The Hollow Ground: A Novel (13 page)

“You should be careful,” she warned. “I don’t feel her as strong as I did. If you’re not open to her being there, she’ll go away.”

And when she told me that I found myself patting my chest as if there were a secret compartment there that might magically open to let Auntie in.

There was one particularly warm afternoon when I walked Marisol home and then continued into the fire zone toward Gram and Gramp’s. Talk of the dead body had dwindled and I no longer walked with my head lowered, worried that someone would say something nasty if I looked them in the face. So I’d had plenty of time to cross the street and avoid the crazy lady who sometimes stood outside our house. She was at the end of the block coming toward me and I was curious, I guess, to see her up close. I wondered if you could tell she was crazy just from the look in her eye.

As we neared each other I saw that she was wearing the same gravy-stained dress that I’d seen her in the last time and that she had a faded red Christmas ribbon in her hair. She stepped to the side as if she was getting out of my way, but as I passed she gripped my arm and got right in my face. Her breath smelled as bad as dog dirt. She had the prettiest pale blue eyes I’d ever seen and they looked wildly, first in one direction, then another. “That was my son down there, wasn’t it, girl? You tell me what he looked like. You tell me it was your grandpa who done it. I always known it was. I ain’t the only one who’s known it neither.”

Then she pushed me so that I fell back into a parked car. “The cops will find out, you know.” She took several steps backward and taunted in a singsong voice, “The cops’ll find out, the cops’ll find out.” She clasped her hands and raised her eyes skyward. “Oh, yes, they’ll find out.”

Eleven

At first I didn’t tell anyone what the crazy lady had said. Everyone was upset enough that I didn’t want to add to it with rumors, but I found myself looking at Gramp more and more. The fingers on both his hands were all crooked from arthritis and breaks and I wondered if that was what a killer’s hands looked like. I knew he’d been in and out of jail for beating up on people and wrecking this or that place and for all I knew he’d killed somebody too.

Often I found myself drawn to ponder the photos of a younger him that Gram had framed on the mantel. There was the photo of the two of them married in the church rectory, Gramp’s face unreadable, possibly a little proud. There was the one of him in uniform when he returned home from the Western Front, the wedding band on his finger symbolizing his marriage to his then wife, his first wife, who would along with their twin tots soon die in a flood. And then there was my favorite photo, the one of him and a group of other little boys down in the mines. The boys were all lined up like in a class photo with the first row crouched in front and the other row standing behind. They were around my age and their faces and clothes were filthy. They all held lanterns or had a headlamp strapped to their heads. Gramp stood far on the left, the features of his face blanked out by the camera’s flash.

When I looked at these photos, I searched for something telling in them, but all they told was that he’d lived through unbelievably difficult times and had survived.

Gramp never seemed to notice or care that I looked at these photos so I didn’t think much of it when he told me to fetch an old wooden cigar box from the hutch. He told me to open it and when I did I found inside a clay pipe, worn smooth. Its whitish color reminded me of the ghostly white stems of what people called Indian pipes or corpse plant that grew in damp places in the woods.

“That pipe … my granddaddy.” Gramp gestured at himself with his thumb.

“You mean the granddaddy who was the Molly Maguire?”

Gramp nodded and for a moment a satisfied proud glint lit his dull eyes.

I held the pipe tenderly, turning it this way and that as if it were a relic. I couldn’t believe I was touching something my great-great-granddaddy had touched. My great-great-granddaddy, the legendary Molly Maguire, who’d heroically attacked a priest and for that had gotten us all cursed.

“What was he like?” I asked.

Gramp’s mouth opened into a smile. “A rogue,” he said.

It was the first time I’d ever seen Gramp smile and I smiled back.

The dead body faded from our lives. People stopped asking about it, even Daddy stopped asking about it and the detectives stopped coming by. On Saturday afternoons Daddy still took me and Brother for walks so Ma could have time for herself. Sometimes we’d stop in at Kreshner’s department store for Daddy to show Mr. Wicket yet again that he would browse there as often as he wanted and not buy a thing. Then we would always stop at The Shaft, but Daddy would only get one beer. If Star was there alone, Daddy barely paid her any mind. But if Bear was with her, then Daddy would take an interest in what she had to say and Star’s long neck and face would flush pink and I’d stare at her with a force that I hoped shot little pellets into her heart.

Mostly though we spent those walks doing what we called “pit watching.” At that time they were digging the pit closest to us, the one that became known as the East Side Pit. The demolition included all of the homes on Saltmire and Elm streets and cut off all access to the railroad tracks but by the highway on the edge of town. Daddy said that they made the pit V-shaped because they were trying to buttress the fire and after they completed this V-shaped trench, they’d create other trenches all along the outside of the fire to keep it from spreading.

The East Side Pit was nearly three hundred feet wide and a hundred deep. They used steam shovels and dragline shovels and digger trucks and dump trucks and fire trucks and bulldozers and front loaders and backhoes and explosives. They’d scoop out the coal and stone and dirt and dump it in piles that they’d then spray with water to keep it cool. And when they started having trouble with truck tires melting, they started using clay and water to keep the ground cool enough where they worked.

Every now and then a journalist would come from this or that paper or magazine to write about the dig out—we’d already been in
Time
magazine and
The Saturday Evening Post
—and if Daddy saw one of those journalists he’d always stop to talk. Usually Daddy would get the conversation to go from the dig out to the disaster and more often than not the journalist was keen to listen, but I started to notice that each time Daddy talked about the disaster, one or another detail was different.

Sometimes Daddy knew the hoist wasn’t working so he didn’t run to it. Sometimes he thought it
was
working, so that was the first place he went. Sometimes he got out after the second tremor. Sometimes the third. Sometimes Uncle Frank helped him get some of the other miners out. Sometimes Uncle Frank wasn’t mentioned at all.

The first time I noticed the differences in Daddy’s story I waited until the journalist was out of earshot and I asked him about it.

“I’m just playing with him, princess,” Daddy said. “See what he knows and what he doesn’t.”

Daddy winked like this was all a great game and I felt the stab of his disappointment when I didn’t smile in return. It didn’t feel like Daddy was playing a game with the journalist. It felt like he was playing a game with me and I couldn’t understand why he’d do that when nobody in the world believed in him as much as I did.

Sometimes when we’d go pit watching Ma would come along and we’d all compete with each other to find the spot that gave the best view. As long as they weren’t blasting, we’d get as close as they’d let us. We might sit on a stoop left where a house used to be or lean against a fence marking a property that no longer existed. We didn’t talk. It was impossible to hear over the machinery. Sometimes Ma would bring snacks, pretzels or maybe Twinkies, and for the first time since Auntie had died we were happy together as a family, soothed somehow by all the noise and destruction. The dig out would work, we all agreed. Look at the destruction? How could the fire survive it?

But by the start of the fall the Krupskys, an old couple who lived thirteen blocks west of Gram and Gramp’s, were killed from carbon monoxide poisoning. The Krupskys lived seven blocks east of the fire zone, well out of the fire’s reach, or so we all had thought. But for carbon monoxide to have killed them, it meant that the fire was bigger than anyone had suspected.

“I won’t believe it. I don’t,” Gram said, referring to the fire’s spread. Even when one of the government inspectors arrived, waving a detector up by the ceilings and in the corners, checking for carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as well as sulfur and methane, Gram told him that if he wanted to wreck the house, he’d have to wreck her too.

“No, ma’am,” the inspector said. “I don’t want to demolish you or your home. I’m just here to monitor the air.”

“I don’t know why,” Gram said. “We sure as heck ain’t in the zone.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “But we don’t want what happened to the Krupskys to happen to anyone else.”

When the inspector mentioned the Krupskys, Brother made a mewling sound and Gramp, from his position in the living-room Barcalounger, pointed and shouted, “Don’t scared. Howleys … survive.”

Brother punched the side of his head with one of his tight little red fists. “Retard,” Gramp hollered. “Only a moron hits himself,” Gram announced. Daddy flicked his eyes at Brother and walked outside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

I crouched in front of Brother and gently punched my own head. “Ow. See how silly?” I did it again. “Ow. Why would I hurt myself?” I squeezed my eyes shut in mock pain and opened them wide, thinking that Mrs. Mott, Brother’s kindergarten teacher in Centrereach, might have been right when she said that Brother should see a psychotherapist.

It was only then I noticed Ma seated at the dining-room table, pasting S&H Green Stamps into her booklet, the smallest smile giving her face a dreamy quality.

Later that night me and Ma moved her mattress from the top bunk down to the floor because gases tend to rise. Gases also tend to hang low in the basement so that night Daddy and Brother had to move their sleeping stuff from the basement to the living room.

“This is the best news I’ve heard in years,” Ma said as we arranged pillows along the wall beside her mattress. “If the fire comes this far, we have to go. We got no choice in the matter.” She folded her legs Indian-style and clenched a pillow to her chest. “I was thinking, seeing as it’s your birthday next week, why don’t we have a party? You’ll be twelve after all, practically grown.”

I sucked my breath, afraid to so much as breathe. If I acted too excited Ma might change her mind to punish me. To Ma, me wanting a party would mean I didn’t appreciate how good I already had it.

Ma let the pillow drop onto her lap where she stroked it absentmindedly. “Still a nice time of year. We could picnic up at Pothole Park. If it rains, we’ll go in that wooden thing they got. I’ll invite Bropey and get you a present, a present like nothing you ever seen before. What would you think of that?” She paused midstroke, her hand hovering over the pillow until I cautiously nodded. “We’d be a family again,” she added. “Like no time passed at all.”

That night there was a damp breeze through the opened window that got me thinking again of the mine and got me dreaming of sliding through the bootlegging hole and reaching the bottom to find Ma lying there dead.

At 3:00
A.M.
I cried out when I opened my eyes to see a man bending over me. It was the inspector, Mr. Smythe, as we came to know him. “Just checking the air,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

*   *   *

Those inspectors were called Guardian Angels throughout the fire zone. Sometimes the floors of the basements they checked were so hot that the bottoms of their shoes got burned. For hours later their gummy soles would stick to the ground as they walked. Their testing equipment made use of little vials and long slender screwdriver-type things and made you think of the terrifying stories you’d heard about old-fashioned medical devices. But those inspectors were all we had to go by that it was still safe to live in our homes. We left our doors unlocked for them to come and go as they pleased and it was more than once that they saved our lives by getting us out of a house when the gases measured too high.

“We got to seal up the cracks, girl,” Gram would holler at me as we’d work to repair any we found in the house. When Gram learned that the gases came not just through cracks but also through the water pipes, she started covering all the faucets and drains with tinfoil each night before bed.

“Fat … lot … help,” Gramp would grunt as Gram went from the kitchen to the bathroom with a bag of the crumpled tinfoil she reused each night, shouting, “Use them sinks now, or go dry till mornin’!”

In the evenings Gram would get on the phone to her best friend, Mrs. Schwackhammer, and remind her to block up her faucets. Gram also let me know that she called to make sure Mrs. Schwackhammer was alive. “She got three kids and not one of ’em check on her. Now tell me, why’d she bother havin’ ’em in the first place?”

Mrs. Schwackhammer lived three blocks west of the Krupskys, which meant the fire was now below her house too, but it took the government a good two weeks to send her the paperwork slating her house for destruction.

On the day that Mrs. Schwackhammer got the paperwork, Gram had me go with her to deliver a pot of stew. “This news will hit Edna worse than a death in the family,” Gram said. “Still, alls you can do is bring food and your dolensces. Makes you feel a fool.”

Edna Schwackhammer was ancient, older than Gram, yet she towered over Gram even when she leaned crooked on her cane. No matter what the temperature, red spots surfaced in her skin like her blood boiled up. A lavender scent always stuck to her clothes and whenever she talked about her long-dead husband, Otto, her usually squinting, judgmental eyes would open wide and turn as blank and pleasant as a cow’s.

On the day we walked over to deliver the stew, Gram told me that Edna and she weren’t always friends. “Edna was top dog of the side seamers,” Gram explained. “No one could tell her what to do, not even Boss Betty, the floor lady. When I started at the mill Edna got the other gals not to talk to me and to this day I don’t know why. My first three months there were so bad I hoped I’d get hit by a trolley on my way home. The only thing to make my mind worse was right about then Gramp got sick. When Edna heard about it, she started helpin’ me out. She worked a shorter shift than me and she’d check in on Gramp on her way home from work. If one of the boys was sick she’d bring over some soup or whatnot. Did more than my own mother ever did, that’s for sure! My mother came to stay to help take care of your daddy when I first started at the mill. It worked out fine for a week or so. Then one day I come home from work and there’s your daddy, not more than a year old, alone and screamin’ in the crib. Turns out my brother’s wife had called askin’ Mama to come and help out with
her
kids. So that’s what Mama did. Took off to watch my brother’s kids and left mine alone. That’s what Mama was like with her boys. My brothers should finish school but I might as well drop out. ‘All you’ll ever be is a wife,’ she said. But I was the first one of her kids to buy my own property.”