“When it climbed out of that tub and chased me down the steps, I told you it was him or me,” Dad would say. “You took your own sweet time deciding which one of us it would be.”
“It was a close-run thing, Homer,” she’d reply, her lips perched on her coffee cup and her hazel eyes twinkling,
Then Dad would look at her and shake his head and then tell how he had loaded her and Albert into his old Ford and drove night and day from West Virginia to the first river he could find past the Florida border, the only place Mom said she could possibly let her pet reptile go.
Then they would laugh, the story told. In later years, whenever there was a report of an alligator eating a poodle or chomping on a golfer, Dad would look up from his newspaper and say, “News of Albert, Elsie,” and she would smile.
It was a good story.
The story Dad seemed to like to tell the best over the kitchen table was how he came to Coalwood. He told it with the same enthusiasm other men might display in recounting their personal experiences as a soldier in a famous battle, or as a player in a great championship game. His chance at a job with Mr. Carter’s coal mine, he said, came in 1934 when the country was deep inside the Great Depression and he was only twenty-two years old. He had come out of nearby Gary, one of the toughest, meanest coal camps in all of McDowell County. Gary, he liked to say, was three mountains and a social philosophy away from Coalwood. After filling in the necessary papers, Dad said he had decided to begin a vigil outside the Coalwood mine superintendent’s office. Why he’d done such a thing, he still didn’t know, but Mom always interrupted his story at this point to say she knew why very well. If he hadn’t gotten the job, all that remained for him was to leave West Virginia and ride the rails with thousands of other unemployed men across the country. I piped up one time and said that riding the rails sounded like fun. Mom hushed me, saying there was nothing fun about being desperate, even aboard a train. I stayed hushed, but it didn’t change my opinion.
Coalwood’s mine superintendent at the time was William “Captain” Laird, a graduate of Stanford University, a World War I hero, and a big-footed, flap-eared giant of a man who went around with a six-shooter strapped to his waist just in case he happened upon a union organizer. Every time the Captain (as everybody in Coalwood called him) came out of his office, he was greeted by the forlorn sight of a scrawny youth in canvas pants and flannel shirt. When the Captain returned to his command post, the thin-as-a-sapling lad was still there.
In the 1930s, union organizers had worked hard to gain a foothold in Coalwood, but had failed because of Mr. Carter’s proposition. Still, every so often they’d send in an agitator hoping to spark some trouble. Suspecting a union trick, the Captain stopped long enough to give the boy a penetrating glare and, with his hand on the handle of his pistol, ask him what the Sam Hill did he think he was doing, standing outside his office like some kind of damned hoodoo scaring his men?
Dad said he had his speech all prepared. “There are no better miners than the Hickams of Gary and I’m one of them. Take me on and you’ll never be sorry.” It was a dangerous speech because it contained within it a boast, something not done lightly in McDowell County. It was common wisdom that a man prone to boasting was not someone who could be trusted.
The Captain challenged the boy. “What makes you any different from all the rest of the fellows who want to get on around here?”
The young Homer Hickam had then made a simple and fateful reply. “Captain, you tell me to do something, it’ll be done, don’t matter what it is, and to the second.”
The Captain had apparently heard such pledges before. “How do I know you’ll really do that?” he demanded.
Dad nodded toward the pistol. “I’ll write out a paper saying it’s all right for you to shoot me if I don’t.”
Captain Laird absorbed the answer, perhaps admired it more than a little, and then asked, almost gently, “Where do you stay at night?”
The young man jerked his head back toward the rhododendron that grew up behind the mine. “Up there.”
“What do you eat?”
Dad shrugged and said nothing, which was also the answer. He had drunk from the creek that ran past the mine. What did it matter about eating when there was a job at stake?
“You like chicken and dumplings?” the Captain asked.
“I’d like a job more,” Dad answered.
Captain Laird bent at the knees and reared back to let out a hoot and a holler. “Well, son, how about both? Come on down to the house tonight, we’ll get you squared away.”
My dad would never forget his promise to the Captain, even after the Captain had retired upstate to the lovely little farm village of Elkins and Dad had taken his job. Growing up, I would hear some people say my father had become all that was good in Coalwood. Others said he had become all that was bad. But whatever side they took in their opinion of him, no one doubted he believed in Coalwood and loved it as naturally as breathing, and because I had heard his story I knew very well why.
Mom’s fox story was one of her best. I loved to hear it, except its ending. She got her fox in 1947 when I was four years old and Jim was six. We were living at the time on Substation Row, a line of company houses that ran down Wolfpen Hollow. The pup came from a passing hunter who’d unearthed a litter after killing the mother fox. When my father came home that evening, he went into the basement to find Mom on the concrete floor cuddling her new “puppy” in her arms. “Funny-looking little dog,” he said, only able to see its tiny face and big ears. Mom did not reply; she just kept holding her new pet.
Dad got into the basement shower and started the daily thirty minutes of hard scrubbing it took to get off the coal dirt. When he came out, he took a longer, closer look at the little creature now scuttling around on the basement floor. Whatever it was, he decided it was no dog. “Elsie,” he asked, as calmly as ever he could, “is that, by any chance, a wolf?”
“It is not,” my mom replied. “It is but a fox.”
Dad was staggered. “You have brought a fox into our house?” Foxes were known as killers of chickens and cats and anything else they could catch. They were not meant to snuggle on your lap while you listened to Jack Benny on the radio.
The little fox sat down and cocked its head, coolly appraising my father. “Look how cute he sits,” Mom said. “I’m going to call him Parkyacarcass, like the funny man on the radio.”
Dad argued with her, but Mom would not listen. She would have her fox.
At this point in the story, Mom and Dad would say some things as surely as the snow came in the winter. “I told your mom a fox should be free,” Dad would say.
“And I told your dad,” she would say, “so should a person.”
“Who’s not free?” Dad would demand.
“You,” she’d say, and then, “Me.”
Dad would start to say something else, then seem to subside. “Well, that’s the end of the story,” he’d say.
“No, it isn’t,” Mom would reply, and while Dad mopped in his corn bread and milk, she’d go on with it.
Mom said Parky grew quickly into exactly what he was supposed to be, a red fox with a big bushy tail, pointy ears, long snout, razor-sharp teeth, and a subtle mind. Though he was in nearly all things a typical fox, his tail was distinctive. Most West Virginia red foxes had a little silvery tip at the end of their tails, but Parky looked as if somebody had dipped his tail in a can of silver paint. It went nearly a third of the tail’s length. It made him all the more beautiful and glorious, at least in a foxy way.
I always laughed when Mom said Parky never walked on the floor but hopped around the house from chair to table to the top of my dad’s head. I could just imagine Dad flailing his arms as he tried to get a fox off his head. Sometimes, I would laugh so hard my stomach hurt, the way Mom told it. Dad always stayed silent.
For a while, Mom said, Parky contented himself with jumping around the house and patrolling the backyard even though it was dominated
by a mother cat named Sis. When Sis arched her back and hissed like a snake, Parky would tuck his tail between his legs and slink. Nothing on this planet could slink like a fox, Mom said, except maybe a politician in a beer joint.
It didn’t take long before Parky took note of a little wooden shack up on the hill across the creek. It belonged to a neighbor and housed a few plump laying hens and the odd rooster. My mom’s first inkling of Parky’s interest in the chicken house came when she saw him racing low to the ground down the hill with a bundle of feathers over his shoulder and a hound dog baying at his hind feet. Parky, his tail straight out behind him like a red and silver flag in a stiff breeze, scampered across the plank that bridged the creek, then flew over the back fence and swished down the basement steps, leaving the hound dog moaning and pacing in frustration outside. When Mom ventured into the basement, she entered a snowstorm of feathers. Giving up on rescue, she sought out the owner of the chicken, confessed everything, and paid him a two-dollar bill for his trouble. That afternoon, Parky, with a feather still on his snout, sought Mom out and curled up on her lap for a quiet snooze. She said she forgave him instantly. He was, after all, but a fox.
Mom continued her story over the kitchen table, her coffee cup empty and Dad digging for the last crumb of milk-sodden corn bread in his glass.
“Parky lived free,” Mom would say proudly. “Even though he came back to me, I loved most of all his free spirit. If it cost me a few dollars for a chicken now and again, I loved that he came and went as he pleased, did as he wanted. How glorious it must be to be truly free!”
“You’re free, Elsie,” Dad would invariably retort.
Why he would say anything, I never knew, because it always gave Mom the opening for a little speech she practiced. “Homer, as long as we’re in this town, I’ll never be free. You have your work, but what do I have but to wait every day to see if you’re still alive? I want an end to it.”
And he would say, “It’s my job.”
And she would reply, “Yes, but it’s not mine.”
Their repartee changed a bit after X rays revealed smears of coal dust on Dad’s lungs. After that, she always added: “Your job is killing you, Homer, one spot on your lung at a time. I swan I won’t let it kill me.”
And then Dad would purse his lips thoughtfully and Mom would continue her story, getting to the part I didn’t like. I could tell Dad wanted to leave, but for some reason he never did.
As time went by, she said, Parky scrambled into the basement with his chicken dinner with ever more dogs after him. The chicken house owner had staffed up on canines. He could afford them because Mom kept paying out her two dollars per hen. Then one day, Mom looked out in the yard and didn’t see Parky and sensed that something was wrong. All day, there was no Parky. Mom suspected the worst, but the dogs at the chicken house were all lolling around, some of them on their backs to expose their pink plump bellies to the sun, too calm by far to have been finally successful against their little foe. At her intense questioning, the chicken house owner denied that he had done anything to Parky. In fact, he allowed he liked the little creature because Mom’s payments represented the only profit he’d ever made on his enterprise.
And then Mom would lean over the table on her elbows and give my father a significant look and say, “Homer, tell me the truth. You carried him off somewhere, didn’t you?”
And Dad would slowly shake his head and say, “No, Elsie. I’m sure Parky just went off the way wild animals do. He’s free, like you like to think.”
“I always know when you’re lying,” she’d say. “I can see it in your face.”
The strange thing about the windup of the Parkya carcass story was that I could see the same thing Mom saw. I guess my father didn’t have a face much good for lying. After a while, I started to believe with Mom that Dad had carried the fox off, too. Maybe he’d even killed him, although I couldn’t imagine it to be so. Dad was never a hunter, odd for a Coalwood man.
For long periods, Mom wouldn’t tell her fox story and I would nearly forget about it. But then it would come back, related over the kitchen table with my parents rehearsing their practiced lines yet again, straight to the ambiguous conclusion. The mystery of what had happened to her fox was one of the sorest things between my mother and my father, and one that even the salve of time didn’t ever seem to heal.
Sometimes, when neither seemed to have a story they wanted to tell, Dad would wait until Mom got a fresh cup of coffee, and then haul out his well-thumbed book of American poetry and read to her. It seemed to calm her and, for some reason, also gave him solace. I could see his face relax, all the lines of care dissolving as he read. The poem he most liked to read was one written by a man with the grand name of Angelo De Ponciano. To me, as much as he loved it, the poem seemed kind of sad:
Have you ever sat by the railroad track
and watched the emptys cuming back?
lumbering along with a groan and a whine—
smoke strung out in a long gray line
belched from the panting injun’s stack
—just emptys cuming back.
I have—and to me the emptys seem
like dreams I sometimes dream—
of a girl—or munney—or maybe fame—
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
—just emptys cuming back.
As a Coalwood boy, I had come to understand that God had determined that there was no joy greater than hard work, and that He made no water holier than the sweat off one’s brow; and I also understood that love is God’s gift to us that we might share it, and also the ache in our soul if it might be lost. But, like Dad’s simple poem, and Mom’s story of her fox, there was much I didn’t understand that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with Coalwood. There were secrets there, altogether as vast and mysterious as the black hole that sits at the center of our galaxy and as glorious as the light that it captures. To understand them, I would have to go away and come back again.
And so I did, in the summer of 1961, when once a president called a nation to greatness, and a town I had forsaken called me home.
2
THE CALL
IN THE fall of 1960, when I was seventeen years old, I left Coalwood and crossed the West Virginia state line to attend the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. My brother was already there on a football scholarship, but the reason I’d picked VPI was that it had one of the toughest engineering schools in the country. It was my intention to become as fine an engineer as ever existed upon this planet so that Dr. Wernher von Braun, the famous rocket scientist, would hire me the day I graduated. I had already gotten a head start in that direction in high school. When Sputnik, the world’s first earth satellite, had been launched in October 1957, five other Big Creek High School boys and I had decided to join the space race between the United States and Russia and build our own rockets. We launched them from an old slack dump we called Cape Coalwood and had done so well we’d even gone to the 1960 National Science Fair and returned to Coalwood with a gold and silver medal for propulsion. We were, for a little while, as famous as any boys from McDowell County were ever likely to be.
Upon my arrival in Blacksburg, I was a bit surprised to learn VPI had a military cadet corps in which I was required to serve. Jim, being a football player, had escaped the corps, but I found myself not only trying to cope with classroom work but also the regimen required of a “rat” freshman. Fortunately, the mysterious regulations and ancient military traditions of the corps intrigued me enough that I set out to master them. The most desirable quality for a cadet turned out to be standing up straight, which I could do, and knowing how to march, which I could learn, and polishing brass and spit-shining shoes, which I could tolerate. By the time my freshman year was done, I had even managed to get myself promoted to private first class.
VPI academics, however, proved to be more difficult, especially chemistry an
d mathematics. Without the incentive of building my rockets, I had trouble paying attention in those classes. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, but most of the time my mind simply wandered off on its own. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t focus on those blackboards filled with dull equations and tedious formulae. Where was the glory in it? Where was the adventure? Where were the rockets? I missed them and I missed the boys and I missed Miss Riley, the high school teacher who’d kept me on the straight and narrow during my years as a rocket boy. If it hadn’t been for English class, I might have even gone on academic probation. My shoddy work did not go unnoticed. After the winter quarter, Dr. Johnston, the dean of Applied Science and Business Administration, under whose auspices English was taught to engineers, called me into his office. He retrieved one of my themes from a pile on his desk. “Read this for me, Mr. Hickam,” he said.
I read where he pointed his finger: The rocket was steaming like a teakettle.
“What is that?”
I sorted through my possible answers. “A simile?” I guessed.
“Yes!” He put my theme back on the stack and patted it. “Did you know, Mr. Hickam, that I’d warrant there is not a single other engineering student in this whole school who would know a simile if it jumped out of a bush and bit him? Or could invent one?”
I didn’t know that and said so.
“You have a rare talent for writing,” Dr. Johnston continued. “You ought to do something with it.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, still not fully comprehending what he was getting at.
He picked up another paper and turned it in my direction. “Do you know what this is?”
I recognized it quite well, although it was nothing I cared to study. “My grade transcript,” I said.
“Indeed it is,” he answered, “and based on it, I fear you are wasting your time here at VPI. Perhaps you should leave us and go to another college, one stronger in the liberal arts, for instance, where your writing talents might be better honed.”