I gathered Roy Lee, O’Dell, and Sherman in my room. My mom’s pet squirrel, Chipper, was hanging upside down on the curtains, watching us. Chipper had the run of the house and loved to join a gathering. “We’re going to build a rocket,” I said as the little rodent launched himself at my shoulder. He landed and snuggled up against my ear. I petted him absently.
The other boys looked at one another and shrugged. “Where will we launch it?” was all that Roy Lee wanted to know. Chipper wiggled his nose in Roy Lee’s direction and then hopped off my shoulder to the bed and then to the floor. The sneak attack was Chipper’s favorite game.
“The fence by the rosebushes,” I said. My house was narrowly fitted between two mountains and a creek, but there was a small clearing behind Mom’s rose garden.
“We’ll need a countdown,” Sherman stated flatly.
“Well of course we have to have a countdown,” O’Dell argued, even though no one was arguing with him. “But what will we make our rocket out of? I can get stuff if you tell me what we need.” O’Dell’s father—Red—was the town garbageman. On weekends, O’Dell and his brothers helped out on the truck and saw just about every kind of stuff there was in Coalwood, one time or another.
Sherman was always a practical boy with an orderly mind. “Do we know how to build a rocket?” he wondered.
I showed them the Life magazine. “All you have to do is put fuel in a tube and a hole at the bottom of it.”
“What kind of fuel?”
I had already given the matter some thought. “I’ve got twelve cherry bombs left over from the Fourth of July,” I said. “I’ve been saving them for New Year’s. We’ll use the powder out of them.”
Satisfied, Sherman nodded. “Okay, that ought to do it. We’ll start the countdown at ten.”
“How high will it fly?” O’Dell wondered.
“High,” I guessed.
We all sat around in a little circle and looked at one another. I didn’t have to spell it out. It was an important moment and we knew it. We boys in Coalwood were joining the space race. “All right, let’s do it,” Roy Lee said just as Chipper landed on his D.A. Roy Lee leapt to his feet and flailed ineffectually at his attacker. Chipper giggled and then jumped for the curtain.
“Chipper! Bad squirrel!” I yelled, but he just closed his beady eyes and vibrated in undisguised delight.
Roy Lee rolled up the Life magazine, but before he could raise his arm, Chipper was gone in a flash, halfway down the stairs toward the safety of Mom in the kitchen. “I can’t wait for squirrel season,” Roy Lee muttered.
I appointed myself chief rocket designer. O’Dell provided me with a small discarded plastic flashlight to use as the body of the rocket. I emptied its batteries and then punched a hole in its base with a nail. I cracked open my cherry bombs and poured the powder from them into the flashlight and then wrapped it all up in electrical tape. I took one of the cherry-bomb fuses left over and stuck it in the hole and then glued the entire apparatus inside the fuselage of a dewinged plastic model airplane—I recall it was an F-100 Super Sabre. Since Sherman couldn’t run very fast—and also because it was his idea—he was placed in charge of the countdown, a position that allowed him to stand back. Roy Lee was to bring the matches. O’Dell was to strike the match and hand it to me. I would light the fuse and make a run for it. Everybody had something to do.
When night came, we balanced our rocket, looking wicked and sleek, on top of my mother’s rose-garden fence. The fence was a source of some pride and satisfaction to her. It had taken six months of her reminding Dad before he finally sent Mr. McDuff down from the mine to build it. The night was cold and clear—all the better, we thought, for us to track our rocket as it streaked across the dark, starry sky. We waited until some coal cars rumbled past, and then I lit the fuse and ran back to the grass at the edge of the rosebushes. O’Dell smacked his hand over his mouth to smother his excited giggle.
Sparkles of fire dribbled out of the fuse. Sherman was counting backward from ten. We waited expectantly, and then Sherman reached zero and yelled, “Blast off!” just as the cherry-bomb powder detonated.
There was an eyewitness, a miner waiting for a ride at the gas station across the street. For the edification of the fence gossipers, he would later describe what he had seen. There was, he reported, a huge flash in the Hickam’s yard and a sound like God Himself had clapped His hands. Then an arc of fire lifted up and up into the darkness, turning and cartwheeling and spewing bright sparks. The way the man told it, our rocket was a beautiful and glorious sight, and I guess he was right, as far as it went. The only problem was, it wasn’t our rocket that streaked into that dark, cold, clear, and starry night.
It was my mother’s rose-garden fence.
WOODEN SPLINTERS WHISTLED past my ears. Big chunks of the fence arced into the sky. Burning debris fell with a clatter. A thunderous echo rumbled back from the surrounding hollows. Dogs up and down the valley barked and house lights came on, one by one. People came out and huddled on their front porches. Later, I would hear that a lot of them were wondering if the mine had blown up or maybe the Russians had attacked. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything except a big orange circle that seemed to be hovering in front of my eyes. When I regained some sensibility and my vision started to come back, the circle diminished and I started to look around. All the other boys were sitting in the grass, holding their ears. With relief, I noted that it didn’t look as if any of them had suffered any serious damage. Roy Lee’s D.A. needed work though, and O’Dell’s eyes were as wide as the barn owls that nested on the tipple. Sherman’s glasses were nearly sideways on his face. The dogs had retreated to the farthest corner of the yard. They were crawling on their bellies back toward us when Mom came out on the back porch and peered into the darkness. “Sonny?” she called. Then I think she saw the burning fence. “Oh, my good Lord!”
Dad, holding his newspaper, came out beside her. “What happened, Elsie?”
At my father’s appearance, the other boys suddenly jumped up and ran off. I guess he had such a fierce reputation at the mine they didn’t want any part of his wrath. I fleetingly caught a glimpse of Roy Lee leaping over the still-standing part of the fence, clearing it by a good yard. The others went through the gap we’d just blown out. I could see them clearly because the standing part of the fence was on fire. I thought to myself, I ought to follow them, maybe take up residence in the woods for a year or two. But I was caught. Running would just put off the inevitable. I answered Mom with a croak, my mouth not working quite right yet. She replied, “Sonny Hickam. You get over here!” Rubbing my ears in an attempt to stop them from ringing, I lurched over to the back porch and waited expectantly for one of my parents to come down off it and kill me.
“Elsie, do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Dad asked.
Mom, bless her, had figured it all out. “Sonny asked us if he could build a rocket, Homer,” she replied, as if she were amazed he had not perceived the perfectly obvious.
Dad puzzled over her statement. “Sonny built a rocket? He doesn’t even know how to put the sprocket chain back on his bike when it slips off.”
“We’ll see,” Mom sniffed. “Sonny, what happened to the other boys?”
I had learned that sometimes when I was in trouble with Mom, the best thing to do was to adopt the complete-idiot strategy. “Other boys?” I asked, most sincerely. Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished. Once, when I had used Mom’s best and only wheelbarrow as a kind of summertime sled to go careening down a gully on Substation Mountain,