Beside the washing machine in the basement was a wide counter and a deep steel sink. I had decided it would be my rocket laboratory. As soon as I set my chemicals on the counter, the upstairs door opened. “Sonny?” Mom called, and I yes-ma’amed her. “Remember what I said. Don’t blow yourself up.”
News in Coalwood traveled a lot faster than a boy on a bike.
QUENTIN hitchhiked over on Saturday and I introduced him to my mother. He made a short bow at the waist to her, an Errol Flynn kind of move I’m sure he had seen in the movies. Mom was impressed by it, however, her hand going to her mouth almost like a bashful girl’s. She rarely baked cookies, but I soon smelled their aroma drifting down from the kitchen. When she thumped down the basement steps with them and two glasses of milk, the plate she handed Quentin was piled twice as high as mine. “These are marvelous, undoubtedly the most delicious cookies I have ever tasted in the entire history of my life,” Quentin told her after a nibble. Mom looked tickled. She wondered what else she could do for us.
“Nothing, Mom,” I answered. I just wanted her to leave so we could get to work.
She seemed to want to loiter. “If you need anything, just call me.”
“We will, Mom. See you later, Mom.”
After my mother had gone back to the kitchen, Quentin worked on his cookies for a while while I waited impatiently. Finally, he took a final swig of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and picked up the bag of saltpeter. He looked inside it. “Looks pure,” he said. I wondered how he would know.
With Dandy and Poteet watching us furtively from a dark nook beside the coal furnace, we began to work. First, we mixed up several small batches of what we hoped was black powder and, as a test, opened the grate and threw a spoonful of each into the coal-fired hot-water heater beside the washing machine. The ingredients hissed feebly, but it was impressive enough for the dogs to beg to be let out. I opened the basement door and they bolted outside. “What do you think?” I asked. Quentin shrugged. Neither of us knew how rocket fuel was supposed to burn.
We decided to test two of our best mixtures inside devices we hoped resembled rockets. There was some one-inch-wide aluminum tubing under the back porch that Dad had brought home from the mine to make a stand for Mom’s bird feeders. I appropriated it with a clear conscience since it looked as if he were never going to get around to it. I hacksawed off two one-foot lengths. Quentin called the lengths our “casements.” We hammered in a short length of broom handle at one open end and then poured in our powder mixes, crimping the other end with pliers to form a constriction the Life magazine diagram called the rocket “nozzle.” The result was obviously crude, but it was for testing purposes only. We attached triangular cardboard fins with model-airplane glue. We knew the fins would probably burn off, but they would at least give our rockets something to sit on. “We need to see how the powder acts under pressure,” Quentin said. “Whatever the result, we’ll have a basis for modification.”
I was becoming used to Quentin’s way of putting things. What he was saying was that we had to start somewhere, either succeed or fail, and then build what we knew as we went along. It seemed to me, considering all the rockets that I read about blowing up down at Cape Canaveral, that was the way Wernher von Braun and the other rocket scientists did their work too. Without Quentin, I might have been too embarrassed to fail in front of God and everybody. With him, no matter what happened, I felt “scientific.” Failure, after all, just added to our body of knowledge. That was Quentin’s phrase too. Body of knowledge. I liked the idea that we were building one.
After the fins dried, I decided we would test our creations behind my house, over by the creek. I didn’t think there was anything over there anybody would care about if we blew it up. To my surprise, Roy Lee appeared, claiming he just happened to be in the neighborhood. I think he’d actually been hanging around waiting for me and Quentin to come out.
The first rocket emitted a boil of nasty, stinking, yellowish smoke and then fell over, the glue on its fins melted. “Wonderful,” Roy Lee muttered, holding his nose. Quentin silently wrote the result down on a scrap of notebook paper. Body of knowledge.
The second rocket blew up. A good-size chunk of shrapnel twanged off the abandoned car we were hiding behind. A cloud of oily smoke covered us. Dad came out on the back porch and yelled, “Sonny! Get over here right now!” Obediently, we followed the smoke, reaching him as it did. He wrinkled his nose. “Didn’t I tell you not to do this again?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer. Mom came out “Homer, telephone.” She gave us boys a little smile while she waved the smoke away from her.
Dad went after the call and then came back out on the porch. He ignored Quentin and Roy Lee, his eyes on me. “As soon as I put the phone down, it rings again. People are complaining about the stink and smoke. I want this stopped. Do you understand me?”
Mom quickly amended his meaning. “Not behind the house, dear. You need to find a better place.”
Dad turned on her. “Elsie, they’ve got to stop trying to burn Coalwood down!”
She kept her smile on us boys. “Okay. I’ll make them promise. You won’t burn this wonderful, beautiful city down, will you, boys?”
“No, ma’am!” we chorused.
“You see?”
Dad stared at her and then shook his head and went inside. She followed him, leaving us boys to contemplate what had been, after all, our scorched, stinking failures. Quentin finished his notes. “First sample was too weak, the second too strong,” he said. “Now we know where we are. This is good, very good.”
Across the creek, some younger children gathered—dirty, snot-nosed urchins all. “Hey, rocket boys! Why don’t your rockets fly?” they chorused.
Roy Lee picked up a rock and they scattered, giggling.
I HITCHHIKED to War on Sunday afternoon. Dorothy’s house was across the railroad tracks on the mountain that overlooked the town. Her mother welcomed me with a delighted grin, as if she never wanted to see anybody more in her life. I could see a little of Dorothy in her face, but, unlike her daughter, she was a big, robust woman. Although Dorothy’s hair was a sandy color, her mother’s hair was the color of an orange. Dorothy’s father, a lanky, nearly bald man, stepped in from the kitchen and listlessly shook my hand. The owner of a gas station in War, I could tell he was used to Mrs. Plunk doing most of the talking. Both parents disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me and. Dorothy in the living room with our biology books. As it turned out, we didn’t study much. She wanted to know all about my rockets. “I’m so proud just to know somebody who does something so interesting!”
Emboldened, I told her I was going to try to learn as much as I could and go down to Cape Canaveral and join up with Wernher von Braun. “Oh, Sonny,” she said, “I know you’re going to be an important person someday. When you get to Florida, will you write me and tell me all about it?”
I struggled to find the nerve to tell her I didn’t want to write her, that I wanted her to be there by my side. But before I could find my voice, she said, “I want to be a teacher and a mom, the best one there ever was. I so love children—”
“So do I!” I exclaimed, although it was news to me. If Dorothy wanted it, I did too.
We continued talking, about friends and our parents. I told her about my mother—all the little funny things she did, about Chipper, her squirrel she kept in the house, and her mural on our kitchen wall. When I described Dad, all I could say was that he was in charge of the mine and worked a lot