"October Sky" by Homer Hickam, Chapters 1–4

I loved it when he had a moment to come out on the church porch and tell me a quick Bible story while I listened, astride my bike, fascinated by his sonorous voice.

The denomination of the preacher the company hired automatically became ours too. Before we became Methodists, I remember being a Baptist and, once for a year, some kind of Pentecostal.

When we ambushed some older boys—my brother, Jim, among them—who were playing cowboys up in the mountains, a great mock battle ensued until Tony, up in a tree for a better line of sight, stepped on a rotted branch and fell and broke his arm.

Mr. George L. Carter, the founder of Coalwood, came in on the back of a mule in 1887, finding nothing but wilderness and, after he dug a little, one of the richest seams of bituminous coal in the world.

When Mr. Carter’s son came home from World War I, he brought with him his army commander, a Stanford University graduate of great engineering and social brilliance named William Laird, who everyone in town called, with the greatest respect and deference, the Captain.

Almost immediately, the Captain saw something in the skinny, hungry lad from Gary—some spark of raw intelligence, perhaps—and took him as a protégé.

After a couple of years, the Captain raised Dad to section foreman, taught him how to lead men and operate and ventilate a mine, and instilled in him a vision of the town.

After a long piece of his intestine was removed, Dad confounded everybody by going back to work in a month.

Welch was a bustling little commercial town set down by the Tug Fork River, its tilted streets filled with throngs of miners and their families come to shop.

In their coveralls and helmets, they reminded me of newsreels I’d seen of soldiers slogging off to the front.

I was awakened in the morning by the tromp of feet and the clunking of lunch buckets outside as the day shift went to work, I ate supper after Dad saw the evening shift down the shaft, and I went to sleep to the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of an arc welder at the little tipple machine shop during the hoot-owl shift.

Every so often, somebody would come up with the idea of putting a penny on the track and getting it run over by the coal cars to make a big flat medal. We’d all do it then until we had used up our meager supply.

Stifling our laughter, we’d hand the crushed coppers across the counter at the company store for candy.

I wallowed through the coal and climbed down the outside ladder of the car and jumped for it, skinning my hands, knees, and elbows on the packed coal around the track.

Mom’s family did not share her aversion to coal mining.

We fell into the hall, me on the inside punching him in the stomach and him yowling and swinging at the air until we rolled down the stairs and crashed into the foyer, where I managed a lucky hit to his ear with my elbow.

Jack ran his bus in dictatorial fashion. The slightest breach in decorum would find the perpetrator kicked off on the side of the road, no matter where we were.

Jack ran his bus in dictatorial fashion. The slightest breach in decorum would find the perpetrator kicked off on the side of the road, no matter where we were.

At the top of the mountain, the road dropped precipitously and swung back and forth until it bottomed out into a long, narrow valley.

According to what I heard Mom tell Uncle Joe during a visit, a lot of people in Caretta had said some real nasty things about that, calling Dad "uppity.”

I had never asked any girl out, much less the exalted Dorothy Plunk.

I had no proclivity for football whatsoever.

“Sputnik, Homer.”
“Over West Virginia?” His tone was incredulous.

“President Eisenhower would never allow such a thing,” he said emphatically.

Roy Lee stared in abject admiration. “I don’t care if they break every bone in my body, I got to go out for football next year.”

Then I saw the bright little ball, moving majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines. I stared at it with no less rapt attention than if it had been God Himself in a golden chariot riding overhead.

It soared with what seemed to me inexorable and dangerous purpose, as if there were no power in the universe that could stop it.

I took one of the cherry-bomb fuses left over and stuck it in the hole and then glued the entire apparatus inside the fuselage of a dewinged plastic model airplane—I recall it was an F-100 Super Sabre.

There was an eyewitness, a miner waiting for a ride at the gas station across the street. For the edification of the fence gossipers, he would later describe what he had seen.

I fleetingly caught a glimpse of Roy Lee leaping over the still-standing part of the fence, clearing it by a good yard.

Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished.

Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished.

She looked at the smoldering ruin of her fence and sighed deeply.

“I know what I did was wrong, Mom,” I said in a bid to preempt whatever she had in mind.

“Sonny, do you think you could build a real rocket?”
She so startled me by her question that I forgot my usual coyness.

“Just go away,” I growled. “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?” he chided. “Trying to decide what dress to wear?”

The Football Fathers were besieged with demands from fans and the football team to do something.

“Elsie, I know what I’m doing,” he replied nonchalantly.

Jim’s face went dark and he shoved his chair back from the table. “I want to be excused,” he said sullenly.

Dad held up his right hand to his face, as if to shield it from Mom’s riveting gaze.

“And if the blind leadeth the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” she told him, making her argument unassailable because it was clearly on the side of the Lord.

In the decade that followed, an edgy peace between labor and management settled on our town, broken only by intermittent strikes, usually quickly settled.

Twenty-five men were cut off from the company. The phrase was apt. Not only were the men separated from their work, they were cut off from their homes, credit at the company stores, and identification as a Coalwood citizen.

A few of them surreptitiously moved up past Snakeroot and built shacks along the fringe of the woods, hoping someday to be rehired.

In December 1957, the United States made its first attempt to put a satellite into orbit with its Vanguard. I saw the result on television. Vanguard managed three tentative feet off the pad, lost thrust, and then blew up.