“Dorothy,” I said, my heart pounding in my ears, “would you like to go to the dance with me Saturday night? With Roy Lee? I mean, in his car? I mean—”
Her big blues blinked. “But I already have plans!”
The blood drained from my face. “Oh …”
“But if you’d come over to my house on Sunday afternoon,” she purred, “I’d love to study biology with you.”
To her house! “I’ll be there!” I swore. “What should I bring? I mean—”
“Just yourself, silly.” She looked me over, studying me, and I kind of thought she liked what she was seeing. “We’ll have so much fun,” she concluded.
Emily Sue had been observing all this. “Be a little careful with this one, Dorothy,” she said.
“Whatever do you mean?” Dorothy asked her friend.
They talked to each other as if I weren’t even there. “Sonny’s nice,” Emily Sue said succinctly.
“Well, so am I!” Dorothy said back. She went on into the classroom.
Roy Lee had been loitering nearby, listening. He came up and stood beside Emily Sue. “What do you think?” he said.
They were talking as if I weren’t there too. “Dangerous,” Emily Sue told him. “But probably not fatal.”
During class, I couldn’t help but sneak looks at Dorothy at her desk while she worked on a drawing of frog intestines. She had the adorable habit of letting the pink tip of her tongue protrude from her full, delectable lips while she concentrated. She was wearing a white pinafore blouse with a blue ribbon around its collar, which made her look so very innocent, yet the way she filled the blouse out troubled me with indecent thoughts. She caught me looking once and gave me a demure little smile while I blushed. I couldn’t figure out how so much perfection could wind up in one person. Then a little misery inserted itself. If Dorothy had plans for Saturday night, I didn’t imagine it was to bake cookies with her mother.
THERE was a company-store system in most of the towns in southern West Virginia. They usually featured easy credit and inflated prices. If a miner got into enough debt with a company store, the company stopped paying the miner with U.S. dollars and issued his pay in the form of scrip—company money good only in the company store. It was an insidious system. A popular song across the country in the late 1950’s was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” where he sang about a miner owing his soul to the company store. That was just about the truth for a lot of West Virginia miners.
As part of his social agenda, the Captain abolished the worst aspects of the company-store system in Coalwood. He brought in a college-educated manager—Mr. Devotee Dantzler, a Mississippi gentleman—to make certain prices were kept fair and no miner was gouged. The Captain dictated that credit could be given, when necessary, but the books were to be watched closely. No miner was allowed to get himself too far into debt. Scrip in Coalwood was issued sparingly. Smaller stores were built around the town for the convenience of the population. Under Mr. Dantzler, the Big Store became a source of town cohesiveness and a social gathering spot.
The Big Store contained a little bit of everything: hard-toe boots, leather utility belts, helmets, coveralls, and the cylindrical lunch buckets the miners favored; clothes for the whole family, groceries, and umbrellas; refrigerators, baby carriages, radios, and television sets with free installation onto the company cable system; pianos, guitars, record players, and a record department too. It had a drugstore where you could get Doc’s prescriptions and a wide variety of patent medicines, and a soda fountain where you could get pop and candy and a milk shake so thick a spoon would stand straight up in it. It had auto parts and lumber; shovels, picks, rakes, and seeds for the little gardens the miners scraped into the sides of the mountains. It even had a limited choice of coffins, hidden away in a back room. It was technically illegal to bury anyone on company property, but the colored people had a cemetery somewhere up Snakeroot Hollow. My father, and the company, looked the other way on it.
The Big Store had just about everything anybody in Coalwood needed, but would it have rocket fuel? With my cigar box of dollars and scrip left from my defunct newspaper delivery business, I went to Junior, the clerk at the drugstore counter, to find out. Junior was a rotund little man with a cherubic face, who was as smart as a whip and liked all over the town. When Junior worked on the store truck that delivered heavy things (like refrigerators) in the afternoon, he was welcome to come right into anybody’s house, even though he was a Negro. Most of the ladies loved him, even petted on him a little. He rarely got away from them after a delivery without some tea or coffee and cake. I saw him once in Mom’s kitchen, admiring her mural. Mom was beaming. It was rumored that Junior had once attended college, which put him ahead of even my father. Junior heard my order and cocked his head doubtfully. “Saltpeter?” he demanded in his raspy voice. “Your folks sent you after that?”
“It’s for me,” I said forthrightly. “Science project. I need sulfur and charcoal too.”
Junior adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles and seemed to make a mental calculation. Then he went into the back and brought out a can each of sulfur and saltpeter and a ten-pound bag of cooking charcoal. “Listen, rocket boy,” he said. “This stuff can blow you to kingdom come. I think you know what I’m saying.”
I mumbled, “Yessir,” and paid with scrip. I loaded my treasures on my bike and rode home. As I passed a line of miners walking to work, Mr. Dubonnet hailed me down. “I hear you’re going to build another rocket,” he said.
“Yessir. I’m thinking about going down to Cape Canaveral and joining up with Wernher von Braun.”
He seemed to brighten at the news. “That’s a good thing. You’re too smart to stay here.”
The line of coal cars beside us suddenly began slamming against each other, just before being pushed to the tipple. It was as loud as a hundred car wrecks happening all at once, but no one, including me, even bothered to look in its direction. We heard that sound every day. “Mr. Dubonnet, you’re smart too,” I said in an attempt to figure out why everybody lately seemed to want me out of town. “After the war, why did you come back to West Virginia if it’s so bad?”
He laughed. He had a deep, rich, ho-ho-ho kind of laugh that was wonderful to hear. “You got me there, Sonny.” He began to walk and I pushed my bicycle beside him. “I guess these old mountains, the mines, the people get in your blood,” he said. “When I got back from overseas I couldn’t wait to get home to McDowell County. It’s where I belong.”
There was the thing. He’d hit right on what I’d been wondering about since Mom’s backyard lecture. “How do you know I don’t belong here too?” I wondered.
He stopped and raised his eyebrows as if I had said the most amazing thing. I guess my ignorance was a continuing surprise to everyone in Coalwood. “Well, you do, of course,” he answered. “Anybody raised here belongs here. You can’t belong anywhere else.”
The empty coal cars shrieked as the locomotive, perhaps a mile down the track, began to push them toward the waiting tipple. I shouted to be heard. “Then I don’t understand why I’m supposed to leave!”
He stopped again, the other miners passing us by at a hard slog, the shift-change hour approaching. “Don’t you understand?” he yelled. “In just a few years, all this will be gone, almost like it never existed.” The coal cars began to roll and the noise lowered to a deep rumble. Mr. Dubonnet lowered his voice with them. “Even the union can’t put the coal back in the ground.”
I knew I probably shouldn’t ask him anything about my father, considering the row I’d observed between them, but I couldn’t resist. “Does my dad know this?”
Mr. Dubonnet grimaced. “He knows. But he acts like he don’t.”
“How come?”
“Now, that’s something you should ask him,”