“We was already married when your daddy told me about the curse,” Ma said, squinting at Gram who stood across the yard beside Edna Schwackhammer, the woman Ma called Gram’s twin twit. That day Gram and Mrs. Schwackhammer did seem twinnish in appearance. They stood there with their old lady skirts halfway down their calves and their thick-heeled, square-toed shoes and chunky clip-on earrings. They’d had their hair dyed and curled by the same hairdresser in town and they looked like different-sized versions of the same woman.
Ma continued, “He gave me the same cock-and-bull story that old biddy tries to sell about the curse making you stronger because it keeps you on your toes. But you know what I think about the curse?”
I wondered if Ma knew about the curse’s secret and if she was trying to tell me about it. “What, Ma?” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. I was desperate to talk about the curse’s secret, especially with Ma. But she saw how bad I wanted her answer, so she wasn’t going to say a thing.
Gram was looking this way and that, squirming under the pressure of Ma’s stare. Eventually she called out, “So why ain’t you met that brother of yours yet, Dolores? What’s keepin’ him from you?”
“He’s busy with his car dealership,” Ma snipped.
“Used car dealership,” Gram said as if the word used was a four-letter curse word. “So? Can’t he have you down to him? Can’t he invite you?”
“He has. Bunch a times,” Ma said but I could tell from the way she held her chin, tilted and up, that he hadn’t. “You just mind your own business, Rowena. Ain’t seen your brother visiting you anytime lately.”
Mrs. Llewelyn, a big fat woman whose feet bulged out of her shoes, stepped up to Gram and got right in her face. “Speaking of minding business, Rowena, I finished that tote. Why’d you go and tell Big Berta I fell short? You’re not the boss here. You can’t even control your own goddamn grandkid from going down in the mine, you think you can control our totes?”
Mrs. Llewelyn must have heard Ma coming because she turned just in time to get Ma’s fist smack in her nose. “You control your own goddamn kids, Linda,” Ma spat and then they ripped at each other’s hair and fell to the ground and I ran to get the janitor to pull them apart, I was so afraid Mrs. Llewelyn would crush Ma.
Eventually as the weeks passed so did Ma’s anger and in its place was something blank and quiet. It was almost like she was still herself, she was still Ma, but somehow less so. She’d collect change to call her brother on one of the pay phones in town and spend evenings smoking out by the catalpa tree, its trunks split three ways like the prongs on a ring that clasped nothing but the starry night air.
Some nights she’d sit on my bed playing solitaire, slow sipping a can of Schlitz, occasionally leaning her head against Daddy’s werewolf poster. At night as we lay in the bunk beds, Ma on top, Ma would tell me gossip about the girls from the mill. She’d tell me about the money she’d hidden from Daddy and how much of it he’d found. She’d tell me, voice all whispery, about the times Uncle Frank had tried to get fresh with her and her voice would carry a kind of wary excitement.
Whenever we got into bed we’d leave the light on. Inevitably Gram would come in and turn the light off and then Ma would instigate her usual fight but there was an emotion lacking to her—“You ain’t the only one who pays the bills, old lady”—as if she were merely mouthing the words.
If all the questions about the unsolved murder made Ma less talkative, they had the opposite effect on Gram. It was only then that Gram started talking about when the mines started slowing down in the twenties. She said the slowdown was so gradual that at first they didn’t think much about it. They thought people would always want coal and couldn’t imagine a time when there wouldn’t be a demand for it anymore. “But then slow and sure the railroads cut back more and more operations and then all sorts of businesses cut back, first on hours, then on workers. Before you knew, it wasn’t just the miners who was strugglin’, it was everybody. It was all of Barrendale.”
Gram also told me that during Prohibition she supported the family making shine until the cops shut her down and later, she said, during World War II she worked in a factory in Scranton making bombs. One day while we were outside cementing the cracks all the drilling and flushing had caused in the foundation, Gram told me that it was her hard-earned money that had bought this house and I should be proud to ever do the same. “Lots of women ain’t got a house to their name,” she said, glancing toward the living-room window behind which Ma was painting her nails.
Gram waved her hand to take in the whole yard and house. “And now look at all I got. And to think when my daddy came here from Limerick not a soul but the mafia would hire him! Nobody else wanted Irish. They thought we were as low as coloreds. Lower maybe. ’Cept for those criminals in the mob. They wanted him to drive one of their trucks. So that’s what he did till he heard the mines would take Irish.”
On some days she talked about Uncle Frank and how he was always in trouble at school for roughhousing, for smoking in the bathroom, for being with girls under the bleachers. And that she knew he was bad but she couldn’t help loving him for it.
I had a putty knife in my hand and I was far enough out of Gram’s reach that she couldn’t slap me. Cagily I asked, “But if you knew he was bad, why’d you tell Ma it was a pity the good one died?”
“What?” she said. “I never said no such thing.” And then she poured too much water into the bucket of cement and clucked her tongue and said that Daddy liked to pretend he was a Mr. Smarty-pants never doing nothin’ wrong, but that sometimes he’d been with Uncle Frank and had gotten in trouble too.
School started and Marisol and I were inseparable in our classes and inseparable afterwards, going on long walks in the warm and yellowing September woods and fields. During those walks Marisol liked to wonder about the dead person’s spirit. She supposed that it had chosen us to help solve its murder, to be the instruments of its revenge. It was possible, she said, that in a past life we’d wronged the man and that was why the spirit had us find it. It was even possible, she’d whisper, that the spirit was standing right next to us, talking to us at that very moment, not knowing it was dead.
In an attempt to communicate with it we used Marisol’s Ouija board, but all it spelled was O-W, which Marisol said meant it couldn’t get past its pain, or it spelled H-O-W, which Marisol said meant it wanted us to find out how it was killed. We tried a séance too. We lit some candles on the shore of White Deer Lake and held hands and asked the spirit to speak to us but we didn’t hear a thing, though Marisol said she could still feel Auntie’s spirit around me, just as she had when we first met in Saint Barbara’s church.
“You should be careful,” she warned. “I don’t feel her as strong as I did. If you’re not open to her being there, she’ll go away.”
And when she told me that I found myself patting my chest as if there were a secret compartment there that might magically open to let Auntie in.
There was one particularly warm afternoon when I walked Marisol home and then continued into the fire zone toward Gram and Gramp’s. Talk of the dead body had dwindled and I no longer walked with my head lowered, worried that someone would say something nasty if I looked them in the face. So I’d had plenty of time to cross the street and avoid the crazy lady who sometimes stood outside our house. She was at the end of the block coming toward me and I was curious, I guess, to see her up close. I wondered if you could tell she was crazy just from the look in her eye.
As we neared each other I saw that she was wearing the same gravy-stained dress that I’d seen her in the last time and that she had a faded red Christmas ribbon in her hair. She stepped to the side as if she was getting out of my way, but as I passed she gripped my arm and got right in my face. Her breath smelled as bad as dog dirt. She had the prettiest pale blue eyes I’d ever seen and they looked wildly, first in one direction, then another. “That was my son down there, wasn’t it, girl? You tell me what he looked li
ke. You tell me it was your grandpa who done it. I always known it was. I ain’t the only one who’s known it neither.”
Then she pushed me so that I fell back into a parked car. “The cops will find out, you know.” She took several steps backward and taunted in a singsong voice, “The cops’ll find out, the cops’ll find out.” She clasped her hands and raised her eyes skyward. “Oh, yes, they’ll find out.”
Eleven
At first I didn’t tell anyone what the crazy lady had said. Everyone was upset enough that I didn’t want to add to it with rumors, but I found myself looking at Gramp more and more. The fingers on both his hands were all crooked from arthritis and breaks and I wondered if that was what a killer’s hands looked like. I knew he’d been in and out of jail for beating up on people and wrecking this or that place and for all I knew he’d killed somebody too.
Often I found myself drawn to ponder the photos of a younger him that Gram had framed on the mantel. There was the photo of the two of them married in the church rectory, Gramp’s face unreadable, possibly a little proud. There was the one of him in uniform when he returned home from the Western Front, the wedding band on his finger symbolizing his marriage to his then wife, his first wife, who would along with their twin tots soon die in a flood. And then there was my favorite photo, the one of him and a group of other little boys down in the mines. The boys were all lined up like in a class photo with the first row crouched in front and the other row standing behind. They were around my age and their faces and clothes were filthy. They all held lanterns or had a headlamp strapped to their heads. Gramp stood far on the left, the features of his face blanked out by the camera’s flash.
When I looked at these photos, I searched for something telling in them, but all they told was that he’d lived through unbelievably difficult times and had survived.
Gramp never seemed to notice or care that I looked at these photos so I didn’t think much of it when he told me to fetch an old wooden cigar box from the hutch. He told me to open it and when I did I found inside a clay pipe, worn smooth. Its whitish color reminded me of the ghostly white stems of what people called Indian pipes or corpse plant that grew in damp places in the woods.
“That pipe … my granddaddy.” Gramp gestured at himself with his thumb.
“You mean the granddaddy who was the Molly Maguire?”
Gramp nodded and for a moment a satisfied proud glint lit his dull eyes.
I held the pipe tenderly, turning it this way and that as if it were a relic. I couldn’t believe I was touching something my great-great-granddaddy had touched. My great-great-granddaddy, the legendary Molly Maguire, who’d heroically attacked a priest and for that had gotten us all cursed.
“What was he like?” I asked.
Gramp’s mouth opened into a smile. “A rogue,” he said.
It was the first time I’d ever seen Gramp smile and I smiled back.
The dead body faded from our lives. People stopped asking about it, even Daddy stopped asking about it and the detectives stopped coming by. On Saturday afternoons Daddy still took me and Brother for walks so Ma could have time for herself. Sometimes we’d stop in at Kreshner’s department store for Daddy to show Mr. Wicket yet again that he would browse there as often as he wanted and not buy a thing. Then we would always stop at The Shaft, but Daddy would only get one beer. If Star was there alone, Daddy barely paid her any mind. But if Bear was with her, then Daddy would take an interest in what she had to say and Star’s long neck and face would flush pink and I’d stare at her with a force that I hoped shot little pellets into her heart.
Mostly though we spent those walks doing what we called “pit watching.” At that time they were digging the pit closest to us, the one that became known as the East Side Pit. The demolition included all of the homes on Saltmire and Elm streets and cut off all access to the railroad tracks but by the highway on the edge of town. Daddy said that they made the pit V-shaped because they were trying to buttress the fire and after they completed this V-shaped trench, they’d create other trenches all along the outside of the fire to keep it from spreading.
The East Side Pit was nearly three hundred feet wide and a hundred deep. They used steam shovels and dragline shovels and digger trucks and dump trucks and fire trucks and bulldozers and front loaders and backhoes and explosives. They’d scoop out the coal and stone and dirt and dump it in piles that they’d then spray with water to keep it cool. And when they started having trouble with truck tires melting, they started using clay and water to keep the ground cool enough where they worked.
Every now and then a journalist would come from this or that paper or magazine to write about the dig out—we’d already been in Time magazine and The Saturday Evening Post—and if Daddy saw one of those journalists he’d always stop to talk. Usually Daddy would get the conversation to go from the dig out to the disaster and more often than not the journalist was keen to listen, but I started to notice that each time Daddy talked about the disaster, one or another detail was different.
Sometimes Daddy knew the hoist wasn’t working so he didn’t run to it. Sometimes he thought it was working, so that was the first place he went. Sometimes he got out after the second tremor. Sometimes the third. Sometimes Uncle Frank helped him get some of the other miners out. Sometimes Uncle Frank wasn’t mentioned at all.
The first time I noticed the differences in Daddy’s story I waited until the journalist was out of earshot and I asked him about it.
“I’m just playing with him, princess,” Daddy said. “See what he knows and what he doesn’t.”
Daddy winked like this was all a great game and I felt the stab of his disappointment when I didn’t smile in return. It didn’t feel like Daddy was playing a game with the journalist. It felt like he was playing a game with me and I couldn’t understand why he’d do that when nobody in the world believed in him as much as I did.
Sometimes when we’d go pit watching Ma would come along and we’d all compete with each other to find the spot that gave the best view. As long as they weren’t blasting, we’d get as close as they’d let us. We might sit on a stoop left where a house used to be or lean against a fence marking a property that no longer existed. We didn’t talk. It was impossible to hear over the machinery. Sometimes Ma would bring snacks, pretzels or maybe Twinkies, and for the first time since Auntie had died we were happy together as a family, soothed somehow by all the noise and destruction. The dig out would work, we all agreed. Look at the destruction? How could the fire survive it?
But by the start of the fall the Krupskys, an old couple who lived thirteen blocks west of Gram and Gramp’s, were killed from carbon monoxide poisoning. The Krupskys lived seven blocks east of the fire zone, well out of the fire’s reach, or so we all had thought. But for carbon monoxide to have killed them, it meant that the fire was bigger than anyone had suspected.
“I won’t believe it. I don’t,” Gram said, referring to the fire’s spread. Even when one of the government inspectors arrived, waving a detector up by the ceilings and in the corners, checking for carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as well as sulfur and methane, Gram told him that if he wanted to wreck the house, he’d have to wreck her too.
“No, ma’am,” the inspector said. “I don’t want to demolish you or your home. I’m just here to monitor the air.”
“I don’t know why,” Gram said. “We sure as heck ain’t in the zone.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “But we don’t want what happened to the Krupskys to happen to anyone else.”
When the inspector mentioned the Krupskys, Brother made a mewling sound and Gramp, from his position in the living-room Barcalounger, pointed and shouted, “Don’t scared. Howleys … survive.”
Brother punched the side of his head with one of his tight little red fists. “Retard,” Gramp hollered. “Only a moron hits himself,” Gram announced. Daddy flicked his eyes at Brother and walked outside, letting the screen door slam behind him.
I crouched i
n front of Brother and gently punched my own head. “Ow. See how silly?” I did it again. “Ow. Why would I hurt myself?” I squeezed my eyes shut in mock pain and opened them wide, thinking that Mrs. Mott, Brother’s kindergarten teacher in Centrereach, might have been right when she said that Brother should see a psychotherapist.
It was only then I noticed Ma seated at the dining-room table, pasting S&H Green Stamps into her booklet, the smallest smile giving her face a dreamy quality.
Later that night me and Ma moved her mattress from the top bunk down to the floor because gases tend to rise. Gases also tend to hang low in the basement so that night Daddy and Brother had to move their sleeping stuff from the basement to the living room.
“This is the best news I’ve heard in years,” Ma said as we arranged pillows along the wall beside her mattress. “If the fire comes this far, we have to go. We got no choice in the matter.” She folded her legs Indian-style and clenched a pillow to her chest. “I was thinking, seeing as it’s your birthday next week, why don’t we have a party? You’ll be twelve after all, practically grown.”
I sucked my breath, afraid to so much as breathe. If I acted too excited Ma might change her mind to punish me. To Ma, me wanting a party would mean I didn’t appreciate how good I already had it.
Ma let the pillow drop onto her lap where she stroked it absentmindedly. “Still a nice time of year. We could picnic up at Pothole Park. If it rains, we’ll go in that wooden thing they got. I’ll invite Bropey and get you a present, a present like nothing you ever seen before. What would you think of that?” She paused midstroke, her hand hovering over the pillow until I cautiously nodded. “We’d be a family again,” she added. “Like no time passed at all.”
That night there was a damp breeze through the opened window that got me thinking again of the mine and got me dreaming of sliding through the bootlegging hole and reaching the bottom to find Ma lying there dead.
The Hollow Ground: A Novel Page 10
