Deep River Burning

by Donelle Dreese

  A few weeks after the bonfire, Samantha Hewitt, who lived on Adena’s busy Lilac Avenue, was playing with a small stick in her back yard where the short, wiry grass was brown in patches even though the spring months brought plenty of warmth and rain. She sat down and pulled at the thin grass, remembering the previous summer when it was thick enough to hide her plump fingers in the bed of green. She picked up a worm that couldn’t hide itself in the poor grass strings and allowed it to twirl around her wrist before she put it back down on the ground.

  “Come in for supper, Samantha!” her mother shouted from the back door to the house.

  “I’m coming,” Samantha responded as she brushed her fine, straight hair away from her cheek. Samantha noticed a small crack in the road where a threadlike steady stream of smoke piped from the ground. When the breeze blew, she barely saw the smoke at all, but when the air was still, she saw the gray, lanky cloud snake from the hole. She slowly waved her hand through the smoke line as if it were stretching from the point of a yellow candle flame, except there was no golden flicker of a burning wick, no dripping wax, and no trace of cinnamon in the air resembling the candles her mom liked to burn. A twinge of fear crept into her heart and she ran inside.

  When Samantha sat down at the table to eat dinner, her father had already prepared a plate for her that consisted of mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and a small piece of ham. The family ate without talking. From Samantha’s seat at the table, she could see out into the back yard through the screen.

  “What do you keep looking at, Samantha?” her mother asked. Samantha looked down at her plate and said, “Nothing.” Their small dog named Bailey came over to the table and sniffed at everyone’s feet. A television could be heard in another room although no one was watching it, and then the phone rang, but no one answered it. Samantha’s father rolled his eyes and went back to eating his dinner as Bailey ran away from the kitchen table and jumped and barked at the screen door. When Samantha’s mother was finished eating, she looked at her little girl and asked, “Ok, are you going to tell us what you keep looking for outside?”

  “It’s too dark now,” Samantha said.

  “Too dark for what?” her father asked.

  “Too dark to see the ground smoking.”

  “What do you mean, Samantha?” her mother asked.

  “Like when daddy smokes his cigars,” she paused, “but it doesn’t smell the same.”

  The following day, a group of borough officials, one of whom was Denver’s father, Ted Oakley, arrived at Samantha’s house. Ted was the head of the Adena town council and was respected for his fairness and even-keeled approach to community matters. The four gentlemen spoke to Samantha’s mother, who was pointing at a tall tree that was dying. Three of the men walked to the edge of the property and carefully scanned the ground until they found the small crack that puffed smoke. Denver’s father stayed behind to talk to Mrs. Hewitt.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Mrs. Hewitt asked. “What are they looking for?”

  “Well, we’re not sure yet,” Ted replied. “Is it all right with you if I ask you a question or two?”

  “Sure, please come in,” she said as she stood back clearing the doorway. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you, I won’t be taking up much of your time.”

  “What can I do for you?” Mrs. Hewitt asked.

  “Was yesterday the first time you saw the smoke hole?”

  “Yes. My daughter Samantha noticed it yesterday when she was playing in the yard and chasing after the dog. Cute little thing is so hard to keep after.”

  Ted gazed out toward the road and around the yard and trees. “Has anyone in the house had any unusual health problems of late?” Ted asked.

  “Nothing unusual,” she said.

  “Any sickness at all?”

  “Well my husband was organizing his tools in the basement on Sunday when he started to get a headache and feel nauseous. He went upstairs and slept for a while and started to feel better. It was just a touch of the flu, I’m sure,” she said, getting a little nervous.

  “Mind if I . . . go down to your basement for a minute?” Ted asked hesitantly.

  “No, no, not at all. Let me show you the way.”

  Mrs. Hewitt pointed Ted down a staircase with a very low ceiling. He looked around and saw nothing unusual in the basement, only a lot of tools, some dusty boxes, a broken down tricycle, and some gardening equipment. He walked from one corner of the basement to the other inspecting the walls and the floor, then moved several boxes, a garden hose, and a work table in order to see into the corners of the basement. He scanned his eyes over a washing machine and clothes dryer, pipes, weight lifting equipment, and a lot of cobwebs. Mrs. Hewitt apologized for the disheveled appearance of the basement, but Ted only laughed and said, “I haven’t seen too many basements that are not disheveled.” As he was leaving, he thanked Mrs. Hewitt for her time and informed her that people from the Department of Environmental Protection would probably be stopping by soon to speak to her again. As Ted walked outside, he took special notice of the warm, breezeless day that sparkled in every direction in contrast to the grim, necklace line of smoke that spun through the crack in the ground.

  On the day the smoke hole was discovered, Denver was dealing with her restlessness by listening to music and talking to Helena on the phone about things she would never tell anyone else. She talked about how Josh sometimes looked at her as if she was a painting in a museum that changed its hues at different times of the day, which frightened her, and how if she ever got married, she wouldn’t change her name. She liked Oakley. It reminded her of a grove of tall trees. She talked about how her mother walked the path that was expected of her, married at eighteen, pregnant at twenty.

  Sometimes, when her mother thought no one was home, she would cry when she was standing in front of the kitchen window, or when she ran her hands over the old hardbound books in her husband’s study. Denver walked in on her mother a few times during one of these moments when her mother’s heart seemed to be falling to pieces, slowly, one by one like a flower that drops its petals until it’s just a withered stalk. But her mother would quickly wipe her tears away and go back to cleaning the counters or organizing the pantry. Denver wondered about the unfulfilled dreams her mother had locked away in the closed hope chest in her heart, but she didn’t want to have regrets like her mother. She didn’t want to wonder about what could have been.

  Downstairs, her mother had finished putting dinner on the table while her father was talking to the mayor, who occasionally joined their family for dinner. This particular night, her mom and dad and the mayor were having an intense discussion that she initially ignored, but their conversation became heated enough that it distracted her attention away from her thoughts of the future. Denver sat down to dinner, gave a halfhearted smile to her mother, and listened intently to the conversation. It didn’t take long for her to realize what was happening.

  “As of this time, we don’t know how it started or how we are going to put it out,” said Mayor Joseph Laredo.

  “I suppose we ought to call a town meeting as soon as possible,” Denver’s father replied.

  “That’s a good idea. You are the head of town council, Ted. People respect you and will listen to you.”

  “I appreciate that, Joe, but it won’t be easy to explain that an underground mine fire has been burning at one end of town for who knows how long. There are many mine tunnels under Adena, and if the fire spreads, the town could expect serious problems. Water supplies could become toxic, mine subsidence is a probability, and plant life and crops would die from the roots up. The tree in Hewitt’s back yard is already dead and taking on a sickly white shade, like a birch tree, but gray. The fire is consuming the coal vein under their house and compromising the Hewitt family’s health and safety. And t
o think the Hewitts have lived in that house for over twenty years.”

  The conversation at dinner continued to shed light on the history of mining in Adena. Denver excused herself from the table and went outside through the backdoor. She kicked off her shoes and mindfully placed each foot onto the grass one at a time. She had never thought about it before, what lies beneath. She paid too much attention to the surface of things. She spent too much time worried about her own future when the future of Adena seemed to be poised at the edge of a burning cliff.

  A few days later, a man and a woman from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection arrived to examine the area looking for clues as to how the fire had started, how long it had been burning, and where it was heading. A map of the mines indicated that the underground mine structure was quite vast allowing for the possibility of significant damage to Adena if the fire could not be stopped. The DEP investigators combed the area near the Hewitt home for answers. Following a section of trees that appeared to be dying to the north of the original smoke hole, they came to a clearing in the trees where a pit bearing the remains of a bonfire or burned garbage was located. There were several logs placed in a circle around the pit and the ground was littered with cigarette butts and a few smashed beer cans sticking out beneath the dirt and leaves. The pit didn’t appear deep enough to be responsible for starting the mine fire. Just to make certain, the investigators ordered the pit to be emptied of its charred remains. The pit was deeper than was originally suspected, and once the remaining ash was dusted from the strangely stinking hole down to the earth’s surface, the thoughts that first ignited in the minds of the investigators began to take shape.

  “A coal vein is very close to the surface on the one side of the pit. If the fire itself didn’t start it burning, then the heat alone would have done it,” the woman from the DEP explained to Ted and Mayor Laredo. Ted’s worst fears were confirmed and the bonfire was the likely cause.

  News of the mine fire made its way through Adena, but there wasn’t much fear to be found. Signs of the fire were barely visible and the Hewitts were chided for making such a big deal of it. If there was a mine fire at all, it would be extinguished, and no one’s life need be interrupted, but the article in the newspaper that appeared a few days after the discovery of the smoke hole expressed a different opinion, and traffic on the road by the Hewitt house increased as people drove by to see the crack in the ground with the rising cloud. After a few more days, the traffic returned to normal, but Samantha no longer played outside and Bailey was confined to the tiny front yard. Neighbors didn’t visit the Hewitt family quite as much, and the dead grass patches widened.

  Ted Oakley took an afternoon and drove up and down every street in Adena. Denver went along but sat quietly in the truck as her father examined his surroundings. He looked at the ground, at the trees, at the grass, and sometimes he got out of his car and walked around until his eyes took in all he needed to see. He had never looked at Adena quite this way before, by focusing entirely on the landscape. The town appeared to him to be a shallow bowl in a sea of ridges and valleys with rolling hillsides guarded by hawks. The spring had been plentiful with rain leaving the maples and oaks broad and lush, but a patch of trees in the distance looked pale and dry from his vantage point. Like most people in Adena, he didn’t think much about what was underground anymore. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he said to himself. But he knew that whatever he saw above ground was a reflection of what was happening below ground, and what he saw on that long, slow afternoon drive brought tears to his eyes and tied a knot in his stomach that he couldn’t loosen.

  Chapter 4

  Resistance

  Autumn arrived in Adena. Leaves waved from the trees like a thousand golden starfish surfacing for a quick view of the world. Despite the efforts of her parents to appease her, Denver had been in a mood that allowed the word no to flow from her tongue before her ears took the time to hear what was being said. She wasn’t afraid of this need to say no, only a little perplexed by its desire to surface when she spoke with her parents, especially her mother, Savannah, who always worked so hard to do and say the right thing. It was this need of her mother’s to be perfect that aggravated Denver to the degree that at times, she would situate herself as the unholy force in the house to counterpoint her mother’s attempts at sainthood, to be the yang in a house with too much yin.

  There were times when Savannah wanted to say no, but never did. Denver knew it by the way her mother clenched her jaw and turned her eyes toward the floor in hopes of stuffing her objection down into a quiet part of her body where it could be dissolved. But it never dissolved. It became a migraine headache or back pain or resulted in endless hours of sewing with pricked fingers. On one cloudy afternoon Savannah asked Denver to remove a strange, hand-written sign from the front yard, but Denver said “No, I like it. It gives the yard character.” It read “Hello No, We Won’t Go!” She knew what the sign meant, and admired that it expressed a steadfast resolve to stand up for something. She wanted her mother to do the same. To say no. To unlock her jaw and have a voice.

  She went up to her room, got her camera from the top shelf of her closet, took a photograph of the sign, and the next day posted the photograph on the kitchen refrigerator with a magnet. Still, there was no reaction from “Saint Savannah.” No anger. No annoyance. Nothing. She was afraid her mother had become numb.

  She walked out to the yard, pulled the metal prongs of the sign out of the soft soil and threw the sign in the trash.

  “Thank you, Denver,” her mother said as Denver walked into the kitchen for a drink of water. “Will you help me tear up this lettuce?”

  “Sure. Hand me a bunch.”

  Savannah handed Denver a colander stacked with tall, crisp leaves of romaine lettuce. “What was wrong with that sign?” Denver asked. “Why did you want me to take it down?”

  “Because it is inappropriate,” Savannah replied.

  “How so?”

  “Because it’s confrontational.”

  “But what if the people who don’t want to leave Adena are right?” Denver asked. “Why should they be forced to leave their homes?”

  “It’s just better to not get involved.”

  “Dad is already involved. Doesn’t he have an opinion?”

  “I’m sure he does, but that doesn’t mean we have to advertise it.”

  Denver tossed a few pieces of the crunchy lettuce into her mouth. “I just don’t want to be afraid of what other people think,” Denver stated.

  “You’ve got an independent mind, just like your father.” Savannah smiled.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” Denver handed her mother the colander full of torn lettuce.

  “Yes it is.” Savannah rinsed the lettuce under cold water and looked out the kitchen window before she began speaking again. “When you get older, Denver, I want you to promise me something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me that you will make your own money. Don’t look to someone else to take care of you.”

  “Okay.” Denver looked intently at her mother. “Why?”

  There was silence. It was not what Denver had expected to hear. A window into her mother’s life had been opened for Denver to look through, a window that shed a new light onto her own future. A window that could never again be closed.

  Her father came home and talked about the mine fire. Denver almost said no when he asked her to join him on his visit to Harvey Himelreich’s house to talk to Harvey about mine fire gases that could be seeping into his house through the ground. She almost said no, but her relationship with her father was less confusing. He was not interested in perfection, not from her, not from her mother, not from anyone. He only wanted to remember the way things used to be.

  In the truck on the drive to Harvey’s house, he pointed at different landmarks that held a mem
ory for him—the softball field where he earned the nickname “Outta-here Oakley” for his home runs, the bar where he had his first beer, the house where her mother lived when she was a little girl, the curve in the river where he caught his first fish, and the places where he would take her mother while they were dating. He even mentioned the apartment building where he smoked his first cigarette, which was also his last, he wanted her to know. He pointed to these places every time they took a ride together and by now, Denver knew them all by heart.

  Denver read the street sign, “Lilac Avenue,” as her father pulled his truck into Harvey Himelreich’s narrow driveway. They walked slowly up the slightly crumbling blocks of cement that served as a sidewalk and knocked on the door.

  “Hiya Ted. How are ya?” said Harvey.

  “Oh, I’m all right, I suppose. How are you?” Ted said as he walked in the door.

  “Not too often the head of the town council comes to visit. What can I do for ya?”