The Hollow Ground: A Novel (8 page)

“Cors-or-ran,” I said, feeling Ma’s real name settle inside us.

“Cork-run,” Ma corrected.

Gram leaned further over Ma’s shoulder and squinted. “Just ’cause he looks like John Patrick don’t mean he’s your brother.”

When Brother heard his name, he tromped over, looked at the photo and said the boy looked “runty” which was a word he’d picked up from Mr. Williamson, our neighbor across the street, who’d drowned the runt of his basset hound’s litter.

“I tell you I remember the name,” Ma said. “Now that I seen it, I remember it. Corkrun,” she said and then carefully repeated,
“Cork-run.”

“Well, so what if it is him?” Gram said, stepping back and eying Brother who had his arm elbow deep in the cookie jar. “What you ’spect to happen if you find him?”

Ma didn’t answer. She pushed back her chair and jostled me out the front door with Gram shouting after us, “Really, Dolores. What you ’spect to happen? Remember, once a thing’s done, you can’t take it back. Think, Dolores. Think before you do somethin’ you’ll regret.”

Quickly we reached the point in the road where it turned onto the long crooked hill down to town. We were walking so fast we were practically at a skip.

“I forgot what he looked like too,” Ma said. “But don’t he look just like John Patrick? His name’s Jerry, short for Jerome. I remembered that even though what I called him was Bropey. I used to cry at night, waiting for him to save me from the orphanage. But he was too little. Four or five when they sent me away.”

Ma stopped short and jabbed at the tears on her cheeks with the heel of her palm. “Know what that bitch said to my daddy? ‘The boy will be useful.’ I heard her say it. And my own daddy let her take me away. Can you imagine a daddy doing such a thing? As bad as your father is—”

She didn’t finish that sentence and we walked in silence to the library where Ma made a beeline for the phone books. In the Allentown phone book she found a Jerome Corcoran. She got change from the librarian and dropped dime after dime into the pay phone outside the library, telling me to dial the number because she was too afraid she’d do it wrong.

Slowly I dialed, double- and triple-checking each number to make sure I had it right. It didn’t help that each time I let the dial roll back into place, Ma made a sound high up in her throat like a wounded animal. Eventually I completed all the numbers and me and Ma waited, staring into each other’s eyes. Then Ma said, “Hello? Bropey?” I’d never heard her voice so broken and sad before. “Bropey?” she cried. “That you?”

But as Ma spoke I heard behind her words Gram’s words:
Once a thing’s done, you can’t take it back.

Through the phone booth’s glass door I stared intently at the street as if by concentration alone I could control where we were headed.

Seven

Once a week I accompanied Ma to the pay phone outside the library where she’d call Uncle Jerry collect. My job was to come and stand guard. Ma never said who I was supposed to be guarding her from but I’d understood, without being able to put it into words, that those phone calls were as valuable to Ma as gold or treasure. While Ma stood there talking to Uncle Jerry, she felt like her words needed protection, even though mostly all she said was, “Yeah? That right? Don’t say?”

Still, it wouldn’t be long before Ma would cry out, “Oh, but this must be costing you a fortune!” And then she’d hang up, promising to call again the following week. Afterward me and Ma would split a vanilla cream soda at the drugstore and Ma’s face would get all wistful and soft and I’d pray all the harder to Ma’s dead ma and to Auntie that Ma would stay as sweet as this forever.

The mornings broke cool but the afternoons broiled to summer fast and the school year ended early due to the heat. Mrs. Schmidt, our history teacher, actually wept with joy, and that’s the first time us kids realized that going to school in the fire zone was even more miserable for the teachers than it was for us. The heat did something to Ma too. As soon as we were out of school she declared that she deserved time to herself. She said “time to herself” like it was a right signed into the Constitution that she’d been denied. So on Saturday afternoons when Ma got home from the mill, Daddy would take me and Brother out of the house so Ma could be free to do what she wanted. I loved this time with Daddy because it reminded me of the “exploring walks” Daddy and me used to go on when we first moved to Barrendale. First we’d wander around the fire zone, passing by blocks where nearly every house stood empty, to blocks where the houses were so well-kept you could believe the rumors that there was no fire and the plan to dig it out was just a conspiracy for the coal company to get the coal cheap.

As a treat Daddy would take us into the air-conditioned space of Kreshner’s where he’d dawdle, picking this or that up, to make it clear to Mr. Wicket that he’d returned and was not going to buy a thing.

Those afternoons with Daddy always ended at a bar, usually The Shaft. Me and Brother didn’t mind it too bad though because Daddy never drank so much that he needed breath mints and he’d always buy me and Brother a root beer or a Coke.

The Shaft was deep in the fire zone, which meant that most of the houses around it were still standing. It was the houses on the edge of the zone that needed to be wrecked first since the trenches were intended to stop the fire from spreading. In those days at the bar the men mostly talked about the fire. They discussed the layout of the mine shafts and how they expected the fire to burn. They talked about how much money the dig out would cost and the impossibility to move anywhere else on the amount of money they’d get for their houses. They talked about the dangers of black damp and other hazards the fire caused and eventually they’d talk about Cuba and Russia and space flight and which Phillies players they thought were worth their salt.

No matter what they talked about the men always listened to what Daddy said like he was someone important. That’s what struck me the most about those afternoons, seeing Daddy being admired the way I always knew he ought to be.

“Smartest in the class, Adrian. That was you,” Joe, the bartender, liked to say. Joe always said something nice about Gramp too. One day he talked about the man Gramp had beaten up for sending the men into the mines the day of the disaster. “Broke a beer bottle right across his face,” Joe said with as much excitement as if Gramp had done it only days ago and not a million years ago before I was even born. “That bastard never saw out of that eye again,” he added. “Right? Right? Am I right?”

Daddy hesitated before he agreed and from the way his eyes got all distant I could tell he was thinking about something else.

“What did Gramp do?” Brother asked as he tried to jam a toy car in his ear to see if it would come out his nose.

“Stop that,” I said, feeling a stab of pain, remorse I guess. Auntie had made me promise multiple times to take care of my little brother, and his not knowing about the family history I took as proof of my neglect. “He beat up the fire boss, Jack Novak,” I said in a low voice. Jack Novak was a name I’d never said out loud before, though I’d said it in my head countless times, enjoying the rhyme. My tongue got heavy saying it out loud, as if I’d just spoken a secret or a curse word.

Intrigued, Brother paused with the car pressed up to his ear. I continued, “Gramp beat him up to get him back for sending everyone into a broken mine shaft. For killing Uncle Frank. For letting him get killed in a shaft that the fire boss knew was dangerous. Gramp was protecting us, all the miners, by letting those mine owners know they had to respect us. They had to treat us right.”

“So he killed him?” Brother’s eyes narrowed and his mouth opened slightly like he wanted to taste the words I spoke.

“No,” I said. “But I guess he was trying to.” I took the car from Brother’s hand, bothered that I’d never before thought that Gramp might have wanted to actually kill the man.

On those Saturday afternoons there weren’t only men in The Shaft. Often there was a woman named Star, though Star wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Beatrice Kittering. She was called Star because she always wore a star pendant around her neck that she liked to hold and rub between her thumb and forefinger as if good luck or a genie might spring from it. Her long neck and large bulging gray eyes gave her a crazed starved look that reminded me of the goldfish we’d had at Auntie’s that froze one January morning in their bowl.

Star had a way of leaning in toward Daddy when she spoke that I didn’t like. What I did like though was that, at least in the beginning, Daddy didn’t pay her any mind. The first time I met her she said, “Why, when I was your age, I had such a crush on your uncle Frank. Remember that, Adrian?”

“Followed him around like a dog,” Daddy said into his beer.

“Like a little puppy,” she agreed. “Wasn’t till I was a little bit older I also got a crush on you, Adrian.”

I pushed up against Daddy’s knee so that I could sit with my head resting on his shoulder and I asked Daddy if we could bring an ice-cream cone home to Ma. Daddy cuddled me with his bad arm and kissed me on the side of the head.

Star took a slow sip from her glass of beer. “So, what brings you back to Barrendale, Adrian?

“Dad took a turn for the worse,” Daddy said, nudging me back toward Brother.

“Sorry to hear that,” she said, rubbing her pendant and lowering her eyes so Daddy couldn’t see what thoughts had floated up into them.

Sometimes Star was there alone, sometimes she was with Bear. Like Star, Bear didn’t look anything like his name. He was skinny and barely taller than me, but he had a tattoo of a bear on his bicep. On his elbows were also tattoos but those were of webs, which Daddy said meant he’d been in jail. Daddy said this with a note of respect but there was an edge to his voice too. Gramp had been in and out of jail, sticking up for himself or the miners by busting up some place or person. “Disorderly conduct” this was called, but Daddy said there was nothing disorderly about sticking up for what’s right. Sometimes Star would hang all over Bear and sometimes she’d act real cool to him and sit on the other side of the bar and tell Joe to tell Bear that she wasn’t going to talk to him for the rest of the afternoon.

One of those Saturday afternoons Star offered Brother some Mary Jane candies she’d pulled from her purse. When Brother reached for one she cuddled him up to her breasts and said how she hoped one day to have one as cute as this. Brother took the hug for about three seconds and then shoved off of her with a push.

“John Patrick,” Daddy growled.

“It’s all right,” Star said, forcing a laugh. “Boys are boys, after all.”

That day an old man was seated at the bar. He looked at least as old as Gramp and he spoke with a backwoods accent that made him hard to understand. His name was Caleb Delling and as soon as he caught Daddy’s eye he started to reminisce about the disaster.

“Saw the rats running by me,” Mr. Delling said.

“We’d been noticing the wood beams sagging for weeks,” another man said to Daddy. “Didn’t you tell them that? But didn’t they send us in anyway?”

“What choice did we have but to go?” Mr. Delling said. “With them cutting us a day or two a week, we needed any work they’d give us.”

“That day I told Frank to get the men out,” Daddy said. “Then there was this tremor and I said, ‘Frankie we got to get the men out.’ But don’t you know, he went deeper in.”

“Must have been looking for someone,” Mr. Delling said. “That’s why he wound up where he was.”

“He was looking for trouble,” Daddy said.

“Wasn’t he always,” Joe said.

Daddy continued, “With the next tremor, I raced to the hoist, but then I heard someone shouting.”

“The way I recall it,” Mr. Delling said, “the hoist didn’t work. That’s why we lost so many men.”

“Yeah,” Daddy said, “but I didn’t know that yet. So I went back to where I’d heard the call. That’s when the beam came down on my shoulder and crushed my arm. I don’t even know how I got us out of Devil Jaw and into colliery nine. But by the third tremor, I was out.”

“I was with your dad, Adrian,” the other old man said. “By the third tremor we were out. He didn’t know where you two boys were except that you’d both been farther down, in the worst of it.”

The sirens from a fire truck grew, then faded, and everyone stopped talking. In the quiet a cardinal’s tweets could be heard through the open door. I didn’t want to think about Daddy being in the mine that day. I couldn’t stand the thought of him down there, knowing the ground perched above him was about to fall.

Star must have been thinking of Daddy too because she said, “Can’t imagine what it was like for all you down there.” But when she said “you” she looked at Daddy and shivered.

Bear squeezed the shell of a peanut until the peanut popped out. Then he reached into the bowl for another nut and squeezed that one too. “You Howleys always thought you were God’s gift. You and your brother. But look at you.” He nodded his chin at Daddy. “Vala-fucking-dictorian. But you didn’t turn out to be much at all.”

No one spoke. Mr. Delling wiped a cold bottle of beer across his forehead.

Daddy took a slow swig from his own beer bottle, then held it in front of his face as if he was trying to see something inside it. His glance grazed mine, then stuck on Bear. Instinctively I stepped backwards, thinking of Gramp bashing a bottle across that fire boss’s face. But all Daddy did was place the bottle down and turn to Star who was standing next to him.

Daddy put his hand on Star’s waist, pulled her to him, and kissed her right on the mouth. Afterward he said, “You got that right. Didn’t turn out to be much at all.”

Joe was quick to offer drinks on the house.

“Now, Bear,” Star said lamely as if she were trying to command a dog she knew wouldn’t listen. She ran a hand over her bouffant hairdo and grabbed the pendant that hung between her breasts.

“Don’t worry,” Bear said with a laugh, cracking the shells of several peanuts by squeezing them in his fist. “He ain’t worth the bother.”

Daddy didn’t say anything. He merely motioned to Joe for another beer. But then after that beer he ordered another and another. He drank so much he forgot me and Brother were there and eventually we had to walk home without him so we wouldn’t be late for supper.