News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  “Hey there,” he said, approaching the table.

  She looked up and broke into a smile. “J.R.”

  His stomach dropped. It had been Kenny’s nickname for him, a character from an old TV show Ray had never seen, about the crooked dealings of a wealthy oil baron.

  “Hi, Franny,” he said, embracing her. She was heavier than he remembered, twice as big around as Evie or his mother. Her braid was shot through with gray.

  “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “Mom and Pop are thrilled.”

  Ray took the name tag she handed him and stuck it to the lapel of his jacket. “Are you sure it isn’t too much for them? All the”—he remembered Pop’s word—“excitement.”

  “Fifty years of marriage, I’d say they could use some excitement. Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “You’ve got to see this.”

  She led him across the room to a table. At one end sat a pile of gifts; at the other, an elaborate tiered wedding cake. Beside it was a black-and-white photo, slightly out of focus. Ray leaned in to examine it. Pop in uniform, his skinny shoulders squared, a boy trying to look bigger than he was. Balding already, with a wispy blond mustache, the kind teenagers grow to prove themselves. Ray’s mother in a simple dress, not white but pale; her face serious, her eyes sad. She was a tiny thing, narrow-waisted. It was hard to believe she’d carried a child.

  “It was the only picture I could find,” said Fran. “Can you imagine? Married for fifty years and no wedding album.”

  “Where’d it come from?” Ray had never seen a photo of the wedding; he’d believed none existed.

  “Pop’s sister gave it to me.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “They didn’t have a wedding reception. No honeymoon. They just got married, and nobody paid any attention.”

  Ray looked around the room. There seemed to be hundreds of Kleenex flowers. Fran must have been making them for weeks.

  “The place looks great,” he said. “You did a hell of a job.”

  “Thanks, J.R. I wish Kenny was here to see it.”

  A tickle in his chest, his lungs tightening. He disengaged his hand. “Be right back, Franny. I need to take a breath.”

  Downstairs at the Firemen’s Club, he ordered a drink. “I’m not a member,” he told the bartender, a bearded man with a familiar face.

  “That’s okay,” said the bartender. “I knew your brother.”

  Ray colored. It was, he realized, the same bartender as last time. A few years ago, when Ray came to town for a high school reunion, Kenny had insisted on taking him for a drink at the club. He’d ordered them each a shot and a beer, and for a moment the bartender had hesitated. He’d asked if Kenny was on duty that night.

  “No, I ain’t on duty. Are you?” Kenny’s voice rising. “If you are, maybe act like a bartender and pour me a shot.” He turned to Ray. “It’s good to see you, buddy. Don’t see much of you anymore.”

  “I’ve been busy.” It was the wrong thing to say, but Ray had no other answer. “I hired two new pups last week. I spend more time telling them what to do than it would take me to do it myself.” He was working for Exxon then, heading a crew of geologists. He told Kenny he was thinking about striking out on his own.

  “Good for you, J.R.” Kenny downed his shot. Red capillaries bloomed at his cheeks and nostrils. He looks like an old man, Ray thought. An old drunk.

  “You did the right thing, getting the hell out. Could be time for me to do the same.” The mines weren’t coming back, he said. Fran couldn’t sell a house with a coal furnace. She had gotten a real estate license, though who’d buy property in Bakerton, Ray couldn’t imagine.

  Ray chugged his beer. He remembered a time—years ago, during a slowdown—when a group of miners picketed Friedman’s Furniture. The store had replaced its coal stove with an oil furnace. It seemed comical now: the miners’ sense of injury, their belief that picketing one store would make a difference.

  “Where would you go?” Ray asked. “If you left town. Any ideas?”

  Years later he would remember his brother’s odd smile, closemouthed to hide his missing tooth. “I hear Texas is nice.”

  Ray drained his glass. “Times are tough everywhere, Ken. The drilling crews aren’t hiring. They’re talking about layoffs.”

  Kenny frowned. “I thought you just hired a couple of guys. A couple of pups.”

  “Geologists,” Ray said, red-faced. “College boys.”

  The bartender came with two more beers—Iron Cities, what every bar in town poured automatically unless you asked for something different. Ray took out his wallet.

  “I got it.” Kenny scrabbled in his pocket and laid a crumpled bill on the counter. “I may not be good for much, but goddamn if I can’t still get my big brother drunk.”

  Later—climbing the hill to his brother’s house, with Kenny leaning on him like deadweight—Ray would regret that moment, the way he’d reached for his wallet. “I’m sorry, Ken,” he said, but by then his brother was barely conscious. Only later, when Ray laid him out on the couch, did he speak.

  “That’s okay, J.R. Ain’t your fault.”

  After dinner Fran pulled up a chair next to Ray. “Hi, stranger. You used to come around a lot more before you struck it rich.”

  He glanced uncomfortably across the room. Evie was making the rounds with a coffeepot, an apron wrapped twice around her small waist.

  “I don’t blame you,” Fran continued. “It must be boring for Evie. God knows there isn’t much to do in this town. But maybe you could come by yourself once in a while. Mom could use the company.”

  “It’s not Evie. She loves coming here. It’s me.” The words came out too fast. “I can’t look anybody in the eye. Mom. Pop. You.”

  “Me?”

  “I could have done something for Kenny after he got laid off.” His heart hammered. Across the room the band was tuning up. The sound seemed very far away.

  “That’s crazy. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “I could have found him a job.” Tightness in his chest. “Then he wouldn’t have been fighting fires. He’d still be alive.”

  “A job?” said Fran. “Around here?”

  “In Houston.”

  Fran snorted. “Are you kidding? Kenny never would have gone to Houston. Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “He asked me about it,” said Ray. “The last time I was home. I made excuses, but really, I didn’t want him down there. His troubles.” He met her eyes. “If I gave him a job, he would’ve come. He said so.”

  “Kenny said a lot of things. Believe me, I heard it all. But nobody made him stay here. He stayed because he wanted to.”

  Ray thought of Kenny as he’d last seen him, shoveling the sidewalk on Dixon Road in his old hunting jacket, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Don’t be a stranger, he’d called as Ray pulled away from the curb.

  “He loved being a fireman,” said Fran. “It made him feel alive. He said it was like being a soldier again.”

  Ray nodded, remembering how Kenny had shown him around the equipment room. How proud he’d been. Ray imagined him suited up in the asbestos pants, the yellow jacket, climbing the stairs of the Commercial Hotel. The fire had started in the kitchen but appeared contained. When Kenny charged into a second-floor bedroom, the floor had crumbled beneath him.

  “The night of the fire,” Ray said. “Was he drinking?”

  “He was always drinking.” Fran took his hand in both of hers. “J.R., sooner or later you have to let go of things. Stop feeling bad about what you can’t undo.”

  Her hands felt cool; for a moment Ray wished he could put them on his face, his cheeks burning with shame.

  “I’m not just talking about Kenny. When’s the last time you saw your boys?”

  “I was hoping they’d be here tonight, but I guess they heard I was coming. Years, Franny. It’s been years.” He met her eyes. “Do you ever see them?”

  “Well, sure. Ray Junior came with Georgette at Christmas. A
nd Bryan comes every few months to give Mom her permanent.”

  “You’re kidding.” Ray thought of the boy in the photo—a man now, with his diamond earring, his thinning hair. “He drives all the way out here—two hundred goddamn miles—to do Mom’s hair?”

  “He’s done it for years. He’s a sweet kid, Ray. He turned out fine.”

  “Jesus.” Ray lowered his voice. “You know, I still can’t believe it. My son, a beautician. For Christ’s sake.”

  “You sound just like Pop. ‘What’s a big boy like that doing in a beauty shop?’ ” She laughed. “He makes a good living. And there’re worse jobs. He’s not going to get himself killed giving permanents.”

  Ray laughed, too. Air filled his lungs; for the first time in hours, his chest relaxed. “I failed them,” he said. “Just like I failed Kenny. And Mom and Pop. I’m not much of a son.”

  “You’re not dead yet.”

  “I have news,” he said. “Evie’s pregnant.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, J.R. That’s wonderful.”

  Yes, he thought, it is a wonder. His life, he knew, had been unfairly blessed. Over and over he’d been saved from what he was born to: fatherlessness in a time when that meant something. The mines. Vietnam and whatever horrors had followed Kenny back from that place. He was saved first by Pop, then by Georgette; deliverance he’d neither asked for nor deserved nor recognized when it came. Now, again, he was being saved.

  “I thought I was done with all that,” he said. “After I flunked the first time.”

  Fran shrugged. “That’s what flunked means. You do it over, whether you like it or not.”

  “You don’t think I’m too old, do you?”

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

  Cake 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.

  Ray 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

  At 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 bicyc
le 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.