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

where the rich people used to live and surrounding us were what had once been beautiful homes, most of them Victorian and Tudor and Queen Anne style houses. We shook our heads at the sofas and appliances left out on the porches to molder and rust. Garbage cans were tied to slate hitching posts. An air conditioner jutted out a stained glass window. Turrets capped houses that were so peeled and beaten it hurt to look at them, yet we couldn’t stop looking at them. They had so much to tell us about what they once had been and what they’d lost along the way.
    Daddy also talked about Barrendale before it was called Barrendale, when it was called Slocum Hollow. Washington Irving supposedly gave it the name Barrendale after being disappointed by a visit to the city. Somehow or other the name stuck. I couldn’t get over that the town would give up such a beautiful name in favor of such an ugly one and I found myself saying “Slocum Hollow” aloud every now and then, loving the way my tongue shaped the words.
    On some days Daddy talked about the Indians who’d called West Mountain Black Mountain. “And when the men who started the Delaware and Hudson Canal heard there was a mountain called Black Mountain, they guessed there was coal there.”
    Daddy showed me the site near the courthouse where the first underground coal mine in the country was opened and he explained how the D&H Canal was built to haul coal from Barrendale to New York City. “They couldn’t get the canal all the way to Barrendale though, because East Mountain was in the way. So they had to build a gravity railroad to get the coal over the mountain to the canal. You wouldn’t think it to look at this place now, but up until the mines shut down it was like a little Philadelphia for all it had going on.”
    We’d wandered from the rich section to the center of town, which consisted mostly of empty storefronts and abandoned lots. High up on the brick buildings were the faded names of the stores that used to be there such as J. C. Penney’s and Newberry’s and Woolworth’s. Every building we passed, Daddy could name what shoe store, or appliance store, or law office it once had been. Daddy told me that the D&H Canal Company was the first million-dollar private enterprise in America and that it was all due to the fact that the biggest anthracite coal vein in the world was right below our feet.
    “We were a part of something, princess,” Daddy said. “We helped make this country great. Don’t you ever forget that.”
    We were standing outside a building that had an old Coca-Cola advertisement pasted to it. We gripped hands and a lady passing by smiled shyly at Daddy. “Handsome as Clark Gable,” Ma liked to say whenever she reminisced and the love she felt for Daddy oozed out from whatever dark place she’d hid it.
    Daddy’s hair was as black and as shiny as the slag littering the lots and his eyes were what’s called Madonna blue, the color of Our Lady’s cloak. Daddy’s what’s called Black Irish. There’s Spanish in his blood. Hundreds of years ago Spanish ships sank off the coast of Ireland and the Spanish soldiers, so in love with the Irish girls, stayed in Ireland—or so the story goes. Their dark-haired descendants became the Black Irish. Of course that meant I had Black Irish in me too, but wherever it was in me didn’t show.
    Those days our walks always ended in the fire zone, if ended is the right word. In a way it was what we were headed to from the start of every walk. The zone started about a quarter of a mile west of Gram and Gramp’s and covered an area of nearly ninety acres. Surrounding most of the houses were a dozen or so holes that had been drilled to have silt flushed down them. Some houses were propped up from where the ground had sunk from the fire or drilling. On the southernmost edge of the zone they’d started digging a huge pit to try and stop the fire from spreading, and an entire playground had been condemned