The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  Eventually Gram said, “Gonna scare the woman half to death callin’ at this hour.” But we didn’t scare Mrs. Schwackhammer. If anything, she was glad to come get us, even though it was only 5:00 A.M. She picked us up in her old Ford sedan, a kerchief tied over her head, and immediately wanted to know all the details of what had happened.

  “Can’t it wait for mornin’, Edna?” Gram said, leaning her head against the passenger side window as if trying to get as far away from Mrs. Schwackhammer as possible.

  “Well, it is morning,” Mrs. Schwackhammer said. She patted Gram’s knee. “But sure, it can wait.”

  Mrs. Schwackhammer set us each up in our own bedroom and seemed to thoroughly enjoy tending to us with tea and soup and hot or cold washcloths. She’d hobble around with her crooked hip, her face all aglow as she talked about the ways she used to care for her Otto. As a thank-you, Gram and I told her all about the gas poisoning and the hospital care, exaggerating our fear and illness as much as possible, but neither one of us mentioned the curse or Father Capedonico.

  “For heaven’s sake, Edna, I can take care of myself,” Gram snapped more than once. Her bedroom was across from mine and the way the beds were positioned we wound up staring at each other if the doors were left open.

  “I know, I know. I just thought maybe once you felt better—”

  Gram didn’t give her a chance to finish. “Edna, I can’t even get my own house moved, forget about yours.”

  “No. I meant … It’s just that…” Mrs. Schwackhammer’s cane clicked on the floor as she approached Gram’s bed and sat down.

  “What for goodness sake? What?!”

  “Maybe you could call to my Otto. You know the way you did to your John. Maybe you could get Otto to come and talk to me?” Mrs. Schwackhammer looked over to where I sat propped up with pillows on the bed across the hall. “Or maybe the girl could call to him? Did he only come to you, Ro, or did the girl see him too?”

  “Good Lord, Edna! You think I wanted him to come? I asked him to leave is what I done.” Gram crossed her arms and dramatically shivered. “A ghost ain’t nothin’ anyone wants to see. Still, I got to wonder what he come for is all.”

  * * *

  The next day Gram insisted we visit Gramp’s grave to ask him if he was trying to warn her about moving the house. “What we got to lose, John?” Gram asked Gramp’s headstone. “They’re gonna wreck the place anyways. At least I might have some money in hand even if they don’t let me buy the place back.” Then Gram whispered to make sure Mrs. Schwackhammer couldn’t hear her from where she stood several yards away by Otto Schwackhammer’s grave, “Or did you come to tell me about the priest?”

  Gram stood there waiting as if she expected Gramp to give an answer. It was a pleasant day, the end of August, that time of year when you first start feeling the yearning that comes with fall. We were up past Saint Barbara’s church, well out of the fire zone, and there were tons of purple and white asters blooming and lots of finches and sparrows flitting around. Maybe it was that feeling of goodness, of nature being as it should, of death and loss all rolled together that made Mrs. Schwackhammer bring up past regrets.

  Carefully she made her way over from her husband’s grave to suggest we all rest for a bit on a nearby bench. She cleared her throat and smoothed the pleats of her dress across her lap. “Rowena, there’s something I got to tell you.” She shifted her eyes to Gram and Gram stiffened.

  Mrs. Schwackhammer continued, “For a long time now, I’ve wanted to explain why I treated you the way I did when you first came to Barrendale.”

  “You told me you was sorry, Edna. That’s enough said!”

  “I’d like to clear my conscience, Rowena. Will you allow that?”

  “Somethin’ tells me I got no choice.”

  Mrs. Schwackhammer nodded in agreement. “I’m sorry to say I was jealous of you. There you were, brand-new to the mill and telling Boss Betty we needed better lights and an extra fan. I was jealous that you’d have the nerve to come to a town where you didn’t know a soul and to speak your mind like that. You know something, in all these years we’ve known each other you never told me what brought you here—why you left Centrereach.”

  Gram shot me such a look that my mouth clamped shut even though I had no intention of speaking. “We was lookin’ for a brand-new start,” Gram said. “Wasn’t nothin’ much left for us in Centrereach.” And from the way Gram’s eyes lowered I imagined she was thinking about her ma and all the mean things she must have said when Gram got pregnant with Daddy. And I realized right then that that was why they’d left Centrereach—to escape the shame, and not the curse as Gram had always said. Maybe Gram even worried when Daddy and Ma moved back to Centrereach that they’d find out about Gram’s shame. Maybe they had.

  “And I’m so glad you did come,” Mrs. Schwackhammer proclaimed, pounding her cane on the ground for emphasis. “I’ll tell you, it sounds awful to say it and I don’t mean it the way it sounds, but I’m glad in a way your John got sick. Once he did, I got to thinking of when my Otto took sick and I could see on your face all I’d been going through and all I wanted to do was help you out as much as I could.”

  Mrs. Schwackhammer dropped her cane and pressed her face into her hands. “And when I got the call from you in the hospital. To think you almost died. If not for this girl here carrying you out, why we’d be here today burying you!”

  Gram then pressed her hands to her ears and Mrs. Schwackhammer again pressed her hands to her eyes and all I could think was if I pressed my hands to my mouth, we’d be the spitting image of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

  Mrs. Schwackhammer’s voice came muffled through her fingers, “I knew I’d been jealous of you back then and I’m jealous now that your John came to you. I know my Otto and the only place he’d ever come back to, if he’d ever come back, is the house. Once it’s gone—”

  Gram raised her eyes to heaven. “Lord Almighty, Edna, enough! You win. Tomorrow you and me will go down to that Revelopment office and you’re going to speak to the clerk yourself. You don’t need me to go with you, Edna Jane. You want it. Big difference twixt the two.”

  * * *

  I didn’t see Daddy until the following day when Gram sent me over to get the mail. I’d been wanting to see him since Father Capedonico told me that Daddy didn’t kill William Sullivan and that want had been building in me almost to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. He was taking his chances staying at the house and I found him at the kitchen table clasping one of Gram’s yellow china cups in both his hands. He looked thin, his clothes were stained and wrinkled. He needed a shower and a shave.

  “Oh, Daddy, you look so sick.” I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. His coppery scent filled an empty part of me and made me aware of all the other parts that still had nothing inside.

  He let me make him sunny-side up eggs and toast and when I served him I was reminded of when he’d let the egg drip down his face, a game that would be silly now because I didn’t think we could laugh like that at anything ever again. I told him that the Redevelopment Authority was in the process of buying the house but, just as Daddy had predicted, Gram’s first application to buy back the house still couldn’t be found and her second one had been filed too late.

  Daddy said nothing. He bit into the toast and pushed the plate away. Then he reached for the stack of mail on the table and from the bottom of it slid out a postcard. The front of the postcard showed a picture of a diner. Beneath the picture in little print it said, THE CORNER DINER, ONE OF BALD KNOB KENTUCKY’S FINEST DESTINATIONS SINCE 1921. On the back of the card Ma had written, Were fine. Dont wory.

  “I hate her,” I said.

  “You can’t hate your ma,” Daddy said, not looking up from his cup.

  “But you hate Gram,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “I hate how she feels about me. That’s different.” Daddy took a sip of his coffee. “I’m proud of you, Brigid. I heard how you saved Gram.
You’re a brave girl. You didn’t get that from me. That comes from your ma.”

  I tossed the postcard across the table. “Ma ran away and left us. You’re the one who survived the disaster. You’re the brave one, Daddy.”

  “It should have been me here that night with the gases. You two shouldn’t have been alone.”

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to think about where he’d been instead of being with us. I didn’t want to think about him being with Star and not wanting to think about Star reminded me of what else I didn’t want to think about—like what Daddy meant when he said, “I killed him.”

  “Detective Kanelous said he wanted to see you,” I said. “He came by when we were in the hospital.”

  Daddy put the cup to his mouth but then hesitated and didn’t drink. “Yes, he wanted to ask me some questions.” He put the cup down. “He told me that you said a ghost saved you.” Daddy’s gaze slid off to the living-room entryway as if the ghost might be there by Gramp’s altar on the mantel.

  Before I knew it I was telling Daddy how Father Capedonico appeared and how he’d lured me outside. “And then he told me things, Daddy.” I stopped talking. It felt like what people said about the devil—that if you talked about him, you brought him near.

  Daddy’s blue eyes had paled and looked as liquidy as water. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can tell me. I know he came for me. That’s who he meant to find here, not you or Gram. It’s me he’s after. I feel it.”

  In a rush I said, “No, Daddy. When I said that you killed Marisol’s daddy he shook his head no.” My mouth opened almost in wonder, I was so relieved to have this be true.

  Daddy shut his eyes and then pressed a hand to his mouth. He sobbed. I didn’t speak. I’d never seen Daddy cry before and it unsettled a deep place inside me. I looked away and waited for him to stop, even though there was another part of me, almost but not quite separate from me, who already knew I’d be sorry I hadn’t at least patted his hand—that I hadn’t in some way let him know I hurt for him.

  Finally, Daddy nodded. “What else?”

  “He said it all comes back to what happened down there.”

  Daddy wiped his nose on one of Gram’s embroidered dish towels and then stared at the crack in the wall. He nodded for me to continue.

  “That’s all he said. What does that mean? What comes back? What happened down there?”

  Daddy opened his hands and looked at them like they could tell him something. Slowly his eyes turned inward to that other place, the dark place he disappeared to more and more. “Don’t ever ask me that again,” he said and then he walked off and left me staring at his uneaten eggs and Ma’s postcard.

  I brought the postcard with the mail to Gram. I guess I wanted to start something with her. Gram was seated in the chair by the window of the room she was staying in at Mrs. Schwackhammer’s. She sorted the pile I handed her, barely glancing at Ma’s postcard, but surprising me by asking how Daddy took seeing it. She hadn’t asked anything about Daddy in so long it had felt like she never would again.

  “I don’t know how he took it. Not well. He’s sick, Gram. Really sick.” And in my voice was an accusation I didn’t try to hide. My life was so screwed up because my parents were so screwed up because of what their parents had done to them. Gram must have understood the feeling in my words because she said, “I’m sorry your daddy is the way he is. And I’m to blame for that to some degree, that’s true. But comes a point when a person’s got to take ’sponsibility for who they is no matter what their parents done to them. That’s somethin’ your ma could learn. She acts like all her problems go back to her bein’ dumped in an orphanage. But some things you got to get past, no matter how bad.”

  As Gram spoke, she twisted the ring on her finger, her daddy’s ma’s ring, the one she’d promised to Ma on Ma’s wedding day. Sometime after Ma left, Gram took to wearing it. “Now listen,” Gram continued. “There’s somethin’ I want to say to you. I saw that look you give me when Edna mention me and Gramp leavin’ Centrereach. But we made that wrong situation right by gettin’ married and movin’ to a new town. So don’t go thinkin’ you’re all high and mighty. Believe me you could just as easy make a mistake and ruin your life too.” Gram shook her head. “That’s not what I mean to say. You ain’t gonna ruin your life and I didn’t ruin mine neither. I fixed it.”

  Gram put a finger to her mouth as we heard a creak on the hall stair. Gram motioned for me to shut the door and then we waited in silence until we heard the thud of Mrs. Schwackhammer’s cane on the kitchen floor beneath us.

  “There’s somethin’ else I want you to know,” Gram said. I sat on the bed facing her, but I didn’t look at her. I looked at the window that framed part of a sassafras tree that had gotten so hot from the fire that it had shed its bark like it was shedding a coat. Gram continued, “I took my ’sponsibilities and did the best I could with them. I hope your daddy can see that one day. A mother’s mistake ain’t the child’s and if I had to do it over I’d have treated your daddy different.” Gram tilted her head back and massaged the base of her hump. “After all, it wasn’t his fault he was the kind of baby he was, all squirmy and never wanting to eat. You be surprised the kind of bad you feel when your own child don’t want to feed from you.”

  I said nothing, merely fixed my stare on the ring on Gram’s hand.

  “This ring was my grandma’s,” Gram explained. “My daddy’s mama. My daddy’s parents lived not ten miles from where Mama’s parents lived. They knew each other’s people. I think for Mama that kind of made them like family, even before she married into them. She must have needed that, to feel like there was at least some connection with where she came from.”

  “Don’t you think that was the same for Ma? Don’t you think she needed that too?”

  Gram narrowed her eyes. “What the heck you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “Daddy had to take that money from Uncle Jerry to buy that ring. And that’s something he’d never have done if you’d just given Ma your grandma’s ring, like you’d promised. If you had, Daddy wouldn’t be like he is now and Ma and Brother wouldn’t be living in some nowheresville in Kentucky!” A sob caught in my throat and I coughed to cover it.

  “That’s just what a little girl would think. A ring ain’t gonna change a whole lot one way or ’nother. A ring is the absolute least of a marriage, I can tell you that.”

  “The ring wasn’t about the marriage, Gram,” I said, blindly following my instinct, not quite understanding what I meant but from the look on Gram’s face I knew I was onto something. “You shouldn’t have kept it from her.”

  “Mama gave me this ring because I was Daddy’s favorite. I ain’t got nothin’ else from him but one of his old shirts that got all moths holes in it now.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have promised it to Ma.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but I felt for your ma so. I don’t know why she could never see that. As soon as we met at the mill, I felt for her comin’ from an orphanage. It reminded me of Mama havin’ to leave the orphanage and then havin’ her own aunt turn her away. I was tryin’ to do for your ma what somebody should have done for my own.”

  “Well, then you should have done it because she needed somebody to do that for her. She needed it bad!” I stood and swiped Ma’s postcard from the pile of mail and then I ripped it and crushed the pieces in my hands.

  Gram squinted. “What’s got into you, girl? What are you all hot about? Somethin’ goin’ on I don’t know about?”

  I opened my hands and let the pieces of postcard drop from them. Gram stood and looked into my eyes with as much concern and kindness as Auntie used to.

  “Ma’s daddy touched her,” I said, the words falling heavy off my tongue, they were so difficult to say. “He touched her the way a daddy’s not supposed to touch. That’s why her stepma sent her away. To save Ma from him. To keep her from getting touched.” I crossed my arms and squeezed as if I could cradle the place in my heart tha
t had been hurting all these months since I’d found out what had happened to Ma.

  I met Gram’s eyes and saw in them some of my own pain. For several moments we stood there frozen until all of the tears and rage I’d been holding on to for so long came out of me in bawling wails.

  Gram grabbed me to her and rocked me. “That ain’t your fault, girl. You hear me? It ain’t your ma’s neither. Let’s just pray one day she knows that. Let’s pray one day she can let it go.”

  “I think somehow she blames me for what’s happened to her,” I cried.

  “Nah. Your ma’s just got so much hurt inside her she don’t know who she is without it. That’s all you’re feelin’. That hurt pushin’ out from her.” Gram gripped my chin, forcing me to look right at her. “You listen to me, love is like anythin’ else in this world. People do it the best they can. Took me a lifetime to figure that out. Your ma loves you best she’s able, you can be sure of that. You hear? Hear?”

  Mrs. Schwackhammer pounded at the door demanding to know what awful thing had happened but Gram ignored her, repeating, “Hear? Hear?” until I nodded.

  Twenty-eight

  We were all home the day Ma pulled into the drive. Gram immediately went to her room and shut the door. Daddy charged outside and I hid behind the aspidistra plant on the porch and watched and listened to them through the row of open windows.

  Daddy didn’t even give Ma a chance to get out of the car. He swung open the door, yanked her out, and kissed her while she leaned up against the car.

  “That don’t change nothin’,” Ma said when they parted.

  “That changes everything,” Daddy said.

  “Nah, it don’t. Anyways alls I come back for is some of my things.”

  “If you wanted to hurt me, Dolores, you did. If that’s what all this was about, you got what you wanted.”

  “Not everything is about you, Adrian. You might as well know I got me someone. He says he’ll take care of me the rest of my life. I’ll never want for nothing he says. You couldn’t do that, Adrian. You couldn’t even if you tried.”