The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  That night Ma had me pray extra hard to her dead ma and to Auntie. “Somehow we got to get out of here. Somehow we got to figure a way.” And I guess the prayers I said for Ma were answered because less than a week later Ma had something happen she’d been waiting for all her life.

  It was a Saturday. On Saturday mornings Ma and Gram worked a half day at the mill and I had a list of chores to do while they were gone. I hated doing them because no matter how hard I tried, Gram was never happy with what I did. There was always some streak she could find on the windows or floor. A powder of dust on this or that molding or lamp shade. But all the drilling and flushing only blocks from the house made it impossible to keep things clean, as Gram herself had admitted the first day we’d arrived. “She ain’t a miracle worker,” Ma would say and Gram would say, “You got that right!”

  In addition to basic cleaning, Gram also had me help with house maintenance and repairs. She had me cut up old dungarees so that we could go on the roof and patch it by spreading tar over the denim pieces. Together we removed the wooden window screens and replaced them with wooden storm windows. We painted the front railing, hammered down the loose nails on the porch stoop and changed the washers in the tub and faucets.

  “See, girl,” Gram liked to tell me. “With what I’m teachin’ you, you don’t need a man. In fact you don’t need no one. I never let a sick husband or this hump”—she jabbed her thumb toward her back—“stop me from anything. That’s somethin’ your ma could use to learn.” Gram would repeat this lecture to me often, ending it with a smack between the shoulder blades and a warning to stand up straight. Gram was convinced that she’d gotten her hump from slouching because her mother had made fun of her so much. “But what did Mama know about being a mama, comin’ from an orphanage and all? You remember that too.” And Gram would give me this telling look that I didn’t quite understand and then inevitably complain about how haphazardly I’d washed the windows or hung the curtains.

  Ma barely seemed to notice Gram’s complaints about my work and I’d learned not to bother complaining to Ma about Gram’s chores either. Once when I’d whined that the dust rags Gram gave me were either Gramp’s old drawers or hankies, Ma said I was lucky that was my only problem and then she’d tell me how in the orphanage the nuns would make you sit in a corner with a dunce cap on if you didn’t do your chores to their standard. When she’d talk about wearing that cap her face would glow with hate as if a bright hot light had been turned on inside her. I could tell Ma considered underdrawers and hankies luxury dust rags and thought I was just acting spoiled thinking otherwise.

  That particular Saturday, by the time Ma came home, I’d finished my chores and Brother and I were sitting out on the side porch enjoying the spring weather. Saturdays were especially nice because there was no drilling or blasting. You could actually hear the breeze and the birdcalls and it was like you only right then realized you’d been missing them all week, which crazy as it sounded, made you miss them more. Brother was busy flipping through one of his favorite Superman comics and I was reading a book about Joan of Arc, eager to get to the part where she burned at the stake.

  I was so into the book that I didn’t even hear Ma come in the porch door. She walked in smoking and when she saw me she winked and started singing, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Me and Brother, surprised by Ma’s good mood, stole a glance at each other. Ma’s smile didn’t even quiver when Gram came in and yelled at Ma to put out her cigarette. Gram took one last puff on her own cigarette before smashing it out in a glass plate she used as an ashtray. Ma took a long slow drag as she happily rolled her eyes at me.

  “Rollin’ your eyes like a little kid!” Gram proclaimed.

  “I’ll hold my tongue out of respect, old lady,” Ma said.

  “Fine with me. You got nothin’ worthwhile to say anyways.”

  “Not to you,” Ma said, her voice relaxed and playful, the way I hadn’t heard it in years, and for some reason or other that unsettled something inside me.

  Gram walked around the porch, inspecting my shabby dusting job. She asked how much brains it took to wipe up some dirt.

  “What’s a little dust?” Ma said, smashing out her cigarette. “Live a little, old lady. I ain’t afraid of you.”

  “’Fraid of me?” Gram said. “Now look at what a fool you sound, Dolores. I’m talkin’ about how to teach your child to ’complish a task.”

  “Complish shmomplish,” Ma said and then we heard a sound like a cat hissing coming from somewhere on the front walk. We all turned toward the window and saw standing out between the two ash trees the crazy old lady who Gram had told us numerous times to ignore.

  “What’s she up to now?” Gram said, stepping behind an aspidistra plant and peering between its large leaves.

  “Who cares?” Ma said, not even glancing toward the window.

  The old lady was staring at the house and slowly shaking her head from side to side. Her hair looked like she’d cut it herself and its uneven gray locks were crushed where she must have slept on them. Her dress appeared to be stained with gravy, or something worse.

  Brother and I knelt on our chairs, hands on the windowsill, leaning forward.

  “Go away!” Brother shouted.

  “Shhh,” Gram commanded from where she stood frozen behind the plant. “Don’t go ’couragin’ her. Woman’s crazier than a loon. Her son goes killin’ himself and she blames us. When people can’t find nobody else to blame they blame us. You kids remember that. We’re what’s called escape goats.”

  Brother’s face went red with anger but I found myself studying the old woman with newfound fascination. I’d always known about our own bad luck, but I couldn’t get over other people blaming us for theirs.

  Ma tapped me on the shoulder and waved at me to follow her into the kitchen. From her purse she pulled out a folded page of newspaper. She sat down at the table and whispered, “Here’s our sign. Right here we got one. This is it.”

  “What are you whisperin’ about?” Gram demanded, clomping into the kitchen. The hump pushed her weight forward and made her heavy on her feet.

  “Don’t you worry about it,” Ma said. “Don’t concern you.”

  But of course those words taunted Gram into peering over Ma’s shoulder to see what was going on because as far as Gram was concerned anything happening under the roof of that house did concern her.

  Ma pointed at a photo of a man and boy above a caption that read BOY HIT BY CAR SURVIVES UNSCATHED. I looked from the photo to Ma’s face, which had turned as shiny and pinkish as a pearl. The tip of her tongue sawed her chipped eyetooth. You could feel the expectation all bristly on her.

  “Can’t you tell?” she asked.

  “What on earth there to tell?” Gram said.

  Ma raised her eyebrows at me, doing her best to pretend that Gram wasn’t there.

  I looked back at the photo again and said, “I guess the little boy looks like Brother.”

  Ma nodded, all justified by my answer. Then she pointed at the kid’s daddy and said to Gram, “Know who that is? That’s my little brother. Told you I’d find him. You said I never would but I told you.” Ma said this like it was Gram herself who sent Ma to the orphanage all those years ago, and not Ma’s daddy’s new wife.

  Ma pointed at the name, JEROME CORCORAN, below the photo and her voice got hushed like she was pointing at something sacred that belonged in the church. “And that’s my real last name. The way it was before the orphanage changed it to Coran. Can’t believe I forgot it. All these years it was right there, at the tip of my brain.”

  Ma’s eyes turned golden, like the creek water with sun on it. Her gaze swerved up and around my face, searching for something.

  “Cors-or-ran,” I said, feeling Ma’s real name settle inside us.

  “Cork-run,” Ma corrected.

  Gram leaned further over Ma’s shoulder and squinted. “Just ’cause he looks like John Patrick don’t mean he’s your brother.”

 
; When Brother heard his name, he tromped over, looked at the photo and said the boy looked “runty” which was a word he’d picked up from Mr. Williamson, our neighbor across the street, who’d drowned the runt of his basset hound’s litter.

  “I tell you I remember the name,” Ma said. “Now that I seen it, I remember it. Corkrun,” she said and then carefully repeated, “Cork-run.”

  “Well, so what if it is him?” Gram said, stepping back and eying Brother who had his arm elbow deep in the cookie jar. “What you ’spect to happen if you find him?”

  Ma didn’t answer. She pushed back her chair and jostled me out the front door with Gram shouting after us, “Really, Dolores. What you ’spect to happen? Remember, once a thing’s done, you can’t take it back. Think, Dolores. Think before you do somethin’ you’ll regret.”

  Quickly we reached the point in the road where it turned onto the long crooked hill down to town. We were walking so fast we were practically at a skip.

  “I forgot what he looked like too,” Ma said. “But don’t he look just like John Patrick? His name’s Jerry, short for Jerome. I remembered that even though what I called him was Bropey. I used to cry at night, waiting for him to save me from the orphanage. But he was too little. Four or five when they sent me away.”

  Ma stopped short and jabbed at the tears on her cheeks with the heel of her palm. “Know what that bitch said to my daddy? ‘The boy will be useful.’ I heard her say it. And my own daddy let her take me away. Can you imagine a daddy doing such a thing? As bad as your father is—”

  She didn’t finish that sentence and we walked in silence to the library where Ma made a beeline for the phone books. In the Allentown phone book she found a Jerome Corcoran. She got change from the librarian and dropped dime after dime into the pay phone outside the library, telling me to dial the number because she was too afraid she’d do it wrong.

  Slowly I dialed, double- and triple-checking each number to make sure I had it right. It didn’t help that each time I let the dial roll back into place, Ma made a sound high up in her throat like a wounded animal. Eventually I completed all the numbers and me and Ma waited, staring into each other’s eyes. Then Ma said, “Hello? Bropey?” I’d never heard her voice so broken and sad before. “Bropey?” she cried. “That you?”

  But as Ma spoke I heard behind her words Gram’s words: Once a thing’s done, you can’t take it back.

  Through the phone booth’s glass door I stared intently at the street as if by concentration alone I could control where we were headed.

  Seven

  Once a week I accompanied Ma to the pay phone outside the library where she’d call Uncle Jerry collect. My job was to come and stand guard. Ma never said who I was supposed to be guarding her from but I’d understood, without being able to put it into words, that those phone calls were as valuable to Ma as gold or treasure. While Ma stood there talking to Uncle Jerry, she felt like her words needed protection, even though mostly all she said was, “Yeah? That right? Don’t say?”

  Still, it wouldn’t be long before Ma would cry out, “Oh, but this must be costing you a fortune!” And then she’d hang up, promising to call again the following week. Afterward me and Ma would split a vanilla cream soda at the drugstore and Ma’s face would get all wistful and soft and I’d pray all the harder to Ma’s dead ma and to Auntie that Ma would stay as sweet as this forever.

  The mornings broke cool but the afternoons broiled to summer fast and the school year ended early due to the heat. Mrs. Schmidt, our history teacher, actually wept with joy, and that’s the first time us kids realized that going to school in the fire zone was even more miserable for the teachers than it was for us. The heat did something to Ma too. As soon as we were out of school she declared that she deserved time to herself. She said “time to herself” like it was a right signed into the Constitution that she’d been denied. So on Saturday afternoons when Ma got home from the mill, Daddy would take me and Brother out of the house so Ma could be free to do what she wanted. I loved this time with Daddy because it reminded me of the “exploring walks” Daddy and me used to go on when we first moved to Barrendale. First we’d wander around the fire zone, passing by blocks where nearly every house stood empty, to blocks where the houses were so well-kept you could believe the rumors that there was no fire and the plan to dig it out was just a conspiracy for the coal company to get the coal cheap.

  As a treat Daddy would take us into the air-conditioned space of Kreshner’s where he’d dawdle, picking this or that up, to make it clear to Mr. Wicket that he’d returned and was not going to buy a thing.

  Those afternoons with Daddy always ended at a bar, usually The Shaft. Me and Brother didn’t mind it too bad though because Daddy never drank so much that he needed breath mints and he’d always buy me and Brother a root beer or a Coke.

  The Shaft was deep in the fire zone, which meant that most of the houses around it were still standing. It was the houses on the edge of the zone that needed to be wrecked first since the trenches were intended to stop the fire from spreading. In those days at the bar the men mostly talked about the fire. They discussed the layout of the mine shafts and how they expected the fire to burn. They talked about how much money the dig out would cost and the impossibility to move anywhere else on the amount of money they’d get for their houses. They talked about the dangers of black damp and other hazards the fire caused and eventually they’d talk about Cuba and Russia and space flight and which Phillies players they thought were worth their salt.

  No matter what they talked about the men always listened to what Daddy said like he was someone important. That’s what struck me the most about those afternoons, seeing Daddy being admired the way I always knew he ought to be.

  “Smartest in the class, Adrian. That was you,” Joe, the bartender, liked to say. Joe always said something nice about Gramp too. One day he talked about the man Gramp had beaten up for sending the men into the mines the day of the disaster. “Broke a beer bottle right across his face,” Joe said with as much excitement as if Gramp had done it only days ago and not a million years ago before I was even born. “That bastard never saw out of that eye again,” he added. “Right? Right? Am I right?”

  Daddy hesitated before he agreed and from the way his eyes got all distant I could tell he was thinking about something else.

  “What did Gramp do?” Brother asked as he tried to jam a toy car in his ear to see if it would come out his nose.

  “Stop that,” I said, feeling a stab of pain, remorse I guess. Auntie had made me promise multiple times to take care of my little brother, and his not knowing about the family history I took as proof of my neglect. “He beat up the fire boss, Jack Novak,” I said in a low voice. Jack Novak was a name I’d never said out loud before, though I’d said it in my head countless times, enjoying the rhyme. My tongue got heavy saying it out loud, as if I’d just spoken a secret or a curse word.

  Intrigued, Brother paused with the car pressed up to his ear. I continued, “Gramp beat him up to get him back for sending everyone into a broken mine shaft. For killing Uncle Frank. For letting him get killed in a shaft that the fire boss knew was dangerous. Gramp was protecting us, all the miners, by letting those mine owners know they had to respect us. They had to treat us right.”

  “So he killed him?” Brother’s eyes narrowed and his mouth opened slightly like he wanted to taste the words I spoke.

  “No,” I said. “But I guess he was trying to.” I took the car from Brother’s hand, bothered that I’d never before thought that Gramp might have wanted to actually kill the man.

  On those Saturday afternoons there weren’t only men in The Shaft. Often there was a woman named Star, though Star wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Beatrice Kittering. She was called Star because she always wore a star pendant around her neck that she liked to hold and rub between her thumb and forefinger as if good luck or a genie might spring from it. Her long neck and large bulging gray eyes gave her a crazed starved
look that reminded me of the goldfish we’d had at Auntie’s that froze one January morning in their bowl.

  Star had a way of leaning in toward Daddy when she spoke that I didn’t like. What I did like though was that, at least in the beginning, Daddy didn’t pay her any mind. The first time I met her she said, “Why, when I was your age, I had such a crush on your uncle Frank. Remember that, Adrian?”

  “Followed him around like a dog,” Daddy said into his beer.

  “Like a little puppy,” she agreed. “Wasn’t till I was a little bit older I also got a crush on you, Adrian.”

  I pushed up against Daddy’s knee so that I could sit with my head resting on his shoulder and I asked Daddy if we could bring an ice-cream cone home to Ma. Daddy cuddled me with his bad arm and kissed me on the side of the head.

  Star took a slow sip from her glass of beer. “So, what brings you back to Barrendale, Adrian?

  “Dad took a turn for the worse,” Daddy said, nudging me back toward Brother.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said, rubbing her pendant and lowering her eyes so Daddy couldn’t see what thoughts had floated up into them.

  Sometimes Star was there alone, sometimes she was with Bear. Like Star, Bear didn’t look anything like his name. He was skinny and barely taller than me, but he had a tattoo of a bear on his bicep. On his elbows were also tattoos but those were of webs, which Daddy said meant he’d been in jail. Daddy said this with a note of respect but there was an edge to his voice too. Gramp had been in and out of jail, sticking up for himself or the miners by busting up some place or person. “Disorderly conduct” this was called, but Daddy said there was nothing disorderly about sticking up for what’s right. Sometimes Star would hang all over Bear and sometimes she’d act real cool to him and sit on the other side of the bar and tell Joe to tell Bear that she wasn’t going to talk to him for the rest of the afternoon.

  One of those Saturday afternoons Star offered Brother some Mary Jane candies she’d pulled from her purse. When Brother reached for one she cuddled him up to her breasts and said how she hoped one day to have one as cute as this. Brother took the hug for about three seconds and then shoved off of her with a push.