The Coalwood Way (7 page)

Mom inspected Dreama’s work. “Well, I’d say she knows exactly what she’s doing.” To Dreama, she said, “You can stay, honey.” To Mrs. Mallett, she said, “It’s my decision, Cleo.”

Mrs. Mallett’s jowls quivered. It looked like she wanted to reply, but something, maybe the tone of Mom’s voice, kept her from it. She turned on her heel and went back to her circle. The glares of those women toward Dreama were shifted to Mom. They were like thrown knives. Dreama said, “Thank you, ma’am.” If Mom said anything in reply to her, I didn’t hear it. She went back to her table piled high with drawings and plans.

Later that night, I saw Dreama walk over to the food table and get herself a cup of punch. At her approach, a cluster of women stalked off and she was left alone, sipping from the cup and turning around, looking out of the tops of her eyes. I thought she looked small and scared and I found myself feeling sorry for her even though she was someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. Then I saw my mother leave her table and stride across the machine-shop floor and go directly to the punch bowl and pour herself a drink. Then she nodded to Dreama. It occurred to me just then that it was a nod from one Gary girl to another.

7

VETERANS DAY

SOMETIME BEFORE THE sun came up on Veterans Day morning, I heard the sound of a truck rumbling past my window and looked at the alarm clock on the table by my bed. It was 4:30 A.M. Coalwood’s proud float was rolling past. Mom in her Buick and a bunch of other ladies in their cars followed closely behind, creeping over a frost-slickened road. The float was being pulled by a rusty, dented truck. Dad had advised Mom just the day before that he was going to need all Olga’s trucks to “haul mine machinery.” The old truck pulling the float had been borrowed by Dad from a little independent mine up Warriormine Hollow that only worked weekends. There were more and more such small, nonunion mines being operated around the county, most of them run by union men who worked for big mines during the week. These little mines skirted safety regulations and union dictates alike, but they made a profit, and some people said that when the big operations finally shut down, the independents would be the only mines still going. Dad said they had their place in the scheme of things but he worried about their safety. “A man who makes an hourly wage will gripe about safety and his working conditions all day long,” I heard him say once to Uncle Clarence, his brother. “But you tell him he can make a profit for himself on a ton of coal and he’ll forget about everything but the money. He’ll hold up the roof with one hand and dig with the other.”

Uncle Clarence, who worked for Dad as an assistant superintendent at the Caretta mine, said, “About half my men work those mines every weekend. Sometimes on Monday, they’re so worn out they all but fall asleep on the job.”

The two Hickam brothers then shook their heads at the strange antics and peculiar attitudes of the men they had been raised with and led for years. Somewhere along the line, they had taken a different turn from their union brethren. When I asked Mom about the reasons for it, she said, “Poppy made them that way. Poppy, and all his books.”

It was at the supper table that Dad told Mom about the truck. He also said he wasn’t going to the parade. “Things to do,” he explained.

“You can’t mean it,” Mom replied, obviously shocked. “I’ve worked so hard—we’ve all worked so hard on this float. You have to be there, Homer. You’re the acting general superintendent. It’s expected!”

“I just can’t,” he said. “And it’s because I am the acting general superintendent that I can’t.”

“Homer . . .”

“Elsie . . .”

There was never a satisfactory resolution to any discussion between my parents when they began to call themselves by their first names, and this one was no exception.

I didn’t know what it was, but there was something in the works at the mine that had sent Dad into a feverish round of activity. Although he always worked long hours, lately he was at the mine until far into the night. Sometimes I would wake, hearing him as he crept up the stairs to go to bed. He was there for only a few hours. I had to get up before sunrise to catch the school bus but he was always up and gone by then.

At 5:00 A.M., the Big Creek school bus picked me and the other Coalwood band members up at the filling station across from my house. We slept through the trip over Welch Mountain, but I was awakened near the top by a rumble of trucks. I wiped the moisture off the window and saw truck after truck going by, all with Olga Coal Company markings on them. In the back of each of them were canvas-shrouded boxes and unidentifiable equipment. I presumed it was Dad’s new mining equipment, whatever it was. I went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until we were winding through the low brick buildings that lined the streets of our county seat.

Our first stop was the Welch Norfolk and Western railroad station. The Big Creek band had been given the honor to welcome Mr. Truman to McDowell County. Mr. Polascik, our band director, was in a state of near nervous exhaustion even though we were all formed up, ready to blare out “The Stars and Stripes Forever” the moment the former president’s train arrived. A man given to worry, Mr. Polascik gave his worst tendency full rein as he raced in between the rows and columns of the nearly one-hundred-strong band. I thought we were looking pretty sharp in our green-and-white uniforms and our big tall shakos. Mr. Polascik was apparently not of the same opinion. His round face was nearly purple with concern. Or perhaps his necktie—a bright green—was pulled too tight. “Not too loud, Sonny, okay?” he reminded me. “Don’t drown out the woodwinds.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, perhaps a little too archly for his ears because he gave me a particularly beseeching look. I didn’t know why he was so worried. I had trained my drummers well. If I put my mind to it, I could keep them so quiet even the flutes could be heard. That was a particularly good idea, since Ginger was one of the flute players. I hadn’t asked her to the Christmas Formal yet but I still planned to do it first chance I got. I had decided it wasn’t right to just blurt out an invitation to a girl like Ginger. It required careful preparation and thought. One of the lessons I’d learned with my rockets was that planning was the parent of success. I figured that surely applied to girls just as well.

At 7:00 A.M., precisely on schedule, the Powhatan Arrow, loudly chuffing steam, rounded a curve and pulled into the station. It was a sleek black bullet of a locomotive. Behind it came a proud chain of red Pullman passenger cars. The last car was not the standard little caboose that trailed on the end of the coal trains but a big Pullman densely draped in red, white, and blue bunting. It looked like something I’d only seen in the movies. On the back was a tiny platform and a big circular sign of some sort that somebody said was the presidential seal. Harry Truman wasn’t president anymore, so I guessed it was an honorary thing and somehow that didn’t seem right to me. If my dad had stopped being the superintendent at the mine, he couldn’t go around wearing his white helmet anymore, could he?

The Powhatan Arrow rested for a bit while venting some more steam, and then the door to the fancy car opened in the back and a couple of men in brown suits with wide lapels walked out on the platform. An attractive, smartly dressed young woman in a white suit and high heels followed, and then out came none other than Harry S Truman himself, looking a bit grim. He was surely a small man, I thought. After he looked us over, he suddenly erupted in a huge grin, as if somebody had pushed a button in his back. He took off his fedora and waved it in the air. Mr. Polascik, about to burst a gasket, loped all around us, his hands shaking in the air to gain our attention. We tore our eyes away from Mr. Truman, and at Mr. Polascik’s nearly hysterical count “One-Two-Three-Four!” we launched into our march. I was so excited I began to batter my snare drum as hard as I could, and so did the other drummers. Everybody in the band played as loudly as ever we could. Mr. Polascik kept jumping up and down and waving and trying to get us to hit some low points as well as highs, but nobody paid him much mind.

When we’d finished with our ear-shattering rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” surely the loudest version President Truman had ever heard, some men climbed up on the car platform with him. I recognized one of them— Chester Matney, a scrap-iron dealer from Welch and a friend of my parents. He’d even attended a couple of our launches at Cape Coalwood.

Mr. Truman, Mr. Matney, the other men, and the one woman came off the train and climbed in automobiles and took off while we launched into a sprightly “Missouri Waltz.” Mr. Polascik gradually came back into my focus. His tie was undone, his coat in disarray, his hair atangle. Then I saw Dreama Jenkins. Her pretty red hair made her hard to miss. She was waving at the band, so excited it looked like she was going to fly right up into the sky. I heard her cry out “Go Owls!” just as if she’d graduated from our high school. I wondered what her fellow Gary High School Coaldiggers would think of that. There was no sign of Cuke.

As the “Missouri Waltz” wound down, I noticed other high school bands had arrived. The Excelsior band formed up beside us. Excelsior was the high school for colored students in Big Creek district. It was located about a mile away from Big Creek High. I was proud of the Excelsior band, although I felt a little jealousy when their drummers started up. How they managed such complex syncopation was beyond me. It was like their wrists were double-jointed or something.

Bobby Gray, our drum major, held up his baton to keep us in place until all the other bands marched past. We were pulling up the rear in the parade this year because we had been selected to go into the Pocahontas theater to play the National Anthem before Mr. Truman spoke. I wasn’t certain how we’d managed to get that honor. Maybe it was just our turn.

The Welch High School band, dressed in smart maroon-and-white uniforms, led the parade. We watched them with not a little envy. It was the judgment of Big Creek students that Welch students were all rich, their parents all lawyers and doctors and politicians and such. Margie Jones was our head majorette, and she had all of her girls especially charged up to match the stellar Welch girls. When we got moving, I’d never seen Margie and the other majorettes throw their batons so high.

As we marched down the street, it seemed the crowd grew in size and enthusiasm. There was wild cheering and applause from all the Big Creek fans as we tramped by. We paraded down Elkhorn Street, then turned into the steep maze of narrow streets that made up downtown Welch. We passed Belcher and Mooney, the men’s shop that my brother Jim had almost single-handedly kept in business before he’d gone off to college; Davis Jewelry, where my mom liked to look but never bought; the Chris-Ann store with women’s fashions all the way from the capital city of Charleston; and the Flat Iron Drug Store, where you could get a fountain Coke and a banana split just like, I was told, in New York City.

American flags flapped from nearly every window, and men took off their hats and women put their hands on their breasts as our color guard marched by. I was swept up by the whole red, white, and blue spectacle and felt so patriotic that if the entire Russian Army had landed at that moment, they would have had their hands full just with me. Mr. Turner, our high school principal, had once given us a speech when he said he felt sorry for the Russians because they were going to have to compete with the boys and girls coming out of Big Creek and McDowell County. This was at a time when a lot people in America were saying we ought to just give up, that communism was an unstoppable force. Mr. Turner said the only unstoppable force was us, and we believed him.

At the corner of Wyoming and McDowell Streets, there was a line of American Legion men in their navy-blue caps. We stiffened our spines and cut loose with a rendition of “E Pluribus Unum.” The batons of our majorettes twinkled high into the air, and then we turned a corner and approached the stand that had been built to hold Mr. Truman, local dignitaries, and the float judges.

Then we stopped. Drum Major Bobby turned around and held his long green baton with a big white ball on the end over his head. That meant we were supposed to march in place. Something was happening up ahead I couldn’t see. We marched and marched with just the drums playing, going nowhere. I saw Mr. Polascik run past and then come walking back. When I looked at him for a sign as to what was going on, he just grimly shook his head.

We marched in place for so long that Patty Cordisco, a flutist in the line behind me, said her feet hurt and she was just going to stop pretty soon. I kept my eye on my drummers. I wasn’t going to let any of them stop, nosiree. Finally, Bobby blew his whistle and rared back, jabbing his baton in the air for us to follow him. “Well, thank the good Lord,” I heard Patty say as we shuffled forward. Then we opened up with Big Creek’s fight song.
On, on, green and white! We are ripe
for the fight tonight! Hold that ball and hit that line . . .

As we surged ahead, I saw what had stopped us, and the sight of it nearly took my breath away. It was the Coalwood float. Broken down, it had been pushed up on the sidewalk to get it out of our way. The old truck’s hood was flung open, and the driver, his miner’s helmet pitched to the ground, was furiously grabbing at wires in the engine. Sherman was standing disconsolately on the float squinting down at the truck, his beret tucked up under his arm. All the other boys were looking miserable, too, and had also hidden their berets. Devota Bradley, the pretty little junior high school girl who was playing the Statue of Liberty, was crying, big tears carrying streaks of mascara down her rosy cheeks. Her crown was dislodged, hanging by a lock of hair, and her cardboard torch holding crepe-paper flames drooped low in her hand.

As we passed, I got a glimpse of the Coalwood women standing in a knot in front of the sagging truck. My mother was pale, her lips pressed into a tense, flat line. She looked like she was in shock. Cleo Mallett stood apart, her fists digging into her wide hips. There was a look of total disdain on her face. Dreama Jenkins also watched from nearby, her big green eyes filled with tears, her hand covering her mouth. It was like looking at a scene in a movie when the film got hung up, just before it melted from the light. Then my mother’s eyes locked on mine and I saw in them something I had never seen there before: despair.

I tore my eyes away, and my drumming sped up unilaterally. I needed to get away from what I had seen. It was just too awful. The other drummers, the entire band, strained to catch up with me. We were almost running before Mr. Polascik’s screams at me to slow down finally penetrated my skull. By then, we were past Harry Truman and the judging stand. We stopped at the Pocahontas theater and to the
clickety-clack
of our sticks on the rims of our drums, my drummers and I cadenced the band inside. We marched up into the balcony and stood in the back. That’s when it sank in. Coalwood, for the first time ever, was going to lose the Veterans Day float competition, and my mom, and probably my dad, too, was going to get the blame for it.

I kept thinking about what I’d seen in Mom’s eyes as the speakers came up on the stage and made their various pronouncements. A Presbyterian preacher gave the invocation. After that, we played the National Anthem while the audience turned and faced the American Legion color guard and sang the words. The old theater’s roof could have lifted up and turned around, everybody sang so hard. Then we said the Pledge of Allegiance, and Sonny Pruett, Big Creek’s lead trumpet player, played Taps as sweetly as ever anybody had done it. Then the mayor of Welch spoke briefly, followed by a chorus from Welch High School singing a medley of songs including the West Virginia official song, “Those West Virginia Hills.” Sam Solins, a Welch businessman and, according to my dad, a “bigwig Democrat,” introduced the former president, and the great man himself stood up and walked to the microphone. He looked about a foot shorter than everybody else onstage, but he strutted to the mike like a banty rooster set loose in the hen house. He only spoke for a few minutes, his reedy voice not entirely pleasant to listen to. I tried to pay attention to what he had to say, but my mind kept wandering back to Mom and the dismal scene of the Coalwood float.