The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  When we walked the creek bed our gaze constantly swept the water, looking for the gold people occasionally panned for, turning over every glittering rock in the hopes of seeing some of the precious metal embedded in its seams.

  On one of those walks I took her to the bootlegging hole where Daddy had taken me, the one that Daddy had helped to dig when he was my age. At the back of the cave the boards of wood the cops had placed to block the hole looked the same as when I’d been there with Daddy. Together Marisol and I hunched and sidestepped into the cave like crabs, our feet kicking up the smell of moldering leaves and wet earth.

  Marisol pressed her palm to one of the boards that sealed off the hole. “My father bootlegged coal,” she said. “Maybe he went down this hole too.”

  At first I didn’t say anything. Weeks ago when I’d asked her where her daddy was she’d just said, “He doesn’t care about us and we don’t care about him.” So I knew not to ask anything else until she’d brought him up herself.

  “My gram says your daddy was in the same class with my uncle Frank,” I said. I didn’t add what else Gram had said—that Marisol’s daddy was a liar and a cheat and had gotten Marisol’s mother pregnant and left. I wondered if Marisol could actually be a bastard born out of wedlock. The only girl I knew who’d gotten pregnant when she wasn’t married had lived across the street from Auntie and as soon as she’d told her parents they’d thrown her out and locked their doors and for hours through our open windows we’d listened to her cry.

  A spider skittered from between the slats of the boards and we both eased our way out of the cave. Marisol said, “They were married only three months when my mother got pregnant. And as soon as she got pregnant he started cheating on her. When my mother found out about it, she told him to leave and never come back. And that’s what he did. Left town when my mother was out to here with me.” Marisol held her hand about a foot out from her stomach. “Can you believe that? And he never so much as sent a postcard.”

  I met her eyes, which had turned the green of the moss clinging to the cave. “But your mother told him she never wanted to hear from him again,” I said.

  “That’s not the point,” Marisol said, her eyes widening with hurt and disapproval and I immediately regretted my words. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if Daddy left us and I spent the rest of my life never hearing from him again. I looked back at the boarded-up hole in the cave. I’d never before thought of myself as lucky when it came to my family. I’d never thought of us as lucky with anything at all.

  Nine

  It took weeks and an outrageously short half shirt for Marisol to finally get Billy’s attention. The chill actually came off his stare as he took in her exposed midriff and said, “Want to meet up later?”

  Marisol shrugged as if she didn’t care one way or the other. “What do you think, Brigid?”

  I murmured something that sounded vaguely like “I don’t know” and Marisol followed with, “Will Eddie be there?”

  Now it was Billy’s turn to act like he didn’t care. “Okay,” he said and then he told us to meet them at Old Man Hudson’s shack later that afternoon.

  “Okay,” Marisol said and we walked off slowly to let Billy know we weren’t in a rush and to give him a chance to take in Marisol’s backside.

  “Why Old Man Hudson’s shack?” I asked. “Who is he?”

  “Who was he,” Marisol said. “He’s been dead for years. The place is abandoned.”

  The thought of being in an abandoned shack with Eddie was too good to think about. “But Eddie doesn’t even like me,” I said.

  “Sure he does. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  I stopped midstride. This was Marisol’s way of thinking, which somehow or other always made sense. “My parents wouldn’t—”

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Marisol cut me off. “But you’ll never get to make out with Eddie until you have a chance to be alone with him.”

  I said nothing and we continued walking. Countless summer nights I’d kissed my hand imagining it was his mouth.

  Marisol misread my silence. “Please go,” she pleaded. “The place is in the middle of nowhere. How could your parents ever find out?”

  Marisol was right about Old Man Hudson’s shack being in the middle of nowhere. It sat in a field of foot-high quack grass and was really more of a bungalow with a little front porch and a hatch to the side for the cellar door. Toward the back was a crooked little outhouse that someone must have used for target practice because it was riddled with holes.

  Our skin was gritty with red dust from the dirt road we’d had to walk to get there. Though I was glad we were so far off the beaten path, I couldn’t stop hearing Ma’s and Gram’s warnings to never go somewhere alone with a boy, especially one I didn’t know. Both Ma and Gram had followed those warnings with stories about girls who’d been foolish enough to let their reputations be ruined. As we waited for Billy and Eddie on the porch those warnings played like static between my ears.

  Billy and Eddie were just two of the boys who hung out in packs, roaming around town, peeping into windows, bending traffic signs. That was what boys did around Barrendale: it didn’t mean they were bad. Besides, Daddy and dead Uncle Frank were just as unruly as teens, according to Gram, and she seemed pleased with them for that. Still, I kept thinking about the pregnant girl who’d lived across the street from Auntie. When her parents threw her out she’d gone to live with an aunt in Plattsburgh who’d taken the baby as soon as it was born and never brought it back. Last we’d heard the girl had gone crazy and was being sent to a funny farm.

  It was a hazy day and we got hot standing on that porch in the middle of that field and we started to regret agreeing to meet them there. But as soon as we saw them walking up the drive, all our regrets were forgotten.

  “God, isn’t he to die for?” Marisol gushed about Billy. She rubbed her hand across her exposed stomach. “I think I’ll let him feel me up. Imagine.” And then she shut her eyes, lost in the fantasy.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think beyond kissing Eddie. I saw his face getting closer and closer. I saw our mouths almost touching. And then … that was it. My imagination dead-ended.

  Quickly the boys neared us, their hands thrust deep into their dungarees’ pockets, their heads down. Eddie walked with a kind of loose stride that reminded me of Daddy’s way of walking. When they reached the porch, Billy said, “We’ve got cold beer in the cellar.”

  “Lot cooler down there,” Eddie said, giving us both an open, friendly smile. His eyes once again reminded me of Auntie’s nut bread, and I was immediately glad Marisol had made me come.

  A piece of rope was the only lock on the basement door. The boys went down the thick concrete steps first. Marisol and I followed and then stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for our eyes to adjust. The only light came from the sunlight streaming in from behind us and a lantern perched on a kitchen table that sat at the center of the small dank room. Along one wall was an old ratty sofa and along another was a mattress on the floor. Hanging above the mattress was a long length of rope tied to a rafter.

  Eddie sat on one end of the mattress and patted it for us to join him. Billy opened a can of beer from a case in the corner. He took a swig and offered it to Marisol. She worried the knot tying shut her shirt before reaching for it.

  “We got the beer off Darren and Jimmy and all those guys,” Billy said, referring to a group of older boys who were notorious for drag racing on Route 6 and for stealing people’s firewood to use for bonfires they built in the woods. Billy explained that every couple of weeks the older boys stashed beer somewhere on East Mountain. “They keep changing their hiding places, but we find them every time.”

  From the smug look on his face you would have thought he was bragging about finding pirate treasure, not a case of Ballantine beer.

  Marisol peered into the darkness clustered by the sofa. “This is where you hang out? Pretty lame if you ask me.”


  “That’s ’cause you haven’t seen it all,” Eddie said.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Marisol said. She slurped at the beer and then handed it to me. “How ’bout you, Brigid? You seen enough?”

  I let the cold beer bubble in my mouth before swallowing. All along our walk Marisol had coached me on the various ways to play hard to get. “Yeah,” I said in the most offhand way I could muster.

  The smug look on Billy’s face briefly hardened. But in a flash the look was gone, replaced by a wink and a half smile. “Nah,” he said. “You girls should stay.”

  “What do you think, Bill?” Eddie said. “Should we show ’em?”

  Billy’s gaze went down the length of Marisol’s body and stayed resting on the floor. “I don’t know if they deserve to see it.”

  Quick as lightning Marisol said, “I know of plenty you don’t deserve to see.”

  Billy’s laugh prickled with something like pleasure. “If we did show you,” he said, “you’d have to keep your mouths shut. It’s the only one the cops don’t know about.”

  “Think you could keep your mouths shut?” Eddie said and I couldn’t tell if there was something nasty in his voice or not.

  “We know we can keep our mouths shut,” Marisol said.

  “But can you?” I asked looking straight at Eddie. He tilted his head to the side, considering either me or the question. When he smiled slyly, I all but stopped breathing. Maybe Marisol was right, maybe we would make out.

  The boys yanked the mattress away from the wall and shoved it into a corner. There was a large wood board on the floor where the mattress had been. The board was about half the size of the mattress and was speckled with mildew and dirt. The boys dragged the piece of wood over to the mattress and then Eddie lifted the lantern from the table and held it so that its light shown on what had lain beneath the board.

  “Oh, my God,” Marisol said.

  There in the floor was a hole about three feet by three feet, but even with the lantern’s light all we could see was blackness within it.

  “A bootlegging hole,” I whispered, my voice hushed with awe. Daddy had told me that people had dug holes in their basements and backyards and I wondered if this was a bootlegging hole Gramp and Daddy had gone down, creeping their way into the mine shafts at night, filling their sacks with whatever coal they could manage to carry out and sell.

  The boys said they’d gone down into the mine too many times to count and had walked its different tunnels for hours. They told us about walls that were covered in dinosaur fossils and caves that glittered with quartz.

  “What about the fire?” I asked.

  “Too far away,” Eddie said.

  “But if we feel it getting hot or we smell sulfur,” Billy said. “We need to leave.”

  Then we all talked about flaming walls, poison gas, flooded shafts, and copperheads as if they were things that existed only in stories and myth. But I knew better than that. I was the child of generations of miners. I knew the air could be bad and you wouldn’t even smell it or that a cave-in could happen without any warning at all.

  The boys had two flashlights, a headlamp, and a lantern that we could take down for light. They also had two sweatshirts that they’d let us wear. Billy handed Marisol his, which meant I got Eddie’s. As I slipped it over my head my insides turned oozy. The sweatshirt smelled musty but beneath that smell was another smell, a coppery scent like blood, a boy’s scent. Eddie’s scent. I breathed a deep whiff of it.

  The boys dropped the rope tied to the rafter into the hole and said they’d go first. “We’ve got sofa cushions down there,” Billy said. “Just climb down as far as you can and let yourself drop. It’s not far. We do it all the time.”

  Billy went down first and tossed the rope back up. Eddie tied the lantern to it and slowly lowered it down to Billy.

  “Take a flashlight,” Eddie said to Marisol. He tucked the other one into the back of his pants. “You take the headlamp,” he said to me. Then he sat on the edge of the hole with his legs dangling inside it and without even gripping the rope slid his bottom forward and dropped clean down into the hole.

  “No problem,” he called up. “Just drop down. You’ll hit a cushion.”

  Marisol leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Just give him a chance. He’ll like you if you give it time.” Then she crossed herself, sat down near the rope and gripped it for a while with her legs dangling into the hole.

  “Come on, Marisol,” Billy said.

  Marisol shook her head slowly from side to side as if there were no way she was ever going to budge and then she slid forward, let go of the rope and dropped down the hole with a high-pitched screech. I heard all sorts of yuck and eww sounds and then she called up, “It’s okay, Brigid. Don’t worry. It’s not that far.”

  I strapped on the headlamp and repositioned it several times to my forehead but no matter what I did it pressed uncomfortably against my skin. For as long as I could remember I’d wanted to go down into the mines, to experience what Daddy had experienced, to feel closer to him. But as I glanced toward the open cellar door that framed a bit of summer sky I felt an unease come over me. Marisol must have read my thoughts because she shouted, “You can do it, Brigid! Really, it’s not that bad.”

  The boys followed her words with squawking chicken noises.

  I stepped near the rope and then sat down on the cool basement floor. Immediately my nostrils burned with the smell of dank mold. I was afraid of going down in the mine, but I knew with a certainty I couldn’t explain that this was what Marisol and I were meant to do. That God had planned for it. So as I sat there with my legs dangling in that hole, I knew that I was about to drop straight down into what I’d been waiting for all my life. I was about to drop straight down into my own destiny. I could only hope that destiny would uncover for me the hidden places of Daddy’s heart.

  I gripped the rope, thrust my body forward, and let go. With a jolt I landed onto the cushions and just lay there for a while wondering how bad I was hurt. I heard Marisol asking if I was all right but all I saw was complete blackness.

  “I can’t see,” I sobbed. My breath snagged in my chest and my heartbeat became thunderous. I thought of Auntie sinking into the earth, I thought of Daddy trapped and terrified in the Devil Jaw mine shafts. “You don’t conquer fears,” Daddy liked to say. “You bury them deep down where you can’t feel them anymore.”

  Billy and Eddie laughed and Billy said, “That’s ’cause the headlamp’s over your face, you dumbass.”

  I sat up and pushed the headlamp back onto my forehead, too embarrassed to say anything. First all I saw was red and white patches but then my eyes started to adjust to the darkness, which was lit dimly a few yards in either direction by our lantern and flashlights.

  I felt my way off the sofa cushions, my palms feeling hot and raw from rope burn. I stood up and shivered. It was not only chilly but so damp you felt like you could touch the moisture in the air. My gaze roved over the ceiling, and then down the wall to the floor. The tunnel was probably about eight feet wide and who knew how long in either direction. The lantern was on the ground near a six-pack of beer. There were empty bottles and cans of beer strewn all around and up against the wall nearest me were three kitchen chairs that matched the kitchen table up in the basement.

  “You guys are the only ones who know about this?” Marisol said.

  “Mike and Georgie come down sometimes too,” Billy said and then the boys bragged about how far they’d wandered in either direction of the tunnel and how many times they thought for sure they were lost or dead. Listening to them I got this feeling of déjà vu, as if I’d been in these tunnels many times.

  “I don’t know about anyone else,” Marisol said. “But I don’t want to get lost or dead.”

  Billy opened a can of beer and handed it to Marisol. “We also just hang out and drink.” He kicked an empty beer bottle. “Sometimes play truth or dare.”

  “Truth or dare?” Marisol said. Her vo
ice quivered with excitement. “Haven’t played that since I lived in New York.”

  Despite the chill, sweat beaded on my neck. Truth or dare was a game the older kids played to get other kids to do or admit horribly embarrassing things. Often girls got dared to lift their shirts or to go off into the dark with a boy. In the back of my mind the warnings from Ma and Gram blazed, making it hard for me to think straight.

  I nuzzled my face into my shoulder to arm myself with a sniff of Eddie’s sweatshirt. The boys arranged the three chairs into a tight circle and Eddie placed an empty bottle in the center.

  “But there’s only three chairs,” Marisol said.

  “Sit on my lap,” Billy said. “If the bottle aims at us we’ll take turns. First I’ll go, then the next time it aims at us, you go.”

  Eddie said, “That’s the stupidest—”

  Billy cut him off. “What do you care?”

  Eddie grunted and looked away as Marisol settled onto Billy’s lap. We were sitting close enough that we could see each other fairly well but only yards from us darkness swallowed all of the light and lay there like a presence.

  “I’ll go first,” Billy said. Awkwardly he leaned to reach the bottle and spin it. I’m sure we all knew he was hoping it would stop and aim straight at him and Marisol. But instead it fell short of its mark and aimed straight at me. He actually groaned in disappointment. “Truth or dare?” he said as if it was the most boring question ever asked by anybody.

  I did Ma’s proud chin tilt. “Truth.”

  He leaned into Marisol and she snuggled against him making a soft sound of sleep or pleasure. “Then you better tell the truth,” Billy said. “Did your grandfather kill Jack Novak?”

  I tsked my tongue, irritated at how gossip made lies out of what happened. “All he did was hit him.” I didn’t add with a bottle, I didn’t want to talk about it with someone like Billy.

  “That’s not how some people say it went,” Billy said.