Saving Wonder

by Mary Knight

  I’m mad at Mr. A for not being a better friend to Papaw. I’m mad at Papaw for taking so long to decide what to do about our mountain. I’m mad at JD for the usual reasons and at Jules for being so hoity-toity honest and good. But most of all, I’m mad at myself for sitting around stewin’ when I should be doing something, anything, to stop Tiverton Coal from blowing up our mountain. Not that I have the slightest idea what.

  Jules is sitting so close to me that the sleeve of her sweater keeps brushing against my arm. I wish she’d go ahead and cuddle up with JD, who’s sharing our lab table with us. The poster collage of elk they worked on together lies facedown in front of them. I think about all the time they spent on it, cutting and pasting, and I want to tear it apart.

  Carl Jenkins grabs Mr. A’s yardstick to use as a pointer. A gutsy thing to do, I’ll give him that. He points to an easel on top of Mr. A’s desk with a blown-up picture of a Carolina parakeet—all bluish green with an orange-red head, like something you’d find in Florida. No wonder everybody wanted their feathers, I think, which makes me mad all over again. Why does everyone always want to destroy what’s pretty to look at? Like mountains, for instance.

  “Any questions for our presenters?” Mr. A scans the room with his laser-like eyes, and I try not to meet his gaze. Too late. “Mr. Hines? You look lost in thought. Care to share?”

  “I do not.” Those three little words come out sharp as nails, and everyone stares.

  “Oh, come on, Curley … please share.” This from Carl Jenkins in a syrupy voice filled with its usual venom.

  Thwack. Carl hits his parakeet poster with Mr. A’s yardstick, I guess to assert some kind of power over me, but it rocks the easel until it teeters and falls right into Mr. A’s trash can. Naturally, the whole class erupts into uncontrollable laughter, and I’m off the hook. At least I think I am until Mr. A quietly pulls the easel out of the trash can and addresses me again.

  “Well, Mr. Hines. Let’s hope Mr. Jenkins pays you the same kind of rapt attention during your presentation you’ve paid him. You and your buddies are up.”

  Jules and JD push back their chairs at the same time and grab the poster. Their part of the presentation comes first. Jules insisted on practicing their spiel in front of me over the weekend, taking both parts since JD was in Indiana visiting his mom. Every time I was about to tell her about Mr. Tiverton’s “offer,” she’d say, “Wait a minute, Curley. I need to change something,” and scribble on one of her note cards. Finally, when I was getting ready to go home, she asked, “What’s up?” but I decided not to tell her just for spite. As I watch the two of them position the poster collage on the easel, I want to be anywhere else but here.

  Their voices drone on, a duet about Eastern elk I already know by heart. I should be listening for my cue, but my mind keeps flipping back to Papaw slumped in his chair, not knowing what to do. If someone as smart as Papaw doesn’t have the answer, then what could a no-account twelve-year-old boy from Wonder Gap, Kentucky, possibly do to stop the likes of a powerful coal boss from blowing the top off a mountain?

  “Curley?” Jules’s voice breaks through a cloud of whispers. “Come on.” She motions for me to get up. “It’s your turn.” JD is busy hooking up his laptop to the TV sitting on a cart in front of the whiteboard.

  “Mr. Hines?” Mr. Amons calls from across the room. “Today would be good.”

  I grab my notes from the back of my science textbook and push by Jules to get to the front of the room. JD hands me the controller and says, “Go get ’em, Ketchup,” a name he calls me on account of Hines being a brand name for condiments even though it’s not spelled the same. His calling me that ticks me off so much, the stack of notes in my left hand rattles. I set them down on Mr. A’s desk.

  I point the controller at the laptop and punch the START arrow. The image of the hunter grinning over his dead elk pops onto the screen.

  “Oh, man, look at that rack!” Carl blurts out. “That’s gotta be an eight pointer!”

  “Well, what do you know?” JD smirks. “Jenkins can count!”

  Carl lunges from his seat.

  Thwack! Mr. A has his yardstick back. Meanwhile, I’ve hit PAUSE.

  “Gentlemen. That’s enough!” Mr. A points the stick at Carl, who slowly lowers himself back into his chair, staring daggers at JD. “Proceed, Mr. Hines.”

  I press PLAY again and the title from the original video appears on the screen, which I try to read aloud. Here’s how it comes out: “Th Relothcathen of Elth in Ethern Kenthucthy.” My throat is so dry, my tongue is sticking to the roof of my mouth like flypaper.

  “Speak up, Mr. Hines,” Mr. A yells from the back of the room, where he’s sitting at a lab table with Anna Ludlow. “Here, try this.” Over the heads of my classmates, he throws me a mini water bottle, which, fortunately, I catch in midair. “You need some spit.”

  I chug about half the bottle. As I swallow, my Adam’s apple feels gigantic, which is something I’m already self-conscious about. Meanwhile, the room is dead quiet, which does little to set me at ease. Darn Mr. A, anyway. I had wanted to add the narration to the video, so I wouldn’t have to go through this, but he insisted I deliver my part of the presentation in person.

  “I want to hear the resonance of your persuasive voice,” he’d said, which I thought sounded like a crock of excrement, but I held my tongue, which goes to show: I’m learning.

  “Okay,” I say, pressing PLAY one more time. “Let’s try this again.” A big green X slashes across the first title on the screen, and the second title—the one I wrote—appears in bold red script. I told Papaw I thought it was a tad overdramatic, but he’d said, “Sell it,” so I do. “You can never go wrong with a metaphor,” he’d said, which is this week’s word, of course.

  “Elk: Pawns in a Deadly Game of Chess,” I read. This time, my words come out sounding clear and sharp. “It had been over a hundred years since anyone saw an elk in eastern Kentucky, since before the Civil War.” I take another sip of water to keep my tongue good and wet. “As my partners pointed out, the Eastern elk were long gone—make that extinct—after being overhunted, probably by folks much like this guy here.

  “So in 1997, a group of people got an idea.” An artist’s etching of an Eastern elk slowly fades onto the screen. “Never mind the Eastern elk. Never mind their unique size and beauty. Never mind that they’re gone forever. We’ll just take another kind of elk, some mountain elk from out west, and transplant them here in Appalachia.”

  At this point in the video, I’ve created a simple animation of an elk being picked up by a cartoon hand and moved across a map drawn to look like a chessboard. I had to call JD to ask him how to do all that, so I guess I owe him one, which I’m not real happy about. The elk has a fake smile on its face.

  “No one will ever know the difference, right?” I pause and look at my audience. The elk’s smile turns into a frown. “Except, of course, the elk.” Most of the class laughs at this, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m feeling pretty good.

  As I continue my narration, the video goes on to show those first elk being rounded up in Kansas and loaded onto a cattle truck by a bunch of guys dressed in camouflage.

  “This is some of the scenery the elk might have seen if they’d been given windows,” I say as the video shows clips of the elk’s thousand-mile trek cross-country. That whole section ends in the hills of Kentucky, of course, with the elk rushing down a ramp, scattering every which way like they’re looking for something.

  “Guess they’re wondering where home went,” I add, a comment not in my notes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. A cover his mouth, muffling a laugh.

  “The elk have settled in real nice, however,” I continue. Now we’re seeing the footage I took up on the mountaintop removal site. “Their numbers have exceeded expectations.”

  I go on to give some statistics about elk reproduction and how people are now finding them a nuisance. Considering how nervous I was initially, I can hardly believe how
relaxed I’m feeling. I give a quick glance toward Jules and she’s beaming. As JD would say, I’m on a roll.

  That is, until I look at the footage of what used to be a mountain and I lose my train of thought. I look down at my notes for the first time, but the words are a blur. All I can think about is my mountain and how Mr. Tiverton wants to blow it up. I look up at the TV and see the beginning of the long, slow pan I took of the mining site, and my eyes begin to burn.

  A few kids fidget in their seats. Carl and his buddies are snickering, and Jules is giving me her bug-eyed, “get with it” look. JD’s brooding eyes are riveted on my face, as they have been from the beginning, but I can’t tell whether he’s sending me good luck or a curse.

  I toss my notes in the trash.

  “Who cares?” I mumble.

  “What’s that, Mr. Hines?” Mr. A stands up and shouts from the back of the room. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Who cares?” I shout back.

  Heads turn from Mr. A to me.

  “Who cares that the Eastern elk are now extinct?” I shout, stabbing the PAUSE button on the remote. The frame freezes on a far-off elk herd against a backdrop of blasted stone.

  “Who cares if a species goes extinct? There are plenty other kinds, right? Like these mountain elk from Kansas and Colorado. We’ll just get us some of those.” I rewind the video and begin the slow pan of the mining site all over again.

  “Who cares where they came from when they look so pretty in our mountains, right?” I freeze the picture on the dragline, that twenty-story monster that sits smack-dab in the middle of that gosh-awful lunar landscape. “But wait … Where’s the mountain?” I press PLAY and the pan continues. “I could have sworn there was a mountain here a year ago. Where did it go?”

  I let the pan run out until it fades to black.

  “Oh, well. Who cares? Who cares that the mountaintop is gone? Who cares that the Eastern elk are gone? Who cares that the Carolina parakeet is gone? Who. Cares. That. We. Will. Never. Get. Any. Of. Them. Back. Ever. Who cares?”

  I shrug and scan the room. Many of my classmates are staring back at me as if I’ve fallen completely off my rocker. At least, that’s what I believe until Anna Ludlow raises her hand. I think she has a question. Her voice is small. I feel it more than hear it.

  “I care,” she says.

  JD raises his hand, slowly, deliberately, like a flag drawn to full mast.

  “I care,” he says.

  Pretty soon, there’s another hand in the air … and then another … and another. Within seconds, the whole room is ringing with the most astonishing chorus of words I’ve ever heard.

  “I care.”

  “I care.”

  “I care.”

  Of course, Carl Jenkins is still staring hate daggers at me. The fact that his cronies have dared to say “I care” probably has something to do with it. Jules also has been staring at me with a look I can’t quite decipher. She seems stern or darkly thoughtful. Like I said, I’m not sure.

  Finally, after everyone has taken their turn, Jules raises her hand. It’s as if she’s been waiting to have the last word, something she’s good at, incidentally. She keeps her hand in the air, waiting for me to acknowledge her, like I’m the teacher or something, so I nod.

  “I care, Curley Hines,” she says. “Do you?”

  I wait until the entire room goes silent. I don’t know why. I guess I want to make sure there’s a place for my words to land.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I return her gaze. “I do.”

  “Ooooh … it’s like they just got married!” Carl squeals like a stuck pig.

  I guess he thinks he can ruin the moment, but in a way, he helps break the ice. Everyone laughs, including me and Jules, even JD.

  Mr. A says we don’t have time for another presentation, so he breaks out his entire bowl of chocolate candy. While everyone is still chattering and licking their fingers, he calls me up to his desk.

  “Mr. Hines, I think you found your gift today.”

  “What’s that, Mr. A?” I’m still thinking about Jules and the way she looked at me when I said, “I do.”

  “I mean that documentary you put together there and the way you talked to us. You made us listen, Curley. You made us care. I’m not sure anyone can teach you how to do that. It’s as if you were born knowing how.”

  “Gosh, Mr. A, thanks … but I had help. Jules and JD, especially JD, helped a lot.”

  “That’s awfully good of you, Mr. Hines, to give credit where credit is due.” Mr. A waves his hand in the air like he’s reconsidered everything he just said and is shooing me away. “I only wanted you to know that I think you’ve got something. Don’t waste it.”

  I’m on my way back to our lab table when I notice Jules looking past me, quizzically, toward the classroom door.

  “Mom?” she says.

  I turn, and instead of Mrs. Cavanaugh answering her daughter, she looks straight at me. Her face is sad and pleading, but what could she want? I’m halfway to the door when my heart freezes and I don’t want to know.

  “Curley,” she says. “It’s Papaw.”

  Metaphor—noun

  : a word or phrase used in conjunction with another word or phrase, suggesting that what they represent is the same or similar, as in “Papaw is my mountain.”

  Nobody wants me to go. They say there’s nothing I can do to help, but I think it’s just a lame excuse for keeping me in the dark. Even Jules fakes this cheerful “it’s going to be all right” look on her face every time we talk about him. She insisted on giving me this week’s word, because “Papaw wouldn’t want me to miss one.” A word I’m finding entirely useless, by the way.

  I haven’t been able to sleep a wink or eat much, not even Mrs. C’s cheesy grits, since she came to school last Monday to tell me about Papaw’s heart attack and then take me in. I had other offers—from Mr. A and even JD’s dad—but I wanted to stay close to home, and shacking up with the enemy was out of the question.

  Aunt Gertie calls me every day from the hospital and tells me Papaw’s stable, but I’m pretty sure she’s lying along with everyone else. Poor Curley, they’re all thinking. Lost his pa and then his ma and brother, too. Now this. They’re all in cahoots, as Papaw would say, and not one of them has the guts to tell me the truth.

  None of them except Mr. A. He’s all about finding out the facts. “Verify, verify, verify,” he’s always saying, which is why he’s driving me up to Lexington so we can both see for ourselves. The chocolate milk shake he got me from McDonald’s on our way out of Fraleysburg tasted pretty good—the first thing I’ve been able to stomach all week—but now my gut’s back in a tangle.

  “Now, Curley … your papaw’s not going to look so good,” Mr. A warns me as we speed-walk through the atrium of the hospital on the way to the cardiac care unit. He’s got a death grip on my shoulder and he’s steering me like a plow. I’m glad for this, never having been to a hospital before.

  “Triple bypass surgery,” I say offhandedly, like I’ve got it together. “Aunt Gertie told me all about it.”

  “Right.”

  Mr. A’s face looks all shadowy gray. I wonder if he remembered to shave.

  Minutes later, we’re standing in front of Room 322. On a slip of paper in a slot under the number, John Weaver is penciled in.

  “This is it.” Mr. A leans on the handle, and the door heaves open.

  I brace myself, but we find ourselves standing in a small entryway in front of a sink. I sneak a look through a rectangle of glass on the second door but only see the blur of a body, probably my aunt, sitting in a blue chair at the foot of a hospital bed. A sign over the sink says, WASH HANDS BEFORE ENTERING.

  I thought there wasn’t anyone in the world I wanted to see more than Papaw right now, but here I am rubbing my hands raw with an antiseptic soap that smells like the opposite of life itself. Suddenly, I’m not so anxious to verify the facts.

  Mr. A and I toss our paper towels into a stainless s
teel bin. He looks down at me and smiles. “Ready?” I nod, even though I’m not.

  My aunt stands and gives me a hug, but all I can look at is this old man tucked in tight like a mummy, faceup, in bed. His eyes are closed. His face is pale and unshaven. Tubes go in and out of his arms. Plastic bags on metal stands drip, drip, drip. Monitors blink and beep.

  That’s my papaw. I know it. And I want to touch him. But I can’t. Those tubes are everywhere. His skin hangs loose around his neck. It’s so thin that I can see a network of veins like branches of tiny trees streaming across his chest. Blue like mountains.

  I’m afraid to touch him. I’m afraid my fingers might poke right through his skin.

  A hint of roses, Aunt Gertie leans into me. “I’ll leave the room so you can visit,” she whispers and then disappears. Mr. A goes with her. And I am alone … with him.

  I’m afraid to talk out loud, so I think to myself: Papaw? Are you in there?

  His eyes pop open, and his whole body jumps like he’s leapt right out of a dream.

  “Curley?” His voice is soft and raspy, but it still sounds like him.

  “Yup, it’s me, Papaw.” I bend over slightly so he can see me. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like an elephant used my chest for a trampoline.” His arms hug a heart-shaped pillow that lies across his chest. “This is for when I have to cough, or, heaven forbid, laugh,” he says. “It helps hold everything together in there … you know … from the surgery.”

  “Oh.”

  The thought of what went on inside Papaw’s chest takes the bones right out of me.

  “Hey!” Papaw says, snatching my hand up with a familiar fierceness. “What the heck are you doing here, anyway?” It’s like his touch sends this bolt of energy straight through me.

  “Thought I’d check up on you, Papaw. Mr. A brought me up. We figured we needed to verify your whereabouts.”

  “Ha! You mean you needed to make sure I wasn’t dead.” He starts to laugh, but it quickly turns into a cough that makes his face twist up in what must be a heap of pain.