The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  “Dammit, stop, Marvena! Hate takes up lodging wherever it’s welcomed—and don’t give a rat’s ass whether the door that opens to it is plain or fancy.” Lily takes a sip of the lemonade, grimaces at the taste. A mite bitter. The lemons had been old, and she’s running low on sugar. “Now, I reckon you didn’t track me down for less than urgent purpose, and right at the moment I can’t think of anything more urgent than the fact we have a Klan presence in our county, and a dead woman who spent at least some of her final moments on earth at their gathering. Can you?”

  Marvena looks at her steadily. “Yes. You seen Hildy of late?”

  Lily shakes her head slowly, her blood running cold, a frisson of fear for her friend.

  “That’s ’cause she’s with me. Came yesterday, partly to confront Tom. Well, to ask him to have her back, more like it. They’ve had a dalliance, for a time now. Hildy’s been wanting to break it off with Merle, but keeps losing heart. Seems to think you and your mama—not to mention her own—will think less of her, taking up with the likes of my brother. Tom finally came to think maybe Hildy herself feels that way, so he broke off with her several nights ago.”

  Lily sets her glass down, hard. Lemonade sloshes to the table. The tiny kitchen feels burdensome, suffocating. All at once, she’s shaky, yet feels as thuddingly heavy as stone.

  Marvena clears her throat. “Way you’re acting, I reckon Hildy was right about how you’d feel. Guess we hill folks is good if’n you need tracking, or help of some kind, but other’n that—”

  “Dammit, stop!”

  Shock widens Marvena’s eyes.

  “Hildy—Hildy is my…” Lily pauses, realizing as she looks at Marvena how much the woman has come to mean to her. So she amends her statement: “Hildy is one of my best friends. She could have told me. Told Mama. Believe me, we’d have both supported her against her own mother’s protests—and Merle’s.” Their rough treatment of Hildy the other night washes over her in a wave of shame. She hadn’t stood up for Hildy then. She’d been so weary from the long day. “We … we’ve always told each other ev-er-y-th-in-g.” Lily’s voice breaks on everything, cracking the word into six pieces. “Did you know she was engaged to my brother Roger?”

  Marvena bites her lower lip, slightly shakes her head.

  “Roger died in the Great War. Daniel was with him. Held him as he died.”

  Tears spring to Marvena’s eyes, and Lily blinks her own back, dashing her hand to her eyes. “Roger would have approved of Tom and Hildy. I know they had their differences, but by now, I think Daniel would have, too.”

  Lily drops her head to her hands. “Life is short. And cruel enough without borrowing trouble. If someone finds love, real love, they should take it. If Tom and Hildy love each other, they should be together. Why wouldn’t she trust me? Why?”

  A year and a half before, with the loss of Daniel, and all that came after, Lily had been impaled with grief. The wound set deep, rending her spirit, and all the tender emotions she’d used to pack the lesion now break forth, and Lily weeps in great gulping sobs that burst from her of their own volition. She wants to pack them back down again, into the gaping pain, but she cannot, and she’s swept away by the force of them gushing free.

  Marvena pulls her chair alongside Lily’s, puts her arms around her.

  Lily accepts her friend’s embrace for a long moment. Then she pulls away and rubs her eyes. When she brings her hands away, she sees him, there, behind Marvena. The silvery boy. She’d thought she had glimpsed him on the walk back here, even commented to Marvena, then when she looked back again, she laughed it off. She was so tired. But here he is again. He has followed her here, from Moonvale Hollow—but no. As he stands still and stares at her—not laughing, not chasing a ball—Lily understands. He’d never been a part of Moonvale Hollow. He’d been a part of her, all along.

  A haunt from another life—in which Daniel lived, and Lily was never sheriff, and a third child was born—a life she would never live, yet haunting the one she is trying to live.

  Lily frowns at him—why, why, are you haunting me? She blinks, rubs her eyes again, and in the next instant he is gone. As always, it is just as shocking when he melts away as when he appears, and Lily saddens at the mundane sights left in his absence, of mere checkered floor tile and icebox and pie safe.

  “Lily? You look like you seen a ghost.” Marvena hands her a handkerchief from her pocket. Lily takes it, blows her nose hard, and the great honking sound, bouncing around her tiny kitchen, strikes her as absurd. She laughs, and then Marvena does, too. When at last they’re spent of both tears and laughter, Marvena scoots back around to the other side of the table.

  “Lily,” she says gently, “if’n I’da known it’d hit you so hard, Hildy not telling you, I’da eased into it. Truth be told—there’s a reason you’ve been tired and some people, specially sensitive ones like Hildy, might be pulling back from you. You’re sad, Lily. It’s been more’n a year, the length of time people give for mourning, but there’s no clock running on sorrow.”

  Lily studies her friend’s face. “But you … your loss—”

  “Everyone’s different. Still, I can tell you that with Jurgis, I’ve found comfort”—Marvena’s voice creaks—“that lets me set aside the pain, now and again. You, though, you just keep hunkering down, waiting for the sorrow to stop, and I understand that. I do. But it’ll never stop, not entirely. You know that. All hunkering down does is give sorrow a way to burrow in, carve a hollow in your heart. Go too deep, and sorrow is all that will ever fill it.”

  Lily’s glass shakes as she picks it up, and she has to hold it in both hands to keep it steady, to take a sip. “All right. Hildy is in Rossville. Staying with you. In love with Tom. That is her business, though—and I’m guessing you didn’t come all this way to carry tales.”

  “You gotta know how she and Tom came to spark on one another. Hildy’s been tutoring some of the miners—and, and, folks like me—on their letters and numbers. In the schoolhouse, after regular hours, along with Olive Harding. Well, in tutoring Tom, she grew sweet on him.” Marvena gives a rueful smile. “Don’t see why—my brother’s nothing pretty to look at, and more stubborn than Guibo.”

  Lily offers a small smile. “Kin of yours? Stubborn?”

  Marvena snorts. “Anyway, what I’m getting at is that it turns out Hildy’s been keeping a secret for Olive and a man that Olive’s more than a little sweet on.” Marvena clears her throat. “The man is Clarence Broward.”

  Even as Lily stares at her in shock, Marvena’s gaze is unflinching.

  Lily feels flattened, as though all the air in the room has been pressed out. She draws in a great breath, as if coming up from underwater. Lily forces her mind to start again, calculating. This time, not the details of crime. The desires of the human heart.

  There had been talk that Mama had tried to keep from her, but that Lily had been aware of, about Lily marrying Daniel years ago—he was, after all, half Indian from his mother’s side; some would whisper savage—and had been a fierce boxer, a sport that was cheered and honored and yet used as a mark against him whenever it was convenient.

  Many would sneer at Jurgis and Marvena consorting without benefit of marriage.

  Certainly, the women of the club would be appalled at Hildy choosing a common miner like Tom over a business owner like Merle.

  But this? Olive and Clarence …

  Lily considers: the state of Ohio repealed its anti-miscegenation laws all the way back in 1887—the most recent state to do so. Mixed-race marriages have been legal here for nearly forty years but remain illegal in most states, and in recent years there have been two attempts to make a constitutional amendment to ban interracial marriages nationwide.

  So though Olive and Clarence could sanctify their relationship under law, that doesn’t mean that it will be treated with respect by everyone in the community. Simply by courting, they’re putting themselves in danger.

  Lily clears her throat. “Well. Lik
e I said. If someone finds real love, they should cherish it.” She’s learned the hard way how quickly such love can be ripped asunder.

  Marvena’s stiff expression relaxes, and she gives a small nod. Yet her expression becomes more grim. “Plenty don’t see it that way.”

  “Who all knows?”

  “I want to think just you, me, Hildy, and Tom. They’ve kept it well hidden—it was a surprise to me. Hildy says that Margaret Dyer came by the grocery and asked if she’d heard anything about Clarence and Olive—that’s what sent her back to Rossville a few days ago, to warn them. And Clarence and Olive have had a shock of their own.” Marvena sighs, as if the world and all its tangled troubles and rules and expectations have ensnared her very soul. “Seems they were out, meeting up, the same night as Thea Kincaide left the asylum and trekked to the Dyers’ old farmhouse in Moonvale. They spotted Thea, near the tunnel, so entranced by something that she stayed stock-still on the track, about to let herself get ran over. Clarence pulled her off. She snapped out of it, called him ‘John.’” Marvena pauses. “Lily? You all right?”

  Lily rubs her eyes. John—the escaped slave who Thea’s father had been hiding from bounty hunters, who had been accused of hanging Rupert from a tree on the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel, who Thea, as a little girl, testified against. Her testimony had been enough, at the time, for John to be found guilty—and to be hanged to death himself.

  Something had thrown Thea back into that time and place, sent her on the search for who knew what—and had been sufficient for Thea to think she’d found John alive again. But what?

  Maybe there would be a clue in the new set of clippings that Seth had dropped off?

  “Is that it?” Lily asks. “That Olive and Clarence spotted Thea, saved her from the train?”

  Marvena shakes her head, her mouth pulled taut in a grim line. “They followed her—worried about her. She was talking nonsense, and they kept asking her where her people were. And she led them up to the Dyers’ old property. When Clarence and Olive seen all them robed and hooded people—they took off, right quick. Not that anyone could blame them.”

  “So … so they’re witnesses? To the WKKK gathering on the Dyer property? To the fact that Thea was definitely there the night she died? I need to talk with them.”

  “Separately,” Marvena says. “And somewhere no one will see you talking with them. We have cover for them now—Hildy is taking over for Olive, and the story is she has taken ill. Hildy’s at Nana’s, and Olive’s with me, so she won’t take a fool notion to run after Clarence. He’s more level-headed, going on with work as usual, with Tom and Jurgis watching out for him. I’ll take back word.” Marvena stands.

  “I’ll drive you back,” Lily says.

  Marvena shakes her head. “Walked in rather than getting a ride so as not to stir wonderings about why I’m seeking out the sheriff again.”

  “Well, at least let me get you down the road a bit.”

  “To the turn on Kinship Road? Got a backwoods shortcut from there.”

  Marvena means the hairpin turn that’s right by Widow Gottschalk’s house as well as the house where Daniel had grown up.

  Lily swallows hard but nods. “Give me a second. I … I have something to drop off at the box outside the post office. Likely to forget to mail it tomorrow, with all I have going on.”

  Then she goes into the parlor, to her desk, pushes aside the new packet of clippings from Seth, and opens the rolltop. Her hands tremble a little as she regards the letter she’d written to Benjamin. Silly. She’s being silly. She starts to shut the letter away, but Marvena’s words come back: All hunkering down does is give sorrow a way to burrow in, carve a hollow in your heart. Go too deep, and sorrow is all that will ever fill it.

  Quickly, Lily picks up the letter and tucks it in her pocket.

  May 26, 1905

  Submitted by Mrs. Mabel Cooper

  Claude Kincaide, age 77, of Kinship, passed to be with the Lord on Saturday, May 27. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Bertha (Gregson) Kincaide, and two infant children.

  Mr. Kincaide is survived by his daughter, Mabel (Kincaide) Cooper, his son-in-law, Chester Cooper, and his granddaughter, Hildy Lee Cooper. He is also survived by many good friends at the Kinship Presbyterian Church.

  Born July 17, 1827, to James and Lee (Marshall) Kincaide, he grew up on a modest farm outside Athens, Ohio. He served in the Mexican-American War, and upon his return established his profitable business. A devout Christian and staunch supporter of the laws of our land, he served as deputy to Sheriff Thomas Langmore each year during the sheriff’s tenure, 1850–1858, and briefly considered his own run but decided to devote his life to his business, a blacksmith shop, to teaching Sunday School, and to hunting and fishing.

  Family will receive friends on Friday, June 2, 5:00–8:00 p.m., with funeral services on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. at the Kinship Presbyterian Church. Burial will immediately follow services on Saturday, at the Kinship Cemetery. A supper will be held in the community room of the Kinship Presbyterian Church.

  June 4, 1905

  Callie’s Corner

  Tidbits from Around Kinship

  —Mrs. Hugh Laney reports that she has more strawberries than she knows what to do with, and is willing to barter for eggs, as a fox got several of her hens earlier this year and her remaining hens haven’t been quite right since.

  —The Methodist Church Quilting Circle, which meets each Tuesday afternoon, is collecting clothing and household linens which are beyond repair but still good enough for quilting squares, as they begin work on baby quilts for new mothers this coming Christmas.

  —We grieved the passing of Mr. Claude Kincaide a few weeks ago, but would be derelict to the duties of this column if we did not note that his funeral drew several mourners from out of town, including former sheriff Thomas Langmore, who served Bronwyn County from 1850 to 1858. Mr. Langmore, who now lives with his son and daughter-in-law in Columbus, is now, we are sorry to report, mostly infirm and relegated to a wheelchair. He spoke to no one while here, and when asked why the sheriff—who moved to Columbus as soon as his tenure was complete in 1858, according to Mrs. Arnold Greystone (my next-door neighbor)—would care to make the surely arduous journey for this particular funeral when he has not visited Kinship since leaving, Mr. Langmore’s son’s only reply was to say he did not know, but it was an ardent wish of his father and he felt it was his obligation to fulfill any wishes of his failing father that he could.

  A more surprising and colorful attendee at the service was a woman, bedecked in a resplendent burgundy dress with black lace trimmings, and the most ostentatious matching hat ever witnessed atop a head anywhere in Bronwyn County—complete with ostrich feathers!

  The woman was none other than Thea Kincaide Dyer, daughter of Rupert Kincaide, Claude’s brother, though neither was mentioned in Mr. Claude Kincaide’s obituary. I learned her identity by questioning her after the funeral service. She stated that she had learned of the passing only because, after coming into “some wealth,” she had contacted an “anonymous friend” and pre-paid said friend a “handsome sum” to send a telegram should any of her Kincaide kin pass away. She was resolute in not divulging who the friend is, and no one I’ve talked to has owned up to being the friend or having a clue who the friend might be. In any case, upon learning of his passing, she immediately made the long train trip from New York City to Cincinnati to Kinship. I asked her about her marital status and children and what she’s done with her life since leaving Bronwyn County. She demurred, and asked if I could guess her age. I declined to take on such a gauche game, though she must surely be in the matronly range, and commented that she looks youthful and has retained a younger woman’s figure. She then boasted that it is to her advantage to have a youthful visage and form that suggests a younger age so she is able to continue the works she loves, dancing in a burlesque show, which she said is like a variety show, but is soon to marry the show’s producer and move to Paris, France.


  What a bold life for Miss Thea Kincaide Dyer—who, I’ve since learned, was last seen in Kinship in a trial of an escaped slave accused of murdering her father, Rupert Edward Kincaide, who, it was alleged, was an abolitionist. As a seven-year-old, Miss Thea—as she asked me to refer to her upon learning of my columnist duties—identified an escaped slave as her father’s attacker, and then lived with her mother as in-home caretakers of the Dyer family in Moonvale Hollow Village; after Mrs. Dyer passed away due to complications bearing a late-in-life baby, the Widow Kincaide married Mr. Dyer, with both Miss Thea and her mother taking the Dyer last name. Miss Thea ran away when she was seventeen years old. She was quite vague as to the details following this shocking choice.

  When asked why she would return now for her uncle’s funeral, Miss Thea only gave an enigmatic smile, but she was observed later calling upon the grieving daughter, Mrs. Mabel (Kincaide) Cooper, who is a first cousin to Miss Thea, so we can only assume that Miss Thea never lost her love for the region of her birth, and perhaps regrets living so far away, and upon learning of the death of her uncle wished to be welcomed back to the bosom of her remaining family.

  June 11, 1905

  Callie’s Corner

  Tidbits from Around Kinship

  —I must begin by first apologizing to any that I may have offended by referencing the brazen lifestyle of Miss Thea Kincaide Dyer in last week’s column. My dear husband explained to me just what “burlesque” might entail in a big city like New York, and my editor promises to more carefully review all items from his correspondents. (Note: The newspaper is short staffed, due to Mr. Baer moving to Cincinnati for a position at the Post.) What’s more, Mrs. Mabel Cooper corrected my assumption that Miss Thea was warmly welcomed. Why, given her improper choices as a young lady (she ran away with a traveling pots-and-pans salesman at the start of her journey to New York!) and her scandalous lifestyle even now as a fifty-five-year-old woman, not a drop of tea or a single biscuit was served, Mrs. Cooper assures me. As to the motivation for the return, Mrs. Cooper theorizes that Miss Thea was hoping to inherit in order to help fund her follies, and states that not only is this not the case, but that Miss Thea serves as an example—which Mrs. Cooper uses if needed with her daughter, though Hildy is so biddable it’s rarely required—of what happens if a child is not brought up properly, and goes astray.