Rocket Boys. Homer Hickam
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I’d spotted some great flower dirt up in the mountains and would’ve brought Mom some home with me “if this blame ol’ ‘wheelbare’ hadn’t fallen apart!” Mom wasn’t fooled, but she got to laughing too hard to swat me at full power. Whatever it took, sometimes, is what I did.
“Elsie, I don’t care about any other boys,” Dad told her. “Just take care of this one before he embarrasses me all over Coalwood.”
Mom laughed—a short, bitter bark. “Oh, my, yes. Heaven forbid you be embarrassed! Why, the next thing you know, the men would stop shoveling coal for you!”
He stared at her. “They don’t shovel. They haven’t shoveled in twenty years. They use machines.”
“Isn’t that interesting!”
I recognized that Mom and Dad were about to go off onto one of their standard quarrels and eased back into the darkness of the yard and stood with the dogs. Dandy nuzzled my hand and Poteet leaned against my legs. I could feel her trembling, or maybe it was me. Dad gave Mom one of his standard speeches about how the mine provided for her and us boys, and she said back her usual piece about how the mine was just a big, dirty death trap. When Dad went back inside, shaking his head, Mrs. Sharitz next door called softly to Mom and she went over and leaned on the fence. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could guess. I could see Mrs. Todd waiting patiently at the next fence beyond. Mrs. Sharitz would cross her yard with the news from Mom and pass it on to Mrs. Todd and so on down the fence line. I knew within an hour all of Coalwood would know about my semi-sort of rocket and how I’d roped the other boys into more of my foolishness, and everybody in town would have a good laugh at my expense. When Mom signed off with Mrs. Sharitz, she walked over and stood beside me. She looked at the smoldering ruin of her fence and sighed deeply. I braced myself. Now that we were alone, she was free to deliver her scorn with both barrels. “Didn’t I tell you not to blow yourself up?” she asked in a surprisingly soft voice.
Just then, I heard the black phone ring and saw Dad through the living-room window as he ran to answer it. I hoped it wasn’t anybody complaining about the noise. Mom looked at the window and then up the road to the tipple. I knew the best thing I could do was to stay quiet while she was chewing things over in her mind. After a while, she pointed at the back porch and said, “Go sit on the steps. We need to talk, you and me.”
“I know what I did was wrong, Mom,” I said in a bid to preempt whatever she had in mind.
“Homer Hadley Hickam, Junior. It wasn’t wrong. It was stupid. I said go sit!”
I did as I was told with the enthusiasm of a prisoner going to his own beheading. Dandy crawled up beside me, whimpered briefly, and laid his head on my feet. Poteet was off chasing bats. I watched her launch herself into the air, do a double twist, and come down running, a big grin on her black muzzle.
I thought to myself, I’m really in for it this time. Mom was a master at delivering creative punishment. Once, after Sunday school, and in my usual rush to get outside and play, I wore my church shoes in the creek to hunt crawl-dads with Roy Lee. When Mom cast an eye on my soggy Buster Browns, she said, “I swear, Sonny, if your head gets any emptier, it’s going to float off your head like a balloon.” For punishment, she dictated that the next week I had to go to church in my stocking feet. It didn’t take long before everybody in town got wind of what I was going to have to do. I didn’t disappoint, walking down the church aisle in my socks while everybody nudged their neighbor and snickered. The thing was, though, I had picked out the socks, and my big toe poked through a hole in one of them. Mom was mortified. Even the preacher couldn’t keep a straight face.
Mom stood before me and crossed her arms and stuck her chin out. Dad said she looked just like a Lavender when she did that, and it usually always meant trouble. “Sonny, do you think you could build a real rocket?”
She so startled me by her question that I forgot my usual coyness. “No, ma’am,” I said, straight up. “I don’t know how.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t know how. I’m asking you if you put your mind to it, could you do it?”
I searched for her trap to make me do something I didn’t want to do. I was sure it was there. It was just a matter of finding it. I thought I’d better say something. “Well, I guess I could—”
Mom stopped me. She knew I was just going to ramble. “Sonny,” she sighed, “you’re a sweet kid. I love you. But, doggone it, you’ve just been drifting along like you were on a cloud your whole life, making up games and leading Roy Lee and Sherman and O’Dell off on all your wild schemes. I’m thinking maybe it’s past time you straightened up a bit.”
When a Coalwood mother told her son maybe he needed to “straighten up a bit,” it was usually in a direction he didn’t necessarily want to go. I started to squirm. She was about to make it ten times worse. “I was worrying about you the other night to your dad,” she said. “I was just kind of wondering out loud what you were going to do with yourself when you grew up. He said for me not to worry, he’d find you a job on the outside up at the mine. You know what that means, Sonny? You’d be some kind of clerk working for your dad, sitting at a typewriter pecking out forms, or writing in a ledger about how many tons got loaded in a day. That’s the best your dad thinks you can do.”
A question just seemed to jump out of my mouth. It surprised even me. I guess I’d been wondering about it for a long time and didn’t know it. “Why doesn’t Dad like me?” I asked her.
Mom looked as if I had slapped her in the face. She was quiet for a moment, obviously chewing over my question. “It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” she said at length. “It’s just with the mine and all, he’s never had much time to think about you one way or the other.”
If that was supposed to make me feel any better, it didn’t work. I knew Dad thought about Jim all the time, was always telling people what a great football player my brother was, and how he was going to tear up the world in football when he went to college.
Mom sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. I twitched at her unfamiliar touch. It had been a long time since she’d hugged me. We just didn’t do much of that kind of thing in our family. “You’ve got to get out of Coalwood, Sonny,” Mom said. “Jimmie will go. Football will get him out. I’d like to see him a doctor, or a dentist, something like that. But football will get him out of Coalwood, and then he can go and be anything he wants to be.”
She clutched my shoulder, pulling me hard against her side. For a little bit, I would’ve put my head on her shoulder, but I sensed that would be going too far. “It’s not going to be so easy for you,” she said. “You and me, we’ve got to figure out some way to make your dad change his mind about you, see his way clear to send you to college. I’ve been saving money right along and probably have enough for you to go, but your dad would have a hissy right now if I said that’s what I was going to do, say it’s a waste of good money. He’s got it in his head you’re going to stay around here, have some little job at his mine.”
“I’d like to go to college, sure—” I began.
“Well, you’d better!” she snapped, cutting me off. She dropped her arm off my shoulder. I felt suddenly chilled without it. “Coalwood’s going to die,” she announced, “deader than a hammer.”
“Ma’am?” She had lost me with that one.
She stood up. I saw that her eyes were glistening. By her nature, she wasn’t a crier. In an instant, she brought herself back under complete control. “You can’t count on the mine being here when you graduate from high school, Sonny. You can’t even count on this town being here. Pay attention, will you? Look at the kids at Big Creek from Berwind, Bartley, Cucumber … Their fathers are out of work, and those towns are just falling down around them. It’s the economy and it’s the easy coal playing out and it’s … I don’t know what all it is, but I’ve got sense enough to know it’s just a matter of time before the same thing happens here in Coalwood too. You need to do everything you can to get out of here, starting