Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

“It turns out,” Mom sighed, “that our Ohio owners had made a big deal with General Motors. It needed coal, and fast. The union could’ve asked for little pink hearts to be pasted on their lunch buckets and the company would’ve given it to them. Your dad was caught in the middle.”

O’Dell’s eyes were wide with excitement. “Then Mr. Dubonnet yells out so everybody can hear, ‘Homer signs this time!’”

Mom said, “Oh, your dad got hot! ‘You can forget that, John!’ he yelled. ‘I’m not signing anything!’”

“Mr. Dubonnet had the agreement all ready,” Billy told me. “He had this folder under his arm and he opened it and took out a paper and brought it over and shoved it right under your dad’s nose.”

Mom shook her head. “John told your dad, ‘I don’t often agree with you, Homer, but by God I trust you. The company will sign anything and then go do whatever it wants to do. But if your name’s on it, I know you’ll quit if the company tries to pull tricks. You sign it or there’s no agreement.’”

“Mr. Bundini signed it right off,” Roy Lee said. “Then he told your dad to sign it too.”

Mom was up on her ladder, painting in another seagull. At the rate she was going, her sky was going to be filled with them before she was through. “I told your dad to go ahead and sign. What difference would it make, after all? We were leaving for Myrtle Beach, weren’t we?”

She put down her brush, climbed down off the ladder, and eyed her work critically. “His look told me all I needed to know. I told him, ‘Oh, Homer, I should have known!’”

“Practically everybody in Coalwood was in a circle around the machine shop by then,” O’Dell said, his eyes wide with the memory of it. “Some women had even brought card-table chairs and were sitting down to watch. It was like a movie.”

“‘Elsie, if I sign this, it’s my word. I’ll have to stay.’” Mom shook her head, looked out at her rose garden and her telephone-pole-thick fence. “That’s what he said. I looked at everybody around us and then at the other boys and then up at these blamed old mountains. Well, what else could I say but what I did? I had to do it for you, didn’t I? I said, ‘Sign it, Homer.’”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. I really was, in a way.

She gave me her look that said she didn’t quite believe me. “Your dad asked me if I was staying with him. I told him if I did, he didn’t deserve it. Then you know what he said?”

“No, ma’am.”

“He said that was the truth.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and then went over and dabbed a little brown paint on a coconut. “Well, how could a woman leave a man who admitted he wasn’t good enough for her?”

Roy Lee shrugged. “And that was that. Your dad signed, and then Mr. Caton ran inside the shop and got busy. We boys went in and swept up while he and a couple of the other machinists did the work. People were coming in all the time, hurrying things up. O’Dell built you some new boxes, and I burned rubber all the way across Welch Mountain to make it to the Trailways station in time. When you called to say you won, I swear it was like the whole town cheered. You could hear it all up and down the valley.”

I listened to everybody who told me their version of the story and said the same thing to each of them and meant it too. “I wish I’d been there to see it.” In all its history, I think it was Coalwood’s best moment, even though my dad lost to the union, and my mom was forced to stay a little longer in the hills. Jake had it right. There’s a plan. If you’re willing to fight it hard enough, you can make it detour for a while, but you’re still going to end up wherever God wants you to be.

GRADUATION night finally came, and the Big Creek High School class of 1960 walked proudly down the aisle in the gymnasium to receive our diplomas, the boys in green gowns, the girls in white. Dorothy was our valedictorian. Quentin, his B’s in phys. ed. catching up with him, was the salutatorian, tied with Billy. Sherman and O’Dell were in the top ten. Roy Lee and I were back in the pack.

Dorothy made a speech. I stirred uncomfortably when she raised her eyes from her prepared remarks and seemed to be looking directly at me. She said, “I know each of us will always care what happens to every other person in our class. We have been very lucky to have been joined together by a wonderful experience—our three years together here at Big Creek High School. I will never forget… you.” Then she went back to her speech while I fidgeted.

When Mr. Turner handed me my diploma, he stopped me for a personal word. “You’ve brought great honor to this school,” he said. “Not bad work for a bomb builder.”

He had placed my National Science Fair medal in the trophy case of gleaming football awards along with an award certificate that read:

The boys and girls of Big Creek went back to their chairs and held their diplomas and looked at one another, filled with present joy and impending loss. Dorothy left before I could talk to her. I took Melba June to the graduation dance that night. Dorothy wasn’t there. I would not see her again for twenty-five years.

AFTER graduation, the BCMA gathered in my room. In a more perfect world, perhaps, everything would have worked out as Quentin hoped and we would have all gotten scholarships because of our win. It didn’t happen. Instead, O’Dell, Billy, and Roy Lee took the Air Force recruiter up on his offer. Immediately after graduation, they were headed for Lackland Air Force Base for basic training, and then they would use the GI Bill for college. Sherman said his parents had come up with some money for him to go to West Virginia Tech, and he was going to work for the rest of it. I decided to take my mother up on her offer of an Elsie Hickam scholarship. I was still trying to decide which college to go to, but I thought maybe the engineering program at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Quentin may not have gotten his scholarship either, but he said if boys from McDowell County, West Virginia, could win a prize at the National Science Fair, he was sure he could figure out how to go to college even if he didn’t have any money. He had decided to enroll at Marshall College in Huntington, West Virginia. He wasn’t certain how he was going to pay for it, but he’d figure it out when he got there. Somehow, I knew he’d do fine.

The only thing left for the BCMA to do was to decide what to do with the six rockets I had brought back from Indianapolis. Sherman suggested we split them among us for souvenirs, but Quentin wouldn’t hear of it. “Sonny, I’ve got a great idea,” he said. “See, we get this big balloon and fill it full of helium. Then we hang our best rocket from it and let it float up about ten miles and then launch. I’ve done the calculations. We’ll make it into space.”

O’Dell had another thought. “Let’s make a day of it,” he proposed. “Launch from morning to night. We’ll put up notices, have Basil write us up, make it a big deal.”

“It would be a way of thanking everybody,” Roy Lee said.

Sherman and Billy both said they liked it.

Quentin sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “We could have done it, you guys,” he said sadly. “We could have gone into space—”

“Aw, Quentin, it’s a miracle we ever got anything off the ground at all,” Roy Lee laughed. “Let’s do this and get out of town while we still can.”

FOR the last time, we posted our little notices at the Big Store and the post office. Between the ads for whole chickens and fresh milk in his paper, Basil did us proud: