Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  PRAISE FOR Whisper Hollow

  “Chris Cander’s debut novel is a multigenerational epic about religion and obsession in a West Virginia coal-mining town. A terrible moment in 1916 echoes across decades, shaping the way an entire community understands good and evil. Beautiful prose and unique, well drawn characters make Whisper Hollow one of the most auspicious debuts of the season.”

  — JEREMY ELLIS,

  BRAZOS BOOKSTORE

  (HOUSTON, TX)

  “Whisper Hollow explores the complex lives of three very different women: Myrthen harbors a cold heart behind a face of piety, Alta is torn between duty to her family and the man she truly loves, and Lidia is a loving young mother who harbors a dark secret. When town scandals that are buried as deep as the mines threaten to come to light, each woman must test her courage. This riveting story with an explosive ending makes for an ‘unputdownable’ read, and a great novel for book clubs to discuss.”

  — PAMELA KLINGER-HORN,

  MAGERS & QUINN

  (MINNEAPOLIS, MN)

  “Oh, the secrets in Verra, West Virginia, run deep and deadly. This multigenerational saga of families holds love, sorrow, and religion up to a mirror and then turns on itself. Myrthen loses her twin sister at a very early age and spends the rest of her life trying to atone for the accident. Alta loves and loses. Lidia has a secret that is causing her nightmares. Set in treacherous coal-mining country, this novel will be perfect for book clubs.”

  — VALERIE KOEHLER,

  BLUE WILLOW BOOKSHOP

  (HOUSTON, TX)

  ALSO BY CHRIS CANDER

  II Stories

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris Cander

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Cander, Chris.

  Whisper hollow / by Chris Cander.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-711-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-59051-712-3 (ebook)

  1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Religiousness—Fiction.

  3. Ambition—Fiction. 4. West Virginia—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A53585W48 2015

  813′.6—dc23

  2014010051

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to atual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For Dorothy Welshonce, in memoriam

  And for Joshua, who told me his ghost stories while he still remembered them

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  October 17, 1916

  May 21, 1925

  May 10, 1927

  April 17, 1928

  August 11, 1929

  September 14, 1929

  October 20, 1929

  February 3, 1930

  February 19, 1930

  April 25, 1930

  June 6, 1930

  June 7, 1930

  June 7, 1930

  December 12, 1931

  February 13, 1934

  August 14, 1936

  July 4, 1944

  August 19, 1944

  November 11, 1944

  December 1, 1944

  March 18, 1945

  July 7, 1945

  January 26, 1946

  October 5, 1948

  November 21, 1949

  September 16, 1950

  October 6, 1950

  October 7, 1950

  October 13, 1950

  November 9, 1950

  Part Two

  March 19, 1964

  January 5, 1965

  January 30, 1965

  March 13, 1965

  September 7, 1965

  October 21, 1965

  March 28, 1967

  September 13, 1967

  December 15, 1967

  October 27, 1968

  November 6, 1968

  March 15, 1969

  March 24, 1969

  March 29, 1969

  April 3, 1969

  April 23, 1969

  May 24, 1969

  May 27, 1969

  June 3, 1969

  June 28, 1969

  June 28, 1969

  June 28, 1969

  June 28, 1969

  August 13, 1969

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.

  —Luke 12:2

  PART ONE

  October 17, 1916

  Myrthen’s mother and father had carried more hopes than means with them when they crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of January 1910. Rachel Engel was just sixteen when she left her home and family in Saxony, Germany, brave and willing and fiercely in love with Otto Bergmann, but nonetheless glancing over her shoulder all the way to the southern shore of the river Elbe, the gateway to the world.

  Myrthen’s grandparents disapproved of Rachel’s choice for a mate, and so she and Otto, a twenty-nine-year-old miner with black cuticles and an uneasy cough, stole away in the middle of a star-filled night. She wore all the clothing she owned and packed everything else in her mother’s upholstery bag: a photograph of herself with her parents and younger sister, a silver creamer that her mother loved, a hairbrush, her Bible. In her arms she carried an unlikely treasure: a divided cutting of the myrtle tree she had been tending since she was a little girl, dampened and wrapped in muslin for protection from the cold. They traveled north to the Port of Hamburg and boarded the steamer Scandia with 804 other passengers. “We Germans are like this tree,” Otto said to Rachel three nights into the hard, dirty twenty-four-day journey to New York. “No matter where we go, we will take root again.”

  They were married on the ship by a Prussian Catholic priest, a Bavarian wheelwright and his wife as witnesses. The only bridal accoutrement Rachel wore was a simple wreath across her brow, woven from the thinnest myrtle branches off the cutting she’d brought. Their honeymoon was taken in the bowels of the ship, during a brief interlude of privacy in a cabin that rarely offered it. That night, as the hulking ship moved quickly over the ocean’s unknowable depths, Myrthen and her twin were conceived.

  “Was bedeutet das?” Rachel peered out into the window-framed dawn and wiped her hands on her apron. “ ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning’? Is that how it goes?” Otto coughed as he sat down to his breakfast of oatmeal and black coffee. “Das ist richtig,” he said. Then, a moment later, after wiping his long, prematurely gray mustache and beard with a threadbare but pressed cloth napkin: “That is correct. Your English is becoming so good, Rachel. I’m proud for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. It was nearly six years ago that they’d arrived in West Virginia, young Rachel still thinking the morning nausea was leftover seasickness from the journey across the Atlantic. Fueled by their unlikely passion, they’d hastily exchanged the Erzgebirge mountain range for the Appalachian; uranium mining for
coal; the town of Niederschlema for the town of Verra. There were many similarities — the metallic cold of winter, the lush patina of foliage in the spring, the graduating blue of the eastward-looking slopes, the toil and promise that awaited underground. But once they slowed down long enough for their breathing to steady and their heat to subside, the differences were too numerous to count.

  The local speech that sounded nothing like the English she’d studied at school in Germany was just one of them. She didn’t understand when a neighbor said she could hang up a line for her “warsh” or that the likelihood for rain was “chancy.” The idea that a man “hain’t good for nothing” was not quite as difficult to comprehend — though she didn’t believe it in her own case — as the idea that “he don’t know no better.” Even Whisper Hollow, the small valley across the creek from Verra where the Catholic church was situated, was pronounced in a way that suggested something irreconcilable; they called it “Whisper Holler.” She didn’t know if it was the lax and tense vowels and the strange conjugations that made her queasy, or the undeniable undercurrent and swell beneath her apron.

  It took her longer than she would have liked to adjust to being in another country among so many other foreigners, being married, being pregnant, then becoming a mother. Her husband went to work for the Blackstone Coal Company, and they rented one of the small camp houses. On a rainy night that same year, Rachel gave birth to identical twin girls, Myrthen and Ruth.

  Rachel had decided upon these two names early on, liking them equally well. “Ruth” was the name of Otto’s mother, the only person in either of their families who supported their marriage and emigration. “Myrthen” came from the title of a work by Rachel’s fellow Saxonian the composer Robert Schumann. She liked the story about his opus 25, Myrthen — he’d dedicated it to his wife on the occasion of their wedding. The name came from that, and from the myrtle branch she’d stolen from her mother’s garden and carried across the sea.

  She purchased an English dictionary from the company store with one of Otto’s first meager paychecks, and looked up the definitions of the words she learned. Out of curiosity, she decided to look up the names she was considering for her child. There was no entry for Myrthen. But for Ruth:

  ruth ’rüth n. Compassion for the misery of another.

  This made it easy for Rachel to choose her favorite. Ruth it would be. She patted her voluminous teenage belly, full of compassion, imagining the plaits she would braid into her daughter’s hair, the piano lessons she would give, the German poetry and history she would recite. Already she knew she would need nothing more: a tiny family comprised of herself and Otto and baby Ruth. It would be perfect.

  But after a bloody, waist-down battle on October 20, 1910, two little girls emerged instead of one, identical in every way but their temperaments.

  “Come, Mädchen,” she said to them. “Come look out the window at how red this sky is.” Ruth sat with her legs splayed on the floor, sorting buttons from her mother’s collection by size. She dropped them in an instant, scattering them like buckshot, and ran to where her mother stood. Dragging one of the wicker-seat chairs over, she climbed on it to have a better view. “Pretty,” she said in a reverent voice.

  “Myrthen, come look. Stand here and let me braid your hair.” Rachel patted the high back of the chair upon which Ruth stood and then turned to follow Ruth’s polite gaze out the window. Myrthen cached her own stack of buttons in her pinafore pocket, then walked over to the handful that Ruth had dropped on the other side of the braided rag rug and, glancing to make sure nobody was looking, pocketed them as well. Then she went and stood obediently in front of her mother and allowed her to part and pull her thick, dark hair so tightly off her face it made her eyes water.

  “Sit still, Myrthen. Be like your sister. See? She’s had her hair done for a half hour already.”

  “Red sky in the morning,” said Otto, thumbing up his suspenders and glancing again out the window. “It will be foul weather today. I can smell something is coming.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine. We have plenty to do inside today, don’t we, girls? Plenty canning to do. Squash and zucchini and beans.”

  “You’re a good wife, Rachel.” Otto smiled at her, cracking his gaunt, ashen face in two. His white teeth and sparkling demeanor were the only two things about him that didn’t seem somber and gray.

  “Danke,” she said, putting her palm against his cheek. “Come home safely.”

  “I always do.” He kissed her first, then Myrthen, who was still standing on the chair. Then he went over to Ruth — who was looking, uncomplaining, under the rug for her missing buttons — and tapped her on the shoulder. She stood up and he bent to kiss her on the nose. Then he pretended to pinch it and sleighted his thumb between his fingers and showed it to her. “I got your nose,” he said, and put his hand into his dungaree pocket. “I’ll keep it with me for good luck.” He winked at her, picked up his brimming dinner bucket and pickax, and was gone.

  The day collapsed into darkness as strong winds from the west blew the clouds into huddled masses, thick and cumulonimbus. Throughout the gloomy morning, Rachel worked as she typically did, domestic needs dictating the course of the day while her husband labored in a two-foot-high tunnel underneath the rain-soaked mountain. There was always so very much to do: tending the children, laundry and gardening, mending and sewing, prepping and kneading and cooking and baking. She was forever beginning the next meal just as she finished the last one. And her efficiency was only ever stalled by the twins’ nearly constant, one-sided feuding.

  “Girls, go outside and play,” Rachel finally said. Beads of sweat mustached her lip as she stirred the contents of the pot. A dozen jars lined the narrow countertop. Already she’d put up forty-eight cans of vegetables, taking them down to the cellar four at a time. It was nearly two o’clock; Otto would be home by 3:30 p.m. She hadn’t, on this rare day, begun a soup or a meal of any kind to feed him when he came home. “I’ll be finished soon, go play. Go down and get your cousin Liam. He’s probably awake from his nap by now.”

  “We can’t go outside, Mama,” Myrthen said in her flat and factual tone. “It’s raining too hard.”

  Rachel sighed and wiped her face with her tea towel. They heard a rifle report of thunder. “So it is,” she said. She tapped the wooden spoon against the pot and set it down, wiped her hands on her splattered apron. “Come along then. Let us see what I have for you in my sewing basket.”

  A stuffed doll, dressed in a pinafore matching the girls’, with blue button eyes and raven hair the same as theirs, but made out of yarn. There was another one, identical, but the hair and eyes had not yet been sewn on, the outfit was not quite ready. Rachel handed the finished one to Ruth. “This is for your birthday, only a little bit early. Almost six years old!” she said, cupping Ruth’s face with her hand. “What big girls you are!” Then she turned to Myrthen and cupped her face the same way. “Myrthen, I’ll finish yours tonight. I was going to give them to you both on Friday, but perhaps now is a good time to have it, yes?”

  Ruth flung her arms around Rachel’s waist. “Thank you, Mama!” she said. Myrthen hung her head in a pout.

  “Ruth, you share yours with your sister today, yes?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Myrthen, don’t be sad. I’ll have yours finished tonight after I do this canning.” She lifted Myrthen’s chin off her chest. “You be a good girl.

  “Now go play,” she said, and picked up her spoon. She wanted to finish the canning and have something ready for Otto to eat.

  Myrthen and Ruth went back to the sitting area and began to play with Ruth’s doll. Myrthen sulked on the rug, fingering the buttons in her pocket while Ruth made the doll walk and sit and dance and lie down in a make-believe cradle, all the while delivering her own version of a lullaby their mother sang at bedtimes: Hush, my baby, do not cry, in your cradle now you sing, then you weep, I softly swing, lullaby, lullaby.

  “You don’t know how
to play baby,” Myrthen said. She snatched the doll by the hair from its imaginary bed.

  “No!”

  Myrthen turned away and held the baby close to her chest, pinching its neck as she ran.

  “Gimme! Gimme her back! Gimmeherback!” Ruth caught up with Myrthen after a few rounds about the kitchen, where Rachel continued spooning stewed beans into glass jars, doing her best to ignore the bickering. Otto could be home any time.

  Ruth grabbed the doll’s legs and Myrthen hung on to her neck, and the two of them tugged and yanked, back and forth, silent but for the swish of cloth and pant of breath. The pair moved the entire process forward a few inches at a time until they were standing in front of the open cellar door, at the top of six downward steps.

  Back and forth they grunted, until the doll’s neatly sewn hair was torn askew, its pinafore ripped, its seam allowances exposed at the most private areas. Myrthen stared, unblinking, at her twin, who would normally have allowed her sister anything she wanted — but this doll was somehow different. Mama had given it to her first. Ruth flinched, but this time she would not let go. She gripped the doll’s legs as though clinging to life itself.

  “She’s mine. Mama gave her to me.”

  Ruth yanked the doll forward with all her strength, pulling Myrthen off balance and swinging them both around until Ruth was the one with her back to the cellar.

  Seesawing, they glared at each other, tethered only by the doll, and Ruth said with all the force she could, “You meanie!”

  Myrthen’s cheeks flushed. “I’m not a meanie! You are!”

  Rachel appeared behind them, carrying more jars to add to the four dozen she had already left at the base of the stairs to be stacked later. “Girls, please,” she said in a tired voice. “Stop arguing.”

  “But she won’t give me back my birthday doll,” Ruth said, holding fast.

  “Myrthen!” Rachel said. “Enough! Give the doll to your sister.”

  Myrthen looked down at the bare, flat legs of Ruth’s doll, and felt something she couldn’t have described: a mix of shame and self-pity and anger. She narrowed her eyes at her twin and said, “I don’t want it anyway. It’s ugly.” When Ruth gave the doll a final yank, Myrthen opened her hands in defiant acquiescence and let go.