When Brother and Daddy were finally ready to go, Brother swung open the front door and rushed out into a choke of cloud caused by the fire heating the wet ground. Daddy shrugged into his peacoat, grimacing with pain. When he got back home, I told him, Auntie would make him a remedy to get the damp out of his bones. “Okay, Daddy?” I said.
But Daddy said nothing. His eyes were that icy blue they got when they were looking off to that other place, the place that turned him empty inside. The place he thought he could fill with dice and whisky.
When he stepped out onto the porch, he turned first one direction, then another, squinting into the gathering fog like something was out there to get him. Brother beckoned from where he stood near one of the boreholes in the street, the long pipe smoking as it vented out of the ground. Brother waved his little knit hat that he’d crushed in his hand, but Daddy jogged down the steps, hands thrust deep into his coat pockets, and walked away from him.
Ma thrust her head over my shoulder and yelled, “And pick up some milk for god’s sake,” but her words sunk in the heavy air. Sighing the way she always did before heading off to the mill, she tilted her head. Gleaming in her eyes was something as timid as a baby deer. Every now and then the shy, tender part of her surfaced. “I know you want to go reading with Auntie,” Ma said to me. “But don’t forget your chores. Don’t go having no fun first.”
“Yes, Ma,” I said, but as soon as the door closed behind her, I headed to the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea. When me and Auntie were alone together, before we settled down to reading, we always sipped a cup of tea and Auntie told me things she’d never told anyone else.
That morning me and Auntie sat on the sofa and sipped a peppermint tea that we’d picked and dried ourselves. “Listen now,” Auntie said. “Remember our family picnics at Culver Lake? And the afternoons we all spent ice-skating on Adam’s pond? Weren’t they fun?”
I nodded. Auntie knew I loved it when Ma and Brother and me hunted crayfish along the lakeshore or when Daddy and I skated backwards across the pond with Ma doing figure eights around us.
Auntie put a finger to her chin and looked off toward the window. From the way she opened and shut her mouth several times I could tell she was searching for the right words. “And then there were all the times when something good happened out of the blue. Like when your ma found fifty dollars just lying on the ground or when your poem was chosen best in class. You know what I mean? If you only think about what’s bad, well then, life’s bad. You see what I’m saying?”
I smiled and stirred my tea, tapping the spoon dry on the edge of the cup. I had no idea what Auntie was getting at, but I always wished to please her. I lifted the cup to my mouth.
Auntie continued, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though both my boys were killed, one on Okinawa, the other in the mines, I don’t believe in the family curse.”
Shocked by her words, I gulped the tea, burning my tongue. The curse was as real and basic as sunlight or water. I couldn’t imagine our lives without it. Scalded, my tongue felt puffy as I said, “How can you say that, Auntie?”
“There isn’t a family curse,” Auntie explained. “Or that’s not exactly what I mean. There is one. But it’s not out there,” she said, pointing out the window. “It’s in here.” She aimed a thick, slightly crooked finger at me and prodded my chest.
“Inside me?” I said, pulling at the cable knit of my sweater as if the curse was hiding somewhere underneath my clothes.
Auntie sighed. “Not just you. Inside each one of us. You see we make—” But Auntie was cut off by an explosion deep in the ground and she completed her thought by saying something in Ukrainian that I knew was a bad word because she’d said it before and would never tell me what it meant. The explosions were something we’d gotten used to because they happened sometimes in winter when the outlets the fire used for air froze over, but Auntie was clearly thinking about the damage the explosion might have caused. She stood and said she’d check on the shed that, with each explosion since Christmas, had started tilting farther toward the left, slowly sinking like an absurd shed-ship into the ground. I didn’t see what the bother was. It was an ugly shed and we didn’t even store anything worthwhile in it, but I’d learned not to stop Auntie from checking on it. That crumpling old shack meant something to her.
Not bothering with a coat, Auntie tramped through the kitchen and banged open the porch door. Through the little window over the sink I watched her walk the gravel path. Flakes of snow so small they resembled ash wafted down around her. I spread some of Auntie’s elderberry jam on a heel of bread and stood at the counter working my jaw hard to chew it. When I next glanced out the window, the snow had so thickened the fog that I couldn’t see a thing. Absently I began peeling the potatoes Auntie and I had planned to boil for supper. I’d been reading a book about Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII, who was said to have had an extra finger. I wondered if she’d used that extra finger for a special purpose, like playing the harp or picking locks, and I tried to picture the various ways it might have grown out of her hand—directly out the side or stuck like a twin to her pinky. I reasoned that if I were a king an extra finger would interest me since I’d probably be bored by everything ordinary. It wasn’t until I’d nearly finished peeling the potatoes that I realized Auntie hadn’t returned.
“Auntie?” I shouted through the sliver of screen visible where the window was open. There was no answer. The flecks of snow had thickened to flakes that had a tinge of yellow to them. The color was odd and pretty all at once and I couldn’t decide if it reminded me of something sick or of something lit up just barely by sun. Dying light, I decided, remembering a poem Auntie had read to me. And then I got afraid.
Slowly I made my way onto the sunporch. With just a push on the back door, it opened wide and I gagged on the sulfur smell the fire sometimes caused. I stared toward the corner of the yard where the shed stood, but the air was so steamy I could only see a few feet in front of me. Fear cracked my voice as I called, “Auntie? I can’t see you. Auntie?”
Cautiously I took first one step, then another, the fog growing hotter. “Auntie?” I called again, my voice now a squeak. I took a few more steps and then just stood there gawking at the gaping hole where the corner of the yard used to be. For what seemed like forever I stood there silent, when I could have been shouting for help, when I could have been saving Auntie.
It wasn’t until flames burst up from the pit that the first scream escaped my throat. I screamed to Auntie, I screamed to the fire. I screamed so that God would have to hear, would have to listen.
I don’t know for how long I stood there, but by the time a fireman picked me up, my mouth was as dry as dust and hardly any sound came out. “She’s gone,” he said. “The ground gave way.” He carried me out the alley to the front yard, my skin singed from the smoke, my eyes stinging.
“My fault,” I whimpered.
“No,” he said. “There was nothing you could do. Hush now.”
But I knew it was my fault. Already I knew. It was my fault because Auntie had told me the curse’s secret—that it lived inside each one of us—and for that the curse had taken her away.
Two
Our lives were empty with Auntie gone. We felt the loss of her in everything and the whole world seemed more fragile and tender because of it. We rarely spoke of her though, which Daddy said was the Irish way. “If you talk about what’s sad, all you do is make yourself sadder,” he explained and so we didn’t talk. We took what we could carry out of the house when the firemen let us inside to get what we needed (they wouldn’t let us live there anymore because the ground was too unstable), and I think in a way it was worse having the house still standing there, filled with the memories and familiar musty smells that had made it our home. I guess we felt that we were as boarded up and condemned as it was.
“We walk on fire or air,” Daddy would say when he saw the sadness dragging on us. This was something he told
us whenever fate or the curse struck a blow. He meant it to prove that the hollowed out ground that either burned with flames or sagged into nothingness had given us a kind of magic—had made us able to survive what would kill anyone else.
“Tall tale-telling,” Ma would call it, but she always said it with a smile and telling tall tales was another part of the Irish way. Though none of us had ever stepped foot in Ireland. But as Ma said, “Time sharpens some stuff.” And I guess over the years of us living in America time had honed the bits still left Irish. I hoped time would do the same to my memories of Auntie until every detail about her was as clear and sharp as cut glass.
In the weeks after losing Auntie we lived in a hotel that the Red Cross paid for. We weren’t the only family there who’d been displaced by the fire but we were the only ones who still slept with the window open, even though we were far on the other side of town, away from Auntie’s house and the fire burning beneath the fields.
Ma and Daddy slept in the bed, and me and Brother slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Sometimes Daddy switched with me or Brother and he took the sleeping bag and one of us would sleep with Ma. My nights with Ma were the ones I liked least of all. Ma slept like a wild cat, clawing at the sheets, breathing in ferocious huffs. Sometimes I’d wake with scratches.
From time to time, me, Ma and Brother would go look at the house. Though it wasn’t yet spring, all the daffodils and tulips Auntie had planted years before had sprung up from the heat in the ground and had colored the yard red and yellow. I remember the afternoon when we found two kittens playing on the front lawn. The kittens were mangy gray matted things, but they romped around, enjoying a rain puddle like there was nothing better in the world. I think it was right then, watching those kittens play, that Ma decided to accept Gram and Gramp’s offer for us to go live with them. Something in Ma just kind of gave way and she leaned against the fence like she’d fall down without it. The usual tightness around her mouth softened and I guessed that was probably the closest Ma ever got to surrender. She didn’t say anything but Brother and I both understood what had happened. We’d soon live in a house again and not a hotel room with a shared bathroom. We’d soon live in a town far, far away from the place that held our loss of Auntie.
That night after dinner at the Y, Daddy made his usual plea to go live with his parents and Ma acted like she was still dead set against it, once again referring to the fight she and Gram had had five years ago when they both declared they’d never speak to each other for the rest of their lives.
All I knew about that fight was that it concerned Gram’s grandma’s ring, a ring Gram had promised to give Ma on Ma and Daddy’s wedding day but when the day of the wedding came, Gram said she couldn’t find it. Ma wound up with a plain old silver ring as a wedding band and whenever she could, she’d wiggle that ring at Daddy saying she’d never be respectable till she had a proper wedding band. “Fancy, Adrian, with diamond chips. You know the type I mean.”
As we sat at one of those long cafeteria tables at the Y chowing on franks and beans, Ma said, “I swore I’d never go in that woman’s house again. Now what kind of fool would I look going back on my word?”
Ma turned to straddle the bench so Brother could sit between her legs. I sat next to Daddy. He had his good arm around my shoulder so I could lean against his chest. He didn’t answer Ma. Sometimes your best offense against her was saying nothing at all.
“Even if I did forgive that old bat,” Ma said, eyes narrowing, “why go to them? They got their own fire, don’t they?”
Brother and I met eyes and smothered smiles. For Ma to even mention going meant she’d already made up her mind and was just making Daddy work for it.
“Who around here doesn’t have a fire?” Daddy said and Ma couldn’t answer. There were coal mine fires burning all across the state. The town of Laurelton had to just pick up and move with nothing left of the old town but some paved streets and stone foundations. Daddy added, “The Red Cross can’t take care of us forever.”
“No,” Ma quipped. “That’s my job, ain’t it?”
Daddy flinched at her cruel tongue and talked about how we couldn’t wait for the government to give us money for Auntie’s house. “That could take months, maybe even years. You know that. And it won’t be what the house is worth. Hell, how much could it be worth with a fire pit as a backyard?”
Ma talked a blue streak about the factories she’d heard were hiring in places like Stroudsburg and Mechanicsville. “We got options. That’s alls I’m saying. Heck, I still got my job at the mill. Eventually we could save enough to rent somewheres.”
“Children need a home, Lores,” Daddy said and Ma squinted the way she did whenever something hurt her. She stroked Brother’s hair, which was usually a wispy strawberry, but it hadn’t been washed in so long that it just sort of stuck a greasy brown to his head.
“Don’t worry, Adrian,” she said. “I’ll go and I won’t say another thing about it, but don’t try and pretend we’re going ’cause we got to. We both know you been dying to go back there ever since we left. To the place where it all happened, where it all went wrong.”
“Nah,” Daddy said, his expression settling into the one he used when Ma said something too crazy to bother with. “You just watch, Lores,” he said. “I’ll give Mother a talking-to. Everyone will be nice.” He took his arm from around me to reach across the table and touch Ma. “Everyone,” he added and clamped his jaw to remind us of what he could be like.
By the following day Daddy had called Gram and the plan was set for us to leave Centrereach by the start of the upcoming week. Brother and I didn’t mind leaving so much because the fire had already forced a dozen of our classmates to move and it made us feel better to be the leavers for a change rather than the ones left behind. Sometimes, though, when I’d recall the words Ma said about Daddy wanting to return to the place where it all went wrong, I’d get the kind of edginess I felt whenever the curse was near. It was then I’d occupy myself telling tall tales about Gramp and Gram to Brother.
I’d tell him how Gramp had been mining since he was a boy and that the black chunks he coughed up were the coal bits he’d held inside him for all those years. “Which just proves you can’t escape your past,” I’d say, repeating something Auntie used to say, “it chooses when to escape you.”
I’d tell him that during World War I Gramp had been a sniper sneaking up on Germans and shooting them in the eye. That he’d slashed tires and people’s faces and been locked up in the county jail, all in revenge for wrongs against fellow miners or himself. Then with my own hands I’d pretend-snap a chicken’s neck and describe what Gram could do to various fowl. The more I spoke the more I scared Brother and the more comforted I felt.
“Come on,” I said, tickling him while Ma and Daddy tried to pack all we owned into the car’s trunk. “We want to go, remember? We won’t have to share the bathroom with strangers and we’ll have our own beds to sleep in.”
Brother’s eyes clouded with doubt. He folded his arms. “Want home,” was all he said, seeing straight through to what each of us felt.
* * *
Barrendale, Pennsylvania, where Gram and Gramp lived, was nearly seventy miles northeast of Centrereach and as far as Ma was concerned, was a place as horrible as it sounded. The last time we’d been there Brother had been so young he didn’t have any memory of it. I don’t know if that made it easier on him or harder. As it was, I didn’t remember much but a street in the town that was as steep as a mountain and a hutch in Gram and Gramp’s living room that was filled with sparkling things I wasn’t allowed to touch. Gram and Gramp were merely shadowy figures who said hardly any words to me at all.
As Daddy took Brother to the bathroom one last time, Ma told me, “Your daddy could stand on his head and juggle and Gramp wouldn’t even notice or care. And that mother of his! You know what she said when Daddy’s brother died?” Ma had repeated Gram’s words numerous times but I knew she wanted me to listen fresh, so I
said, “What, Ma?”
“‘Shame the good one died.’ That’s what she said. Can you believe it? His own mother! And still your daddy wants to go back there. Worse, I think that’s why he wants to go back. Because they don’t care. Somehow he likes that.” Ma pressed her lips together and bounced her head as if she’d just proved Daddy was nuts.
On the way out of town we stopped by Auntie’s house and Ma said, “Just don’t even think about it.” And we knew she was referring not only to Auntie, but our move to Barrendale and everything we’d had to leave behind. “Auntie would want us to keep our spirits up. Both you kids know that. So don’t go worrying about the fire they got in Barrendale.” Ma turned to shake her finger at us. “Ever hear how lightning don’t strike twice? Well fire don’t neither.”
But I knew lightning could strike twice; it could strike hundreds of times in the same place. It struck the water tower in Centrereach over and over.
“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” Daddy sang. “Come on,” he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror, pleading with me to help lift everyone’s spirits. I joined in with “Climbing high into the sun.” Daddy’s next glance in the mirror was grateful and approving and we smiled at each other in our private, special way. Then we all sang “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as we watched the Pennsylvania countryside go from factories and stores to roly-poly countryside that went on for as far as the eye could see. As we got closer to Barrendale the road cut through high jagged walls of rock that were layered and raw and stuck all over with icicles, telling you just how ancient this countryside really was.
The Hollow Ground: A Novel Page 2
