Sky of Stone (4 page)

4

HOMEBOUND

I
STOOD
at my favorite hitchhike site in Blacksburg, just past Doc Roberts’s Shell Service Station, and stuck out my thumb in the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. It was the morning after I’d received the phone call from my mom ordering me to go back to Coalwood to be with my father. I was resigned to do what she’d told me, but there was also a plan percolating in the back of my brain. I didn’t know its particulars, not yet, but in general it consisted of getting in and out of Coalwood in a hurry.

After only a few minutes, a beat-up Chrysler came along. Its driver was a milling machine salesman who proceeded to talk my ear off, something to do with a legend about an Indian boy named Falling Rocks who’d gotten lost somewhere along the New River. “Do you see that sign?” he asked as we crossed a mountain. I did. It said
LOOK OUT FOR FALLING ROCKS
. “They’re still looking for him!” the salesman said, and then slapped his knee and laughed heartily.

I joined him with a chuckle, that being the polite thing to do and also because the car was going too fast for me to jump out.

“Where you headed, son?” the salesman asked after his guffaws petered away.

“Coalwood, West Virginia.”

He frowned thoughtfully. “Seems like I sold a milling machine there one time. Who’s the boss of the machine shop?”

“Bill Bolt.”

“Big guy, tough as a rock?”

“That would be him.”

“Small world.”

I agreed and said so out loud. If conversation was what it took to get my ride, I was paying full price.

We cruised along until we reached the town of Narrows, where the salesman had a client. I stuck my thumb out again, and soon an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer driver picked me up and carried me across the West Virginia state line. There was no sign announcing I was back in the Mountain State, but I didn’t need one. On the Virginia side were smooth, meadowed ridges, green dimpled valleys, healthy fields of corn, and contented herds of plump cattle. On the West Virginia side were humpbacked, rock-strewn hills furrowed by hollows choked with tangled masses of rhododendron. My nose picked up the drifting pungent odor of a nearby coke oven, too. Such ovens were built back into the sides of mountains and used to bake raw coal into the hard, dry stuff—coke—that was needed to make steel. I’d been away from them long enough that now they seemed to stink to high heaven.

Thankfully, the driver of the truck was quiet as we bumped along, my mind gradually turning dark with uncharitable thoughts about my spoiled summer plans. To add to my dour mood, it began to rain. The road we were on paralleled a set of curving railroad tracks filled with endless lines of coal cars, the heavy locomotives chuffing past, straining to pull their heavy loads. The air was filled with black soot, mixing with the rain to form a gray scum on the windshield, which the wipers only smeared. On the sides of the surrounding mountains were dingy little wood and tar-paper houses, some of them hardly more than shacks, their wet tin roofs glittering in the wan light. The people sitting on the porches looked thin and poor and ill clothed. West Virginia politicians liked to say we mountaineers might be poor but we were proud. Hearing that, my mother liked to say that if there was anything more pitiful than a proud poor person, she didn’t know what it was. Since she’d grown up about as poor as anybody could get, I guess she had the right to her opinion.

The truck wound its way into Bluefield, a city in the hills where railroad tracks converged from all around the southern end of the state. Bluefield was a prosperous town, its downtown of narrow, winding streets lined by busy shops and majestic banks.

The driver finally spoke. “Where you heading, boy?”

“Coalwood, sir.”

“Where’s that?”

“McDowell County.”

“That’s a rough place.”

“I grew up there,” I said.

He looked me over. “You don’t look like somebody who’d come out of a hellhole like that.”

I didn’t know whether to thank him or take offense, so I did neither. I just said, “I’m a college boy now.”

“I’ll be letting you off just a piece more down the road,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

We turned southerly onto Highway 52 and drove over a high bridge that spanned a dozen railroad tracks clogged with coal cars as far as could be seen. The economy was picking up, or so I’d read in the newspapers, and that meant more people were buying automobiles, which meant more steel was being made and, to make the steel, more coal was being dug. I had the sudden thought that maybe Tuck’s death was connected to the improving economy. As a Coalwood boy, I knew very well that the busier the mine got, the more dangerous it got, too.

Outside Bluefield, the grade increased rapidly and my driver fought the gears until he found the right one. As we trundled past the campus of Bluefield State College, I studied its low brick buildings. Bluefield State was where we rocket boys had won the Southern West Virginia Science Fair. It seemed to me now like it was something that had happened a century ago, not just the year before. The man was right who said if you take your eye off time, it’ll jump down a hole like a scared rabbit.

The truck driver let me off in Bluewell, a small community just past Bluefield. The rain was coming down faster and there was no traffic, so I started hiking. By the time I reached a small punch mine—one dug into the mountainside to get at a shallow vein—I was dripping wet. I ducked inside a tin shed in front of the mine, stripped off my shirt, and wrung it out. As it happened, one of the miners just off from work took pity on me and offered me a ride all the way to Welch. We talked a little, exchanging names until we found one in common. He knew Jack Burnette, one of Dad’s engineers. Mr. Burnette was also another one of our scoutmasters. Coalwood men competed for the honor of being our scoutmaster—all of them, that is, except my dad. He didn’t like going into the woods very much. Maybe if the Boy Scouts could have held camp-outs inside the mine, he might have taken the position.

In Welch, I walked around the county seat’s tilted streets looking for a Coalwood citizen who might give me a ride the rest of the way to my fair hometown. I found, instead, and to my great delight, Miss Freida Riley, my most wonderful teacher of chemistry, physics, and rockets at dear old Big Creek High. She was just coming out of the Flat Iron Drug Store. “Is it really you, Sonny?” she asked, her eyes lighting up.

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” I said, grinning. Miss Riley was as gloriously beautiful as ever except she was thinner, probably because of her Hodgkin’s disease cancer. She’d let her glossy black hair grow out a bit, too. I felt like hugging her, but I held back, such familiarity not being the West Virginia way.

“How’d you get so wet?” she wanted to know.

“I’ve been hitchhiking in the rain,” I told her. “I’m just in from college.”

“Tell me everything!”

We went inside the Flat Iron and sat down at a tiny wrought-iron table and ordered chocolate milk shakes. Even when she’d been my teacher, I could always talk easily to Miss Riley, so I told her in some detail about the deans who thought I might be less than pure engineering material, and about my mom going off to Myrtle Beach, and about my dad’s situation, at least as best I knew it. She heard my stories and then said, “Sonny, when I was your teacher, I used to worry about you all the time. When your dad got hurt in the mine, and your friend Mr. Bykovski got killed, I was certain that you were going to stop your rockets and just give up. I gave you some advice then. Do you remember what it was?”

Mr. Bykovski, a machinist by trade, had been the first man to help the Big Creek Missile Agency. Dad had exiled him to work inside the mine for his unauthorized rocket building, and there, one awful night, he’d been killed. After that, I’d sworn off building rockets, and Miss Riley had gotten after me because of it.

“You said,” I recalled, “if I had a job to do, I was supposed to do it whether I liked it or not.”

She narrowed her eyes. “To be precise, I said when you don’t like a job, you
especially
give it everything you’ve got. I also said you’d regret it for the rest of your life if you stopped building your rockets.”

“I remember now,” I said. “It was good advice.”

“Afterward, you went all the way to the National Science Fair and I haven’t worried about you since. You’re going to get through everything life has to throw at you, Sonny. You’ll get through VPI just fine and then you’ll go to NASA and show them how to do things. I’ll just watch from the sidelines and applaud.”

“I’ll keep doing my best,” I promised.

“Do better,” she said, summing up her philosophy in two words.

“And you, Miss Riley?” I asked. “How are you?”

“My cancer is in remission, but it’s probably only temporary,” she said straight out. “I’m off to West Virginia University this summer for education classes to help me teach better. I’m going to fight this disease as long as I can. They’ll have to carry me out of my classroom!”

“You’re the best teacher I ever had,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for you, the rocket boys would have never gotten anywhere.”

Her smile lit up the whole room. “I’ll carry those words with me forever.”

Miss Riley had to go down to Woolworth’s to meet her sister, Iva Gray, so we finished our shakes, which she paid for, and I escorted her back outside. She waved good-bye, and I sadly watched her go.

I went back to wandering the Welch streets seeking someone from Coalwood who’d give me a ride. In front of the municipal parking building, where once I’d questioned the future president of the United States, I found Mr. Maynard Fleming, one of Dad’s foremen who lived on Coalwood’s Substation Row. He said he’d be glad to give me a lift. He retrieved his car out of the parking building, and soon we were motoring our way on the high road out of Welch that followed the winding Tug River. “I hear you’re getting bad grades down there at VPI,” he said.

It didn’t surprise me that Mr. Fleming would know my business. The gossip fence in Coalwood was an active one. “I made A’s in English,” I said.

“Does that mean you can at least
spell
engineer?” he asked with a chuckle.

“I can not only spell it,” I said. “I can conjugate it. I engineer today, I engineered yesterday, I have engineered many times before.”

“That’s a good one,” he replied, although I didn’t notice him laughing.

We drove on in silence until, just as we topped Welch Mountain, Mr. Fleming said, “Bad business about Tuck Dillon, Sonny. I guess you heard all about it.”

Mr. Fleming was the first Coalwoodian I’d come across, and already we were talking about Tuck. That meant everybody in Coalwood was talking about him, too. “All I know is what my mom told me, which wasn’t much. What happened?”

Mr. Fleming, in the Coalwood style, considered his answer carefully. “There was a lot of rain that night,” he said. “Ten times what it is now. Lightning and thunder like I never seen before. It was like a bunch of atom bombs going off. All the fans got knocked out and your dad pulled the men on the hoot-owl shift out of the mine. But Tuck somehow ended up down in his section on a motor. He ran into a patch of fire damp and got blowed up. That’s all I know.”

I considered his account. The fans were the huge blowers on the surface that ventilated the mine. A motor was what Coalwood miners called the electric trams that traveled on the rails that went into every working section of the mine.
Fire damp
was the colloquial term for methane, an explosive gas that seeped naturally out of exposed coal. The purpose of the fans was to keep the methane from building up. Coalwood was a notoriously gassy mine. If the fans went down for just a short time, dangerous concentrations of methane could collect in a hurry. It wouldn’t take much—perhaps no more than an electric spark from a motor—to cause an explosion.

“That doesn’t sound like anything an experienced man would do,” I observed.

“It sure as hell doesn’t sound like Tuck Dillon,” Mr. Fleming huffed. “He was always real careful, always doing safety checks for this or that on his section. The bosses got onto him all the time for going too slow. It was because he was always checking.”

The “bosses” Mr. Fleming was referring to probably included my dad. I decided to ask another question. “What’s wrong with Nate Dooley?”

He shot me a look. “Nate? What makes you think anything’s wrong with him?”

“Just something I heard.”

Mr. Fleming gripped the steering wheel. “You know we don’t talk about him, not to . . .” He stopped, as if he was searching his mind for the right word.

I found it for him. “An outsider?” It gave me an odd sense of satisfaction to realize he considered me exactly that.

Mr. Fleming didn’t reply. He just kept turning the
steering wheel back and forth, back and forth, taking the twists in the road. Then we hit a little straight stretch, and through the rain-streaked windshield I could see the tips of the roofs of New Camp Row. A bit farther and the headlights illuminated a familiar white sign with black letters. It said
COALWOOD
and beneath it,
UNINCORPORATED
.

I was back.

5

THE CAPTAIN’S HOUSE

A
FTER
M
R.
F
LEMING
let me out, I stood, oblivious to the rain, and just stared at our old house, dimly lit by the streetlight on the corner. When Dad had taken the mine superintendent’s job in 1954, we moved into the big white house on the corner of Substation and Tipple Rows, which everybody in town called the Captain’s house. Until we Hickams moved in, Captain Laird and his wife, my third-grade teacher, had been its only tenants.

The windows in the house were dark. Dad had either already gone to bed or, more likely, was still at the mine. I contemplated the old crab-apple tree by the garage. Daisy Mae, my cat and confidante for so many years, lay buried beneath it. She had been hit by a car driven by one of my father’s many enemies. I had once come to terms with who I was and what I was going to do with my life beneath that tree just before I’d gone off to the National Science Fair. Then I thought:
What in God’s good name am I doing here?
I felt like a ghost somehow blown out of shining heaven back to dull earth.

I took a deep breath and tasted the sharp, acrid odor of coal. Less than a hundred yards away sat the mine, its buildings almost lost in the swirling wet darkness. I heard the ringing sound of a hammer on steel coming from the little tipple machine shop. It made me think of Mr. Bykovski. Four years ago, my visit to him in that shop had sealed his fate—and mine.

I opened the back gate and went into the yard. A scramble of paws at the basement steps announced the imminent appearance of our dogs. Poteet appeared first, followed by Dandy, our pure-bred golden cocker spaniel. Poteet was a thin black mongrel who had been taken in by my mom, primarily to keep Dandy company. She trotted up to me, her tongue lolling, and gave me a perfunctory sniff, and then whined in recognition. I stroked her head, then did the same for Dandy and felt the ancient dog shudder as if afraid. Poteet nuzzled Dandy’s neck. It looked like she was consoling him. Mom had written to me some months back that Dandy was just about blind. Then he licked my hand and I knew he’d finally remembered me, at least by smell.

Satisfied with the overall situation, Poteet led Dandy out of the rain and back down into the basement. I climbed the steps to the back porch. There were two covered pans in front of the door and a note. It said
Supper,
and was signed
Rosemary.
I figured it was from Rosemary Sharitz, our next-door neighbor. Cecil Sharitz, her husband, was one of Dad’s most trusted foremen. In Mom’s absence, I supposed the Sharitzes were looking after Dad as best they could.

I picked up the pans, took them inside, and switched on the light with my elbow. The first thing I saw was Mom’s mural of Myrtle Beach painted on the kitchen wall. She had worked on it for years and had finally finished it just before I’d graduated from high school. It showed a beach, a rolling surf, some shells, seagulls, blue skies, a few puffy clouds, palm trees, a house, and a woman standing alone atop a sand dune. The woman, I believed, was Mom. There was no one else in the picture, not Dad or me, or my brother, Jim, either.

Then I looked closer. Mom had apparently worked on her painting recently. There was what appeared to be a small dog sitting beside her. It was red, had pointy ears, a long snout, and a bushy, half-silver tail wrapped around its legs. It was her fox, Parkyacarcass.

I studied the painting for a long time. Mom was gone, but the sad story of her fox continued right where Dad would see it every day. “What happened to you, Parky?” I asked the little fox in the mural. “Where did you go?”

The electric stove sat bare and cold. I opened the bread and snack drawers but found them empty. The refrigerator had some milk in it and some old lunch meat, both past their prime. In Mrs. Sharitz’s pans, I found a stew in one and green beans in the other. There was plenty, more than enough for two people, so I turned on the stove and set the pans on it, stirring them a bit.

While the food heated, I decided to go down into the basement and have a look around my old rocket laboratory. The other rocket boys and I had spent hours there, building our rockets, loading them with various chemical concoctions, and, until we’d blown it up, testing our propellants in the coal-fired hot water heater. Mom had gotten herself a new electric hot water heater out of that deal, so she’d never yelled at us about it too much.

I opened the door and went down the wooden steps, hoping to see old Lucifer, our tomcat, asleep at the bottom of the steps on a rug. The rug was still there but he wasn’t. I ducked my head beneath the big furnace pipes and went to the back of the basement, where I found the sinks and shelves that were all that was left of our lab. Someone, Dad probably, had pitched out all our chemicals. The bare shelves looked as lonely and forlorn as I felt.

Sherman Siers had been the rocket boy who’d helped me most often mix up our compositions. I imagined him standing there, dressed in his heavy coat, rubber gloves, and the ridiculous ball cap with a piece of clear plastic taped to its bill that was supposed to protect his eyes. Some people said we were lucky we hadn’t blown the house, and ourselves, up. I figured we just knew what we were doing, not counting the hot water heater incident. That had been all my fault, anyway, when I’d gotten too cocky and full of myself. I had to watch that tendency the whole time I was a rocket boy.

Where was Sherman now? Was he coming back to Coalwood for the summer? He’d gone to West Virginia Tech up in Montgomery, working his way through. Likely he’d stay there, I supposed, to keep working to help pay the tuition. O’Dell Carroll and Billy Rose were in the air force. Roy Lee was married and attending Concord College. Quentin Wilson, the “brains” of the Big Creek Missile Agency, had hitched a ride to Huntington and just showed up at Marshall College. There, he’d gone to the registrar’s office, introduced himself, reminded them that he was, after all, the cowinner of a National Science Fair medal, and informed them he was willing to give their school a try. The Marshall officials had been so astonished by his brass that they’d signed him up and given him a little scholarship and odd jobs to pay for his tuition. Now I didn’t know where he was. I wondered if I’d ever see any of the boys again.

I had absorbed all the old memories I could stand in the basement and went back upstairs and finished heating the stew and beans. I ate my share, put the rest in the refrigerator, taped Rosemary’s note to the refrigerator door, then carried my little duffel bag upstairs. When I opened my bedroom door, I caught the familiar whiff of model airplane glue and old books. There was my desk, marred by paste and paint, and my dresser with charred steel rocket nozzles and splintered nose cones arranged atop it. The shelves on the wall were choked with my books. A wedge on the top shelf featured the complete set of Hardy Boys mysteries. In another place was a row of science fiction—Heinlein, of course, along with Verne and Asimov and others. John Steinbeck’s books were there, too.
My room, my wonderful room.
Yet it wasn’t exactly mine. I wasn’t that boy who used to live in it, not anymore. I wasn’t exactly certain who I was, but I knew I wasn’t him.

I sat on my bed beneath the window that faced the coal mine. How often had I lain in that bed, Daisy Mae asleep by my leg, and looked up at the ceiling, dappled by the lights from the tipple, and wondered where my future would take me? Surely I would go to Cape Canaveral or someplace where I could work on the space program. Roy Lee had called us the “designated refugees” of Coalwood, propelled by our parents and all the townspeople to leave to find a new life—propelled by all, that is, except for my father. He’d wanted me to leave, all right, but he’d also wanted me to return as a mining engineer to help him run the mine. It was the only time he’d ever asked me to do anything important for him, and I had turned him down. I doubted that he’d yet forgiven me for it, or ever would.

It was past midnight when I awoke to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Every step had a distinctive creak, and I remembered each one. Dad was in from the mine. He walked past my bedroom door without pausing, and then I heard his bedroom door click shut. For some reason, it gave me a sense of peace just knowing he was home, and I went right back to sleep.

M
ORNING BROUGHT
a dull gray light announcing there had been a sunrise somewhere behind Substation Mountain. The clouds had been blown away, but it would still take some time before the sun could struggle high enough to top Coalwood’s mountains and penetrate its narrow valleys. Dad’s bedroom door was standing open, his bed roughly made. The kitchen revealed no sign of his being there. An investigation of Mrs. Sharitz’s pots showed that he hadn’t opened them. There was no note from him or evidence that he’d eaten breakfast. Dad had come and gone, like a shadow. I wasn’t even sure he knew I was back.

I contemplated going up to the mine to say hello to him, maybe even nose out what kind of trouble he was in, or see if he would tell me what was wrong with Nate Dooley. But it was nearly nine o’clock, and I realized Dad was probably already inside the mine. He wouldn’t be out until sometime later in the afternoon. I cast around for something to do in the meantime and decided to go down to the machine shop. Coalwood’s machinists had once been my rocket builders. I wanted to let them get a look at me, to see how far I’d come as a college man. Maybe I’d also swing by Ginger Dantzler’s house. Ginger was the daughter of Mr. Devotee Dantzler, the company store manager. She and I had been almost boyfriend-girlfriend there for a while, but one thing or another had kept us from it. Maybe Ginger would know something about Tuck or Nate, too, and maybe, I thought hopefully, we could even fire up our friendship, if just a little.

I checked on the dogs in the basement. They had plenty of food and water and seemed reasonably content. Then I looked around for Lucifer, but there was still no sign of him. The old tom had been known to spend a few days at a time in the mountains, so I wasn’t unduly worried.

I sorted through the keys hanging on a nail in the basement until I found one for the Buick. I didn’t figure Dad would care if I took his old car out for a spin, so I drove it down Main Street, through Coalwood Main, and then over the railroad tracks to the machine shop. As soon as I walked through the door, I smelled the deliciously pungent mixture of hot oil and burning oxyacetylene. How I loved that smell! To me, it meant progress, work done, and satisfaction. The machines wound down and the torches spat off, and men came up to me, pushing their goggles up on their foreheads. “Sonny, the rocket boy!” somebody said, and I saw big grins. Responding to their rapid-fire questions, I told them I was doing the best I could in college and hadn’t flunked out, not yet, no matter what they’d heard. Their eyes told me they were pleased at the news.

Clinton Caton, the machinist who’d done most of the lathe work on the Big Creek Missile Agency’s rocket nozzles, grasped my hand. “Got a rocket drawing?” he asked eagerly. “I’ll get right on it if you do!”

I didn’t and said so. Mr. Caton’s creased face lost its smile. The other men looked grim. I hated to disappoint them. They’d always liked being rocket builders more than working on Dad’s mine machinery.

“Sonny boy!” The hearty voice that boomed behind me belonged to Bill Bolt, the machine shop supervisor. Leaning back in his chair, he waved to me from his office. “Come have a word!”

Mr. Bolt offered me a chair, then closed the office door, muffling the roar of the machinery as the men outside revved up their lathes and drill presses again. He sat down at his desk and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. Mr. Bolt’s hair was filled with silver threads I’d never noticed before, but otherwise he was the same hearty fellow I’d always known. He asked me about college, and I covered my classes and talked a bit about the cadet corps, too. “You like all that marching around?” he asked. “Never figured you for a soldier.”

“Some people around here used to say the army was going to love us rocket boys,” I reminded him. “They said we’d already had our combat training down at Cape Coalwood, what with our rockets blowing up and chasing us around the hollow.”

Mr. Bolt laughed. “I might have been the one who said it. You boys did dig a few craters in that old slack dump.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. Then his smile faded. “Have you talked to your dad about the Tuck Dillon mess?”

“I haven’t seen him yet,” I said. “He came in after I went to bed, was gone before I got up.”

“Late to bed, early to rise, that’s your daddy.” He ran his tongue inside his lips. I knew he had something to say. “Sonny, Homer’s got steel company, state, and federal inspectors all over him. They’re turning the mine upside down, trying to figure out how Tuck got himself killed.”

“What do you think happened, Mr. Bolt?” I asked worriedly. “Was Dad to blame?”

He squirmed a bit. “That’s a good question,” he finally allowed.

“Yes, sir,” I replied softly. “That’s why I need to hear the answer.”

He considered my comment, then nodded. “I’ll tell you what I know. There was a big thunderstorm that night, a hellacious storm, lightning firing all around. A big old shagbark hickory tree behind the church got hit, killed it deader’n a hammer. A lot of fans went down, you know how they do. The hoot-owl shift was told not to go inside—too dangerous, what with the fans going in and out, the methane building up down there. Tuck went inside sometime after three o’clock in the morning from what I heard, I guess to inspect his section—10 West. When he drove his motor inside it, the section blew up. It was the fire damp for sure. The blast was so big it lifted the motor completely off the track and tossed it against a row of posts. Then the roof fell down. Tuck was thrown clear. At least they were able to have an open-casket funeral. That was a bit of a comfort to his missus. Just about everybody in Coalwood showed up for it. Never seen so many flowers in my life.”

I struggled to imagine the blast, which must have been like a red-hot hurricane. “Why would Tuck drive a motor into a section that wasn’t ventilated?”