On the second-floor landing, I stood and listened again. Voices, quiet, then voices. Hammering. Quiet.
I waited another minute. A bit of soft laughter rolled up the stairs, then more talking.
The sound of a shovel scraping dirt from a cement surface. In Ashland, Kentucky.
I continued downward, feeling the tide rising to meet me.
The first time I ever saw my mother cry I was three years old. She was in the kitchen, and Nanny, my grandmother, my father's mother, was comforting her, holding her, letting her cry on her shoulder.
I hadn't known that mothers cried until then.
The film in my head begins with that image.
What's wrong? I ask.
No one pays attention.
What's the matter?
Go upstairs, Nanny tells me. Away you go.
I head onto the stairs, where I sit, halfway up, listening, looking through the rails. My mother is still crying. I don't understand it. I am scared.
Later, Nanny tells me that my mother's father died. I try to understand how sad she must have been to cry like that.
No one took me to the funeral home or to the service.
I have no memory of him.
On the stairs, I thought. I am still on the stairs. Going down, instead of up. Jack, I thought. Jack. Are you down there?
I do not pray anymore. I cannot believe as I once did. Everything changed.
I am forty. It is a gray area, a crossroads. I approach a world without the past, my parents disappearing, one at a time, slowly, in bits. The people about me, friends, brothers, sisters, are changing into whatever it is they will become next. Their own children are growing up.
We had a name picked out for my stillborn son. It is a name we never spoke aloud afterward. But I use it when I speak to him in my head, when I try to explain to him what happened. You see, he was alive. Once. I know he was. I felt him move and kick, often, before he was born.
He knows his name. It is Aidan.
I never say it out loud.
It hadn't occurred to me that my concept of a basement was formed by my experience as a Canadian, or as one from the northern states of fifty years hence—an area carved out neatly and fashioned to harbor the mechanics of a house: furnace, electricity, plumbing, storage. And then you could opt for finishing it, adding an entire living level.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, below the main floor, and found myself standing in mud. No furnace. Nothing but light bulbs dangling intermittently from an electric wire that dwindled away into the darkness.
I could smell the earth around me, damp and primitive. Focusing my eyes, I looked about and saw a large room that was the size of what a full basement might be, a cave beneath the Scott Hotel, filled with enormous piles of moist brown subsoil.
And I could hear men digging.
Maybe nature constructs us in such a way that we are destined to be only what we can be, what we were always meant to be. Experience then tests us. It is only when we have survived the crucibles that we start to find out what we hold true and valuable, who we are. Our spirit discovers how much it can absorb.
I think of white-hot metal hammered relentlessly. Then we cool, bubble in water, hissing in pain and wonder, and what emerges is truer, harder, purer.
The shadows fall away.
We glow, ready again.
The string of light bulbs led to the far side of the room, toward the sounds that echoed, feebly, all the way to the third floor. Shading my eyes from the glare with my hand, I stepped, carefully, slowly, through the mud and earth, following the lights to the far end of the room.
And stared in silence at the tunnel that had been dug in the wall in front of me, at the lights snaking out into the subterranean channel beneath the streets of Ashland.
Two-by-fours and two-by-sixes blocked off an opening six feet in height by four feet in width. Tram tracks disappeared down the center of the tunnel.
In my head, I heard Stanley's voice. Was a coal miner, Harlan County. In thirty-one, he was asked to dig for thirty-three cents a ton.
I stepped onto the ties and entered the tunnel, walking slowly, carefully. I seemed to be heading east, out under the street. About twenty feet into the tunnel, the noises of men working becoming clearer, closer, it all hit me with a brazen clarity, like the tumblers in a giant lock sliding open.
Bank's a bank..., he had said. But that one ... That one's still there.
I stood for several minutes watching them dig before anyone noticed me: the two men that I had seen entering the hotel earlier, Stanley, two others whom I did not know.
And Jack.
The air was scarcely breathable—close, humid, fetid. The men were naked to the waist, crowded together in the confines of the tunnel, covered in sweat and dirt, ankle-deep in mud.
Slowly, one by one, they straightened, stopped what they were doing, stared at me, brows wrinkled, mouths set. The two strangers at the far dirt-face leaned on their shovels. Stanley let his pickaxe settle at his feet. The two men I had met earlier held their shovels in front of them, tools that had shape-shifted into weapons, their knuckles showing white.
Finally, Jack turned and met my gaze. He rested one hand on the small tram filled with freshly dug earth. Even in the harsh dimness of a single light bulb, his body streaked with grime, surrounded by puddles, mud, crow bars, I saw his blue eyes flash recklessly.
They flashed, I saw, like sun on a waterfall, the river full of rapids, running deep into underground caverns.
They waited in silence. Their glances flickered to the empty spaces behind me, to where the tunnel dwindled into a string of harsh light-bulb pearls.
Waiting.
Jack spoke first. "This here's Leo." They still waited, listened.
I answered their unspoken question. "I'm alone," I said.
The two leaning on their shovels shifted their weight.
"I thought I heard something. I came to see." I shrugged.
"What do you see?" asked Stanley. His voice was soft.
They were motionless.
I looked at them. I looked from one to the next, each in turn, mud-stained and still as stopped clocks. I felt the rapids cascading from Jack's eyes flow into my chest with a soundless tumult. "Dreams," I said. Then I breathed slowly, in and out, my heart beating like a bird's wings. "I see dreams."
"He might not be alone." One of the strangers spoke.
They squinted around me, listened.
"You alone, Leo?" Jack asked.
I nodded. "Yes."
Jack looked at me. Then he turned around and spoke to the stranger. "I think he's alone."
"He ain't from around here. He talks funny," the man continued.
"He talks funny like me," Jack said.
"I'm a friend of Jack's sister," I said.
Jack smiled.
I watched them. I listened to the silence below the earth. I listened to my heart. Then I spoke again. "I can help," I said.
Jack nodded. The white teeth showed as the smile broadened, and I saw my mother's face.
The rapids thundered in my veins. "I want to help."
We stood in the mud in the basement back under the Scott Hotel. They seemed satisfied that I was alone.
"This here's Emmett and Henry." Stanley introduced me to the two men who had passed me on the front verandah the previous afternoon.
They were sturdy, strong men, in their early thirties I guessed, whose hands, I could see, bore the calluses of hard work.
"And George and Jimmy."
George was round-faced and perhaps the oldest of the group—maybe forty. Jimmy's red hair was matted and filthy. Irish, I thought.
George looked at Stanley. "I dunno about this."
Stanley's eyes crinkled. He looked at Jack, then back at me. He dropped his head, thinking.
"Don't want to make a mistake," said Jimmy. His feet shifted uneasily.
"What are our choicest" Stan asked.
They were silent.
&
nbsp; "C'mon. What are they?"
Nobody answered.
"Pretty quiet bunch. You know what they are. Same's I do." He placed his hands on his hips. "Leo's either in or he's out." He looked at me. "Aren't you, Leo? If you're out, could be dangerous to us all."
I scanned their faces. They looked scared. And because they were scared, they might be dangerous. But that was not a real factor in my decision. Their fear was a deeply rooted human fear, different from the fear of someone caught in an act of wrongdoing. I felt that what they feared was not me.
"I'd like to be in. I can help."
Again, nobody spoke. I glanced at Jack. There was the faint trace of smile left on his face.
Stanley paused. Then he said: "Believin' a man is a tricky business. Man says one thing, does another. Happens all the time. 'Specially when he's scared."
I looked at Jack, Stanley, Jimmy. "I'm not scared."
"Maybe you should be," George said. His fingers gripped his shovel tightly.
"Maybe." I had no idea what I was doing here, how I had even gotten here.
I looked again at Jack, felt his excitement, felt more alive that I had in years. Below the ground in Ashland, I had discovered six men digging for a future, with hope and craziness and desperation.
And I was in awe of them all.
"I'll vouch for him."
They all turned to stare at Jack.
"He's just a guy. He knows my sister, back home."
The others listened to him.
"He's okay," he said. And then the smile came back in full bloom. "I can just tell. Somehow."
"He could be a cop, a Fed, Pinkerton," George said.
Jack smiled. "Nah," he said. Then even he looked a bit perplexed. "Any guy who could find me way he did, with nothin' but scraps of letters to recall and old photographs way back in his head, it's kinda like he's meant to be here, with us."
Stanley looked at Jack. "Hope you're right," he said at last.
Jack nodded. "I am," he said.
"You know what's goin' on?" Stanley asked.
I nodded.
They said nothing, waiting for me to tell them. Emmett reached for a water bottle, took a long swig from it, then passed it to Henry.
"Jobs dried up and blew away," I said.
They listened.
"Two million men roaming the country looking for jobs, handouts. Maybe three million. Maybe more."
Henry passed the water bottle to George.
"More'n twenty million unemployed."
Jimmy nodded.
"And out there, right in the middle of it all, sits that big bank, fat with money."
They stared at me.
"And here you are, fellows who know a thing or two about diggin' tunnels, about goin' into the earth for what's there."
The bottle passed to Jack. He had it to his lips when I said, "I know about Toledo."
He stopped, lowered the bottle.
The men in the dank underworld studied him. Jack looked both bewildered and sheepish.
I shrugged. "We all learn. It's okay."
Jack didn't look at me.
"Who's right, who's wrong ... What to do ... Sometimes it isn't so clear ..." I thought of my own life, of things that I didn't want to discuss, decisions I had made, things that embarrassed me when I remembered them.
Jack looked up, his face puzzled.
I stared hard at Stanley Matusik. "Who'll be hurt? Anybody in town? Neighbors?"
"No," he said. "We ain't gonna drill safety deposit boxes. Nothin' personal like that. Just cash. All insured. Nobody'll be hurt."
I nodded. It was madness. All of it. The idea. The tunnel. The Scott Hotel. My presence here.
All of it.
"I'm in," I said.
Stanley smiled.
Jack looked at me in wonder.
George was sitting on an overturned orange crate in the middle of the mud. "I once walked twenty-five miles looking for a job. Made it all the way to Portsmouth. Stopped at every store, every house, knocked and asked. Mostly, nobody'd talk to me." He shook his head. "Had to hitch home. Lost twelve pounds. Gettin' too old."
"Back in thirty-two," said Henry, "I was with a crowd of folks in Charleston. Men and women. We raided a grocery store near City Hall. We was all arrested. Twenty-six of us."
"My little boy died," said Emmett. "Scarlet fever." His lips moved, but nothing else came out. He fell silent.
"Somethin's wrong," said George, frowning. "Something's bad wrong."
"Money'll come in Friday, the twelfth. Bank'll be full all weekend. Leaves on the Monday. It's the same every month. We seen it, like clockwork," Stanley said.
"I'm not following."
"Comes in by train," he explained patiently, "from Huntington, Charleston, Bluefield, Roanoke. Stays the weekend. Goes on down to Lexington, Louisville. Ends up in Cincinnati, in a big goddamn bank. Bigger'n this one." "How much?"
Stanley shrugged. "Depends. We got folks tell us some months it gets as high as four hundred thousand. Others, bad months, two-fifty, maybe three."
"Whose money is it?"
Jack smiled. He looked at Stanley.
"Barbara's," Stanley said.
I know my lips parted because I found myself closing them quickly.
"Barbara Hutton. Woolworth heiress."
I pictured Jeanne, then Teresa, behind the counter.
"Poor little rich girl," he said.
"She's got more stores than you or I got hairs on our head," said Stanley. "There's a Woolworth's in every town in America. Some got two, three of 'em. Ashland's got five."
"More'n a thousand throughout the country." Jimmy wiped his hand across his brow as he spoke, streaking the dirt. "Even up there in Canada, I hear," he said, looking at me closely.
I remembered the one at Yonge and Eglinton. I remembered the one at Queen and Yonge. Carlton and Yonge. The Danforth.
"Newspapers say she inherited forty-five million dollars," George said.
"I heard sixty-five million," said Emmett.
I looked at Jack. "She won't miss it," he said. "Nobody's hurt." Then he added, meeting my eyes: "Ain't like Toledo."
"Is this it?" I asked. "How many are in on this?"
"There are others," said Stanley. "They give us information, tools, lumber." He was silent for a moment. "You don't need to know, Leo."
I looked into the tunnel. It went in sixty, eighty, a hundred feet. I couldn't tell. "How close are you?"
"We'll be there by the fourteenth," said Stanley. He stepped in front of me. "We could use another strong back, just to be sure."
"This is crazy," I said. "You'll never do it. It's too much digging. Too far."
"My daddy was part of a crew cut a tunnel ten miles long one way, then twenty-three miles t'other," said Stanley. "Had to get 'round a ridge. He traveled 'bout five miles a day on his knees."
I studied the firm set of their faces again.
Crazy, I thought, completely exhilarated.
Then my head was dizzy with other faces: my mother, my father, my grandfather, Nanny, Jack Radey, my brothers and sisters. Jeanne and Adam.
Aidan.
TEN
Wednesday, October 10, 1934
The next morning, Stanley, Jack and I sipped coffee on the veranda of the Scott Hotel. It was only eight o'clock, but the sun was already warming.
"You know much about Barbara?" Stanley asked.
"Some. Not much," I said.
"She got the inheritance last November. 'Bout a year ago."
"You read about her comin'-out party?" asked Jack.
"Don't remember," I said.
"When she was eighteen." He thought for a moment. "Would be nineteen thirty. Was in all the papers and magazines."
I shrugged, smiled.
"Was at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. A thousand guests. Maurice Chevalier, Rudy Vallee, three other orchestras."
"For her, there weren't no Prohibition or Depression," said Stanley. "Was thousands of bottles of champagn
e, the papers said."
I began to realize the degree of people's obsession with her as I listened.
"Had flowers and trees flown in special from both coasts."
"Eucalyptus trees, from California," said Jack.
I had read once how farmers there during the Depression planted mile-long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep the plowed topsoil from blowing away.
"One night only," said Stanley, emphasizing the point with his index finger. "Party for a little girl. Cost fifty thousand dollars."
"Two hundred fifty million dollars in sales in nineteen thirty-two for the company," Jack said. "She got married last year. Wore jewelry worth one million dollars. They say her lace lingerie for her weddin' night was made by a dozen nuns. Cost twenty thousand dollars."
"Speedboats, Argentinean polo ponies, the White Russian choir, European honeymoon," added Stanley. He paused. "All we wanted was union wages."
"Nobody'll be hurt," said Jack, his blue eyes sparkling, a missionary zeal spreading across his face. And he smiled that smile. "Drop in the bucket," he said.
"Only problem we might run into is rain," said Stanley.
I looked at him, listened.
"Rain and tunnels, they don't mix. Get a lot of it, could weaken the ground. Too much of it, could flood." He sipped his coffee, thought for a minute. "Been lots of flooding in this town. People in Ashland still talk about the big one of nineteen thirteen." He nodded toward the north. "River rose up. Happened in eighteen eighty-four, too, they say. Whole town went underwater two or three feet."
We all looked into the east, looked at the sky.
Later that evening, I dug with them, in the mud beneath the streets of Ashland. The shovel in my hands was real, but the sensation of being beneath the earth, buried treasure and Rosetta Stone lying in wait somewhere ahead of us, was not.
"My little girl, Jenny, she got typhoid last year," said Henry. "All her hair fell out. She's just turned eight years old this summer. Went through the school year bald-headed." He wheezed a load of dirt to one side. "Couldn't afford no wig for her. Leastways, no wig worth wearin'. Place in Louisville wanted fifty dollars for one made of human hair—blond, like her own." He paused, straightened, thinking. "Can't remember the last time I had fifty dollars all at one time." He placed his hand on the small of his back, working the muscles there with his fingers. He continued to think. "Don't think I ever had fifty dollars all at one time."
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