Whisper Hollow (35 page)

“How would Gabe know that?” Danny’s voice was sharp.

“Hold it down, now. Nobody needs to be overhearing this,” Stanley admonished, shushing him with his hand, a thread of cigarette smoke whipping between them. “Sissy Borasky evidently was looking after Gabe when Lidia was over there helping Peggy with something and Gabe told her there was
something shiny under the hydrangea bushes alongside her house. He couldn’t even see the bushes from where he was sitting, she said, but she went out anyway and didn’t see anything so she went back inside. Said Gabe was insistent about there being something there. Curiosity got hold of her — she’s heard the stories, too, of course — and so she dug up that whole row of hydrangeas that’d been growing there lord knows how long and damn if she didn’t find a cigar box full of gold coins her daddy won in a poker game and buried to keep her mother from spending it. He died before he ever told them where it was. And so according to Sissy, it was Gabe who solved the mystery of it.”

“He could have been talking about a shovel! Or a nail or a gum wrapper! Could have been anything.”

“But it wasn’t just anything, see?” Stanley took another drag.

“So are you saying you believe all this nonsense? You really think Gabriel … knows things?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I believe it or not,” Stanley said with a sigh, looking down at the space where his finger had once been. “But in case he does …” He looked back up. “Danny, you’re a good man. You’re a good worker and a good father and I appreciate you taking care of my Liddie like you have. But in case what they’re saying about Gabe is true, you need to take him and Lidia and go.” He took a long swig and set his mug down hard.

“Go? What are you talking about, go? Go where?”

“Go back to where your people are. New York or New Jersey or wherever. Anywhere. Kentucky. Ohio. Anywhere. But you need to take them away. Get them out of Verra for a bit, maybe a couple years, give him time to … grow out of it. Or for people’s concerns to die down. I’m telling you,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not good for you here right now.”

Danny pushed his mug a few inches away. “Stanley, I have to tell you, you sound as crazy as the rest of them. Gabe’s just a regular kid, normal as Lidia and me.”

“I know things you don’t know,” Stanley said, in a voice husky and close to a whisper. He raised an eyebrow at the table, tapped the ash off his cigarette, then looked up at Danny.

“What things?”

“If there’s a chance — just a tiny chance — that Gabriel knows … things, or can tell the future, or the past … then there’s cause to protect him.”

“So what if he can tell something that’s already passed? Who cares about that?”

“Everybody,” he said. “Everybody cares about what’s passed. Everybody! Don’t you want to know what happened before your daddy died? And your mama? Don’t you want to know what guilt they owned? What secrets they took on with ’em to the grave? People always want to know the truth. They never rest completely without it.”

“Well?” Danny shrugged. “What’s wrong with knowing the truth? Not saying Gabe knows the truth about anything except the sun’s going to come up in the morning. But so what if folks think he does?”

“So what?” Stanley said. “So what if the truth is something you don’t want shared? What if the truth would change everybody’s thinking about what’s done and gone? People come to terms with things, then maybe somebody comes along and tells them something different and all of a sudden they have to change their view? And what if what really happened is a whole lot different than what people assumed? There’s responsibility in that.” Stanley looked down again. “That’s asking a lot. Of everybody.”

“And now you’re asking a lot of me to take my family off to God-knows-where just because a few people are scared he might say something they don’t want everybody to know. I
mean, what could he say that would justify us leaving home? What’s the worst that could happen? So what if somebody gets shamed by something? Maybe they’d deserve it.”

“You don’t get it.”

Danny shrugged, then sat up straighter against the seat. “No, I s’pose I don’t.”

“Then let me tell you something that might make you see things a little clearer,” Stanley said in a low voice that sounded like thunder and fear at the same time. He took another long swig of beer and set it down, quiet and precise.

“I never told anybody this,” Stanley said. “I didn’t intend to tell you now, but you don’t seem budged by me pointing out the risks to you keeping my daughter and grandson here. There’s something else …” He paused. “There’s something that if it got out, it could get me hanged. Something I did. But nobody knew it was me who did it. I let somebody else take the blame for it, though, because in the end, it wasn’t something I meant to do. It was an accident, really, even though it didn’t start out that way.” He shook his head and closed his eyes. “After it was done, I couldn’t tell anybody what really happened. I kept it buried like a seam of coal all these years. Let the weight of time hold it down deep, and now, if it was to get dug up and hauled out into the light …” Stanley dropped his head back against the seat pad and looked dull-eyed at Danny. “If I was found out, people would want me gone or dead or both — and my family with me. They’d never want to lay eyes again on anyone related to Stanley Kielar by blood or marriage.”

Danny leaned forward, his wide eyes reflecting the candlelight like a boy sitting by a campfire, equally scared and riveted by the ghost stories being told. “What’d you do?” he whispered.

“About five months after Eagan got sick with the meningitis, we knew he’d never be the same. I blamed myself, you
know. One day I’d come home and my wife said he’d woken up from his nap irritable and lethargic. She worried about him enough to want to take him to the doctor, but I didn’t. I checked on him, patted him on the head. He said to me, ‘My neck hurts, Daddy,’ but even then I figured he just had a regular fever, even though he’d had it a few days already. It’d been a long day, and I figured he’d be all right. Next day, though, the fever hadn’t broken and Eagan acted confused, and if he tried to move his neck he cried, so we took him down to see Doc Bartlett, who said we needed to get him to the hospital in Charleston. Doc rode with us, sat in the back with Anna, holding Eagan across their laps while I drove. It took me twice as long as it would’ve otherwise because of a hailstorm.” He stopped, letting his memory idle for a moment, helpless, next to his young son’s hospital bed. He tried not to let his voice crack when he said, “I never did forgive myself for not taking him down the night before. I should’ve put my boots right back on that minute and carried him down. I found out later it might’ve turned out different if I had.”

Danny wondered about the last time Gabriel had had a fever. He always deferred to Lidia in such cases; he tended to assume — right or wrong — things would work themselves out. “How could you have known?” he said, suddenly aware of how vulnerable they all were to the things they didn’t know.

“I looked back on it and thought I should’ve, somehow. And then they told us he was most likely going to be retarded for the rest of his life, and the bills came, and Anna started worrying about how we were going to take care of him. So I came up with a plan. Which is the part that nobody knows. I was going to do something that would make sure Anna and Eagan and Lidia — who was only a year old at the time — would be set up with enough money so they could leave Verra and move someplace where Anna could get help for Eagan. Because all I know is mining coal. I didn’t have any other ideas about how to get
us all out of here together and into a city with a real hospital if Eagan needed one, or a special type of school. So this plan I had would take care of them, and also take care of me. It was supposed to deliver me from my guilt. But instead, it only made it worse.”

Danny had always thought the reason Stanley acted so reserved and remote, serious and older than he should have been, was because of Eagan, but he didn’t know exactly why. Now, watching him wrestle with the past, Danny wasn’t sure he wanted to witness his father-in-law mine the depths of his own shameful history. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the reasons for all the lines on Stanley’s face.

“Dead shift was coming up. We only did it three, four times a year. There’s no hoot-owl on nights before a dead shift, you know, so I knew the mine would be empty for the eight hours after the second shift ended and dead shift started the next day. So I decided …” Stanley bought a minute more of solitude with his secret by lighting another cigarette. “I decided I was going to do something to make things better for Anna. That morning I got up when Anna and the kids did, early morning, which was unusual because I usually slept in to around ten o’clock. I ate breakfast with them, and Anna kept looking at me funny, but I just told her I wanted some time with them, and so I spent the whole morning with them, holding Lidia and trying to play with Eagan; all the while I was saying goodbye to them inside my mind, and to Anna, too. It took everything I had to keep from breaking down right there, but I kept telling myself they were going to be better off.”

He stopped again, and Danny, alarmed but understanding the rhythm, waited.

“At the end of my shift that night, Walter Pulaski, who was foreman — you know Alta, right? Walter was her husband — he called the end of the shift and everyone got on the mantrip and
went about their business getting changed and going home. I planned to say I’d forgotten my dinner bucket and go back down on my own, take care of what I needed to, but that’s when I heard Liam Magee tell Walter he was going back in to put the batteries on charge. So I just hung by the side of the hole in the dark, hunkering down behind a rock. It was a crescent moon that night, but I could see pretty well, and I waited what seemed like a lifetime for Magee to come back out. Must have been a half hour or more, then he comes out and reaches up and slaps the safety sign like he always did. I saw him pull out a flask, but that was typical. Magee was a drunk just like his daddy.”

Danny interrupted him. “I gotta tell you, Mr. Kielar — Stanley, I mean — I’m not following you exactly. When was this?”

“It was October 6, 1950. The night before the Number Seventeen exploded.”

“So you’re saying you saw him do something to cause it?”

Stanley slipped out of his seat and stood up. He heaved a sigh and walked with a heavy stride toward the front of the bar. Danny swung around to watch him, wondering if he would keep on going right through the door. But he didn’t. He stood looking out the window a moment, then walked slowly back to their table and sat down.

“I’m not saying Magee did something,” he said in a low voice full of ache. “I’m saying
I
did.”

“What?” Danny said. “What do you mean,
you
did?”

“I mean I waited for Liam Magee to come back out and then I went back in.” He sighed and looked down again. “I planned to rig the ventilation system, make it look accidental, open up some of the stoppings to change the air flow, you know, then let the methane build up in one of the drifts near the face, where I’d be waiting …”

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting for the methane levels to get up to five, six percent of the atmosphere, not too high — I didn’t want too big a blast. Nothing that would shut down production for any real length of time, but enough that they’d find my body next day when the dead shift crew came on. Like I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Your body? You mean …”

Stanley nodded.

“But why?”

“I told you, I wanted to set Anna up so she could take Eagan and Lidia out of Verra.”

“But you’re here. And Liam Magee’s not. And all those guys died.”

“I know it. And it’s my fault.”

“So why does everybody talk about it being Magee’s fault? I heard he never turned up again after that day, and everyone seems to think it was because of something he did. Where’d he go after he left the mine that night?”

“Best guess is he came somewhere downtown. According to Pudge Bellini, he had more than a few, then said he had to be going. As for why they blamed him, it was because Pudge said he was talking about setting something up. Apparently, he was pissed off about being passed over for promotion. He’d been making a stink for months about the mine not being safe, heckling the Blackstone shirts to get us better safety protocol, better ventilation. They ignored him, of course, maybe passed him over because of it, but it would’ve worked to my advantage having everyone already thinking that maybe the conditions weren’t as good as the company wanted us to believe. Anyway, Pudge said Magee was drinking with him and started bragging about having cut away part of the insulation on the trolley wire and setting something metal against it so it’d set off a spark when the dead crew powered up the power station.
Nobody knows for sure, of course. Magee never could be found to question and the investigators couldn’t do more than guess what happened based on the explosion and what Pudge claimed Magee had said.”

“Then I don’t understand why you’re saying it was your fault.”

“Truth is I’m not a hundred percent sure it was. But I know I opened up plenty of the stoppings in the old works to screw up the ventilation corridor. I was underground awhile; couple, three hours at least. I just sat there holding that book of matches, waiting for the gas tester to tell me it was time to go. But then when it finally got built up enough, I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking maybe there was a chance they’d tell Anna it was my fault, that I shouldn’t have been underground past my shift, that if it was a normal shift the fire boss would have tested for gas buildup and evacuated the crew if the levels were too high. And if they didn’t think it was their fault because of poor ventilation, they wouldn’t pay anything out to Anna. Then where’d she be? I’d be dead for nothing. Couldn’t even offer her and the kids what little I had. So I went back, closed up the stoppings again, then slipped back into my bed like it was a regular night. I recall Anna rolling over in her sleep, putting her arm across my chest. She didn’t even know I’d been gone any longer than usual.”