The Hollow Ground: A Novel (9 page)

Eight

During the early part of that summer I spent much of my time reading. The house, stuffy and dark with Gramp’s sickness, became a place to escape so I often read outside. Some of my favorite haunts were the shores of the local ponds where I could cool my feet in the shallows that were green and purple with pickerelweed. But I also liked to spend time in the church.

Saint Barbara’s Roman Catholic Church was built of gray stone and erected in 1829 when the canal and gravity railroad were being built. It towered partway up a hillside, looking like the back of it had been wedged into the mountain and being partway up the mountain had protected it against the great fire of 1850 and countless floods and tornadoes. To me, that gave it a true feeling of sanctuary and I especially loved being there in the late afternoon when the sun through the stained glass windows sent swaths of ruby and golden light across the wooden pews, the heat making the benches smell woodier. Sometimes that waxy wood smell got so far up into my nose that I could taste it.

Daddy said people got the idea for stained glass by looking at trees that were backdropped by the setting sun, the crisscrossed tree branches framing oddly shaped patches of reddish amber light. Whenever I saw bare trees from a distance I thought of stained glass and whenever I looked at stained glass, I thought of trees. The stained glass windows in Saint Barbara’s all depicted saints, each saint representing the type of people who’d worked digging the canals and mines. There was Saint Patrick for the Irish, Saint Anthony for the Italians, Saint Adalbert for the Polish, Saint George for the English, Saint Joan of Arc for the French. There were far more men saints than women and they all just stood there, draped in robes of various colors, staring out blankly as if there was nothing in all the world for them to see.

Saint Barbara was the patron saint of prisoners, artillerymen, and of miners. She was also the saint to turn to during thunderstorms or fires. I supposed if she could be the patron saint of a prisoner, then she could also be the saint of the cursed. So whenever I went into that church I prayed especially hard to her. Ma had only married into the curse, so she shouldn’t be as cursed as Daddy, Brother, and me, but I often found myself praying twice as hard for her.

That summer I’d made it my goal to read all of the Nancy Drews. I’d already read all the books that had the words
the clue
in their title and I remember pausing when I’d reach a dramatic part in the book, savoring the moment before Nancy solved the crime. Sometimes I’d catch myself fantasizing that just like Nancy I lived alone with my daddy. In this fantasy Ma was dead and Brother never existed. I’d relish the feeling of all my love being just for Daddy and all of Daddy’s love being just for me until I’d get sick with guilt that I could ever wish Ma dead and Brother never born. Then I’d convince myself that it was the curse living inside me that thought such awful things and that it was Father Capedonico himself whispering those ugly thoughts into the chambers of my heart.

On those days when I went to the church to read I always sat near the statue of Saint Barbara on the right side of the altar. Sometimes seated on the left side of the altar, where the statue of the Virgin stood, was a girl. I’d seen this girl many times, both at church and at school. She had spirals of black hair past her shoulders and eyes that appeared either gray or green depending on the light. Her skin was the color of the tea Auntie used to drink, a sunny brown, and speckling her nose were freckles, a darker brown than her skin. At Sunday mass she ignored the service, praying the rosary like the old ladies did, a string of mother-of-pearl rosaries worked bead by bead between her thumb and index finger, continuing to sit even when everyone else stood or kneeled. Even at school she had a way of walking through the halls that set her apart and there were always a couple of boys following her around, taunting and teasing her. Marisol Diaz Sullivan was her name, and whenever she said it, she pronounced
Diaz
like it was a threat, like it was a bit of something sharp and glinting on her tongue. Each time I saw her I couldn’t help fantasizing that my blah-brown hair would blacken and my blah-brown eyes would chameleonlike change color.

Usually I watched her from a distance but once during an air-raid drill I got so close that I could smell the baby shampoo of her hair. It was lunchtime and we wound up crouched under the same cafeteria table. The sides of our legs and arms pressed together and I wondered if she ever let any of the boys touch her and if she had, where. As if reading my thoughts, she shot me a snotty glance and I looked away, imagining what would happen if this wasn’t a drill, but the real thing and the atomic bomb was actually dropping right outside the window. I pictured me and Marisol laid out together, our faces burned like the photo I’d seen in
Life
magazine of two little Japanese girls who’d been in Hiroshima when we dropped the bomb on them.

That day in the church when I actually met Marisol Diaz Sullivan I thought again of the bomb dropping and I touched the warm clammy skin at the back of my neck. Curled up asleep on the pew behind me was Brother. He looked like a little angel with his wisps of strawberry blond hair and cupid lips, which made me think that Ma was right when she said you could never trust a thing for what it was.

At the time I was reading
The Ghost of Blackwood Hall
and though I was into the story I couldn’t keep from glancing at Marisol. She looked to be doing a crossword puzzle, a pencil poised between her fingers, a streak of orange light from a stained glass window coloring her face. Every now and then she reached into a straw purse on the bench beside her for a potato chip that she’d then slowly crunch in her mouth with a dreamy look on her face as if it was the Eucharist itself.

Feeling my stare Marisol turned toward me, but the sound of a door being closed coming from somewhere deep in the dark entry to the rectory snapped her to attention. We both turned in time to see Mr. Edelmann, the church sacristarian, in the entryway off the side of the altar. He wielded a feather duster like a sword and pointed it at Marisol. “You better not be eating in here again.” Marisol didn’t say a thing and his glance swept over her bag and then up and over me. “What are you two girls doing?”

“Praying,” Marisol was quick to say. “Isn’t that what church is for?”

He turned on me a bullying stare. I looked down at my shoes that sparkled with the rhinestone clips Daddy had taken from Kreshner’s. “Praying,” I confirmed, fanning myself with an opened hymnal in my hand. When I read, I always kept a hymnal beside me just in case a priest or a nun walked in. Mr. Edelmann narrowed his eyes into an angry squint and aimed the feather duster at Brother. “Get that kid up. This is the house of the Lord, not some flophouse.”

I moved as if to wake Brother but as soon as Mr. Edelmann left I sat back down. Without saying a word, Marisol stood, slipped her bag over her shoulder, and sidestepped out of her pew and into mine. She plopped the bag between us and offered me a chip. The chips were barbequed flavor. As soon as I took one, my tongue zinged with the spice of it.

“Thanks,” she said. “Last week he caught me eating in here and said he’d throw me out if I did it again. I said, ‘How could you throw me out of church? It’s the house of God and my body is a temple of the Holy Ghost so shouldn’t the house for God be open for a house for God?’”

She smiled wide, her eyes seeking something in mine. I smiled back. She was two years older than me because she’d been left back twice and her age and experience were something I flat-out admired. Together we reached into her bag for a chip and as we chewed, the rust-colored powder coating our fingers sealed our friendship as good as any Indian blood vow.

Eventually she said, “I know about your family.”

“Yeah?” I tilted my head to look at her from the side. I never knew where a comment about my family was headed.

“I heard about your grandfather,” she said. “That he never lets anybody push him around. I like that.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at a tear in the cushion of the kneeler, not knowing why the thought of Gramp being looked up to made me feel small.

Then she said that she’d seen me around at school and I blushed, having thought that I’d slipped through the halls safely unnoticed.

“New people interest me,” she explained. “I always wonder why anyone would want to come to Barrendale.”

I shook my head. “We didn’t want to.” And then I told her about Centrereach and Auntie and the remedies she’d make. I felt breathless and raw when I described the fire under the fields and how the earth opened up like a mouth to eat Auntie. I’d never spoken about the way she’d died and it made me feel like I was losing more of her, like putting it all into words somehow made Auntie less than who she was.

Marisol’s gaze roamed over my body as if she expected to find something wrong with me. Leaning forward, she waved her hand in front of my face like she was washing a window. “Your auntie’s spirit is around you. I can feel it.”

“Where?” I said, studying the air near my hands and legs. “I can’t feel it.”

“You’re closed to it,” she said and crumpled the potato chip bag up. “My grandfather is a
curador,
a healer like your auntie was. What he would tell you is that you must beat your heart open. Whatever that means. Ask me, there’s enough people out there who’ll do that for you. You don’t need to do it yourself.”

From that day on Marisol and I became fast friends. She had a way of seeing things and of saying things that I especially liked, and she said that it was exactly her way of saying things that had gotten her left back twice. “Teachers want you to say what
they
want you to say,” she explained. I found out that she was born in Barrendale but had spent most of her life living with her grandmother in the Bronx. She’d only come back to Barrendale two years ago to take care of her sick mother whose healing she prayed for whenever she came to church. Often she’d talk about how much she missed her grandmother and her neighborhood in the Bronx, especially the salt marshes.

“The air tastes of the ocean all morning,” she’d say, “and smells of faraway places all night.” Then she’d go on about how the setting sun turned the marsh grasses pink and how the moonlight made the grasses look like slivers of spirits all moving together in the wind.

I’d never even heard of the Bronx, but I couldn’t get over that Marisol could make a place with such an ugly name sound so pretty and the fact that she could made her seem more than ordinary to me. She was like us, I figured. She also walked on fire or air. She had a kind of magic to her.

And I understood that we were not only meant to meet but that we were meant to do something I’d been waiting for all my life. I just didn’t yet know what that something was. But with each day that passed, I could feel it coming closer and closer.

*   *   *

Marisol and I met on the afternoons that she didn’t work cleaning and doing chores for one of the rich old ladies in town, a widow of one of the mine managers. Sometimes if the old lady had enough work she’d hire me too and Marisol and I would work together, cleaning windows or polishing copper pots. When the old lady was napping or out, we went up into the attic and tried on the dresses and shawls and hats that were packed away in the trunks, most of them Victorian style, their mustiness whispering of a glorious Barrendale past that was almost impossible to imagine.

On the days Marisol didn’t work we’d often sit side by side in church or on boulders by a lake and we’d read. In less than a week we devoured
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
and while I longed to be loved by Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester, Marisol considered Cathy and Jane fools. “Why haunt a SOB like Heathcliff?” Marisol said about Cathy. “And that Rochester!” Marisol said about Jane, “He tries to marry her when he’s
already
married and she
forgives
him for it?”

When we weren’t reading we spent our time doing silly stuff that amused us. One entire afternoon we went door-to-door Christmas caroling in the July heat. Sometimes we’d put on accents and pretend to be foreigners from this or that made-up country and we’d ask directions from people or give cashiers a hard time counting our change. And when we weren’t doing what Gram called “the crazy that comes from doin’ nothin’ all day” we boy-watched. We watched them play softball, basketball, and stickball. We hid and watched them skinny-dip at Tinton Falls, deciding that their privates were the least attractive parts of them. We took long walks starting from the farthest reaches of the fire zone on the west side of the city to the farms and hunters’ shacks on the east side, all in the hopes of seeing Billy Branigan, a boy who was a year older than Marisol, which meant he was three grades ahead of us in school. He had curly blond hair cut so short it was just a sort of wiry frizz and his eyes were such a pale cold blue they reminded me of the ice covering a winter pond. To me he seemed stuck-up and mean, but Marisol knew things I didn’t so I figured there must be something cute and nice in Billy that I couldn’t see.

Regardless I didn’t mind those long walks because sometimes Billy was with Eddie Battista, a boy whose eyes were the same light brown as Auntie’s nut bread and made me feel all sweet inside. If we saw Billy, and we usually did, nothing much would happen though. Marisol would lay on Billy a heated look that Billy would shrug off, his cold blue gaze sliding off her like melting ice. If Eddie was there he’d usually follow us for a block or so and make kissy noises or ask questions like, “Where you headed?” or “What’s your rush?” These questions, much to my disappointment, were never aimed at me.

On especially hot days, Marisol and I would hike up the steep streets out of town and into the woods of East Mountain. We’d wend our way through ferny woods, then marshy meadows, and then back into ferny woods. Occasionally we saw coyotes that looked like strung-out wolves and a black bear that resembled the giant black dog the devil was said to come as. We eagerly kept watch for the cougar said to live up there and the snapping turtles rumored to eat small children. In the marshes it was hot and buggy but the bushes were heavy with blueberries and there was a creek that was cold and shallow enough in places for us to walk its bed. Sometimes its rippling water looked jeweled by so many darning needles flitting along it, their lacey wings shimmery with light.