The Coalwood Way

  I wanted most of all to look inside the nozzle, the working end of the rocket. Our new propellant, which we called “zincoshine,” consisted of zinc dust, sulfur, and the purest alcohol John Eye Blevins could produce from his still up Snakeroot Hollow. The nozzle and the propellant were the keys to our success. Unless both worked according to our designs, our rockets might fly but they were not going to be “great.”

  While we waited for the Auk to cool, Quentin decided it was a good opportunity to give us one of his professorial lectures, although he didn’t look anything like a professor. He was wearing a flannel shirt that was ragged at both elbows, and his pants legs were about two inches too short. One of his ankle-high leather brogans was untied, too, the tongue lapping out between the laces like the tongue of a tired old hound dog. “Gentlemen, it is time we adopt a new approach to our work,” he said, his index finger held aloft. “To date, we have accomplished prodigious results with our rockets. Yet, I perceive a certain tendency among some of you . . .” At this he sneaked a look at Roy Lee. “. . . to see our work as—dare I say it?—fun! This is not fun, gentlemen. We are about important work here. Therefore, henceforth, I challenge all of us to be absolutely, completely, and utterly rigorous!”

  The other boys looked at him with slack jaws. He’d lost me, too, but I was not one to let Quentin get away with much. “Define rigorous,” I said.

  Quentin rolled his eyes as he always did when he was disgusted with my ignorance. “To be rigorous in our work, Sonny, means it is absolutely necessary that we have a thoroughly scientific approach to everything we do. And, of course, it also means that we must do everything quickly, without delay, lest opportunity slip between our fingers.”

  I didn’t see what one thing had to do with the other, but nothing ever happened fast enough to suit Quentin. “I don’t know how we can work any faster,” I told him, “especially since I’m doing all the drawings and seeing to the machine-shop work. I’ve got other things to do, you know.”

  “Such as?” Quentin growled.

  I stamped my feet, trying to stay warm in the chill breeze coming down the hollow. Winter would soon stake out its claim in the mountains of southern West Virginia. “Look, Quentin,” I said, “try to understand something. I can’t spend all my time building rockets. I’m trying to make all A’s this semester. And I’ve got band practice, too. I’m the head drummer, you know.”

  Quentin looked down his long nose at me. “Your other activities, Sonny, are of no consequence to this group. You must transcend such matters and bear down on your designs. I assure you that without such rigor, we will impress no judges at the science fair. We must present a careful, well-thought-out, rigorous scientific explanation as to why and how our rockets fly. You may be exasperated with me, old son, but it is nevertheless an incontrovertible fact.”

  I simplified all his big words until I’d ferreted out his meaning. Quentin believed that if our rockets won the county science fair and then we went on to the state science fair and maybe even the nationals, somehow that would result in him getting an opportunity to go to college. I sincerely doubted his concept. Boys could get football scholarships in McDowell County, but I never heard of anybody getting much more than ribbons and medals at a science fair. Still, when Quentin got an idea, it was almost impossible to dislodge it from his brain. The boy had a brilliant mind, but it could get off onto some strange tracks sometimes.

  The casement finally cooled enough so Quentin could pick it up. He put his eye on the nozzle, clucked loudly, and then shoved it into my face. “Look! Erosion!”

  He was right. The hole down through the center of the rocket nozzle had been burned into an ugly irregular oval. That’s why it hadn’t performed according to its design.

  Quentin handed me the rocket with disdain. “Gentlemen, how do we resolve this? Billy, what say you?”

  Billy had been hanging back, not looking at the rocket. He seemed to be studying something on the ridge of Rocket Mountain. I looked in that direction but saw nothing but a grove of pines. He came back to us. “Maybe we just need a tougher steel,” he said with only a trace of his usual enthusiasm. Billy was painfully thin, and his shirt, neatly laundered but faded and patched, hung on him like he was a scarecrow. His father had quit the mine some months back over a dispute. I didn’t know what the dispute was, but I did know his dad tended to drink more than a little. Billy was the oldest of seven children. I had no idea how his family was getting by.

  “If we use a tougher steel, it’ll take a lot longer to machine it,” O’Dell said in answer to Billy’s idea. “Anyway, I don’t think we can afford much better.” O’Dell was the BCMA’s chief scrounger, a natural job for the son of Red Carroll, Coalwood’s garbageman. O’Dell also came up with various schemes to make money to buy our materials, some of which actually worked.

  Sherman kicked at the slack. “Maybe zincoshine’s just too hot,” he said. “Rocket candy worked pretty good. Maybe we ought to go back to it.”

  “Of course it’s hot, Sherman!” Quentin cried. “That’s why it’s so good! And going back to melted potassium nitrate and sugar would hardly be rigorous, would it?” He eyed me. “What do you think, Sonny boy?”

  I was actually thinking I was going to knock Quentin’s block off if he said “rigor” or “rigorous” one more time. “I don’t know,” I said instead. It was an honest, if unimpressive, answer. Mr. Van Dyke, Coalwood’s general superintendent before the steel company sacked him, used to say, “It’s better to confess ignorance than to provide it.”

  When nobody else had any ideas on what to do, we started to clean up the Cape. As usual, we sang as we worked. We never knew exactly what we were going to sing. It just came to us. Today, we launched into “Get a Job.” Eventually, we’d work our way around to singing what I thought of as the song of the Cape: “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” We surely loved the Everly Brothers.

  Our audience was dispersing. There had been just over a hundred spectators, mostly off-duty miners and their families. Coalwood’s union chief, Mr. John Dubonnet, was getting into his car. It was a brand-new maroon Chrysler, pretty fancy for a union man, I thought. Mr. Dubonnet rarely missed one of our rocket launches, unlike my father, who’d never been to even one. Dad had tried to stop the BCMA when we’d first gotten started, saying such activities had no place in Coalwood. Then, because of the harassment he had received from my mother and the teachers at the Coalwood school, Dad had given in and turned over the old slack dump below Frog Level for us to use as our rocket range. Although he’d given in, that still didn’t mean he approved of us. He kept his distance, pretending ignorance of what we were doing. There were, however, no secrets in Coalwood. The fence-line gossipers made certain of that.

  Some of the miners, still in their helmets, huddled on the other side of the road. There was likewise a cluster of women, sharing the day while watching their children playing on the slack. Our launches doubled as social occasions, too. We Rocket Boys had first become popular in 1958 when Big Creek High School’s football team had been idle. My dad, as president of the Big Creek Football Fathers, had sued the state high school athletic commission to let the team play in the 1957 championship game. The result, after the suit got tossed out of court, had been a year’s suspension for the team. Desperate for distraction when the next fall rolled around, football fans from around the district had started showing up at Cape Coalwood. Pretty soon, they brought the whole family. Even Big Creek cheerleaders came, dressed in full uniform. By order of the court, we had become the only game in town.

  As I came up by the blockhouse, I saw a thin, red-haired young woman in a plain brown coat waving at me. I didn’t recognize her. “Come here, come here, come here!” she yelled while gesturing with her hand toward her ample breast. Then, when I didn’t come, she walked across the slack to me, her long, slender legs taking big strides. “I saw your rocket!” she said breathlessly, coming up to me. “It was the most wonderful thing I ever seed!” She stuck out her hand.
“Shake!” she said. “My name’s Dreama Jenkins.”

  I was a little startled by her forwardness. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said, taking her hand. She had working hands, red and hard.

  “You called me ma’am.” She giggled, then laid a huge grin on me, showing me her teeth. I guess she was proud of them, but it was her eyes that captured my attention. They were the color of moss. I had never seen eyes so green. Her hair was long and shiny and framed her pretty face, which was punctuated by a small nose with a sprinkle of freckles across it. I put her at maybe nineteen years old, but her youthful beauty was spoiled by heavily rouged cheeks and lips coated with a dark red glossy lipstick. By her look, I knew her for what the fence-line gossipers called a “country woman,” a girl washed up in Coalwood from some deep West Virginia hollow, ignorant of manners. Such women, with little knowledge of the Coalwood way of doing things, rarely lasted in our town. If the company didn’t chase them out right away, the ladies of our town eventually did.

  “You can call me Dreama,” she said. “Tell your maw I said hello. I hear she’s from Gary, just like me. Tell her I’m from up Number Three. Dreama Carlotta Jenkins, that’s my whole name. Farlow Jenkins was my paw before he got killed in the mine.”

  I looked past her and saw a Coalwood miner named Cuke Snoddy walking toward us. When he got near, the woman grabbed his arm. “Oh, Cuke, honey, tell Sonny here how wonderful his rocket was. Go on, tell him now. What’s gotten into you? Speak up!”

  Cuke looked at me as if I was something that needed to be scraped off the bottom of his boot. That didn’t surprise me. I’d known Cuke all my life, one way or the other, and he was always pretty sour. “Cuke” was short for Cucumber, a vegetable he apparently liked above all others. Before he’d come to Coalwood, he had been in prison for something violent—not the usual moonshining or petty larceny that sometimes caught a man in southern West Virginia, but something mean and loathsome that people wouldn’t talk about. He lived in a little house set back up on the mountain, nearly in the woods, just down from the Coalwood school. When I was delivering the Bluefield Telegraph, I was forced to go into Cuke’s house to collect what he owed me, and my nose was always assaulted by its nasty smell, a mixture of tobacco smoke, rotting food, alcohol (probably pure rock gut), and unwashed clothing.

  Cuke seemed to stir something inside himself, his shoulders twisting inside his filthy plaid wool coat as if it took all his might to get the words out. “I don’t give a good god-damn about any fool rockets,” he said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice near my feet. “Big Creek football team ain’t worth nothin’, that’s what the hell I care about. It’s your daddy’s fault. Your brother wasn’t never all that great, neither.”

  Cuke’s sentiment wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. Even though the Big Creek football team was back in action, it wasn’t having a very good season and a lot of people blamed my dad for it, saying he’d caused the suspension that had made the team stale. I didn’t think it was stale. It was just missing the big, tough players who had graduated. That included Jim, my older brother. Even though he’d been forced to sit out his senior year, Jim had gotten a college football scholarship down at Virginia Tech. A lot of his fellow players, denied a chance to impress football scouts, hadn’t been so lucky. Those boys were now either working in the mines or gone off to the military services. Some people blamed my dad for that, too.

  The woman clutched Cuke’s arm. “Now, Cuke, that ain’t nice,” she said. “You apologize, you hear?”

  Cuke was somewhere in his forties, I guessed, but his face was already that of an old, old man, with deep furrows in his brow and sunken cheeks. He was missing some teeth up front, too, and those that were still there were chipped and broken. Cuke’s dirty hand moved to take hers. It was a surprisingly gentle, almost dainty, gesture. “Dreama, I’d do near anything for you. But apologize to a blamed Hickam? Ain’t no way!”

  “You better do what I say, you old fool.” The woman scowled, removing his hand from hers.

  Cuke’s eyes went soft, then hard. He grabbed her arm and squeezed. She yelped and backed away. Roy Lee came up just then, his fists ready. “Come on, Cuke,” he said. “You want to fight somebody? Try me.”

  Cuke eyed Roy Lee, sizing him up, but then the other boys arrived. He let the woman go and she took a step away. A tear was running down one of her rouged cheeks. “I can’t believe you hurt me,” she said in a small voice.

  “Aw, honey, you know I didn’t mean to,” Cuke said, and turned toward her but found himself staring instead into the placid eyes of Tag Farmer, Coalwood’s constable.

  I was glad to see Tag. He showed up for almost all our launches, and I suppose he had spotted trouble about to happen and come down from the road. He tipped his constable’s hat to the woman. “Ma’am? I think ya’ll should go get in the car. Cuke will be along. I just need to have a word with him.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman said nervously. She gave me a smile. “I’m sorry, Sonny. I didn’t mean to cause no trouble.”

  “Go on now,” Tag said firmly.

  The woman walked to Cuke’s car, an ancient Chevrolet, and climbed in. Tag took Cuke aside, his big hand on the miner’s shoulder. Tag was at least a foot taller than Cuke. He bent low over him, his lips moving near Cuke’s ear. Then, after Tag was through, Cuke slouched off, got in his car with the woman, and aimed up the dirt road that led to Frog Level and then Coalwood Main.

  The woman rolled down her window and pushed her head out and yelled “Bye-bye, Sonny! You tell your maw about me, hear?” Then Cuke lifted his hand in a one-fingered salute to one and all and floored it, peeling rubber and sending out a cloud of brown dust behind.

  Tag strolled over to the launchpad. “Boys, let me tell you something and you listen up good. A man who hurts his woman is a man who most of all don’t like himself.” He pushed his cap back on his head and scratched up under it, pondering the boil of dust coming from Cuke’s car as he raced toward Frog Level. “That’s why he does it. It makes him feel big for a minute or two, but it don’t last. He’s small and he knows it, but knowing it can drive a man crazy.” He looked up the road and frowned, then shook his head. “Trouble there,” he said softly. “Trouble there.”

  WHEN I got home, I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table in front of the mural she was painting of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Chipper, her beloved pet squirrel, was on her lap, and a stack of drawings she was working on were on the table. They were the plans, I suspected, for Coalwood’s Veterans Day float built annually by the Coalwood Women’s Club. Mom was in charge of the float this year. “They’re not married,” she said when I mentioned Cuke and the woman. A lot of people over the years had remarked how beautiful my mother was, saying she looked a bit like Loretta Young, the famous movie actress. She leaned her head on her hand, her curly black hair spilling down her arm. “I hear she’s out of Gary,” she added.

  “She said she’s from up Number Three Hollow,” I reported.

  Mom frowned. Her face was often furrowed with worry over Dad or me or Jim or Coalwood in general. “There’s some sorry people been known to come out of Number Three,” she said, sighing. Since Mom had been raised in Gary, I guess she was an expert on the denizens of the town. “I heard she was pretty, though,” she continued. “God only knows what that child’s doing with Cuke.” Chipper stretched, his little front paws grabbing her dress. She smiled down on him and tickled his chin. He grunted in ecstasy. “Sometimes a woman like that just takes any man who’ll have her,” she added, and then I could tell by the set of her jaw she’d finished all she had to say about Dreama Carlotta Jenkins. “Did you have a good rocket launch?” she asked. “Wish I could have made it but I had too much work to do on the float.” She nodded toward the drawings.

  “We didn’t go as high as I calculated,” I reported. “There’s erosion in the nozzle. We can’t figure out what to do about it.”

  “Well, I’m sure you will, dear,” she said placidly. “I no
tice you’ve been spending a lot of time on your homework, too. I’m proud of you, Sonny.”

  “I’m going to make all A’s this semester,” I told her, making certain I didn’t sound puffed up, a Coalwood sin.

  She eyed me. “Don’t try to do too much. This is your senior year. You’re supposed to have some fun, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But if I’m going to college, I’ve got to make the grades.”

  She smiled, more to herself, I thought, than at me. “Tell you what I think would be fun,” she said. “Just as soon as I get the Veterans Day float done, I’ll be figuring out what to do on the Christmas Pageant. How about helping me? We’d make a good team. You could write the script.”

  It was a temptation. I’d been writing since the third grade when Mrs. Laird, my teacher, had started mimeographing my short stories and spreading them around the school. “Some day, Sonny Hickam,” she had told me, “you will make your living as a writer.” Although she had retired and moved to Elkins with the Captain, her husband, I’d heard that she was sorely disappointed I had decided to become a rocket engineer. I hadn’t completely stopped writing, though. Just last year, I’d written a school play modeled after Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “Beware yon Quintonius Wilsonius, he has a lean and hungry look,” was my favorite line in the piece. Everybody laughed at it, but Quentin said he didn’t see what was so blamed funny. In Bartley, where Quentin lived, I guess hunger was too real to be amusing.

  As tempted as I was to jump into writing a script for the Christmas pageant, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. And as much as I tried to hide it, she saw the anger at the memory of the last Christmas in my eyes. “Sonny? It’s time to put what happened last year out of your mind.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. She was right. She usually was. I waited to see if she had anything else to say, and when she didn’t, I went off to my room while she went back to her drawings. I sat at my desk for a while, trying not to think, and then got out the stubby pencil and plastic ruler I used to make my rocket designs. We just had to get our nozzles right. The purpose of a rocket nozzle was to direct and compress the hot gases when the propellant burned, causing those gases to speed up. The faster the speed of the gases, the more thrust we got and the higher our rockets flew. Our present nozzle design used steel-bar stock with a hole drilled through its center. It also had countersunk ends, which meant they sloped inward at the top and outward at the bottom like inverted drains. It was a crude design, but it was the best that could be done without getting into a lot of mathematical calculations, something I wasn’t confident I could do even though I had been studying calculus and differential equations to prepare myself.