Whisper Hollow (7 page)

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 that 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.

John didn’t know whether it was her mysterious beauty or her apparent disregard for domestic captivity that urged him on. But, at her father’s surprising encouragement, John returned to Myrthen’s house the day after he’d met her and followed her home.

Clutching a fistful of wildflowers, he stood at her decaying doorstep as though at an altar, and waited in the late-summer heat for someone to answer his call.

Alta had known what was coming. Her brother Marek had been buzzing around her for a week, hinting at how things were about to change for the better. Cyryl and Kasper had been kinder than usual, saying thank you for their meals and clean work clothes, taking care to remove their soot- and snow-covered boots before coming into the house. Even her father seemed different, quieter and even more distant, as though he was mourning some unspoken sadness. Yet when he spoke to her, it was with new respect. So she almost expected it when Walter showed up for dinner on Friday and — as had become custom in recent months — the other men cleared out with vague excuses, leaving them entirely alone in the sitting room.

Walter balanced his weight on the outermost edge of the couch, his mass crushing the floral cushion. He wiped his square brow with the back of his hand and when he swallowed, she could see the lump in his throat rise up and down. “Alta,” he began.

Sitting in the chair across from him, she crossed her ankles and pressed her interlaced fingers so deeply into her thighs her wrists hurt. Outwardly, she held a polite smile. Inwardly, she winced at his obvious discomfort with this rite of passage he
attempted to cross with solemnity and meaning. She wished he had just written her a note.
Marry me?
was all it needed to say.
Yes
, she would write back. Of course it would be yes. Theirs was a good match between decent people in indecent times. Nobody could afford to be alone. Nobody wanted to be. It was the natural course to find someone kind and honorable with whom to go forth and procreate. It was expected. It was correct.
Yes
was the only reasonable answer to such a question.

“I’ve been thinking …”

She took a deep breath and held it.

“You and me.”

The clock above his head ticked the seconds. Had his mother ever imagined her infant son’s head would someday be so large, so angular? He looked down at his hands.

“Yes?” she asked.

He looked up at her again, held his eyes level with hers, which he didn’t often do. What he said next came out fast, his words colliding into one another like train cars in a wreck. “I’ve been thinking — and your daddy is in accord — that you and I ought to get married, and I was wondering if you thought so, too.”

Say yes.
She looked back at him, his brown eyes nearly pleading, his mouth wrenched into a forced smile. It had been only four months and twenty days since they first met. She felt for him, this large man sitting so awkwardly on her mother’s couch, reduced to such vulnerability.
Say yes.
He swallowed again, his gullet confessing his nerves. What would it be like to kiss those wide, narrow lips? What would it be like to serve him his dinner? Would their children all be as large and straight as he? What would she feel, fifty years hence, on the verge of their golden anniversary?
Say yes.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

From within her life of daily and incessant service to the men around her, Alta lived for the promise of Wednesday afternoons. She spent Saturdays, the days her father and brothers weren’t working underground, washing their combustible, bituminous clothes. Sundays were for rest, in theory, but that didn’t take into account the next meal to be cooked and the next household chore to be done, mending or darning or cleaning out the water tray in the icebox. Mondays, she did enough shopping and baking to carry them through midweek. She spent colorless Friday evenings in the quiet company of her fiancé of almost three weeks. But Wednesdays, once she’d filled the men’s dinner buckets and sent them off into the bowels of the earth to earn their living, then made their beds and put a big stew together to slow-cook until dinner, she would take whatever book she was reading by candlelight late each night after everyone else was asleep, and go down to the library.