The Coalwood Way Read online

  “Right!” Roy Lee hopped across the creek from rock to rock. He’d just reached the far bank when Chipper made a big leap across from one tree to the other. Then he jumped to another tree and then another and kept going up the mountain until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  “He is joining his fellows up there,” Quentin said admiringly. Then, as ever, he turned the moment into an intellectual exercise. “I wonder what more than one squirrel is called? For instance, more than one cat is a clowder. Then there’s a murder of crows, and also an exaltation of larks.”

  “It’s a disaster of squirrels, thanks to you and Roy Lee,” I growled before inviting Quentin to shut up. I was feeling a knot forming in my stomach. Even though he had a brain about as big as a pea, Chipper was part of our family and Mom surely loved him as much as she loved anything in the world. I had no choice but to carry the unhappy news to her.

  “Do you want us to go with you?” Roy Lee asked in a tone of voice that clearly hoped for a negative reply.

  I didn’t see any reason for it. Roy Lee had let Chipper out, but I was the one who was going to get the blame. I figured I might as well get it over with. The BCMA meeting was called off on account of disaster, the boys scattering. I trudged alone up the back porch steps and into the kitchen, found Mom working on her mural, and confessed the entire thing.

  “Where did he go?” Mom cried.

  I told her and Mom threw her brush down and, coatless, ran outside and across the back alley to the creek. I slogged along behind. “Chipper!” she yelled up into the woods. The woods remained silent. “Why is it,” she demanded, “I can’t have at least one thing in my house I love?” She made no attempt to wipe away the tear that followed. She wanted me to see her misery, I guess. “He’s got no nest. He’ll die up there, cold as it is.” She turned on me. “You’ve killed my squirrel!”

  I stammered an apology, but she abruptly held up her hand. “Don’t bother. I’ve heard it all before.” She wrapped her arms around herself and stalked back to the house.

  I had no coat on and my feet were wet, but I splashed through the creek and scrambled up into the snowy woods. I was going to climb every tree in the woods if that was what it took to find Chipper and bring him home. It was a fool’s errand, but I was a fool and it was fine by me. I thought I heard, way up on the mountain ridge, a mocking chirp.

  It was past dark when I came back down the mountain, defeated and chilled to the bone. Mom had retreated to her room. Dad was still at the mine. The cats and dogs were in the basement, huddled near the furnace. I sat alone in the empty, dead living room. Without Chipper in the house, it seemed suddenly larger and colder. I got up and went out on the Captain’s porch and stared for the longest time at Chipper’s wheel. It made me think of Reverend Richard’s story of the potter and the wheel, but it gave me no comfort. Not much did these days, it seemed. I allowed myself a little self-pity and it felt pretty good. I thought to myself: I guess that’s why some people get so addicted to it. I couldn’t do it for long, though. Self-pity wasn’t going to get Chipper back. For that, I needed a miracle.

  12

  JAKE’S PRESENT

  THE MIRACLE I hoped for that would quickly bring Chipper home didn’t happen. Instead, as Thanksgiving approached, a bitter cold wind came sweeping down on us out of the north, bringing with it an accumulation of ice and snow on the mountains that made it even more unlikely that he had survived. O’Dell said a squirrel that hadn’t hidden itself a cache of nuts would starve pretty quickly in the winter, especially when there was a lot of snow. Still, I kept looking. As soon as I got home from school every evening, I climbed the mountain and searched, calling out Chipper’s name and peering into the trees. I spotted a skinny squirrel or two, but they all had full tails. I came across a doe once, too, and wondered if it was one of the deer I’d seen at the filling station. It looked at me and took off. It was so thin I was sorry to make it work so hard to run away.

  For a while, I reported my lack of progress on finding Chipper to Mom, and every time she said nearly the same thing in response. “Chipper was raised in the house, Sonny. Likely he didn’t even make it through the first night without a nest to sleep in. I miss him, I surely do, but he’s gone. You don’t have to look for him anymore.” She had put his things up. His wheel was in the basement. I could see it when I came down to work on my rockets, a constant reminder of how I’d messed up.

  “How about we trap her another squirrel?” O’Dell suggested when I asked him what I should do.

  “She doesn’t want another squirrel,” I said. “She wants Chipper.”

  He shrugged. “You know, I never could figure out how he survived in a house full of cats, anyway.”

  Neither did I, exactly, other than he was one blamed lucky squirrel. He’d used to be, anyway. It looked like he’d finally run out his streak.

  OF all the problems that had so far arrived in a season of problems, none surprised me more than the one that arrived at a Monday-night supper table. That was when Mom chose to make an announcement: “I’m going to go to Myrtle Beach this Christmas,” she said.

  Dad held his spoonful of beans in midair. “What are you talking about, Elsie?”

  “Mr. Peabody says I can work real estate with him and his wife. It’s one of their busiest seasons and they can use all the help they can get. I’ll stay in a room in the back of their place. I’ll just be gone for a week. You’ll hardly miss me.”

  Dad put his spoon down and seemed to organize his response. “Elsie, I forbid it.”

  Mom’s eyebrows lifted. “Forbid?”

  “You know what I mean,” Dad said, rapidly backpedaling. “You can’t be gone at Christmas. The family is supposed to be together.” Dad gave me a hard look. “Isn’t that right, Sonny?”

  I looked back in surprise. Why was he dragging me into their argument? I was just trying to eat my supper.

  He shifted his gaze back to Mom. “Wait a minute. Is this because of that blamed squirrel?” I kept my mouth shut. Silence is the best defense of the guilty, I reasoned.

  “It has nothing to do with Chipper,” Mom said, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Well, maybe. But that was just the final straw.” She gave me a look and I slid down in my chair. I eyed the basement door with longing. If I jumped up and ran for it, I could be through it before they could stop me. It was an idle thought, but I think Mom caught me at it. She shook her head at me and then went back after Dad.

  “The fact is I’m going, Homer, and I’ve got good cause, the same one I’ve been harping about ever since they found that spot on your lungs. When Coalwood finally knocks you down so far you can’t get up again, I’m going to know how to do real estate and have us a place where we can go.”

  Dad looked at his plate and then picked up his spoon again. He shoveled his beans into his mouth and sat there, thoughtfully chewing. “For better or for worse,” he said finally.

  Tears had formed, despite herself, and she wiped them with the back of her hand. “Your better, my worse,” Mom said, and the conversation was done. She left the table.

  Dad pondered me and I wilted under his eyes. “Dad, I’m making all A’s this semester,” I said. It was a preemptive strike to avoid him talking about how I’d lost Chipper.

  “Are you taking easy subjects?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Every one of them is a snap.”

  He nodded and went back to eating. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I couldn’t wait to put this one down on my list. But when I got to it, I was stumped. What was I to write? I finally settled on Making straight A’s. I also remembered to add Mom going to Myrtle Beach . If this kept up, I was going to need another sheet of paper.

  ALTHOUGH nobody talked to me directly about it, seeing as how I was who I was, I kept hearing snippets of conversations on the school bus from students whose fathers were working in 11 East. The Germans were in there doing something with their machinery, but nobody knew what. One Coalwood crew was tryin
g to get through a big rock header while two other crews were driving entries into the coal on either side of it. Nobody could figure out why that was being done, even the men who were doing it. Every day there were fence-line bulletins about something bad that had happened on 11 East—rockfalls, trams jumping the track, seeping methane, even flooding. The pumps had failed once, O’Dell’s cousin Jackie Carroll said, and men were up to their knees in cold black water within minutes. They’d been lucky they hadn’t drowned. Roy Lee confirmed all the stories. His coal miner brother kept him apprised.

  I could easily pick out 11 East men when I saw them walking down the road after work. Instead of being black with coal dust, they were brown, coated with the powder from the rock they were trying to batter through. When we passed the tipple in the morning on the school bus, nearly everybody cast a worried glance in its direction. Our driver, Jack Martin, tooted the horn, but only a few miners raised their hands in greeting. They looked as if they were about to go to war, and I guess, in a way, they were. The shaft’s mouth lay yawning before them, a column of dirty mist rising from it. It was as if 11 East were a black-hearted dragon, ready to swallow them.

  I couldn’t escape 11 East even at Dr. Hale’s office when I went to get my teeth cleaned. Coalwood’s dandy dentist had just spent a week playing golf in Florida and, to celebrate it, was still wearing his golf duds at the office. He was a sight in a pair of knee-length knickerbockers, gaudy plaid knee-high socks, white shirt, black bow tie, and a slouchy hat. He was, as my mom would say, the cat’s meow. “So, Sonny,” he said as he probed my teeth with his cold steel implements, “what’s the news on 11 East?”

  With my mouth wide open and filled with his hands and dental gear, the best I could do was make a noise that had the cadence of “I don’t know.” It made him laugh.

  One night, I was in the living room reading when I heard Dad talking on the black phone about how the evening and hoot-owl shifts on 11 East were “dragging their feet.” I listened up, hoping for some details, but none came. Then Ted Keneda, the husband of Mom’s best friend, was taken off the day shift and put on the evening shift so he could work the section. “Naomi wants Ted back on the day shift,” Mom reported to Dad at the supper table. “She’s mad at you and she’s mad at me about it and I don’t much blame her. Ted worked hard to get that day-shift position.”

  Dad was silent for a moment. I think he was thinking about not saying anything, but then he apparently thought better of it. “Ted’s one of my best foremen,” he said softly. “I need him where I put him. He hasn’t complained.”

  “Naomi’s my friend, Homer,” Mom replied. “As you know, I have precious few.”

  Dad chewed on a chicken leg for a little while and then said, “Ted will be back on his old section next week.”

  Mom gave him a nearly imperceptible nod and then looked over the lip of her coffee cup at the bird feeder in the window behind me. “The birds sure are hungry,” she said, deftly changing the subject, since she had gotten what she wanted. I admired her technique. “I can’t keep enough seeds in the pan.”

  “The deer are hungry, too,” Dad replied, obviously just as pleased to talk about something else. “There was a buck, some does, and a couple of fawns in the tipple yard yesterday. They were pretty skinny so I heard.”

  I remembered the deer I’d seen out my window over by the filling station. I wondered if it was the same bunch. “What happened to them?” I asked Dad.

  He shrugged. “I had them chased off the grounds. I guess they went back up in the mountains.”

  “Couldn’t you feed them?” I wondered.

  “I should have had them shot,” Dad said without hesitation. “They don’t have enough to eat up in the mountains this year. I guess because it’s been so cold. The hunters say the hunting season was too short so there’s too many of them, too. It wouldn’t be right to feed them, Sonny. The strong will get through. The rest won’t. That’s nature’s way.”

  Dad’s answer didn’t sit well with me. I thought somebody ought to come up with a plan to get more for the deer to eat. It wasn’t the first time my ideas conflicted with the natural order of things and I guessed it wouldn’t be the last. It wasn’t nature’s way to blast rockets off into the sky, either.

  THEN it happened, what everybody feared: Somebody got hurt on 11 East. I saw the ambulance at the man-hoist when I came home from school. Mr. Sheets, a member of the header crew, had an arm broken by a rock that had slipped out from beneath a roof bolt. The next day, Mr. Crow snapped his ankle getting out of the way of more falling rock. The black phone rang constantly, and Dad kept yelling into it and then grabbing his hat and coat and heading up to the mine. Sherman told me on the school bus that he’d heard that the union was writing up all the articles it would need to call a general strike because of the “unsafe working conditions” on 11 East. Mom would make no comment on 11 East except to say, “One part of that old mine is as bad as another.”

  I’D had my share of problems with the Mallett boys, the sons of Leo and Cleo Mallett, over the years, especially during strikes. There were three brothers, Rodney and Siebert, both overgrown brutes, and little Germy. Germy’s real name was Jeremy but it had always been pronounced Germy. The nickname suited him. Germy was too little to try to beat me up over 11 East, but he could throw a mean rock. He caught me on a Saturday just after I’d gotten a haircut in the little shop behind the post office. “Hey, boss’s boy,” he squeaked. “You think you’re a big shot, don’t you? Your old man’s stupid going down 11 East!”

  When I ignored him and started to get on my bike, he threw his rock. He was a good pitcher, and it hit me square in the back. It hurt and I knew I was going to have a bruise. I decided to teach the little rat a lesson. Germy took off running, and I dropped my bike and went running after him. He ran up the alley beside the creek, cut through Buford Manning’s yard, and then into a group of boys playing touch football on the road between the Community Church and the Club House. Rodney and Siebert were among them. Germy went screaming to them and pointed back at me. “He slugged me, boss’s boy did!”

  I skidded to a halt. “Germy hit me with a rock,” I said.

  Rodney and Siebert both looked at each other and then plodded in my direction, their hands balled into fists. They were vocational-school boys and had arms the size of telephone poles. I stood my ground. If I was going to get pounded, I’d get in a few punches of my own, but there was no way I was going to run from a Mallett or even a trio of them.

  “You need some help?” a familiar voice asked behind me.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Jake!”

  Jake Mosby had on a suit and a tie, so I guessed he’d just arrived in town. I looked past him and there it was, his bright cherry-red Corvette. It was the most wonderful car I’d ever seen in my life because it had brought Jake back to Coalwood.

  The two Mallett hulks stopped. Siebert managed a thought. “His daddy’s gonna kill our daddy down 11 East.” His tiny eyes were nearly crossed he was concentrating so hard.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Jake. “Are you back to stay?”

  Jake took off his suit jacket and pitched it down on the sidewalk. “For now, anyway. You know your dad couldn’t run that mine without me. You ready to take these two on?”

  “No. I’m going to get destroyed, but what else is new?” I pointed at Siebert. “One at a time,” I said. “You’re chicken if both of you come at me at once.”

  “We ain’t fightin’,” Siebert said, suddenly abashed. Seeing Jake beside me, even if I wouldn’t let him help, had taken the fight out of him. I knew from the start neither boy really wanted to fight, anyway. I’d been attacked by enough union boys over the years to be able to see the glint in their eyes when they were really after me. Jake had given Rodney and Siebert the excuse they wanted. They went back to their football game, but I noticed Rodney give Germy a cuff on the side of the head and he went off bawling toward home.

  I helped Jake carry his
luggage up to his old room in the Club House and then filled him in on all the news I could think of. He sat on the edge of the bed and sipped from a hip flask and listened. Then he said, “To tell you the truth, I’m back in Coalwood to look over your dad’s shoulder.”

  “Because of 11 East?” I asked.

  Jake smiled. “So how’s Miss Riley?” he asked.

  Miss Riley was fine, or nearly so. It seemed to me that she looked tired these days, or maybe like she was fighting off something.

  I reported what I noticed about Miss Riley, and Jake frowned. “Has there ever been a better-looking, smarter, and nicer woman than Freida Riley?” he asked rhetorically.

  I didn’t guess there had. I thought to stir the pot a bit. “I think she’d like to see you, Jake.” They’d dated a few times before Jake had gone back to Ohio. But Jake was known for his high-living ways, where Miss Riley was quiet and respectable. They seemed to be too different to enjoy each other’s company but apparently they had, at least for a while.

  “I’d like to see her, too,” Jake said. “Tell her I’m back, will you?”

  I promised I would.

  Jake opened his suitcase and drew out a small package. “I got this present for you.”

  I took it from him. It was wrapped in brown paper. There wasn’t a bow or ribbon or anything on it, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t used to getting presents. “Thanks, Jake!”

  “Go ahead, open it.”

  I pulled the paper off. It was a book titled A Complete Guide to the Heavens. On its cover was a drawing of a spiral galaxy and also Saturn with its big rings. “Wow” was all I could say.

  “You been using my telescope?”

  “Every chance I get.”

  He took a long drag off his flask and whistled out a breath. “This will help you figure out what you’re looking at.”

  “This is great, Jake. I’ll study up on it.” I just had to add: “I’m getting all A’s in my classes so far this semester.”

  He perked up. “Are you now?” He stuck out his hand. “Shake, you bastard. Attaboy!”