The Hollow Ground: A Novel (23 page)

“Of course he will,” Daddy murmured, kissing her gently on the side of the head. “Why wouldn’t he? He’s your long-lost brother, after all.”

But Uncle Jerry didn’t forgive Daddy. The next day Ma took off work to drive down to Allentown to return the money and to collect Daddy’s things from the dealership. She had me miss school so I could make the trip with her and we met Uncle Jerry in the parking lot of a Giant supermarket because Ma was too ashamed to have Norma or Joe or Phil, Daddy’s workers, see us.

“I won’t bring him up on charges, Dolores,” Uncle Jerry said, handing Ma a paper bag filled with Daddy’s things. “That’s the best I can do. But don’t you forget my offer. And you”—Uncle Jerry pointed at me and barked—“you be good to your mother. You’re lucky she doesn’t stick you in an orphanage with all she’s got on her plate.”

I turned away, but just before I did, I shot Uncle Jerry the nastiest look I could muster and secretly smiled when his mouth flinched in response. “My ma would never do that,” I said.

“Come on, Brigid,” Ma said, her voice weak and her body bent like she’d just been punched in the gut. “We got a long trip ahead.”

On our way out of Allentown, Ma drove slow on Furlong Street past the house that Uncle Jerry’s friend had been fixing up for us. “Say goodbye to it, Brigid,” Ma said with a type of longing I’d never heard before in her voice. “Say goodbye to everything your daddy took from us.”

“It’s the curse, Ma,” I said. “Not Daddy taking it away.”

“Don’t I know it. Your daddy’s curse.”

I said nothing. It felt like the core of me was hollow and Uncle Jerry’s words about Ma leaving me in an orphanage were echoing inside that place over and over.

*   *   *

When we got back to Barrendale Ma got into bed, pulled the quilt to her eyes, and voice muffled, told me to tell Daddy that she didn’t want to talk to him. But Daddy didn’t come back that whole afternoon and later when I knocked on the door to bring Ma supper, Ma said, “Go to hell, Adrian. Go to hell and don’t never come back.”

“It’s me, Ma,” I said. “I got some of Gram’s meat loaf.”

Ma didn’t say anything so I stepped inside and saw that Ma had spread out on her mattress everything Stepma had given us, all that remained of Ma’s dead ma. Looking at the objects made me think again of the bad things Ma’s daddy had done to her, the things perverts were arrested for, and I shivered even though the room was steaming hot from the radiator pumping.

Ma’s face was grayish, coated with sweat and the grime that coated everything inside and outside the house. She sat Indian-style on her mattress, holding in one hand a tortoiseshell comb with one of the teeth missing. On her lap was a small crocheted white purse and a single long black glove. Spread around her were some hair curlers, a porcelain figurine that spun on a music box, lace collars, and oblongs of lace with snap buttons on them.

Ma dropped the comb and patted the mattress for me to sit. I put the plate of food on the desk and knelt beside her. Ma hadn’t let me look through the box of her ma’s things so I looked with interest at a porcelain bride with hardened lace on its dress and the little metal barrettes with stiff ribbons glued onto them and the crochet-edged hankies folded neatly in thin cardboard boxes.

“I thought getting married and having my own family was all I ever wanted,” Ma said. “I thought having my own family would make me forget the one I came from, but all it did was make me think about them worse.”

I didn’t know how to comfort the pain in Ma’s voice so I reached for a folded yellowing hankie and cradled it against my cheek.

“Jesus Christ, Brigid.” Ma slapped the hankie from my hand. “You gettin’ it all filthy.”

“It’s already filthy,” I said, streaking a clean spot on the porcelain figurine with my finger. All the stuff was coated with the dust from years of storage as well as the house’s general dirt. I wiped the dirt from my finger on to my pant’s pocket and wondered how Ma’s dead ma could be as saintly as Ma said if she’d let what had happened to Ma happen.

I picked up the photo of my grandma that Ma had propped on the pillow. “I wish I’d known her,” I said, trying to get at what I was thinking.

Ma nodded, then pressed her lips tight like she was in pain. She reached for me and clutched me to her. “Ah, God,” she cried. “I got everything that’s left of her. I got everything there is to get and it still ain’t enough. I still got a hole inside.”

Ma let me go and thumped her chest like she was drumming the hollow of her heart. Then she lay down on her mattress and I stroked her hair until she quieted. It was only early evening but Ma slept through till night and when I went to bed, I could hear her breezy snores. I tried to stay awake to hear when Daddy came home, but sleep got the better of me and I didn’t wake until 3:00
A.M.
, in expectation of Mr. Smythe’s nightly gas check. I rarely slept through it, but when I woke he wasn’t there. Through the window, fingers of white moonlight stretched out on the floor to aim straight at Ma’s mattress, which I saw was empty. From the kitchen came noises. I guessed Ma had gotten up to make herself something to eat.

“Shh,” she said when I stepped into the kitchen and found her at the counter making two cheese sandwiches, one with ketchup on it, the way only Brother liked it. I looked from the sandwiches to the suitcase, Auntie’s old green one, which was propped by the door.

“What are you doing, Ma?”

“Me and John Patrick is taking a trip. Don’t you mind about it.” Ma held her arm up and licked ketchup from where it had globbed on her skin like blood. “Don’t go making me feel bad. Uncle Jerry ain’t got room for you. John Patrick can stay in Little Jerry’s room. There ain’t room for me and you in the guest room.” She looked toward a crack in the wall that had grown crooked and long during the night. “It’s just temporary, Brigid. Don’t go giving me a hard time about it.”

Ma tiptoed into the living room past Daddy who was loudly snoring in Gramp’s Barcalounger. She lifted Brother from where he curled on the couch and carried him with his head on her shoulder and his arm sloped around her neck. “I’m the one who has to get out of here,” she whispered. “It’s not just you who’s suffering. You can’t just think about yourself.”

In the kitchen she quieted Brother by cupping the back of his head with her hand. “Now don’t go making me feel bad, Brigid. I don’t want to do this. He don’t have room for you is all. That ain’t my fault. No one can say it is.” Her glance toward me was uneasy. We didn’t meet eyes.

“Is this because of your daddy?” I asked.

“What?” she said, the word quick and sharp as a dagger.

“Is it because I look like him? You said I did. Is that why you don’t want to take me?”

“This is no time for your foolishness, Brigid. The ridiculous things you say!” Carefully she opened the door, mindful of how it squeaked. Slowly she then slid Brother down to his feet and told him to walk to the car. She picked up Auntie’s old valise and stepped out onto the moon-shadowed ground. She didn’t look back but she stood there for a moment as if pondering West Mountain glowing red between the trees.

My body went so slack and heavy that I felt as if the bones in my legs had left with Ma. I managed to pull out a kitchen chair and to kind of collapse into it, leaning partway on the table for support. I heard the car motor turn over. I heard the tires crunch the gravel on the drive and then I listened to the fading sound of the car as it drove off. Long after it had gone, I stayed at the table, unable to move.

Eventually Mr. Smythe quietly opened the screen door. He smiled, seemingly not surprised to find someone, even a little girl, up in the middle of the night. “Can’t sleep,” he stated, shaking his head. He helped himself to a bottle of milk from the fridge and poured a glass. He set the glass on the table and patted me on the head. “Don’t stay up too late,” he said and then he reached in his back pocket for his gauge meter and waved it up by the ceiling.

Gradually night gave way to bluish, then gray light. A woodpecker worked on a nearby tree. When I heard Gram shuffling around her room, I attempted to get up but the heaviness in my legs had given way to a quivering sensation and I still couldn’t move.

“What on earth?” I heard Gram declare. She was staring at the crack in the wall, which no matter how many ways she’d tried to stop its growth, still lengthened by degrees every night. “Lord, girl, what the heck you got the door open for?” Gram trudged toward the door and stepped in front of the dusting of dirt that had blown in a foot or more across the linoleum.

I cringed, waiting for the slap I’d get for leaving it open, but instead Gram lifted a note from the counter. She held it at arm’s length and read out loud, “Time to look out for myself since it don’t seem no one else will.”

Gram peered out the screen, then shut the door. “Guess her brother gave her the gas money. Lord knows what he’ll want from her in return.”

I said nothing, my leg had stopped its involuntary twitching and now felt heavy as rock.

“Well, you just goin’ to sit there?” Gram crumpled the paper and tromped over to the trash where she dumped it. “Even if your ma’s gone, you’re still here. And it’s still Saturday, your day to clean the floors. And you got a mess right there you can start with.” Gram pointed at the patch of dirt by the door.

I gripped the edge of the table, leaned my hand against it, and pushed myself up from the chair. But instead of standing, my numb legs collapsed and I found myself flat out on the floor, staring at a table leg, stunned, having never had my body fail me before.

“Get up, girl! Get up!” Gram shouted.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one grungy pink slipper coming toward me.

“Get up,” Gram said. “Don’t go lyin’ there like a slug.” She nudged my shoulder with the tip of her slipper and when I didn’t respond she kicked me with it. “Get up, girl. Get up. She ain’t worth it, you hear?”

I started to cry. Gram sat down on the chair, bent down and slapped me hard on the cheek. But I only wailed harder so she slapped me again, striking my cheek, my nose, the ridge above my eye. “You deserve better than her. And don’t you ever forget it, you hear me?”

I rolled to the side and then pushed up out of Gram’s reach, gagging on a sob, my vision clearing. From her bathrobe pocket Gram pulled out a wad of crumpled tissues. She picked out a clean one and offered it to me. “Let it go, girl. Let her go. She can’t give you what you want. Let her go. You can do it if you try.”

I crawled forward to take the tissue from Gram’s hand and as I reached for it Gram said, “It’s not your fault who your ma is, you remember that.”

Through a haze of tears I focused on Gram’s face, surprised beyond all words to see kindness softening its creases.

PART III

Twenty

Spring never came that year. Winter lasted into May with a blizzard blanketing the fire zone in such a thick fog that on Mother’s Day weekend Route 6 was closed to traffic and by that following weekend it was closed again because 86 degree days had flooded the road with snowmelt.

Spring was Gram’s favorite month and the shock of its absence unhinged something in her. Suddenly she couldn’t take a trip to the store or clean a gutter without saying a prayer to this or that patron saint first. On her way to the Hi-Lo market she’d pray, “Saint Christopher, get me there safe, you hear?” As she’d stand on a ladder, swiping her long fingers through the gutter, she’d shout, “Keep me from fallin’, Saint Sitha!” Since Saint Sitha was not only the patron saint of housework but also of people who’d lost their keys, she’d usually add, “And don’t let me lose my keys!” Of course after such a prayer she wouldn’t be able to find the keys to the car or to the little jewelry box where she kept her wedding ring while she cleaned.

Saint Brigid crosses hung above every window to protect against fire and evil, and in every room she’d positioned Saint Joseph statues to protect the house. There was hardly a place you could stand where you weren’t fixed with his eerie painted-eye stare. Twice a day she said the rosary when she used to not say it at all and she started holding prayer meetings in the living room, all in an effort for God to deliver us free of the fire and save the house from destruction.

I came to learn there was a patron saint for pretty much anything. A patron saint for stomachaches and one for headaches. There was a patron saint for different types of animals as well as for bakers and brewers of beer. There was a saint to pray to if you were accused wrongly and one to pray to if you were accused rightly. There was a saint to pray to if you wanted children and one to pray to for unwanted children. There was a patron saint of children. I also came to learn there were multiple saints for mothers and orphans and that some saints had more than one specialty. Saint Monica, for instance, covered both mothers and drunks and it was she who Gram said I should pray to “every second of every minute of every day for both your ma and daddy.” But I couldn’t do it. I’d had enough of praying with no good ever coming from it. For the first time I felt for the people in Auntie’s story “The Great Forgetting.” I used to think their belief that God ignored them made them foolish, but I’d come to realize that it made them wise instead.

The unusually humid and breezeless afternoons put a glaze on everything. Distances looked like you were seeing them through a filmy glass. Anything that could shone and sweated, and the still glossy surfaces of the lakes reflected sky and made you feel the world had turned upside down. At Pothole Park numerous springs shot out from crevices in the pothole, carving the hole further, the water seemingly spiraling down to the center of the earth.

The heat had its effect on me, Gram, and Daddy too. It was like all our worst feelings rose to the surface, clinging to us as damp and sticky as sweat. The lack of spring weather didn’t stop Gram from spring-cleaning and as she and I took down storm windows and washed curtains we were snippier with each other than usual. Daddy, who’d normally lecture about the origins of spring-cleaning or the various uses for baking soda or aluminum foil as a cleaner, didn’t say anything except correct Gram when she pronounced the word
perennial
as
peri-en-ul
and shake his head when he saw us dibbling holes to plant bulbs that would bloom in the fall. I thought it was sad and silly to plant flowers that would bloom after the house had been wrecked too, but I didn’t tell Gram that, not when she was so busy praying to Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardening.