Dad was wound up, no doubt about it. When he got that way, he would often start coughing, but Mom had her ways of winding him down. “The sun came up this morning, Homer,” she said patiently. “I reckon it’ll set later on, too.”
Dad absorbed Mom’s solar activity report and got her point. “There’s a present for you in one of the suitcases,” he said. “Perfume.”
“What kind?”
“It’s orange color. You like oranges.”
“I like to eat oranges, Homer,” Mom said, suppressing a smile. “I don’t know about smelling like one.”
Dad shrugged and went off to change his clothes to go to the mine, where at least they knew how to spell and pronounce his name and nobody wore perfume. I was surprised when he came back within an hour. I heard him down in the basement hacking, and then a long, strangled silence followed by another horrible wet coughing fit. Finally, it quieted and I heard him come slowly up the basement steps as if he were carrying a ton of rocks on his back. I guess in a way he was. I came down to see what was going on. When he opened the door into the kitchen, his face was pale. “What the good Lord, Homer?” Mom asked, her voice faintly atremble. “Do you want me to call Doc?”
Dad ignored her question. “They didn’t even wait until I got home. Message waiting for me at the office. I either get the tonnage up by ten percent or I’ve got to cut off thirty more men,” he said. “That’s not news for anybody but family,” he added, giving me a dark look.
“You ran all the way home to tell me this?” Mom asked. “With your lungs, Homer, you’re lucky you didn’t have a stroke.”
“Don’t you understand, Elsie?” Dad demanded. “There’s no way I can increase production by that much. Thirty good men . . . they have to go by seniority. That means young men with families. I’ve got to do something about this, come up with a different plan.”
Mom slowly put down her pencil. “Buddy, let’s get out of here while we still can,” she said. When she was looking to calm my dad, Mom often called Dad “Buddy.” I never knew why. “Let’s go to Myrtle Beach. Peabody Real Estate would hire us both in a second. We’ll work together, sell property, get rich as kings. Every day, we’ll go down to the ocean, breathe in nothing but fresh, clean air. Coalwood’s had its day. We’ve had a good life here, I swan, but it’s over.”
Dad brushed past me, heading to the black phone. Soon he was on it, talking to a foreman. “Run East Main as hard as you can tonight, Cecil. Do you hear me?” He stopped to cough into a bandanna, then said, in a strangled voice, “We’ve got to get that tonnage up!”
I trudged back upstairs. That night, when I heard the evening shift being replaced by the hoot-owlers, I got to thinking about Little Richard’s potter’s wheel again. If God was shaping us, he was doing it powerfully hard.
4
THE STOOP CHILDREN
THE CHANGES THAT had come to Coalwood arrived at our front door on Halloween. I was doing the answering for the trick-or-treaters. Dad, an adviser to the county Salvation Army Post in Welch, had gone to a meeting. Mom was at the kitchen table worrying over her plans for the Veterans Day float along with her first thoughts for the Christmas Pageant.
To keep me supplied for the trick-or-treaters, Mom had made up a batch of candied apples and popcorn balls. All I had to do was drop them into the outstretched paper sacks of whatever ghouls or goblins came knocking. The kids who showed up reminded me of myself, just four or five years back. I had usually gone out on Halloween nights with Roy Lee because he had a knack for causing excitement. Occasionally, we’d trick our treaters just for the fun of it. It was innocent stuff—knocking on doors and running, or soaping windows. When we were in the fourth grade, we got caught soaping windows at Bunky Smith’s house on Substation Row. After he reported us to the authorities, which meant our mothers, Roy Lee and I spent the next day washing every one of Bunky’s windows. “Boy, we had fun, though,” Roy Lee had snickered while we worked under the close supervision of Mrs. Smith. I told Roy Lee to shut up. Mrs. Smith rewarded my snottiness by giving my behind a good swat with a folded newspaper. When I told Mom on her for doing it, Mom just laughed and said, “She should have used a board.”
For years, the Coalwood school had held an annual company-sponsored Halloween party where nearly everyone in town showed up. There were always prizes, usually cakes and cookies, given for the best costume. It was part of the family legend that, before I was born, Mom had gone as a hillbilly, complete with red long johns. She’d pranced around the stage singing about Mountaineers being always free (it was our state motto: Montani Semper Liberi) while she received a long, careful appraisal from the judges. She’d also gotten some whoops from the men in the crowd until their wives shushed them, principally because no one had instructed Mom that she might need to button the trap door in her men’s underwear. She won the judging, of course. Two years ago, our Ohio owners had ordered the company not to support the carnival any longer, and a Coalwood tradition had died.
A few children came to our door early, dressed in a variety of homemade costumes. Witches were popular with the little girls—a black dress, a glued-together cardboard pointy hat, an old broom, and a painted nose wart was their standard costume. The boys were mostly cowboys—plenty of cap pistols and cowboy hats around town—or ghosts in bedsheets or devils in cardboard horns and dyed-red pajamas. The little kids were cute, but they were also sparse. Coalwood was getting older. In the rest of the United States, the so-called baby boom was still in grade school, but in Coalwood ours was just about busted. The school classes younger than mine were all smaller. A lot of the young men back from World War II and Korea hadn’t come home to West Virginia to work in the mine. Once they were out, they had stayed out.
It was around 10:00 P.M., a time when Coalwood’s trick-or-treaters were usually home safely in bed, that I heard a nearly inaudible tapping on our aluminum storm door. When I opened it, I found on our front stoop a half dozen or so children dressed as ragged urchins. I didn’t recognize any of them. “Trick or treat!” they yelled. Their voices were shrill and oddly anxious. Then, when I took a second look, I realized they weren’t wearing costumes at all.
I gave them all the candy and apples I had left and then went into the kitchen. I got a big grocery sack and emptied out all the cookies Mom kept in the drawer beside the sink. She looked up from her drawings and lists. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked tiredly.
“More kids than we thought,” I mumbled.
“At this hour? Well, I’ll bet they’re just coming around again. I made plenty of treats. Let me take a look.” She went to the front door with me close behind. The huddled kids shrank away from her. “Oh, my,” she said. Her hand strayed to her heart. The children backed down a step, their eyes wide. “Don’t you move!” she ordered, and they froze in place.
I followed Mom back into the kitchen and watched her open up the refrigerator and begin tossing baloney and ham slices and cheese into a sack. When it was filled up, she got another sack and put a loaf of bread in it and then opened up her pantry and tossed in cans of soup and a jar of peanut butter. She pointed at the sacks. “Quick, before they get away!”
I did as I was told, handing over the groceries. “Thank you!” the children said over and over, and when I looked out at the gate, I saw for the first time that they’d been accompanied by a woman. She had been just out of sight, hidden behind Mom’s rose arbor. The woman wore a thin coat and had a kerchief pulled around her head. She looked tiny and frail, what I could see of her. She waited for the children to come through the gate, and then, whispering amongst themselves excitedly, the family disappeared into the night.
“I wonder where they’re from?” Mom said. “Couldn’t be from Coalwood. They must have come in over the mountain.” She went to the telephone and called Mrs. Sharitz next door. “Rosemary? Did some raggedy kids just come to your house? They did? Did you know them? No, I didn’t, either.” Mom phoned each lady on Tipple Row, but the answer was all the same. No one recognized the children.
When Dad came in late from his Salvation Army meeting, I was in the basement, contemplating my latest approach to fin design. I thought maybe it would be quicker to just cut two rectangles and bend them around the casement and clamp them together. That would give us four rectangular fins for about what it now took to make two of them. Dad came down the basement steps, and I heard Lucifer, our old tomcat, growl. When Lucifer came into the basement to get warm, he always chose the bottom step of the staircase that came down from the kitchen to make his nest. “I’m not going to step on you, you crazy old thing,” Dad said. “Sonny boy—what are you doing up so late?” He had a blue suit on, an unusual sartorial event for Dad, but going to a meeting in Welch apparently demanded it. Although he was forty-seven years old, his hair was as black and full as I guess it had ever been. He and my brother Jim shared the same faded blue eyes, but Dad had a sharper face, his nose thin and triangular.
I showed Dad the drawing of my fin design, and he reached inside his coat for some reading glasses to peruse it. After a moment, he handed it back to me. “You need a sharper pencil” was his only comment. He looked at the furnace and said, “Throw a shovelful of coal or two in there before you come up.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. He turned to go but stopped at the base of the stairs, straddling Lucifer, who gave him an irritated, heavy-lidded look. Dad pondered me and I thought he was about to say something, but then he went on up the steps. I heard him cross through the kitchen and the dining room, and then he stopped. I knew it was to sort through his mail stacked on the dining-room table. I heard Mom’s footsteps on the stairs and then their muffled voices. I was quiet, so I could hear what they were saying.
She told him about the children on the stoop. “Buddy, I talked to everybody on Tipple Row and nobody knew who they were. They couldn’t be from Coalwood, could they?”
“I don’t know, Elsie,” he said. “I hope not but—”
She interrupted him. “Buddy, let’s get out of here while you’ve still got breath left in your lungs.”
“It’s going to be all right, Elsie,” Dad said, his voice low. “I have a plan. We’re going to go into . . .” But I couldn’t hear what else he said.
I heard Mom well enough. “I won’t let this place kill you, Homer.”
“For better or for worse,” he said.
“Your better, my worse,” Mom replied, and then I heard her footsteps going up the stairs.
5
THE COALWOOD WOMEN’S CLUB
MR. DEVOTIE DANTZLER was Coalwood’s company-store manager. He was from Mississippi, and he had the soft, courtly drawl of an educated man from a more southerly and genteel clime. He wore three-piece suits and carried in a pocket of his vest a fine railroad watch that had a gold chain attached. In the summer, in a time of no air-conditioning, he took off the coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves in the office in the back of the Big Store, but I never saw him without his vest.
The company store, which Mr. Dantzler ran with a sure and benevolent hand, consisted of the Big Store in Coalwood, the Little Store on Substation Row, the Six Store near the Number Six shaft, and two stores in our sister town of Caretta on the other side of Coalwood Mountain. Not only could hardware of all types be bought in Olga Coal’s company stores, but also groceries, tobacco, clothing, patent drugs, candy, and the best milk shake anywhere to be found in West Virginia. When a miner was down on his luck or had overextended his credit, Mr. Dantzler took a personal interest and helped him manage his financial affairs until he was caught up. He was a man everybody respected, but you didn’t want to get caught stealing from one of his stores. When that rare event happened, Mr. Dantzler had no pity. He called Tag and Tag called the state police and then you went to jail in Welch where everybody in Coalwood agreed you belonged.
Mr. Dantzler’s wife, Mrs. Eleanor Marie Dantzler, was from Kentucky, where she had played the piano in the silent movie houses while going to the University of Kentucky. Mrs. Dantzler brought her love of music to Coalwood along with a big grand piano and, from the first day of her arrival, let everybody know she wanted to teach the children piano and voice. Coalwood’s parents, always glad to add to their children’s talents and skills, especially when it didn’t cost that much, took her up on it, and soon she had a thriving business. Mrs. Dantzler taught at home, her lessons beginning at 4:00 P.M. on a school day and at noon on Saturdays. She charged two dollars an hour and held four recitals a year. As it happened, there was a piano in my house. Dad had given it to Mom on their first wedding anniversary. Since she had never learned to play, I became the designated piano player in the house as soon as I was big enough to sit on the piano bench and reach the keys and the pedals.
For eight years, while I was in the second through the ninth grade, I arrived at the Dantzlers’ house each Wednesday afternoon after school, carrying my lesson books with me. Although I never cared much for playing the piano, I loved going to the Dantzler house. It smelled of light perfume and was cool even on the hottest day in August, the drapes and windows kept closed against the heat. There were fine Persian rugs laid perfectly over a polished oak floor, and the carved furniture seemed to me as if it belonged in a European castle. Sometimes, while I was waiting for my lesson to begin, the Dantzlers’ youngest daughter, Ginger, whose real name was Zanice Virginia, would come in and sit with me and we’d read comic books together. I always liked Ginger, but she was two years younger than me, a lifetime when I was in grade school, so I didn’t see her very much except when I came for my lessons. I always thought she was a pretty girl, though. She had the face of an alert pixie, a dimple in her right cheek, brown curly locks, and big amber eyes that always seemed to be a second away from mischief.
Mrs. Dantzler was the most glorious woman I’d ever met. She had hair the color and sheen of mercury and the figure of Marilyn Monroe. Her deep blue eyes were large and expressive, and her lashes were long and curled at the ends. She laughed a lot and she had fine, straight, very white teeth. I never saw her when she wasn’t wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes. She had beautiful, expressive hands, and her fingers were long and her nails always polished a deep ruby. She was how I imagined a queen would look. I often wondered if she wasn’t in fact some sort of royalty that had accidentally ended up in Coalwood.
On Sundays, Mrs. Dantzler played the piano at the Coalwood Community Church. She insisted on a good tempo, no long drawn-out hymns for her. Mom used to laugh and say that “once Eleanor Marie got the bit in her mouth, everybody had to ride or get bucked off.” Usually, Mrs. Dantzler didn’t sing with the choir, but every so often, at special occasions—Christmas, Easter, and maybe a wedding— she would don the maroon robe of the choir and step out for a solo. She was a glorious sight standing alone beside the pulpit, her face raised to heaven. Her voice was huge in our little church, rattling even the rafters, her great, pearly notes hit sure and strong like a hammer square onto a nail. Sometimes when she was singing, the sun would shine through the windows and her hair would glow almost like molten silver and it seemed to me she had turned into an angel. All she needed were the wings. When she finished one of her solos, I always felt breathless.
Although I had no talent for piano, Mrs. Dantzler kept at me until I at least had developed some playing skill. At her recitals, she always had me last on the schedule, since I was the only boy in her class. To make certain I was presentable for the recitals, which were considered important society events in Coalwood, she taught me to sit up straight on the piano bench and how to bow when I was finished, putting one arm across my stomach, the other across my back.
Although I was perfectly agreeable to taking piano, I hated practicing. “A little more time at your piano at home, Sonny, is in order before your next lesson,” Mrs. Dantzler would say routinely. “You know, two dollars doesn’t grow on trees.”
When I started to go to Big Creek High, I decided it was time to quit the piano. I had a lot of homework and rockets to build, and practicing the piano cut into my time. Mom said it was okay by her if I wanted to quit, but I had to tell Mrs. Dantzler to her face. I think she thought that would stop me, but I was determined.
I rehearsed what I would tell Mrs. Dantzler. I had myself quite a verbal concoction. It wasn’t that I was quitting, that’s what I was going to tell her. I was just going to play the piano more for myself, that’s it. I had learned so much, see, and now I needed a little while to just work on all that I knew. I would keep playing, you could bet on that, now and forever. So thanks a lot, Mrs. Dantzler, you’ve been grand. While riding my bike, I went over my tall tale all the way down to the Dantzler house, but as soon as she opened her door, my little lies flew out of my head like scared bats. I stammered a bit and then just blurted, “I can’t take piano anymore!”
Her big blue eyes opened in shock. “Why not, Sonny?”
“Because . . . because . . . I don’t want to!”
Mrs. Dantzler looked at me with disappointment and hurt while I shrank under her gaze, and then she silently led me back to her piano and sat beside me as she had done so many hundreds of times before. She turned on the meter and it ticked as I went through my compositions. She corrected me as if it were a normal lesson and that she would get to see the results next week as she had done for all those years. Finally, the excruciating hour was over, and she turned off the meter and got up and went to the window and looked out at the mountains while I gathered my books and manuals. I left two crumpled dollar bills on the piano bench. “I’ll keep practicing,” I told her back.
“No, you won’t,” she said quietly.
I fled, knowing she was right.
SHERMAN was the Rocket Boy I could always call on to help me mix up propellant. For some reason, he enjoyed spending time up to his elbows in chemicals. A day early in November 1959 found the two of us in my basement laboratory mixing the goopy gray gunk we called zincoshine. We followed a set routine, never deviating from what we knew to be safe. First a small amount of zinc dust was measured into a wooden mixing bowl, followed by an appropriate amount of sulfur. After that, we poured enough of John Eye’s finest into the mix to make a thick slurry. We’d mix the ingredients in the bowl with a wooden spoon or our hands until it had turned a uniform gray, and then scrape it out on a cookie sheet. A rolling pin was used to squeeze out excess alcohol. Each small batch we produced was enough for us to load a few inches of propellant into a casement. We mixed and loaded, giving a minimum of one hour between loads for the zincoshine to “cure” in the casement. It was a slow, tedious process, but Sherman and I loved to do it. We’d listen to rock and roll on the little Japanese radio I owned, or talk about girls, or gossip about the goings and comings of Coalwood people. We were never bored.
At no extra charge, Mr. Clinton Caton, the machinist who usually did our work, had come up with a slightly higher-carbon steel for the nozzle we were going to use on our next rocket. Luckily, just when we needed it, he’d had a few lengths of the special bar stock left over from a company job. Quentin was certain we would lick the erosion problem with the new steel, but there was only one way to find out: launch a rocket using it. Sherman and I were loading what I’d designated
Auk XXII-F,
pretty much a copy of the last rocket we’d fired except for the new steel.
To mix our propellants and load our rockets, I had built a small laboratory in the basement of our house. It was just a piece of plywood across the washing machine, which sat beside twin laundry sinks over which shelves groaned with our chemicals and mixing utensils. I had liberated most of my propellant-mixing hardware from Mom’s kitchen. She’d never asked for any of it back. I think she was afraid of being poisoned or blown up.
For safety, Sherman was wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, a heavy woolen overcoat, and a ball cap with a piece of plastic taped to the brim to protect his eyes. I was pretty much dressed the same way, and we were sweating because not more than ten feet away was a coal-fired furnace. As long as we kept the grate shut, it was safe. We also kept the basement door cracked to the outside to make certain the lab was ventilated.
I heard the upstairs door creak open. “Sonny, what are you doing down there?” Mom asked from the kitchen.
“We’re loading a rocket, Mom,” I said casually.
Her response was just as casual, although there was a hint of resignation in it. “Well, don’t blow yourself up,” she said for about the millionth time since I had become a Rocket Boy. “You either, Sherman,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Sherman seemed to slouch under the weight of all his protective gear, but it was really because he always held one foot at an acute angle from the other and kept his weight on his good leg.
“The Women’s Club meeting is going to start in about ten minutes,” Mom continued from above. “How about not making too much noise while they’re here? Also, I’d appreciate it if you gave the place a little air.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, and screwed the top on the fruit jar of moonshine and then went over and opened the basement door as wide as it would go. Since we’d gotten into zincoshine, Mom had told every nose-wrinkling visitor to the house, “I’m not running a juke joint here. It’s just Sonny’s . . .” and then the visitor would chime in unison with her, “. . . rocket stuff in the basement,” nodding in sympathy.
There were still some people in Coalwood who believed the Rocket Boys were the town’s special burden. I guess we had caused more than a little uproar over the years. One of our first rockets had careened into Dad’s office at the mine, causing him to order me to never launch another rocket in Coalwood again. Under pressure, he later relaxed his sentence, but we were banished a mile below Frog Level to the slack dump we called Cape Coalwood. There, Dad expected us to stay out of sight and out of mind of Coalwood citizenry. In no time, however, we managed to send a missile on a ballistic arc from the Cape all the way to a field not more than one hundred feet from the houses on Middletown Row, a distance of three miles. A steel company official sent down to oversee the selling of Coalwood’s houses and utilities had observed the near miss and ordered our blockhouse torn down and launchpad bulldozed. Dad had taken up for us on that one and we’d kept our range. I guess the way he saw it was that if anybody was going to kick the Rocket Boys out of Coalwood, he was going to do it, not some steel company slicker. We’d also been falsely accused by the West Virginia State Police of starting a forest fire over in Davy. Miss Riley had saved us on that one, pointing out on a map that our rockets couldn’t quite reach out that far—not yet, anyway. In the last few months, we’d stayed pretty much out of trouble, although nearly every weekend, our rockets shook the ground from one of our spectacular successes or our devastating but always colorful pyrotechnic failures.
The basement was a good echo chamber, and I could hear nearly everything that happened on the floor above. I heard Mom cross the kitchen floor to the back porch. I supposed one of the women of the Women’s Club had arrived. Then the basement door opened again. “Somebody here to see you,” she said, and then I heard footsteps down the basement steps and then a pause at the last one. I knew whoever it was was carefully stepping over Lucifer. “Lucifer, I swan,” Mom said by way of a complaint as she got past him.
I turned to see who was with her. Much to my surprise, it was Mrs. Dantzler and Ginger. The furnace pipes ran along the ceiling and they had to duck them to get to us. Mrs. Dantzler was especially careful of her hairdo. “Hello, Sherman,” she said, giving him a quick smile that she lost when her eyes came to rest on me. “So, Sonny, this is what took the place of your piano lessons.” Her large blue eyes flitted across the cluttered shelves. “Elsie, how you keep your house on the ground is beyond me. And the smell of it!”
“I know, Eleanor Marie,” Mom sighed. “We do the best we can with what we’ve got to work with.”
“Sonny, take off those gloves and raise your hands,” Mrs. Dantzler commanded. “There, you see, Elsie? Long fingers, wide palms. Those are the hands of a pianist. If only Sonny had kept at his lessons . . . It’s a shame is what it is.”
I glanced at Mom and was rewarded with a twinkle in her eye. “Now, boys,” she said, “the ladies and I have some last-minute Veterans Day float issues to discuss today. All I ask is you keep it quiet down here. Got it?”