The Essay A Novel (20 page)

He walked to the foot of the stairs and reached for a suitcase three times before finally latching hold of the handle. “What's the suitcase for?” I asked.

“What do you usually use a suitcase for?” he sneered.

“A trip?”

“Nothing gets by you, does it, college boy? I'm out of here. I'm done. I've had enough of all of ya. Virgil said he's got good work for me down in Florida. I'm leavin'.” He looked at my mother and said, “I'll have work and I won't have to listen to you bitchin' at me all hours of the day and night.” He looked at me and said, “And I won't have to hear any more of this hocus-pocus about you goin' to college.”

“Nick, I don't want you to leave. I don't . . .” Her words trailed off.

Anger was at the root of nearly every decision Nick Hickam ever made. Alcohol was his propellant, but anger was his engine. There was no reasoning with my dad when he had been drinking or when he had his mind made up, and both factors were currently at work. It was the third time to my recollection that he had left home. When I was in the sixth grade, he left for a month and shacked up with a divorcee in McArthur that he met at the Double Eagle and who apparently found beer breath and an eighth-grade education attractive. When I was in junior high, he left for a week. No one ever found out where he went that time. Edgel told me that he left home once or twice before I was born, but he always found his way back, broke and meaner than when he left.

He stomped down the front steps and threw his suitcase in the back seat. “Dad, don't you think you should at least wait until morning, maybe sober up a little?” Edgel asked.

Dad didn't answer. He gave Edgel a hateful look and climbed into the driver's side of his 1963 Plymouth Belvedere, a former police car he had bought at an auction. It still had red lights in the grill, rusted fenders, and the faint outline of a badge on the driver's door. He slammed the door shut and after a moment of fumbling with his keys, twisted hard on the ignition.

And it wouldn't start.

It whined and backfired twice, and then started the slow
woo, woo, woo, woo
as the battery exhausted itself. He pounded twice on the dashboard, cursed, and tried the ignition again. Nothing but
click, click, click
.

The dramatic departure of Nick Hickam was halted by the failure of yet another of his two-hundred dollar junkers. The three of us, even my tear-streaked mother, choked back grins as my dad climbed out of the car and began kicking the door. “You sonofabitch,” he yelled with each of a half-dozen kicks.

“Give me a ride to Route 50,” he yelled to Edgel. “I'll hitchhike, goddammit.”

“You're going to hitchhike to Florida?” Edgel asked.

“You're goddammed right I am.” He didn't wait to see if Edgel was agreeable. Rather, he grabbed his suitcase from the back seat of the Belvedere and threw it in the back of the Rocket, then got in on the passenger side, arms folded over his chest and looking straight ahead.

Edgel was resigned to his job. “I'll be back in a little bit,” Edgel said as he started down the steps. “I'll try to talk some sense into him on the way over.”

The last time Edgel saw my dad he was standing along the berm of Route 50, thumb out, walking backward toward Athens.

“Did he say if he'd call when he got there, or anything?” Mom asked over a dinner of pancakes and fried eggs.

“Mom, he didn't say one damn word the whole ride. When I stopped at the stop sign at White Road and Route 50, he got out, grabbed his bag and started hitchhiking. He wouldn't even look at me. I watched him for a minute, then turned around and left. What the hell. He's like a damned mule; he wasn't going to listen to reason.”

I didn't like the look on Edgel's face. It was suddenly dour and his eyes distant, not unlike the face I had seen so many times before in the prison visiting room.

“God damn that Mr. Morgan,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “He'd been a good worker for twenty years. Why didn't that bastard just give him his job back, for Christ's sake?”

Chapter Sixteen

T

here was not much to cheer about in southern Ohio in the autumn of 1973. Along the Ohio River, the steel mills and electric generating plants, long the faithful consumers of Vinton County coal, were crumbling under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency for cleaner smokestack emissions. The culprit of the pollution was the high-sulfur coal that was pulled from the mines in our area. The river industries began buying coal from Wyoming and other Western states, even South America, that met the new governmental standards.

As the demand for Vinton County coal dwindled, the mines began to close. The big mining companies—Hudson Mining, Sunday Creek Mineral & Coal, Gem of Egypt Mining, Big Muskie Mines— all closed operations. None of the communities that speckled the Appalachian foothills had ever prospered. They were poor towns that scratched out an existence like the miners who lived there, but once King Coal was gone, death came quickly. The coal mines were simply the first to fall in a long line of dominoes. The stores and bars and businesses that relied on the paychecks of the coal miners began to struggle. Some closed. Others changed hands a few times, but eventually they all met with a similar fate.

But that fall, the East Vinton Elks had given the folks in those destitute hollows and dales something to cheer about. It had been years since East Vinton's football team had recorded a winning season, and decades since its last conference championship. We went from conference doormat to conference contender in three years. In the tiny communities of Creola, New Plymouth, Wilkesville, and Zaleski, porches were decorated in navy and gray crepe paper. “Go Elks” signs that the booster club had printed were taped to windows throughout the school district. The cheerleaders painted spirited words on car windows in the school parking lot with white shoe polish and passed out ribbons that read, “Crush the Crusaders.”

The students at the Zaleski Elementary School made a six-foot-tall good-luck card that was signed by every student in the school. It was great fun to be pivotal to such excitement. When I walked down the hall, kids were patting me on the shoulder and telling me good luck. It was a far cry, I thought, from my freshman year when I was virtually invisible in the same hallway except for looks of derision.

No one was talking about the essay competition, except for Miss Singletary, of course, who was relentless with her drills. Actually, it was probably good for me. It gave me time to clear the McArthur Central Catholic Crusaders from my brain. “You know, Coach Battershell always lets up on us a little right before a game,” I told her, hinting that I was prepared for the essay contest.

“That's nice, but I'm not Coach Battershell,” she said, handing me another blue notebook to fill. “I'm Coach Singletary and we're going to work right up until kickoff.”

Thursday night practices were called our “socks and jocks” workouts. We wore no pads other than helmets and ran through the plays a final time before the game. It was by far the easiest practice of the week. Afterward, the Athletic Mothers Club had a spaghetti dinner for us in the school cafeteria. “We're proud of you, no matter what happens tomorrow night,” said Carroll Ullrich, the president of the club and mother of our split end and kicker.

She was being nice and expressing a sentiment that was close to the surface of every parent and fan. Outside of the players and coaches, no one thought we had much of a chance against Central Catholic. We were the upstarts, the team that put a nice season together once every two decades, and the Crusaders were a perennial state power. Most of our fans silently harbored the belief that we would be soundly defeated, but they would be proud of us nonetheless, as though trying to soften the blow of the inevitable loss.

After the spaghetti dinner, I got a ride home with Coach Battershell, who used the time to drill me on the McArthur Central Catholic running scheme. Mom was sitting in the living room in her nightclothes, a worn and faded terrycloth robe that held little of its original blue and a pair of open-toed slippers that had worn through under her heels. Her brown hair was still damp from the shower and clinging around her face, and she sat with her dime-store reading glasses on the end of her nose and a tabloid from the truck stop in her lap. She looked remarkably at peace, as though my dad's departure had relieved her of a terrible weight. I realized that there is a look of weariness worn by people who are always scared. It's not caused by fear, but by the anticipation of fear and the knowledge that it cannot be avoided. When my dad wasn't home, Mom could never totally relax because he was always out there, drunk and mean, angry at life, and ready to come home and take it out on his family. When he was home, the slightest misstep could send him into a fury.

“Did you hear from Dad?” I asked.

Mom shook her head and looked back down to the tabloid. “No. Maybe he'll call when he gets to wherever it is he's going.”

“Where's Edgel?” The Rocket 88 had not been in its usual place.

“He's off working.”

“This late?”

“He said something about having to make an overnight run for the Farnsworth boys—over to West Virginia, somewhere, to pick up some parts.”

“It couldn't wait until tomorrow morning?”

She looked back up, blinking twice and staring at me over the top of her glasses. “I didn't ask him, Jimmy Lee. I'm glad he's got the work. I'm going to need a little extra help around here.”

“Okay. I've got some homework. I'll see in you the morning.”

“Good night, sweetheart,” she said, already back to her reading.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned back. “Mom, you know that tomorrow night is Senior Night? You and Dad were supposed to walk out on the field with me before the game. You think maybe Edgel will come with you instead?”

“I expect he'd be tickled to do it. I'll ask him in the morning.”

I went on up the stairs and read two chapters of world history and made a half-hearted attempt to write the last assignments Miss Singletary had given me before the competition. As I wrote, my chin kept falling to my chest and my pencil ran off the page. Finally, I gave up, set the notebook atop my history book and crawled into bed.

At a few minutes before 3
AM
on Friday, the day of the big game, I was awakened from a hard sleep by my mother, who was standing at the foot of my bed, rolling her hands upon one another. “Get dressed and come downstairs,” she said.

It took me a minute to get my bearings. “What's wrong?”

She was already heading out of the room. “Just come downstairs.”

I pulled on a pair of jeans and an “Elks Football” T-shirt and followed her down the stairs. She was standing at the railing on the front porch, the radio that was usually on the counter in the kitchen was at her feet, the electric cord stretched through the torn screen door and plugged into an outlet in the living room. The placid look that had been on her face a few hours earlier was gone. Her eyes were red-rimmed and a damp tissue was balled up in her fist.

“What's wrong, Mom?”

She nodded to the southwest. I looked over a moonless sky, unsure of what I was looking for until I spotted an orange glow that reached over a distant hill line. It was not unlike the flicker of a television in a dark room with staccato bursts of light flashing off the cloudy sky. Mom dabbed at her eyes. I didn't understand. Somewhere, deep in the hills between the deserted mining town of Moonville and McArthur, an inferno raged. It took a baritone newscaster at WCHI in Chillicothe to make things clear.

Good morning, this is Chet West at WCHI, your southern Ohio news leader. And this is your three o'clock report. Firefighters from four area departments are fighting a raging fire at the Morgan Lumber Company outside of McArthur. The blaze was spotted shortly after 1
AM
by Vinton County Sheriff's Deputy Dewey LaMarr, who was on patrol in the area. LaMarr told WCHI that flames were already shooting out of the roof of the building when he spotted the fire. We have Deputy LaMarr on the phone. Deputy, thanks for joining us . . .