The Hollow Ground: A Novel (5 page)

At dinner me and Brother devoured everything within reach except for the canned peas and Ma kept saying, “That’s enough,” and slapping our hands. Then she’d laugh. “They act as if they ain’t never ate before.”

“Right now,” Gram said, “we got it to spare. But that won’t last for long. Adrian, Dad put his good name out there for you. Jim Schaffer’s grandson runs the shoe department at Kreshner’s. He says he could use some help. It ain’t much but if it works, maybe it could lead to more.”

“Shoes? You mean dealing with people’s smelly feet?” Daddy held his nose and made faces to make us laugh.

“Shoes is fine,” Ma was quick to say. “Everybody needs ’em.”

Through the kitchen entryway we could see Gramp seated in the Barcalounger in the living room. He hacked up something from deep in his chest and spit it in his cloth napkin. He had another napkin tucked in his collar as a bib and he sat with a TV dinner tray on his lap and a TV dinner steaming up into his face. He waved and pointed at something on the hutch.

“Can’t believe I forgot,” Gram said and she was quick to go to the hutch and retrieve a folded newspaper clipping. It was an article about the disaster, in memoriam of its fifteenth anniversary. Within it was a bio about Uncle Frank that mentioned his high school football achievements as well as the fact that he’d been elected a shop steward after being a miner for only two years. The article ended by speculating that he’d been found dead in a monkey shaft because he was probably trying to rescue one or more of his trapped men.

Gram stood framed in the living-room entryway and read it out loud. When she reached “one or more of his trapped men,” she licked her teeth as if she’d missed a morsel of something tasty between them.

Ma said, “Ain’t that nice.”

Gram sat back down and spread her napkin neatly on her lap. “I’d say it’s more than nice. I’m specially glad they mentioned he was a commemorated veteran.”

“The word is
decorated
, Mother,” Daddy said.

Gram stared at the space to the left of Daddy’s head. “He was so brave he volunteered. Didn’t wait for no draft.” Gram made a sucking sound with her lips and her eyes shifted toward Daddy, then away. “There our Frankie was only seventeen years old, but lyin’ ’bout his age so they’d take him. He didn’t want to wait no extra year. That’s a lesson you kids could learn.” Gram shook her finger first at Brother, then at me.

“What the heck kind of lesson is that?” Ma said. “If he’d waited, the war would have been over and he wouldn’t had to go.”

Gramp grunted and gripped the fork with his fist, the way Brother still did, and shoveled into his brownie before he’d even touched his Salisbury steak.

Gram massaged the top of her hump and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder where Frank would be now. Probably havin’ a big house like you see in those magazines. Maybe he’d even be in the movies and have a movie star wife!” The lines in Gram’s face deepened as she shot a glance at Ma.

“For chrissakes,” Ma said. “You act like he was a saint.”

“Not in my house,” Gram declared, pointing with her knife at Ma. “No one’s takin’ the Lord’s name.”

“For god’s sakes,” Daddy said. “Enough about Frank.” Daddy pushed his plate from him and shut his eyes. “He’s gone from us. Let the dead lie.”

For dessert Gram served pound cake. She poured us kids two large glasses of milk and talked about the wonders of having a Roman Catholic president, and an Irish one to boot. “Just shows how far we’ve come. From no one wantin’ to hire us to being president of these here great United States!” Gram wiped a dusting of powdered sugar from the cake plate and said, “Just a shame ’bout his politics, is all. By the way, Dolores, I got you your old job back. Won’t that be a kick in the pants!”

Ma shifted in her chair as if she
had
just been kicked in the pants. “Actually, I was hoping for something better.”

“Who ain’t?” Gram quipped. “I’m still there sewin’ up side seams. I’ll be watchin’ you.”

“I’ll be watching you too, Rowena.” And Ma said
Rowena
like it was a razor at the tip of her tongue.

“What happened to callin’ me mom?” Gram said with a tight triumphant smile, like she’d just revealed some telling part of Ma. “But I guess mom’s a hard word for you. I understand. I told you my mother was sent to an orphanage too. And she wasn’t sent to no nice Pennsylvania orphanage. She was sent to one in Dublin where things was much worse than they ever was over here. Her parents had too many mouths, so they just stuck her in some orphanage. She was right ’round the age you was when your daddy dropped you off, Dolores. I told you I understand. You think I don’t, but I told you before I do.”

You could just feel the electric rising off Ma and I slouched in my chair, eyeing Brother whose face showed the same concern.

“Was my new stepma brought me there,” Ma said. “Brought
me
. Not my little brother. Dirty bitch.” And when Ma said
bitch
she said it straight into Gram’s face.

“Not in my house,” Gram said. “Filthy mouth.”

“Enough, Mother,” Daddy said. “Remember what I said about all of us getting along?”

Gram bit into some cake and chewed as if it had gone sour in her mouth.

*   *   *

That night I stretched out on the lower bunk. Ma didn’t like the thought of having anyone sleep above her, which was why she took the top. We kept the desk lamp on because we’d gotten used to the neon light from the hotel’s sign beaming in our window. In the lamp’s light my eyes flit from the sag of Ma’s rump above me to the picture of a werewolf taped to the wall by my head. The lower bunk had been Daddy’s bunk when he was growing up so I was just as glad Ma had taken the top. Looking at the werewolf made me feel close to the boy who’d so many years ago ripped it out of a magazine and stuck it to the wall. I liked the fact that I’d have its steely wolf eye on me all night long.

Above me, Ma flipped through a
Reader’s Digest
. “Can you believe they say a man marries someone just like his mother? A whole stupid article they wrote about it. I may not know much, but I know I ain’t nothing like that old bitch.” Ma flung the magazine to the floor. The mattress squeaked as she rolled onto her side. “Damn it, Brigid! Didn’t I tell you not to leave that glass of water on the desk? I swear, sometimes I think you’re retarded. Now she’ll blame us for the dang ring it leaves!” Ma hung her head down to look at me. Upside down, her mouth and cheeks slouched.

Quick I got up and moved the glass from the desk to the floor. Standing there on the worn carpet I shivered, even though I wasn’t cold. But I could just feel Ma waiting for me to get settled so she could start her nightly talking. At the hotel, Ma had gotten into the habit of talking to me before bed, telling me about some bit of gossip she’d heard or movies she’d watched as a kid. But that night, our first night at Gram and Gramp’s, I knew Ma’s talk would be prickly with all her unspoken concerns.

Gram knocked and opened the door without waiting for an answer, demanding to know why we’d left on the light.

“This room ain’t familiar to us yet,” Ma said. “We need it on.”

“Scaredy-cats,” Gram said. “First time you pay an electric bill you can put on any lights you like.” She stomped to the corner, head thrust forward from her hump, and flicked off the lamp. In the dark she tramped out and shut the door.

Ma whispered that she’d turn it back on and a few minutes later she did just that. She rolled up one of her old hand-knit sweaters and placed it at the bottom of the door to keep all the light inside. “Alls I know is it can’t stay like this. Not for long. You pray to Auntie.” Years ago Ma had given up prayers, which included going to Sunday mass. “If God wants to see me on my day off,” she’d say, “he can come and tell me himself.”

Thinking of Auntie made me think of her all alone buried in the darkness of our backyard. Though we’d had a funeral, they’d never found her body and it still felt to me that she hadn’t been put to rest. “We go where we believe we’ll go,” Daddy had said. Ma said, “
If
there is a heaven, Auntie’s sure to be there.”

I’d stashed a small brightly painted cross of Auntie’s beneath my pillow and right then I pressed my head back hard to feel it. I tried to do what Auntie had so often told me to do, to feel the calm inside myself, but instead all I could think about was the curse’s secret, that it lived inside us. In the past whenever I’d thought of Father Capedonico, the priest who cursed us, I’d see him as a short red-faced bulldog of a man and at that moment I imagined a tiny version of him creeping into my ear, trying to goad me into telling Ma the secret so then he could seek his revenge on me as he had on Auntie.

Ma climbed back up the bed ladder and flopped onto the mattress with a huff. She added, “You pray and we’ll wait for a sign. Auntie will send it. She won’t forget us. You pray to my dead ma too. Sometimes I think she looks out for me. Wherever she is, if she can help, I bet she will.”

Then Ma went on to talk about the few memories she had of her ma who died when Ma was only seven. The way her ma spit-tied her hair with rags at night to make it curl. The way her ma made crowns of flowers with bridal wreath or Queen Anne’s lace, buttercup or clover. “But,” Ma said, “she also told me kids don’t got headaches or problems. Can you believe that? That’s something I never told you or your brother. If anyone knows that ain’t true, it’s me.”

Eventually Ma fell asleep, but I stayed up after, listening to her breathe as if each sigh of her breath carried the clue to our happiness.

Four

Those first few days there, me and Daddy walked all over Barrendale. “Exploring,” he called it, but “recalling” would have been the better word. He showed me a place called Devil’s Well where the water pooled so deep in the river that a boy had drowned. He took me to the field that was no longer a field but a salt rock factory where he and Uncle Frank used to play ball. He pointed out all the spots known to have bootlegging holes, the holes people dug so they could get down into the mine shafts and steal as much coal as they could carry. Daddy was careful to let me know that the people were forced to do this because the coal company wouldn’t give them enough work or pay to make a living. Meanwhile, he told me, there was still more than two million tons of coal unused beneath our feet. “What a waste,” he said. “And they’d arrest you for taking it when they know there’s more down there than they could ever use.”

Most of the bootlegging holes Daddy knew about were off dirt roads up in the mountains and were so boarded up there was no way down them anymore. The entry to one of them was inside a cave and Daddy and I hunched outside of it one day and stared at the wood slats the cops had used to seal it off.

“One of Gramp’s friends used to own this property,” Daddy said. “We helped him dig the hole. In exchange he let us use it. I was only eleven at the time. Your age.” Daddy looked at me with wonder as if how old I was had surprised him. “I didn’t think of myself as a kid though. There were other boys my age helping out their dads. All the men had their hours cut. All the men had to figure out some way to get by.”

I loved to walk with Daddy and think about the ground beneath us that was honeycombed with gangways and shafts and tunnels, the very tunnels Daddy had mined, the very tunnels I’d dreamt of all my life, wishing I could one day see them for myself. I tried hard to imagine a young daddy, a daddy my age, going down that hole in that cave with Gramp. If I pictured him hard enough, if I felt what he felt then, I’d get closer to his heart. I’d concentrate as if my life depended on it, as if my imaginative abilities could somehow prove my love.

During those “exploring walks” was the first time Daddy talked about Uncle Frank and when he talked about the places where they’d worked or hung out as boys, there was a rawness to his voice that was so tender and rough it made me jealous.

“Pity the good one died,” Gram had said about Uncle Frank and I thought if I could be as good as dead Uncle Frank had been, maybe one day Daddy would talk about me like that, with an ache in his voice. And I pictured myself dead in a coffin in the pink dress Auntie had bought me with Daddy telling people how good I was, his voice all sweet with the sad.

On those walks, though, Daddy didn’t just recall his own memories. He talked about the original city of Barrendale that burned down in the great fire of 1850 and how the people came together to build it up again. He took me to a little knoll in the furthest part of the cemetery and showed me where some Civil War soldiers were buried and then he showed me a house with a busted-up widow’s walk that had been part of the Underground Railroad. “When I was a kid,” he said, “the rich old lady who owned this place hired me to set mousetraps in the tunnels between the walls where the slaves used to crawl.”

We looked up at the house and then at the house across the street that had a portico with big white columns. We’d entered the north side of town where the rich people used to live and surrounding us were what had once been beautiful homes, most of them Victorian and Tudor and Queen Anne style houses. We shook our heads at the sofas and appliances left out on the porches to molder and rust. Garbage cans were tied to slate hitching posts. An air conditioner jutted out a stained glass window. Turrets capped houses that were so peeled and beaten it hurt to look at them, yet we couldn’t stop looking at them. They had so much to tell us about what they once had been and what they’d lost along the way.

Daddy also talked about Barrendale before it was called Barrendale, when it was called Slocum Hollow. Washington Irving supposedly gave it the name Barrendale after being disappointed by a visit to the city. Somehow or other the name stuck. I couldn’t get over that the town would give up such a beautiful name in favor of such an ugly one and I found myself saying “Slocum Hollow” aloud every now and then, loving the way my tongue shaped the words.

On some days Daddy talked about the Indians who’d called West Mountain Black Mountain. “And when the men who started the Delaware and Hudson Canal heard there was a mountain called Black Mountain, they guessed there was coal there.”