Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  When he stood before them, Walter nodded and extended his hand toward Marek. “Good to see you,” he said in a voice that didn’t match his bulk. Alta shifted very slightly forward to hear.

  “Walter, I’d like to introduce my sister, Alta.”

  Walter nodded at her and started to extend his hand, and then, hesitating, pulled it back entirely. “How d’you do,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Alta said, and looked into her basket as the butterflies settled back down.

  Marek laughed out loud. “Now that’s done with.” He reached out for the basket. “Alta, I’ll take that basket over to the ladies at the Country Kitchen and give them your regards. Why don’t the two of you go for a walk, get to know each other a little bit?”

  Walter smiled and Alta met his gaze. He had a nice smile, she thought. His eyes were a very nice brown. She smiled back and then turned to Marek to hand off the basket. Marek winked at her and she rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  Alta and Walter stood still, watching Marek walk away, swinging the basket in a manner that suggested he knew they were watching. They waited for him to turn around and wave or shoo them onto their walk, but he didn’t. Finally, Walter turned to Alta and said, “Well?”

  “Shall we?”

  “Yes.”

  And they set off together down a path. Walter asked her polite questions about herself, the answers to which he no doubt already knew: how old she was, how many siblings, how she enjoyed passing her spare time. He said kind things about Marek, her elder brothers, and her father, whom he’d met underground. He didn’t mention her mother. In turn, she asked about him.

  He’d turned twenty that June, an only child and half-orphaned at age three after his mother died giving birth to stillborn twin boys. He worked as an electrician for Blackstone, and he liked to spend quiet mornings hunting or building furniture with felled wood that he found in the Hollow. He liked to read but wasn’t very fast at it, so he favored the Charleston Sentinel over books. He spoke clearly but softly, and much of what she gleaned came not from what he said, but from what he didn’t.

  They meandered around the church grounds and circled the happenings of the bazaar while they talked, until they finally ended up by the edge of the cemetery that had been set up for games.

  “Win your gal a grab bag!” called Mr. Adler, the parishioner volunteer. “Twenty-five cents buys you three tries to win her something special! There’s some with chewing gum, or soaps, or trout flies, and a few got some fancy items you’d sure be lucky to win!”

  Walter looked at Alta and she shrugged, smiling and embarrassed at — but also intrigued by — the idea of her being his “gal.” Walter seemed shy about it, too, but ready for the challenge. He dug into his trouser pockets for a quarter.

  Six rows of six brown paper sacks had been arranged, each sack tied with twine. The idea was to take a fishing pole and try to catch one of the sacks by one of the tiny bow loops. It was harder than it looked. The loops were pulled small, and the hook was so light that it would take aim and patience and a lull in the autumn breeze to catch one. Walter took the wooden stick and surveyed the thirty-six identical bags. Alta wondered what he was thinking when he chose the one that was in the fourth column, third row from the right. He suspended the hook above the bag, eyebrows knitted in concentration, and lowered it. He missed.

  “That’s one!” Mr. Adler teased. “You got two more.”

  Walter lifted the hook and took a breath. He dipped it down, faster this time, and then pulled up, thinking he’d hooked it.

  “That’s two!”

  Walter glanced at Alta. She nodded with what she hoped looked like encouragement. He tried again.

  As though it were a canary down a shaft, Walter lowered the hook, steady, watchful. He was just about to connect when a sudden breeze blew the hook away. There was a collective groan among the three of them. Mr. Adler glanced around, checking to see if anyone else was watching, then winked. “That there was an act of God; you’da got it that time. Go on, take one last turn. No charge.”

  Walter shook his head. “Thank you but no.” His shoulders reminded her of some sort of large animal, a gorilla maybe. Or an ox. Alta gave a polite thanks-anyway smile to both of the men and shifted her weight as if leaving, assuming Walter would do the same. Instead, he reached into his pocket and withdrew another quarter. “I’ll try again, but I want to pay for it,” he said.

  Mr. Adler took it and held it aloft like the Host and nodded, pumping it as he did so. “A good man,” he said. Then he turned to her and nodded again, one eye narrowed. “That’s a good man you got there. You hang on to that one, hear?”

  Alta blushed and looked down. She glanced at Walter across her shoulder, and saw that he, too, was blushing, and fighting a tiny smile. Once again, he poised the hook above the chosen bag and waited until the breeze had passed and the line had stilled. All of them watched, wanting him to catch it, wanting to escape the disappointment and embarrassment of another failed attempt, even though the prize was no more than a simple paper bag filled with next to nothing. But it was more than that, too, and all of them knew it.

  He lowered the hook to the loop and waited — he seemed to Alta a patient sort of man — and, in that stillness, he outlasted the lusty wind that blew in and threatened to steal his prize. He angled his wrist, and the point slipped into the loop of twine, and he pulled it up carefully, testing the heft of the reward. When the loop held and the bag began to rise, they all sighed through broad smiles, as though the miners had all made it safely upground after a shift or the baby had started breathing again or they had enough money at the end of the month for something special. Walter unhooked the bag and held it out to Alta, who accepted it demurely. “Thank you,” she said, and held it to her chest. It weighed very little.

  “Well, ain’t you gonna open it up? See what your fella got for you? It could be a soap, but it might be one of those fancy ones the ladies packed up.” Mr. Adler leaned in and winked. “I heard tell one of them’s even got a diamond ring! Now, it’s not a real one, o’ course. But even still, could be something to get you started in that direction.” He winked again. “Go on, open it up.”

  Alta held the bag close. She wouldn’t mind at all if it were nothing more than a chunk of good-smelling soap, but she knew better. It felt like a feather in her hand. A diamond ring, on the other hand, even a plastic one, might give Walter an idea she wasn’t sure she was prepared to entertain. But what kind of beggar was she to be so choosy? She wasn’t anything like her beautiful and worldly aunt Maggie. She should be grateful that anyone would show an interest in her. And Walter seemed nice enough. She looked at him before she untied the twine, and was surprised to see eagerness in his expression. His eyes were bright and held hers, direct and unflinching, for the first time since Marek had introduced them. She hadn’t stopped to wonder until that moment what he might have been thinking about her all this time. If he liked her or if he didn’t. By the look in his eyes, she thought there was a strong chance he did.

  She smiled at the thought, but the butterflies remained peacefully at rest inside her belly. Untying the bag, she peered in.

  Her eyes grew wide, but she immediately forced them back to neutral. At the bottom of the brown sack was nothing less than a plastic diamond in a plastic gold setting. It was oversized, likely from the gumball machine at the Company Store, nothing she would ever actually wear, even if it had been real. She swallowed and smiled and rolled the bag down, making out as if it were heavier than it really was.

  “Soap,” she said, her voice bright.

  “Aw, now that’s a darn shame,” Mr. Adler said.

  “No, no. Soap is great. Soap is perfect,” she said, and turned to Walter. “Thank you. For winning it for me.”

  Walter’s smile faded. “You’re welcome,” he said, and handed Mr. Adler back the fishing pole.

  “Want to give it another go?” Mr. Adler’s eyebrows lifted like a salesm
an’s. “Try for that diamond ring to give your gal?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. “She seems happy with the soap for now.”

  “Next time then,” he said.

  “Next time.” Walter nodded and then turned toward Alta. “Want to go see what’s for sale in the Country Kitchen?”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” she said, holding the bag in the hand farther away from Walter.

  Walter nodded and they began walking, he matching his ambling pace to her long, sturdy one and trying to add more weight to the memory of that fragile sack when he’d hooked it off the ground.

  October 20, 1929

  Today was Myrthen Bergmann’s nineteenth birthday. A day that other girls her age would celebrate with a cake, perhaps a new dress, or a special meal with her family or her husband, if she were already married, as many nineteen-year-olds in Verra were. But Myrthen no longer celebrated her birthdays. She no longer considered such blithe happiness an appropriate indulgence. Instead, she mourned.

  St. Michael’s Catholic Church was to the left off the path that led from town across New Creek and up into Whisper Hollow. To the right was the cemetery, which was bordered by an iron fence to keep out deer and wolves. And people, too, it seemed, since it was usually empty. On this day, like most, it was just she and all the souls that had been laid to rest there. The earliest dead were men, their stones dating back to 1867, the year the first settlers came to work for Blackstone Coal. Twelve out of a little more than a hundred had died in Verra within the first three months of their arrival from neighboring states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky. As the company grew, so did the town. And the death tolls. Within another decade, Polish and Irish and Italian surnames were chiseled by hand into the small grave markers, men who’d crossed the Atlantic to do the hard, dangerous work in the mines. Verra was one of the first places an ex-slave could earn an equal wage, working ton for ton alongside a white man, so they came, too. But when they died, they were buried with their own. All of them — the Negroes, the Catholics and the Jews, the Baptists and the Lutherans — lived their segregated lives, then filled up their segregated cemeteries as they succumbed to illness and accidents. Perhaps some even died of homesickness, because the rough, untamed West Virginia wild was nothing like the countries they’d left behind. Back home, even the poorest had familiarity. The comfort of their own landscape, customs, languages. Their mothers.

  Myrthen knew these graves. She’d imagined the entire history of Verra, all the lives interred there, just by walking through the town’s cemeteries over the years. The one behind St. Michael’s was special, though. Sometimes it seemed as though it might get absorbed back into the lush, savage mountainside it had once been part of. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If, during her year-round walks, Myrthen noticed weeds beginning to overtake someone’s stone, she would stop and yank them out. She’d stuff them into her pockets and throw them alongside the road later, when she left. It offended her when life threatened to choke off the dead.

  She could barely remember her sister’s burial, or even much from the days before it. Ruth’s actual death, if she allowed herself to think of it, existed as a composite of fractured images in her mind: poor, sweet Ruthie, so fragile, so weak, always, even in that watery world they shared before birth. Myrthen remembered Ruth as having a limp, but couldn’t remember why she always listed to one side. Maybe the weight of that rag doll their mother made had altered her gait somehow. Their mother had made that doll as Myrthen’s birthday gift, and Ruth wanted it so badly that Myrthen felt she had no choice but to give it to her — wasn’t that right? Ruth was her twin, her other half; she would do anything for her. But then Ruthie dropped it down the cellar steps one summer night — she was always so clumsy — and Myrthen heard her cry out, “My doll, my doll!” But she wasn’t able to get to Ruth fast enough to save her from trying to go down those steep cellar steps on her own. She got there just after Ruth had tumbled down the stairs. There’d been silence, then Mama crying. Always, Mama crying.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Ready or not, here I come.

  She always thought of Ruth with a desperate mixture of guilt and longing, even though her death hadn’t been her fault. It wasn’t her fault, was it? No matter what her mother said — or didn’t say?

  So why did it feel like it was?

  Now, thirteen years to the day since Ruth had been buried, Myrthen knelt down at her grave. She kissed the tips of her fingers and ran them across the face of the cold stone as though it were the foot of St. Peter. Immediately, she sank into a depth of calm. The only other time she knew such peace was during prayer. The conjured presence of her dead sister brought her as close to Heaven as she’d yet been able to come. And Ruth’s imagined voice was the nearest she’d come to God’s.

  “Happy birthday, Ruthie,” she said.

  Myrthen stayed a while in the quiet. When she finally spoke again, louder this time, her voice was filled with contempt. “He’s come to call three times. That ruffian, John Esposito, I mean. Papa invites him to sit with us on Friday nights.”

  She flicked away a leaf.

  “I can’t imagine why he keeps coming back. I’ve barely spoken to him. I only sit with him because Mama and Papa have told me I must.” She sighed, and shifted her position. “I know they want me to marry, even though they know I don’t want to. Papa told me he wants me to be happy, but he doesn’t understand.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I won’t do it. I want to be a nun and I want to be with you.”

  Myrthen had decided the winter she was nine years old that she would never marry. She had been loitering, as she liked to do, in the modest wings of St. Michael’s after Mass. While her parents were speaking to acquaintances in the narthex, Myrthen had slipped quietly away.

  Father Timothy kept literature on the side table outside his office. He wanted to give parishioners something to distract themselves with so as not to overhear the confessions of the penitents. She’d picked up the book on top of the shallow pile: Mother Isabel of the Sacred Heart Carmelite Nun of Lisieux. 1882–1914. On the back cover was a picture of Mother Isabel wearing a habit and holding a prayer book and rosary, eyes full of benevolent fervor.

  Father Timothy tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped. “Have you found something interesting, Myrthen?”

  She shrugged. He sat down in one of the rickety chairs and extended a hand toward another one. As he rhapsodized about the order of the Carmelite nuns in France, who prayed together six or seven hours every day for the salvation of the world, she took a seat and listened. “They prayed especially hard for the souls of the priests,” he said, and sighed. “Thank heaven for Sisters.”

  “Sisters?”

  “Nuns,” he said.

  “Nuns are sisters?” She knew nuns existed, but had never seen any.

  “Well, if I’m technically correct, all nuns are Sisters but not all Sisters are nuns.” In response to her blank expression, he continued. “It depends on the types of vows they take. We can talk more about it later if you’d like, but I expect your parents will be looking for you soon. Nuns consider themselves part of a sisterhood. They live and work and pray together. They choose to serve God above everything else, and so they don’t marry, don’t have children. But it’s a rewarding life for the ones who are called to it.”

  “How do they get called to it?” She moved toward the edge of the chair.

  Father Timothy folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. “God speaks to them.”

  That night, she prayed until her knees ached, and then she lay in bed to wait for Him to speak. She heard the slow ticking of the hall clock, her father’s occasional wheezing, and the groan of her parents’ bedsprings whenever he sat up to cough. The wind against the screen door, another cough, tick-tock, tick-tock. She’d thought that His voice would be loud, like Father Timothy’s, but maybe it would be quiet, like a whisper, so she strained to hear it over the noises in the house. What was that? Was t
hat it? But no, it was only the sound of her own eager heart beating.

  During the ten years since Father Timothy had first told her about the Carmelites she listened, but God still hadn’t spoken to her. She passed much of that time kneeling at her sister’s grave, thinking her proximity to death might better attune her ears to any whisper from Heaven. She learned, too, to quiet the sounds around her: the laughter of classmates, the teasing calls of prepubescent and, later, adolescent boys to girls, the girls’ flirtatious answers. So intent was her listening, so ready was she to heed, that she even silenced the pleas of her father, who wished she had a more social life, one that would bring normalcy and color into their dreary home and might someday procure them a son-in-law, grandchildren. It was, for him, as though they’d lost not one but both daughters. Her mother, who always seemed angry at her for something or other, expressed no opinion on the matter.

  The letters Myrthen had sent to the convents when she was sixteen had all been politely answered: Thank you for your interest … I am afraid you are not yet old enough to be eligible for candidacy … If by the time you reach twenty years of age you still feel called to Carmel, then we could begin the process of discernment … But now she had only one year left to live among the laity, and then she would find her rightful place, even if she had to do it Sadie Hawkins style, if God hadn’t yet invited her. There, in the company of Sisters, she could finally reconcile her longing. She would be closer to God and, therefore, closer to Ruth. It seemed Heaven was the only place she might find love; none of her relationships with the living had turned out particularly well.

  Myrthen bent her head and deepened her focus. She tried to make herself modest by hiding her appearance behind the chapel veils and dark, heavy clothing she sewed herself. But this only made her seem even more regal, more fine.

  This, in fact, was precisely what had captivated John Esposito the day she walked into the Welcome Store, and what compelled him to accept Otto’s invitation to sit with them over tepid cups of tea for two months of Friday nights. In Verra, girls learned early, either by some predatory instinct or by direct instruction, to make themselves beautiful and desirable to potential husbands. Girls were to become wives, mothers. The men, miners most of them, needed women to give them a reason to make the daily descent into the bowels of the earth. So they would have something to look forward to, something to come back up for, coughing black lungsful of coal dust on the way. That dirty, dangerous life was worth it when there was a good wife waiting, hearth tended, table full, bed warm. Myrthen, of course, wanted no part of it.