Carrying Albert Home

by Homer Hickam

  Elsie pointed toward the lake. “Go home, Albert,” she said, her voice cracking. “Please go home.”

  Albert’s smile faded. He stared at her, then nuzzled her with a questioning grunt. She pushed him away. “No! You have to go home. This is home! Don’t you understand? Get in that water, Albert!” She pointed at the lake. “Go on! You can’t be with me anymore. Go!”

  Albert cocked his head and seemed to be thinking. He turned around and made a tentative step toward the water, then looked back. Elsie waved him on. “That’s it. Go take a swim. It will be all right, Albert. I’ll be right here. I’ll never leave you.”

  Albert put a foot in the water, then two, then pushed off. He waved his tail and slipped through the water.

  Elsie ran past Buddy, past the clubhouse and through the gate. Homer was leaning against the Buick, holding the rooster. She threw herself at her husband and he opened his arms to her, the rooster fluttering away. “Carry me home,” she cried. “Homer, carry me home!”

  Epilogue

  AND SO HOMER CARRIED ELSIE HOME TO COALWOOD. The rooster did not go with them. Where he went, no one ever knew.

  As for Albert, well . . . here is what little I can tell you.

  Once in Coalwood during my growing-up years, my father read in the paper that a huge alligator in Florida had scared a woman golfer by abruptly coming out of a lake next to a fairway. It so startled her that she fell down and began to scream, certain that she was about to be attacked. But she was not attacked at all. Instead, the alligator walked up to her and rubbed itself against her legs, then turned upside down as if asking to have its ample belly scratched. The woman got up and ran, her peculiar story soon making the national news. There was no plan to remove the alligator from the pond, the article went on, as it was considered a pet by the membership of the club.

  In a strained voice, Dad called out, “News of Albert, Elsie! News of Albert!”

  There was no reply but when I walked into the kitchen, I discovered my mom, who was washing the dishes at the time, looking through the window into the darkness as if she were looking a million miles away. Then she put down the plate she was washing, slowly wiped her hands on her apron, and walked into the living room, where my dad was sitting in his easy chair with the newspaper in his lap. She held out her hand and he handed her the paper. She read it and then did the most astonishing thing. Never one to show much affection toward him, she sat on Dad’s lap and hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. And to my further astonishment, for the one and only time in the history of my life and his, I saw my father bury his face in my mother’s hair and weep.

  A Further Postscript

  IN OCTOBER 2009, MY MOTHER LAY ON HER DEATHBED, clearly disappointed. She was ninety-seven years old and had hoped to live to be one hundred but, based on her doctor’s candid report and the fact that her second son was uncharacteristically hovering about, she knew she probably wasn’t going to make it. To cheer her up, I told her I would drive her over to the beach, an offer I thought for certain she’d at least entertain. After all, it was her love for the sand and salt air and the sea of the South Carolina coast that had caused her to decamp from landlocked West Virginia many years before. But her response was a firm no. “I don’t want to go to the beach,” she said. “I’m done with the beach. I don’t need it anymore.”

  My father had been gone by then for two decades, the coal dust in his lungs finally taking him only a few years after he had left Coalwood and joined Mom at the beach. They seemed to have a good life there, although I understood very well that Dad was only there because he felt he owed it to his wife after the years she’d spent in Coalwood.

  I pulled up a chair and held my mother’s hand. It felt so fragile that I thought if I squeezed it too hard the bones inside would turn to powder. They had once been a working woman’s hands, strong enough to snatch me up by the nape of my neck when I was pulling one of my usual childhood pranks and swat me a few. Now, as her life ebbed, her body was turning to fine crystal that the mildest distress could shatter. When she said she didn’t want to go to the beach, I knew she was truly on her way out.

  Her bed had been moved into the living room of her house so the hospice workers would have room to work around her. They needn’t have bothered. She had no need of them. Before long, she lapsed into a state that was neither here nor there and neither now nor then. She talked to her long-dead brothers, Charlie and Ken and Robert and Joe, and to her mother and father. She even talked to Victor, the brother who had died of fever when he was but a child. And, of course, she talked to her cats and her dogs, who had departed the world so many years before, and her late, much lamented pet fox Parkyacarcass, and her beloved squirrel Chipper. I was told by her caretakers she really enjoyed talking to the fellow named Albert, whoever he was. I smiled and said, “I’m not surprised.”

  The hospice workers also said they never heard her talk to her husband. I told them I wasn’t surprised about that, either, that I thought they managed to say everything they wanted to say to each other while he was alive.

  As her days ticked down, Mom sometimes held both her hands toward the ceiling as if she were holding something. When a nurse pushed them down, she put them back up. “I’m reading,” she explained. After she finished her book, she lowered her arms on her own. She was, I believed, writing and reading her own book. She had always wanted to be a writer.

  On a visit I suspected would be my last, I was sitting beside her when her breathing slowed and became shallow. I thought this was the last but then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “Those stories about Albert,” she said, “they were fun to tell.”

  “I probably learned more about Dad in those stories than anything else,” I said. “But, Mom, what really happened?”

  She took a deep breath, then accomplished a small shrug, her thin shoulders barely moving against the white sheets. “We drove to Florida and let Albert go at a golf course near where Uncle Aubrey lived, then drove home.”

  “What about all the other things you said you and Dad did?”

  “We did them all,” she said in a voice I had to strain to hear, “even when we didn’t.”

  I held her hand, feeling the warmth of it gradually turning cold, and believed, really believed, and as I believed, I heard a sound that sounded like someone or something very far away saying, Yeah-yeah-yeah. It was a happy sound. “Hello, Albert,” I said into the forever that seemed to be opening up for the frail woman on the bed. “Get ready for her. Your mom is coming home.”

  Acknowledgments

  COALWOOD, WEST VIRGINIA, WAS BUILT TO MINE COAL but strong families ended up as its most important product. I was lucky to be part of one of those families headed up by two very interesting people, Homer and Elsie Lavender Hickam. I am indebted to them for raising me and seeing to my education and also providing the stories that comprise this book.

  The story of Albert’s journey wouldn’t have been written without the encouragement of Frank Weimann, my marvelous literary agent. When I proposed the idea to him, I fully expected him to say that it was crazy. Instead, he immediately said it was a story I needed to tell and for me to get right on it.

  Albert’s story also wouldn’t have been told without the support of Kate Nintzel, my wonderful editor at William Morrow. She made it “her book,” and much of the novel is the result of her insights and suggestions as she guided me through its creation. When Kate had other obligations, editor Margaux Weisman was always there to help me and Albert along.

  I am now lucky to be part of another strong family and that is the one at William Morrow. At the risk of leaving someone out, I want to thank publishers Liate Stehlik and Lynn Grady for their kind and generous support. Also thanks go out to Jennifer Hart (group marketing director), Kaitlin Harri (marketing), Kaitlyn Kennedy (publicist), Juliette Shapland (international sales), Adam Johnson (cover art), Virginia Stanley (academic and library marketing), Tricia Wygal (production editor), and everyone at this great literary house.r />
  Thanks also to my wife, Linda Terry Hickam, who is my first reader and always has great insights. She even found a life-like stuffed toy alligator for us to carry around in our car so I could get an idea of what Albert in the back seat was like. She didn’t provide a rooster because she said she didn’t understand why he was on the journey. Neither do I but as long as he did, I guess that’s all that matters.

  Photographs Pertaining to the Journey

  CARRYING ALBERT HOME IS A FAMILY EPIC, WHICH MEANS it’s a blend of fact and fiction, evolved from stories told by my parents, both of whom were West Virginians and knew how to make their tales tall as the hills that surrounded them on all sides. Still, there are clues as to what was real and what wasn’t in the photographs my mother kept that were discovered in a number of cardboard boxes after she passed away.

  When I finished writing this book, my editor, the wonderful Kate Nintzel, asked me to look for any photos that might have something to do with the journey. I hauled out Mom’s boxes to see what was there. Unhappily, in most of the photos, Mom didn’t think it was necessary to identify the people who were in them. This isn’t a criticism. We’re all guilty of keeping photos that other folks wouldn’t understand without an attached description. Still, it was frustrating as I went through the old pictures she thought were important enough to keep for decades. Photograph after photograph, the eyes of people, young and old, stared back at me, saying, in effect, I was important to your mother but you don’t know why, when, or where. Some I could identify, such as my grandparents and my uncles and aunts and so forth, but not my uncle Victor, who died long before I was born. Fortunately, his photos were one of the few Mom identified.

  In Albert, I have Elsie talking about Victor, who, it’s clear, she still thinks about a great deal and whose death has profoundly affected her. Still, I was surprised at the number of pictures of this tragic little coal camp boy she had saved. Just as I wrote, I think she never stopped mourning him. During the few times she spoke of Victor to me, she said she thought Victor would have been a writer. Why she thought that, I don’t know. Some people, looking at those old pictures, think Victor and I look something alike. Maybe, somehow, Mom positioned me to fulfill the hopes and dreams she had had for her brother. If so, I’m glad she lived long enough to see me become an author of many books. Of all the things I did in my life, I am certain she was most thrilled by my success as a writer.

  One of my hopes during my archaeology photo dig was to find an image of Albert. When I found pictures of Mom’s other peculiar pets, such as her fox Parkyacarcass and Chipper her squirrel, I was encouraged. Sadly, however, no images of the alligator turned up. A tantalizing clue to his existence, however, was revealed when I found a photo taken at the company house where my parents lived in the 1930s and 1940s. In it, a cat (or it might be Parkyacarcass) can be seen drinking from a concrete pond. The coal company, which owned the house and the yard, was not given to installing ponds for its coal miners. In fact, the installation of such a permanent and expensive addition in the yard of a company house would have been considered foolish. After all, company houses were assigned to miners only for the duration of employment. So what was the pressing need for such a pond? When I grew up in the same company house, I knew that pond very well, although Mom had prettied it up with plants. Even though I didn’t understand it at the time, she called it the alligator pond. It was only when she began to tell me the story of Albert’s journey that I understood why.

  Continuing my photographic excavation through Mom’s old boxes, I came across a number of pictures that show her in Orlando with various friends and her Uncle Aubrey. In them, she is radiant, fresh, and happy, very much different from the frustrated and often acerbic woman I knew in Coalwood and described in my memoirs Rocket Boys (aka October Sky), The Coalwood Way, and Sky of Stone. I think she forever yearned for those carefree days in Orlando when once she had danced with a funny, charming, long-legged boy.

  Of the photos I found of my dad as a young man, his facial expressions indicate a thoughtful, serious fellow quite similar to the older Homer I knew. Over the years and in other books, I have struggled to figure out who he really was and what motivated him to become the man he became, tough and relentless to others while patient and deferential to his often difficult wife. Certainly, he took on the challenges presented to him over his lifetime with all the strength and intelligence he could muster. One of those challenges, most certainly, and to the end of his days, was Elsie Gardner Lavender.

  Although Mom and Dad never mentioned they had brought along a camera on the journey, two photos turned up that might have been taken during the events chronicled in this novel. One of them of Elsie is marked on the back “KW Garden, 1935.” Could it be her in Hemingway’s Key West garden? It would have certainly been like Pauline Hemingway, a pleasant and kind woman by all accounts, to send it to her. Another is marked “SSprngs,” which shows a young Homer holding a pith helmet beside what might be a glass-bottom boat. Was this in Silver Springs, Florida, during the journey? And is that the reptile wrangler’s helmet? There’s no way to know. All I can say is I believe all the images shown in this section had something to do with the time when Albert was carried home, and love, that strange and marvelous emotion, was left to endure in the hearts of Homer and Elsie Hickam.

  Elsie, fresh off the bus from West Virginia after graduating from high school, poses in Orlando, Florida, where she went to live with her rich Uncle Aubrey. Soon she would meet Buddy Ebsen and fall in love.

  Homer, in a photo marked “SSprngs” on the back, is beside what is possibly a glass-bottom boat at Silver Springs, Florida. Is this evidence he and Elsie were really in a movie being filmed there? Note he is holding a pith helmet. Did it belong to the reptile wrangler?

  Elsie, in a fancy dress sitting on the running board of a fancy car. This was in Orlando during her “Buddy” days. Soon Buddy would leave and she would go back to West Virginia and marry Homer.

  Elsie, fresh and relaxed, lazes beside a lake near Orlando. She would long for those days for the rest of her life.

  Elsie’s “rich” Uncle Aubrey and an unidentified friend on a golf outing. He had some remaining funds even after the Great Depression, enough that he continued to play golf on posh courses in the Orlando area.

  One of the few photos Elsie marked was this one of her “Uncle Aubrey Bouldin.” He was her mother’s brother. This was apparently taken on one of his few trips to see his sister as un-Floridian mountains are in the background. He was a dapper dresser!

  Another photo of Uncle Aubrey on a visit to his sister, Elsie’s mother. This photo was not in coal country but probably on a farm along the way. It was on one of these trips that “rich” Uncle Aubrey offered Elsie a chance to escape the coalfields and come live with him.

  Victor Lee Lavender was Elsie’s youngest brother who died when he was six years old from an unspecified fever, probably the flu that led quickly to pneumonia. She grieved for Victor all her days. It was her belief that he would have been a writer. For that reason, she was happy that her youngest son eventually became one.

  Elsie Hickam, probably in the early 1930s in Orlando, Florida. There she attended secretary school and worked in a diner.

  Homer Hickam (senior), probably at high school graduation in 1929. His family apparently went all out for the photo, paying for colorization. His vivid blue eyes were what originally attracted Elsie to him.

  This photo was marked “KW Garden 1935.” Could this be Elsie in a garden on Key West, perhaps even at the Hemingway house?

  Photo taken in Coalwood, West Virginia, around 1949 of brothers Jim (left) and “Sonny” (Homer Jr.) Hickam. Jim is holding their new puppy. Behind them to the right is the pond that Elsie, their mother, called the “alligator pond.” This is the pond her father built for her to hold Albert.

  Photo taken in Coalwood, West Virginia, probably around 1940. The cat (or it might have been Elsie’s fox) can be seen drinking from the “alligator pond.�
�� The house and yard belonged to the coal company, so Elsie’s father installed it for her to hold Albert.

  Elsie and her “rich” Uncle Aubrey in their happy days in Orlando. All too soon, Elsie would go back to West Virginia.

  This photo, taken in the 1950s, is the house where Elsie and Homer Hickam lived when they had Albert in the 1930s. A former boardinghouse, the company turned it into a duplex, the one on the right the one occupied by the Hickams. The large plant along the fence line is the site of the pond built for the alligator. The company filled in the pond after Elsie and Homer moved to another Coalwood house.

  About the Author

  HOMER HICKAM (also known as Homer H. Hickam Jr.) is the bestselling and award-winning author of many books, including the #1 New York Times memoir Rocket Boys, which was adapted into the popular film October Sky. A writer since grade school, he is also a Vietnam veteran, a former coal miner, a scuba instructor, an avid amateur paleontologist, and a retired engineer. He lives in Alabama and the Virgin Islands.

  www.homerhickam.com

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  Also by Homer Hickam

  Back to the Moon

  Red Helmet

  Torpedo Junction

  The Dinosaur Hunter

  Paco, the Cat Who Meowed in Space