Whisper Hollow (24 page)

Alta sat at her kitchen table, her long hands cupping a mug of hot coffee. Next to her sat a soggy, three-day-old
Charleston Sentinel.
Her bowl and spoon had been washed and set to dry on a linen towel spread by the sink. The counters cleaned. The stove quiet. The only sound was the clock in the living room, ticking away the minutes.

She looked beyond the steam rising from her cup and out the window. It had just started to rain again, fat drops, slow and even. She’d been staring through that window daily since the day they came to tell her that everyone she loved had died.

She’d only just seared the pork tenderloin for that night’s dinner when Sonny Schumann knocked on her screen door. He still had on his turtleback hat. When she opened the door and stood before him, he took it off and held it at his waist.

“Mrs. Pulaski?”

“Morning, Sonny. What brings you by so early?” She hadn’t heard the thunder and lightning coming up from underground. Other townsfolk had. They’d come trotting up to the mine entrance, gathered around, watched the black smoke billowing out, growing tense, waiting.

“It’s the mine,” he said. “Mr. Pulaski — your husband — was working Number Seventeen this morning, wasn’t he?”

“He was working, yes.”

“There was … an accident.”

“No,” she said. She took a step backward.

Sonny paused, then wiped his brow and said at last, “Your husband and your son were underground.” He waited a moment for her to absorb his words, seeking her eyes for the moment of recognition.

“There was an explosion.”

“No.”

He looked down at his hat, the expression on her face too much to bear. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“An explosion?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pulaski. It was an explosion. They got rescue teams going down. But your husband … your son … they both been found. I’m sorry.”

Alta swallowed hard. Abel’s and Walter’s dishes were drying beneath a shaft of sunlight on the kitchen counter. The ironing board wore one of Walter’s shirts, the empty sleeve dangling loose in the open air.

“Found?”

“The mine collapsed around ’em, Mrs. Pulaski. I was sent to tell you. Walter — Mr. Pulaski — was found in the power station with Mr. Esposito, don’t know if you know him, and your son — Abel — was with the other men closer up the face. The investigators are coming in, but it appears to be caused by methane. Weren’t nobody found alive.”

Alta, her month-ago self, lowered her head and let the door fall closed on Sonny Schumann. Now at her breakfast table with yet another cup of tepid coffee and a windowful of rain-smashed memories, she looked and looked outside but saw nothing. All
the ticked-away minutes adding up to nothing. Just the world traveling its slow way around the sun.

For all anyone knew, Alta mourned only two lost miners — more than anyone ever should — her son most of all. Her love for John was private, and her grief would be, too. Nobody would ever know the fathomless depths of her loss or the crushing weight of her guilt.

Well
,
I don’t know if I can wait that long.
John’s last words to her in person. “Did you do it?” she asked the empty room. All she knew was that he had asked Walter — the obstacle that stood in his way — to take his shift. Then they were dead, and nobody knew why.

The town called John a hero. Eyewitness accounts saw him running toward the mine after the others had already gone inside. They all thought he’d intended to save everyone, but died instead. But the townsfolk didn’t know how he stood to profit from their loss. That she was the fallen woman who’d driven him to such madness. She’d told him she’d marry him when her husband was gone. Didn’t she, therefore, deserve some of the blame?

You are my always.

Maybe he didn’t do it. After all, even the investigators hadn’t yet figured it out for certain. In need of someone to blame, everyone seemed to agree that it had been planned by the missing renegade named Sparky Magee.

The rain abated. The windows were streaked and steamed; the coffee, cold; the silence, sterile. There was nobody home. No clothes to wash and iron, no meals to cook and warm on the stove while she stole away. No one to steal away to.

She wondered about the asparagus. If weeds grew on the graves of her three lost loves. Whether she would survive.

Alta looked down at the paper. The front page announced that President Truman was heading to Key West for a vacation
in the sunshine. She’d never been to Florida, or anywhere but where she was right then, in a lackluster coal-mining town with mountains like arms around her, always squeezing. Every day of all her thirty-eight years had been spent in a town that, at its greatest density, contained only a little more than seven thousand people. She used to imagine traveling to some glamorous place, maybe even moving. Folding the
Sentinel
, she pushed it deep into the potato peels in the trash.

Then she thought of her lost aunt Maggie and how abundant with pleasures her life had seemed. How elegant she’d looked that first time Alta saw her, just off the train from New York, standing in her flapper dress smoking a cigarette. That was the day she’d first encountered John, too. Both of them, Maggie and John, mesmerizing and mythical in her thirteen-year-old mind. And even as Alta aged, even after Maggie disappointed her and, many years later, John fell in love with her, both of them retained in her mind some of that dazzling, inaugural splendor.

Alta pushed herself away from the table. She went into her bedroom and knelt beside the cedar hope chest her father had made her. Underneath her wedding dress and Abel’s christening gown and a quilt that had belonged to her grandmother, next to her mother’s Bible and the first watercolor she’d painted — a small brown mouse asleep on a bed of lettuce — was the
Motion Picture
magazine with Colleen Moore on the cover that Maggie had given her in 1925. She looked at the starlet’s porcelain skin, her rosebud mouth, the faded orange-and-maroon cover. Alta pressed it against her chest, just as she’d done more than a quarter century earlier, and carried it back to the kitchen table.

Listen, do you like motion pictures?
Maggie’s effervescent voice bubbled in her memory.
I’ll take you to one sometime, you and me, okay?

Flipping open the magazine, she read the articles and film novelizations, gazed for minutes apiece at the photos and
advertisements, until she found the cigarette that Maggie had given her with a wink and a promise:
Don’t smoke it yet. I’ll teach you how sometime.
Alta peeled it carefully off the page and held it between her fingertips. Maybe she should go now, to Florida or Paris or someplace even farther away. Distract herself with beaches or art galleries or foreign languages. What did she have to keep her here? What left did she have to lose?

She found a box of matches in a drawer and sat back down, put one end between her lips and struck the match. She lit the flattened cigarette and inhaled until her lungs filled all too quickly with hot smoke and stale tar, then slapped her free hand against her chest in protest. A few seconds later, she’d coughed it all out and she held the burning thing out away from her and wondered how that kind of suffocation could become a habit. She stood at the sink while a month’s worth — a lifetime’s worth — of hot tears ran down her face. Everyone she loved was gone.

No, she decided, she wouldn’t go anywhere else. There was no point in it. She would stay where her memories were buried, a weed growing on their graves.

Opening the tap, she ran water over the cigarette until it disintegrated into nothing and fell down the drain.

 
PART TWO
 

 

Lidia Kielar slid into the booth across from her friend Peggy. This was only their second time taking part in the pep rallies. Every Thursday night in the spring, after baseball season started, the high school kids gathered at the school’s front steps and did cheers along with the cheerleaders. When it got too dark, or too cold, they moved to the Sugar Bowl, drinking Cokes with peanuts, and listening to music by Frank Sinatra and Ricky Nelson. It was 1964, but the old Wurlitzer didn’t have songs by the Beatles or the Supremes or the Four Seasons or the Beach Boys yet. Lidia and Peggy didn’t care. They were happy just to be there.

Peggy shrugged off her overcoat and shoved it down in the seat next to her. Bouncing a little in the seat, she smiled as she looked around, proud of the way she filled out her mohair sweater. She knew it was like honey to the Verra Bears.

“Isn’t this great?” she whispered, leaning forward. Lidia could see a player elbow his friend as Peggy’s chest pressed against the Formica table.

Nodding, Lidia shrugged out of her brother’s hand-me-down jacket and hung it on the rack beside the booth. She
finger-combed her dark blonde hair, and settled herself in her seat. It was rare for her to be out socializing at night, needed as she was at home. But she’d done her homework and fixed her father’s dinner right after school, covered it and left it on the kitchen table. Her brother, who would turn eighteen in a week, was already doing an eight-hour shift in the mines: the third shift, which meant he’d be asleep until after she got home. He started at eleven at night — the hoot-owl shift — but because it was the easiest shift, it was safer for him.

“How do you think you did on the math quiz?” Peggy asked. Before Lidia could answer, Peggy began to hum along with Paul Anka on the jukebox. Her eyes drifted around the diner and landed on the new boy in school, Danny Pollock. “Hey there, lonely boy …,” she sang under her breath, flashing a coquettish smile in his direction. She dropped her gaze and looked back to Lidia.

“Did you see who’s over there?” Peggy asked, leaning forward again and tilting her head with eyebrows lifted.

Lidia looked over her shoulder and saw him standing at the counter, holding a Coke. From the corner of his eye, he stared back at her, his face nearly expressionless. Inside, Lidia felt herself give way. Her eyes dropped to her lap, her hands suddenly damp.

“Danny Pollock,” Peggy said, flashing a quick smile at him. “I heard he’s a really good second baseman.” She giggled. “I bet I could get him to prove it.”

Lidia smiled and kicked her lightly under the table. “You’re awful.”

“No, I’m not.” She winked. “I’m terrific. Or at least I will be.” They both laughed at that. Peggy took the straw out of her drink, then tipped it back to drain the last bit. It was shocking, the way Peggy wiggled her tongue around the inside of the glass, her plucky disregard for the manners her mother would slap her for ignoring.

As Peggy set down her glass, her mouth full of soggy peanuts, Danny Pollock slid into the seat next to her. Peggy turned and looked at him with wide eyes, mute but for the sound of frantic swallowing.

“Ladies,” he said, nodding first at Peggy and then at Lidia. “Buy you a Coke?”

“Well, isn’t that sweet of you, Danny?” Peggy said, recovering. She kicked Lidia under the table.

Lidia shot her a smile, then looked down at the tiny flowers on her skirt.

“My friend here is a quiet little bird sometimes,” Peggy said.

Danny propped his head on one palm, threading his fingers into the sandy-colored hair above his ear. Lidia could feel his curiosity before she saw it, and when she looked back up at him, she couldn’t stop.

“I’ve never seen a girl as pretty as you,” he said to Lidia.

She blushed.

“I mean it,” he said. “You must get that all the time.”

Peggy swiveled toward him with her eyebrows pinched together. “No, actually, she doesn’t,” she said in a petulant tone.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Danny said.

“It’s true,” Lidia said, looking at Peggy.

Peggy cleared her throat and bounced once in her seat, as though to change the subject. “Oh, I’m just teasing, aren’t I?” She reached over the table with her hand open, and offered Lidia a smile that wasn’t quite synchronized with her eyes.

Lidia played it off, bringing her hand up and placing it near Peggy’s. Peggy squeezed it once, then let go. “So, Danny,” she said, moving slightly closer to him. “How do you like Verra so far?”