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

because the ground was too hot for dogs or kids to play. Here and there remained only a cellar door or a gaping foundation to mark where a house once stood.
    Daddy didn’t say so but I could tell the fire was much worse than he’d expected. You could see the worry pull creases at his brow like lines tugging on a weight too heavy to bear. “Don’t worry, princess,” he said. “They’re going to spend three years and over two million dollars to dig this fire out. And if they’re going to spend that kind of money they’re planning to do the job right. They’ve declared the whole area a slum which means they get to wreck every house and dig down as far as it takes. Dig to the middle of the earth. Dig to China, if they have to.”
    He took my hand and squeezed it till I gave him a weak smile. “Now what would the middle of the earth look like?” he said and we made guesses to that as we walked all the way back to Gram and Gramp’s, swinging hands, coming up with more and more fantastical ways to describe the earth’s center, settling finally on a blue ball of ice, as clear and fragile as glass.

 
    Five
    That first week in Barrendale Brother and I dreaded starting a new school, but our first day turned out to be easier than expected. Since the school was located in the fire zone, nearly three-quarters of the kids and teachers were either waiting for their houses to be destroyed or were already living in hotels or with extended family. Us being the new kids barely went noticed by anyone but ourselves.
    During those first weeks in Barrendale the best part of my day was when school ended and I went to visit Ma at the mill. I’d follow the railroad to the edge of town and I’d veer onto Stone Lane, a long narrow road that meandered along a cliff that dead-ended at the mill’s enormous imposing doors. The mill was the largest building I’d ever seen, at least twelve houses wide and two high. It was made of bluestone, which gave it a shimmery bluish or gray quality depending on the light and the top of it was what Daddy called crenulated. I’d never heard that word before. All I knew was that the building put you in mind of a castle. It was easy to imagine it with turrets and a drawbridge. Sometimes when I approached it, the sun would be at just the right angle to make its countless windows glint and the sight of it would fill me with wonder.
    Ma, though, I don’t think ever had that feeling as she walked to work. Her station was on the second floor of a room that was maybe three times the size of the baseball field in the park. I’d walk up the side stairs that also served as a fire escape and I’d wave to Big Berta, the floor lady, who’d wave back, letting me through to where Ma sat near a window that looked out on tree branches. Sometimes birds flew in the opened windows and snakes dropped from the trees’ limbs to slither across the sill.
    At the end of a long row of women bent at sewing machines, Ma worked stitching the crotches of pair after pair of underwear. The noise of the machines was so steady it made even your blood thrum. “It gets inside you,” Ma said matter-of-factly. “You can’t escape it.”
    Feeling trapped by her work made Ma expressive like she’d never been before. I loved to come by and visit because each time she told me a little more about her life before she had me. It was like one of those children books where you can slide a picture to the side to reveal another picture beneath it. Slowly Ma was pulling aside the surface part of her to show me a different deeper part of her that I believed to be truer. Just a week earlier she’d told me how after leaving the orphanage, she eventually wound up in Barrendale because she’d heard the mill was looking for workers.
    “When I first met Gram I actually thought she was nice. That’s how mean the orphanage nuns were. But I’ll tell you what your daddy said to me. He said he didn’t care that I came from no orphanage. He said his