The Hollow Ground: A Novel by Natalie S. Harnett Read Free Book Online

Queen Anne’s lace, buttercup or clover. “But,” Ma said, “she also told me kids don’t got headaches or problems. Can you believe that? That’s something I never told you or your brother. If anyone knows that ain’t true, it’s me.”
    Eventually Ma fell asleep, but I stayed up after, listening to her breathe as if each sigh of her breath carried the clue to our happiness.

 
    Four
    Those first few days there, me and Daddy walked all over Barrendale. “Exploring,” he called it, but “recalling” would have been the better word. He showed me a place called Devil’s Well where the water pooled so deep in the river that a boy had drowned. He took me to the field that was no longer a field but a salt rock factory where he and Uncle Frank used to play ball. He pointed out all the spots known to have bootlegging holes, the holes people dug so they could get down into the mine shafts and steal as much coal as they could carry. Daddy was careful to let me know that the people were forced to do this because the coal company wouldn’t give them enough work or pay to make a living. Meanwhile, he told me, there was still more than two million tons of coal unused beneath our feet. “What a waste,” he said. “And they’d arrest you for taking it when they know there’s more down there than they could ever use.”
    Most of the bootlegging holes Daddy knew about were off dirt roads up in the mountains and were so boarded up there was no way down them anymore. The entry to one of them was inside a cave and Daddy and I hunched outside of it one day and stared at the wood slats the cops had used to seal it off.
    “One of Gramp’s friends used to own this property,” Daddy said. “We helped him dig the hole. In exchange he let us use it. I was only eleven at the time. Your age.” Daddy looked at me with wonder as if how old I was had surprised him. “I didn’t think of myself as a kid though. There were other boys my age helping out their dads. All the men had their hours cut. All the men had to figure out some way to get by.”
    I loved to walk with Daddy and think about the ground beneath us that was honeycombed with gangways and shafts and tunnels, the very tunnels Daddy had mined, the very tunnels I’d dreamt of all my life, wishing I could one day see them for myself. I tried hard to imagine a young daddy, a daddy my age, going down that hole in that cave with Gramp. If I pictured him hard enough, if I felt what he felt then, I’d get closer to his heart. I’d concentrate as if my life depended on it, as if my imaginative abilities could somehow prove my love.
    During those “exploring walks” was the first time Daddy talked about Uncle Frank and when he talked about the places where they’d worked or hung out as boys, there was a rawness to his voice that was so tender and rough it made me jealous.
    “Pity the good one died,” Gram had said about Uncle Frank and I thought if I could be as good as dead Uncle Frank had been, maybe one day Daddy would talk about me like that, with an ache in his voice. And I pictured myself dead in a coffin in the pink dress Auntie had bought me with Daddy telling people how good I was, his voice all sweet with the sad.
    On those walks, though, Daddy didn’t just recall his own memories. He talked about the original city of Barrendale that burned down in the great fire of 1850 and how the people came together to build it up again. He took me to a little knoll in the furthest part of the cemetery and showed me where some Civil War soldiers were buried and then he showed me a house with a busted-up widow’s walk that had been part of the Underground Railroad. “When I was a kid,” he said, “the rich old lady who owned this place hired me to set mousetraps in the tunnels between the walls where the slaves used to crawl.”
    We looked up at the house and then at the house across the street that had a portico with big white columns. We’d entered the north side of town