The Hollow Ground: A Novel (6 page)

Daddy showed me the site near the courthouse where the first underground coal mine in the country was opened and he explained how the D&H Canal was built to haul coal from Barrendale to New York City. “They couldn’t get the canal all the way to Barrendale though, because East Mountain was in the way. So they had to build a gravity railroad to get the coal over the mountain to the canal. You wouldn’t think it to look at this place now, but up until the mines shut down it was like a little Philadelphia for all it had going on.”

We’d wandered from the rich section to the center of town, which consisted mostly of empty storefronts and abandoned lots. High up on the brick buildings were the faded names of the stores that used to be there such as J. C. Penney’s and Newberry’s and Woolworth’s. Every building we passed, Daddy could name what shoe store, or appliance store, or law office it once had been. Daddy told me that the D&H Canal Company was the first million-dollar private enterprise in America and that it was all due to the fact that the biggest anthracite coal vein in the world was right below our feet.

“We were a part of something, princess,” Daddy said. “We helped make this country great. Don’t you ever forget that.”

We were standing outside a building that had an old Coca-Cola advertisement pasted to it. We gripped hands and a lady passing by smiled shyly at Daddy. “Handsome as Clark Gable,” Ma liked to say whenever she reminisced and the love she felt for Daddy oozed out from whatever dark place she’d hid it.

Daddy’s hair was as black and as shiny as the slag littering the lots and his eyes were what’s called Madonna blue, the color of Our Lady’s cloak. Daddy’s what’s called Black Irish. There’s Spanish in his blood. Hundreds of years ago Spanish ships sank off the coast of Ireland and the Spanish soldiers, so in love with the Irish girls, stayed in Ireland—or so the story goes. Their dark-haired descendants became the Black Irish. Of course that meant I had Black Irish in me too, but wherever it was in me didn’t show.

Those days our walks always ended in the fire zone, if ended is the right word. In a way it was what we were headed to from the start of every walk. The zone started about a quarter of a mile west of Gram and Gramp’s and covered an area of nearly ninety acres. Surrounding most of the houses were a dozen or so holes that had been drilled to have silt flushed down them. Some houses were propped up from where the ground had sunk from the fire or drilling. On the southernmost edge of the zone they’d started digging a huge pit to try and stop the fire from spreading, and an entire playground had been condemned because the ground was too hot for dogs or kids to play. Here and there remained only a cellar door or a gaping foundation to mark where a house once stood.

Daddy didn’t say so but I could tell the fire was much worse than he’d expected. You could see the worry pull creases at his brow like lines tugging on a weight too heavy to bear. “Don’t worry, princess,” he said. “They’re going to spend three years and over two million dollars to dig this fire out. And if they’re going to spend that kind of money they’re planning to do the job right. They’ve declared the whole area a slum which means they get to wreck every house and dig down as far as it takes. Dig to the middle of the earth. Dig to China, if they have to.”

He took my hand and squeezed it till I gave him a weak smile. “Now what would the middle of the earth look like?” he said and we made guesses to that as we walked all the way back to Gram and Gramp’s, swinging hands, coming up with more and more fantastical ways to describe the earth’s center, settling finally on a blue ball of ice, as clear and fragile as glass.

Five

That first week in Barrendale Brother and I dreaded starting a new school, but our first day turned out to be easier than expected. Since the school was located in the fire zone, nearly three-quarters of the kids and teachers were either waiting for their houses to be destroyed or were already living in hotels or with extended family. Us being the new kids barely went noticed by anyone but ourselves.

During those first weeks in Barrendale the best part of my day was when school ended and I went to visit Ma at the mill. I’d follow the railroad to the edge of town and I’d veer onto Stone Lane, a long narrow road that meandered along a cliff that dead-ended at the mill’s enormous imposing doors. The mill was the largest building I’d ever seen, at least twelve houses wide and two high. It was made of bluestone, which gave it a shimmery bluish or gray quality depending on the light and the top of it was what Daddy called crenulated. I’d never heard that word before. All I knew was that the building put you in mind of a castle. It was easy to imagine it with turrets and a drawbridge. Sometimes when I approached it, the sun would be at just the right angle to make its countless windows glint and the sight of it would fill me with wonder.

Ma, though, I don’t think ever had that feeling as she walked to work. Her station was on the second floor of a room that was maybe three times the size of the baseball field in the park. I’d walk up the side stairs that also served as a fire escape and I’d wave to Big Berta, the floor lady, who’d wave back, letting me through to where Ma sat near a window that looked out on tree branches. Sometimes birds flew in the opened windows and snakes dropped from the trees’ limbs to slither across the sill.

At the end of a long row of women bent at sewing machines, Ma worked stitching the crotches of pair after pair of underwear. The noise of the machines was so steady it made even your blood thrum. “It gets inside you,” Ma said matter-of-factly. “You can’t escape it.”

Feeling trapped by her work made Ma expressive like she’d never been before. I loved to come by and visit because each time she told me a little more about her life before she had me. It was like one of those children books where you can slide a picture to the side to reveal another picture beneath it. Slowly Ma was pulling aside the surface part of her to show me a different deeper part of her that I believed to be truer. Just a week earlier she’d told me how after leaving the orphanage, she eventually wound up in Barrendale because she’d heard the mill was looking for workers.

“When I first met Gram I actually thought she was nice. That’s how mean the orphanage nuns were. But I’ll tell you what your daddy said to me. He said he didn’t care that I came from no orphanage. He said his own grandma came from one and so he was orphanage trash too. And the moment he said that, well, I knew right then he was the one for me.”

On the day Daddy started his job at Kreshner’s department store though, Ma was cranky and out of sorts—more than usual. Just looking at her you could see the tension ready to burst out of her like an overwound spring. Before she and Daddy moved from Barrendale, Ma had been the best crotch sewer the mill had, but since then, she’d become slower. She couldn’t see as well. Over and over she’d mention how she wanted to go back to hooking on the knitting machines back in Centrereach.

She talked out of the side of her mouth because she was holding two pins between her teeth. “When I met your daddy, I thought all I’d been wishing and hoping for was about to happen. He was the best-looking man I’d ever seen. Better looking than his brother, that’s for sure.”

Ma swerved her head to cut a steely glance at Gram who, hunched at her machine on the opposite side of the room, sensed it and looked up. Ma continued, “Your daddy paid me attention right from the start. He noticed the littlest thing I’d do or say. Then when your daddy’s arm got all broke in the mine, everyone said I shouldn’t marry him. We was only engaged then but I would have felt bad leaving him just ’cause he wasn’t useful no more. Besides something happened to him down there. I don’t know what it was. I asked him once but what I seen in his eyes made me never ask again.” Ma gazed off toward the window and crinkled her nose in thought. “That’s what surviving does. Puts something hard and mean in you. I liked that in him. That he’d been through something worse than me.”

She pulled the pins from between her teeth to cough out a vicious laugh. Then she covered her mouth and we both looked over to where Big Berta stood, flicking her eyes away, pretending not to notice us. “I was so stupid back then,” Ma added, “I thought living with Gramp and Gram would be like a dream come true. I thought I was finally getting a family. That’s how stupid I was
then
, and now look at me.”

She actually waited for me to look at her. Lines splintered out from her lips and the skin beneath her eyes was veined and yellow. I thought back to that day in the trailer when Brother plunged into her with his first steps and Ma looked like she’d been singed by fire.

“Here I am,” she proclaimed. “Back exactly where I started—nowhere. All that wishing and hoping as a little girl turned out to be just a way to pass the time. You remember that, Brigid. That’s what wishing and hoping gets you. Nowhere. I sure as heck remember it every stinking day I walk down Stone Lane.”

“Bah-bah-but nah-nah-not for long, Ma.” I blinked and stammered, mimicking the way Daddy mimicked his manager, Mr. Wicket. I reminded Ma that Daddy said he’d be able to do his new job with his hands cuffed behind his back. “It’s that easy, Ma. Daddy will have no problem with it. Auntie or your ma will make sure of it. You’ll see. Soon we’ll have our own house and you’ll never have to work in a place like this again.”

Ma slouched in her chair, softened by the prospect of everything she wanted. Then she told me about a time long ago when I was just a baby and Daddy had a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door. “He was so good at it they got jealous. They fired him, saying he talked too much. That for the time he spent selling one family, he coulda sold two or three. Your daddy’s smart. I don’t say that much, but it’s the truth. I bet what he told those families was all sorts of facts nobody else would ever tell ’em. But none of that mattered. Getting fired took the last bit of oomph out of him.” Ma’s gaze flicked off Gram. “Don’t tell him I never said it but he should of been much more than he is. And now he ain’t done nothing in so long, maybe nothing’s all he’s good at.”

Just then Gram interrupted by beckoning to me from the other side of the floor where the side seamers sat. Ma glanced toward Big Berta, stuck the pins back in her mouth, and through clenched teeth said, “You best move on.”

At her sewing machine Gram hunched sewing the side seams on one pair of underpants after another. Next to her sat Edna Schwackhammer, Gram’s closest friend. The Twit Twins, Ma called them or, depending on her mood, Twin Twits. Not that they looked that much alike. Mrs. Schwackhammer was tall and big boned and unlike Gram, who walked tilted forward from her hump, Mrs. Schwackhammer walked tilted to the side from a bad hip. But they did both wear large clip-on earrings and skirts and blouses that must have been a million years old and they had a way of looking at you that made you feel like you’d been judged and had come out poorly.

That day seated on the opposite side of Gram from Mrs. Schwackhammer was a lady I didn’t recognize. She was young and pretty and looked like one of the seniors from the high school. Her lips and cheeks were bubble-gum pink. Her hair was the yellow of the inside of a peach and was swept up into a French twist that left little wisps of curls at the back of her neck.

Gram’s hump shoved her head almost up to the sewing machine. She lowered the dark-rimmed reading glasses on her nose and ripped at a thread dangling from a pair of black underwear with the words “Little Angel” embroidered on its front. “This is Brigid,” she said to the pretty lady. “The girl of my oldest boy.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “The son who was wounded in the mine?”

I smiled, pleased that she knew about Daddy. I thought of his hurt arm as a badge of honor. “He tried to tell everyone not to go in that day,” I told the lady whose wide pale eyes opened attentively. “If everyone had listened to him it wouldn’t have happened. I mean the tunnels would have collapsed, but no one would have died.”

“The body of my youngest boy,” Gram said, “was found down a monkey shaft. Nobody knows what he was doin’ down there. They weren’t minin’ that shaft no more. But you can bet he was tryin’ to stop the disaster. That he was tryin’ to warn people. That’s the type he was. Once he stopped a runaway colt at the county fair. Another time he got an entire stadium of people to follow him off the football field because he was sure a tornado was comin’. And boy did it come! Tore through those bleachers like they was toothpicks.”

Mrs. Schwackhammer chimed in. “I swear, Ro, he was the most handsome boy from anywhere around. Both my girls mooned all over him. Violet sent him secret admirer letters for years.”

Gram nodded. “I don’t blame her one bit. Senior year, my Frankie was voted number one athlete. Wrestlin’, baseball, football—you name it!” She turned to the pretty woman and said, “Shame you two never got to meet. You and him would have made a nice pair. Though of course now he’d be quite a bit older than you.”

Gram sent me off with some money and a grocery list and as I crossed back through the room to the stair, I found myself wishing dead Uncle Frank was alive so Gram could see living proof of something Daddy often said, “The body wears down, but brain smarts last forever.”

*   *   *

Outside the crisp air tasted of wintergreen and wet rock. Cardinals trilled and red-winged blackbirds called and the feeling of spring walloped me, as it always did, making me ache worse than I ever did in the fall. Which got me thinking of something Auntie used to say—that it hurts worse to open than close.

But that feeling of spring was quickly gone as soon as I stepped inside Kreshner’s. The store smelled of damp wool and bleach cleaner and burned in my nose and throat. I didn’t even have to look for Daddy. I could hear him talking from where I stood in the main aisle so I simply followed his voice to the back of the store where I found him explaining different grains of leather and the benefits and drawbacks of buckskin versus patent to one of the high school stock boys. The boy nodded and said things like, “You don’t say, Mr. Howley?” or “That a fact?”

Several yards from them a woman sat waiting to try on shoes while her two little kids spread their arms and played airplane wars, crashing into each other and the chairs.