Sky of Stone (10 page)

When Big Jeb returned, we went back to work and kept up the same routine all day. By the time the man-trip showed up, I was pretty much worn out. All I could do was thank the good Lord my dad was going to cut me off. I wanted nothing more to do with mining coal, even though, technically, I hadn’t actually mined so much as a lump. I got on the man-lift and looked up the shaft. There was light up there somewhere. I allowed myself a little smile as we started to rise toward it.

My career as a coal miner was over, and that was fine by me.

13

CUT OFF

W
HEN
I stepped onto blessed open ground, Mr. Filbert, the lamp man, waved at me from his lamphouse. “Hey, Sonny, come on over here.”

I didn’t know what he wanted, but I had to turn in my lamp and give up my tag for the first and last time, anyway. Mr. Filbert led me to a wooden powder box in a dark corner. “Back here’s the lost-and-found box,” he said. “See anything in there you lost?” He was having trouble holding back his outright laughter.

Silently, I retrieved my bucket.

“Guess you got mighty hungry,” he said, still laughing up his sleeve.

“Not a bit of it,” I said. “I’m on a diet.”

I headed outside, where, to my surprise, Big Jeb was waiting for me. “What is it, Big Jeb?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and fell in beside me.

“I’m supposed to go see my dad,” I explained.

Big Jeb shrugged heavily and kept walking with me. At Dad’s office, he sat down on the steps. “I’ll be right out,” I told him, since it looked like he was bound and determined to stay with me. He raised a hand and wheezed while nodding his head.

Wally glanced up as I came inside his anteroom. “Go on in,” he said.

Dad was at his desk. At my knock, he waved me inside. “Shut the door,” he said ominously.

I did as I was told. Dad got up and sat on the front edge of his desk. “All right, Sonny,” he said tiredly. “You and John Dubonnet have had your fun but it’s over. I want you to quit.”

“Quit? I thought you were going to cut me off,” I said.

Dad crossed his arms. “Sonny, I’ve got a problem. I want you to help me with it.”

“Okay,” I said, but I was instantly on my guard.

“I can’t afford to train a couple of college boys just to have them leave in a few months. You understand what I’m saying? That means the only jobs you and Bobby Likens are going to get are the absolute worst and dirtiest ones in this mine. Why do you think Dubonnet agreed to this in the first place? It’s because his union members don’t want to do those jobs.”

“Then why don’t you just cut me off?” I asked.

His blue eyes went hard. “Because you’re a union member!” He shook his head as if he hadn’t yet quite grasped the concept. “If you quit, Dubonnet won’t be able to say anything. So that’s what you have to do.”

“What about Bobby Likens?” I wondered. “Did you tell him he had to quit, too?”

“Yes. He just left.”

“What did he say?”

Dad looked grim. “He said he needed the job. He didn’t care if it meant he had to shovel gob twenty-four hours a day, he wasn’t going to quit.”

“Then I’m not quitting, either,” I said.

“Bobby’s parents can’t pay his way through med school,” Dad said, his voice calm although I noticed his fingers tighten on the edge of the desk. “But you—you’re on the gravy train. I pay every penny of your college tuition, your books, your uniforms, everything. You don’t need this job.”

I didn’t have a good answer to that and he knew it. All I could say is what I said. “I’m not quitting.” Then I thought—
Damn! That felt good!

Dad glowered, and his voice tightened. “All right. Let’s do it this way. You want to keep going to college? Quit, or you’ll never see another dime from me.”

My dander was totally up. For the first time in the entire history of my life, I was going toe-to-toe with my dad. “I don’t care what you do,” I said. “I’m not quitting. And if you give me trouble about it, I’ll run to the union.”

Dad’s eyebrows went up so high I thought they were going to bounce off the ceiling. “You’re just like your mother!” he sputtered. “If I see you at work tomorrow, you’ll get no more money for college—ever. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

“Well, I leave it, then,” I said. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought it was going to leap right out of my throat.

Dad blinked, then took a sudden interest in the map of the mine that covered one side of his wall. “Get out,” he said.

I had the sudden sense I’d embarrassed him. Wally was listening, even through the closed door. Everything we’d said would be all over Coalwood in a matter of minutes. “Dad—”

“You heard me.”

I closed the office door behind me. Wally just stared. Big Jeb stood up as I came outside. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Big Jeb and I marched side by side down Main Street. I felt weak-kneed and foggy-brained. Not only did my head hurt, every muscle in my body felt like it had been twisted into knots. It felt like I had blisters on my feet, too. Between jolts of pain, it occurred to me that I had managed to get myself cut off, not from the mine but from college. What had I done?

At the Club House, I stopped at the steps. To my astonishment, Big Jeb put a huge paw on my shoulder. I winced, my shoulder a wad of cramped muscles. “You done good,” he rumbled.

Startled, I gulped, “Thank you, Big Jeb.”

His lips turned up in a smile and his tiny eyes fairly glowed. “You done
real
good.”

Then Big Jeb removed his giant hand from my shoulder and, wheezing, lumbered on down the road. As I watched him go, it occurred to me Big Jeb was about as eloquent a man as I’d ever had the privilege to know.

14

WHUPPED

W
HEN
I entered the Club House, I found Floretta waiting for me. “You look like you’re whupped,” she said.

The grimace on my face probably told her I was in full agreement.

“Tell me what hurts.”

“Everything.”

She chuckled. “I think some of my special liniment might fix you up. Get on upstairs and take your shower. There’s Lava soap in there. Scrub good around your eyes. We don’t want you looking like Cleopatra.”

I limped toward the stairs. “These new boots pretty much rubbed my feet raw.”

“I got some salve for that, too. Go on with you, and I’ll be right up.”

I shuffled to the bathroom and sat down on a stool by the shower. I practically had to screw off my boots. There were two nice blisters on each of my feet, one on the heel, the other on my instep. I stripped off my sweaty, filthy clothes, perched my glasses on the window ledge, and climbed in. The hot water beat on my back. I’d never felt anything quite so wonderful. I slid down to the tile floor and just let the water wash over me. When I started to feel a bit better, I crawled to my feet and got the Lava soap and started scrubbing. Lava soap, made of volcanic grit and beach sand, could peel a layer of hide right off you, but it did its job.

When I finished, I wrapped a towel around my waist and tottered to my room, falling facefirst on my bed. A little later, I heard a tapping on my door and Floretta came in without me saying anything. She was carrying a glass jar and a round tin can. When she opened the jar, the smell of whatever was in it burned my nose all the way across the room. “What is that?” I asked suspiciously.

“Floretta’s Special Club House Muscle Liniment,” she replied.

“What’s in it?”

“Pine resin, mutton tallow, ginseng, pale bergamot, Gilean buds, pennyroyal, and John Eye’s joy juice,” she recited. “Along with a good dose of camphor-
phe’nique.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Let’s find out.” Her tone was gleeful. She stripped my towel away. When I started to complain, she said, “I seen you when you was a baby and I still ain’t interested.”

I was too sore to argue. She dripped the liquid on my back and started kneading muscles. I yelped when she found knots and gave them a special squeeze. Her liniment burned like acid and I said so.

“That means it’s working,” she said, kneading even harder. “So did you get cut off?”

“Only from college.”

She stopped her battering. “What are you talking about?”

I told her the whole thing, and she started to squeeze my muscles again, this time even harder. “I swan, you Hickams! Sometimes you say things that don’t mean nothing to nobody nohow. I can understand your daddy—he’s been known to get puffed up now and again, but you, I figure you’d do some better.”

“I’m sorry,” I grunted. I didn’t know why she was so mad.

She huffed, then seemed to subside. “How’d you like working with Big Jeb?”

“I never had so much fun.” Then I asked, “Is it true he has two wives?”

“Big Jeb’s business is colored folks’ business,” she said.

“But you talk about
me
all the time,” I said. “Isn’t that white folks’ business?”

“Some roads go only one way.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Who are you to say what’s fair or not? Be careful or I’ll slap you silly.”

“I don’t think I’d feel it right now,” I confessed.

Floretta finished her kneading and put the cap back on the bottle of the foul-smelling liquid. Then she applied some salve from the tin on my foot blisters. It felt wonderful.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Possum grease.”

“Really?”

She chuckled. “Why do you care as long as it works?”

“I was born curious,” I answered.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” she said.

“And the possum, too,” I quipped.

She finished layering on the salve and pushed the top back on the tin. “That’ll do you,” she said. “I’ll bring up a food tray later.”

“You don’t want me to come to the dining room?”

“The way you stink? I don’t think so!” She laughed herself out of the room.

I
WOKE
the next morning to the shrill rattle of the alarm clock on my bedside table. It sounded like a giant metal hornet. I flailed at the thing and knocked it off the table, where it bounced once and happily kept ringing. I threw my blanket down to smother it. The little key in the back of the clock must have gotten tangled because it produced a strangled little
bing
and—thank the good Lord—stopped.

I waited until my heart stopped pounding, then eased my legs around to sit on the edge of the bed. I took stock of my body. It felt like somebody had spent the night hitting me with a board. I wrapped a towel around my waist and lurched into the hall, my thighs screaming bloody murder. My head also hurt and my feet announced they still had their blisters, too.

When I returned to my room, I found my work clothes, all washed and nicely pressed, beside the door. I was too stiff to pick them up, so I opened the door and kicked them inside. After much grunting and groaning, I managed to get myself dressed. Limping, my blisters complaining as they rubbed against my boots, I went slowly downstairs. I entered the dining room just as Floretta came in from the kitchen with a huge plate of steaming eggs, bacon, toast, and hashed potatoes. She set it down in front of Ned and Victor, who, surprisingly, just stared at it. “Did my liniment help?” she asked me.

“I don’t know.”

She frowned. “It takes a while to get the kinks out sometimes.”

“I think I got more than kinks,” I groaned as I eased myself into a chair. The junior engineers just stared straight ahead, their faces kind of green-hued. “What’s with them?” I asked her.

She huffed. “Got themselves drunk as mules last night. I put them to bed myself. You boys need to stay away from that John Eye liquor, you hear?”

Ned and Victor nodded sadly, then both of them grabbed their mouths and rushed out of the room. I watched them go and then forgot about them. I had my own problems. I dug into breakfast. At least my appetite was alive and well.

After I’d finished off my second plate and was working on my third, I was surprised when the enginette—
Rita—arrived and pulled up a chair opposite me. She leaned her elbows on the table and gave me a sweet smile. “Are you going to talk to your dad about me going inside the mine?” she asked, her tone as sweet as her smile.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” I answered.

Her smile faded. “Why not?”

I shrugged, or attempted to. It hurt too much for the full thing.

Her eyes narrowed. “Is it true you used to build rockets?”

“Yes.”

“I’d love to see one fly,” she said.

“You’re a year too late,” I replied, grimacing as a muscle in my back announced that it was still peeved about yesterday.

Floretta appeared, carrying a coffeepot. “You be eating with this old coal miner, honey?”

Rita shook her head. “He’s a bit too grumpy for me. I think I might have liked him better when he was a rocket boy.”

“Honey, everybody liked him better then,” Floretta said. “He was a boy knew how to be a boy. Now he’s a man don’t know how to be one. That’s why he’s all grumped up.”

Rita said, “I’ll have my breakfast at my table, Floretta, thank you.”

She went over to a corner table where I saw there was a rose in a vase. She got a cloth napkin, too. We at the junior engineer table got paper ones.

I kept eating. I just couldn’t get enough food in me fast enough. When I was on my fourth plate, none other than Mr. John Dubonnet appeared and sat down opposite me. Maybe, I thought, I should start charging admission for the chair. “How’d yesterday go?” he asked.

“I was born to be a coal miner,” I said.

My attempt at humor eluded him. “Sonny, I’m going to put my cards on the table.” When he caught me looking, he said, “I don’t mean literally.” He twisted his lips over to one side, then drummed his long fingers. He was having trouble saying what he was about to say, whatever it was. “You see, it’s like this. Your mother called the other day, said she wanted you to stay in Coalwood for a while, that you and your daddy needed to have some time together. She asked my advice and I told her to leave it to me, I’d see what I could do about keeping you here. Then you rolled your daddy’s Buick and I struck upon the idea of offering you a job in the mine to pay for the damage. What better way to keep you in Coalwood? That was my thinking, anyhow. But I made the mistake of not telling your mom about it. I guess I can get too clever by half if I’m not careful. It’s a trait you and I tend to share. Your mother nearly wore my ear out about it last night, and said I needed to get it straight. So I called your father and we agreed to let you quit, if that was what you wanted.”

Of all the things he’d just said, only one seemed incredible. “You and my dad agreed on something?”

He took off his hat and laid it on the table. “All I agreed to was that I wouldn’t fight it.” He shook his head. “Lord knows I was a fool for getting mixed up with you Hickams.”

I had to agree with him on that one. “I’m not quitting,” I said, but even as I said it, I thought,
What a strange beast am I!
There was nothing I really wanted more than to get out of that old coal mine.

Mr. Dubonnet looked pleased. “Well, I have to say I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “It’s good for a boy to mine a little coal sometime in his life. There’s a lot to learn down there. But what are you going to use for college money? Your dad said he was serious about cutting you off from it.”

Again, I tried to shrug but ended up wincing instead. “I’m making good money in the mine. I’ll use that.”

“It won’t be enough,” he said. “Not even three months of work will cover a year of tuition, books, and all that. Homer’s not done you any favors on this one, Sonny boy.”

A question just popped out of me and it surprised me as much as it did Mr. Dubonnet. “Mr. Dubonnet, why do you hate my dad so much?”

Although I could tell I had startled him, his answer back was immediate, as if he was used to answering it. “I don’t hate him. I just don’t like him. There’s a big difference.”

“Still, I guess you’ll be plenty glad if he loses his job over Tuck Dillon,” I said.

His eyebrows plunged. “I don’t like any man to lose his job!” he snapped.

I guess I looked taken aback, because Mr. Dubonnet’s expression softened. He leaned in. “Sonny, does the name Amos Fuller ring a bell with you?”

“Talks like a machine gun and has a personality to match?”

“That would be him.”

“Sure. He was the man the steel company sent down to sell off the houses. He even tried to put the rocket boys out of business while he was at it. Dad took up for us on that one.”

Mr. Dubonnet nodded. “Fuller’s the steel company’s hatchet man. Whenever they’ve got something nasty to be done, he’s their man to do it.” His hand went to his hat and he stood up. “Fuller’s been put in charge of the Tuck Dillon investigation. He should be here any day. Thought you should know. I’ve already told your mom.”

“What did she say?”

Mr. Dubonnet plopped on his old hat, running his fingers over the brim. “She had a few things to say, but I guess I’ll keep them to myself.”

His answer was no surprise. My mom was one for secrets and intrigues. “Can you help Dad, Mr. Dubonnet?”

He shook his head. “This is one I can’t touch, Sonny,” he said. “For a couple of reasons.” When he saw me open my mouth to ask what reasons those might be, he said, “Coalwood business, son. I’m sorry.”

After he left, I was just starting to contemplate Mr. Dubonnet’s latest round of information—and lack of same—when Floretta came in from the kitchen to hurry me along to work.

“Floretta,” I asked, “have you reserved a room for Mr. Fuller? He works for the steel company.”

“I know who that rascal is,” she answered, making an ugly face. “He’ll be here next Sunday.”

“He’s coming to destroy Dad,” I said grimly.

“That may be, Sonny,” she replied, filling my hand with my lunch bucket and aiming me out the door. “But there’s not a thing you can do about it. Go on. And this time remember to take your bucket inside with you!”

“Okay, Mom,” I said, which seemed to give her some pleasure. She responded with a soft chuckle.

I
WAS
back in the line of men heading up the valley when I noticed a woman standing in the front yard of one of the smaller houses along Main Street. It was Mrs. Nate Dooley, the wife of Coalwood’s secret man. She was wearing a pink robe, and was leaning on her fence, her hand languidly holding a cigarette between two upraised fingers. Blue and pink hair curlers covered her head. She lifted her thin, pale face at the sight of me. “Sonny Hickam,” she called. “Come here.”

I went to the fence. “Yes, ma’am?” I could smell the chemicals, sharp and bitter, on her hair.

“Where are you going?”

“To work, ma’am.”

Mrs. Dooley frowned and took a puff on her cigarette, then threw it down and stepped on it with a pink bedroom slipper. “Next couple of days, come by the house. It’s time for Nate’s bath.”

“Ma’am?”

“Are you deaf? I need help with Mr. Dooley’s bath.”

“How is he?” I asked stupidly.

She raised her eyebrows. “Dirty. That’s why he needs a bath.”

“I mean his wrist.”

Her pale blue eyes rested on me. “It’s better,” she said at length.

“How did it happen?” I thought to at least get a report for Mom. Our next conversation, I figured, was going to be a knockdown, drag-out affair about me working in the mine, and maybe I could get her talking about Mr. Dooley instead. It was a slim hope but a hope nonethe-less.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Dooley asked.

“Did he fall?”

“No, he didn’t fall.”

“What then? I asked Doc Lassiter, but he said he didn’t put on the cast. Who did?”

She shrugged and pushed back from the fence. “Come Saturday noon,” she said. Then she went up on her porch, opened her front door, and went inside.

I puzzled after her for a bit and then fell back into line. As I neared the Coalwood School, I heard what sounded like somebody running in their boots thudding behind me. When I turned, I was surprised to see it was Rita Walicki, the enginette. She was carrying a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She slowed to a walk. “Got to deliver some drawings to the tipple,” she said, taking in a quick breath. “Mind if I walk with you?”