The Hollow Ground: A Novel

by Natalie S. Harnett

  From Ma’s tight smile I could tell she was working hard to hold back the slice of her tongue. “Whatever there is belongs to me,” Ma said. “Me and Bropey. You have no right to it.”

  “You’re treating me as if I’ve stolen your mother’s things, Dolores. I don’t want to keep any of it. I just have to find where they are. My husband, your father, God rest his soul—”

  “Don’t talk about my daddy to me. Not after what you done.”

  In the living room we sat on a checkered sofa facing a Christmas tree with blue lights. Beneath the tree were presents wrapped in paper that was covered with tiny little Santas. Flanking us were two end tables, each displaying photos of Uncle Jerry as a kid. In one of them he rode a bicycle. In another he was dressed in a Boy Scout’s uniform. In still another he stood in cap and gown. There were also photos of Little Jerry and a wedding photo of a thinner and younger Stepma standing beside a man who must have been Ma’s daddy.

  Ma sat, glaring through an archway at Stepma who was searching the bottom drawers of a hutch. I reached for the wedding photo and studied Ma’s daddy’s face, amazed to see him wearing an expression I’d seen in photos on my own face, a half smile with a bit of squint.

  I shivered, feeling as if one of Marisol’s spirit shadows was somewhere in the room with us. It was eerie to think of what lurked inside you that wasn’t of your own making, that came from ancestors you didn’t even know.

  Ma made a noise deep in her throat like a growl and I shifted away from her toward the armrest. I almost felt bad for Stepma, for making an enemy out of Ma, and I had to remind myself of the awful thing Stepma had done, which reminded me of the awful thing Gramp had probably done. I felt sick and told Ma I needed the bathroom but Ma wasn’t listening to me. She’d gotten up to read the tags on the presents. “To Jerry,” Ma read, “Love, Mom. To Little Jerry, Love, Nana.” She made her voice tight and snotty as she read each of them. Her voice was so bitter that her mouth screwed up as she spoke and she didn’t even notice me walk out to find the bathroom. For some time I stood over the toilet waiting for something to come up that never did. When I came out, I heard Stepma announcing, “I’m not saying I did the best I could, Dolores. I’m not saying that.”

  Stepma stood in the entry between the living room and dining room, holding a shoe box in both her hands. The plumpness of her cheeks appeared to sag and her eyes darkened.

  Ma stood not an arm’s length from Stepma and demanded, “How could you have done it? If you’d hated me that’d be one thing. But you was nice to me. That’s what I can’t forgive.”

  Ma stepped forward, wagging her head, and Stepma cowered, raising the box up to her face for protection. On the side of the box written in black ink were the words “Mooney Family Photos.” Slowly Stepma lowered the box. Her eyes, veined red and yellow, roamed up toward the ceiling as she announced, “Forgiveness is the path to glory, Jesus says.”

  “Jesus never helped me once.”

  “He’s not there to help you,” Stepma said with a wedge of contempt. She held the box out to Ma who warily read the label out loud.

  “Mooney’s your mother’s maiden name,” Stepma said. “She and I went to the same school. I was a few years ahead. I didn’t know her well, but I didn’t hear of anybody who didn’t like her.”

  “’Course everyone liked her,” Ma snapped and took the box over to the sofa where I followed. Ma looked Stepma dead in the eye and added, “She was an angel. A real angel, not just one pretending to be nice.”

  As Ma opened the lid on the box, I sat down next to her. Dozens of black-and-white photos of people lay inside. Groups of unrecognizable children and adults—Ma’s family, my family. They stood on rickety porches and in front of old-fashioned automobiles. These people were my family but looking at their unfamiliar bleak faces only made me feel empty inside.

  Stepma said she’d check the basement to see what else she could find. We heard a door creak and then the slow thud of her steps downstairs. Ma waited barely a minute before she started rifling the drawers of the end tables, then of the cabinet beneath the TV. I stayed put on the couch, searching through the box of photos. Sometimes flickering beneath Ma’s face was another face, sweet and helpless. A little girl’s face. Ma’s face, young. I knew all I needed to do was find that face in the photo album and I’d have found Ma.

  When I hit on a photo of Ma’s daddy standing beside a different bride, I pulled it out to study the face of Ma’s dead ma. There was such a gentleness to the soft roundness of her forehead and to her large doe-looking eyes that for the first time I felt the loss of this woman who would have loved all the hard edges off Ma. I put the photo to the side and then rummaged the rest of the box until I found a photo of a little girl with fat dangling curls. Just a glance and I could see in that girl’s face the shy, tender parts that I sometimes saw in Ma.

  I placed the two photos beside me on the couch and closed the box. My limbs felt so quivery I couldn’t move for a few moments. I couldn’t believe I was going to get to give Ma what she craved most her whole life. I was going to get to give Ma, Ma, and at that moment there was nothing in the world I wanted more to do.

  By that time Ma had made her way to the kitchen where I found her picking off spoons from a display case on the wall and dropping them into her pocketbook. “Ma,” I said, “I got what we came for. You don’t need to take anything else.” First I handed her the photo of her mother because I wanted to savor handing her the one of herself. “Here, Ma,” I said. “Look. Your ma.”

  Ma wiped her hands as if they’d gotten dirty from touching the spoons. When she took the photo, she held it up inches from her nose and her face got all soft and swollen like she’d been crying. She talked about how in the orphanage she used to picture her ma coming to her at night. “But she didn’t look nothing like this. I remembered her wrong. Even when I pictured her I didn’t have her right. She wasn’t even there in my memory.” Ma’s shoulders curved in and her head hung low like she wanted to curl into herself.

  But she was in your heart, I thought, but didn’t say out loud. For the rest of my life I’ll regret not saying those words to Ma right then when she needed to hear them the most.

  Stepma called to see where we’d gone and when she found us in the kitchen her eyes shifted from one to the other of us suspiciously. In Stepma’s arms was a small box and perched on top of that box was a rusty green and gold tin. I slid the photo of Ma into my pocket as Ma grabbed the tin from Stepma and then handed me the box. “You sure this is everything?” Ma said. “Bropey will know if you’re trying to cheat us. He might be younger than me but he remembers his ma too. And he’ll come here and look through every last inch of this place if he thinks you’re lying.”

  Stepma’s mouth pursed like she was about to blow a kiss but instead tears glopped down her chubby cheeks and the flab on her neck quaked.

  “Don’t cry, old lady,” Ma said. “This stuff belongs to me. Me and Bropey. You should have given all of it to him long ago. So he could have known his family right from the start. So he could recognize them for God’s sake if he saw them on the street.”

  “But he did know his family,” Stepma said. “My family. I raised him. I was his mother.”

  Ma moved forward holding the tin in her hand like she was about to hurl it. Her words were a growl. “You’re once removed from a mother and don’t you ever forget it. You’re just his stepmother is all.” Ma sucked hard on her breath like she had a sourball of air in her mouth. “You just tell me one thing, Elsie Corcoran. Did my daddy know where I was? Did you even tell him where you sent me?”

  Stepma eased down onto one of the kitchen-table chairs. With slow hard circles she rubbed at her hip. “Sure he did. He had to sign the paper to get you there.”

  Ma banged the tin down on the kitchen table and Stepma jolted. “Then you tell me what you did,” Ma demanded. “You tell me what you did to make him not come to get me. And you tell me the truth. You was afraid I’d hit you before and
I swear I’ll knock your face clean through that wall if you lie to me now.”

  Stepma’s fingers stopped in midrub. Her thumb pressed deep into her flesh as her eyes shifted toward the half-empty spoon rack on the wall. Within seconds, though, the surprise on her face quickly became something else and her gaze roamed down the length of Ma’s body until it fixed on the lime green linoleum square beside Ma’s shoe. “If you remember him at all,” Stepma said, “then you remember he did anything he wanted. On his own account he promised never to go get you and at least with that, he kept his word.”

  Ma’s voice came out soft and low. “Then you’re a wicked woman for taking that promise. And you can be sure there are some sins Jesus never forgives.”

  Stepma’s cheeks turned the color of grits. Her stare broke from the floor and stuck onto Ma’s face. “But I was saving you,” she said. “I saved you.”

  Ma squinted and leaned forward like she was trying to see Stepma better. “Saved me? From what? My home? My own brother and daddy?”

  “Yes, from your daddy. From him touching you. Don’t you remember?”

  Ma took two quick steps across the floor and slapped Stepma’s pasty-white cheek. “You’re a hateful woman. I’m taking my ma’s things and that’s the last I ever want to hear of you and your lies again. All those years my daddy could have come got me but your sick lies kept him from it.” Ma broke down sobbing and stumbled into the living room where she kicked one of the presents beneath the tree. Then she grabbed the box of photos from my hands, told me to take the rest of the stuff and fled outside.

  Dazed, me and Stepma stood in the hallway staring at the opened front door, which framed the snowy street and Ma fleeing down it.

  “I only wish I could have checked on her but I didn’t dare,” Stepma said as she walked behind me down the hall to the front door. “It seemed best to leave things as they were. For all of us to forget. God forgive me for it.”

  I paused at the threshold, tasting the snowy cold on my tongue. “What is it her daddy done?” I whispered, afraid to really ask, to really know, but I could feel the weight of it already inside me, pulling me down.

  “Little girls shouldn’t think of such things,” Stepma said and squeezed my shoulder, nudging me out the door. “You take care of your mother. She needs you. She needs all the help she can get.”

  Then Stepma shut the door and left me there with the knowledge of what had happened to Ma and of who my granddaddy was, this man I resembled. My legs felt heavy and tired like I’d run miles on them and it seemed to take a while before I reached Ma at the spot where she leaned up against a tree. I stood a distance from her as if the things her daddy had done were laying right there at our feet, ugly and shameful. Without a doubt I knew that Ma would hate me if I paid them any mind at all.

  “Ma,” I said, slipping from my pocket the picture of her as a little girl. “You can stop looking. I got you what you wanted. Here, Ma.” I handed her the photo. “Here you are.”

  Ma barely looked at the photo before slipping it into the box of her ma’s photos that she held in the crook of her arm. “Yeah. Ain’t that something,” she said. “There I am.”

  Nineteen

  Ma and Daddy’s anniversary fell on a Saturday that year. Daddy got the day off so he could take me, Brother, and Ma to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate it special. It was late February and the sun was such a pale white with a coating of clouds pasted to it that it was easy to look at. Here and there in the fire zone patches of crocuses came up from the heat and in one spot we even saw a daffodil. But in other places in the zone the ground was blistered and the shrubs and trees were budless and dead. The restaurant though was far away enough, right on the border where the rich people used to live, that the snow kept and there were mounds of it left over from a blizzard the week before.

  Ma had walked from the house in a raincoat and rubber boots to protect her pretty dress from the ash and mud and when we crossed the bridge out of the zone and into the east side of the city, she took them off in the empty parking lot where the Sears used to be. She then spit on a hankie and wiped the grime from my and Brother’s face. Daddy, Ma said, wore the dirt well and didn’t need a wipe. And she was right. He looked as handsome as ever as he removed his jacket to enjoy the feel of the sun on him. Brother ran ahead and threw bottle caps at the holes in the asphalt where the brick showed through and we walked the long way so Daddy could, as he said, “Show off his girls.”

  At the restaurant we had sweet and sour pork and chop suey and Daddy ordered us fried dumplings and spare ribs, which were things Daddy had eaten in a Chinese restaurant in Allentown and thought we’d like.

  Both Ma and Daddy talked about our new house on Furlong Street in Allentown, which was supposed to be ready for us in a month. “We’ll hang our laundry in the backyard, respectable like,” Ma said. “I ain’t going to have no clothesline going across the front porch. Maybe we’ll even get ourselves a dog. We’ll be living proper. With our own house, and with family living practically just down the street.”

  Brother had bitten into three dumplings and spit the ball of meat out onto the plate and he sat there looking down at them as if they were three little turds. Ma flicked her eyes from his plate to the window and then she lifted her orange soda in a toast. “To our new home and family. Well, they ain’t new. They’re old family but we’re only getting to know them now, I mean.”

  Me and Daddy clicked glasses with her and neither of us mentioned that Uncle Jerry lived nearly half a mile away in a neighborhood where the houses had garages and big front yards. Brother picked at an egg roll, eating some of its fried skin, his blue eyes widening in pleasure. Ma was like the weather for us. If her mood was all sunshine and warmth so was ours and for the first time I started to look forward to our move to Allentown, to putting everything that had happened behind us. To not ever having to watch Marisol ignore me again.

  The sun hadn’t yet set but that part of the city was in shadow. The overhead lights went on and the waiter served us ice cream and fortune cookies. As soon as the waiter walked away, Daddy stood, put on his jacket and got down on one knee beside Ma.

  Ma giggled with nervousness as he took her hand. He kissed it and Ma’s eyes swerved here and there to see who was watching, wanting the moment to be seen, but there was only one other customer, an older man sipping his soup from a bowl and both him and the waiter pretended like they hadn’t noticed a thing.

  From his pocket Daddy drew out a small jewelry box. When he flicked it open, me and Ma sucked our breath. There against a black velvety background lay a gold ring glistening with diamond chips. “Oh, Adrian. Oh, my God.” Ma’s hand quivered as she held her fingers spread in anticipation for Daddy to slip the ring on. When he did, she cupped her hand as gently as if some wounded creature trembled on her palm.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, crossing her arms and squeezing her shoulders in a hug. “I got my brother, I got my ma’s things, and now I got an honest-to-god wedding band. I got everything I always wanted.” And then she sobbed uncontrollably and me and Daddy hovered over her, knowing how helpless she felt when she cried.

  Out on the street, Ma gained control of herself. She held the ring up to the dying sunlight and said, “Just wait till all them bitches at the mill see this. Just wait till Rowena sees this.” Suspiciously her eyes shifted toward Daddy. “We own it free and clear?”

  “Free and clear.”

  “How’d you ever get the money? Or don’t I want to know?”

  “You don’t want to know. But a little luck isn’t a bad thing.”

  Ma, who always lashed out at Daddy when he mentioned luck or anything about gambling, surprised us all by saying, “Well, I guess a little luck ain’t so bad.”

  “Nah, it’s not so bad,” Daddy said. “It’s only good that’s going to happen from now on, Lores.” He looked from Ma to me with his jaw set to show he meant it. “We’re owed some good luck, after all. And I tell you, I can feel it coming our
way. One thing’s for certain, I don’t want either of you worrying anymore, you hear me?” He pointed from me to Ma and we both giggled with pleasure and relief. No matter what Daddy had done in the past we always wanted him to take care of us.

  That evening when we got back to the house, Ma stuck her hand in front of Gram’s face. “See this, you old biddy? I don’t need nothing from you no more.”

  Gram was standing beside the Hoosier cabinet with the phone pressed to her ear. “’Scuse me, Edna,” Gram said into the receiver before cupping her hand over it. To Daddy she whispered, “How many horse races you win to buy that?” She pronounced “that” like it was some hot, burning thing in her mouth, then she turned her back on Ma and tugged at the phone cord, stretching it so that she could walk to the stove. “No, Edna, really. Legally they ain’t got the right to take it away.”

  Ma walked to where the phone hung on the wall and calmly pressed the lever to disconnect the call. Gram banged the receiver against the side of the stove. “Like a little kid, I swear.”

  That night Ma called me into the bedroom to brush her hair. “Hundred strokes, remember?” she said, hearkening back to a long-ago time when me and Ma brushed each other’s hair every night. Ma sighed and held her hand out, turning the ring this way and that. “Ain’t it pretty?”

  “It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen, Ma,” I said, my gut aching with desire for it. Through the shut door we could hear glassware clinking in the kitchen and Gram singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”