“Who?” I said, standing up and stepping toward him. Marisol said my name as a form of plea and I sat back down, wondering what she could possibly see in such a jerk as Billy. “Who?” I said again.
“Lots of people,” Eddie said. He nodded his chin at me. “Your turn.”
I leaned down and spun the bottle, hoping it would land on Eddie and not hoping it would land on Eddie. If it landed on him I’d surprise everyone by not daring him to so much as hold my hand. I had my pride. I’d make him tell me who was spreading those lies about Gramp.
The bottle stopped slightly to the side of Eddie. “Truth or dare?” I asked him.
“Dare.”
I tongued the back of my teeth like I could find a good dare stuck between them. Billy made kissy-kissy noises and Eddie grunted again and looked up at the ceiling.
“Shut up,” Marisol said and the burn off Billy’s teasing eased.
I looked off toward the darkness beyond Eddie and my inner eye lit with visions of crystal caves and lacey fossils of creatures no one ever knew existed. I dared Eddie to walk a hundred feet down the shaft and when he readily agreed, I said I wanted to come with him.
“No hankie-panky you two,” Billy said.
“Jesus,” Eddie said and he swiped up his flashlight and started down the shaft with me trailing him. Then I heard a slap and Marisol playfully say, “Behave. That’s off-limits.”
“What about here?” Billy said.
“Jesus,” Eddie said again.
I was embarrassed by what Marisol was doing and by what Eddie clearly did not want to do with me, but I was also excited by the thought of going deeper into the mine. Eddie moved deftly into the darkness and it was easy for me to focus on following his beam of light. It was easy for me to convince myself that Daddy had at one time or another walked the very ground I was walking and I felt that proved something mysterious and vastly important. For the first time I felt more than merely pride that my great-great-granddaddy had been a Molly Maguire, I felt a connection to him.
Eddie stopped and shone his light at the wall. “Look at this,” he said. There in the beam of our lights was an opening in the wall, a narrow shaft that started at chest level and ended a couple of yards below the ceiling. A monkey shaft, so named because only a monkey could maneuver well in it. It was exactly this type of shaft that Uncle Frank was found dead in.
I bent and twisted my head so that my headlamp beamed up into the craggy dark of the chasm where some mica, embedded in the rock, glistened. “Wow,” I said. “I always imagined what one would look like.”
“Come on,” he said, waving me back in the direction we came. “That was at least a hundred feet. Probably more.”
We headed back quickly to the sounds of Marisol play-slapping Billy and saying, “Bad boy. No. What’d I say?”
Eddie stepped into the circle and spun the bottle before I’d even sat down. It stopped and pointed directly at my empty chair. “Redo,” he said.
“Nah, that counts,” Billy said with a wicked laugh.
“Truth or dare?” Eddie said.
I didn’t even pause. “Dare,” I said.
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His face was less than a foot from mine and my heart hammered at the thought that he’d dare me to kiss him, dare me to kiss him just to be mean.
“I dare you to crawl a hundred feet up that monkey shaft.”
“A hundred!” Marisol said.
“Okay, fifty.”
“Fine,” I said, pushing the headlamp further up my forehead. Then I stood and faced the darkness behind Eddie but I didn’t move.
“I’ll go with you,” Marisol said. Eddie stood to go with us and then Billy did too. The tunnel was wide enough that we could walk side by side and Marisol and I linked arms and Billy and Eddie flanked us. We reached the monkey shaft more quickly than I expected and this time I didn’t pause. I reached into the hole, my fingers scraping at whatever purchase I could find and then I yelped as I felt hands on my backend and the boys lifted me and pushed me in. I took a deep breath and coughed on some dirt I’d swallowed.
The hole was high enough that I didn’t have to slither and could crawl on all fours. It led upwards slightly and was probably more than thirty feet wide. The cold wet rock scraped my bare legs as I slowly crawled forward, swinging my head from side to side to keep an eye on what was next to me as well as what was ahead.
“Can I touch you there?” I heard Eddie say, followed by a slap and a high-pitched giggle. “What about here?” Billy said.
“This will cut up my knees,” I said. “How far do I have to go?”
“I’ll tell you when to stop,” Eddie said.
“She’s in shorts, Eddie,” Marisol said.
“Who told her to wear shorts?” he said.
“You all right?” Marisol called to me.
“Yeah,” I said, managing to crawl a few more feet. The cuts on my legs and hands felt like badges of honor. Ahead I could see the shaft open up into a wide chamber. “Crawling into the earth’s belly,” was how Daddy described crawling up a monkey shaft. “You can get so spun around you can’t tell your forward from your back,” he’d say. “You can get so lost it can feel like no one will ever find you.”
As I looked sideways in the narrow space I was sure I was feeling some of the same feelings Daddy had felt countless times and I felt so close to him then, to who he was before the disaster, that I quickly moved ahead, eager to feel even more.
“Okay,” Marisol said. “Enough.” This time the slap and her protest sounded real. “Come on, Brigid. Turn around. Let’s get out of here.”
I looked behind me, trying to figure how best to get out. The ceiling of the shaft wasn’t high enough to let me easily turn around. It was only then I noticed a sound I couldn’t place. It was like a fast ticking clock or water quickly dripping. The rocks were wetter here. Maybe I was near a spring. But then something brushed my arm and shot past me into my beam of light. A rat! I sobbed, “A rat touched me.”
“Get out,” Marisol said. “Move fast.”
“I’m trying,” I said and veered to the side but I’d moved too quickly and a small avalanche of rock and coal showered me.
“Crawl slow,” Billy said.
“Shit,” Eddie said. “I knew we shouldn’t have brought a little girl.”
Slowly I moved backwards, seeing yet another rat several feet from me and realizing the sound I’d been hearing was them calling each other, doing whatever they do with their tongues in anticipation of food. I whimpered again and kept trying to turn my head to see behind me but all that happened was that my headlamp beamed the darkness to my side.
“Keep coming, Brigid, you’re doing all right,” Marisol said.
“As long as you keep moving, the rats won’t bother you,” Billy said.
Backwards I moved first one leg than another and then my skin prickled as if someone was watching me. I could feel the stare coming from somewhere to my left, to the side I was turned away from. I swung my head in that direction but saw nothing except rock. Could bootleggers still be coming down here? Is this where some serial killer or pervert hid? Or could there really be a monster living down in the mines like rumor said?
For one ridiculous moment I feared that this was the monkey shaft Uncle Frank had been found in and that his ghost was there waiting to get me. I knew I needed to follow Daddy’s advice and bury my fear deep down where I couldn’t feel it anymore, but I didn’t know how to do that when all I could feel was dread.
My hand touched something and I snapped it back, but then I saw it was only some miner’s old glove.
“You got to straighten out,” Marisol said. “You’re heading to the side.”
I turned my head over my shoulder, aiming the headlamp as best I could and trying to maneuver so that my feet angled straight down to the opening of the shaft. “Better?” I said but then my head knocked the roof and another shower of rock fell on me. I gripped something hard to steady myse
lf and moved a leg backward, lowering my head to see what I was holding. It was a white stick. And alongside that white stick was another white stick and then a piece of cloth and then a rib cage.
A scream stuck in my throat. There, several feet from my hand, was a skull staring at me.
I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. Even when Billy and Eddie crawled up and poked the skeleton with a flashlight, I didn’t make a sound. Fear had turned all my muscles as stiff as the bones I was staring at.
They had to pull me out by my ankles, shredding my shins and belly with sooty black cuts. Marisol held me and said the Hail Mary and told the boys that we had to get out of there. Even after we’d scrambled up out of the hole and were standing outside in the bright green of the day, all I could do was merely whimper. I could still feel the empty eyes of the skull looking at me, knowing I was there.
PART II
Ten
Nobody rested well in the weeks after finding the body. A murder down in what everyone called “our mines” was a bad omen and surely meant that the dig-out project would fail and the fire only worsen. And as far as most of Barrendale was concerned, us kids were to blame.
“Couldn’t you leave well enough alone?” was one of the questions we heard in those first few days after finding the body. “Don’t we have enough problems without you kids digging around for more?”
The postmistress was so angry that she hissed at me over her counter, “Knew once you started hanging around with that Puerto Rican girl you’d be trouble.” And I remember how hurt and shocked I was by her saying that, especially when she didn’t know Marisol or me at all.
“Don’t tell nobody nothin’,” Gram warned me. “If they can blame an Irishman, they will. Blame a Howley, even better. Tell them lies if you have to. Tell ’em anythin’ but the truth.” Gram’s face looked as wrinkled as a crumpled sheet as she added, “Specially don’t say nothin’ about being with two fifteen-year-old boys. Don’t you value yourself none, girl? Don’t you want to be good?”
Billy’s daddy beat him so bad he had to wear a sling on his arm for a week and whenever he saw me or Marisol he acted like he had no idea who we were. Eddie’s daddy sent him off to work on a relative’s farm in Ohio. “That boy’s a bad seed,” Mr. Battista would tell anyone who’d listen. “What could I do? Tie him to a tree? I couldn’t watch him every second.”
Marisol said she’d heard people calling her spic and little bastard. “My parents were married,” she said to me, her eyes fierce. “And if my mother wasn’t Puerto Rican people would believe that.”
Not everyone reacted with anger, though. For some of the people, especially the ones who lived in the worst of the zone, it grated their nerves further. “Is it true his skull was bashed in? Do they know who it was? Do they know who did it?”
By far though, no one was more angry or anxious about it than Ma. She’d thrash around at night unable to sleep. She’d look at me as if I’d betrayed her worse than her own daddy or stepma had. “How could you a done this now?” she said to me. “Everybody knows a dead body is bad luck. What’s Bropey going to think?”
In those first few days after finding the body it was Daddy who protected me against Ma’s wrath, saying it was crazy to punish me when the image of that dead body would be with me for life.
“Let me get this straight,” Ma said. “She goes off with a couple of boys down in some mine somewheres and don’t tell nobody and we ain’t gonna do a thing? Well, let me tell you something, Adrian Howley. That’s how come she’s a daydreamer. She thinks the world’s soft when it’s the hardest thing there is.”
But Daddy had this look on him, like I was sick or something and it was somehow his fault. Over and over he’d ask me to describe exactly where the body was and how it looked. And though I hated thinking about what I’d seen in that shaft, I loved having Daddy’s attention focused on my every word. His eyes would rove from the wall up to the ceiling like he was trying to solve the murder from the little I could tell him. Eventually I’d repeated the details so often that it became like a story I told. It became like one of the tall tales Daddy and I used to tell each other. It was almost a thing of pleasure.
Only when we were alone did Daddy listen that carefully to me. When the detectives were there he acted like he didn’t care what I’d seen. Which was how we all acted. It was understood by us all that cops were especially not to be trusted. Gram particularly disliked the main detective who was Greek. “Remember the story ’bout that big horse they sent to trick them people,” Gram warned me more than once. “Greeks is sneaky.”
Gramp and Daddy agreed and I started to think Gram was right because whenever that detective came by he’d ask the same questions over and over as if eventually he’d trick me into saying something I hadn’t said before.
“You can tell us anything,” Detective Kanelous liked to say.
“Anything. Absolutely anything,” Detective Wolinski would repeat, looking up from his notepad where he constantly scribbled as if I’d said volumes when I never said much at all.
They wanted to know what I saw, what I’d heard—what I’d been doing earlier that day. They wanted to know how we’d found the hole. Whose idea it was for us to go down there. How long I’d known Marisol. How long I’d known Billy and Eddie. They asked the same questions to Marisol, but still I thought it was me they were after. Their questions made it seem like they thought I’d killed the man and dragged him into that monkey shaft. And in a way I felt I had. That people were right when they thought that in finding the body I was to blame for it being there. I guess I felt that in simply wanting to be close to Daddy, to experience what he’d gone through in the mines, I’d been selfish. I’d wanted too much.
Whenever the detectives showed up, I’d sit on Daddy’s lap, leaning my weight against his good arm, his bad arm around me like a battered shield. Each time they came, Daddy’s voice would get a waxiness to it, his words greased with fury and contempt. “For chrissakes, we go through this each time. Don’t you know where she found it? Don’t you know what position it was in? She’s only a little girl. You act like you think my daughter did it.”
“Not at all,” Detective Kanelous would say, passively lowering his eyelids and then widening them as if he could blink his way into my head.
“Not at all,” Detective Wolinski would repeat, gripping his pad as though it contained the key to unlocking the murder.
Just as Gram had predicted, once the detectives discovered that Gramp and Daddy had bootlegged that hole, it was Howleys they seemed to blame.
“Know anyone else who used that shaft?” Detective Kanelous asked Gramp and Daddy. He was a big man with the blackest hair I’d ever seen and he spoke in a quick clipped New York way. “Anyone unusual? Anyone you didn’t know?”
“Lots men … used it.” Gramp said, eyes slit, swallowing and gagging on the effort to keep his cough at bay.
“Bootlegging holes are all over this town,” Daddy added. “You know how many men used them?”
There were little bumps on Detective Kanelous’s cheeks that glistened where his beard came in. “How many?” he asked.
Daddy said nothing and then Detective Wolinski asked Gramp, “About how many would you say, Mr. Howley?” Detective Wolinski had a mustache that curved down toward his jaw and made me think some furry creature perched on top of his mouth, ready to eat his words.
Daddy made his face as blank as stone. “How would we know?” he said. “Can’t you tell my father’s sick? Can’t you leave him alone?”
On one of the times after the detectives left, Daddy poured two glasses of whisky and he and Gramp sat out on the side porch, sipping it. The window over Daddy’s head was open and I heard Daddy say this would all come back to the Devil Jaw mining disaster.
Gramp grunted.
“You know you can tell me what happened,” Daddy said. “You’re not the only one who tried to help Frank. I tried to help too.”
The juicy sounds of Gramp sucking the
saliva in his mouth was followed by him saying. “You tell … what happen … that day … down there.”
“I’ve told you that already,” Daddy said, his voice strained. “I went down into Devil Jaw to tell him to get the men out. To tell him he could keep the money and still do right by the men.”
Gramp hocked up something. “Make no sense … why Frank in … monkey shaft.”
“Chrissakes,” Daddy said. “He’s dead. What does it matter why he was in a monkey shaft? You know these cops aren’t going to quit until they pin this on someone. How ’bout trying to protect me the way you were always protecting him?”
An explosion in the fire zone shook the house and all of Gram’s dishes on the hutch clattered.
“Shit,” Daddy said and the pain in his voice drew me out into the doorway where I saw him gripping his hurt arm the way he did when it ached from rain. “Shit,” he said again and then he kicked at the screen door, swinging it open. He jogged down the steps and crossed the lawn without once looking back, leaving me for hours after to ponder his words with Gramp. What was it Daddy wanted Gramp to tell him about? Had Uncle Frank been taking bribes? Why did Gramp think Daddy knew why Uncle Frank had been in a monkey shaft? All these things I thought about and for days after whenever I shut my lids I’d see Gramp’s and Daddy’s faces blurring with Father Capedonico’s and then I’d see the white skull with its empty sockets and I’d open my eyes with a shudder.
* * *
I should have avoided Ma in those first weeks, but instead I found myself hanging around her more, hoping somehow I could make things better between us. Sometimes I’d even meet her on her lunch break at the mill thinking that if I could get her to tell me stories about her and Daddy’s pasts, like she used to, she’d start to like me again and not worry about the dead body.
On one of those days I found her standing in the side yard over by the garbage bins, smoking fast and hard. It was a warm day that smelled of the brown lanky river running below the cliff. The bluish stone of the mill towered behind us, greenish in the crevices with mold.
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