The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  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.

  I waited by a display of rhinestone clips that were in the shape of bows and circles meant to dress up shoes. I spun the display case around, admiring the way the stones caught the dim overhead lights and sparkled.

  After several minutes a man approached Daddy. The man’s face was all red and bumpy and every time he talked he blinked his eyes. I knew from Daddy’s description that this was Mr. Wicket, Daddy’s manager, who Daddy called Mr. Shit-it. Daddy hated the way Mr. Wicket bowed and blinked to the customers as if they were royalty. “Obsequious,” Daddy said about Mr. Wicket as if that were worse than being one of the perverts we read about in the paper who touched little kids.

  Daddy was dressed in one of Gramp’s old suits. His arm must have been bothering him because he held his shoulder up and his elbow pressed to his side. The stock boy retreated through a swinging door to the back room and I could tell Mr. Wicket and Daddy were exchanging words, though I couldn’t hear clearly what was said because the two little kids were making sputtering crash noises.

  Mr. Wicket pointed to the lady waiting to be served and Daddy pointed at the door the stock boy had just gone through. Mr. Wicket said something else and Daddy put his hand on Mr. Wicket’s shoulder and pushed him back a step. Mr. Wicket’s big brown eyes blinked slowly closed, then open. He said something else and Daddy turned from him and started walking toward me.

  “Princess!” he loudly exclaimed and the sour look that had been on his face so quickly became one of delight that it made my heart hurt. He lifted a pair of clips from the rack and said, “What do you think of these clips? Pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Beautiful,” I said, my voice thick with desire for them.

  “Ma’am,” Mr. Wicket said, bowing his head slightly toward the woman as he passed her on his way to us. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”

  I looked up at Daddy in surprise. Daddy had made fun of Mr. Wicket’s stutter so often that I was shocked to hear him speak with no stutter at all.

  Mr. Wicket’s face had flushed a deeper red than his pimples. “Mr. Howley, if you leave now, you come back a paying customer. Your working days here will be through!” Mr. Wicket’s voice went as high-pitched as a girl’s and his eyes turned weepy.

  “Then I guess I’m through,” Daddy said as happily as if he’d wished Mr. Wicket good day. Daddy reached his hand out for me and I took it. Together we walked out of the shoe department and into the women’s dress clothes, aiming for the door. Daddy blinked his eyes and mimicked Mr. Wicket, “If you leave now, you come back a paying customer.”

  My laugh was edgy and when we pushed through the doors I felt my insides turn as hard and blank as the slate on the walk. “Daddy,” I said. “Ma—”

  “Shh,” he said. From his jacket pocket he pulled out the rhinestone clips. “They have plenty. They won’t miss them.”

  He placed the clips on my opened palm and for a few moments all I could see was their glinting brilliance. “But, Daddy, are you fired?”

  Daddy ran his hand through his hair, his jaw already bluish with growth. He stared ahead as if he was gazing for the first time on some wondrous sight but all that was ahead was a second-hand shop that had a scratched-up rocking horse and a ratty baby carriage out front.

  “Daddy?”

  Daddy turned to look back at Kreshner’s. “Shoes,” he said bleakly. “What a joke.” He shoved his hands into his pant’s pockets and started walking at a fast clip. Together we crossed the bridge into the west side of town and kept walking deeper and deeper into the fire zone, sidestepping cracks and dips in the street. A man called from the doorway of a shingled building that had no windows in it. In faded letters above the door it read The Shaft.

  “Adrian. Hey, Adrian, I’d heard you were back.”

  Daddy waved and crossed the street.

  “Buy you a beer?” the man said.

  “Daddy, what about Ma? What you promised Ma?” I gripped the elbow of Daddy’s jacket but he shook me off. “Please, Daddy,” I cried. “You need to apologize to Mr. Wicket. You need to get your job back. Please, Daddy. For us.”

  The man pinched my cheek. “What’s the problem, sweetheart? What’s got you worked up?”

  Daddy told the man he’d meet him inside and then he pushed me toward the dirt parking lot where someone had dumped a TV and an armchair. The blue of Daddy’s eyes went as glassy and dark as night water. His fingers squeezed my shoulder until I imagined them touching bone. This was the part of my daddy I hated. The part that didn’t love us and wished us harm. “Get on your way,” he said, shoving me in the direction of Gram and Gramp’s. “Get on your way and don’t come back here again.”


  Six

  The night Daddy came home from quitting his job, Gram and Ma sat at the kitchen table waiting for him, Gram sipping tea and Ma sipping a can of Schlitz, neither speaking to the other, but sharing a kind of general dissatisfaction. Through the window above the sink you could see part of West Mountain glowing red, matching the way Ma and Gram must have felt inside.

  “Here you go insultin’ the grandson of one of Dad’s friends,” Gram said as soon as Daddy stepped in the house. “When Dad spoke up to get you the job, no less! Always such a big shot with all your awards and nose in the books, but where’d it get you? Frankie would a taken any job he could get his hands on.”

  “Shut up, Rowena,” Ma said. She stood and tossed her beer can in the sink where it rattled against some forks and spoons.

  Gram’s face went slack with surprise. “What on earth you stickin’ up for him for?” When Gram said him she jerked her thumb at Daddy.

  Ma stomped toward the hall and as she passed Daddy, her eyes clouded over like frosted glass, the way they did if he’d lost a horse bet or spent our last bit of money on whisky. “Promises shmomises,” she said so softly I barely heard it.

  Gramp cleared his throat from where he slumped in the living-room Barcalounger. He waved Daddy toward him and asked what had happened. Daddy said that the little twerp of a manager wouldn’t let him take any breaks. “He expected me to work straight through,” Daddy said. “Who the hell is he to tell me when I can go to the bathroom?”

  Gramp tilted the spit can gripped in his hands and pondered the gunk inside it. “If true … should punched … his face.”

  Daddy’s eyes misted red as the fog clinging to West Mountain. “I just said it, so why wouldn’t it be true?”

  Gramp shrugged and hocked up into the can.