Sky of Stone

by Homer Hickam

“You got his tag?”

  I handed him Rita’s tag and my own. He glanced at them, then hung them on the board.

  Mr. Caulder went inside the hoisthouse and I handed over the battery pack and lamp to Rita, who was standing in the shadow of the bathhouse. After a few seconds, she switched on her lamp. “Let’s go.”

  At the man-lift, I put my finger to the bell to let Mr. Caulder know we were ready to go down. But I couldn’t do it. All the doubts I had for the scheme came back in a rush. Sweat appeared on my forehead. Rita pushed my finger out of the way and pushed the bell herself. “This is my chance, Sonny,” she said harshly. “Don’t ruin it.” She opened the gate and stepped out on the man-lift. “You stay here,” she said. “I can go the rest of the way by myself.”

  Then the bell rang three times, the signal from Mr. Caulder in the hoisthouse. “Here we go,” she said, and started to pull the gate closed.

  At the last possible second, I jumped aboard. Rita took a deep breath as the cage lurched once and then began a steady crawl down the shaft. “Thank you,” she said. She touched my arm, but I pulled away. What madness had I signed up for? Then I thought of the testimony. My father was in the fight of his life, and now I was going to lay all this on top of him. There was going to be hell to pay, and a lot of it was going to come out of my pocket.

  Frozen in fear for what I’d done, I silently watched as the eons of earth’s progression passed before our eyes, layer upon layer. Rita’s light swung around the shaft, then disappeared as she craned her eyes upward into the gloom. Her light came down and then I could feel it move across my face. “I’ll never forget this, Sonny,” she said.

  I didn’t know if she was thanking me or commenting on what she was seeing on the way down. I kept trying to think of something that would talk her out of what she was doing, but the words wouldn’t come.

  She walked around the man-lift. “The ride is a bit jerky,” she commented. “Likely a need for more grease on the bullwheel or maybe the axle needs replacing. This open cage is dangerous, too. What if somebody accidentally knocked something into the shaft? Even a pebble could hit a miner hard enough to kill him.”

  She observed the slide rails. “Maintenance is the key to a good operation, Sonny. Look here. See those rust spots on the rails? They should be sanded and greased.” She took the notebook from her shirt pocket and began to make notes. “New eyes see new things,” she murmured to herself.

  As we kept descending, I watched Rita. Even though my heart beat like a snare drum just at the sight of her, I realized that the Rita Walicki I had fallen tea over kettle completely in love with on Water Tank Mountain didn’t really exist except in my imagination. I’d thought of Rita as beautiful and smart, which she surely was, but I’d also believed her to be soft and needy, too, a maiden in distress that I, Sonny the white knight, could rescue, even if it was from herself. But now I could see that Rita was tough, far tougher than I was, and didn’t need or want rescue. Bobby had been right. He’d said Rita had experience in places I didn’t even have, but those places, I now understood, were in her mind. I eyed her while she paced around the man-lift platform, scribbling in her notebook and muttering to herself, and remembered how close she’d been to tears during her pitch to rebuild the main line. At that moment, she had shown that she was vulnerable and my heart had gone out to her. But now I recalled she had fought back her tears and set her jaw against her hurt and hadn’t asked for anybody to take up for her. I also remembered her comment that Coalwood had a history of mistreating its women. Maybe Rita was hurtling down the mine shaft this crazy night, with me dragged along behind her, because she was intent on righting all those wrongs she saw. It came to me in a flash, the way things so often did. Rita was not only out to prove false the superstition about women in a coal mine; she was also out to show she was as good as any man, and maybe better. It was such an alien concept it was nearly past my ability to grasp it, and as it was, I was only able to hang on to it for the briefest of moments.

  Rita raised her face and took a deep, satisfied breath. “We’re almost there. I can smell it!”

  I could, too. The air billowing up from the mine below was distinctive, the odor of wet gunpowder, cool and biting and dangerous. It gave me another attack of nerves. “Rita, we’ve got to go back up,” I told her urgently. I fumbled for some way to reach her. “You said one time you wanted a good report from Dad, said it was the main reason you were in Coalwood. This isn’t the way to get it. He’ll cut you off at the neck.”

  She gave me a condescending smile. “Oh, Sonny, no he won’t. Your dad will respect what I’ve done. In some ways, I think I understand him better than you do. He’s a pure engineer. He’ll know why I had to fight this superstition and put it to rest, once and for all.”

  “Trust me on this,” I begged her. “You’re not going to like what’s about to happen. We’ve got to go up!”

  She kept her confident smile. “What’s the worst thing that can happen? We’ll get yelled at, then people will laugh it off.”

  “You don’t know Coalwood,” I said miserably. “And you sure don’t know my dad.”

  “I bet your mother would understand. From everything I know about her, she’s been fighting the same battle for years.”

  I realized that arguing with her was hopeless. This was Rita’s chance and she was taking it. But there was one thing I had to get straight with her. “If we still have jobs after tomorrow, Rita, I’m asking you now—please don’t ever cheat for me again.”

  She frowned. “Those Caretta boys are experienced track layers. It wasn’t a fair bet from the beginning. I didn’t cheat for you. I just evened the score a bit.”

  “You did cheat, Rita. I knew the score before I took the bet. Anything you did to help me isn’t right. Don’t you see that?”

  “But you’ll lose, otherwise,” she said. “Surely you don’t want that!”

  I gave up. “Just don’t help me anymore, okay?”

  Rita gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged as the

  man-lift platform dropped into the vast open room that housed the landing at the base of the shaft. Then the boards beneath our feet shuddered once and stopped twenty feet above the bottom gate. “What’s wrong?” Rita demanded, squinting up the shaft at the frozen cables.

  “I don’t know.” I looked up as condensed water came down the shaft, splattering on my glasses and misting them up. “This doesn’t usually happen.”

  There was no one on the landing. A motor sat there, all ready to carry anyone who needed it back into the mine. Then the bell rang twice and the man-lift started back up the shaft. “Dammit!” Rita snapped.

  Rita was silent all the way up, but I could feel her seething. As the cage rose past ground level, I saw the problem.

  There stood Victor.

  He had on a white shirt, one side of it hanging out, and there were very definite signs of lipstick on his collar. He was more sagging than standing. Wherever he’d been, he’d had a rough night of it, and apparently it had recently gotten rougher. Mr. Caulder came outside and opened the gate. “Sonny, this ain’t right,” he grumbled. “You could have cost me my job.”

  Rita stormed off the man-lift. “Victor, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “When I got in, Floretta told me about the call,” he said. “So I went over, saw the drawings gone. I figured out what you did, Rita. You’re not going to get me fired, no way, lady.”

  Rita hit him on the chin with her fist so hard he turned around once before falling like a rag doll into the gob. He never even made a sound. I’d never seen a man collapse like that. She stepped over him. “You bastard. Why couldn’t you stay in Keystone with your whore?”

  “I guess because I ran out of money,” Victor said, still facedown in the dirt. He made no move to get up.

  Rita turned on Mr. Caulder. “Send me down!” she ordered. “Benson needs these drawings! I made them! I have a right to take them!”

  “I can’t do that, ma’am,�
�� he said, taking a step back from her.

  She looked at me, then shook her head. I thought she was going to kick Victor, but he groaned and maybe she took pity on him, though I doubt it. She turned back to the man-lift. At first, I didn’t realize what she was doing, and then I saw she was going for the steps.

  I knew those steps. They scared the bejesus out of me. The first thirty feet of them were made of concrete and were covered with a wet slime. What followed was seven hundred feet of steel steps that went back and forth all the way down to the bottom of the shaft. In some places, there wasn’t even a handrail. The steps were for emergency use only. I couldn’t imagine a situation that would ever get me on those rickety old things.

  “Don’t, Rita!” I yelled, but it was too late. She started down the steps and then I heard her boots slip and a thumping sound, then the clatter of her helmet hitting the side of the shaft, then nothing.

  I ran to the steps and looked down. To my everlasting relief, Rita was sitting at the bottom of the first landing. I carefully stepped down to her, pressing myself up against the stone wall as far away from the shaft as I could get. “Are you all right?”

  “Do I look all right to you?” She got to her feet and looked down the steps.

  “Don’t try it,” I told her. “You’ll fall.”

  I watched as her shoulders sagged. Then she turned around and climbed past me. I followed, my heart rattling my chest. I saw that Victor had crawled to his feet. “Give me the drawings, Rita,” he said, holding out his hand.

  She turned and tossed the bag into the shaft. “You want them, go get them.” She took off her helmet, threw it down, then unbuckled her belt and dropped it into the dirt. Then she walked away, down the hill to the road.

  27

  A QUESTION FOR MOM

  MR. CAULDER, Victor, and I watched Rita go. Mr. Caulder’s jaw was unhinged from all that he’d seen, and Victor was rubbing his chin from Rita’s blow. I was the first one to speak, mainly because I could. “I hope you boys will keep all this to yourself,” I said.

  Mr. Caulder closed his mouth, chewed a bit on his tobacco cud, then spat. “I wouldn’t even know what to say,” he allowed. “Craziest thing I ever seen. Naw, I’m not telling nobody.”

  “Same here,” Victor said, tucking in his shirt. “I’d never live it down. But you’d better talk to Floretta. She fielded the phone calls.”

  Victor was right, one of the few times I’d ever known a junior engineer to figure something out pretty much on his own. Strapping on his battery, he headed for the man-lift while Mr. Caulder went back into the hoisthouse to lower him down. Victor would have to scramble around in the mud under the man-lift, but I thought he’d find Rita’s bag without too much problem.

  I looked around the grounds in the darkness and then at my watch, illuminated by the tipple lights. It was nearly three A.M., about the same time Dad and Tuck had gathered in front of the man-lift on the night Tuck had been killed. I took a moment to imagine what it must have been like that night. Low clouds and spitting rain were surely left over from the great storm that had just swept through the county. The tipple would have been dripping water, a constant staccato of drops plopping onto the packed gob below, and there would have been steam caused by the warm air rising from the shaft, curling into the sky. In the distance, there must have been the low rumble of thunder and flashes of far-off lightning as the storm pounded up through Mingo and Logan counties. It would have been eerie, a place filled with shadows, and frightening.

  But then I thought—no, neither Dad nor Tuck would have thought that way. They were professional mining supervisors. Shadows wouldn’t bother them, and there would have been no foreboding, just a job to do.

  I turned and saw the glow of the Tipple Row streetlights that illuminated our house. It was then I thought—Mom was home that night! It was the first time that had occurred to me. It was nothing new to her to have the black phone ring in the middle of the night. That was, after all, the reason she had a separate bedroom. But I’d never believed she could sleep through Dad getting up at all hours. Often, when we’d lived under the same roof, I would hear her pull her blinds up in her bedroom to watch Dad heading in the dark to the mine. Now I wondered what Mom had seen or heard that night, or what Dad might have told her. Had anybody even asked her?

  When Mr. Caulder came out of the hoisthouse, he walked over to stand beside me. I was still studying the Captain’s house, the house where my dad now slept. Or was he lying awake, wondering what was coming at him down the track?

  my dreams have all returned the same,

  swinging along the homebound track

  —just emptys cuming back.

  Maybe, I thought, they aren’t going to be empty this time, but filled with broken dreams, his dreams. I found myself troubled, more than I might have believed, over that concept. I had always spent so much time worrying about my dreams. But what about Dad’s dreams? Weren’t they as important as mine? What right did I have to think otherwise?

  “Crazy times, Sonny,” Mr. Caulder said, interrupting my churning mind.

  A question came, nearly unbidden. “Mr. Caulder, when you gave your testimony, did you leave anything out?”

  “Not that I can think of,” he said. “God knows I been asked enough about that night. Now, don’t you start!”

  I ignored his protest. I’d always known Mr. Caulder to be a man who liked to talk. “Tell me what happened again.”

  Mr. Caulder hemmed and hawed a bit, but I could tell he was going to get to it, so I waited him out. “Tuck and your dad came up and I issued them their lamps,” he said finally. “Then I saw them put their tags on the board. It warn’t nothing unusual.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “Just that they were going to go down to 10 West and check for methane before the day shift arrived.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Well, I heard your dad talk about where they were going to park the motor and then walk in. I guess Tuck wasn’t listening. That’s what got him, driving that locomotive into the fire damp.”

  “Do you have any idea why he would do that?”

  Mr. Caulder shook his head. “I don’t know, Sonny. I’m not an inside man. Most men say Tuck probably figured the gas buildup was near the face, rather than back in the drift. That’s usually the case. He just probably wanted to get a little closer so he didn’t have to walk so far. He bet his life on it and lost.”

  “You believe that?”

  Mr. Caulder pursed his lips, then slowly shook his head. “Not really.”

  “What happened after you heard Dad and Tuck talking?”

  He shrugged. “I went in the hoisthouse, waited for the bell, and then let them down.” He paused, squinting into the darkness. “Or I thought I had. When I came out, they were both gone, so I figured they were down there. Your dad’s tag was on the board, so I was sure of it.”

  “Dad didn’t go in the mine, but he left his tag on the board?”

  Mr. Caulder nodded. “Yep. I noticed it when he arrived with Mr. Nordman and Doc Lassiter a couple of hours later. His tag was still hanging there—number thirteen, who could forget it?”

  “Did you say anything to him about it?”

  “I started to but then I thought I’d better not. Your daddy ain’t one to mess around with. I figured he’d just forgot it after he’d decided not to go down in the mine.”

  “How about his helmet lamp?”

  Mr. Caulder thought it over. “Nobody ever asked me that. He didn’t leave it on the counter that night. I guess he took it with him when he left.”

  “He took mine property with him? Doesn’t sound like my dad.”

  “Naw, it don’t,” he said, thoughtfully munching on his chaw. “It surely don’t.”

  My mind was clicking along. I could sense I was close to something even though I didn’t have a clue what it was. “How long were you in the hoisthouse before you heard the man-lift bell?”

  Mr. Caulder ran his han
d up under his helmet and gave his head a good scratch. He spat a stream of tobacco juice. “It was a good, long time. I was about to come out and ask what was going on. Then I heard the bell. Maybe ten minutes.”

  There was nothing else Mr. Caulder could think to tell me and I had run out of questions, so I thanked him kindly, asked him again to keep what Rita and I had done to himself, and then walked back to the Club House. Along the way, I tried to let all the night’s events sink in. It had been a peculiar and eventful one, that much was for certain.

  In the foyer, I halfway considered going up and knocking on Rita’s door and seeing if maybe she’d want to talk. But good sense somehow got the upper hand, and I went inside the parlor instead. I couldn’t sleep, not after all that had happened, and anyway, I wanted to chew a bit more on what Mr. Caulder had told me. I sat on the couch, and that’s where Floretta found me, fast asleep, a couple of hours later.

  “Miss Rita done told me all what happened when she came back,” she said when I told her where I’d been. “If I’d only known, I’d of never told Victor about that call. And no, I won’t be telling a soul. It’s too sad, breaks my heart, for that woman. She tries so hard and all she gets is the back of the company’s hand. Now get on upstairs and get yourself ready to work. You got some track to lay, young man, and I got ten dollars on you to do it faster than those boys from Caretta.”

  “You put a bet down?”

  She looked proud. “Walked up to John Eye’s myself and handed him a ten-dollar bill, said put it on my boy! Did you know Mr. Alexander Hamilton himself is on that bill?”

  I didn’t, which surprised me. It was a rare gap in my Coalwood education. “I haven’t seen many ten-dollar bills in my life, now that I think on it.”

  Satisfaction crossed her face. She was going to get to teach me something. “The reason for that is because the coal companies like to pay in two-dollar bills. That way all the businessmen over in Welch know where the power comes from in this county when they see old Tom Jefferson staring back at them. I heard tell there’s more two-