The fire beneath the west side of Barrendale still burns and the dig out continues. Some say it will take another five years to dig it out. Some say ten. It’s already forced more than a thousand people out of their homes and destroyed more than a hundred and twenty acres of houses and streets and landmarks that will now only exist in photos and memory. After they finish digging the fire out and fill in all the trenches, the west side will be just one huge flat piece of land in an otherwise jagged landscape because even its telltale slopes and dips and hills will be gone.
Though it’s only been five years since we lost Daddy, Ma’s been with three different guys. If this one doesn’t stick she says she’s off men altogether. It doesn’t matter to me really either way. I just want what’s best for Brother, who Ma keeps switching from school to school to avoid him getting left back or suspended. Slow and subtle I’m working on Gram to let Brother come live with us. Soon I think she’ll give in, even though she’s worried we can’t handle whatever problems he’s probably now got worse than he had before. But deep down Gram’s got a good heart. She’s actually encouraging me to save enough money to move to New York City’s Greenwich Village, even though she calls it Hedonland. “Still,” she says, “it’s your dream and dreams is best lived than remembered.”
It’s both my and Marisol’s dream and we’re pulling extra shifts after school and on the weekends working the cash registers at the Hi-Lo to make it happen. We’ve turned into what people call hippies. We read Ginsberg and Kerouac and sport peasant skirts and love beads. We do yoga and wear peace signs and work hard on acceptance. Marisol is working hard to accept that her daddy might have loved her if he’d had the chance, and I’m close to accepting that I couldn’t have done anything to make Ma love me better or to put peace into Daddy’s heart. We all walk our own path, as people say. And we walk it alone. All I can do now is wish Ma and Daddy the best life and death can offer. And I do wish them that. I especially wish Daddy that, wherever he is now.
Gram says she feels like she’s a hundred and one. “And I’m nowhere near that!” But she looks it. She and Mrs. Schwackhammer resemble dried-up scarecrows sitting out on one or the other’s porch, wrapped in blankets, staring off at West Mountain while they shell peas or crack nuts or crochet or braid rugs. Or they just sit there rocking hard as if the rocking itself has got a purpose. They inevitably complain about this or that person who’s moved on to The Ridge or gossip about ladies from the mill or bicker about the best way to clean a chicken or cook a pot roast.
Today we’re all sitting out on Gram’s closed-in side porch to celebrate my eighteenth birthday. Marisol gave me a fringed vest, the color of which is the same green as her eyes as we sit beside the aspidistra plant. Mrs. Schwackhammer gave me an empty book to use, she said, as a diary or what-have-you. And Gram presented me with two gifts, both ones I’ll cherish the rest of my life. One is the clay pipe that was Gramp’s granddaddy’s, the Molly. And the other is Gram’s grandma’s ring, the one Ma had wanted for so long that when she finally got it, she couldn’t bear its sight. That’s what wanting does, I guess. It takes away everything, even the pleasure of getting the thing you wanted in the first place.
Gram and Mrs. Schwackhammer are sitting in rockers, stringing the last of the garden’s beans and dropping them whole into bowls by their feet. I’ve got my clay pipe lit and clenched between my teeth, my ring shooting bits of rainbow onto the wall. It’s Indian summer. The trees up on this end of The Ridge have all turned gold and umber, ginger and crimson. The porch is warm but Gram and Mrs. Schwackhammer are bundled. Marisol and I are in our favorite skirts and sandals. Holding back our nearly waist-length hair are flower headbands made of aster and yarrow that we wove ourselves. The headbands have launched Gram onto one of her favorite tirades about flower children and what she calls “this godforsaken generation.”
Gram holds a bean string up in the air as if it’s something worth pondering and then she offers all sorts of condemnations against pot and girls crazy enough not to wear bras. She’s just getting up steam. The floorboards creak under the rhythmic weight of her rocker. Shading her eyes is a large-brimmed straw hat and when she lifts her head the afternoon sun cuts half her face in shadow. She’s on to the evils of communes and the pill now. She’s rocking hard like she intends to lift off into outer space. She’s talking loud enough for her voice to echo back and forth off East and West mountains. “Free love?” she declares. “My left foot! Why, love ain’t free. It costs and costs.…”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NATALIE S. HARNETT is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She has been awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship, a Summer Literary Seminars Fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center Writer’s Grant, and was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. Harnett has been published in The New York Times, The Madison Review, and The MacGuffin. She lives on Long Island with her husband and toddler.
Visit her Web site at www.natalieharnett.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE HOLLOW GROUND. Copyright © 2014 by Natalie S. Harnett. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Young Jin Lim
Cover photo-illustration by Richard Tuschman
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Harnett, Natalie S.
The hollow ground: a novel / Natalie S. Harnett.—First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-04198-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-3919-9 (e-book)
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Irish Americans—Fiction. 3. Coal mine accidents—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A7495H27 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013046181
eISBN 9781466839199
First Edition: May 2013
The Hollow Ground: A Novel Page 27
