The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  “Throat … hurt,” he said. “Lean … close.”

  Looking into his glassy eyes I actually wondered if he meant to strangle me or whisper in my ear. My fist tightened until my fingernails cut my hand. I bent down and felt his breath on my neck.

  “Your … daddy,” he said.

  I stared at a faint crack in the wall that made the plaster look as thin and fragile as an eggshell.

  “Your … daddy,” he said again.

  “What about him?” I said, trying to contain the fury building inside me, knowing his next words would be insults about Daddy. “Don’t say nasty things about my daddy. I’m talking about you. What you did.”

  Fast as a snake his hand lashed out and gripped my arm. His thick sharp nails bit into my skin.

  “Let go,” I screamed. “Daddy!”

  Gramp released me so fast I lost balance and had to steady myself by gripping the coffee table. Then I bolted for Daddy’s bedroom and flung open the door. Daddy was sitting up on the mattress, dazed, his hair sticking straight up like he’d been the one who got scared and not me.

  “Gramp,” I said. “He tried to hurt me.”

  Daddy shook his head, stood, and cleared the room in a few quick strides. Then he stopped short in the living room and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Gramp’s body had gone slack like a doll. The corner of his mouth sagged, an eyelid drooped. His arm dangled helplessly off the chair toward the floor.

  Slowly Daddy went up to him and knelt. First he felt for the pulse at Gramp’s neck, then at his wrist. Then he pressed his ear to Gramp’s chest and right then Gramp gurgled.

  “For the love of God,” Daddy said, his face inches from Gramp’s, his hands clasping Gramp’s shoulders. “Tell me while you still can. Did he know about the money? Is that why you did it? Was there nothing you wouldn’t do for him?”

  “An ambulance, Daddy?” I said. “Should I call an ambulance?”

  Daddy nodded and I went to the phone, feeling like it was someone else who spoke into the receiver, someone who had no relation to the moment at all. As I walked back to the living room I guessed Uncle Frank was the him Daddy was talking about and I didn’t want to guess what it was Daddy thought Gramp had done. “They’ll be here soon, Daddy,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” Daddy stood and gazed out toward the porch. Already we heard the sirens coming. “He’s dead and now I’ll never get an answer.”

  I stood there clenching and unclenching my fingers on the article that had smeared my hand with its print. Body identified as William Sullivan … Foul play suspected … Wife and daughter stunned. My gaze took in the photo on the mantel of Gramp as a little boy down in the mine, his face all whited out by the flash. Whited out now, forever.

  “Oh, God, Daddy,” I said. “I think I did this to him. I upset him.”

  “No, princess. He was sick. It was his time.”

  A vastness opened up inside me as big, I supposed, as eternity. I walked up to Daddy and took his hand, wanting to comfort him in what I deemed the worst loss imaginable, the loss of a father.

  Together we opened the door for the ambulance workers. Daddy was all business, like we were dealing with the death of a stray animal, but I could see in his eyes something brewing that I knew must have to do with whatever Daddy wanted Gramp to tell him. With all my heart I wished I could take whatever that was and fling it far from Barrendale. Far from us.

  Sixteen

  It felt like Gramp’s death stoked the fire. Within days of his funeral, the fire spread all the way east and north to Spruce and Electric streets, which put our house solidly in the fire zone. Black boxes, like the ones Daddy had been waiting for us to get in Centrereach, were installed in various corners of the house as a way to monitor the carbon monoxide levels at all hours. The boxes ticked like clocks (or like bombs, Ma said) and shrilled if the gas levels went too high. Us kids especially were warned to keep our distance from woodwork because the gases were said to collect there, but Brother took warnings as taunts and many is the time me, Ma, Daddy, or Gram had to pull him off from sniffing a molding or a window frame.

  Gram sat at the kitchen table reading the notice the county had sent. “The Appalachian Mine Fire Control Project Number Twenty-four B, they’re callin’ it. How many of these godforsaken projects they got?”

  Gram looked up as if waiting for an answer and I said, “Twenty-four, I guess.”

  I expected to get a cluck of tongue or a “Thank you, Miss Smarty-pants,” but Gram’s eyes had gone stark with fear. She peered through the doorway to all the mass cards for Gramp displayed on the mantel. Then she shook the paper and continued, “They say we got a blight belowground and they got federal funds to take down everything. That’s how come they get to take our homes. They’re callin’ us a slum.”

  “They can call us anything as long as it gets us out of here,” Ma said.

  “You ain’t got no heart, Dolores,” Gram said, “to say that to me now. With John not even cold in the ground and this house all I got in the world.”

  Ma’s spiteful face crashed with regret, but all she did was raise her head and walk away. There was no way in this world or the next that she was ever going to say sorry to Gram.

  “I think this must be the curse come to get me,” Gram said, looking over at the bowl of crumpled aluminum foil she reused each night to cover the faucets. “Now with John gone, it’s me it’ll be after next.”

  “But remember what you said, Gram,” I reminded her. “The curse keeps us on our toes.”

  Gram harrumphed agreement. “Well, I’m on ’em!”

  Edna Schwackhammer started coming on Thursday evenings for supper, during which she’d inevitably cry over her Otto and her house, which hadn’t yet been demolished. Mrs. Schwackhammer would talk about which part of her basement was too hot to touch and how many tomatoes had ripened in what should have been the frostbitten ground in her garden. She’d complain that even the cold water from the faucet ran lukewarm and that the wallpaper in her living room had started to peel. Inevitably she and Gram would gossip about this or that theory involving the county and the state and the coal company, all of who were said to be conspiring to get the coal beneath the west side of Barrendale as cheaply as possible.

  “They don’t care how many houses and families they wreck,” Gram declared, “as long as they get every last flake of coal down to the bedrock.”

  As for me, I tried to follow Detective Kanelous’s advice and not only forget what I’d seen down in the mine, but forget that we were in the fire zone, forget that Marisol and I weren’t friends, that her daddy had been killed, that we Howleys were cursed—but I found that in thinking about forgetting, I thought about everything worse.

  To Ma though, the news of us being a part of the Appalachian Mine Fire Control Project was the best news she’d ever heard. “Now nothin’ can stop us from gettin the heck out of here,” Ma said to me, her eyes glinting as hard and bright as mica chips.

  On Thursday nights when Mrs. Schwackhammer visited, me and Ma would go out to survey the progress of the destruction. The East Side Pit, the trench nearest us, was now large enough to hold a battleship. Buckets that could hold ten tons of dirt swung off enormous draglines. Ma liked to repeat proudly, as if she was responsible for it, that after they got finished digging, they would have dug out more earth than they did for the Panama Canal.

  Clouds of smoke hovered over the area and whenever we got close enough to the edge of what had become a man-made valley, we’d see flames flicking through the coal chambers that had been opened up to the air. All around us the night glowed eerily pink from the heaps of dug-up coal that burned a hot smoky red.

  “Worse than anything I ever seen,” Ma would say as if that were the highest compliment she could offer. “Anything I ever imagined.” The lines of her face would smooth, the sight of the wreckage seeming to satisfy and console her.

  In the weeks that followed Gramp’s death, it wasn’t only
the fire that was let loose. It loosed something in Gram too. Suddenly she was at the ready to talk my ear off as I peeled carrots in the kitchen or as I knelt scrubbing the bathroom floor. She’d interrupt me as I read on the ratty sofa on the porch or tried to work on my math equations at the dining-room table. Her voice would become somewhat breathy as she told me gossip about the rich Barrendale family she used to do laundry for when Daddy was little. She could go on for hours about the mansions and theater and music festivals that once existed in Barrendale as if she were describing some mythic lost world.

  She especially liked to talk about her sisters. “I was the oldest girl,” she told me. “Mama said the boys needed school and I didn’t, so after Papa died I dropped out and started cookin’ and cleanin’. As soon as my sisters were old enough, they left and went to New York City. Four of them, Mary, Louise, Kate, and Franny. They all got jobs sewin’ at some factory and they got themselves nice young men too, all Catholic. And as long as they weren’t Italian, Mama approved. So I thought, what’s to stop me from goin’ to New York City too? Mama didn’t need me at home no more. But do you know what those girls said to me—my own sisters? They said they didn’t have no room for me. And after all I done supportin’ them all those years!”

  Gram looked wistfully at a loaf of bread waiting to rise on the shelf above the stove. “If only I’d had the gumption to pick up and go to New York anyways, on my own. Imagine where I’d be now! My life would be so different I bet I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself!”

  Ma and Daddy were so involved with our move to Allentown that they didn’t even notice I no longer hung out with Marisol. Gram was the only one who said something about it. “Why ain’t you never with that Puerto Rican girl no more? Lord knows what her daddy did to get dead that way, but one thing’s for certain, you’re better off without her.”

  I was out on the closed-in porch, under a heap of blankets, reading one of my True Confessions magazines. I didn’t even think about it, I just said it, “There are rumors going around that it was Gramp who got her daddy dead that way. There are people who are saying it was Howley who done it.”

  Quick as anything Gram ripped the magazine from my hands and flung it across the room. She stuck her finger so close to my face it touched the tip of my nose. “Don’t you go sayin’ rumors like that in this house! Don’t you go besmirkin’ your own flesh and blood! You got to have pride, girl. Words ain’t just words. They got an awful power. Don’t go helpin’ them along by repeatin’ them yourself!”

  Daddy started working every other Saturday and on some of the weekends when he worked, he didn’t come home at all. When he did come home though, he and Ma only whispered about moving to Allentown, but that didn’t fool Gram. “If Frankie was alive he wouldn’t leave his own mother alone to fend for herself. He was the type to think about more than just his own good.”

  “That’s what you think,” Daddy said.

  “The green’s showin’ on your face, Adrian,” Gram declared. “The green of jealousy. And it ain’t pretty!”

  To make Daddy feel better Ma told him that parents are supposed to want the best for their kids. “If she was a good ma, she’d want us to go. Down the line, you can send her some money. Now and again, not regular. That’s all we can do.” When all Daddy did was grunt, Ma added, “How much has that old biddy ever done for us? You need to think about your own family. You need to think about me.”

  At school I kept my distance from Marisol who, if she looked at me at all, stared through me like I was a window, like I wasn’t there. “Stay away from her,” she told Ellen Adwood, her new best friend. “Howleys are bad luck.” Briefly I saw surprise light her face when I didn’t so much as flinch at her words. Gram was wrong: words were just words. And I was resolved not to care what anybody said about me or my family anymore—no matter how bad it hurt.

  Every now and then flashing through my mind were pictures of Daddy tossed out of a car’s shattered windshield or of him bloodied and broken at the base of a mine shaft. When Daddy came home from Allentown on Friday night and when he left again on Sundays I took to sitting on his lap like a little girl and clinging to his hand when we went on our Saturday walks. “Stickin’ to him like a piece of tape,” Gram said. “Like super glue,” Ma added.

  One Sunday night dinner Gram said, “You ’fraid, girl, that a pit goin’ to open up and eat you like it ate Auntie?”

  “No,” Brother wailed, pulling at the cowlick on top of his head.

  “Shh,” I said to him. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “No, it ain’t,” Gram agreed. “Just ’cause they say fire is beneath us, don’t mean it is. You kids remember that.”

  “Things like what happened to Auntie don’t happen to a family twice,” Ma said. She looked first me, then Brother, smack in the face with a conviction I’d never seen before.

  Later that night I followed Daddy out to the car and pleaded with him not to go to Allentown for the week. He nuzzled me into the crook of his bad arm and I pressed my nose to his coat, smelling past Ma’s cigarette smell to the musty, metallic smell that was Daddy’s.

  We walked into the yard and looked up at the stars and Daddy talked about the possibility of life on other planets and how small we were in the context of things, and his talking about space aliens and other planets got me thinking about what he said after Gramp died—“He’s gone and now I’ll never have an answer.” What did Daddy want an answer to?

  I walked Daddy to the car and hugged him hard. His face, whitish from the streetlight that flickered between the pines, looked ghostly and sick and I got afraid that I’d never see him again and I guess that fear made me brave enough to ask questions. “Daddy, what did Gramp mean when he said it didn’t make sense? When he was talking to you about Uncle Frank being in the monkey shaft? I heard you both when you were out on the side porch. Why was Uncle Frank in a monkey shaft they weren’t mining anymore anyway? What did you say that didn’t make sense?”

  Daddy looked toward the house with its lit windows all cracked for air. He beckoned for me to walk down the street and then he crouched so that he was looking up at me. “I told him that Frank was down by that monkey shaft because it wasn’t being worked anymore. Frank would go there from time to time to meet with people he couldn’t be seen with in the light of day. People he shouldn’t have been meeting with once he became a shop steward. Gramp didn’t want to believe that about him. That he was doing anything against the union, the workers.” Daddy patted my shoulder and stood. “You’ll understand better when you’re older.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really meaning it. When I spoke my throat was so dry that my voice came out low and hoarse. “What about when Gramp died? What was it you wanted him to tell you?”

  Daddy took my hand and we started walking slowly back to the car, careful to avoid the dips and cracks in the street. “I wanted to know where the treasure map was. To the pirates’ gold. What else would I be asking him?” And Daddy tugged on my arm to get me to smile, but I wasn’t looking for tall tales. I was looking for truth, or as close as I could get to it. I shook my head, trying to make sense of the little Daddy had told me.

  “But, Daddy, why was Uncle Frank in the monkey shaft? He couldn’t have been meeting people inside it. It’s too narrow. He must have been meeting people outside it, right?”

  “One of the tremors must have thrown him inside it, princess. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  “But, Daddy—”

  “Jesus!” Daddy said. “Is this what I have to come home to? I’m tired, princess. I’d like to enjoy myself in the little time I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, and then we leaned against the hood of the car and Daddy talked about the president’s promise to put a man on the moon, saying that one day we’d fly around in space just like we did in airplanes. Then he kissed me on the side of the head and got in the car. “Be good,” he said and when I didn’t answer he said, “What I wanted to know was why he
was never proud of me. But that was a foolish question.”

  Daddy shut the door and pulled out of the drive, leaving me to wonder why that could ever be a foolish question. I waved and watched his car vanish into a cloud of pinkish smoke at the end of the block. I stood there staring into that pink cloud as it appeared to grow and come toward me and I thought about what else I’d wanted to ask Daddy. Hadn’t he told me once that the first tremor hit while he was with Uncle Frank? And wouldn’t that have meant he was with Uncle Frank when the collapse started? I couldn’t remember for sure. Maybe it was something he’d told one of the journalists to test, as he’d said, how much the man knew.

  It was a long time before I finally walked back to the house, but as I did, I felt as unsettled as the ground beneath my feet.

  Seventeen

  On our first trip to Allentown it snowed. Big fat flakes stuck in Uncle Jerry’s hair as he picked me, Ma, and Brother up from the bus depot. He kissed Ma on the cheek and patted me and Brother hard on the head, asking how our trip was. “Great,” Ma quickly said, though the ride from Barrendale had been long, cold, and smelly. When me and Brother balked, Ma said, “Shut it.” Sheepishly she added to Uncle Jerry, “What do these kids know from bad?”

  Uncle Jerry grunted agreement and at Ma’s request drove us first thing to the house Uncle Jerry’s friend was fixing up for us to rent. Ma had spent most of the bus ride talking about the white eyelet curtains she planned for the kitchen windows and the fluffy white towels she planned for the bath. “The whole place is getting redone, so as everything will be new. New stove, new carpet, new paint on the walls!”

  The house was on Furlong Street, which consisted of several blocks of attached houses, all identical with yellow shingles and two front windows that stared out at us like blank eyes.

  “The suburbs,” Ma whispered to me as Uncle Jerry walked ahead to unlock the door. “Don’t matter how bad our shit stinks, we’ll be middle class by Tuesday.”