s no toy. She’s a serious woman and she means to put her mark on the world. Don’t you be trying to get in her way.”
“I’m not going to get in her way,” I said, miffed at being fussed at so early in the morning.
“She don’t have no time for a boyfriend,” Floretta insisted.
“Who said I wanted to be her boyfriend?”
“You did, maybe not in so many words but in the way you look at her. I seen you with them puppy-dog eyes.”
“I’m innocent of all charges,” I said, even though I knew she wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t believe myself.
Floretta wrapped her arms around herself in the cool morning air and muttered something I couldn’t hear. We walked side by side down the stone steps to the sidewalk. Miners were quietly going past in clumps of twos and threes. “Hey, Floretta,” Pick Hylton called as he slogged by. “Don’t forget to kiss your little boy good-bye.”
“You just mind your own business, Pick,” Floretta snapped. She pushed me into the line. “Get on with you, Sonny, and don’t forget what I done told you!”
I got on, but I instantly dismissed Floretta’s worries about me and Rita. Rita Walicki, Rita Walicki. How I loved my newest song. I couldn’t imagine why Floretta would think there was a thing wrong with it.
THE WEEK wore on. I just kept working, eating, and sleeping. There wasn’t much else to do. I supposed I was making some money, although I hadn’t seen any of it yet. I dragged myself out of bed every morning, dug into breakfast like I was starved, which I nearly alw
ays was, and then headed for the mine. Before I even got to the tipple, my stomach was growling. It was like I had a hollow leg. My shirt was getting tighter, but my pants at my waist were getting looser. I didn’t know what to make of it, but at least my aches and pains had almost gone away. It had taken a while but maybe I was finally getting the kinks out.
I saw nothing of Dad, and Mom didn’t call. It was as if I had been cast adrift, and I kind of savored the feeling. One evening at supper, Ned and Victor took note of my solitude. They were good old boys, in their simple way. “Come on with us, Sonny,” Ned said, straddling a chair alongside me. “Victor and me, we’re headed over to Cinder Bottom. One of those girls over there will fix you right up.”
“Sure,” Victor added, leaning on my table. “Why, we’ll even let you pay our way. There’s this girl over there—”
“The one with the peroxide streak in her hair?” Ned asked eagerly.
“Yeah, that’s the one. There’s this girl who—”
“And has rings on her toes?”
“Yeah, she’s the one. Now, Sonny, this girl—”
“And a rose tattoo on her back?”
“Yes, Ned!” Victor spat. “What of it?”
“Didn’t she say she was going to slap your face if she ever saw you again?”
Victor gave Ned a look. “I’m trying to talk to Sonny, Ned. If he wants to pay my way with a girl, even if she’s mad at me, who am I to argue?”
I picked up my plate and moved to another table. “I’m not paying anybody’s way anywhere and I’m not going to Cinder Bottom,” I said over my shoulder.
“Well, thanks for considering it,” Victor said in an aggrieved tone. When I saw him start to follow me, I picked up my plate and went up to my room, the only place I figured I could get any peace.
One morning while we waited for the man-lift, Mr. Marshall walked over to Johnny, Bobby, and me. “Come on over to the office,” he said. “There’s something you need to hear.”
