I’ve always wanted to write a novel. The working title is Seven Hills (but may change as the arc of the story changes) I’m posting a chapter or two or three to see if anyone loves it or hates it or has advice. This is chapter one. My father grew up near the Tri-State mining district in a tiny community called Timber Hill/Bluejacket, Oklahoma. This is the somewhat fictional setting for the novel and a story that is still being written. Maybe, someday, I’ll finish it…thanks for reading. bt

CHAPTER 1 – THE GAME

Percy McLemore sat in the bleachers of the Jasper American Legion baseball field thumbing a worn 1957 copy of Sport magazine, the one with Mickey Mantle on the cover. He wasn’t reading it so much as soaking in it—every crease, every caption, every photo of the Commerce Comet, Oklahoma’s hero. The field was abandoned except for Clay Boyd, who stood on the pitcher’s mound pretending to wind up against a lineup of Yankees. The afternoon sun filtered through the surrounding oaks, dappled light and shadow refracted against the emerald green outfield grass. Behind the right field fence, the rusted mill that processed ore from local mine shafts, rose prominently, the ghostly rust of their father’s labor. 

Jasper was on life support, a town going quickly to seed. The metal awning over Grogan’s Feed Store flapped in the breeze like a restless old man shifting in a porch swing. Storefront glass was coated with the white residue of the town’s seven hills, 200 foot tall piles of tailings, the discarded remnants of years of mining for lead and zinc. Boys still tossed rocks at trains and fished in creeks rusted red from lead, zinc, and cadmium leaching from the hills of gravel. The town was birthed by the Great War, a war that was renamed once the body count of World War II corrected the notion of what a great war actually was.  

The children of the town were like most in small town America. They knew the words of Mickey Mouse and the exploits of Mickey Mantle, who was also the son of a miner, growing up in nearby Commerce, Oklahoma. 

The Sermon on the Mount was applied literally in Jasper, as was the entire Bible. The folks in these parts were not only poor in spirit, but now physically poor, with a claim to Heaven as a reward for a life well-lived held as a standard against the hardship that came from scratching a living from shafts of darkness. There was a growing hunger, a visceral longing for the good ‘ole days.

The Bible says that a city on a hill must not be hidden, but revealed. Jasper was no longer a shining city, but there was an unspoken glow, a shining that would take years to reveal, one that would one day kill like the lead of bullets, only insidiously, slowly. This once important town produced the ore that was milled down into the lead that helped produce half of the bullets used in the World War II. A City on a hill that produces that much metal cannot be hidden, but it seemed to be disappearing before their very eyes.  

Shadows covered most of the field now. Sunlight still shone on the right field fence advertisement for Peabody Ford. It featured a picture of a 1958 Edsel, “It acts the way it looks, but doesn’t cost that much.” Clay leaned back against the bleacher wall on the top row while tossing a Rawlings baseball into his glove. He asked, “Reckon he’ll really be there?”  “Mantle? It’s in the newspaper. Miami, Oklahoma. Exhibition game against the Picher Lead Feet. That’s only fifteen miles. We could do that in a day.” said Percy. 

“We’d have to camp overnight,” Clay said, thinking aloud. “Sleep under the stars. Travel light. Quietly.” Percy grinned. “I’ll bring beans.” They skinned it, a secret handshake—their solemn contract. A hike to Miami to see Mantle play ball.

That night, Percy dug through his father’s war trunk, beneath yellowed maps and medals he wasn’t supposed to touch. He pulled out the old compass and a folding knife and tucked both into his knapsack. His mom thought he was staying at Clay’s. Clay told his dad he was helping Percy’s uncle repair a fence.

The following morning they met on the outskirts of town, near the old mining road that hadn’t been used since the pump stations stopped running and the groundwater turned red. When the pumps were no longer needed to maintain the mineshafts, hundreds of underground tunnels flooded and the land above them turned to fetid marsh, mourning and quiet

“We follow the power lines,” Percy said, pointing south. “Then cut through Johnson’s hay meadow and the strip pits.” Clay nodded. “I brought dad’s flashlight.”

They set off with the scent of honeysuckle drifting through the trees. Neither knew exactly what they’d find on the way, only that Mickey Mantle waited at the end—and maybe someone else waited in the shadows of a mining district that was once a kingdom of riches, digging out the ore and extracting the lead that formed bullets that were fired from rifles to kill enough of the enemy to keep America and the world free. 

That decision to see Mickey Mantle play ball, inked in dust and bound by a handshake, would lead them out of Jasper and into the woods, down roads more tangled than they ever imagined.