The Coalwood Way Read online

  I started to draw another countersunk nozzle, but my eyes fell on the red book on my desk. Entitled Principles of Guided Missile Design, it was the book Miss Riley, our science teacher, had given me last winter. Inside it were all the equations we needed to design a sophisticated rocket nozzle called a De Laval nozzle. A De Laval nozzle, I suspected, was the key to a “great” rocket. All I had to do was find the courage to begin using it. I opened the book, gazed at the myriad of complex equations, and then shut it again. There were just too many thoughts ricocheting through my mind for me to concentrate on anything. The worst of it was that Mom had started me thinking about Christmas, something I didn’t want to do. In all the years I had grown up in Coalwood, Christmas for me had been a joyful, glorious time. Now, the thought of Christmas made me think of poor dead Poppy, and then of my father’s eyes, slowly filling with scorn and disgust for what I had done and couldn’t do.

  2

  POPPY

  REVEREND JOSIAH LANIER of the Coalwood Community Church used to preach that we should look upon vexations as gifts from God, trials that would strengthen us and our resolve to do and be better. My mother, never one to admire being vexed by anyone, said she and her resolve were about as strong as they were going to get and if the good Lord and Reverend Lanier didn’t mind, they could both rest easy on her case. It seemed to me, however, that she was more tolerant of vexes that came my particular way.

  “I’m sorry you’ve got problems, Sonny,” Mom told me once when I was complaining about this or that, “but that’s called life.” At the time, she was up on a ladder, putting in a palm tree on the mural of a beach scene she had been painting on our kitchen wall over the years. “You can’t expect everything to go your way,” she declared after considering the proper brushstrokes for coconuts. “Sometimes life just has another plan.”

  Later that day, having overheard what my mother had told me, my father let me know he had a different idea about life and its plans. He came into my room while I was studying. “If you don’t like the way things are going,” he said, “find the courage to change it. That’s called being a man.” Then, when the mine phone, which we called the black phone, started ringing, he went off to yell at one of his foremen, leaving me struck with the thought that my parents were the most interesting people I knew.

  During all the years I spent in Coalwood, West Virginia, I was called “Sonny” instead of my real name, which was Homer Hadley Hickam, the same as my dad except I had a Junior attached. My older brother’s name was James Venable, but everybody called him Jimmie or Jim. The story of how I, as Elsie and Homer Hickam’s second of two sons (and no daughters), got tagged with my dad’s name had several different versions. The one I think is true, knowing my mother as I do, was that my father took one look at me after I was born and said, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” After he left, the next person in the room at the Stevens Clinic Hospital in the county seat of Welch was a nurse with a clipboard. “And what is the name of your baby?” she asked officiously. I can well imagine my mother’s triumphant smile forming as she opened her mouth to speak.

  I think it was some relief to my father when people started calling me by my nickname. Even though he and I shared the same name, most people agreed we weren’t much alike. He had an intimidating physical and intellectual presence, while I was more relaxed. According to what I’d heard, my grandmother on my mother’s side—my Amamma— once came to Coalwood to visit when I was a baby and snatched me out of the cradle and made me wake up. “Gaw, Elsie, this baby’s got to move,” she said, “or he ain’t ever going to amount to a thing.” Then she put me down on the floor and made me crawl around for the rest of the day even though I fell into slumber every time she took her eye off me. Mom said I pretty much slept through babyhood. That may have been thanks to her daily doses of catnip tea to cure my colic, but I like to think I was just resting up for all the excitement to come.

  My mother taught me to read before I went to the first grade, and in the books my parents kept stacked in the upstairs hall, I found a new world past Coalwood and its mountains. I fought pirates with Jim Hawkins, flew above a crystal sea with Wendy and the Lost Boys, went down the Mississippi on a raft with Huck and Jim, and became one of the last of the Mohican tribe. I had an almost insatiable need to act out the adventures I found in the books I read and formed elaborate games with my boyhood friends, especially Benny Brown and Roy Lee. When we were pirates, we tied bandannas around our heads, hammered together wooden swords, and built rafts, terrorizing mostly the crawl-dads in the creek. “Avast there, wench! Serve us some rum!” I yelled at my mother one time from the creek as she came into the backyard to hang up sheets on the clothesline.

  “Wench, is it?” she said, laughing. “I think a certain young man’s been reading a little too much Treasure Island.”

  “Arghhhh! I’ll see ye keelhauled!” was my reply. I was good at staying in character even under the stress of reality.

  After I’d seen the Disney television show about Davy Crockett, the miners trooping home after the day shift became Mexican soldiers. I gave the signal and we boys rose up over the walls of our Alamo of sticks and boards and let fly with horrendous gouts of imagined smoke and fire from our broomstick muskets. The miners, having played parts in my sagas more than once, comprehended their roles immediately and staggered and clutched their chests before righting themselves and moving on down the valley. Benny Brown would usually volunteer to play the last Mexican horde and let me pretend to swing my Old Betsy musket broomstick at him, knocking him down a hundred times before finally I’d collapse, moaning with patriotic fervor for Texas, which I took to be someplace down south. Benny’s father died of dust silicosis, and according to the rules of Coalwood, he and his mother had to move on. I still missed him.

  In 1954, my father became the mine superintendent in Coalwood, and my mother, brother Jim, and I moved down to what was known as the Captain’s house. The coal company tipple, where the coal was brought out, sorted, and loaded into coal railcars, was a mere hundred yards from our house. As I watched the miners go up and down the path that led to the tipple grounds, I thought they looked like soldiers in the newsreels, except instead of carrying rifles, they swung cylindrical tin lunch buckets as they marched, their black helmets shining in the sun or sparkling in the rain. My dad was, in many ways, their general, plotting strategy and tactics against an unyielding foe, the mine itself. Coalwood’s miners proudly dug the finest bituminous coal in the world, all of it shipped to the steel mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Dad said that without Coalwood and the towns like it, there would be no steel, and without steel, there would be no United States as we knew it. He took it as his personal and patriotic responsibility to keep the coal heading north. Every day, even though he didn’t have to, he went to the face where the coal was cut from the seam. There he could see the results of his daily plan. There, also, microscopic coal dust produced by the continuous miners filled the air and coated the men. In 1957, Dad was diagnosed with black spots on his lungs, but he still kept to his daily routine of going to the face. When he coughed at home, my mother’s eyes would fill with worry. She knew very well lung spots never got smaller, only bigger.

  Both of my parents had come to Coalwood from Gary, another McDowell County coal camp. The two towns were separated by twelve miles, two mountains, and the philosophy of Mr. George L. Carter, Coalwood’s founder. When Dad graduated from Gary High School, the Great Depression was in full swing and he found himself among many young Gary men, quietly desperate to make a living wage. Coalwood must have seemed like heaven. Gary was a harsh place of union strikes and bloody heads. Coalwood had steady employment, an honest company-store system, free medical and dental care, and fine, big, sturdy houses provided to each miner for only a small monthly rent. Mr. Carter allowed no union in his mine but paid the best wages in the county. He also worked hard to keep his mine safe, installing a complex ventilation system to flush out the explosive methane that see
ped from the coal seams. Gary had coke ovens beside its houses, and their noxious fumes covered its hollows. The drifting smoke made children and old people sickly. Coalwood’s air, though dusty from the endless coal trains chuffing from the tipple through the center of town, was sweet in comparison. When Dad applied for work, Captain William Laird, Mr. Carter’s right-hand man, saw something in the skinny youth and took him under his wing, teaching him how to mine coal, lead men, and to ferociously love Coalwood and Mr. Carter’s social philosophy. A lot of people in town called Dad the “little Captain.”

  Mr. John Dubonnet, a Gary High School classmate of both my father and mother, began work at the Coalwood mine at the same time. Mr. Dubonnet became a fierce advocate of the United Mine Workers of America and joined the long battle to unionize the Coalwood mine. The union won its battle with Mr. Carter in 1949, causing him to sell out to a steel company in Ohio. The Carter Coal Company was renamed the Olga Coal Company, after the wife of a steel official. Five years after the unionization, the Captain retired and Dad took the mine superintendent’s job. About the same time, Mr. Dubonnet took over the union local. Two boys from Gary who’d arrived in Coalwood sharing their poverty and desperation now shared only suspicion and distrust.

  Coalwood’s houses were jammed between steep, hump-backed mountains pushed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other. The houses were built in rows down the valleys, each row with a distinctive name: New Camp, Substation, Tipple, Six, Main Street, Coalwood Main, Club House, Snakeroot, Middletown, Mudhole, and Frog Level. Coalwood Main included the central company store (known as the Big Store), the company offices, the general superintendent’s mansion on an overlooking hill (vacant since Mr. Van Dyke had been fired), the company Club House (which was a hotel for single miners and visitors and was also used for company banquets and dances), the company churches (the preachers were company men), offices for the company doctor and dentist (still provided free to miners and their families), and the federal post office. When visitors drove over Welch Mountain, the first row they encountered was New Camp on the left followed by Substation on the right. Coming in over Coalwood Mountain from Caretta and War brought visitors past Six and then the mine tipple, where the coal was loaded into waiting railcars. Our house, a big four-bedroom, two-story wood-frame house, was at the intersection of Tipple and Substation Rows.

  It seemed to me that life in Coalwood was timeless, that forever men and their sons and their sons coming behind them would tramp to the mine to gouge out the coal. But soon after Dad took his position as the mine superintendent, nearly everything about Coalwood began to change. The biggest change was when the steel company sold the houses. If a Coalwood miner wanted to stay in town, he had to buy his house or leave. The selling of the houses came in the spring of 1959 when I was a junior in high school. Within a few months, the sale was accomplished except for two houses, ours and the general superintendent’s, both of which remained company property. The churches were also sold off, along with the utilities. For the first time in six decades of existence, Coalwood was no longer a pure company town, and strangers began to appear in our midst.

  Before the houses were sold, when a man lost his job at the mine, the company’s rules required him to move out of town and take his family with him. If a man was killed, the rules still applied—two weeks to get the funeral done and get out. But with the houses sold, men who had quit or were cut off could hunker down where they were, defying the mortgage company. Within a few months of the sell-off, there were rumors that Coalwood had families up Six Hollow going hungry. This had never happened to us before. Coalwood was surrounded by poverty-stricken towns like Gary and Bartley and Berwind, towns where the mines had closed or were choked by strikes and where families lined up every week for the commodity food handouts from the government. But Coalwood had always been an oasis of prosperity in the county. Every day, I heard people in town worrying over what was to become of us. Dad especially worried about it over the supper table at night. It seemed to me that ever since his father had died, Dad had been suffering one worry after another.

  In the fall of 1958, Poppy had developed a rampant colon cancer too far gone to do anything about. Dad had survived the same cancer five years before, but his father was older and weaker. It was to be the last insult to a man who, in 1941, had both of his legs cut off in the Coalwood mine. What was left of him after his accident slumped on a chair where someone put him. He never had a wheelchair, didn’t want one, refused to use it when Dad got one for him. As a small child, I was terrified of the old man I called Poppy. He had moist blue eyes, stringy arms, and a toothless mouth, but it was his legless lap that gave me nightmares.

  Mom said Dad blamed himself for Poppy’s accident. It was Dad who had convinced Poppy to leave his job in Gary and come and work for the Captain. It was only a few months after moving to Coalwood that Poppy was standing in the gob at the turnout of his section when a loaded coal car jumped the track, took down the row of posts he had just put in, and slid over him. The razor-sharp wheels of the car sliced his legs off at the hip. It was said that Poppy stayed awake during the whole thing, even while he was carried from the mine. Dad was one of the men who bore him out. He had to listen to his father beg over and over for someone to finish him off.

  For a full day, according to the Captain’s orders, Poppy’s legs were left in the gob where he’d been run over. A sign was nailed to a post. It read: a man lost his legs here because he stood too close to the track. From what I heard, the Captain’s sign worked. For a long time, no Coalwood miner stood anywhere near any track, and the spot where Poppy lost his legs was avoided most of all. Poppy’s legs were taken out and buried somewhere up on the mountain behind the mine, but the sign remained for some weeks until it disappeared. Mom said Dad had taken it, maybe the only time he’d done something against the Captain’s orders, and chopped it up for firewood.

  Poppy, whose real name was Benjamin Venable Hickam, was a well-read man. After his accident, he read nearly every book in the county library until the pain of his lost legs forced him onto the paregoric. A woman who lived up near Panther kept him well supplied with Dad paying for it and delivering it as needed. After he got on the paregoric, Mom said Poppy never read another book.

  Dad had found his father a little house up Warriormine Hollow and saw to the monthly rent. Every other Sunday, Mom and Dad and Jim and I visited Poppy and my grandmother, whom we kids called Mimmie, as meek and quiet a woman as I ever knew. When we came to visit, she spent most of her time at the cooking stove and then sat silently at the table during dinner not eating, her hands folded on her lap. Her oval face was always placid, but it seemed to me behind her mask there was something awful going on. One time Mom encouraged me to show Mimmie a model airplane I’d built out of balsa wood. She sat down and handled it, her tiny brown eyes running across the rude fuselage and wings until it occurred to me that maybe she had never seen a real airplane. I’d seen precious few of them myself, mostly at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when we went there on miner’s vacation. After I’d finished my description of my model plane, Mimmie sat for a moment more, as if waiting to see if I had anything more to say. When I didn’t, she silently handed it back to me and rose to go back to her cookstove. Mimmie died of a heart attack in 1956. It was an open-casket funeral, the only time I ever saw her smiling.

  By December of 1958, Poppy had been taken to Stevens Clinic. Mom said she didn’t think he’d ever leave. While Poppy was in the hospital, Dad rarely spoke at the supper table, my only daily interval with him. His haunted eyes were focused somewhere I couldn’t see. Each night, he got in the Buick and drove to the hospital, returning after I’d gone to bed.

  One night, Mom came to my room and found me at my desk working on my rocket plans. “Listen, Sonny, you need to go with your dad to see Poppy,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You need to go,” she said again, and since she had said it twice, the ar
gument, such as it was, was over.

  The next night, as Dad was gathering up his hat and coat, she pushed me forward. “Sonny wants to go,” she said.

  “Guess he should,” Dad said, and that was that.

  Dad said nothing to me while he drove the Buick across Welch Mountain and I sat shrouded in the darkness of the mountain and my own mind. I didn’t want to be going to any old stinking hospital, and I guessed he knew that. Stevens Clinic was on the other side of Welch, so we navigated through the town, resplendent with cheerful Christmas lights and bustling shoppers. Miners still wearing their helmets walked the tilted streets, their wives on their arms, and little children skipping behind, breathless and excited. I envied them.

  We crept down the hushed hospital halls, which smelled of medicinal alcohol, cotton sheets, and detergent-scrubbed floors. Poppy lay in his bed with tubes leading in and out of him. A sheet only partially covered his torso, leaving his short stumps exposed. They were horribly mangled things with purplish scar tissue on their ends. Dad spoke so softly that it didn’t sound like his voice at all. “Hi, Daddy.”