The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  Ma finished her speech and stepped around the car so that the trunk was between her and Daddy. Even from the distance I was at I could tell she was breathing hard and I knew without even being able to see them that her eyes were as bright and as hard as river rocks. Her chin was raised in challenge. It was obvious to me that she’d been hot to get to this moment for a long time.

  It must have been obvious to Daddy too and he set his jaw the way that sometimes worked on her. “No one knows you better than I do, Dolores. No one understands better what it’s like to have memories you can’t live with.”

  “That don’t matter no more. You was right, Adrian, when you told me all those years ago not to marry you. That you had something broke inside that nothing in this whole world could fix. I don’t know what happened to you that day down there in the mine and that don’t matter anymore neither.”

  Slowly Daddy made his way around the car and as he moved he spoke: “No one’s ever going to make you happy, Dolores. Can’t you see that? Not this guy. Not someone else.”

  With each step that Daddy took forward, Ma took a step back. “Maybe so. But I got to try.”

  “I loved you more than anything else in the world,” Daddy said. “But I don’t think you ever believed it, did you? What else do you want from me, Dolores? What?” Daddy stopped when he reached the spot where Ma had been standing when he started moving toward her. Ma had back-stepped all the way around to the front of the car and was now in the backyard, near the catalpa tree.

  “Nothing, Adrian,” she said. “That’s my point.”

  “Then I guess this is so long, Dolores,” Daddy said, and you could just hear the plea and hurt in his words.

  “Then I guess it is.”

  “I’m going to leave now, Dolores. And I’m not going to chase after you and I’m not going to beg you to come back. But you’ll always have a home here with us. We’ll always be your family, no matter where you go or what you do. You know that, don’t you? There’s nothing that could ever happen that could change that.”

  Ma scratched at her eye like a gnat had flown into it, but I suspected she was swatting away tears. Daddy always knew how to reach the soft places inside her no matter how hard she tried to pretend that he didn’t.

  Daddy turned and started walking toward the street and I suppose he must have wanted Ma to call him back, but he also must have known her well enough to know she wouldn’t. Maybe he even knew those would be the last words they’d ever say to each other. From the way he stopped when he reached the curb and looked back I think he must have sensed that he needed to see Ma one more time and from the way he cradled his bad arm, I think he must have been feeling how close the curse was to us at that moment, closer than it had ever been before. I felt it too and shivered where I stood behind the plant. But there was only so long Daddy could stand at the curb looking back. Then there was nothing left for him to do, but to do what he’d said. He had to go and not ask her to stay and so he walked forward into the cracked and dipping street and didn’t look back again.

  As soon as he was out of sight I pressed my face to the screen. I could see Ma walking alongside the house peering in windows and I was reminded of Ma in Stepma’s kitchen plucking spoons off the spoon rack and dropping them into her bag. All at once I felt a rush of hate for her, having all of Daddy’s love and not wanting it. When she turned the corner to the back of the house, I darted out the front and crept to the car, expecting to find Brother asleep on the backseat but instead I found only a couple of crayons and a coloring book.

  “Ain’t you gonna say hello?” I heard.

  I turned and there was Ma. We were the same height, five feet four and a half, and we stood maybe a foot apart, eyes locked on each other.

  “Huh?” she said again with the teasing smile she used as a cover for whenever she was feeling uncomfortable.

  “Where’s Brother?” I said.

  Ma didn’t answer. She broke stare and turned to the house with a kind of stunned look on her face.

  “Ma.” I gripped her arm. “Where is he? What did you do with him?”

  “Jesus Christ, Brigid!” Ma shook off my hand. “What do you think? I’d dump him in some orphanage somewheres? Chrissakes, I’d rather leave him on the street!”

  Ma swung open the car door, grabbed some leftover sandwich that was heating up on the dashboard, and threw it into the drive for the birds to peck. A starling immediately flew to the ground and in moments a whole flock of them was there, pulling at the bread, ripping it away from one another.

  Ma shook out a cigarette from the pack she’d left on the passenger seat. “I left him with Louie. He’s got a room upstairs from us, him and his little boy do.” She lit the cigarette and then with her sharp little pinky nail picked at something stuck to her lip. “Quit lookin’ at me like that. Alls we’re doing is helping each other out. I have a right to some help. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

  Ma swerved her head to take in the abandoned houses across the street. Her hushed voice came off awestruck. “Driving in I couldn’t believe how bad it all looks. Makes you think of Revelations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the four horseguys come riding out of them clouds up there.” Ma gazed up at the three puffy white clouds hanging low in the creamy blue September sky.

  “That’s right, Ma. It is bad. Where are you living? Is Brother all right? Is there room for me?”

  “Now I just told you about Louie. You’re getting to be a young lady now. Louie’s a stranger to you. Wouldn’t be proper for him to stop by for a visit if you was there. A man’s a man, after all. Can’t blame him for what he is.”

  “But you blame Daddy.”

  “You’re too young to understand. Your daddy’s just your daddy to you. You don’t know what it’s like. A husband needs to be”—Ma inhaled and slowly exhaled—“much more. You know, you was always so close to your daddy, wondering what he went through down in that mine. But you never thought about me like that, what I went through that day they sent me to the orphanage, did you?”

  I looked away. I didn’t want Ma to see the place inside me that was as stark as the woodlands in the fire zone. It was the place where I’d failed her as a daughter and a friend. Truth was I’d never wanted to get that close to Ma.

  Ma tossed her cigarette onto the drive and left it there burning. “Anyways, I got some things I need to get.” Then she swung open the porch door, letting it slam shut, which I guessed meant she thought Gram wasn’t home. She walked through the living room picking up this or that statue or vase and I kept fast on her heels. When she went to fondle some of the objects on Gramp’s altar on the mantel, I stepped right up behind her.

  “Good God, Brigid!” she shouted. “I ain’t gonna steal nothing. You don’t got to keep following me around.”

  I stepped back and gave her some space as she went into Daddy’s childhood bedroom. She stood there, looking around the room dazed, as if everything about it had changed, when all that was different was that it was a mess. Then she opened the closet and started picking out clothes of hers that she wanted to take. She made me think of the starlings pecking the bread outside. She made me think of “The Great Forgetting” and the child who got chained to a mountainside for giving the people what they’d asked for but didn’t want.

  “Maybe you should take Stepma’s offer to go live with her, Ma,” I said. “Maybe it would be the best thing for Brother. Maybe she was trying to do right by you all along.”

  “What do you know about right from wrong? The world’s a screwed up place, Brigid. Sometimes right ain’t possible to do.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you have to do wrong.”

  “Well, what in the heck do it mean then?” Ma sat down on the little wooden chair and rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her palm. “Is this the way things is going to be between us? I was hoping for better.”

  “So was I.”

  “You got some mouth. But I guess I can see where you’d get that from.” Ma did her p
layful smile and I looked away. This was how Ma always turned me to her when she’d hurt me in the past and I wasn’t going to let her do it this time.

  Ma pointed at the mattress. “Just sit down for chrissakes, Brigid. You’re making me nervous standing there staring at me.” Ma’s glance sliced into me, then out. Her gaze softened. “Remember when you used to ask how my heart got broke?”

  My eyes widened, wanting to take in as much of Ma as possible. I had asked Ma that question too many times to count, but I hadn’t asked it since before Auntie died and never once had Ma brought up talking about it on her own.

  “Do you remember?” Ma asked as if I could have possibly forgotten that long-ago moment when Brother took his first steps and something within Ma changed for the worse.

  “Every time you asked about it,” Ma continued, “I’d tell you the same thing—that my heart had forgot it was broke but then it remembered. But I never told you what it remembered.”

  Ma met my gaze straight on and I sat down on the mattress. She continued, “We was sitting in the trailer, you remember?”

  I nodded. “We were playing tiddlywinks,” I said. “And Daddy was lying on the cot in the living room telling stories about the tiddlywinks queen and princess.”

  Ma smiled, surprised I had remembered it that keenly. “That’s right,” she said. “We was just playing a game but for some reason I remember being struck by the fact that you was the same age I was when I got sent off to the orphanage. I was just sitting there thinking that when all of a sudden John Patrick stood up and took his first step. Then he took another, then another, and right then I saw it. I saw it as if I was reliving it all over again. There I was outside the house in Loppsville. I was in the car with Stepma. I had my stuffed bunny rabbit and cloth doll Abigail on my lap. We was going on a trip, that’s what Stepma had told me, but I was nervous because there was only one suitcase. ‘Are Daddy and Bropey going?’ I said. ‘They’ll join us later,’ she said and I believed her, even though I wondered how they’d do that when we had the car. Daddy and Bropey stood on the porch waving and then as we started driving away Bropey ran down the steps toward us, crying and screaming for me. Somehow he knew better than I did what was about to happen.”

  Ma’s eyes blinked with dryness. “I guess seeing John Patrick stumbling toward me, crying, brought me back to my little Bropey running toward me. It wasn’t long after that I started remembering other stuff. Just pieces here and there. But before I had that memory of Stepma taking me away, I didn’t remember much at all. Before that I used to figure my stepma must have snuck me out of the house ’cause how else would my daddy have let her take me away?”

  Ma tilted her head and gazed up at the ceiling in recollection. “There was this nice nun there in the orphanage. Sister Joseph Thomas was her name. I asked her once why God had let my stepma dump me in an orphanage and she said that God’s will was mysterious and we must not question it but must do the best with what we were given. And it was right then I decided I didn’t want another thing to do with a god like that. I mean, who in the heck is he to decide I should get sent off to an orphanage? Why do I got to make the best out of that?”

  My eyes shifted off Ma’s face. “Do you think of your daddy when you look at me?”

  “Sometimes. You got this way of looking at things that makes your face resemble his. But you ain’t nothin’ like him, Brigid. You got a heart so big, I bet we could all live inside it. I bet you’d let us live in it too. I’ll tell you there ain’t many people who’d do that. You’re”—Ma paused and slowly pronounced—“extraordinary. And don’t you ever forget it.”

  “How could I, Ma? You already live in my heart.”

  Ma leaned forward and brushed a strand of hair from where it lingered near my eye. “From the time you was born I could tell you was what gets called a wise soul and I got afraid for you. I got afraid as soon as I saw that wiseness in your eyes. I got afraid for all you’d wind up having to see and know to earn the wiseness you already had inside you.”

  There was the sound of clinking china from the kitchen. “Shit,” Ma whispered, looking at her watch. “Shouldn’t she be at the mill?”

  “She had her shift switched to the early one,” I said.

  And as Ma stuffed her clothes into one of the boxes we’d taken from Auntie’s I considered telling her why Gram had had her shift switched, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear Ma dismiss the Great Idea as stupid or impossible and I didn’t want to give her any additional ammunition against Gram. I watched Ma awkwardly clutch the box to her chest and I thought she’d head straight through the living room and out the porch, to avoid Gram. But she didn’t. She turned into the kitchen.

  “Ain’t you hurt the girl enough?” Gram said from where she sat at the kitchen table.

  “If I was you, Rowena, I wouldn’t go sitting in no judgment lest you want to start getting judged.”

  “Believe it or not, I was hopin’ you’d come back,” Gram said.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, Rowena, but I don’t believe it.”

  Gram’s reading glasses were hanging from a beaded string around her neck. There were papers for the Great Idea in front of her. She pointed at the other end of the table. “Put the box down. I have somethin’ for you.”

  Ma gave me a look like, You believe this? But she plunked the box down and said, “Hope you’re not planning on hitting me ’cause I’d have to sock you back.”

  Gram slid her grandma’s ring off her finger and offered it to Ma. “If I gave you this now, would it change nothin’?”

  Ma eyes glittered as brightly as the ring. “I ain’t coming back, if that’s what you mean.”

  Gram stood and walked toward Ma. “I ain’t tryin’ to bribe you to come back. You listen here. This ring was my daddy’s mama’s. I treasure it. But you can have it, if it’d mean somethin’ to you, Dolores. If my givin’ it might change somethin’ about how you feel”—Gram tapped between Ma’s breasts—“in here.”

  Ma swallowed and she leaned closer to the ring that Gram held pinched between two fingers, but she still didn’t touch it. It almost seemed like Ma was afraid to touch it.

  “Nah,” Ma said. “You keep it, old lady, and every time you look at it you remember how mean you was to me.” But Ma’s voice didn’t deliver the way she wanted. She lowered her eyes and you could just see her whole body go limp. Ma added, “When Brigid’s old enough you let her have the ring, you hear? That’ll be like a gift from both of us, Brigid. You remember that.”

  Then Ma clasped the box to her chest and nodded at me to open the door. She stepped out and headed down the path to the drive and as I moved to follow, Gram gripped my arm. “You remember what I said. All she can do is love the best she can. That’s all you can ’spect from her, girl. For the rest of her life, for the rest of yours.”

  At the car me and Ma hugged. She got into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The window was partway open and I placed my hands on the edge of the glass, gripping it like it was a ledge.

  “You got to let me go now, Brigid. I’ll be late. I got to get back. When I get a phone, I’ll call. That’s all I can do right now.” Ma started the car and shifted it into reverse. “That’s all I can do,” she repeated.

  “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen, Ma. To Daddy and to me. To all of us.”

  “We all are, Brigid. That’s what life is. Now come on.” She put her arm behind the empty passenger seat and looked behind her, preparing to back down the drive. “Come on now, Brigid. You’re making me late. I got to get moving.”

  She waited to press the accelerator, sensing the moment when I lifted my hands and let go.

  Twenty-nine

  Within hours of Ma’s leaving I got a bad feeling, the worst I’d ever had, and in my mind flashed a vision of Daddy on the uppermost ledge of the East Side Pit. I saw him in a swirl of steam standing with the dead deer and dogs and coons and cats that had fallen in and died there. The more I tried to dismiss the imag
e, the stronger it got until there was nothing left for me to do but go and find him.

  I took a flashlight because dusk had begun its slow creep up the hill and as I swung the beam back and forth, looking for fissures and sinkholes along the path, I was surprised by how many asters and everlastings sprung out from the silty cracks. Dozens of beetles and spiders skittered away from my light and made me guess that even if Russia did drop the bomb on us, little bits of nature would still cling on.

  When I reached the pit, I took my time scanning the various shelves and ledges that had been created by the men as they dug it deeper and deeper. The topmost ledge was only maybe ten yards or so down the slope of the pit, but at times the steam and smoke was so thick I could barely see. Worse, occasionally flames shot out from caverns farther below and momentarily blinded me, spotting the back of my eyelids with shooting stars of light. Still, I didn’t find any trace of Daddy, only the heated carcasses of whatever animals had had the misfortune to fall in.

  Looking down into that pit got me feeling unsteady on my feet. There was a pinkish glow to the air from all the heaps of burning coal and it started to feel like even the pink air was on fire—it was so hot and seemed to flicker before my very eyes. I started to feel like I was on fire; there was a feverish heat to my skin. Every now and then I thought I saw Father Capedonico, hovering just on the edge of my sight. His image wavered like he was made of steam and I didn’t know if he was the curse out to get us or my mind playing tricks on me. Then I recalled what Marisol had said about curses coming from ignorant spirits who could be banished by a stronger spirit. I shouted, “I’m not afraid of you! You need to go back where you belong. We’ve paid our price. You’ve had more than your just revenge.”

  I wiped my forehead and waited. I shined my flashlight in every direction but the priest didn’t appear and I wondered if that was what Auntie had meant about the curse being inside us. Maybe she’d meant that the power to get rid of it was inside us, not the curse itself.