The Hollow Ground: A Novel (31 page)

As Gram spoke, she twisted the ring on her finger, her daddy’s ma’s ring, the one she’d promised to Ma on Ma’s wedding day. Sometime after Ma left, Gram took to wearing it. “Now listen,” Gram continued. “There’s somethin’ I want to say to you. I saw that look you give me when Edna mention me and Gramp leavin’ Centrereach. But we made that wrong situation right by gettin’ married and movin’ to a new town. So don’t go thinkin’ you’re all high and mighty. Believe me you could just as easy make a mistake and ruin your life too.” Gram shook her head. “That’s not what I mean to say. You ain’t gonna ruin your life and I didn’t ruin mine neither. I fixed it.”

Gram put a finger to her mouth as we heard a creak on the hall stair. Gram motioned for me to shut the door and then we waited in silence until we heard the thud of Mrs. Schwackhammer’s cane on the kitchen floor beneath us.

“There’s somethin’ else I want you to know,” Gram said. I sat on the bed facing her, but I didn’t look at her. I looked at the window that framed part of a sassafras tree that had gotten so hot from the fire that it had shed its bark like it was shedding a coat. Gram continued, “I took my ’sponsibilities and did the best I could with them. I hope your daddy can see that one day. A mother’s mistake ain’t the child’s and if I had to do it over I’d have treated your daddy different.” Gram tilted her head back and massaged the base of her hump. “After all, it wasn’t his fault he was the kind of baby he was, all squirmy and never wanting to eat. You be surprised the kind of bad you feel when your own child don’t want to feed from you.”

I said nothing, merely fixed my stare on the ring on Gram’s hand.

“This ring was my grandma’s,” Gram explained. “My daddy’s mama. My daddy’s parents lived not ten miles from where Mama’s parents lived. They knew each other’s people. I think for Mama that kind of made them like family, even before she married into them. She must have needed that, to feel like there was at least some connection with where she came from.”

“Don’t you think that was the same for Ma? Don’t you think she needed that too?”

Gram narrowed her eyes. “What the heck you talkin’ ’bout?”

“Daddy had to take that money from Uncle Jerry to buy that ring. And that’s something he’d never have done if you’d just given Ma your grandma’s ring, like you’d promised. If you had, Daddy wouldn’t be like he is now and Ma and Brother wouldn’t be living in some nowheresville in Kentucky!” A sob caught in my throat and I coughed to cover it.

“That’s just what a little girl would think. A ring ain’t gonna change a whole lot one way or ’nother. A ring is the absolute least of a marriage, I can tell you that.”

“The ring wasn’t about the marriage, Gram,” I said, blindly following my instinct, not quite understanding what I meant but from the look on Gram’s face I knew I was onto something. “
You
shouldn’t have kept it from her.”

“Mama gave me this ring because I was Daddy’s favorite. I ain’t got nothin’ else from him but one of his old shirts that got all moths holes in it now.”

“Then you shouldn’t have promised it to Ma.”

“I suppose that’s true, but I felt for your ma so. I don’t know why she could never see that. As soon as we met at the mill, I felt for her comin’ from an orphanage. It reminded me of Mama havin’ to leave the orphanage and then havin’ her own aunt turn her away. I was tryin’ to do for your ma what somebody should have done for my own.”

“Well, then you should have done it because she needed somebody to do that for her. She needed it bad!” I stood and swiped Ma’s postcard from the pile of mail and then I ripped it and crushed the pieces in my hands.

Gram squinted. “What’s got into you, girl? What are you all hot about? Somethin’ goin’ on I don’t know about?”

I opened my hands and let the pieces of postcard drop from them. Gram stood and looked into my eyes with as much concern and kindness as Auntie used to.

“Ma’s daddy touched her,” I said, the words falling heavy off my tongue, they were so difficult to say. “He touched her the way a daddy’s not supposed to touch. That’s why her stepma sent her away. To save Ma from him. To keep her from getting touched.” I crossed my arms and squeezed as if I could cradle the place in my heart that had been hurting all these months since I’d found out what had happened to Ma.

I met Gram’s eyes and saw in them some of my own pain. For several moments we stood there frozen until all of the tears and rage I’d been holding on to for so long came out of me in bawling wails.

Gram grabbed me to her and rocked me. “That ain’t your fault, girl. You hear me? It ain’t your ma’s neither. Let’s just pray one day she knows that. Let’s pray one day she can let it go.”

“I think somehow she blames me for what’s happened to her,” I cried.

“Nah. Your ma’s just got so much hurt inside her she don’t know who she is without it. That’s all you’re feelin’. That hurt pushin’ out from her.” Gram gripped my chin, forcing me to look right at her. “You listen to me, love is like anythin’ else in this world. People do it the best they can. Took me a lifetime to figure that out. Your ma loves you best she’s able, you can be sure of that. You hear? Hear?”

Mrs. Schwackhammer pounded at the door demanding to know what awful thing had happened but Gram ignored her, repeating, “Hear? Hear?” until I nodded.

Twenty-eight

We were all home the day Ma pulled into the drive. Gram immediately went to her room and shut the door. Daddy charged outside and I hid behind the aspidistra plant on the porch and watched and listened to them through the row of open windows.

Daddy didn’t even give Ma a chance to get out of the car. He swung open the door, yanked her out, and kissed her while she leaned up against the car.

“That don’t change nothin’,” Ma said when they parted.

“That changes everything,” Daddy said.

“Nah, it don’t. Anyways alls I come back for is some of my things.”

“If you wanted to hurt me, Dolores, you did. If that’s what all this was about, you got what you wanted.”

“Not everything is about you, Adrian. You might as well know I got me someone. He says he’ll take care of me the rest of my life. I’ll never want for nothing he says. You couldn’t do that, Adrian. You couldn’t even if you tried.”

Ma finished her speech and stepped around the car so that the trunk was between her and Daddy. Even from the distance I was at I could tell she was breathing hard and I knew without even being able to see them that her eyes were as bright and as hard as river rocks. Her chin was raised in challenge. It was obvious to me that she’d been hot to get to this moment for a long time.

It must have been obvious to Daddy too and he set his jaw the way that sometimes worked on her. “No one knows you better than I do, Dolores. No one understands better what it’s like to have memories you can’t live with.”

“That don’t matter no more. You was right, Adrian, when you told me all those years ago not to marry you. That you had something broke inside that nothing in this whole world could fix. I don’t know what happened to you that day down there in the mine and that don’t matter anymore neither.”

Slowly Daddy made his way around the car and as he moved he spoke: “No one’s ever going to make you happy, Dolores. Can’t you see that? Not this guy. Not someone else.”

With each step that Daddy took forward, Ma took a step back. “Maybe so. But I got to try.”

“I loved you more than anything else in the world,” Daddy said. “But I don’t think you ever believed it, did you? What else do you want from me, Dolores? What?” Daddy stopped when he reached the spot where Ma had been standing when he started moving toward her. Ma had back-stepped all the way around to the front of the car and was now in the backyard, near the catalpa tree.

“Nothing, Adrian,” she said. “That’s my point.”

“Then I guess this is so long, Dolores,” Daddy said, and you could just hear the plea and hurt in his words.

“Then I guess it is.”

“I’m going to leave now, Dolores. And I’m not going to chase after you and I’m not going to beg you to come back. But you’ll always have a home here with us. We’ll always be your family, no matter where you go or what you do. You know that, don’t you? There’s nothing that could ever happen that could change that.”

Ma scratched at her eye like a gnat had flown into it, but I suspected she was swatting away tears. Daddy always knew how to reach the soft places inside her no matter how hard she tried to pretend that he didn’t.

Daddy turned and started walking toward the street and I suppose he must have wanted Ma to call him back, but he also must have known her well enough to know she wouldn’t. Maybe he even knew those would be the last words they’d ever say to each other. From the way he stopped when he reached the curb and looked back I think he must have sensed that he needed to see Ma one more time and from the way he cradled his bad arm, I think he must have been feeling how close the curse was to us at that moment, closer than it had ever been before. I felt it too and shivered where I stood behind the plant. But there was only so long Daddy could stand at the curb looking back. Then there was nothing left for him to do, but to do what he’d said. He had to go and not ask her to stay and so he walked forward into the cracked and dipping street and didn’t look back again.

As soon as he was out of sight I pressed my face to the screen. I could see Ma walking alongside the house peering in windows and I was reminded of Ma in Stepma’s kitchen plucking spoons off the spoon rack and dropping them into her bag. All at once I felt a rush of hate for her, having all of Daddy’s love and not wanting it. When she turned the corner to the back of the house, I darted out the front and crept to the car, expecting to find Brother asleep on the backseat but instead I found only a couple of crayons and a coloring book.

“Ain’t you gonna say hello?” I heard.

I turned and there was Ma. We were the same height, five feet four and a half, and we stood maybe a foot apart, eyes locked on each other.

“Huh?” she said again with the teasing smile she used as a cover for whenever she was feeling uncomfortable.

“Where’s Brother?” I said.

Ma didn’t answer. She broke stare and turned to the house with a kind of stunned look on her face.

“Ma.” I gripped her arm. “Where is he? What did you do with him?”

“Jesus Christ, Brigid!” Ma shook off my hand. “What do you think? I’d dump him in some orphanage somewheres? Chrissakes, I’d rather leave him on the street!”

Ma swung open the car door, grabbed some leftover sandwich that was heating up on the dashboard, and threw it into the drive for the birds to peck. A starling immediately flew to the ground and in moments a whole flock of them was there, pulling at the bread, ripping it away from one another.

Ma shook out a cigarette from the pack she’d left on the passenger seat. “I left him with Louie. He’s got a room upstairs from us, him and his little boy do.” She lit the cigarette and then with her sharp little pinky nail picked at something stuck to her lip. “Quit lookin’ at me like that. Alls we’re doing is helping each other out. I have a right to some help. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

Ma swerved her head to take in the abandoned houses across the street. Her hushed voice came off awestruck. “Driving in I couldn’t believe how bad it all looks. Makes you think of Revelations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the four horseguys come riding out of them clouds up there.” Ma gazed up at the three puffy white clouds hanging low in the creamy blue September sky.

“That’s right, Ma. It
is
bad. Where are you living? Is Brother all right? Is there room for me?”

“Now I just told you about Louie. You’re getting to be a young lady now. Louie’s a stranger to you. Wouldn’t be proper for him to stop by for a visit if you was there. A man’s a man, after all. Can’t blame him for what he is.”

“But you blame Daddy.”

“You’re too young to understand. Your daddy’s just your daddy to you. You don’t know what it’s like. A husband needs to be”—Ma inhaled and slowly exhaled—“much more. You know, you was always so close to your daddy, wondering what he went through down in that mine. But you never thought about me like that, what I went through that day they sent me to the orphanage, did you?”

I looked away. I didn’t want Ma to see the place inside me that was as stark as the woodlands in the fire zone. It was the place where I’d failed her as a daughter and a friend. Truth was I’d never wanted to get that close to Ma.

Ma tossed her cigarette onto the drive and left it there burning. “Anyways, I got some things I need to get.” Then she swung open the porch door, letting it slam shut, which I guessed meant she thought Gram wasn’t home. She walked through the living room picking up this or that statue or vase and I kept fast on her heels. When she went to fondle some of the objects on Gramp’s altar on the mantel, I stepped right up behind her.

“Good God, Brigid!” she shouted. “I ain’t gonna steal nothing. You don’t got to keep following me around.”

I stepped back and gave her some space as she went into Daddy’s childhood bedroom. She stood there, looking around the room dazed, as if everything about it had changed, when all that was different was that it was a mess. Then she opened the closet and started picking out clothes of hers that she wanted to take. She made me think of the starlings pecking the bread outside. She made me think of “The Great Forgetting” and the child who got chained to a mountainside for giving the people what they’d asked for but didn’t want.

“Maybe you should take Stepma’s offer to go live with her, Ma,” I said. “Maybe it would be the best thing for Brother. Maybe she was trying to do right by you all along.”

“What do you know about right from wrong? The world’s a screwed up place, Brigid. Sometimes right ain’t possible to do.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to do wrong.”

“Well, what in the heck do it mean then?” Ma sat down on the little wooden chair and rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her palm. “Is this the way things is going to be between us? I was hoping for better.”

“So was I.”

“You got some mouth. But I guess I can see where you’d get that from.” Ma did her playful smile and I looked away. This was how Ma always turned me to her when she’d hurt me in the past and I wasn’t going to let her do it this time.