The Hollow Ground: A Novel (12 page)

Not everyone reacted with anger, though. For some of the people, especially the ones who lived in the worst of the zone, it grated their nerves further. “Is it true his skull was bashed in? Do they know who it was? Do they know who did it?”

By far though, no one was more angry or anxious about it than Ma. She’d thrash around at night unable to sleep. She’d look at me as if I’d betrayed her worse than her own daddy or stepma had. “How could you a done this
now
?” she said to me. “Everybody knows a dead body is bad luck. What’s Bropey going to think?”

In those first few days after finding the body it was Daddy who protected me against Ma’s wrath, saying it was crazy to punish me when the image of that dead body would be with me for life.

“Let me get this straight,” Ma said. “She goes off with a couple of boys down in some mine somewheres and don’t tell nobody and we ain’t gonna do a thing? Well, let me tell
you
something, Adrian Howley. That’s how come she’s a daydreamer. She thinks the world’s soft when it’s the hardest thing there is.”

But Daddy had this look on him, like I was sick or something and it was somehow his fault. Over and over he’d ask me to describe exactly where the body was and how it looked. And though I hated thinking about what I’d seen in that shaft, I loved having Daddy’s attention focused on my every word. His eyes would rove from the wall up to the ceiling like he was trying to solve the murder from the little I could tell him. Eventually I’d repeated the details so often that it became like a story I told. It became like one of the tall tales Daddy and I used to tell each other. It was almost a thing of pleasure.

Only when we were alone did Daddy listen that carefully to me. When the detectives were there he acted like he didn’t care what I’d seen. Which was how we all acted. It was understood by us all that cops were especially not to be trusted. Gram particularly disliked the main detective who was Greek. “Remember the story ’bout that big horse they sent to trick them people,” Gram warned me more than once. “Greeks is sneaky.”

Gramp and Daddy agreed and I started to think Gram was right because whenever that detective came by he’d ask the same questions over and over as if eventually he’d trick me into saying something I hadn’t said before.

“You can tell us anything,” Detective Kanelous liked to say.

“Anything. Absolutely anything,” Detective Wolinski would repeat, looking up from his notepad where he constantly scribbled as if I’d said volumes when I never said much at all.

They wanted to know what I saw, what I’d heard—what I’d been doing earlier that day. They wanted to know how we’d found the hole. Whose idea it was for us to go down there. How long I’d known Marisol. How long I’d known Billy and Eddie. They asked the same questions to Marisol, but still I thought it was me they were after. Their questions made it seem like they thought I’d killed the man and dragged him into that monkey shaft. And in a way I felt I had. That people were right when they thought that in finding the body I was to blame for it being there. I guess I felt that in simply wanting to be close to Daddy, to experience what he’d gone through in the mines, I’d been selfish. I’d wanted too much.

Whenever the detectives showed up, I’d sit on Daddy’s lap, leaning my weight against his good arm, his bad arm around me like a battered shield. Each time they came, Daddy’s voice would get a waxiness to it, his words greased with fury and contempt. “For chrissakes, we go through this each time. Don’t
you
know where she found it? Don’t
you
know what position it was in? She’s only a little girl. You act like you think my daughter did it.”

“Not at all,” Detective Kanelous would say, passively lowering his eyelids and then widening them as if he could blink his way into my head.

“Not at all,” Detective Wolinski would repeat, gripping his pad as though it contained the key to unlocking the murder.

Just as Gram had predicted, once the detectives discovered that Gramp and Daddy had bootlegged that hole, it was Howleys they seemed to blame.

“Know anyone else who used that shaft?” Detective Kanelous asked Gramp and Daddy. He was a big man with the blackest hair I’d ever seen and he spoke in a quick clipped New York way. “Anyone unusual? Anyone you didn’t know?”

“Lots men … used it.” Gramp said, eyes slit, swallowing and gagging on the effort to keep his cough at bay.

“Bootlegging holes are all over this town,” Daddy added. “You know how many men used them?”

There were little bumps on Detective Kanelous’s cheeks that glistened where his beard came in. “How many?” he asked.

Daddy said nothing and then Detective Wolinski asked Gramp, “About how many would you say, Mr. Howley?” Detective Wolinski had a mustache that curved down toward his jaw and made me think some furry creature perched on top of his mouth, ready to eat his words.

Daddy made his face as blank as stone. “How would
we
know?” he said. “Can’t you tell my father’s sick? Can’t you leave him alone?”

On one of the times after the detectives left, Daddy poured two glasses of whisky and he and Gramp sat out on the side porch, sipping it. The window over Daddy’s head was open and I heard Daddy say this would all come back to the Devil Jaw mining disaster.

Gramp grunted.

“You know you can tell me what happened,” Daddy said. “You’re not the only one who tried to help Frank. I tried to help too.”

The juicy sounds of Gramp sucking the saliva in his mouth was followed by him saying. “You tell … what happen … that day … down there.”

“I’ve told you that already,” Daddy said, his voice strained. “I went down into Devil Jaw to tell him to get the men out. To tell him he could keep the money and still do right by the men.”

Gramp hocked up something. “Make no sense … why Frank in … monkey shaft.”

“Chrissakes,” Daddy said. “He’s dead. What does it matter why he was in a monkey shaft? You know these cops aren’t going to quit until they pin this on someone. How ’bout trying to protect me the way you were always protecting him?”

An explosion in the fire zone shook the house and all of Gram’s dishes on the hutch clattered.

“Shit,” Daddy said and the pain in his voice drew me out into the doorway where I saw him gripping his hurt arm the way he did when it ached from rain. “Shit,” he said again and then he kicked at the screen door, swinging it open. He jogged down the steps and crossed the lawn without once looking back, leaving me for hours after to ponder his words with Gramp. What was it Daddy wanted Gramp to tell him about? Had Uncle Frank been taking bribes? Why did Gramp think Daddy knew why Uncle Frank had been in a monkey shaft? All these things I thought about and for days after whenever I shut my lids I’d see Gramp’s and Daddy’s faces blurring with Father Capedonico’s and then I’d see the white skull with its empty sockets and I’d open my eyes with a shudder.

*   *   *

I should have avoided Ma in those first weeks, but instead I found myself hanging around her more, hoping somehow I could make things better between us. Sometimes I’d even meet her on her lunch break at the mill thinking that if I could get her to tell me stories about her and Daddy’s pasts, like she used to, she’d start to like me again and not worry about the dead body.

On one of those days I found her standing in the side yard over by the garbage bins, smoking fast and hard. It was a warm day that smelled of the brown lanky river running below the cliff. The bluish stone of the mill towered behind us, greenish in the crevices with mold.

“We was already married when your daddy told me about the curse,” Ma said, squinting at Gram who stood across the yard beside Edna Schwackhammer, the woman Ma called Gram’s twin twit. That day Gram and Mrs. Schwackhammer did seem twinnish in appearance. They stood there with their old lady skirts halfway down their calves and their thick-heeled, square-toed shoes and chunky clip-on earrings. They’d had their hair dyed and curled by the same hairdresser in town and they looked like different-sized versions of the same woman.

Ma continued, “He gave me the same cock-and-bull story that old biddy tries to sell about the curse making you stronger because it keeps you on your toes. But you know what I think about the curse?”

I wondered if Ma knew about the curse’s secret and if she was trying to tell me about it. “What, Ma?” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. I was desperate to talk about the curse’s secret, especially with Ma. But she saw how bad I wanted her answer, so she wasn’t going to say a thing.

Gram was looking this way and that, squirming under the pressure of Ma’s stare. Eventually she called out, “So why ain’t you met that brother of yours yet, Dolores? What’s keepin’ him from you?”

“He’s busy with his car dealership,” Ma snipped.

“
Used
car dealership,” Gram said as if the word
used
was a four-letter curse word. “So? Can’t he have you down to him? Can’t he invite you?”

“He has. Bunch a times,” Ma said but I could tell from the way she held her chin, tilted and up, that he hadn’t. “You just mind your own business, Rowena. Ain’t seen your brother visiting you anytime lately.”

Mrs. Llewelyn, a big fat woman whose feet bulged out of her shoes, stepped up to Gram and got right in her face. “Speaking of minding business, Rowena, I finished that tote. Why’d you go and tell Big Berta I fell short? You’re not the boss here. You can’t even control your own goddamn grandkid from going down in the mine, you think you can control our totes?”

Mrs. Llewelyn must have heard Ma coming because she turned just in time to get Ma’s fist smack in her nose. “You control your own goddamn kids, Linda,” Ma spat and then they ripped at each other’s hair and fell to the ground and I ran to get the janitor to pull them apart, I was so afraid Mrs. Llewelyn would crush Ma.

Eventually as the weeks passed so did Ma’s anger and in its place was something blank and quiet. It was almost like she was still herself, she was still Ma, but somehow less so. She’d collect change to call her brother on one of the pay phones in town and spend evenings smoking out by the catalpa tree, its trunks split three ways like the prongs on a ring that clasped nothing but the starry night air.

Some nights she’d sit on my bed playing solitaire, slow sipping a can of Schlitz, occasionally leaning her head against Daddy’s werewolf poster. At night as we lay in the bunk beds, Ma on top, Ma would tell me gossip about the girls from the mill. She’d tell me about the money she’d hidden from Daddy and how much of it he’d found. She’d tell me, voice all whispery, about the times Uncle Frank had tried to get fresh with her and her voice would carry a kind of wary excitement.

Whenever we got into bed we’d leave the light on. Inevitably Gram would come in and turn the light off and then Ma would instigate her usual fight but there was an emotion lacking to her—“You ain’t the only one who pays the bills, old lady”—as if she were merely mouthing the words.

If all the questions about the unsolved murder made Ma less talkative, they had the opposite effect on Gram. It was only then that Gram started talking about when the mines started slowing down in the twenties. She said the slowdown was so gradual that at first they didn’t think much about it. They thought people would always want coal and couldn’t imagine a time when there wouldn’t be a demand for it anymore. “But then slow and sure the railroads cut back more and more operations and then all sorts of businesses cut back, first on hours, then on workers. Before you knew, it wasn’t just the miners who was strugglin’, it was everybody. It was all of Barrendale.”

Gram also told me that during Prohibition she supported the family making shine until the cops shut her down and later, she said, during World War II she worked in a factory in Scranton making bombs. One day while we were outside cementing the cracks all the drilling and flushing had caused in the foundation, Gram told me that it was her hard-earned money that had bought this house and I should be proud to ever do the same. “Lots of women ain’t got a house to their name,” she said, glancing toward the living-room window behind which Ma was painting her nails.

Gram waved her hand to take in the whole yard and house. “And now look at all I got. And to think when my daddy came here from Limerick not a soul but the mafia would hire him! Nobody else wanted Irish. They thought we were as low as coloreds. Lower maybe. ’Cept for those criminals in the mob. They wanted him to drive one of their trucks. So that’s what he did till he heard the mines would take Irish.”

On some days she talked about Uncle Frank and how he was always in trouble at school for roughhousing, for smoking in the bathroom, for being with girls under the bleachers. And that she knew he was bad but she couldn’t help loving him for it.

I had a putty knife in my hand and I was far enough out of Gram’s reach that she couldn’t slap me. Cagily I asked, “But if you knew he was bad, why’d you tell Ma it was a pity the good one died?”

“What?” she said. “I never said no such thing.” And then she poured too much water into the bucket of cement and clucked her tongue and said that Daddy liked to pretend he was a Mr. Smarty-pants never doing nothin’ wrong, but that sometimes he’d been with Uncle Frank and had gotten in trouble too.

School started and Marisol and I were inseparable in our classes and inseparable afterwards, going on long walks in the warm and yellowing September woods and fields. During those walks Marisol liked to wonder about the dead person’s spirit. She supposed that it had chosen us to help solve its murder, to be the instruments of its revenge. It was possible, she said, that in a past life we’d wronged the man and that was why the spirit had us find it. It was even possible, she’d whisper, that the spirit was standing right next to us, talking to us at that very moment, not knowing it was dead.

In an attempt to communicate with it we used Marisol’s Ouija board, but all it spelled was O-W, which Marisol said meant it couldn’t get past its pain, or it spelled H-O-W, which Marisol said meant it wanted us to find out how it was killed. We tried a séance too. We lit some candles on the shore of White Deer Lake and held hands and asked the spirit to speak to us but we didn’t hear a thing, though Marisol said she could still feel Auntie’s spirit around me, just as she had when we first met in Saint Barbara’s church.