The Hollow Ground: A Novel (32 page)

Ma pointed at the mattress. “Just sit down for chrissakes, Brigid. You’re making me nervous standing there staring at me.” Ma’s glance sliced into me, then out. Her gaze softened. “Remember when you used to ask how my heart got broke?”

My eyes widened, wanting to take in as much of Ma as possible. I had asked Ma that question too many times to count, but I hadn’t asked it since before Auntie died and never once had Ma brought up talking about it on her own.

“Do you remember?” Ma asked as if I could have possibly forgotten that long-ago moment when Brother took his first steps and something within Ma changed for the worse.

“Every time you asked about it,” Ma continued, “I’d tell you the same thing—that my heart had forgot it was broke but then it remembered. But I never told you
what
it remembered.”

Ma met my gaze straight on and I sat down on the mattress. She continued, “We was sitting in the trailer, you remember?”

I nodded. “We were playing tiddlywinks,” I said. “And Daddy was lying on the cot in the living room telling stories about the tiddlywinks queen and princess.”

Ma smiled, surprised I had remembered it that keenly. “That’s right,” she said. “We was just playing a game but for some reason I remember being struck by the fact that you was the same age I was when I got sent off to the orphanage. I was just sitting there thinking that when all of a sudden John Patrick stood up and took his first step. Then he took another, then another, and right then I saw it. I saw it as if I was reliving it all over again. There I was outside the house in Loppsville. I was in the car with Stepma. I had my stuffed bunny rabbit and cloth doll Abigail on my lap. We was going on a trip, that’s what Stepma had told me, but I was nervous because there was only one suitcase. ‘Are Daddy and Bropey going?’ I said. ‘They’ll join us later,’ she said and I believed her, even though I wondered how they’d do that when we had the car. Daddy and Bropey stood on the porch waving and then as we started driving away Bropey ran down the steps toward us, crying and screaming for me. Somehow he knew better than I did what was about to happen.”

Ma’s eyes blinked with dryness. “I guess seeing John Patrick stumbling toward me, crying, brought me back to my little Bropey running toward me. It wasn’t long after that I started remembering other stuff. Just pieces here and there. But before I had that memory of Stepma taking me away, I didn’t remember much at all. Before that I used to figure my stepma must have snuck me out of the house ’cause how else would my daddy have let her take me away?”

Ma tilted her head and gazed up at the ceiling in recollection. “There was this nice nun there in the orphanage. Sister Joseph Thomas was her name. I asked her once why God had let my stepma dump me in an orphanage and she said that God’s will was mysterious and we must not question it but must do the best with what we were given. And it was right then I decided I didn’t want another thing to do with a god like that. I mean, who in the heck is he to decide I should get sent off to an orphanage? Why do I got to make the best out of
that?
”

My eyes shifted off Ma’s face. “Do you think of your daddy when you look at me?”

“Sometimes. You got this way of looking at things that makes your face resemble his. But you ain’t nothin’ like him, Brigid. You got a heart so big, I bet we could all live inside it. I bet you’d let us live in it too. I’ll tell you there ain’t many people who’d do that. You’re”—Ma paused and slowly pronounced—“extraordinary. And don’t you ever forget it.”

“How could I, Ma? You already live in my heart.”

Ma leaned forward and brushed a strand of hair from where it lingered near my eye. “From the time you was born I could tell you was what gets called a wise soul and I got afraid for you. I got afraid as soon as I saw that wiseness in your eyes. I got afraid for all you’d wind up having to see and know to earn the wiseness you already had inside you.”

There was the sound of clinking china from the kitchen. “Shit,” Ma whispered, looking at her watch. “Shouldn’t she be at the mill?”

“She had her shift switched to the early one,” I said.

And as Ma stuffed her clothes into one of the boxes we’d taken from Auntie’s I considered telling her why Gram had had her shift switched, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear Ma dismiss the Great Idea as stupid or impossible and I didn’t want to give her any additional ammunition against Gram. I watched Ma awkwardly clutch the box to her chest and I thought she’d head straight through the living room and out the porch, to avoid Gram. But she didn’t. She turned into the kitchen.

“Ain’t you hurt the girl enough?” Gram said from where she sat at the kitchen table.

“If I was you, Rowena, I wouldn’t go sitting in no judgment lest you want to start getting judged.”

“Believe it or not, I was hopin’ you’d come back,” Gram said.

“Don’t take it the wrong way, Rowena, but I don’t believe it.”

Gram’s reading glasses were hanging from a beaded string around her neck. There were papers for the Great Idea in front of her. She pointed at the other end of the table. “Put the box down. I have somethin’ for you.”

Ma gave me a look like, You believe
this
? But she plunked the box down and said, “Hope you’re not planning on hitting me ’cause I’d have to sock you back.”

Gram slid her grandma’s ring off her finger and offered it to Ma. “If I gave you this now, would it change nothin’?”

Ma eyes glittered as brightly as the ring. “I ain’t coming back, if that’s what you mean.”

Gram stood and walked toward Ma. “I ain’t tryin’ to bribe you to come back. You listen here. This ring was my daddy’s mama’s. I treasure it. But you can have it, if it’d mean somethin’ to you, Dolores. If my givin’ it might change somethin’ about how you feel”—Gram tapped between Ma’s breasts—“in here.”

Ma swallowed and she leaned closer to the ring that Gram held pinched between two fingers, but she still didn’t touch it. It almost seemed like Ma was afraid to touch it.

“Nah,” Ma said. “You keep it, old lady, and every time you look at it you remember how mean you was to me.” But Ma’s voice didn’t deliver the way she wanted. She lowered her eyes and you could just see her whole body go limp. Ma added, “When Brigid’s old enough you let her have the ring, you hear? That’ll be like a gift from both of us, Brigid. You remember that.”

Then Ma clasped the box to her chest and nodded at me to open the door. She stepped out and headed down the path to the drive and as I moved to follow, Gram gripped my arm. “You remember what I said. All she can do is love the best she can. That’s all you can ’spect from her, girl. For the rest of her life, for the rest of yours.”

At the car me and Ma hugged. She got into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The window was partway open and I placed my hands on the edge of the glass, gripping it like it was a ledge.

“You got to let me go now, Brigid. I’ll be late. I got to get back. When I get a phone, I’ll call. That’s all I can do right now.” Ma started the car and shifted it into reverse. “That’s all I can do,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid of what’s going to happen, Ma. To Daddy and to me. To all of us.”

“We all are, Brigid. That’s what life is. Now come on.” She put her arm behind the empty passenger seat and looked behind her, preparing to back down the drive. “Come on now, Brigid. You’re making me late. I got to get moving.”

She waited to press the accelerator, sensing the moment when I lifted my hands and let go.

Twenty-nine

Within hours of Ma’s leaving I got a bad feeling, the worst I’d ever had, and in my mind flashed a vision of Daddy on the uppermost ledge of the East Side Pit. I saw him in a swirl of steam standing with the dead deer and dogs and coons and cats that had fallen in and died there. The more I tried to dismiss the image, the stronger it got until there was nothing left for me to do but go and find him.

I took a flashlight because dusk had begun its slow creep up the hill and as I swung the beam back and forth, looking for fissures and sinkholes along the path, I was surprised by how many asters and everlastings sprung out from the silty cracks. Dozens of beetles and spiders skittered away from my light and made me guess that even if Russia did drop the bomb on us, little bits of nature would still cling on.

When I reached the pit, I took my time scanning the various shelves and ledges that had been created by the men as they dug it deeper and deeper. The topmost ledge was only maybe ten yards or so down the slope of the pit, but at times the steam and smoke was so thick I could barely see. Worse, occasionally flames shot out from caverns farther below and momentarily blinded me, spotting the back of my eyelids with shooting stars of light. Still, I didn’t find any trace of Daddy, only the heated carcasses of whatever animals had had the misfortune to fall in.

Looking down into that pit got me feeling unsteady on my feet. There was a pinkish glow to the air from all the heaps of burning coal and it started to feel like even the pink air was on fire—it was so hot and seemed to flicker before my very eyes. I started to feel like I was on fire; there was a feverish heat to my skin. Every now and then I thought I saw Father Capedonico, hovering just on the edge of my sight. His image wavered like he was made of steam and I didn’t know if he was the curse out to get us or my mind playing tricks on me. Then I recalled what Marisol had said about curses coming from ignorant spirits who could be banished by a stronger spirit. I shouted, “I’m not afraid of you! You need to go back where you belong. We’ve paid our price. You’ve had more than your just revenge.”

I wiped my forehead and waited. I shined my flashlight in every direction but the priest didn’t appear and I wondered if that was what Auntie had meant about the curse being inside us. Maybe she’d meant that the power to get rid of it was inside us, not the curse itself.

I’d completed my walk around the pit and as I meandered further into the zone I saw old Mrs. Novak on a stoop that wasn’t attached to a house. Her greasy skin and hair caught the pinkish light and gave her an eerie kind of halo.

As I passed she said, “Rowena liked to think that Frank of hers was God’s gift, but he was a little bastard. I saw that the first time I laid eyes on him. He’d a done anything to save his own skin.”

There was a glaze to her stare that told me she knew something I didn’t and it was right then I understood that it hadn’t been my mind tricking me into seeing the priest, but the priest tricking me into believing the curse was going to strike in the pit. It was then I ran, cutting through yard after abandoned yard, sidestepping boreholes and sinkholes like I had an instinct for them, like I had the magical quality Daddy used to say we had. Like I
could
actually walk on fire or air.

As I reached the front walk, Detective Kanelous came out the door. He stood in the yellow light cast from the kitchen window and pressed his lips together. His big orangey cat eyes were tinged with sorrow and made me dread what lay in wait for me behind the shut front door.

“If you ever need something, you remember you can come to me,” he said. Then we both turned because we heard Daddy and Gram yelling at each other from inside the house. “Maybe you should wait before you go in,” he said. “Give them a few minutes.”

Still breathless from the run, I shook my head.

He touched my arm. “Good luck, Brigid,” he said and it seemed such a strange thing to say and so full of its own kind of bleakness that it made the feeling of dread go all hollow inside me. I opened the door as quietly as possible and crossed through the kitchen, avoiding the spots that creaked.

“Least I now know it was Frank, not Dad, who killed Sully,” Daddy said from where he and Gram faced each other by Gramp’s altar on the mantel. “Least I know there were some things Dad wasn’t willing to do for him.”

They hadn’t noticed me come in. And I stayed, hardly daring to breathe, a few feet back from the living-room entryway.

“Well, he must a had a good reason to do what he done,” Gram said. “We can’t know what was in his heart.”

“Good reason?” Daddy said. “Kanelous just told you the reason.
I
told you the reason. When Sully found out Frank took bribes to say the mines were safe, he tried to blackmail Frank so Frank killed him. Joe at The Shaft heard them. He
heard
Sully tell Frank he wanted a thousand dollars. He
heard
Frank say he’d kill him before he’d give him a dime. That was the same night Sully disappeared.
That
was Frank’s good reason. Keeping all his bribe money to himself!”

“You’re like a scratched record, Adrian, playin’ the same words over and over. I don’t care ’bout no bribes or blackmail.”

“I know you don’t. But what
do
you care about, Mother? Do you care to know that your sweet, wonderful Frank, the apple of your eye, tried to kill his own brother?”

I must have made a sound and they both turned. Daddy’s eyes were as crazy as old Mrs. Novak and he looked as wild as the werewolf poster that used to hang beside his bed.

Daddy cradled his head with his hands. “And I loved him so, but he never believed it. And I tried not to do it, I tried.” Daddy lowered his hands and stared at them as if he didn’t recognize them as his own. Then he gripped his bad arm and held it like he was in the worst pain I’d ever seen.

Gram pressed her hands to her ears and wildly shook her head.

Daddy squeezed his arm. “I went down there to help him. To tell him it wasn’t too late. He could still do right by the men. He could still get them out. But then he did
this
to me.” Daddy let go of his arm and looked down at it like it was as mauled and bloodied as Father Capedonico’s arm had been. “He would have killed me if I hadn’t—”

“Don’t tell me!” Gram shouted, pulling at her ears as if she could pull them from her head. “Alls I got is my memory of him. Don’t take that away too!” She lunged toward Daddy but Daddy sidestepped and bolted past her and out the porch door.

Dazed, Gram walked off into her room and I walked onto the porch to stare at West Mountain that had an odd almost greenish tint to its smoke, similar to the color the sky turned when a tornado was brewing. Staring at that greenish glow put me in mind of crazy old Mrs. Novak’s words and in a sort of senseless rush I replayed all the various things I’d heard Daddy say about Uncle Frank and the mines and the day of the disaster. It felt like I was coming toward an understanding that had been waiting for me to come to it, practically all my life. It felt like I was dropping down into the endless blackness of the bootlegging hole all over again, but this time what I’d discover would be worse than finding my best friend’s dead daddy. It would be the worst thing I’d ever in my heart hope to find.