News from Heaven (19 page)

She considered this. “No,” she said slowly. “I'd say you're finally old enough.”

C
ake was served; the music started. “Here we go,” Ray told Evie. He'd been exposed to polkas periodically throughout his childhood—at church festivals, at family weddings—and had built up a tolerance for the bad singing and dimwitted lyrics, the relentless accordions and shrill clarinets. Evie had no idea what she was in for. A couple hours of this, he thought, and she's going to lose her mind.

The singer stepped up to the mike and said something in Polish. Then in English—in the same flat, tuneless tenor as every polka singer Ray had ever heard—he sang.

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself.

It's later than you think.

Two by two the guests got up to dance: relatives and neighbors, Pop's union buddies, elderly couples Ray recognized from St. Casimir's. He hadn't seen these people in years. Their broad Slavic faces had aged little; only their bodies had changed. The women were stout or stooped and frail; the men moved stiffly, leaning on their wives. They suffered from miner's knee, miner's hip, miner's back; in everyday life they walked with canes; but somehow—only God knew how—they were getting up to dance.

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself.

It's later than you think.

The floor filled with couples. The singer whooped into the microphone. Pop's cousin Joe, eighty that spring, tapped gamely at the drums.

“Look,” Evie said, pointing.

Ray watched his mother and father join the dancers. Pop quick despite his bad knee, arthritis in his hips; Mom almost girlish in her flowered dress. The other couples stepped back to clear their path, and in a moment they were the only dancers on the floor. The singer said something in Polish, and the crowd responded, clapping in time with the music. Mom and Pop whirled around the floor. Her white curls bounced; her round face was flushed with pleasure.

“She looks beautiful,” said Evie, and it was true. His mother who'd lost her first love and married her second, surrendered her good name in a town where nothing was forgotten. She had been hurt; undoubtedly she had regrets. Still she got up to dance.

R
ay and Evie rose early Sunday morning. Bells rang in the distance, the eight o'clock Mass at St. Casimir's. The air smelled of wet earth, an early spring. Ray hoisted their suitcases to his shoulder. Arm in arm, Evie and his mother followed him outside.

“Thanks for everything,” said Ray, kissing his mother's cheek. He touched her white curls and thought of Bryan driving in from Cleveland with his hairpins and rollers. His good son.

Ray loaded the luggage into the rental car.

“Need a hand there?” Pop leaned against the porch railing, wearing Kenny's old hunting jacket.

“Nah, I got it.”

“Safe trip,” Pop said, offering his hand. “Don't be a stranger.”

Ray turned the Ford in the narrow road, scattering gravel; he honked and waved. The town disappeared behind them in the rearview mirror: Dixon Road; the fire hall; the dirt lane behind the high school, where Pop had taught him to drive; Holy Roller Hill, where he and Kenny had raced their sleds. He passed the turnoff to the deserted road behind the reservoir, where he and Georgette had parked late at night, where his son Bryan had been conceived. At the edge of town he passed McNulty's service station, its concrete wall painted with bold letters:
TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST. TOUGH PEOPLE DO
. He reached for Evie's hand, and she placed his on her belly. I'll do better this time, he thought. I'm not dead yet. They would land in Houston at dusk and drive into the city for dinner, to a new Thai place that had opened downtown. The streets would be quiet on a Sunday night, resting for the week ahead. But Monday morning they would come alive, and Ray with them; himself still new, and still becoming.

What Remains

A
t the northern tip of Bakerton, along the winding country road called Deer Run, lies a sloping parcel of land once cleared for farming. A century ago, a family named Hoeffer owned it, got rich on corn and soybeans and—briefly, during war rationing—even coal, after Quentin Hoeffer found a shallow bed in his back forty and took a pick and shovel to it. Then Hoeffer's son-in-law, no farmer, tried his hand at raising sheep, with disastrous consequences. Saxon Savings repossessed the property and let the place go to seed.

By the time Sunny Baker bought it in the 1970s, the Hoeffer farm had lain dormant for a full generation, and a young forest had taken root: fast-growing paper birches and Norway spruce; a spongy ground cover of aggressive kudzu; in the deep shade, soft pockets of fern. She lived in the old farmhouse barely visible from the road, surrounded by what resembled, from a distance, a dense jungle of metal and plastic. Passersby on Deer Run could pick out two junk cars, several old refrigerators, a decrepit lawn tractor, a busted generator, a ramshackle aluminum shed. A child's swing set, an old Victrola, a toilet, a motorcycle, a snowmobile, and a rusted dinghy filled with dirt. At the edge of the property, with weeds growing up between them, lay piles of building supplies: ten-foot lengths of PVC piping, a heap of warped two-by-fours. Waterlogged parlor furniture—armchairs, a sofa—clustered at the center in a conversational grouping, as though a family might sit there watching television.

Sunny's junk was an eyesore, but for a long time no one was looking. Her nearest neighbor was a dairy farmer a mile down the road. The farmer's wife noted Sunny's comings and goings. Her car, a twelve-year-old Thunderbird, looked much like the others propped up on blocks in the front yard, yet it ran well enough to get her into town a few times a month. In the A&P and the state liquor store, she was instantly recognized by her general dishevelment and the jacket she wore regardless of the weather—a plaid hunting coat, red-and-black-checked, left behind years ago by one of her men.

The town, Bakerton, wasn't named for Sunny or even her great-grandfather; but for the coal mines he'd dug in that valley. Mines brought miners, miners built camps. Mining camps multiplied until someone called them a town.

Bakerton.

Did Sunny hear her own name when the town was mentioned? Or was Bakerton no more than an address, like any other place in the world?

Over the years her junk multiplied, covering a full acre. A horse trailer appeared; rolls of chicken wire; a doghouse. Certain objects were discernibly Sunny's own: a ten-speed bicycle she'd been seen riding, a beautician's sink she'd acquired from her aunt Rosalie, the actress, who'd hired a local hairdresser to keep her in pin curls. Other items—a crib and high chair, a green plastic Inchworm—were presumably connected to Sunny's children, back when she still had them, back before someone—their father or her aunt or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—intervened to save them, since they weren't grown enough to run away themselves. But most of the junk was plainly masculine, a rusty scat trail: the unsightly droppings of Sunny's men, who'd met her in one bar or another and figured out who she was, or had been.

The first was a man she'd brought back from Oregon, a hippie type who might have loved her when she was young and less obviously crazy, before she'd drunk away her looks and her health and what Baker money she could wheedle out of her aunt, Virgie Baker having clutched the purse strings even on her deathbed. The hippie had tooled around Bakerton in a dilapidated van, amber-colored, with an iridescent starburst airbrushed on one side. Sunny was pregnant then, her second: the hippie's, probably, though there had been no wedding as far as anyone knew. The new baby, a girl, was seen eventually in town, strapped to the hippie's back like an Indian papoose. After a year or two the hippie disappeared, taking (it was thought) the two babies but leaving behind the beginnings of Sunny's own private salvage yard: the starburst van, a nonfunctioning rototiller. He'd been an enthusiastic gardener, as hippies were.

There had been, locally, some goodwill toward this hippie, seen picnicking at Garman Lake when Sunny was immensely pregnant, helping her up tenderly from the grass. That meant something, the women agreed: if a man loved you at eight months, tired and bitching and big as a bus, he loved you to the very end. Later, though—in the revisionist history of Sunny Baker, the story as it was told after the ending was known—the hippie would be judged more harshly. It was the hippie who'd left the first junk on Sunny's lawn, who'd
pioneered
the leaving of junk, and paved the way for the rest.

S
he was the last of the Bakers: a spoiled lonely girl without siblings, without cousins, raised by two maiden aunts who'd lost everything—one histrionically, the other in silent bitterness—and invested all their hopes in her.

Sunny's great-grandfather Chester Baker had thrown the first shovel; but it was Chester Junior, known as Chessie, who grew the two Baker mines—in a few decades, with the help of two wars—into twelve. Chessie was a mine operator, and only that; the planet, to him, the scene of a cosmic shell game. Its land masses existed for one purpose only, the hiding of bituminous coal. He kept the company name, Baker Brothers, though he'd long been brotherless. (Edgar Baker had been killed at the Somme.) From his youth, Chessie lived only for his mines, a man so single-minded that he'd never once gone to the pictures, never watched a single game played by the Baker Bombers, his company's baseball team.

Yet he found time to marry and raise three children, or at least get them started. There was a clever girl named Virginia, a pretty one named Rosalie. The boy, Chester III, was known in the family as
Third
or simply
The Youngest,
a title shortened in childhood to the tender moniker
Ty.
These names were part of Sunny's childhood, each matched to a framed portrait on the parlor wall of the Baker house on Indian Hill. The house referred to, in town, as
The Mansion,
with audible capitals, and by the Bakers as
the big house
or simply
home.

For all of Sunny's girlhood, the wall was laden with photographs. Chester and Elias (known as
the Brothers
) posed before Baker One in string ties and muttonchops, the coalman's uniform of the day. There was a stern portrait of her grandfather Chessie, in his vest and round spectacles, and a lovely one of Chessie's lost brother, a slender blond boy in tennis whites. There were the aunts who'd raised her, each captured at the time of her greatest happiness: Virgie in tweed and cashmere, crossing the quadrangle at Wellesley College with her great friend Tess Drew; Rosalie under a velvety layer of Max Factor in a publicity still for
The Edge of the Universe
—the David O. Selznick extravaganza, never released, that was to have made her a star.

At the center of the display—the place of honor, the fulcrum around which the others were balanced—hung a wedding portrait of Sunny's parents. Its mahogany frame had cost a hundred dollars, back when a dollar bought dinner and a hundred could get you a car. The photo was taken in a church in England where the couple had been married. Ty Baker wore his dress uniform, decked with medals; his blond hair waved back from his forehead like the actor Leslie Howard's. Nola, his English bride, was draped in white.

Of these parents—dead before her fifth birthday—Sunny had two memories. The first: sitting at the dressing table in her mother's bedroom, Nola painting her mouth with lipstick (
Hold still, darling
) while demonstrating the proper position, lips puckered for a kiss. The second: Ty and Nola in the foyer of the big house wearing hats and long wool coats, dressed for one of their trips. Sunny had been distraught, overcome with the exhaustion that came when you'd cried so long that you couldn't remember the feeling of not crying. She'd crouched on the staircase, peering through the banister, and shrunk away when her mother bent to kiss her. Nola had protested wearily—
Beatrice Emma, don't be tiresome—
but Sunny wouldn't give in, wouldn't let herself be touched.

Let her sulk, then
. Ty Baker nodded curtly and led Nola to the door.

Had it been their final departure, Sunny's last glimpse of her parents? Her whole life, the possibility would haunt her: that she'd been so sulky and unpleasant, they'd been glad to be rid of her; that she'd refused her mother's final embrace on the day their plane went down. The question tore at her. It also made her angry. She felt wrongly judged, the victim of a gross injustice: branded a tantrumming brat when in fact she'd been a jolly child, earning her nickname.

Only Sunny's mother, in an irritable mood, had ever called her Beatrice.

After her parents were gone, she became Poor Sunny
.
There was no way to make up for all the child had lost, but her aunts did their best. Her girlhood was filled with hugs and kisses, bedtime stories and unexpected treats. There were darling dresses, music lessons, a pony. One Christmas brought dolls from all over the world, dressed in exotic costumes—Balinese princess, geisha, Eskimo. The everyday gifts were, in a way, even more extravagant: the full attention of two grown women with nothing else to live for, who spent their days dreaming up entertainments for her. Like three little girls, they hunched over dolls and jacks, Parcheesi and checkers and Saturday-morning cartoons. Summer brought picnics and croquet and rides on horseback—with both aunts, when Rosalie was still able, and later with Virgie alone.

At fourteen Sunny was sent, as her aunts had been, to Miss Porter's in Connecticut, an endless train ride. She was an excellent student, well rounded and popular; a thoroughly well-adjusted girl, until she wasn't. Halfway through her final year at Miss Porter's, a nurse was sent by train to bring her back to Bakerton, the first of many such rescues. In later years nurses would be dispatched to New York; to Atlantic City; to Berkeley, California. Each time the mission was the same, to calm and cajole and, if necessary, sedate her; whatever was necessary to bring the last Baker home.

T
he men took the long way out of town, with Dick Devlin—president of the Bakerton Borough Council, owner of the reopened Commercial Hotel—at the wheel. Beside him sat Chuck Helsel, a bigwig with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections; in the backseat, Dominic Nudo of Nudo Construction, the state's contractor. They looked uncertainly out the window as the Jeep roared up the hill, its old engine straining.

“Man, these Jeeps are something,” Nudo said.

“I'll say.” Helsel shifted in his seat. “I drove one in the army. I swore never again.”

Dick kept quiet. His new son-in-law drove a Land Rover made by Mitsubishi. Matt claimed they were all over the roads in Maryland, where he and Katie lived. Dick had driven it once and was impressed by the smooth ride but couldn't bring himself to buy one. A lifetime ago, after high school, he'd spent three years on an assembly line for Fisher Body, making chassis for Chevys. He bought American. He was, he knew, a dying breed.

“Wears like a tank, though,” he pointed out.

“Rides like one, too,” Helsel said.

It was a false spring day in March. Garman Road—a rocky trail marked out with red dog—was sloppy with snowmelt. Rust-colored mud spattered the Jeep's winter tires.

“Not much of a road, is it? Hard on the vehicle.” Helsel was big and blond, a former police officer or maybe a prison guard. Dick could spot the type a mile away—the sort of man who drove his
vehicle
to his
residence;
who lived his whole life in the language of cops.

Dick gave his politician's smile. “Won't be bad in summer. If it ever comes.” The weather, a safe topic. “I guess the little bastard saw his shadow.”

Helsel frowned. “Does that mean spring or more winter? I can never remember.”

“More winter,” Dick said. Punxsutawney was just fifty miles away; as a boy of ten, he'd been taken to see the groundhog come out of its hole. He'd expected a silent snowy forest, the creature, driven by some ancient instinct, popping furtively from the ground. The reality—the noisy crowd, the stunned rodent tossed out in front of a throng of cameras—depressed and perplexed him. Why go through the motions if everyone knew it was a sham?

As an adult, he understood the reasons. Punxsutawney—like Bakerton, like the entire western half of Pennsylvania—was down on its luck, its population dwindling, its mines and mills closed. All of Punxsy's businesses, in fact, were struggling. (Dick's own restaurant was outfitted with secondhand ductwork from a failed Punxsy diner. He'd saved himself a bundle there.) But for a few days each February, every motel in Punxsutawney was booked; at the Mobil station, a dozen rental cars idled in line. The TV crews bought breakfasts and newspapers, coffee and cigarettes. When Groundhog Day coincided with a lake-effect snowstorm, the local True Value sold out of ice scrapers and rock salt. It was no replacement for real industry, the union jobs that once supported local families. But a few days each year, the groundhog nonsense attracted national attention, a chance for Punxsy to trumpet its other virtues: low cost of living, tax breaks for new business, a heartbreakingly eager workforce. For Bakerton there was no TV coverage, no famous rodent, but Dick trusted in the resiliency of the American economy. He believed—he had to—that deliverance would come.

At the top of the hill, he parked. The proposed site was fifty acres, half covered with forest. The land was bordered to the north and east by pastures belonging to Dickey's Dairy. The owners—the former Marcia Dickey and her husband—had promised their support.

“And to the west?” Helsel asked.

“A private landowner,” Dick said. He charged ahead, preempting further questions. Water and sewage would be handled by the borough, the roads serviced in winter by Carbon Township. The township owned just three plows but would gladly buy another, to be used solely on the roads around the new prison.