Gram looked up and smiled at my approach. The morning’s first sun warmed the front porch of the cabin, and the shadow from Gram’s head fell across the Bible on her lap.
“He was good, that Jesus,” she said as a hello to me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I didn’t stutter as much around Gram. While there is plenty doctors don’t know about stutters, they do know it seems to happen when the vocal cords tighten and lock up. Part of why they tighten, though, is because stutterers are afraid of stuttering. And the more fearful they are, the more they stutter. So the problem just keeps getting worse. Around Gram, though, I’m less afraid of stuttering because I know she doesn’t care if I do, and because I’m less afraid, I stutter less.
Gram took off her reading glasses, folded them, and set them on her lap beside the Bible. “Even folks who don’t believe in his miracles will agree he was a great teacher, that thousands followed him and hung on his every word. But did he charge admission? Did he ask for a collection plate? No, sir.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Just heard on the radio about another television preacher caught doing wrong. Them’s the ones so caught up in wordly riches they forget the teachings—how a soul is worth so much more than anything the world can give them.”
She sighed again. “So when I get discouraged hearing about those who use Jesus and his teachings badly, I just go right back to the source.” She patted her Bible. “Helps me remember all over again how good God is. And my faith don’t get tarnished none.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Sometimes I disagree with her, just for the fun of getting her all worked up and excited. This morning, however, I didn’t have the heart for it. I had too much on my mind.
She patted the Bible again. “This does give me comfort as I gets closer and closer to the pearly gates.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Gram leaned forward and peered at me. “Don’t ‘yes ma’am’ me like I’m some child you want to keep happy. You should be telling me them pearly gates is still a long ways off. And furthermore, you and me have had enough talks. You should be chastising me for calling them the pearly gates. As if heaven’s such a small place that gates can contain it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, finally grinning.
“That’s better,” she said. “You looked like you’d just left a funeral.”
She pointed at the rocking chair beside her. “Set yourself down,” she said, “and tell me what’s eating you. And I know it ain’t football.”
I set myself down. “Ma’am?”
“There’s no way you didn’t make the team,” she said. “Not my Roy Linden, the boy who’s fast enough to slap a deer’s rump.”
“Gram, it was j-just once, and I wish you w-w-wouldn’t keep on with that story.”
“You can’t deny it. And folks around here have seen you run. They know it’s the truth.”
Gram had been with me that afternoon, back when I was fourteen. I had been standing at the edge of a clearing, downwind from the yearling doe so it couldn’t catch my smell. There was enough of a wind that it couldn’t hear me move softly through the deep grass. I’d gotten close enough to see its eyelashes. I’d burst up from the grass, not even sure why I was doing it. But I’d gotten enough of a jump to swat the doe’s hind end as it started to run from me.
“‘Course,” Gram said, “legs like yours don’t do a team no good without someone who’s got an arm to take advantage of it. Anyone else show up for quarterback besides that pitiful boy of the Schenleys’?”
“No, ma’am.” Usually this was how we spent our time. She talked a lot to spare me the effort.
Gram shook her head in disgust. “That boy’s arm don’t have the power to throw a football through a wet paper towel. It’s a shame. A real shame. You’re probably the best-kept secret playing football in Kentucky ‘cause there’s no one to get you the ball.”
“Gram, you’re s-saying that because you’re s-supposed to.”
“No,” she said, “I’m saying it because I could go to my grave a happy woman knowing that those fleet legs of yours got you a scholarship to college. Be the best chance you have of making something of yourself and leaving this coal town. And it ain’t going to happen with a quarterback like that Schenley boy. Your team’s got to win some games before any scouts will make the visit to Johnstown.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes, each of us rocking as we enjoyed the sunshine and the trees and the view of the valley beyond the trees. In a few weeks, when the autumn frost struck, the vivid colors in the trees as their leaves turned would make the woods look like a storybook picture.
Finally, Gram sighed to break our silence. “Is it about the water? Is that why you come up here so glum?”
Gram always could read my mind. She knew what was weighing me down.
“Yes, ma’am. It is.”
And I began to tell her my bad news.
chapter four
Although I stutter less around Gram than around others, talking still doesn’t come easily. And every once in a while I get mad at myself because the words I hear in my head don’t come out as fast as I think them.
So it took me a while to tell her what I had discovered in the science lab just before football practice.
In the last couple of months, Gram had found several dead birds near her cabin. Not dead like killed-by-foxes dead, with piles of feathers scattered around a bush. These birds looked more like they had flown into a window. Tiny perfect bundles of color that would never sing again. Gram found them in her garden, under her apple trees, and even in the creek, trapped against roots and fallen branches by the force of the current.
Gram doesn’t believe in using pesticides on her apple trees or in her garden. She had started to wonder if something in the water was killing those birds. There is a spring-fed creek—Gram calls it a crick—that runs past her cabin, which is perched halfway up a hill and overlooks the hollow—she calls it a holler. Near the cabin, the creek widens into a small pond, and then it narrows again and flows into the bottom of the hollow to join a small river.
Gram started to worry when she hadn’t seen a frog or a turtle in the pond in a while.
She had been right to worry about the water.
In the science lab, I’d looked at two water samples through a microscope. The first sample came from a creek in a valley on the other side of the hill. The second sample came from the pond near Gram’s cabin.
In the first sample I saw what I had expected to from all the things I had learned in biology. There were dozens of little wriggly things, so small they were invisible without the microscope. As my biology teacher had explained, they were the beginning of the food chain. Roughly speaking, they were food for tiny bugs, which became food for bigger bugs, and the bigger bugs became food for birds and so on up the line.
The first sample, then, was normal.
In the sample from Gram’s pond, though, I saw hardly anything through the microscope. It looked like tap water: Nothing wriggled in it.
“Chemicals,” Gram grimly announced when I told her what I’d seen. “It’s chemicals what’s killed the tiny wrigglers. And chemicals what’s killed the birds. How did chemicals get in my crick?”
I shook my head. “Th-that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out, Gram. All I can th-think of is the Johns Corporation and the c-coal mining. B-but I’ve looked at the county m-m-maps. Th-he closest m-mine shaft is a few miles south of here, clear over Lookout H-h-hill.”
“Chemicals,” she repeated with conviction. “Mark my words. Something unnatural. Can you do some sort of special test on the water to find out what’s in it?”
“I can give a s-sample to the c-county health dep-dep-dep-dep...”—I gave up on the word department and found another word— “officials.”
Gram nodded briskly. “Do that then.”
I’d been worried about something ever since I’d looked at the pond water sample. “Wh-what about y-your w-w-well?” I asked. Being n
ervous about her drinking water affected my speech. “Wh-what if the w-water is...”
“It’s not,” she said firmly. “That well draws from a hundred feet down. Purest water a body can drink. Besides, it’ll take more than bad water to put me in a cold grave.”
I didn’t disagree. Still, when Gram went inside to fix breakfast, I walked down to my truck. I had brought the empty jars for a reason. After breakfast, I would fill them with water samples from different places along the creek, upstream and downstream, to see where the bad water began and how far it went.
I took one of the empty jars and wrote on the label in red ink: WATER SAMPLE FROM CLAIRE LINDEN’S WELL. COLLECTED ON SEPTEMBER 10.
I went to her well, pumped until cold water flowed and filled the jar. I tightened the lid and stashed the jar in my truck.
It would go with all the other samples to the county health department.
Tough as Gram was, I couldn’t help but think of those little birds—so stiff and silent and much too dead. And I couldn’t help but think how horrible it would be for the same thing to happen to Gram.
chapter five
In the locker room the following Friday night, the entire team gathered to listen as Coach Pitt gave us a pep talk on winning the game. Coach Donaldson had gone outside to talk to the referees.
Coach Pitt repeated the same old rah-rah speech we’d heard dozens of times before, and I began to think about the water in Gram’s creek. I wasn’t smart enough to keep my eyes on Coach Pitt, though, and without warning, he began to yell at me.
“Linden! Pay attention! Don’t you care about this game?”
I nodded.
“Speak to me, Linden. Be a man!”
“I c-c-c-c...” I felt my face turning red.
“C-c-come on, L-l-linden,” Coach Pitt began with a sneer. “T-t-talk.”
Flustered, I couldn’t get a word out. I felt tears of frustration threaten to start.
Then a clear voice came from somewhere in the middle of the team. “T-t-t-tobacco j-j-j-juice!”
Everyone busted up.
“Who said that?” Coach Pitt yelled. He hated being laughed at. Maybe that’s why he picked on others. When no one answered, he repeated, “Who said that?!”
Again no answer. But a lot of snorting laughter.
“All right,” Coach Pitt said. The anger in his voice caused us to quiet down. “Linden, give me one hundred push-ups. Now.”
I took a deep breath, remembering what Gram had told me. Weak people picked on others, just to make themselves feel better.
This was Coach Pitt’s problem. Not mine. But as I dropped to the ground, to my surprise, so did a bunch of my teammates. They began to do push-ups with me. In a few seconds, everyone had joined us.
Coach Pitt was speechless.
But Coach Donaldson wasn’t. He walked in and found his whole team doing push-ups.
“Pitt,” he said, “it’s tough enough for these kids to win games. Do you have to tire them out before the game even begins?”
Coach Donaldson told us to get up, and then he sent us out to the field.
I guessed Pitt wouldn’t bother me again soon.
I stood in the backfield, waiting. The night was warm, and big moths darted around the lights above the field. A huge crowd had gathered for our first home game of the season.
In seconds, we would start the first play. With me as part of the suicide squad.
That’s what they called those of us who played on the kick return team. Even though I’m a receiver, our high school is so small that a lot of us have to play more than one position.
But why call us the suicide squad?
Think of it this way. The kickoff is one of the few times when the opposing team has a chance to gain sixty yards’ worth of steam before trying to mow down the player with the ball.
And, against tonight’s team, the Penhold Panthers, that sixty yards’ worth of full speed could be painful. Because, of all the teams in the league, these guys were among the biggest.
Add up all the weight of the football equipment—helmet, shoulder pads, hip pads, thigh pads, knee pads, elbow pads, rib pads— and it’s about fifty or sixty pounds, more on a rainy day when the padding soaks up water.
Now put that sixty pounds on guys who already weigh close to two hundred pounds— like most of the defensive players on the Panthers. It turns them into tanks.
The ref dropped his arm to start the game. Their kicker ran forward and leaned into the ball. It sailed so high, I lost it briefly against the glare of the setting sun.
Then, there it was. Tumbling from the sky like a shot goose on my side of the field.
I looked ahead briefly and saw that our guards were forming a wedge to protect me.
I backed up several steps, and timed it so that as I ran forward again, I caught the ball in the center of my stomach. I wanted my feet to be moving when I got the ball.
As I connected with the ball, the Panthers began hitting our line. Above the screaming of the crowd, I heard the popping sounds of helmets and shoulder pads meeting at full speed and the grunts of bodies colliding.
Within seconds the Panthers had destroyed the wedge and were swarming toward me.
It’s a lot easier to turn at full speed than at a standstill. The key to outmaneuvering an opponent is to keep moving, which I did.
The first Panther dived toward me, but I was able to cut left and jump over two fallen players. His hands plucked at my jersey as I slipped loose.
I took another quick look up the field. I could see a gap to my right. I blasted toward it, hearing more grunts as tacklers missed me and hit the ground.
A shoulder fake to the left and a duck to the right put me past another two players.
And just like that, there were only three players between me and the end zone.
I kicked into full speed, with two players angling toward me. I outran one of them. The other one got a hand on my shoulder, but I shook him off and he lost his balance. As he fell, he grabbed at my leg. I stumbled, nearly fell, but recovered.
Only one player was ahead of me and the others were chasing me from behind.
I headed back to my left, the most open part of the field.
Maybe I couldn’t talk well, but I knew how to run. Getting to a place where I could use full speed would be an advantage.
It was.
The last player made a dive at me and fell short.
I heard two players chasing me hard from behind. But with no one left between me and the end zone, it became a foot race. I wasn’t going to lose.
I put my head down and stretched hard, gaining five yards, then seven yards, then ten yards on my pursuers. By the time I crossed the goal line, I had a fifteen-yard lead.
I lifted my arms high as the crowd roared its delight.
First game. First play. First touchdown.
It felt great.
I dropped the ball and stood with my hands on my knees, gasping for breath as the rest of my team caught up to me.
The extra point was good, and we were up 7–0.
Our joy lasted for about five minutes.
That’s how long it took for the Panthers to work the ball back to our end and score an answering touchdown. And the point after.
Seven to seven.
On the next kickoff, the Panthers kept the ball away from me and forced us to begin a drive on our own ten-yard line.
On our first play, Schenley, our quarterback, threw up a marshmallow that their safety picked out of the air.
I tackled him as he tried to run the ball in for a touchdown. But we’d lost the possession.
Two plays later, the Panther quarterback ran the ball in himself. Just like that, we were down 13–7. With the point after, it was 14–7.
It only got worse from there. Schenley was intercepted another dozen times—probably some sort of pitiful record. We lost 49–7.
First game. First loss. And with Schenley as our only quarterback, it looked like it wouldn’
t be our last.
chapter six
Monday afternoon, I stood waiting all alone at the front desk of the county offices, a low, square, brick building on Main Street. As I looked around, I realized the inside was as boring to look at as the outside.
Beyond the front desk was a hallway lined with tiny windowless offices. I could see into the nearest offices; each held a small desk and lots of paper clutter. The walls all around me were dull white with no pictures.
The air was stale and smelled a little like old sweat.
I waited a while longer. I finally cleared my throat, hoping someone would come out of one of the offices down the hallway.
A few minutes later, I heard rustling, the sound of nylon against nylon. A skinny woman in a bright red dress came out of a carpeted office and clicked down the hallway toward me in high heels.
“Yes?” she asked. She stopped behind the front desk, looking not at me but at her nails, shiny and as red as her dress. Her huge fake eyelashes fluttered every time she blinked.
“I w-w-was here l-l-last M-monday,” I said, “w-w-w-with w-water s-samples.”
I could tell she was getting impatient with my slow words, which made speaking more difficult.
“I l-l-left th-th-them w-w-w—”
“Yeah,” she said, cutting me off, “with Fred, our health inspector.”
That was one advantage, I guess, about stuttering. People remembered you.
She half turned and bellowed back down the hallway. “Fred! Drag those lazy bones of yours out of the coffee room. You’ve got a visitor!”
She went back to studying her fingernails. She saw a bit of lint and blew it off. Then she buffed her nails against the shoulder of her dress.
Fred finally appeared. I knew what he looked like, of course, from the week before. He was older, about my height, with thinning brown hair, tired eyes and a sagging face. He wore the same brown suit and same stained tie he’d had on the last time I’d seen him.
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