A rustle then, a jangle of keys: Terri rooting around in her pocketbook.
“I found some old photos of you and Mum. Daddy, too. I thought you might want to have them.”
It is just like Terri to entice her with these treasures, all that remains of their dead parents. Shameless. Yet in the silence Agnes feels a pang of longing, exactly as Terri intends her to.
“Fine,” Terri huffs. “Be that way.”
Agnes thinks, Please go away.
“He’s using you. Don’t say nobody warned you.”
The screen door slams shut. Agnes exhales softly as Terri’s boots clomp down the stairs.
Cautiously she approaches the window, just in time to see Terri lose her footing on the path and land gracelessly on her wide behind. Agnes feels a flash of alarm, a wash of tenderness. Baby fell down. For a second she wants to burst through the front door and run down the porch stairs, to make sure her baby sister isn’t hurt.
The moment, and the urge, pass swiftly. Terri gets to her feet. The sweater-coat is ruined, a blessing, really. She was doing her figure no favors in that coat.
Terri, Theresa, has always been her baby—twelve years younger, a toddler when Agnes started high school. For the first year of her life, Agnes carried her around like a doll, and Theresa did, in fact resemble the dolls of that era: blond curls and a dimple, chubby hands that clapped and a tiny mouth always pursed for a kiss. She was born pretty and stayed pretty. Unlike Agnes, who was backward, Theresa was bubbly and sociable. As different as they can be, their mother often said. Like apples and turnips.
There was no doubt, ever, which sister was the turnip.
If they’d been closer in age, Agnes might have envied Theresa. Instead she felt nothing but pride that her baby sister did not stutter, did not blush, that she jumped rope with the other girls at noon recess. (Agnes had spent lunchtimes in the school library with a book.) On the playground, the school bus, Theresa was surrounded by girlfriends: a little chubby always, but still the prettiest, a girl everyone loved. Agnes and her mother took turns dressing her. At the dime store they studied the pattern books. They bought sprigged cotton and gingham, cherry pink and sunny yellow. They shared Theresa like well-behaved children. Each day after school, they kept her company at the kitchen table while she had her snack, a slice of homemade cake or pie. Theresa was an excellent mimic, adept at imitating her teachers and schoolmates. Agnes and her mother sat by patiently, waiting to be entertained.
They were two big, strong women, sturdy and plain as Russian peasants. Of the two, Agnes was slightly smaller and softer. She had the comfortable proportions of a woman who’d borne four children, without actually having done so; in fact, she had never been on a date. At that time she worked second shift at the hospital, four to midnight. The other nurses, married with children, groused about the hours, but Agnes didn’t mind.
They were happy years: her parents still living, the mines booming, her father sleeping all day, working the night shift—known locally as Hoot Owl—at Baker Eleven. Later, looking back, Agnes wished she had paid more attention, that she had noticed and savored every moment. Her mother would have liked more children, but Nature hadn’t cooperated; and as she liked to tell her telephone friends, she wasn’t one to complain. After all the miscarriages, she had been blessed with Theresa, a peppy girl with the energy of several, filling the house with life.
Then, in one bewildering year, several things happened. Theresa graduated high school and went on a diet and began calling herself Terri. She started and quit the nurses’ training, married a town cop named Andy Carnicella, and moved into her own house behind Mount Carmel, the Italian church in town. And when the dust had settled, Agnes was thirty-one and living with two aging parents, and she understood for the first time that her family were isolated people. Her mother, an only child, had grown up on the Hoeffer farm in the middle of nowhere. Her father’s people, the Lubickis, had disapproved of his marriage to Mae: they were Poles, and clannish, and so Mae had never bothered with them. As a result, Agnes had a pile of Lubicki cousins she’d never met. These cousins lived a few miles away, in Fallentree or Moss Creek, but she’d be hard pressed to recognize them in the grocery store.
When Agnes was a girl, this had seemed unimportant. But her mother, as the years passed, was lonely. Before her marriage, during the war, Mae had worked three years in the dress factory; she’d retained a few friends from that time—a Mrs. Miller, a Mrs. Goss, women she kept up with by telephone. For most of her married life, Mae left the house only for church on Sundays. While Agnes or her father did the grocery shopping, Mae stayed home to work in the garden; to sew the family’s clothes; to bake bread and pies; to put up quarts of vegetables and homemade preserves. Always she cooked enough for a crowd, even after Theresa left and she had only a single overfed daughter and a lean, fussy husband who ate like a bird. They lived in a newish house on the edge of town, a pleasant split-level with a large backyard, and yet Mae labored like a farm wife with a dozen children. Agnes was an adult before she understood that this was work that didn’t need to be done, that her mother was simply desperate to fill the days.
Sometimes, her other chores finished, Mae would get down on her knees and scrub the garage floor with a brush.
She had never been a beauty—in the eyes of the town, an unlikely bride for John Lubicki, who as a young man had been handsome as a film star. He’d come back from the war determined to marry, a decision made while marching across Belgium sick with pneumonia. What, in that faraway place, made him think of Mae Hoeffer? In school she’d been two grades ahead; she had never been his sweetheart, or anyone else’s. When the war ended, handsome John Lubicki had his pick of the Bakerton girls, and he chose her.
It had been pointed out—though not to Mae’s face—that the Lubickis were dirt-poor, and Mae would inherit the Hoeffer farm. In marrying her, John had shown some initiative. The more charitable of the town gossips called it a practical choice.
In the afternoon the rain stops. Agnes pulls on her boots and walks down the muddy lane to the road. Deer Run is high and winding, overlooking a deep valley. The abandoned coal mine looms in the distance, the rusted tipple of the old Baker Twelve. Years ago, PennDOT resurfaced Deer Run every year, for the hundreds of miners who drove it each day to work. Now the road is poorly maintained, the asphalt crumbling in places. Moving here was Luke’s idea. On Deer Run they’d have no prying neighbors. Their trailer is invisible from the road.
Agnes climbs the hill to the mailbox, one of several mounted on an old railroad tie. The other mailboxes are unused, unlabeled—relics from an earlier time, when the property was covered with trailers. Five years ago a strip-mining company, Keystone Surface, descended on Saxon Mountain, peeling back the trees and vegetation and extracting what coal they could. They brought their own trailers and stayed just a year, but you can still see the imprints they left behind, rectangular depressions in the bare earth. Luke and Agnes’s trailer is the only one left; they rent it from a man named Jay Wenturine, whom Luke calls my old buddy. Luke speaks often of his old buddies, boyhood friends he’s tracked down since returning to town. He was a teenager when his father was laid off and moved the family to Maryland. Luke reappeared in Bakerton ten months ago and met Agnes soon after. In that time she’s met no old buddies except Jay Wenturine, who stops by the trailer on the first of each month.
In the mailbox she finds a phone bill addressed to her, a sale flyer from the grocery store. Behind them, wedged at the back of the box, is a slender packet of photographs.
I thought you might want to have them.
Greedily she shoves the envelope into her pocket. She walks fast and sticks close to the road. It’s the first week of buck season, and the woods ring with gunshot. She should have worn Luke’s orange jacket.
Back inside, she opens the packet. The first photo makes her throat ache. Agnes and her mother at the kitchen table, rolling dough for noodles. They sit shoulder to shoulder, Agnes in an old sweatsh
irt, Mae in one of her flowered housedresses. Their large hands are crusted with flour. They wear the same shy smile.
The next photos are from Terri’s wedding, a day Agnes has no particular interest in reliving. It’s disorienting to see her mother in the dress Terri chose for her, a pale blue sack covered with a tent of sheer lace. She is bigger than Agnes remembers, and Dad looks smaller. His tuxedo is a size too large. Terri stands between them in her frilly white dress and picture hat, which was the style at the time. Agnes herself lurks at the edge of the photo, in her nursing smock and slacks. That day, as always, she worked the second shift, though she could have swapped with someone if she’d wanted. She hadn’t wanted. She was glad to skip the reception at the church hall, to which Terri had invited two hundred guests: Andy Carnicella’s large family, plus half her graduating class from Bakerton High. For bridesmaids, she’d chosen four friends from high school. I didn’t think you’d want to, she’d explained to Agnes. Getting dressed up and all. I know you don’t like to make a fuss.
Certainly this was true. She’d have been mortified to stand at the altar alongside the others, who, even young and slender, looked ridiculous in their shiny dresses, with puffed sleeves and a bow on each hip. Still, she’d have liked to be asked.
Agnes shuffles quickly through the photos. Each one sets a fire in her, sharp bright bursts like Fourth of July sparklers: a crackle, a smolder, a lingering trace.
The last photo is of her parents, younger than she has ever imagined them being: her father in uniform, his pompadour glistening with Brylcreem; her mother thinner then, a big raw-boned girl tightly corseted, her hair crimped into precise curls. They sit at a table littered with empty glasses; behind them, couples are dancing. On the back of the photo is a handwritten date: June 1, 1946. In six months they would be married. In two years he’d run the Hoeffer farm into the ground.
She studies the photo. Her father smiles easily for the camera, his arm around Mae’s shoulders, a gesture Agnes finds startling. Her parents had never, in her lifetime, shared a bedroom. She can scarcely remember seeing them touch. In his final years, when John Lubicki was breathless and wheezing from black lung, it was Agnes who combed his hair and shaved his handsome face, who pounded his back to help him cough.
The years underground had ruined his lungs, though by local standards he was considered lucky: to have a daughter who’d never married, a daughter who happened to be a nurse. Agnes, a strong girl, changed his oxygen tanks without fanfare; for many years a local company, Miners Medical, delivered them to the front door. She could strip his bedsheets almost without disturbing him, a magician’s trick.
As miners did, he spent a long time dying. His wife, in those years, seemed sturdy as a tree. Then, ten years into his dying, Mae suffered a sudden stroke and went quietly in her sleep.
Two deaths in a single winter; two funeral Masses. After that Agnes lived alone, in the house her father had left her as payment for her devotion. Three days a week she worked double shifts at the hospital; the other days she slept endlessly. That spring she planted a large garden, as her mother had done. In September she canned sixty quarts of tomatoes.
The following year she planted nothing at all.
She lived on coffee and canned soup, sandwiches made with store-bought bread. Her uniform hung on her like a shroud. Taking in the smock seemed like too much bother, so she ordered new ones from a catalog. Clocks ticked in the quiet house.
This went on for years and would have continued forever if not for a thunderstorm the summer she turned fifty. A tall poplar in the backyard was struck by lightning. By God’s design or His clumsiness, it tipped over onto the roof and brought Luke Garman to her door.
The day is vivid in her memory: the smells and weather, the trilling birdsong. She woke that morning in the narrow twin bed, hers since childhood, not imagining that everything was about to change.
For three days in a row, the roofers had appeared at dawn. When the noise of their hammering punctured her sleep, Agnes rose and dressed and closed the windows against their shouted conversations, their loud radio that played mostly commercials, the slap of shingles falling to the ground.
The roofers worked shirtless, and called each other by last name. Each hammered at his own pace. Wojick was scrawny and blond-haired. He worked fast but took frequent breaks; the lawn was studded with his cigarette butts. Garman had curly hair and a beard the color of caramel. He worked steadily and took his time.
The third morning, while Agnes was assembling her breakfast, Garman knocked at the kitchen door. He had put on a shirt but hadn’t buttoned it. “Can I use your phone?” he asked softly, his voice surprisingly deep.
Up close he was baby-faced, younger than she’d imagined. The beard seemed like a disguise to make him look older, a prop attached with spirit gum, an actor’s trick. And yet his grave voice did not belong to a boy. He had a man’s voice.
“My partner fell off the ladder. He’s all right, but he wants me to call his wife.”
Automatically Agnes went to the sink. “Let me see him,” she said as she scrubbed her hands. “I’m a nurse.”
She followed Garman to the backyard. Wojick lay stretched out on the grass, gripping his shoulder. No blood or abrasions, but his face was white with pain.
“Jesus Christ,” he said through gritted teeth. “I landed on my fucking shoulder.”
Agnes blinked. His gaunt face surprised her. She had seen him only from behind, his worn blue jeans sliding down his hips, and thought him a teenager. She saw now that he was her age.
“Don’t move,” she said.
She knelt on the grass. Wojick’s skinny chest was sunburned, the blond hair going gray at his throat. She slid her hands beneath his back. “Just relax. Let your body go limp.”
Wojick did, aided probably by whatever he’d been drinking. Leaning over him, she could smell the alcohol fumes rising from his skin.
In a single smooth motion, Agnes lifted his lower back from the ground.
His eyes snapped open. “Whoa. What the hell?”
“You dislocated your shoulder. I moved it back into place.”
She eased him into a seated position, remembering that one of her father’s sisters—he’d had seven—had married a Wojick. This Wojick, if he was aware of the connection, seemed unlikely to care.
“Holy shit.” Gingerly he felt his shoulder, as if making sure it was still there. “That’s some trick.”
Agnes helped him to his feet. “You should have an X-ray.” She glanced at Garman, who stood watching. “Can you take him to the emergency room?”
“My wife can take me,” said Wojick. “You called her, right?”
“Hold your horses,” Garman said.
Agnes led him back into the house and showed him the telephone, an old rotary model on the kitchen wall.
“My grandmother had one of these,” Garman said.
He dialed a number and spoke softly. Agnes closed her eyes and listened to his voice.
“Franny, it’s Luke. Ken took a header. He’s all right, but he wants you to come get him.”
Luke, Agnes thought.
Later, after Wojick’s wife had come and gone, Agnes went outside with a glass of cold water. The afternoon was muggy and still, no breeze blowing. Luke was kneeling on the grass, collecting shingles into a pile. His back was tanned and freckled, the skin peeling at the shoulders. His beard looked very soft.
“Here.” She handed him the glass, struck by how easy it was. For three days he had labored in the hot sun. At any point she might have brought him a glass of water. Why had she waited so long?
He took it and drank deeply, half the glass in one gulp.
“What you did before,” he said. “My buddy didn’t thank you.”
“That’s all right,” Agnes said.
“He’s not usually like that.” He stood. “Watch your step. There are nails everywhere.”
They both looked down at her bare feet—bony and white, the second toe longer
than it should be. She felt a sudden urge to apologize for her feet. “He’ll need to rest his shoulder,” she said instead. “For a few weeks, at least.”
“That’s okay. I can finish without him. One more day should do it.”
Agnes shaded her eyes and looked up at the roof.
“Your gutters are shot,” Luke told her. “I can replace them if you want. I can work up a price tomorrow.”
“I thought you were a roofer.”
“I do everything.” He drained the glass and handed it back to her. His mouth looked moist and shiny. His fingers had left an imprint on the sweaty glass.
How they became what they are is a question she’s stopped asking. She accepts it as she accepts other miracles, the Resurrection and Ascension. A few she has witnessed firsthand—spontaneous remissions, children sick with leukemia who recovered without warning—but none involved her personally. Luke is the most remarkable thing that’s ever happened to her, the only one, really. The great mystery of her life.
“I’m fifty years old,” she told him only once. “Old enough to be your mother.”
“My mother is dead,” he said.
She’d died young, an aggressive cancer. At the end she’d cried tears of joy, ready to meet her personal Savior. After that her boys had run wild, looking for trouble. In Baltimore, where the family had settled, trouble was easily found.
“We never should have left Bakerton” was all Luke would say about it. “From that day on, everything went to hell.”
It seemed unkind to point out that certain things would have happened anyway, that cancer didn’t care where you lived.
In Agnes’s room they pushed the twin beds together, the only possible solution. There were no double beds in the house.
Though she wanted to, she did not apologize for her feet, or any other part of her. She didn’t tell him, I’ve never done this before. She imagined it was obvious enough.
The act itself was not quite what she’d pictured. The main difference was the presence of herself. Her fantasies, always, had involved other people: beautiful women desired, handsome men enraptured. They were late-night thoughts, unbidden and unwanted, secret movies playing in her head. She, Agnes Lubicki, never appeared in these films. Occasionally she wondered: did other women, normal women, have similar fantasies? Or did they dream only about themselves?
News From Heaven Page 11