The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  As simple as this sounded, it wasn’t. There were heaps of paperwork and permits and this or that signature or stamp required and Gram would sit there at the table with the black gas gauge meter in the corner ticking like a loud and persistent clock and say, “I tell you, all them authorities is workin’ in collision to make sure I can’t get this done.” Or “I bet they’re hopin’ the house gets wrecked ’fore you can get the permit to get the permit to get the darned thing moved!”

  Once Edna Schwackhammer found out about Gram’s Great Idea she wanted to try and get her house moved too. Gram never said so but I could tell she regretted ever telling Mrs. Schwackhammer about her plans. Some nights a dazed Mrs. Schwackhammer would sit with Gram at the kitchen table so confused by all the legal issues that she’d cry, “I don’t know how to do any of this, Rowena. Otto did everything. Everything! You’ve got to help me. I don’t know how.”

  “Well, ain’t that what you said about writin’ a check?” Gram would say. Or “Didn’t you say the same thing about nailin’ a dawggone nail in the wall? Yet you done both, Edna Jane. And now you done them so many times I bet you can’t even imagine not knowin’ how!” Then cagily Gram would suggest that it might be better to see what happened with Gram’s applications for getting the house moved before doing anything with Edna’s. Every now and then she’d add for good measure, “I’m the one who had the idea after all, Edna, sose if they only goin’ to let one of us go, it should be me.”

  Then Mrs. Schwackhammer would cry that her house was slated for demolition sooner than Gram’s, so if anyone should get to move their house first, it should be her. Sometimes she’d even plead her case further by claiming her Otto’s spirit still rested within her house’s walls.

  “Well, it’s both my spirit and my livin’ body that rests within these walls!” Gram would declare. “And I ain’t got no place else to go. You got three children could take you, Edna, and don’t you forget it!”

  And then Gram would make a pot of tea and push aside the paperwork until Mrs. Schwackhammer left for the night.

  Gram had quit holding prayer meetings because she said they got her “too danged depressed,” but she still said a prayer to Saint Jude each time she tackled some part of the Great Idea and she lovingly dusted her Saint Joseph statues every day. No matter how much filth managed to seep in from the dig out those statues stared cleanly out at you from every corner of the room.

  “Out of your mind,” Daddy said when he first heard about the Great Idea from one of the men who worked for the Redevelopment Authority. “Once they buy it, you’ve got nothing but their word that they’ll sell it back. Even if they put it in writing, what good will that be? You think you can take the entire Redevelopment Authority to court?”

  “Maybe I can,” Gram snapped. “Anyhows you got any better ideas? What you think is goin’ to happen once this house gets wrecked? You think some tramp’s goin’ to let you stay at her place? What about this girl here?” Gram stuck her arm straight out and pointed at me where I sat on the plastic-covered couch trying both to listen to them and read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

  “Christ,” Daddy said, rolling his eyes toward me and the mantel that still displayed all of Gramp’s mass cards.

  “No takin’ the Lord!” Gram shouted, slamming her hand against the wall and knocking a Saint Brigid cross crooked from where it hung above the window.

  Daddy took a deep breath and leveled his stare at Gram. “Tramps, Mother? Really? Now isn’t that the pot calling the kettle…”

  He didn’t finish the saying but Gram’s eyes went as black with pain as if he had. And from that point on she not only hardly talked to Daddy, but she stopped doing any of his cooking, mending, or washing too.

  For the most part Daddy ignored the fact that she ignored him and I started doing all of his washing and ironing and mending and cooking. I couldn’t turn my heart cold to him, no matter what he’d done to us. Ma and Gram could do that, but not me, and I was proud not to be like them in that way.

  Sometimes when I looked at him his cheeks and eyes had a hollowness to them as if they’d caved in. Sometimes he didn’t even feel like he was my daddy, just someone who’d been sick a long time who slept in Daddy’s old room and drank the hot bitter coffee that he liked to brew two or three times a day. And as mad as I was at him for letting things get to where they were, my heart went out to him when I saw him like that and I’d make him his sunny-side up eggs and toast the way I used to do for him every day in Centrereach. I even started making him Auntie’s remedy for what she called the liquid devil for when he drank too much. It was black tea with skullcap and sage and in a way it was a remedy for me too because just in the making of it I felt near to Auntie, which made me think of Marisol saying that Auntie’s spirit was around me. Maybe I was no longer closed to her spirit the way Marisol had said I was. Maybe something in me had opened.

  Twenty-five

  The mail used to come at exactly a quarter after ten every morning but the dig out had made the postman Mr. Grodnik’s job so difficult that sometimes he didn’t get to us until half past noon. It was my job to check the mail the second it was delivered and if there was anything from the Redevelopment Authority or the moving company to run it—in Gram’s words “fast as feet can fly”—to the mill so Gram could know immediately “the no good them folk is up to.”

  On the day we got something with the return address stamped straight from the Redevelopment Authority I took it immediately to the mill, veering onto Stone Lane at a jog. Even in my hurry my sight roved over the beautiful stone of the mill with its castlelike crenulated ridges, a word I remembered by first thinking of the word crinoline, and when I reached the side stairs out of breath I took a moment to appreciate the little bits of sparkle in the chunk of bluestone nearest me.

  At the top of the stairs I waved at Big Berta who waved me through to Gram but my pace slowed as I walked across the big room. The noise was grating but not as steady or deafening as usual. There were any number of sewer’s chairs left empty and too many sewers gone to count. Gram had told me they’d lost dozens of gals due to the dig out, but it hadn’t hit me until then how many Barrendalers had left and how much we’d eventually feel the loss of them being gone.

  Gram’s eyes widened as she looked at the envelope in my hand. Gripping me by the elbow, she steered me back across the room and out onto the top landing of the stairs. The noise from inside the mill made it feel like there wasn’t a soul who could hear us as we stood out there looking down at the river snaking its way below the cliff.

  Gram stared at the ducks and weedy grasses clustered far below us, all of it a blur I imagined since she hadn’t bothered to remove the reading glasses she used to sew. “Open it,” she said and then I read out loud two sentences stating that the Redevelopment Authority was in the process of finalizing the purchase of her house but had no record of any agreement to sell it back to her. It ended by thanking her for her numerous inquiries into the matter and was signed with a man’s name neither of us had heard before.

  Gram sucked air through the space where she had a missing tooth. “Goddamn it,” she said, and I nearly dropped the letter I was so surprised by Gram not only cussing but taking the Lord’s name.

  Before I knew what was happening, the river and everything around it went screwy. I gripped the railing to steady myself. “It’s just like Daddy said,” I cried, dizzy with the upset I felt. “All we had is their word that they’d sell it back and now they won’t. And what will we do, Gram? Where will we go?”

  “I’ll tell you where we’ll go. You stay right there and grip that rail.” Gram did an about-face and returned several minutes later. “Get ready, girl. We’re goin’ to Scranton, straight to that Revelopment office and we’ll find this man what’s-his-name”—Gram pointed at the letter crumpled in my hand—“and we’ll find that record of agreement if we have to look through all his files ourself!”

  But when we got to the office the only person there was a
lady clerk who said she’d be sure to let Mr. Forsythe know we’d stopped by.

  “It’s a matter of urgent concern,” Gram kept saying as she tilted her hat first one direction, then another. “You tell him that, little miss. You tell him he better find that record and fast.”

  At home me and Gram looked so out of sorts that Daddy actually noticed and asked what was wrong. His voice was so full of concern that it made me go all soft to him.

  Gram smoothed the creases in her skirt. “Let’s just say you better keep that job of yours, Adrian Howley. We’re goin’ to need it!” Then she plotted ways that the mill could pay me to do some sewing. “Those child labor laws,” she said with the same disgust she used to talk about welfare or scab strikebreakers. “Gramp was workin’ a lot younger than you and doin’ a lot harder work than side seamin’ some underdrawers, you can bet you that!” And she turned on me a stare as full of blame as if I’d made the child labor laws myself.

  “I could drop out of school and lie about my age,” I said to Daddy once Gram had put on her best dress and left to go talk to the mayor and every government official she could get her hands on.

  “Princess!” Daddy said and his mouth opened and his face went white as if I’d physically hurt him. “Never,” he said, placing his hand over mine. “It will never come to that.”

  And his words made me feel so good that later I went to visit him at the mill, wanting him to put his arm around me and tell me tall tales about the fairies who lived in the nooks of the river—or for him to sing me some Irish tunes, letting me know in just the lilting of his voice that everything was going to be all right. But when I got down there I found Mr. Dober, the boss janitor, emptying the boxes of sewing waste into the big bin in the side yard.

  Mr. Dober had a large vein popping out on his forehead. “You tell that daddy of yours to sober up and get here fast if he wants this job!”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and bolted. First I went home to pick up Auntie’s remedy for the liquid devil. I kept a brew of it in an old jam jar and I grabbed it from where I’d hidden it behind some other jars of homemade teas. Then I ran as fast as I could to The Shaft, but the East Side Pit had grown to the point that it must have cost me an extra fifteen minutes to get around it.

  By then the dig out had gotten so close to The Shaft that the building was only one short block away from the pit. All the shops and houses along Essex Street weren’t more than twenty feet from the ledge. Dirt and coal and ash laid an inch thick on the pavement and quickly coated my skin, making me feel like I needed a bath by the time I pushed open the bar’s front door.

  It had been a cloudy day and it didn’t take my eyes long to adjust to the dimness inside the room. Two of the old men from the disaster were at one end of the bar. Star and Bear were at the other. Joe the bartender was behind it, drying glasses. Daddy wasn’t there. He must have already left for work.

  I gasped in relief but then I heard a moan and noticed a heap of something by a table. It was Daddy sprawled on the floor, his head up against a chair leg.

  I rushed forward and slid to my knees. I watched to make sure his chest rose and fell, I touched his cheek.

  “Your daddy’s just sleeping it off, honey,” Joe said. “He’ll wake up soon. He always does.”

  I swept Daddy’s hair back from his face and he jolted like I’d struck him. The skin at his temple was a slick shiny purple.

  “No,” he moaned. “Please.” He put his arms up to his head like he expected to be pummeled with fists. “Won’t tell anyone. Never tell anyone.”

  “You hit him,” I said to Bear.

  “Nuh-uh, little miss,” Bear said. “The table hit him. Not me.”

  Star laughed the same throaty laugh I’d heard when she was in the shower with Daddy and I narrowed my eyes at her. She had her arm around Bear’s waist and she whispered something in his ear that made him grunt in pleasure.

  “Ah, God!” Daddy shouted and his eyes opened wide in terror.

  “What, Daddy? Does it hurt?” I opened the jar and held it to his mouth but he wouldn’t drink. He stared beyond the table like there was something there to get him. But all that was there was some dried-up peanut shells and a mushroom-shaped stain on the floor. Then he started mumbling something I couldn’t understand.

  I leaned so that my body blocked him from Star’s and Bear’s view but I could feel their stares all prickly on my back. It took me a while to figure out he was saying, “Didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it,” over and over.

  “Didn’t mean what, Daddy?” I said, but he just kept mumbling and staring out at nothing as if in fear for his life. The smell of him was of beer sweat and pee and reminded me of Gramp’s sick smell. “Daddy? Can you get up? If you lean on me, can you walk?”

  He stopped mumbling and shook his head but I wasn’t sure he’d understood what I’d asked. Then he said something so low it was like a whisper’s whisper.

  “What, Daddy?” I asked. “What are you trying to say?”

  He again spoke and again it was so low I almost couldn’t catch it. “I killed him,” he said.

  “What?” I said, figuring I must have misheard but my heart pounded as if my body knew better than my mind did what was true.

  “I killed him,” he said.

  I stared at the table leg and the faint shadow it cast from the light behind the bar and all at once I felt the shame of who we were. We weren’t the proud descendants of the heroic Mollies. We were cursed white trash, liars, thieves, ruffians. We were people whose own parents left us or sent us away or wish we’d never been born. We were killers, the lowest of the low.

  I bent so that my mouth was right against his ear. “Marisol’s daddy, you mean? William Sullivan?”

  “I killed him,” Daddy said again.

  And then I sat him up and smacked at his face to rouse him. When his eyes met mine and focused I whispered, “I wish you’d died in that disaster. I wish you weren’t my daddy. I wish I never see you again.”

  I stood and glared at everyone in the bar. The look on Star’s face reminded me of Aunt Janice’s when she was holding Ma’s business letter and laughing about it on the phone.

  Stepping toward me Star said loud enough for everyone to hear, “You’re just a little bitch like your mother, ain’t you? You think I don’t know it was you who broke my necklace?”

  “Yeah, it was me,” I said. “And I’d do it again.”

  Then I swung at her so hard it knocked us both to the ground. Blindly I fought, shutting my eyes against Star’s fake nails and for the first time I understood what Ma meant when she said, “Ain’t nothing better than slapping the bitch out of someone.”

  Twenty-six

  A hair-pulling hussy was what Gram called me over breakfast the next morning.

  “Better than just being a hussy,” I mumbled into the oatmeal I’d made too runny.

  Gram snatched the spoon from my hand and shook it at me. “What did you say?”

  I said nothing. I already regretted my words. I’d just wanted everyone to be as miserable as me.

  “Sorry? Say again.” Gram dropped the spoon onto the table with a clatter.

  “Nothing,” I said. Our eyes met and then immediately flicked off each other.

  “Don’t go thinkin’ who you are or talkin’ ’bout things you know nothin’ about!” Gram declared with a stomp of her foot. Still, she wanted to know what hits and bruises I’d managed to get in on Star, and as I described them, her eyes lit with pleasure.

  I didn’t know if Daddy remembered anything about what had happened at the bar. The next day he had a vacant, troubled look to him and we carefully avoided each other’s eyes, skulking past each other in the kitchen or hall. He’d lost his job at the mill and for days afterward he’d sleep long stretches at a time on Ma’s old mattress, often screaming out in one of the nightmares he got from time to time about the disaster. Sometimes I’d go in the room and openly stare at him sprawled out on the mattress the way he’d been sprawled o
ut on the floor of the bar. I’d do it just to make myself face the truth of who he was—a liar, a cheater, a murderer. Worse than all those things was the fact that my whole life I’d thought he was someone else, someone wonderful. Maybe I’d never been his princess. Maybe he’d never loved me, as he’d always said, with the best of his heart. And the thought of that would leave me lying on the porch sofa for hours, staring up at the ceiling, mourning the loss of the daddy I’d loved so much, who’d never really existed at all.

  “Curse or flu,” Gram said, referring to the fact that by the following week all three of us were ill.

  “Since Smythe has the flu,” Daddy said, “I think it’s safe to say flu.”

  “Someone speakin’?” Gram said to the air next to my face.

  I turned away; I didn’t want to play their no-speaking game anymore.

  Daddy, ignoring, as usual, the fact that he was being ignored, said, “I heard the Redevelopment office can’t find your request, Mother.”

  We were all at the kitchen table slurping a supper of Campbell’s chicken soup that I’d heated, all of us listless and clammy with aching stomachs and heads. I bent low over my bowl but Gram rapped my head with her knuckles as if she was knocking on a door. “You tell him they just misfiled it, but if I have to I’ll file ’nother one. And if I got to, I’ll just file ’nother one after that.”

  “But those requests might be dated too late,” Daddy explained. “In three months our entire street is slated for demolition. If you file a second request too late, they may be able to disregard the first request that was filed on time.”

  I lifted my eyes and swerved them from Daddy to Gram, trying to detect in Gram’s reaction if Daddy could be right.

  Gram wiped the feverish sweat from her forehead with a napkin and forgot herself enough to speak directly to Daddy. “I got the mayor and most of the town council on my side. They know I filed it on time.”