wo remarkable events happened the winter I was fourteen: my Daddy lost his job and Floyd Collins got himself stuck down a cave.
My daddy worked at the tobacconists down by the coal camp and he knew Carl Carlisle since his school days, but all the same, Carl said it was getting tight around the store and he’d have to let him go and he hoped he didn’t mind. At least that’s what Daddy said. Mama was angrier than he was and broke two wooden spoons on the kitchen table and cursed to surprise even me. Daddy just kind of wandered, not walked, out the kitchen door and went down the road without his winter hat. He wasn’t home for dinner and Mama said he could just stay at the Blue Hog as long as he wanted for all she cared but that night she went and got him anyway.
The next day, at school, I heard about Floyd. Mama told the class, “That Collins boy’s missing and they think he’s caught in a cave. This is why your folks don’t want you running around the caves by yourself.”
Some of the boys seemed excited, whispering to each other across the aisle, and some of the girls began to squirm, and Lila, who cried at least once a week in school, began to sniffle. Her voice shook and her nose ran as she asked Mama, “Is he going to die down there?”
“Shush, now. He’ll be just fine. They’ve got men who know every cave in Kentucky out there and the police and Collins family. They’ll probably get him out before the end of the day.” Mama did not look at Lila as she spoke. Mama never looked at you when you cried.
Lydon Hopstreet was one of the best looking boys in eighth grade and Mama liked him all right and I guess so did I.
She told Daddy, “The youngest Hopstreet is sweet on Clemmy.”
He looked at me. “And?”
“He wants to take her out with his family after church,” she said.
Daddy ran his bread heel through the last of the gravy on his plate. “I suppose that’d be fine.”
“I’ll give you something in case they don’t bother for lunch,” Mama told me. She took the bread basket off the table and snapped her hand towel at the crumbs on the table, sending them to the floor.
“He’s a nice boy,” I said to Daddy, guessing.
He nodded and kept his head down.
Daddy was home now during the day and out at night. I used to know how to talk to him after school, after dinner, before bed. But I stopped telling him about school because he didn’t like to hear about Mama’s work. When I saw him, he looked uncomfortable to be around his own house. It made me feel like maybe I should be uncomfortable, too.
He paced the creaky floorboards like the little bear the Doggards kept in a cage by the side of the road. For a nickel, you could walk right up to him and watch him throw his shoulders against the side of the cage to make the cage and you rattle. The bear seemed stronger, and smaller, than I’d expected.
Pastor Olsen rubbed his hands together and took a drink of water. Several babies began to cry.
The church was a one-story farmhouse with the walls between the living room and dining room knocked down to make room for twenty pews. The air inside didn’t move. I shifted in my seat and sighed. I tried to straighten the hem of my dress, which crumpled no matter how many times Mama ironed it. My Sunday dress was fading badly and I began to become a little ashamed of it, especially because Lydon would take me out after. I hoped to find a newer-looking dress at the camp second hand shop, but nothing fit. I was getting fat in the stomach. Pastor Olsen had us pray for Floyd, and for everyone who was lost.
At fourteen, I had already mastered the art of half-paying attention to Pastor Olsen. It got so I only listened when he talked about himself.
“About eleven at night on August eighth, the late Julius Hanson, a neighbor, came to inform us that my sister had been in an accident. One of my parents asked if she was hurt. Mr. Hanson answered, ‘She’s dead.’ Some of the first words my Mother said, in Norwegian, were, ‘Oh, where is her soul?’ It took this tragedy in our home to bring my Mother back to the Holy Father. It became also the means to stir my heart again into the realization of my lostness and my need of deliverance.”
I had buried three tomcats but I’d never had a relative die. Probably just because we didn’t have many, Mama and Daddy being just about the only ones left as far as I knew.
After church, I met Lydon’s family and we all went to see Floyd. I was so happy to be out of the house for a whole day. Lydon’s Uncle Brewster was in town from Louisville and had brought his Model T. Lydon kept elbowing me as he walked towards it, saying, “Not bad, huh?” but it looked like the toys the younger kids at school played with, only gone huge and silly. It was unnaturally shiny. Nothing was shiny in January except, sometimes, the crick when it froze through. Lydon grinned as his uncle pulled down a divider seat for us in the back of the car.
I’d made a honey and butter sandwich that morning and kept it in my coat pocket. I thought I could throw it down to Floyd, who was probably not getting many honey sandwiches. I also brought a comb and powder case I made Mama buy for me, which seemed to try her.
“You’re going to waste my money on that nonsense. At your age,” she said, scowling, as she handed over the money.
Lydon sat next to me and sometimes his knee would bump mine, making my stomach hurt. His mom and aunt sat across from us and didn’t stop talking for a breath till Brewster leaned back and shouted, “We’re here. Will you take a look at this traffic? Looks like half Kentucky showed up.”
“My word,” Lydon’s mother said as she peered out the window. “These buggies need to get out of our way. Honk the horn, Brewster.”
More people were standing outside that hole in the ground than I’d ever seen at the county fair. I couldn’t get close enough to see the hole, much less throw down my sandwich. And the folks ahead of me and Lydon weren’t even talking to Floyd. Far as I could tell, they were talking to each other, and mostly about sports and taxes. There was Bub Former and those two McGuires who used to run the coal camp general store, where folks bought their calico, needles, hangover remedies, salve and any number of elixirs to soothe sooty lungs, all of them talking a mile a minute as if they were still important, as if anyone had to listen to them anymore. Some of the men I recognized by their voices, size, shoulder slopes, by their hands, but their faces looked naked and bleached without a layer of coal dust. Only a few people seemed to remember Floyd was there.
“Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was headed?” a man said.
“Wouldn’t’ve done him any good.”
“Hope he’s got a coat.”
“How long you suppose you could go without food?”
“About six hours.”
Lydon lead me around the outside of the crowd. He asked me if I enjoyed church that day and I asked him how his geography project was going. He said he hadn’t started yet. I said he should consider Egypt. “It’s just deserts and one big river,” I said. We passed a cluster of men around a fiddler and I hoped Floyd couldn’t hear the music.
It was cold and unpleasantly bright that day. Too bright to see, too cold to smell. A blue jay screamed at the trespassers from an ash tree nearby.
Lydon bought me a sock doll with button eyes and a yarn mouth that had Floyd Collins, ’25 stitched onto its chest. So I’d remember. I wondered which inventive town person had come up with that idea. Someone was selling hot tea and someone else had sandwiches. All the people laughing and chattering made me feel restless and wrong. Two men ushered two other men into a buggy parked under a Pignut and in a moment, the visitors left with smothered smiles and two tin cups. Lydon elbowed me again. “Think we should get something to drink?” he asked. I didn’t know how he meant it, so I laughed. He looked handsome when he didn’t have that grin on his face. It made him look like a little boy, apple-cheeked and laughing at some stupid joke. I felt silly standing next to him.
“That’s a Red Tailed Hawk,” Lydon told me, pointing to a vulture who was circling higher and higher until he disappeared.
When we met back up with his family, Lydon’s mother’s cheeks were bright red. “You’ll never guess where that lady was from. Cleveland. Doesn’t that beat all?”
“I think I met a gentleman from Memphis. Probably a businessman,” the aunt said with some tone of authority. "Said nothing can stop money in Tennessee, said sooner or later everyone here's going to move there, land of milk and honey and all that, called us the land of coal and lichen and I told him I don't even know what lichen is. Clementine," the aunt said and looked at me for the first time, "ask your mother what lichen is."
“Your mother,” Lydon’s mother told me, “should take you all here. To learn about caves and not wandering down every hole you see. And to wear a hat,” she said, then looked at the aunt. “I mean, really. No hat. No gloves.”
The aunt nodded her head solemnly, like people did at church. “And can you imagine how his mother must feel?”
“Maybe I should send her something.”
“You’re too thoughtful.” The aunt plucked a pill from her felt skirt and flicked it Lydon-ward. "There's money in lichen, you think?"
“It’ll give me a chance to try that new sweet potato pie recipe.”
“Those army men look so strong,” the aunt said, sighing. The blue jay kept screaming.
“I might join the military,” Lydon told me, “when I’m older.”
“If I ever get stuck down a well or a cave,” his mother announced, “I hope they send those boys after me.”
“I think it’s a shame the police couldn’t do it on their own. Our boys have more important affairs to attend to than the Collins boy. And did you see the redhead soldier? My word.”
The next day, I couldn’t pay attention in school. I got worn out, always being around Mama, at home and at school, and never being around Daddy. I’d drift off during the day, thinking about that man stuck under the ground.
I wondered what songs he was humming to himself and I wondered what songs I would sing if I was in his place. Not Nearer My God to Thee, you can't sing that in the bottom of a cave. Maybe There's a Wideness, Abide With Me, or One Who is All Unfit. Or maybe just one of Clete Hindman's songs about ladies and the Blue Hog and wasn't Gray Hill better when he was young. I thought about how well he was sleeping, if he was sleeping. I also wondered if Daddy would want to see Floyd. Daddy wasn’t having any fun as it was and maybe the trip would be good for him. Show him that someone had it bad, too. And maybe he’d meet a man from a big town who’d give him a job and we could all move away but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to the cave. The radio said that morning that the men digging him out had caused a cave-in and blocked the entrance.
Mama yelled at me twice during the day and almost made me stay after school, except that I have to do that every day to wait for her anyway.
On the way home, she walked too quickly for me and I had to skip a step every once and a while to keep up.
She was holding her lips tight together and looked at me and said, “I know what’s been on your mind, lately,” like it was a threat. “It’s Lydon, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” was all I could say. I asked if she’d heard anything about Floyd during the day.
“No, thank God.”
“Why is it taking so long?”
“Because people are incompetent.”
“People?” I asked and looked at my shoes. “You think the army’ll be able to get him out?”
“They’d better. You can’t go without water for more than a week.”
“How long has it been?”
“More than a week. You know,” she said, “I heard an interview with the commander in charge of the scheme. He said they’re on track and that the last cave-in was part of their plan.” Mama rolled her eyes. She had embarrassingly little faith in the police or the army. That summer, the police wouldn’t charge our neighbor, Tom Salks, for shooting our beagle, Elmira. And the firemen, she says, let our barn burn down because we didn’t go to the dance they have every year. I’m not sure what she had against the army, but she sure didn’t seem to think much of them either.
“I prayed for Floyd last night,” I told her.
“Me, too.”
“You think he’ll be okay?” She didn’t answer. “Cause why pray if you don’t?” I said, a little nervous.
She stepped over a slush pile and said, “Try not to ruin your dress, will you?”
We kept the radio on all night at home, and Mama even put it on at recess. It became useful at home, because no one had to speak at dinner. We’d sit there, staring at the box like we could understand the voices better by looking at it. Mostly it was Floyd, but also there were crop estimates for the next year and harvest, general coal outrage, and, sometimes, a storywriter would come on and read us something. One was a true story about a man who saved his family and the neighbors from a bear by beating him to death with an axe handle. Sometimes, Lydon would come over for dinner. Then we’d talk some. I could tell that Lydon didn’t much like talking to his teacher at the dinner table and that Daddy seemed to frighten him. Seeing Lydon next to Daddy made Lydon look like a chubby, sleepy baby and Daddy like a lumberjack.
“You should’ve seen him before, though,” I told Lydon one night after dinner.
“Before what?”
I didn’t want to tell him. “Before winter. Before Floyd. You’ll like him better in the spring,” I said.
Lydon stretched. “I can’t wait for spring.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m gonna try out for the baseball team. Think I’ll make it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”
“Dinner was good. I love pork chops.”
“Yes,” I said.
A door shut and a wave of cold air rushed through the living room. “Was that your Dad?”
“Yes.” I began to feel as if I didn’t have to answer for Lydon to continue.
Daddy left after dinner, always, and it got so I didn’t like having Lydon over. He told me he thought it was strange Daddy didn’t stay and maybe I did, too.
Girls like Alice Ians or Greta Tomshaw’d giggle and ask me if Lydon’d kissed me and wanted to know everything about where we went and what we said to each other. I didn’t know what to tell them. “He’s all right, I guess,” was all I came up with.
One day, Lydon walked me home from school and we hung back a block or so from Mama. He asked me about the poem we had to memorize, and if I’d chosen one yet. I said no, that I didn’t feel like reading poetry in front of the whole class and he said, “I know what you mean.”
Then he asked if I heard anything about Floyd and I said no. He said Greta Tomshaw had passed him a note and wanted to know what we were up to. He said I looked pretty that day. Then he said his brother and Evelyn Williams were going to get married so they could see each other naked and kiss and touch each other. He talked about it long enough that I got the hint.
“I just don’t think I could,” I said. I was quiet for a long time and I scrunched my mouth from one side to the other and kicked some rocks out of my path. It took about a minute of that before he kicked a water pump and cut through the Neckers’ yard.
I had to run to catch up with Mama.
Mama was cleaning the table when the radioman began talking, loud and rushed. “On the eighteenth day of the Floyd Collins crisis, we have an update,” he began.
The army men had found a new route after the one caved in, and they had reached Floyd, three days dead. Mama set down the bowl of potatoes on the table and looked at Daddy, who was halfway out the door. He stood there, letting the winter air fill the room.
“Fools,” Mama said in her spiteful voice and crossed herself. “Bickering, arrogant fools.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was a little glad he got to die in private. If he’d been rescued, what would he say to the crowd? To the man selling sandwiches?
Daddy pulled out a chair and Mama shut the door. He slumped like someone let the air of his chest.
“I can’t believe it,” Daddy said. He held his head in his hands. Mama stood behind him and put her worn hands on his shoulders. I looked away because I didn’t want to see him cry.
“I just can’t believe it,” he said. I could. And I was only surprised that I wasn’t surprised.
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