Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  “Doing the engineering in a mine takes a lot of experience and careful calculations,” Dad continued while searching my eyes. I think he was looking for a glimmer of understanding. “Men who work under those roofs depend on the mining engineers to do it right the first time. It’s not like your rocket men—those crazy German scientists—just throwing something up to see if it will work.”

  I resisted the urge to answer that charge, and Dad lectured on. The coal company used the block system, he said, each block being seventy-five feet by ninety feet. Entries were driven through them in sets of four. After that, the blocks were taken out by continuous-mining machines, one by one, until each of them was only about fifteen feet square. Those remaining blocks were called pillars, which were also eventually mined. During all of it, roof bolts and posts and cribs all had to be calculated and set to hold the roof up.

  Then Dad went off into his favorite subject: ventilating air through the mine. “If the air stops circulating, methane will seep out of the coal and build up,” Dad said. “One spark and the whole mine could explode. To keep that from happening, we use a pressure system. Fans raise the pressure in the mine to a little greater than the surface pressure. The methane is blown out through the vents.”

  “You designed that?” I asked.

  “I did a good portion of it,” he answered, glancing down at his drawings.

  I was confused on this point. “So you’re an engineer?”

  He toyed with a slide rule. “No. An engineer has a degree.”

  I decided to use some of Mr. Hartsfield’s deductive reasoning. “Jake Mosby’s an engineer,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You know a lot more about coal mining than he does.”

  “That’s true.”

  I shrugged. “Then you’re an engineer, right?”

  Dad shook his head. “Sonny, you have to have a diploma from a college to be an engineer. I don’t have one. That means I can never be an engineer.” He looked at me speculatively. “But you could.”

  Not knowing what to say, I didn’t reply, but kept studying the drawings. “This is interesting,” I said, and meant it.

  Dad led me to the bathhouse and opened his locker and handed me a one-piece coverall, hard-toe boots, a white foreman’s helmet, and a leather utility belt. When I joined him at the man-hoist, he showed me how to clip a lamp battery pack onto my belt and the lamp on my helmet. With the lamp attached, the helmet felt heavy. I moved it around until it felt comfortable. He appraised me and readjusted the helmet, then my belt until the buckle was squared in the front and the battery hung exactly off my right hip. I felt like a soldier under inspection. “Now you look like a mine foreman,” he said after another critical assessment. “Let’s go.”

  The attendant swung the gate aside, and for the first time in my life I stepped onto the wooden-plank platform of the lift. I thought of all the times when I was a small child and had watched the miners descend into the darkness. Now it was my turn! I could feel my heart speed up. The boards in the floor were set apart enough that I could see between them. There was nothing beneath us but a dark chasm. I had a momentary twinge of fear that we were going to fall. The bell rang three times, announcing that we were about to be let down. I took a deep, ragged breath. The man-hoist winch began to creak and the lift dropped quickly, my stomach lifting up around my throat. I grabbed Dad’s arm, then quickly let go in embarrassment. He said nothing, and I watched the solid rock of the shaft slip past. Men had hand-dug the shaft, but I couldn’t imagine how. It had taken me and the boys all day just to dig out a little place for our blockhouse at Cape Coalwood.

  Through the gaps in the floor, I started to see lights far below. Above us, the square of light at the top of the shaft had shrunk to a tiny twinkling star. We were being swallowed by the earth, and I hadn’t decided yet whether I liked that. I remembered that Tag had frozen at the bottom of the shaft, refusing to get off the lift. Now I understood his fear very well.

  When we neared the bottom, the lift slowed, jerked a few times, and then settled level with a rock platform. I switched on my helmet light. There were miners waiting on the platform. Mr. Dubonnet was among them. He looked at me with surprise. “A new hire, Homer? He’ll need to join the union.”

  “Sonny’s thinking about becoming a mining engineer,” Dad snapped. “A company man.”

  “Well, well,” Mr. Dubonnet replied with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “Now, wouldn’t that be something?”

  Solid gray walls surrounded us. I felt almost as if I were on some alien planet. All the things I’d ever known that oriented me—trees, the sky, the mountains—none of them was around. The air even smelled different, like wet gunpowder. Off to the right was a set of tracks with a big yellow electric locomotive sitting on it, some cars behind. I could see a connecting tunnel to the left, the blue haze of fluorescent lights showing through the window in a concrete block building. Hot white flashes and rapid hisses within indicated arc welding. Dad saw me looking. “We put a little machine shop down here. Saves time bringing out equipment that needs repair.”

  “Is Mr. Bykovski in there?” I wondered.

  Dad rocked on his hard-toe boots. “Ike’s not a machinist anymore, Sonny. He’s a loader, and a damn good one.” He stepped forward. “Come on. Let’s get on down the line.”

  Dad led me to the locomotive, stopping to talk to its operator. I recognized him—Mr. Weaver, whose son Harry was five grades ahead of me. Harry had gone in the Marine Corps, had landed in Lebanon when President Eisenhower had decided to help out over there. Mr. Weaver sat on the front with a lever to control the power to the locomotive’s electric motors. “Hey, Sonny,” he greeted.

  “Hey, sir.”

  “Take us all the way to the face, Frank,” Dad said.

  “You got it.”

  Dad took me to an attached car he called a “man-trip.” It was a low-slung steel car with two hard metal benches inside that faced each other. We crawled inside the man-trip and sat side by side, facing forward. Dad slapped the top to let Mr. Weaver know we were ready to go. The man-trip lurched and we were off, plunging down what seemed an endless black tunnel. Dad said we were on the “main line.” For twenty minutes, the rails clacked beneath us, the posts holding up the rock roof blurring past like a subterranean forest of gray tree trunks. On straightaways, the locomotive roared as we flew down the track, the man-trip rattling and shaking. I could smell the hot odor of the locomotive’s electric motor. Before we got to a curve, Mr. Weaver applied the brakes, and the steel wheels of the locomotive and our man-trip squealed like a thousand tortured pigs. I held the steel seat with my hands between my legs so I wouldn’t fall over when we took the curves.

  As we sped along, I occasionally saw the flash of miners’ lamps down branching tunnels, but it was too dark to see what they were doing. At my question about them, Dad said they were “dusting”: spreading rock dust around to hold down the explosive mixture of coal dust and air. It registered on me after a time that the mine was not the cold, dank, ugly place I’d always imagined it to be. The air was cool and dry, and when we stopped at a switch to let a line of low coal cars go past us, I peered down the tunnel and the mica in the rock wall sparkled like diamonds.

  I remembered then that Dad had once brought some mica crystals home with him and left them on the kitchen table for Mom, along with a card that said: You always wanted diamonds, but these are the best I can do. I wish they were real. The next morning, waiting for him on the table was Mom’s note of reply: I never wanted diamonds. I only wanted a little of your time. That’s still all I want. But she didn’t throw Dad’s diamonds away. I knew. I had come across them and the notes while looking for some writing paper in her desk.

  When the man-trip stopped, Dad jumped out. “We’ve got an operation going at the face today,” he said. “I want you to see it.” When I climbed out, I stood up and slammed my helmet into the roof so hard it almost knocked me to my knees. I staggered, then lo
oked up to see what I had hit and saw slabs of rock, roof bolts jammed into them every few feet. Dad ignored my trouble and took off at a fast pace, never looking back. I took off after him, my helmet whapping against the roof in a painful staccato. Every time I thought I had found a rhythm to my walk, I hit my head again. Once I hit a header so hard it knocked me off my feet. I landed on my back, my helmet flying, saved only by the lamp cord attached to the battery on my belt. I scrambled after it. By the time I got my helmet back on, Dad had disappeared around a turn. I could see the jumping reflections of his lamp on a far wall. I hurried after him, my helmet still knocking against the roof. I was developing a powerful crick in my neck. Pretty soon, he was so far ahead of me I knew I would never catch up. I was close to panic. What if I got lost? If my lamp went out, nobody would ever find me again!

  Then I heard a noise, like the mine was tearing itself apart. I felt like running away, but where would I go? I turned a corner and I beheld an astonishingly huge machine, spotlights bolted to its side, tearing at a wall of coal. Dad was off to the side, watching it. He saw me and waved me over.

  “That’s a continuous-mining machine!” he yelled over its roar. It looked to me more like some kind of great prehistoric animal. Dad positioned me out of the way when a shuttle car darted in, its crablike arms sweeping up the coal thrown out behind the continuous miner. When the shuttle was full, it backed off, dragging a thick electrical umbilical behind it. I realized this was the kind of vehicle Mr. Bykovski had been assigned to. I looked closer to see if it was him, but the operator was Mr. Kirk, the father of Wanda, a girl in the class behind mine. Wanda had a great voice and sang in the school choir. Mr. Kirk made a run to the track to unload his shuttle into a waiting coal car.

  The noise was deafening. Dad yelled into my ear, explaining what I was seeing. The miner was working a block, he said, sloughing off the coal until all that was left was a pillar. “An engineer has to study the rock above these pillars! If weight becomes concentrated on one of them, it’ll explode! The last time that happened, it tore one of our shuttles to pieces!”

  I looked at Mr. Kirk’s shuttle as it returned and tried to imagine the power it would take to tear such a machine apart. I wondered what had happened to the driver of the shuttle and started to ask, but Dad interrupted my train of thought. “This is real engineering work, Sonny!” he yelled, sweeping his hand around the busy workplace.

  The foreman of the work party saw us and came over. The black face under the white foreman’s helmet was my uncle Robert, Mom’s brother. “Homer, Sonny,” he said, looking at me long and quizzically.” How’s Elsie?”

  “Fine, Bob, fine,” Dad said distractedly.

  “Does she know Sonny’s down here?”

  “I wouldn’t take him anywhere he’s not safe,” Dad said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “I wonder if his mom would agree with that,” Uncle Robert replied amiably, cocking an eyebrow.

  “You just let me worry about Elsie,” Dad said firmly.

  Dad and Uncle Robert started discussing business and I wandered away, trying to get a better angle on watching the continuous miner and the shuttle go through their choreographed dance of mining coal. Uncle Robert came and got me. “That’s not a good place to stand,” he said. He carried a three-foot wooden pole with him and used it to poke at the ceiling. A big, jagged rock came loose and hit the floor with a heavy thump right where I had been standing. I jumped and whapped my helmet once more against the roof. How my neck hurt! Uncle Robert chuckled. “A man has to be thinking every second down here, Sonny.”

  I positioned myself where Uncle Robert pointed, under a roof bolt, and kept watching until Dad led me back to the man-trip. As we trundled back down the main line, I was thinking about all that I had seen. I couldn’t wait to tell the boys, but then I thought I couldn’t do that—this was supposed to be a secret. I was worrying how I was going to get around that, when Dad suddenly started to talk. “I love the mine,” he said. “I love everything about it. I love getting up in the morning before sunrise and walking up the path to the tipple. I love seeing the shifts change, the men bunching up at the man-hoist, ready to go to work.”

  I listened, amazed, not that he was saying what he was saying, but that he would share such thoughts with me. I felt proud, grown-up. Dad took off his helmet and rubbed his head, scratching around it where the sides of the helmet had pressed in his hair. When he started to talk again, I focused on his every word as if they were gold coins he was dropping into my hand, one by one. “I love going to the face. I go every day even though I don’t have to. That’s where I see if my plan for the day is working. I see it all in my head days before, see the cut the continuous miners will take, the route of the loaders, the roof bolts going in, the places where the methane might build up and where the foreman needs to check with his safety lamp. It’s all there when I arrive, just as I saw it, and I get great satisfaction from that.”

  I found that I was staring at him, the narrow beam of my lamp focused on his face like a spotlight on an actor. “Every day,” he said, “I meet with Mr. Van Dyke and his engineers. Even though I don’t have a diploma, I know more than they do, because I’ve been to the face and they haven’t. I’ve ridden the man-trip down the main line, got out and walked back into the gob, and felt the air pressure on my face. I know the mine like I know a man, can sense things about it that aren’t right even when everything on paper says it is. Every day there’s something that needs to be done—because men will be hurt if it isn’t done, or the coal the company’s promised to load won’t get loaded. Coal is the life blood of this country. If we fail, steel fails, and then the country fails.”

  The beam from his helmet lamp shone in my eyes. “There’s no men in the world like miners, Sonny. They’re good men, strong men. The best there is. I think no matter what you do with your life, no matter where you go or who you know, you will never know such good and strong men.

  “You’re my boy,” he said, and then mined so his lamp shined down a side cut, the lamps of his men flashing back from the darkness as if they knew he were passing. “I was born to lead men in the profession of mining coal. Maybe you were too.”

  You’re my boy. In the dark, I could savor the words without embarrassment.

  After the man-trip got back to the bottom of the shaft, Dad led me to the lift. The cage was beneath us, the shaft a little deeper than the main level. He pushed a brass button and a bell rang and the cage came up. Dad pushed the bell twice more and we stepped aboard. A miner came out of the little cement blockhouse and, at Dad’s nod, pushed the bell three times. We started up at a good clip. About a hundred feet up the shaft, the lift suddenly stopped. I looked around worriedly. The ragged cut rock surrounding us seemed to close in. All I could see above was a tiny spark of sunlight. I noticed a detail I hadn’t seen before, a set of steel steps. At my question, Dad said they went all the way from the top of the shaft to the bottom. There was a gap between the cage and the steps. To get on them would require taking a step over the oblivion of the deep hole beneath us. At that prospect, my heart sped up and my hands started to sweat. “Don’t fret,” Dad said, perhaps sensing my unease. “They’re probably just greasing the hoist.”

  We stood quietly for a long minute. “So what do you think about the mine?” Dad finally asked.

  I knew what he wanted me to say and it was tempting to say it, but I also didn’t want to lie to him. I considered my answer and settled on the kind of evasive response I’d used on my mother over the years. “I learned a lot,” I said, and left it at that.

  I couldn’t fool Dad any better than I could Mom. The difference was he didn’t see any humor in it the way she usually did. “What I’m asking you is do you want to be a mining engineer?” he demanded. “If you do, I’ll pay your way through school.”

  I carefully crafted my answer. “I’d like to be an engineer,” I told him.

  “A mining engineer?” he pressed.

  He had me. I had n
o choice but to tell him the truth. “I want to go to work for Dr. von Braun, Dad.”

  He didn’t hide his disappointment. “You should talk to Ike Bykovski about those damn Germans running around loose,” he muttered.

  “Sir?”

  “For chrissake, don’t you even know Ike’s a Jew?” Dad snapped. “He’ll tell you that von Braun German bastard’s not worth hanging.”

  The lift jerked and once more we started up. I glumly watched the rock slide past. I had really messed up this time. Dad was not only mad at me, I knew I’d hurt him too. And what had he meant about Dr. von Braun and Mr. Bykovski? I blamed myself for everything. I should have never agreed to go down in the mine. I knew what Dad was likely to be getting at, and I knew I wasn’t going to agree to it. So why had I gone along with it? I was a stupid kid sometimes, no doubt about it.

  As we neared the surface, the cold, fresh air off the mountain blew down the shaft, giving me a shiver. The earth’s surface slipped past and there, standing at the gate still in her church clothes, was my mother. A rock-dust crew stood nearby, their eyes locked on her. They shifted their gaze to Dad and me. Mom stared at what I knew must be my grimy face, my coal-mascaraed eyes, and my blackened coveralls. Then, to my utter astonishment, she burst into tears. The rock-dust crew took a step backward. Some of them took off their helmets, rubbing their heads and looking down at their feet as if embarrassed to be witnesses to her tears. Dad tried to shush her. “Stop it, Elsie, you’re scaring the men,” he said while unlatching the lift gate.

  “Everything’s fine, Mom,” I said, my stomach bottoming out: We were about to have a family argument right here in front of God and everybody. I couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing.

  “He’s thinking about being a mining engineer,” Dad said doggedly.

  Mom’s tears seemed to dry up instantly, as if they’d been sucked back inside her. “Over my dead body,” a voice from deep inside her said.