Saving Wonder

by Mary Knight

  “Nurse!” I shout, desperately searching for some kind of emergency button. I’m here five minutes and I’ve already caused him to relapse or whatever it is people do when they take a turn for the worse.

  “Curley,” Papaw gasps, waving his hand in the air. “Never mind, son. Just hand me that cup of water, would you?” He nods toward the table at the side of his bed. I notice he’s hugging his heart pillow real tight.

  The cup has a bent straw in it. I hold it up to Papaw’s mouth so he can drink. It feels good to be helpful, as opposed to … well … detrimental (d word, last July). Papaw pushes the straw away with his tongue and wipes his mouth with the edge of the hospital blanket. He takes a long breath in and lets it out nice and slow.

  “Where is that good-for-nothin’ old coot, anyway?” I know he means Mr. A. It’s how he talks about him, especially after their falling-out.

  “He stepped out with Aunt Gertie, Papaw, to give me some time alone with you.”

  “Uh-oh. That’s bound to lead to no good.”

  A picture of Mr. A and my aunt making out in a dark corner of the hospital cafeteria pops into my head. “Eeeew, gross, Papaw, you can’t mean—”

  “Curley, he could be on his deathbed, and that rascal would still be chasing the ladies.” The word deathbed crashes right through me, leaving terror in its wake. Papaw must sense it and quickly adds, “Look, Curley, I may be a little weak, but I’m on the mend. I won’t be dying any time soon.”

  Tears stream down my cheeks, as hard as I try to hold them back. I feel like I’m three years old and losing my father all over again. “Really, Papaw?” My voice comes out all squeaky. As much as I want to believe what he says is true, my fear of becoming an orphan is even stronger. This is the fear that’s been gnawing at me all week like a dog gnaws at a bone.

  “Really. You and me, we’re stuck with each other.” He grips my forearm at the elbow and holds it firmly against his. In spite of all the tubes taped to his wrist, his touch makes me feel solid again. “The good Lord ain’t done with me yet.”

  Papaw and I are linked up like that for a while, not talking, when I start to think about our mountain and what we’re going to do. I know I shouldn’t bother him with it. In fact, worrying about it is probably what landed Papaw in the hospital in the first place. But the month that Tiverton gave us is almost up, and we’re still without a plan. I’m about to say something, when we hear the outer door click open and water running.

  “Well, if it ain’t John ‘the Baptist’ Weaver, alive and kicking!” Mr. A’s booming voice precedes him into the room. I half expect to see him slapping his yardstick against the metal rails of Papaw’s hospital bed. “I see St. Peter threw you back … or was that the devil who didn’t want you?”

  “Now, Percy.” My aunt is about a foot shorter than Mr. A, so she tilts her head up to smile at him. She tucks a wisp of red hair behind her ear in a flirty sort of way. “I told you not to make him laugh,” she says.

  “No chance of that,” Papaw whispers, but his words come out all tight. That’s when I remember Mr. A is his mortal enemy and I’m the one who brought him here.

  The smile on Mr. A’s face drops into a frown. “Oh, come on, John,” he says softly. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. No use stirring up old muck. Not now.”

  The room gets real quiet.

  Papaw looks at me and then over at his onetime friend and shrugs. I’m trying to determine if it’s a “get lost” shrug or a “what the heck” shrug, when Aunt Gertie tugs at the sleeve of my jacket.

  “Come on, Curley. Let’s leave these boys alone.” As she steers me from the room, I turn to see Mr. A stepping closer to Papaw’s bedside.

  I hope to heck it’s safe.

  Aunt Gertie and I go down to the hospital’s cafeteria for a snack, but most of my fries turn cold and soggy on the plate, what with all the worry-thoughts churning in my gut. What if Papaw and Mr. A are at each other’s throats? What if Papaw can’t take care of me anymore? He says the good Lord ain’t done with him yet, but what if He is? And what about our mountain? What if Tiverton Coal blows it up? What then? I need to know what Papaw wants us to do. We need a plan.

  I guess Aunt Gertie can see that I’m anxious, so we don’t stay away long. As we approach Papaw’s room at the end of the hall, we can hear Mr. A’s thunderous laughter rumbling through both steel doors.

  “Your papaw’s practicing how to laugh on the inside,” Mr. A says defensively, predicting my aunt’s protests as soon as we walk into the room. “It takes deep concentration, but I do believe he’s getting the hang of it.”

  I check to see how tight Papaw’s holding his heart pillow, when I notice he’s wiggling his index finger up and down and grinning like a fool.

  “That little motion there indicates how hard he’s laughing.” Mr. A leans back in the hospital chair and props a foot up on the bed railing. “Ingenious, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yeah, your IQ is off the charts … but I won’t say in what direction!” Aunt Gertie laughs. “For now, I think it’s time for you and Curley to head for home.” She pushes Mr. A’s foot off the rail and reaches for his hand. “Come on, Percy. Let’s let Curley say good-bye to his grandfather in peace.”

  When Papaw thanks Mr. A for bringing me up to see him, they both get to looking all misty-eyed. I think maybe Mr. A’s going to bend over and kiss Papaw on the forehead—which would really be something to see—but then Papaw brushes him away and says, “Go on. Get out of here.” Honestly, I think they’re both so happy to be friends again they can hardly stand to look at each other.

  As Aunt Gertie and Mr. A leave, a nurse comes in to take Papaw’s blood pressure. She also gives him a pain shot, so I know we don’t have much time before it takes effect. As soon as she’s out the door, the question busts out of me.

  “What are we going to do about our mountain, Papaw?”

  Papaw sighs and leans back into his pillow. “As you can probably tell, Curley, I’m in no position to fight.” I swallow hard. I was afraid he’d say that. “That doesn’t mean you can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Fight.”

  “Fight?”

  “Yeah, fight. It doesn’t mean you’ll win, but it matters that you try.”

  “But how, Papaw? What can I do?”

  A twelve-year-old fighting Big Coal? That painkiller must be dimming his brain. He closes his eyes like he’s thinking, but he’s quiet for so long, I think maybe he’s fallen asleep. I’m about to tap him on the shoulder, when he starts talking again.

  “When you were a little tyke, you’d get all frustrated over something that wasn’t working out your way. You’d start kicking and screaming and your ma would finally say, real gentle-like, ‘Curley, use your words.’ And by golly, your words usually got you what you wanted.” He opens his eyes and stares straight into mine with those steely blues. “That’s how you fight, dear boy. I’ve given you a wagonload of words. Use them.”

  “Papaw, Mr. Tiverton said if we talked against coal, we’d lose our money. How are we going to live?”

  Papaw’s breathing slows way down, and I think maybe I’ve lost him—not in a dead-and-gone kind of way, but to sleep. I pull up so close to his ear I can see this tiny tuft of white hair sticking out of his earlobe in the place where the ear starts to curl.

  “Papaw,” I say again. “How are we going to live?” I’m about to give up and leave, when I hear him take a deep breath.

  “I don’t know,” he says. And that’s it.

  That’s the last thing Papaw says to me that day, not even good-bye.

  On the ride home, I get a niggle.

  That’s what Jules would call it, anyway. It’s the word she gave me this week, since Papaw couldn’t. She says a niggle is an idea that comes to you by way of intuition—an inner kind of knowing you can’t learn in books. Niggles often come out of the blue, she says. And sometimes they don’t make sense. Like the one I just got.

  “Stay with JD,�
� this niggle says to me.

  I say, Huh? Not out loud, of course. Mr. A would think I’m nuts. He’s lost in his own world, anyway. So I begin to have this little conversation with myself, or maybe it’s with the niggle. It goes something like this:

  You’ve got to be absolutely out of your mind! Stay with JD?! He’s the enemy … or at least the son of the enemy. A mortal enemy, if there ever was one.

  “Stay with JD,” the niggle says again.

  Jules warned me about this. Rarely does a niggle explain itself, she said. I thought she was crazy. Now I know … I am.

  But what will I do there? I’ll have to eat with them, maybe even sleep in the same room with JD himself. What good could that possibly do?

  “Stay with JD.”

  A niggle keeps on coming at you, apparently, kind of like a rabid hound, and it won’t let you go until you’ve really heard it. None of this is in the Big Book, incidentally. This is straight from Jules.

  Okay, let’s say I stay with JD. Let’s say I stay for a weekend. Will that be enough?

  Silence.

  Is that a yes?

  Silence.

  I don’t believe this is happening.

  Niggle—noun

  According to Jules: an idea that bugs you until you listen to it

  I call JD from Jules’s house as soon as I get back. When I ask him if I can spend the following weekend with him and his dad, you’d think I told him he won the Kentucky Powerball Lottery.

  “That’s so cool, dude! We’ll play pool and listen to music and then I’ll teach you how to play Battle King. After my dad goes to bed, we’ll raid the refrigerator and eat some chocolate chip cookie dough, and then we’ll sneak into his office and watch Terminator 2 on his home theater movie screen. It’ll be awesome.”

  Everything sounds like fun, I have to admit, except for maybe the cookie dough. That has my stomach feeling a little queasy. Or maybe it’s the thought of spending an entire weekend with my should-be-girlfriend’s boyfriend.

  The whole conversation with JD has me wondering what that niggle wants from me, and if I’m ready to give it.

  Jules has her own interpretation, of course, one that she freely gives me every chance she gets. She’s especially chatty on the walk home from the bus stop today—this being Friday, the first night of my stay-over at the Tivertons’. She’s been rambling on and on about what great friends JD and I could be as I blow some chords on old Gloria. I guess you could say I’m playing a sound track to her thoughts.

  I’m not so crazy about those thoughts, incidentally, about me needing more friends and how “JD has more going on than you give him credit for.” It’s not her words but their rhythm that makes me want to follow along in song.

  Jules and I stop to eat a granola bar at Tyler Creek, a tributary of the stream Ma and little Zeb got caught in. Tyler runs clean now that they stopped the mining up on Miller Hill, a testimony to Mother Nature and how she refreshes herself, Papaw once told me. “That doesn’t mean that a lot of life didn’t die in the process,” he was sure to add.

  Jules hands me a peanut butter and oats bar her ma made. She knows it’s my favorite. We sit on a boulder that’s been baking in the sun. As we snack, we listen to the burbling stream and the chip-chip-chipping of chickadees flitting through the branches. Jules crumbles the last of her granola bar and tosses it under a tree, leaving something for the birds like she usually does.

  “Curley, what’s that?” She sits bolt upright and points several hundred yards up ahead toward a place where the county road peeks through the woods.

  I follow her arm up the holler to a line of phosphorescent orange ribbons flashing through the trees. At first, my mind stalls over such an unnatural color in the woods. But then, without a word passing between us, Jules and I jump off our boulder and race toward those ribbons only to confirm what is rising in both of us—our greatest fear.

  Tiverton’s goons have tramped through the holler, marking all the trees that need to come down to make way for a mining road.

  “It’s started,” I say.

  “It’s started,” she says.

  And then we see it. A plastic orange ribbon tied around Ol’ Charley. Jules runs and throws her arms around its trunk.

  “This can’t happen,” she sobs.

  “I know,” I say.

  I can feel my heart turning to steel.

  Mrs. C says she’s going to call up her environmental friends this weekend to see if there’s anything they can do about our mountain.

  “Curley, I knew Barkley Coal had the lease on Red Hawk, but I never thought they’d do anything with it on account of your family,” Mrs. C says before she and Jules leave for the Kmart up in Fraleysburg after dinner. “I was hoping Tiverton might feel the same way.” She looks at me with the same sad eyes I’ve seen on Jules, and I can tell my ma, pa, and little Zeb are all lined up in her mind’s eye.

  Meanwhile, my duffle bag is packed for JD’s, and I don’t mind telling you, I’m scared. I’ve decided my niggle wants me to talk to Mr. Tiverton, to make him see what a bad idea it is to blow up Red Hawk Mountain. I’m afraid I don’t have the right words, so I make an emergency call to the only person I know who can get me out of this jam.

  “Papaw, I need more words and I need them quick.”

  Papaw was released from the hospital a few days after my visit and is staying with my Aunt Gertie up in Cincinnati while he recuperates. I talk to him almost every day.

  “Hold on there, son. What’s all the fuss?”

  I tell him about the orange ribbons, spending the weekend at the Tivertons’, Jules giving me the word niggle, and what I think my niggle wants me to do.

  “I know it’s not Sunday yet, Papaw, but I desperately need my next word to come with me, maybe two.”

  “Hmmm … I see what you mean.” He clears his throat. “Curley, you know how I love our system. I love how the alphabet fits so neatly into a year twice over.”

  “I know, Papaw. But this is an emergency.”

  “I hear that. I was just going to say that systems, like words, need to remain flexible in order to serve the ones who created them.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes.” And then he gives me o and p.

  I’m good with the p word, but what the heck am I supposed to do with oxymoron?

  “Isn’t that a laundry detergent?”

  “No.” Papaw laughs. “It’s a combination of two words or concepts that seem directly opposite each other, like an ‘honest lawyer’ or a ‘loud silence.’ ”

  “How is that going to help?” I practically yell into the phone.

  “That’s not mine to know,” he answers in that obnoxiously mysterious way of his.

  I sigh. “Okay, Papaw. Thanks. Gotta go.” Sometimes he makes my head hurt.

  “Call when you need more, Curley. But make sure you live each word fully. Like gifts and friendship, some words take longer to unwrap.”

  And some are better left in the box, I want to snap. Thankfully, I catch myself, and we say our good-byes. I hate being short with Papaw, especially now when he’s so frail, but the seriousness of what I have to do is squeezing in from all sides. I feel caught in a vise, like the one in Papaw’s workshop, and Tiverton Coal is turning the screws.

  I hear the kitchen door slam. It’s got to be JD. Since he and Jules have been going together, he’s like another member of the household. He doesn’t even knock. He comes strolling into the living room, where I’m sitting in the dark.

  “Hey, Ketchup, what’s up?” When I don’t answer, he swings my duffle bag over his shoulder and kicks at my feet. “Come on, little brother, let’s get going. Looks like you could use some cheering up.”

  I hate to admit it, but Jules is right. There’s more to JD than meets the eye.

  The first thing he does when we get to his room is show me his Hot Wheels car collection he started as a kid. They’re all lined up on a shelf that runs the entire circumference of his room about two fee
t below the ceiling. There has to be a thousand of them, no kidding. What surprises me most, however, is how uncool it is—I mean, what bad boy admits to having a Hot Wheels car collection?—which, of course, makes him seem that much cooler.

  Next, he teaches me the video game Battle King like he promised, on his very own gazillion-inch TV. After a few hours, we actually win a battle against some kids from Berlin, which boggles my mind considering our wartime history, not that any of us were alive when it was being made. Now, there’s an oxymoron: a friendly battle. Papaw would never believe it.

  Around midnight, Mr. Tiverton sticks his head in the room to check on us. He acts all fatherly and concerned about us “staying up too late.” JD ignores him and keeps waging war.

  “How’s your grandpa, Curley?” Mr. Tiverton asks before leaving.

  “He’s better, sir.” He’d be even better if you weren’t about to blow up our mountain.

  “Glad to hear it. We’ve been thinking about him,” he says as he quietly shuts the door.

  After that, JD and I watch a really old movie called Rebel Without a Cause, starring this bad-boy actor, James Dean, who kind of looks like JD himself. Come to think of it, he even has his initials. According to JD, it’s one of the greatest movies ever made, but it seemed kind of hokey to me. The DVD came off a spiral shelf that’s floor-to-ceiling movies. There’s so many I haven’t seen; it would take a year of Sundays to watch them all.

  Papaw’s always saying how money can’t buy happiness, but after my first night at the Tivertons’, I’m beginning to think it can.

  We stay up until 2:00 a.m. Friday night, which I guess is really Saturday. JD gives me his bed and sleeps on a blow-up mattress by his enormous dresser, a useless piece of furniture since he keeps all his clothes on the floor. Something I hope Jules never finds out about JD and I’m never going to tell her: He snores.

  It’s noon by the time we wake up. The weekend’s half-gone and I’m starting to feel anxious about finding a time for me and Mr. Tiverton to talk. He spends the day either closed up in his office or sitting in front of the TV in the living room watching baseball. “Now that the season’s started,” JD says, “I’ll see even less of him, which is fine by me.”