What Sleeps in Hollow: The First Journal

The dust came up off the cardboard in pale plumes, catching the slant of late-afternoon light from Maren Thatch's kitchen window. Ellis Thorne stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands, watching Maren kneel on the warped linoleum with a box cutter and a patience she did not appear to possess.

"Ellis." She did not look up. "You can come in or you can hover. Pick one."

He came in. The house smelled of cedar and cold grease and something underneath, something that reminded him of his grandmother's parlor on summer Sundays when he was small and no one had died yet. He set his hat on the counter and crouched beside her. The box was labeled in block letters, the handwriting deliberate and certain: KITCHEN. UPSTAIRS. NOT WINTER.

"That's a useful sorting system," he said.

"It's Adelaide's." Maren slid the blade under the packing tape. "She labeled her own boxes before she stopped being able to write her own name. Said she didn't trust any of us to know what was what."

The tape peeled away with a dry sound, the way a fingernail lifts from old skin. Inside, beneath crumpled newsprint yellowed to the color of weak tea, lay a stack of composition notebooks. Their covers were soft with age, the marbled black-and-white pattern gone gray with handling. The top one read, in blue ink that had faded to the color of a winter sky: 1952.

"Christ," Maren said quietly. "She started the day she moved in."

Ellis reached for the notebook, then stopped. "She's your kin, not mine."

"You came over." Maren lifted it out and turned it over in her hands, weighing it the way a person weighs a decision she has already made. "So you get a vote."

She opened the cover. The first page was a name and a date in careful, slanted cursive: Adelaide Ruth Vance, June 3, 1952. Below that, in the same measured script, a line that looked as if it had been added later, with a different pen: The house was waiting.

"She married your grandfather that June," Ellis said. He had known the dates. Everybody in Hollow knew the dates. Adelaide had made sure of it.

"Hush." Maren turned the page.

The next page was a list, written small, in three columns. At the top, the heading: WHAT MOTHER-IN-LAW SAID.

Ellis skimmed the first few entries. Instructions about the kettle. Instructions about the cellar latch. Instructions about which chair at the table was hers and which chair was not, and which chair no one was to sit in even if it stood empty for fifty years. Then, halfway down the page, set apart by a small drawn line of asterisks:

Every evening, after the last dish is dried and put away, take the kitchen knife. The long one with the wooden handle. Go to the back porch. From the porch step, count nine paces toward the tree line. Stop where the ground turns soft. Kneel. Drive the knife into the earth, point down, and leave it there until first light. Do not speak while you walk. Do not speak while you kneel. Do not speak when you pull it out. Bring it back inside, wash it, dry it, put it away. Do this every night, including Sundays, including Christmas, including the day your child is born if it happens to come at night. If you forget, the hollow will know. If you refuse, the hollow will know. Mother-in-law said the previous wife had refused. She said the previous wife had been gone inside a year. She said this while looking at me the way a person looks at a horse they are thinking of buying.

Maren turned the page. Then she turned it back and read the entry again, her lips barely moving. The kitchen was so quiet Ellis could hear the clock on the wall, the tick of it almost louder than a heartbeat, almost louder than his own breathing.

"She wasn't making it up," Maren said. Her voice had gone careful and flat, the way it got when she was deciding how much of herself to put into a sentence. "Look at the next page."

The next page held a single line in that same careful script:

First night I did it, I cried so hard I could not see the tree line.

Below it, in a different ink, the letters small and tight, the pen pressed so hard it had almost torn through the paper:

Mother-in-law stood on the back porch the entire time. She did not offer to come with me. She did not offer to hold the knife. She watched.

"She watched." Ellis said it before he thought about saying it.

"She watched." Maren set the notebook down on the linoleum, facedown, as if it had begun to give off heat. Outside the window, a mockingbird started up in the dogwood and stopped, started again, stopped. The slant of light in the kitchen had thickened, gone the color of brewed tea. The linoleum under Ellis's knee was cold enough to feel through his trousers.

"I asked her once," Maren said, "when she was still mostly herself, why the knife. Why not a stake. Why not a rock. Why a kitchen knife with a wooden handle, and she looked at me like I had asked her why the sky was up. 'Because it's what you have,' she said. 'You use what you have.'"

Ellis sat back on his heels. His knees popped. "Did you ever ask her what happened if you stopped?"

"She never answered that one." Maren looked at him, and for a moment her face had the same flat, considering look he had seen on Adelaide's face in the back pew of the Methodist church when he was a boy. The same eyes. The same patience. The same way of holding her mouth that said she had already decided something and you were only now being told. "She would change the subject. Every time. Change it so smooth you didn't realize she'd done it until you were already talking about the price of feed."

She picked up the notebook again and turned forward, past more dated entries, past more lists and headings, until she came to one near the middle. The handwriting in this one was looser, faster, the letters running into one another the way Adelaide's had in her last years, when the arthritis had taken the joints in her right hand and she had refused, every day, to learn to write with the left.

June 28, 1952. H came home early from the feed store. Asked me why my hands were shaking. Told him it was the cold. He did not ask again. The hollow was louder tonight than usual. I do not know how else to write it. Louder than a field of crickets. Louder than the river in spring. As if it had something to say and could not get the breath to say it.

Ellis read it twice. "Louder than a field of crickets," he said. "That's how she wrote it."

"That's how she meant it." Maren shut the notebook and held it flat against her knee, palm down. "She told me once that the hollow had a sound, and the sound was not wind and not water and not any animal she could name. She said you could only hear it past the tree line, after dark, when there was no moon. She said if you heard it, you were not supposed to walk toward it. You were supposed to walk the other way, and you were supposed to walk fast."

Outside, the dogwood shadow had lengthened across the yard. Somewhere down the road a screen door banged once and then stopped, and nobody called out after it. The kitchen clock took up its ticking again as if it had only been holding its breath.

"There's more boxes," Maren said. "Three more in the attic. She labeled them BEDROOM, PARLOR, and one she just labeled HERS."

"Hers," Ellis said.

"Hers." Maren set the 1952 notebook on the counter beside his hat. She did not look at it after she set it down. "You want to start with the parlor, or you want to wait until tomorrow when the light's better."

Ellis looked at the notebook. The faded blue of the year on the cover. The careful, slanted handwriting inside. The house was waiting. He thought about the kitchen knife with the wooden handle, and he thought about Adelaide Thatch at nineteen, kneeling in soft ground at the edge of a hollow, driving a blade into the earth with her teeth set, and her mother-in-law on the porch, watching.

"Tomorrow," he said. "When the light's better."

Maren nodded, once, the way her grandmother used to nod when a decision had been reached and there was nothing left to say about it. She stood, and her knees popped too, and she went to put the kettle on. The burner clicked three times before the flame caught, and the small blue ring of it jumped up and steadied, and the kitchen began, very slowly, to smell of nothing at all.

The kettle had not yet begun to whisper when Ellis reached across the counter and put his hand on the notebook. The cover felt cooler than he had expected, the cardboard slightly waxy beneath his fingertips, and the year on the front had been written in a careful hand, the 1 and the 9 leaning into each other as if leaning into a wind. Maren turned from the stove. She did not tell him to put it down. She did not tell him to open it either. She turned back to the kettle and the small sound of water beginning to move inside the metal.

He opened the cover. The first page held a name and a date.

Adelaide Ruth Thatch Cane Hollow, Harlan County January the 3rd, 1952

Below that, in a different ink, in a hand he did not recognize as hers from the boxes of receipts and church bulletins that had come before, a paragraph:

I will write down what my mother-in-law told me at the edge of the spring, because I am afraid I will begin to forget the words she used, and because if I forget the words she used I will begin to forget the reason she used them, and if I forget the reason I will be no better than the rest of them, who let the years eat the meaning out of things and called what was left faith.

Ellis glanced up. Maren was standing very still by the stove, watching the flame. He looked back down.

The next several pages were a careful, unhurried account of Adelaide's first winter in Cane Hollow as a bride of nineteen. The ink was a brown-black that suggested a pen kept long in a drawer. The lines slanted slightly upward from left to right, as if the hand that made them had been pulling itself forward across the page. She wrote of the house, of the porch that sagged in the middle and had to be braced with a forked oak limb, of the kitchen stove that smoked when the wind came out of the southeast. She wrote of her mother-in-law, Mertie Thatch, in terms that were respectful on the surface and something else underneath, the way a person writes about weather that has caused them damage.

Ellis turned pages slowly. The clock ticked. The kettle began, very faintly, to tick against the lid as the water inside it began to warm. He could smell, faintly, the cedar of the old paper, and beneath that a ghost of something sharper, like dried ink, or like the inside of a drawer that had held a pen for a long time.

Then, near the back of the first third of the notebook, the handwriting changed. Not the slant. Not the ink. But the spacing between the words tightened, as if the hand that wrote them had drawn closer to what it was writing, the way a person leans forward when they are listening. The page was dated October the 17th, 1952.

Tonight I went down to the basin at dusk. Mertie had told me to go. She had told me at noon, and again at three, and again at four, and the fourth time she took me by the wrist, in the kitchen, with the light coming in low, and she said, Girl, you will go when the light goes amber and not before, and you will not speak until the bowl is full, and when you speak you will speak the words I will give you, and you will not repeat them to any living soul, and you will not speak them in your sleep, and if you find them coming up in a dream you will bite your tongue until you wake, and you will not write them down, but if you must remember them you will remember the place they came from and not the sound they made, because the sound was the leash and the place was the throat of the thing they were leashing.

I went down. The path behind the smokehouse had gone to fern and to wet leaves, and the fern brushed my stockings. The basin was where Mertie had said it would be, in the clearing past the black oak, where the ground sank into a kind of bowl. The stone was older than any stone in the house. It had been set there before the house had a name. Mertie had carried the milk in a jar with a cloth tied over the top, and she had carried the honey in a small tin with a wooden spoon stuck in it. She gave them to me at the edge of the clearing and she stepped back.

I knelt. The stone was cool through my skirt. The milk went first, and it was thick, and it ran slow down the side of the basin and pooled in the bottom the way milk pools when the air is cool. Then the honey, and I had to work it out of the tin with the wooden spoon, and the spoon had been carved with marks I had not noticed before, three small crosses and a line beneath them, and I did not look at the spoon longer than I had to. I poured the honey in a thin line over the milk, and the honey did not sink. It lay on top of the milk in a slow gold thread, and it stayed there, and I did not understand how it stayed there, and I did not ask.

The light was going amber at the edge of the trees. Mertie had said amber, and amber was what it was, a color like the inside of a paper lantern. I could hear her breathing behind me. I could hear my own breath going in and out through my teeth. The bowl was not yet full. Mertie had said nothing about adding anything else. I thought about the jar of milk and the tin of honey and the spoon with the marks and the small crosses. I thought about going back to the house and asking her. I did not go back.

Then I spoke.

I cannot write the words. I will not write the words. They are not English, and they are not the Old Language the preachers used at the camp meetings when I was small, and they are not Latin, though they had the shape of Latin in the mouth. They were given to me in a string of seven, and Mertie had made me say them three times through while we stood in the kitchen, and each time I said them I felt the air in the room pull against my tongue as if I were speaking into a jar. The first time my throat ached after. The third time I could feel the words in the bones of my jaw.

I said them over the bowl. The milk and the honey did not move. The light did not move. The fern at the edge of the clearing did not move. Something behind the black oak did move. I heard it the way you hear a dog shift in its sleep, a single soft sound and then a quietness that was different from the quietness that had been there before.

When I had said the seven words three times each, Mertie stepped forward and put her hand on the back of my neck. Her hand was cold and dry. She did not speak. She led me back up the path and into the house. She did not let me wash the bowl. She set it behind the door of the smokehouse and she told me, before she let go of my neck, that I had done what was needful, and that I was not to speak of it, and that if ever the thing in the clearing grew hungry again, it would be my daughter or my son's wife who went down to the basin, because that was the way of it, and that was the price of living in the house.

I have not spoken the words since. I have dreamed them twice. Both times I woke with my tongue between my teeth and the taste of iron in my mouth.

Ellis read the last line twice. The taste of iron in my mouth. He closed the notebook. He set it back on the counter. His hand, he noticed, had gone cold around the edges, the way a hand goes cold when a person has been holding still too long in a draft. The kettle behind Maren had reached a low, steady hum.

Maren did not turn. She lifted the kettle off the flame. She poured water into two mugs she had set out, and the tea bag in one of them went pale immediately, the way tea only does when the water is just off the boil. She set one mug in front of Ellis. The other she kept for herself. She did not sit. She stood across from him with her own mug held in both hands, the steam rising past her face and softening the line of her jaw.

"My grandmother told me once," Maren said, "that there was a thing in the family she would not talk about. Not a person. A thing." She took a sip. The mug hid her mouth for a moment. "I asked her what kind of thing. She said the kind you do not ask the kind of."

Ellis looked at her. The clock ticked. The dogwood shadow had gone from the floor entirely now, and the kitchen had taken on the flat, even light of a room after the sun has gone past the ridge. The stove ticked as the metal cooled. Somewhere outside a wren gave three notes and stopped, as if it had been answered and did not like the answer.

"What did she call it," he said.

"She didn't call it anything," Maren said. "She said if you called it by a name it knew you were thinking of it. She said you could feel it lift its head, the way a horse lifts its head when you say the right word in the right tone across a pasture. She said it was not safe to make it lift its head."

She set the mug down. The sound it made on the counter was small and precise.

"That's all I know," she said. "That's all she ever told me. And that's all I'm going to tell you tonight."

Ellis nodded. He wrapped his hands around his own mug. The warmth came up through the ceramic and met the cold in his fingers, and for a moment the two temperatures sat in his hands like two different kinds of weather. He did not drink. He watched the steam.

"What about your brother," he said.

Maren did not answer at once. She looked at the notebook on the counter. She looked at the stove, where the burner was still cooling, the metal clicking down through its own small scale. She looked at the window, where the last of the light had gone the color of cold slate.

"He went down to the spring," she said. "I was not here. I was already gone. But that is what my mother told me, the year after. He went down to the spring one evening, and he did not come back up the path."

She picked up her mug again. She did not drink.

"There were footprints in the wet leaves," she said. "They stopped at the edge of the clearing. There were no footprints past the clearing. There was nothing else. The sheriff walked the ground with a flashlight and a man from the state police, and the man from the state police told my mother that the ground past the clearing had not been walked on by anything with weight in it for a long time. My mother said, How long is a long time. The man said, Years. My mother said, Longer than that. The man did not answer her."

Ellis set his mug down. The tea inside it had gone still and dark.

"She went down there herself," Maren said. "That was the other thing she told me. The night they brought my brother's shoes back up the path in a paper bag, my mother went down to the clearing alone. She did not take the jar. She did not take the honey. She knelt at the stone, and she spoke seven words she had never been taught, and she did not know where they had come from. She said afterward that they had risen up in her throat like a cough. She said the milk in the basin, what was left of it, had gone black."

The clock ticked. The stove ticked. The wren outside did not call again.

"She never told me the words," Maren said. "She said she had given them back."

Ellis looked at the notebook. The blue of the year on the cover had gone gray in the flat light. The slanted handwriting inside was still legible, if a person knew how to read a hand that had been pulling itself forward for seventy years.

He thought about Adelaide at nineteen, kneeling in soft ground at the edge of a hollow, with her teeth set and her mother-in-law's hand on the back of her neck. He thought about the gold thread of honey lying on top of the milk without sinking. He thought about the quietness at the edge of the clearing that was different from the quietness that had been there before.

"You said tomorrow," Maren said. "When the light's better."

The light was better the next morning, though better was a relative word in Hollow. The sky had gone the color of old pewter by the time Ellis climbed the porch steps of the general store at seven, and the air held the particular chill of late autumn waiting to decide whether it would commit to winter. He had not slept well. The notebook had sat on the passenger seat of his truck all night while he drove back to his cabin on the ridge, and he had not opened it again, but he had felt its weight the way a person feels the weight of a sleeping animal beside them, something breathing that was not quite part of the room.

Maren was already behind the counter when he came in. She was sweeping a patch of floor near the canned goods that did not appear to need sweeping, and she did not look up.

"I brought coffee," Ellis said.

"I can see that."

"It's from the place in Crayburn. The one with the green awning."

"I know which one." She leaned the broom against the shelf and crossed to him. Her hands were cold when she took the paper cup. He noticed because she did not wince, and a person who noticed their own cold hands would have winced.

They drank their coffee standing up. The store smelled of floor wax and the faint sweet rot of apples in a crate near the back, the ones Mr. Halse had marked down the week before and that no one had bought. The bell above the door had not rung when Ellis came in because Maren had propped it open with a brick to let in air.

"I read more of it last night," she said. "After you left."

He waited.

"There's a page near the middle that's been pasted in. Different paper. Stiff, like the cover of an old photo album. I didn't notice it at first because the edges had been tucked under other pages. But when I lifted them, there was something behind."

She set her cup down on the counter and reached beneath the register where the notebook lay in its blue cloth. She opened it with both hands, the way a person handles something they are not sure they have the right to handle, and turned to a page near the back third. The pages stuck a little at the seam where the pasted paper began. She lifted the corner with her thumbnail and drew out what lay beneath.

It was a photograph. Black and white. The edges had gone soft with age, the white border yellowed to the color of weak tea. In the picture, seven women stood in a line at the edge of a clearing that Ellis recognized from the map Adelaide had shown him, the one with the small black square drawn at its center. Behind them, the slope of the hollow rose in a long, unbroken curve, and the trees at its lip were so dark they had printed almost solid on the negative.

The seven women were arranged shoulder to shoulder, each woman's hand resting on the shoulder of the woman to her left, so that the line of them was connected by touch across the whole frame. They were all wearing the same dark dress. High-necked. Long-sleeved. The fabric hung heavy in the photograph, suggesting wool, and each woman held the front of her skirt slightly lifted at the hem with her free hand, the way women of a certain generation held their skirts in fields. Their hair was pulled back. Their feet were bare.

And their eyes.

Ellis set his coffee down because his hand had begun to shake, and he did not want to spill it on the photograph.

Every one of them had the same eyes.

He knew Adelaide's eyes. He had looked into them across a kitchen table for nearly three weeks, and he had catalogued them the way he catalogued things now, by shape and shade and the particular way they held light. Gray. Not the gray of storm clouds, which moved and changed, but the gray of certain stones that hold their color no matter the weather. Lighter at the rim, darker at the pupil, with a fine line of darker still around the iris like a ring drawn in pencil. Adelaide's eyes.

Seven of them, in a row, looking out of a photograph that had been folded into a journal kept by a woman who had married into the family that had lived at the hollow's edge for over a century.

"There's writing on the back," Maren said. Her voice had gone very even. "Look."

He turned the photograph over with the tips of his fingers. The pencil on the back was faint but legible, in a hand that was neither Adelaide's careful slanted script nor the older hand that had written the rest of the journal. This hand was blocky, impatient, the letters uneven on the baseline as though the writer had been holding the pencil in a fist.

Four dates. Spaced eleven years apart. And beneath them, four names.

He read the names aloud without meaning to. "Mary Thatch. Ruth Thatch. Adelaide Thatch. Maren Thatch."

The store was quiet. The apples in the back crate had begun to give off a sweeter smell as the morning warmed, and somewhere outside, a dog was barking in three short bursts, then silence, then three short bursts again.

"That's not possible," Maren said. She had not moved. "I'm not in that picture. I've never been to that clearing. I haven't even been back to Hollow in ten years."

"I know."

"That's my name. In my grandmother's handwriting. On the back of a photograph I have never seen."

"I know."

She looked at him. Her eyes were brown. They had always been brown. He had noticed this about her the first time she had walked into the diner on his second day in town, when she had ordered black coffee and a piece of pie she had not eaten, and he had watched her because she was a stranger in a place that did not get many, and he had thought, without knowing why, that her eyes were not the eyes of this town.

"They're not all her," Maren said. "Look again. Some of them are younger. Some of them are older. That's not the same woman seven times."

Ellis looked again. She was right. The woman at the far left was stooped with age, her white hair visible even in the gray wash of the old print. The woman beside her was perhaps sixty. The third was Adelaide's age, or near it. The fourth was younger. The fifth younger still. The sixth was a girl. The seventh was a child.

Seven women. Four generations. All with the same eyes.

"It says the dates are spaced eleven years apart," Ellis said.

"I can read."

"The last one is dated this year."

Maren took the photograph from him. She held it under the light of the bulb above the counter and studied it the way a person studies a map when they are lost. The bell above the door gave a single muted jingle as a breeze came through the propped opening, though no one had entered.

"I asked her once," Maren said. "When I was a girl. I asked her why she never let me play down by the creek. She said it was because the creek was not for playing. I asked her what it was for. She said it was for keeping. I didn't understand what she meant. I thought she meant the bank, the way you bank a fire. I thought she meant the creek was something you tended."

Ellis nodded. He did not speak.

"The woman in the picture. The youngest one. The child." Maren held the photograph out to him and pointed. "Look at her feet."

He looked. The child at the end of the line was standing slightly forward of the others, as though she had stepped out of alignment just before the shutter clicked. Her bare feet were planted in the soft ground at the edge of the clearing, and around each ankle, just above the place where the foot met the earth, there was a faint mark. A discoloration, perhaps. Or a shadow. He could not tell whether it was a thing that was there in the photograph or a thing the photograph had made.

"It could be a trick of the print," he said.

"It could be."

Neither of them believed it.

The dog outside had stopped barking. The store held its breath the way stores do when the weather is turning, the canned goods on their shelves giving off tiny ticks as the metal warmed and expanded. Maren put the photograph back between the pages of the notebook, and the notebook back in its cloth, and the cloth back beneath the register.

"I need to go see her," Maren said.

"Now?"

"Before I lose the nerve to ask the question I need to ask."

Ellis picked up his coffee. It had gone cold. He drank it anyway because his hands wanted something to hold, and because there are small acts of stubbornness that keep a person upright when the larger ones have been used up.

"I'll drive you," he said.

She did not argue. She untied her apron and folded it once and set it on the counter beside the register. She reached beneath and lifted the cloth-wrapped notebook and tucked it under her arm.

The bell above the door rang once, clearly, when they stepped out into the morning. The sky had not decided what it was. The air smelled of wet leaves and the first suggestion of woodsmoke from one of the houses on the lane. Maren walked ahead of him to his truck and opened the passenger door without waiting for him to unlock it.

She set the notebook on her lap and placed both hands flat on top of it. She was looking at the windshield, but not at anything on the other side of it.

"Ellis."

"Yes."

"When we get there. If she answers me. If she tells me what I think she's going to tell me."

He waited.

"I want you to promise me you'll write it down."

"I will."

"All of it. Whatever she says. Word for word."

"I promise."

The engine turned over. The wipers smeared a fine mist across the glass. He pulled out onto the lane and turned toward Adelaide Thatch's house, and the notebook sat between them on the seat like a third passenger who had been waiting a long time to be heard.