The Hollow Ground: A Novel (3 page)

“We walk on fire or air,” Daddy would say when he saw the sadness dragging on us. This was something he told us whenever fate or the curse struck a blow. He meant it to prove that the hollowed out ground that either burned with flames or sagged into nothingness had given us a kind of magic—had made us able to survive what would kill anyone else.

“Tall tale-telling,” Ma would call it, but she always said it with a smile and telling tall tales was another part of the Irish way. Though none of us had ever stepped foot in Ireland. But as Ma said, “Time sharpens some stuff.” And I guess over the years of us living in America time had honed the bits still left Irish. I hoped time would do the same to my memories of Auntie until every detail about her was as clear and sharp as cut glass.

In the weeks after losing Auntie we lived in a hotel that the Red Cross paid for. We weren’t the only family there who’d been displaced by the fire but we were the only ones who still slept with the window open, even though we were far on the other side of town, away from Auntie’s house and the fire burning beneath the fields.

Ma and Daddy slept in the bed, and me and Brother slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Sometimes Daddy switched with me or Brother and he took the sleeping bag and one of us would sleep with Ma. My nights with Ma were the ones I liked least of all. Ma slept like a wild cat, clawing at the sheets, breathing in ferocious huffs. Sometimes I’d wake with scratches.

From time to time, me, Ma and Brother would go look at the house. Though it wasn’t yet spring, all the daffodils and tulips Auntie had planted years before had sprung up from the heat in the ground and had colored the yard red and yellow. I remember the afternoon when we found two kittens playing on the front lawn. The kittens were mangy gray matted things, but they romped around, enjoying a rain puddle like there was nothing better in the world. I think it was right then, watching those kittens play, that Ma decided to accept Gram and Gramp’s offer for us to go live with them. Something in Ma just kind of gave way and she leaned against the fence like she’d fall down without it. The usual tightness around her mouth softened and I guessed that was probably the closest Ma ever got to surrender. She didn’t say anything but Brother and I both understood what had happened. We’d soon live in a house again and not a hotel room with a shared bathroom. We’d soon live in a town far, far away from the place that held our loss of Auntie.

That night after dinner at the Y, Daddy made his usual plea to go live with his parents and Ma acted like she was still dead set against it, once again referring to the fight she and Gram had had five years ago when they both declared they’d never speak to each other for the rest of their lives.

All I knew about that fight was that it concerned Gram’s grandma’s ring, a ring Gram had promised to give Ma on Ma and Daddy’s wedding day but when the day of the wedding came, Gram said she couldn’t find it. Ma wound up with a plain old silver ring as a wedding band and whenever she could, she’d wiggle that ring at Daddy saying she’d never be respectable till she had a proper wedding band. “Fancy, Adrian, with diamond chips. You know the type I mean.”

As we sat at one of those long cafeteria tables at the Y chowing on franks and beans, Ma said, “I swore I’d never go in that woman’s house again. Now what kind of fool would I look going back on my word?”

Ma turned to straddle the bench so Brother could sit between her legs. I sat next to Daddy. He had his good arm around my shoulder so I could lean against his chest. He didn’t answer Ma. Sometimes your best offense against her was saying nothing at all.

“Even if I did forgive that old bat,” Ma said, eyes narrowing, “why go to them? They got their own fire, don’t they?”

Brother and I met eyes and smothered smiles. For Ma to even mention going meant she’d already made up her mind and was just making Daddy work for it.

“Who around here doesn’t have a fire?” Daddy said and Ma couldn’t answer. There were coal mine fires burning all across the state. The town of Laurelton had to just pick up and move with nothing left of the old town but some paved streets and stone foundations. Daddy added, “The Red Cross can’t take care of us forever.”

“No,” Ma quipped. “That’s my job, ain’t it?”

Daddy flinched at her cruel tongue and talked about how we couldn’t wait for the government to give us money for Auntie’s house. “That could take months, maybe even years. You know that. And it won’t be what the house is worth. Hell, how much could it be worth with a fire pit as a backyard?”

Ma talked a blue streak about the factories she’d heard were hiring in places like Stroudsburg and Mechanicsville. “We got options. That’s alls I’m saying. Heck, I still got my job at the mill. Eventually we could save enough to rent somewheres.”

“Children need a home, Lores,” Daddy said and Ma squinted the way she did whenever something hurt her. She stroked Brother’s hair, which was usually a wispy strawberry, but it hadn’t been washed in so long that it just sort of stuck a greasy brown to his head.

“Don’t worry, Adrian,” she said. “I’ll go and I won’t say another thing about it, but don’t try and pretend we’re going ’cause we got to. We both know you been dying to go back there ever since we left. To the place where it all happened, where it all went wrong.”

“Nah,” Daddy said, his expression settling into the one he used when Ma said something too crazy to bother with. “You just watch, Lores,” he said. “I’ll give Mother a talking-to. Everyone will be nice.” He took his arm from around me to reach across the table and touch Ma. “Everyone,” he added and clamped his jaw to remind us of what he could be like.

By the following day Daddy had called Gram and the plan was set for us to leave Centrereach by the start of the upcoming week. Brother and I didn’t mind leaving so much because the fire had already forced a dozen of our classmates to move and it made us feel better to be the leavers for a change rather than the ones left behind. Sometimes, though, when I’d recall the words Ma said about Daddy wanting to return to the place where it all went wrong, I’d get the kind of edginess I felt whenever the curse was near. It was then I’d occupy myself telling tall tales about Gramp and Gram to Brother.

I’d tell him how Gramp had been mining since he was a boy and that the black chunks he coughed up were the coal bits he’d held inside him for all those years. “Which just proves you can’t escape your past,” I’d say, repeating something Auntie used to say, “it chooses when to escape you.”

I’d tell him that during World War I Gramp had been a sniper sneaking up on Germans and shooting them in the eye. That he’d slashed tires and people’s faces and been locked up in the county jail, all in revenge for wrongs against fellow miners or himself. Then with my own hands I’d pretend-snap a chicken’s neck and describe what Gram could do to various fowl. The more I spoke the more I scared Brother and the more comforted I felt.

“Come on,” I said, tickling him while Ma and Daddy tried to pack all we owned into the car’s trunk. “We want to go, remember? We won’t have to share the bathroom with strangers and we’ll have our own beds to sleep in.”

Brother’s eyes clouded with doubt. He folded his arms. “Want home,” was all he said, seeing straight through to what each of us felt.

*   *   *

Barrendale, Pennsylvania, where Gram and Gramp lived, was nearly seventy miles northeast of Centrereach and as far as Ma was concerned, was a place as horrible as it sounded. The last time we’d been there Brother had been so young he didn’t have any memory of it. I don’t know if that made it easier on him or harder. As it was, I didn’t remember much but a street in the town that was as steep as a mountain and a hutch in Gram and Gramp’s living room that was filled with sparkling things I wasn’t allowed to touch. Gram and Gramp were merely shadowy figures who said hardly any words to me at all.

As Daddy took Brother to the bathroom one last time, Ma told me, “Your daddy could stand on his head and juggle and Gramp wouldn’t even notice or care. And that mother of his! You know what she said when Daddy’s brother died?” Ma had repeated Gram’s words numerous times but I knew she wanted me to listen fresh, so I said, “What, Ma?”

“‘Shame the good one died.’ That’s what she said. Can you believe it? His own mother! And still your daddy wants to go back there. Worse, I think that’s why he
wants
to go back. Because they don’t care. Somehow he likes that.” Ma pressed her lips together and bounced her head as if she’d just proved Daddy was nuts.

On the way out of town we stopped by Auntie’s house and Ma said, “Just don’t even think about it.” And we knew she was referring not only to Auntie, but our move to Barrendale and everything we’d had to leave behind. “Auntie would want us to keep our spirits up. Both you kids know that. So don’t go worrying about the fire they got in Barrendale.” Ma turned to shake her finger at us. “Ever hear how lightning don’t strike twice? Well fire don’t neither.”

But I knew lightning could strike twice; it could strike hundreds of times in the same place. It struck the water tower in Centrereach over and over.

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” Daddy sang. “Come on,” he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror, pleading with me to help lift everyone’s spirits. I joined in with “Climbing high into the sun.” Daddy’s next glance in the mirror was grateful and approving and we smiled at each other in our private, special way. Then we all sang “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as we watched the Pennsylvania countryside go from factories and stores to roly-poly countryside that went on for as far as the eye could see. As we got closer to Barrendale the road cut through high jagged walls of rock that were layered and raw and stuck all over with icicles, telling you just how ancient this countryside really was.

Daddy slowed for a turn and pointed at the lowest layer of rock. “Look at that,” he said with a kind of genuine excitement we’d all learned to ignore. “Sedimentary rock. Formed hundreds of millions of years ago. We’re seeing right back into time!”

When we neared the outer limits of Barrendale the road looped along the edge of a mountain and we looked down into a valley dotted with clusters of small towns. On impulse I belted out, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” but no one joined in and we entered the city in silence.

Ma sucked her breath. “Place looks worse than I remembered.”

Daddy didn’t say anything, but he slowed the car and in the rearview mirror I watched his eyes shift suspiciously from side to side as if he thought he was being duped and this wasn’t really his hometown.

Tree roots had pushed up the bluestone sidewalks on the narrow hilly streets and there wasn’t an even space of ground anywhere to be seen. Steps slumped or tilted. Orangey brown bricks showed beneath the pockmarked, worn-out asphalt and heaps of slag were piled in abandoned lots. There were blocks of empty stores with their names faded from the brick and a grimness to the buildings that made the whole town feel deserted, which in a way it was. Back when the mines and canal and gravity railroad had been thriving, Barrendale had been one of the biggest cities around and the loss of what the town had once been was reflected in every alley and blank storefront.

“You just remember what we agreed on,” Ma said to Daddy. “What you promised. We both get jobs and save every last penny. We ain’t staying here a minute longer than we have to.”

“Promises shmomises,” Daddy said, beaming a guilty smile to show he’d been joking.

I was sitting behind Daddy so I could see Ma’s profile in the passenger seat. She opened her mouth and from the way she held her jaw I could tell she was eager to say some sharp thing. But Gramp had said he was sure to get Daddy a job, so Ma was on her best behavior. Whenever Daddy had any prospects of work she had to at least give the appearance of listening to him.

We crossed a small bridge over a dinky creek that miles from there grew into the great Lackawaxen River. The bridge divided the main part of the city from the working-class neighborhoods. Many of the houses were narrow and wooden with their faces sitting smack up against the sidewalk. “Miners’ homes,” Daddy explained. “The ones the company owned.” And you could just feel the oldness and all the living that had gone on in those buildings as if the wooden beams and shingles had stories to tell. Other homes had wraparound porches and picture windows and yards bushy with forsythia eager to bloom. Some of the lawns were already a spring green but others were the spiky brown of cut hay. Most of those dead lawns sported holes drilled, we knew, to flush out the fire, a treatment they’d already tried in Centrereach. Here and there between houses we could see West Mountain smoking.

“The fire is only on the west side of town,” Daddy said to reassure us. “Mostly beneath the mountain. Far from Gram and Gramp’s. And they’ve got it contained. Not like Centrereach.” At Daddy’s mention of Centrereach we all gazed longingly out the window as if Auntie’s house might rise up out of the cool Barrendale air.

We turned up a long hill and entered a neighborhood where the houses were spaced farther apart. Some houses had gray-and-red-speckled shingles that were supposed to look like red brick. Others were painted white with dark green or black trim. They were all set back from the road with spacious front yards and graveled paths leading up to their front doors. There was something relaxed and well cared for in the tree-lined streets that made us all breathe easier. You could just feel that the fire hadn’t touched here.

Gram and Gramp’s house was at the top of the hill behind two enormous ash trees. Its shingles were painted yolk yellow and the wide windows of its closed-in side porch glinted in the sun. As Daddy parked in the driveway, he hummed, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” Slowly we all got out of the car and then for I don’t know how long just stood there, staring down at the trunk, which had been packed so full it had needed to be tied closed.

Eventually we heard, “Well, what are you gonna do? Just stand there all day?”

Startled, we turned toward the porch where we saw Gram hunched. The hump at the top of her spine pushed her head forward like a turtle from its shell. She swung open the door and gazed down at us from the top of the steps. Tightly permed pinkish blond curls haloed her face, which looked as dried up and crinkled as a peach left out in the sun. Coral-colored lipstick was caked into the seams of her thin lips and the whites of her eyes were webbed red. She had on a beige housedress with a pin in the shape of a peacock up by the collar.