Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (14 page)

Her hair, I thought, was beautiful.

I looked at Jack, then back at her.

And I remembered that it had been done in a beauty parlor.

"Leo, this is Teresa."

She wiped her hand on the white apron, then placed it in mine. "Pleased to meet you."

I found my voice. "Hi, Teresa." I tried, rather unsuccessfully, not to stare.

Her face crinkled. "Not from around here, are you?-"

I shook my head. "Toronto. Like Jack."

"Can tell from your accent. North somewhere."

"Leo's a friend of my sister Marg. Might stay a bit."

"Ah." She seemed to understand something. What it was, I wasn't sure.

"Depends," I said.

"Do you think Barbara could spare us a sandwich?" asked Jack. "Keep body and soul together?"

She smiled at him. "See what she can do." She moved off down the counter.

When she was rummaging in a loaf of white bread, I asked, "Who's Barbara?"

He grinned. "Hutton. Woolworth heiress. Poor little rich girl. Who else?" He turned to me, speaking under his breath. "I figure Barbara can afford to treat me to the occasional sandwich. You, too. Nobody's hurt." He glanced down the counter, smiling that startling smile at Teresa, who smiled back. "Only reason I come here," he said.

His last sentence settled like a door clicking solidly shut. Yet glancing from one to the other of them, watching what passed between them, I saw, with wonder and trepidation, that there was clearly another reason why he came here.

That night, Jack went to work at the hospital and left me alone in his room. I sat in a chair by the open window and watched the sheets of lightning flash across my surreal world, knowing that this was all leading somewhere, through the past, through the future. Finally, I began to hear the rolls of distant thunder, and knew that the rain, which seemed spread across fifty years, was coming at last.

But it wasn't until some time after midnight, while I was still sitting in the chair, between waking and dreaming, between action and possibility, that the noises coming from the basement began to infiltrate my consciousness.

I listened.

Opening the door, I stood on the third-floor landing.

Muffled voices. A pause. Hammering.

Silence.

I descended the stairs. As on the journey into the past, through lightning and heat, I was being drawn down, led beneath the apparent schematics of things, into the subterranean world of some dark truth.

NINE

Tuesday, October 9, 1934

The mind is plated with electrically galvanized images. There are incidents, voices, that never leave us, and we replay them at odd moments, letting them speak to us with their eerie clarity. The past is a scrapbook of clipped dialogues and scenes, of which childhood is a part.

I have a memory of my mother sitting in the aluminum-and-cloth folding chair on the front veranda of the house in which my father still lives today. It is summer. I am eight, perhaps ten years of age. I ask my mother if she could have anything she wants, what would she have.

Peace and quiet, she says.

I do not understand this, so I try again. No, really, what would you have?

Suddenly, she confides in me, a child, the fourth of her five. I'd like to know, she says, what happened to my brother Jack. I'd like to know what became of him, why he never wrote again.

My mother has told me stories about herself and her brother growing up. I know his name. I have a picture of him in my head, based on a faint memory of a photograph I once saw. Even in my innocence, though, I realize that I have elicited a truth that may have surprised both of us.

Why, I ask, do you think you haven't heard from him? What happened to him?
 

She is quiet.
 

The summer is quiet.
 

Childhood stands still.

I think he must be dead, she says finally. I don't think there could be any other reason. Otherwise, she says, he'd have written.

The film in my head runs out at this point, and I cannot see or hear any more.

But I remember the feeling of being allowed into this secret place. I remember it as one of the closest moments I ever had with my mother.

On the second-floor landing, I stood and listened again. Voices, quiet, then voices. Hammering. Quiet.

I waited another minute. A bit of soft laughter rolled up the stairs, then more talking.

The sound of a shovel scraping dirt from a cement surface. In Ashland, Kentucky.

I continued downward, feeling the tide rising to meet me.

The first time I ever saw my mother cry I was three years old. She was in the kitchen, and Nanny, my grandmother, my father's mother, was comforting her, holding her, letting her cry on her shoulder.

I hadn't known that mothers cried until then.
 

The film in my head begins with that image.
 

What's wrong? I ask.
 

No one pays attention.
 

What's the matter?

Go upstairs, Nanny tells me. Away you go.

I head onto the stairs, where I sit, halfway up, listening, looking through the rails. My mother is still crying. I don't understand it. I am scared.

Later, Nanny tells me that my mother's father died. I try to understand how sad she must have been to cry like that.

No one took me to the funeral home or to the service.

I have no memory of him.

On the stairs, I thought. I am still on the stairs. Going down, instead of up. Jack, I thought. Jack. Are you down there?

I do not pray anymore. I cannot believe as I once did. Everything changed.

I am forty. It is a gray area, a crossroads. I approach a world without the past, my parents disappearing, one at a time, slowly, in bits. The people about me, friends, brothers, sisters, are changing into whatever it is they will become next. Their own children are growing up.

We had a name picked out for my stillborn son. It is a name we never spoke aloud afterward. But I use it when I speak to him in my head, when I try to explain to him what happened. You see, he was alive. Once. I know he was. I felt him move and kick, often, before he was born.

He knows his name. It is Aidan.

I never say it out loud.

It hadn't occurred to me that my concept of a basement was formed by my experience as a Canadian, or as one from the northern states of fifty years hence—an area carved out neatly and fashioned to harbor the mechanics of a house: furnace, electricity, plumbing, storage. And then you could opt for finishing it, adding an entire living level.

I reached the bottom of the stairs, below the main floor, and found myself standing in mud. No furnace. Nothing but light bulbs dangling intermittently from an electric wire that dwindled away into the darkness.

I could smell the earth around me, damp and primitive. Focusing my eyes, I looked about and saw a large room that was the size of what a full basement might be, a cave beneath the Scott Hotel, filled with enormous piles of moist brown subsoil.

And I could hear men digging.

Maybe nature constructs us in such a way that we are destined to be only what we can be, what we were always meant to be. Experience then tests us. It is only when we have survived the crucibles that we start to find out what we hold true and valuable, who we are. Our spirit discovers how much it can absorb.

I think of white-hot metal hammered relentlessly. Then we cool, bubble in water, hissing in pain and wonder, and what emerges is truer, harder, purer.

The shadows fall away.

We glow, ready again.

The string of light bulbs led to the far side of the room, toward the sounds that echoed, feebly, all the way to the third floor. Shading my eyes from the glare with my hand, I stepped, carefully, slowly, through the mud and earth, following the lights to the far end of the room.

And stared in silence at the tunnel that had been dug in the wall in front of me, at the lights snaking out into the subterranean channel beneath the streets of Ashland.

Two-by-fours and two-by-sixes blocked off an opening six feet in height by four feet in width. Tram tracks disappeared down the center of the tunnel.

In my head, I heard Stanley's voice. Was a coal miner, Harlan County. In thirty-one, he was asked to dig for thirty-three cents a ton.

I stepped onto the ties and entered the tunnel, walking slowly, carefully. I seemed to be heading east, out under the street. About twenty feet into the tunnel, the noises of men working becoming clearer, closer, it all hit me with a brazen clarity, like the tumblers in a giant lock sliding open.

Bank's a bank..., he had said. But that one ... That one's still there.

I stood for several minutes watching them dig before anyone noticed me: the two men that I had seen entering the hotel earlier, Stanley, two others whom I did not know.

And Jack.

The air was scarcely breathable—close, humid, fetid. The men were naked to the waist, crowded together in the confines of the tunnel, covered in sweat and dirt, ankle-deep in mud.

Slowly, one by one, they straightened, stopped what they were doing, stared at me, brows wrinkled, mouths set. The two strangers at the far dirt-face leaned on their shovels. Stanley let his pickaxe settle at his feet. The two men I had met earlier held their shovels in front of them, tools that had shape-shifted into weapons, their knuckles showing white.

Finally, Jack turned and met my gaze. He rested one hand on the small tram filled with freshly dug earth. Even in the harsh dimness of a single light bulb, his body streaked with grime, surrounded by puddles, mud, crow bars, I saw his blue eyes flash recklessly.

They flashed, I saw, like sun on a waterfall, the river full of rapids, running deep into underground caverns.

They waited in silence. Their glances flickered to the empty spaces behind me, to where the tunnel dwindled into a string of harsh light-bulb pearls.

Waiting.

Jack spoke first. "This here's Leo." They still waited, listened.

I answered their unspoken question. "I'm alone," I said.
 

The two leaning on their shovels shifted their weight.
 

"I thought I heard something. I came to see." I shrugged.
 

"What do you see?" asked Stanley. His voice was soft.
 

They were motionless.

I looked at them. I looked from one to the next, each in turn, mud-stained and still as stopped clocks. I felt the rapids cascading from Jack's eyes flow into my chest with a soundless tumult. "Dreams," I said. Then I breathed slowly, in and out, my heart beating like a bird's wings. "I see dreams."
 

"He might not be alone." One of the strangers spoke.
 

They squinted around me, listened.
 

"You alone, Leo?" Jack asked.
 

I nodded. "Yes."

Jack looked at me. Then he turned around and spoke to the stranger. "I think he's alone."

"He ain't from around here. He talks funny," the man continued.

"He talks funny like me," Jack said.
 

"I'm a friend of Jack's sister," I said.
 

Jack smiled.

I watched them. I listened to the silence below the earth. I listened to my heart. Then I spoke again. "I can help," I said.

Jack nodded. The white teeth showed as the smile broadened, and I saw my mother's face.

The rapids thundered in my veins. "I want to help."

We stood in the mud in the basement back under the Scott Hotel. They seemed satisfied that I was alone.

"This here's Emmett and Henry." Stanley introduced me to the two men who had passed me on the front verandah the previous afternoon.

They were sturdy, strong men, in their early thirties I guessed, whose hands, I could see, bore the calluses of hard work.

"And George and Jimmy."

George was round-faced and perhaps the oldest of the group—maybe forty. Jimmy's red hair was matted and filthy. Irish, I thought.

George looked at Stanley. "I dunno about this."

Stanley's eyes crinkled. He looked at Jack, then back at me. He dropped his head, thinking.

"Don't want to make a mistake," said Jimmy. His feet shifted uneasily.

"What are our choicest" Stan asked.