After the final parade at the end of the school year, the cadets of my squadron boxed up their uniforms, tidied up their rooms, and took off for wherever their summers led them. I said good-bye to everyone, including my roommate, George Fox, whose parents had come to pick him up. My plan was to spend one more night in the dormitory, then hitchhike down to Myrtle Beach the next day. In my room, I crawled on top of my bunk, pulled out a tattered paperback, and quickly became engrossed in Starship Troopers. It was at least the fifth time I’d read it. I loved everything Robert Heinlein wrote. Next to John Steinbeck, he was my favorite author. I liked the way he made me want to turn the page even when I knew what was going to happen.
I heard the phone ringing in the booth down the hall, and it kept ringing until somebody picked it up. I subsided back into my book until there came a knock at my door. It was Butch Harper, a fellow cadet who was still waiting for his father to pick him up. “Telephone, Sonny,” he said.
I had never received a telephone call during my entire time at VPI, so I was mildly astonished. Who could be calling me? It had to be bad news, that’s all I knew. I walked like a condemned man down the hall and crawled inside the booth. When I nervously answered, I heard Mom’s voice. “I was afraid you’d already started down here,” she said.
“I’m sticking my thumb out first thing in the morning,” I told her.
She was silent, as if she was chewing something over in her mind. “No,” she said finally. “You have to go home, to Coalwood.”
Her words didn’t entirely register. For one thing, I’d stopped thinking of Coalwood as my home. I’d put that old place behind me, just as she had. And as far as going to it now, why ever would I want to do that? Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach! I started to tell her my opinion, but she interrupted me before I could get a word out of my mouth. “It’s the Tuck Dillon accident,” she said. “They’re blaming your father.”
I struggled to understand. Somebody was blaming Dad for a mine accident? I couldn’t recall anybody ever getting blamed for somebody getting killed in the mine. If you got killed, it was because you didn’t follow the rules, or because God had booby-trapped the place with too much methane or loose slate or some-such a million years ago. Nobody could do much about that, not even my dad.
“There’s going to be a big investigation,” she continued, breaking through my thoughts, “and who knows what’s going to come out? Your dad’s alone. Somebody in the family needs to be with him.”
Her meaning eluded me. When had Dad ever needed anybody other than his foremen when it came to things at the mine? And why would he need me, of all people? Why couldn’t Jim go to Coalwood? He was the first son and Dad’s favorite, anyway. It was true Jim was going to summer school, but it hadn’t started yet. I took a breath, preparing my defense, but before I got a word out, she said, “Sonny, don’t argue with me. Just go.”
I realized that I wasn’t in a debate but in the midst of a typical Elsie Hickam discussion, which meant she was telling me whatever she wanted to tell me and then I was supposed to do exactly what she said. I fumbled for a response but only managed a feeble question. “How’s Chipper?” I asked. It was the best I could do while I tried to think of some way out of her box.
“My little boy? He loves it down here. I’ve got a big cage for him on the back porch so he can look at the bay.”
“Has he bit anybody yet?”
“Nobody important.”
Chipper was the meanest squirrel who ever drew breath. Even so, I liked him, mainly because he usually took great care to bite my brother before he got around to me. “How’s the beach?” I asked, still flailing.
“Beautiful. Sun’s out, water’s blue, the house is going to be great once I get it fixed up.”
I decided to try for a simple reduction of my sentence. “How about I go to Coalwood for two weeks?”
“One more thing,” she said.
I braced myself.
“There’s something wrong with Nate Dooley.”
“The secret man?”
“Don’t call him that!” she snapped. “Just go see Mrs. Dooley and find out what you can. You owe Nate that much.”
“I owe him?”
“If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be dead.”
And with that, perhaps thinking of the money she was spending on the long-distance call, she hung up. I sat in the booth for a while, the receiver still in my hand. When I looked up, I found Butch watching me with a worried expression. “Trouble?” he asked.
“The worst kind,” I confirmed.
“What is it?”
“I have to go . . .” I started to say “home” but caught myself in time. “To West Virginia,” I said instead.
“What’s there?” he wondered.
A fragment of Dad’s poem popped into my mind:
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
—just emptys cuming back.
“What’s there?” Butch asked again.
“Coalwood,” I said, and to me that said it all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOMER HICKAM is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys: A Memoir, which received a National Book Critics Circle nomination and was the basis for the critically acclaimed movie October Sky. He is also the author of Back to the Moon, Torpedo Junction, and Sky of Stone, a sequel to Rocket Boys and The Coalwood Way. A retired NASA engineer, a scuba instructor, and a consultant on a variety of aerospace projects that interest him, he lives with his wife in Huntsville, Alabama—Rocket City, USA.
Also by Homer Hickam
TORPEDO JUNCTION
ROCKET BOYS
BACK TO THE MOON
SKY OF STONE
Published by
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Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-35884
September 2001
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42332-0
v3.0
Homer Hickam, The Coalwood Way
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