Chapter 6: Iron Hoop

With much less fanfare than Maddie Flanagan, Nate and his Uncle Henry pulled out of Hank Thompson’s and went on to Jim Frank’s place. When they got there, Jim Frank and Henry went through their normal routine of greetings, opening cans of beer, and lighting up smokes. Nate idly examined the hubcaps nailed to the porch, while the two men talked about how Jim Frank configured his junk. When Nate got to the back edge of the porch, he leaned against the rail and looked around the corner. There, hanging on the side of the house, was an old, rusted hoop. It looked like the kind of hoop that held barrel staves together, or it could’ve been the rim of a small wagon wheel. One thing was certain, it had been on the wall for a long time, judging by the rust stains that ran down to the ground.

Nate reached over and pulled it off the wall and examined it. It was heavy and solid and still substantial in spite of years of rusting away.

“What’s this?”

Henry stopped talking. He had never noticed the hoop before, either.

“What’s that?” he said, “An old wheel or something?”

For a long time, Jim Frank just stared silently at the circle of rust in Nate’s hand, until Nate thought he’d burn his fingers with the Pall Mall.

“Iron Hoop,” he said and looked away.

Slowly a look of recognition came over Henry’s face. “You mean from that old cave?”

No one in Nate’s family talked about Iron Hoop Cave much, except in hushed tones and when they thought the children couldn’t hear. It was definitely forbidden to bring it up around Grandmother Tillman. It was where her husband had died in an accident. Nate had asked his mother about it once and she had said that it upset Grandmother Tillman and not to bring it up ever again. Now he was holding something solid in his hands that had to do with it, and he wanted to know more about the cave and what had happened.

Nate looked at Jim Frank. “Tell me about it.”

“Not much to tell,” he said with a shrug. “There was this old cave back in the woods, just a creep hole at the top. Could hardly tell it was there.” Jim Frank tugged and pulled at his tee shirt. “It was hard to see, so someone set this iron hoop above the entrance so you could find it. Folks called it Iron Hoop Cave because of it.”

Jim Frank took the iron hoop out of Nate’s hands and hefted it for a second before putting it back on the wall. “Like I said, wasn’t much to tell.”

“I mean tell me about my granddaddy. Tell me how he died.”

Holding the hoop reminded Nate of how he felt when he heard the story about Grandmother Tillman aiming her rifle at Ricky Thornton. Both smacked of adventure. Nate had always thought of himself as dull and insignificant. He saw his father: quiet, bland, and always sitting passively and silently on the edge of things. He assumed he would be the same. Last Sunday, however, he had found out that his grandmother pointed rifles at people and he had just now been holding something that made Jim Frank uneasy and not want to talk about Nate’s grandfather. It might be that he could’ve inherited something from his grandparents, this mysterious association with adventure. He felt that he had to know the story of Iron Hoop and how his grandfather died.

Jim Frank said, “It’s been laid to rest many years now. Let it be.”

“I need to know about my granddaddy and Iron Hoop Cave.”

Nate sounded confident, like a long-lost heir demanding the keys to his boarded-up estate. There was something in the story that belonged to him, and he had a right to it. It might tell him where he’d come from and maybe who he could be.

Jim Frank sat down heavily in his caned chair. “Well, Henry, you’d better pass me another beer and light me up a fresh cigarette.”

Henry hurriedly obliged. He struggled with the lighter and was almost as excited as Nate. Obviously, Hattie had never talked to him much about it either. For a moment, the air smelled again of beer, tobacco, and lighter fluid.

“Your granddaddy worked for the railroad, riding around on one of those hand-cars, inspecting tracks and supervising repair crews. He was a slender, wiry man, and when he wasn’t pumping one of those hand-cars around, he loved to slither and shimmy down holes in the ground.”

Nate reached around and pulled the hoop off the wall. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the porch and laid the hoop in front of himself. He wanted it there just so he could look at it and touch it while he listened. Henry and Jim Frank looked at it and nodded. They understood.

“Well, your granddaddy would usually take two or three of us young fellows with him when he felt like exploring. I guess we were your age.”

Nate felt even more connected now to the hoop and drew it closer to himself.

“He’d take some carbide lamps and other stuff from the railroad equipment shed—they had lots of stuff for working in tunnels—and we’d dive down into these old caves around the area.”

“What’s a carbide lamp?” Nate asked. He’d been well trained in his Saturday rides with his Uncle Henry to ask leading questions.

“Carbide’s a crystal kind of stuff,” Jim Frank said. “Drop it in water and it gives off a gas that burns with a bright light. Coal miners and tunnelers used these carbide lamps to light their way underground before there was battery-powered lamps. You’d fill the lamp with water and drop some carbide in it. There was a little pin valve where you could regulate how much gas flowed out, and you’d light the gas there. You could adjust the brightness of the lamp by regulating the flow of the gas.”

“Like a kerosene lantern,” Nate said.

“Yeah, but safer and easier,” Jim Frank replied, “Because you didn’t have to lug any fuel around, just a small can of carbide and some water. Anyway, your granddaddy would bring some of these lamps home with him sometimes, and he’d take some of us caving.”

“Did Seth, Louis, or Gabriel ever go,” Henry asked.

“They were too small,” Jim Frank said. “Mrs. Tillman would never allow it. She said it was bad enough to have to clean the cave mud out of her husband’s clothes without having to clean up a bunch of small boys, too. Mainly, though, I think she was worried that something would happen to them.”

Jim Frank continued with the story. “Three of us went out with him that last time: me, Jeremiah Lightcap, and Luther Hanley. You know Jeremiah Lightcap, Nate, that’s Doc Lightcap. You probably don’t remember Luther Hanley, he’s been long gone out of Davis Corners for awhile now, but you know his youngest boy, Grub.”

Nate was awestruck. He never would have imagined those three people being associated with each other, nevertheless with his grandfather. Jim Frank saw his open mouth.

“I know it’s hard to imagine the town doctor and the town junkman being friends when they were boys, but we were. Jeremiah wasn’t much to speak of back then. It wasn’t until after your granddaddy died that Jeremiah got serious about his own life. As for Luther, none of us liked him. He was mean spirited, but your granddaddy was a nice fellow who wouldn’t turn anybody away.

“It was a real hot day in August and we thought we’d just do some light exploring, you know, just to get into the coolness of the caves, more than anything. There was no air conditioning back then, and caves stay at sixty-something degrees all the time. It was a great way to cool down in summer.”

As Nate listened to Jim Frank, he remembered how he and his parents used to go to the movies on Saturdays at the Roxy when it was the only air-conditioned building in town. He could imagine the cool air of the caves and how his granddaddy and Jim Frank probably felt when they got down deep enough to feel it.

“We poked around in this one cave for awhile when your granddaddy suggested we explore Iron Hoop on the way back. Iron Hoop was a tough cave, a long crawl on your belly getting in and a lot of tight squeezes along the way. It opened up real nice after a quarter mile or so and was your granddaddy’s favorite cave because not many people ever went there. That tough crawl at the beginning kept them away, I reckon.

“We drove over to Iron Hoop, and your granddaddy went right in and the rest of us crawled after him. We all worked up a sweat getting through the first set of squeezes and were sitting around letting the chill of the cave set in when your granddaddy spotted something he’d never seen before. In the bottom of this bowl-like depression we were sitting in was a tiny opening between two rocks. He told us he thought it could lead to a big chamber. Your granddaddy was always pushing through small crawl-ways, looking for big rooms no one had ever discovered before. Jeremiah asked your granddaddy why he thought so.

“’Look around,’ your granddaddy told him. Me, Luther, and Jeremiah all looked. It was mostly mud and rock, the usual cave stuff—a little damper maybe—but there were all these leaves and acorns on the floor.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“Same question I asked your granddaddy,” Jim Frank said. “Your granddaddy laughed at me and said they had to come from up top, unless we remembered passing any oak trees since we climbed in there. So I asked how they got down into the cave.

“He explained to us that the cave must flood when it rained and the water carried the leaves and acorns down there.

“Jeremiah asked him where the water went and your granddaddy smiled and pointed to the crack between the two rocks. ‘It’s got to go down there,’ he said, and that’s why he believed there was a chamber if we squeezed far enough.

“Well, none of us boys were real excited about going down that little crack, but your granddaddy was all determined to push it and find that chamber. We told him we’d wait while he explored it first. That’s all it took for your granddaddy, once he saw that we were scared, it made him all the more determined to do it himself. He backed into the crack. Your granddaddy always backed through the tight spaces, said there was less chance of getting trapped that way, God rest his soul.”

Jim Frank drank slowly from the Pabst Blue Ribbon can, as if in memorial to Nate’s grandfather.

“We kept hollering to him to make sure he was all right. He’d got about fifteen feet in when we heard a muffled sound like one or two rocks moving. We heard your granddaddy cuss so we figured he was all right. It made us giggle to hear him swear. Your granddaddy was a righteous man.”

That made Nate remember something his Uncle Henry had told him on one of their Saturday rides. The ash from his Pall Mall had gone down his shirt when he tried to flick it out the open window. He had said “goddamn” as it burned his neck. Nate had never heard him curse before, and his astonishment had shown.

“Don’t be a man who curses loosely,” Henry had said, “Otherwise you won’t have anything to say when something really pisses you off, like a piece of fire blowing down your neck.”

As Nate listened to Jim Frank’s story, it struck him that his grandfather was probably glad he’d saved his cuss words for then.

“We hollered down to him to see if he was okay and to find out what had happened, and he called back to us that he was stuck.” Jim Frank stopped and drew hard on the Pall Mall. “We all kind of laughed at the idea of him being stuck. The idea that he might be in any kind of danger hadn’t struck any of us. We sobered up, though, when we realized that at least one of us was going to have to go in and help him. I guess we all realized it at the same time and quit laughing. Finally, Jeremiah said he’d go down and get him out. He slithered into the crack headfirst, pushing his carbide lamp and a coil of rope ahead of him. All we heard for the longest time was huffing and groaning and cuss words. None of it seemed funny anymore; we were getting scared.

“Luther was a regular pain in the ass during all of this, going on about how your granddaddy was trapped and wasn’t ever going to get out and describing how he’d die slow and miserable. He kept saying as how your granddaddy was bat-food for sure. I was just about to hit him when we saw Jeremiah’s feet pop out of the crack. We pulled the rest of him out and asked how things looked.

“He said fine but that your granddaddy had got himself stuck good. It seemed that as your granddaddy was backing through a tight squeeze, he kicked a big rock loose and it wedged right behind his knee so he couldn’t straighten his leg out. With his leg cocked like that, he couldn’t go further in or pull himself out. Jeremiah said that the rock had slipped in there like the last piece of a puzzle and had locked him in just as pretty as you please.

“I asked Jeremiah what we were going to do and Luther Hanley kept saying it didn’t make any difference, your granddaddy was bat-food for sure. Jeremiah said we were going to have to dig him out. I said I’d go get picks and shovels, but Jeremiah said there wasn’t enough room to swing a pick and it was too rocky for shovels. He told me to go get a hammer and some chisels, that’s all there’d be room for.”

“We took turns for four hours chipping away in that crawl hole. It was terrible, just getting to your granddaddy was hard. Once we reached him, there was hardly any room to move or get a good swing with the hammer. You were really just swinging with your wrist so you couldn’t put any strength in it. The rock around him was hard too, and wasn’t giving in any. Finally, we realized it was more than we were going to be able to get done, so we decided to go to town for help. We got out of the cave and it was almost dark. Jeremiah told Luther to stay and keep animals out of the cave and to keep checking on your granddaddy. He told me to get to town and let the sheriff know what had happened. He said he was going to see Mrs. Tillman to let her know and to get some food and blankets. I drove your granddaddy’s car into town, and Jeremiah ran over to see your grandmother. We were only about a mile and a half from your granddaddy’s farm. None of us envied him the job of telling her what was going on.

“Well, the sheriff got a bunch of men together as a rescue team and we headed back to Iron Hoop. Word got around pretty good and by ten that night, half the town was out at the cave. There were torches and campfires everywhere. It looked like a carnival. It turned out that none of the men could fit into the crawl space where your granddaddy was trapped, so me and Jeremiah were the ones who had to keep going in. We still didn’t make any headway, but we got food and water to your granddaddy and got a blanket around his shoulders to keep him warm.”

“How was my granddaddy during all this?”

“Sometimes his spirits were high, and he’d be optimistic and joking about how stupid it was to get stuck and how embarrassed he was that everyone from town would be outside the cave when he came out. Other times, he’d get sullen and quiet. A cave’s a cold, clammy place to be stuck in. It’ll get you down. For a while he just quit talking altogether. He had this one outburst of anger while I was picking at the rock. It scared me, I thought a chip had hit him in the eye or something. He screamed and cussed and thrashed real hard and I thought for a moment his rage would shake him free.”

Jim Frank paused, with a far-away look.

“It didn’t. He got real quiet after that and then looked up at me. It was the last thing I was ever going to hear him say. He smiled and said real soft, ‘It’s the cruel indifference of it that gets me’.”

“What’d he mean?”

Jim Frank stroked his pointed chin and said, “I’ve wondered about that a lot. I think he meant that he could’ve understood it better if the cave would’ve had a mind and had been out to get him or if some mean person had pushed the rock. That way, at least, there would’ve been a reason he was going to die, even if a bad one. As it was, it had nothing to do with him. He was dying at the hands of dumb luck and laws of nature, and neither even knew or cared that he existed.”

After a pause and a heavy sigh, Jim Frank said, “I left him sleeping and went up top to take my turn resting. It had turned daylight, but it was a grim and gray daylight. A storm was moving in and folks were packing up and heading back to town. I couldn’t find Jeremiah. Luther Hanley said he’d gone to see Mrs. Tillman. She had the kids to tend and couldn’t come to the cave. Luther was grinning and pointing at the thunderclouds rolling in. ‘Going to get wet and deep down there when that downpour hits,’ the sonofabitch said, while grinning about it. I was just about to hit him for sure when Jeremiah showed up. He was breathing heavy and looking at the clouds. Apparently he’d run all the way from Mrs. Tillman’s. He had a canvas satchel over his shoulder. He said we had to try one more time to get him out before it rained. I swear he had no more said it when a big clap of thunder shook us and it started raining. It was a doozy, too. You could tell it was going to come down in a big way. Jeremiah gave me the satchel and told me to bring it. He grabbed the tools and headed into the cave. For some reason I grabbed the iron hoop on the way in and brought it with me, so I gave the satchel to Luther Hanley to carry.

“We got down to the crack where your granddaddy was, and Jeremiah asked me for the satchel. I turned and then realized that Luther Hanley wasn’t there. By that time, water was starting to come in and flow down the crack. I heard your granddaddy moan. Jeremiah gave me a real mean look for not having the satchel and started backing down into the crack. I begged him not to go. I’m sorry, but I figured your granddaddy was a goner for sure and I didn’t want to lose Jeremiah. Our own situation in that cave wasn’t all that safe either, with the water already starting to come in. Jeremiah told me he was going to have your granddaddy grab his legs and that he was going to crawl out with your granddaddy hanging onto him.

“He was down there forever, and I could hear them both struggling and hollering with the effort. Then I heard the water coming. I hollered to Jeremiah to get out of there. It hit like someone had opened up the gates of a dam. It went from a trickle to a torrent in seconds, all of it pouring down that crack. All I could do was reach down the crack and hope I could help Jeremiah out. I still had that iron hoop, so I shoved it down the crack and held on for dear life. Finally I felt Jeremiah grab onto it, and I pulled with everything I had left. Out he came, but alone.”

Nate just sat there a moment. His grandfather had drowned, stuck hopelessly and meaninglessly in Iron Hoop Cave. He shivered, even though it was a hot afternoon on Jim Frank’s porch.

“We barely got back to the top ourselves. The sheriff asked us how it was and Jeremiah told him everything was all under water.”

“Jeremiah asked me what the hell had happened to the satchel. I told him I’d given it to Luther to carry, so I could bring down the iron hoop. Seeing as how the hoop had helped save his life, there wasn’t much he could say to me about it. We looked for Luther Hanley, but he was long gone.”

“What was in the satchel?”

“Honestly don’t know,” Jim Frank said. “I asked Jeremiah and he said he didn’t know either, but I think he did.”

“What happened after that?” Henry said. “What did you do about his body?”

“After the storm, we tried to go down, but the crawl-way had caved in. Your granddaddy’s buried in Iron Hoop Cave,” Jim Frank told Nate. “Some men from the railroad sealed it up a few days later, and nobody’s been down it since. I kept the iron hoop, so I reckon nobody even knows where the cave is anymore.”

Nate picked up the hoop and felt its coolness. He wondered if part of the cave’s coolness had soaked into it. He turned it full circle through his hands, so he’d be sure to touch where Jeremiah Lightcap had grabbed it for his life’s sake.

“Thank you,” Nate said.

Chapter 7

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Copyright (C) 2009 Michael A. Hughes