News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  Later, the meeting adjourned, Dick led Dr. Stusick across the street to the Commercial. The dining room was closed, Dick’s wife vacuuming the carpet. He ducked behind the bar for a bottle and glasses, as nervous as a schoolboy on a date.

  The two men had never raised a glass together. They had nothing against each other personally, but their fathers had been mortal enemies. For nearly twenty years, Regis Devlin had been president of the Mine Workers’ local—a position he’d expected to die in and likely would have, if Eugene Stusick hadn’t run a dirty campaign against him. Stusick’s platform had been simple and vicious: Devlin was in bed with management, making backdoor deals with Baker and leaving his men out in the cold. It was an easy charge to make and a hard one to refute. Stusick appealed to the men’s greed and paranoia and won by a healthy margin. Regis Devlin—for thirty years a celebrity in town, more powerful than ten mayors—never recovered from the humiliation. He died a drunk, bitter and broken, while Gene Stusick succumbed even more horribly, crushed in the famous collapse at Baker Twelve. Anyone would say their sons had good reason to avoid each other. Any conversation between a Devlin and a Stusick could only lead to ruin.

  Dick poured the doctor a whiskey, himself a club soda. Mindful of his father’s end, he went easy on the sauce. “We need to get a handle on this, pronto. Carnicella’s a hothead. I’m afraid of what he’ll do.”

  “Could be trouble,” the doctor agreed. “None for you?”

  “Next round, maybe.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “The thing is, I have nothing against Sunny Baker, or any of them. Old Chessie wasn’t a bad guy, my dad said. They did some drinking together. I guess you heard.”

  This was dangerous territory—his father’s alleged chumminess with Baker. But Rege and Gene were long dead, their sons old men. Baker Brothers, the Mine Workers, and the whole mining industry were relics of another century, never to return.

  The doctor grinned. “I’ve never seen Davis Eickmeier so worked up.”

  “I thought he was going to swallow his snuff.” Dick splashed whiskey into his glass. “He’s right, though. It’s her property, and I don’t like the idea of poking in her business. And yet—”

  “The prison,” the doctor said.

  “Goddamn if we don’t need those jobs.”

  They drank in silent agreement. Nudo Construction, though based in Harrisburg, would use local subcontractors: electricians, plumbers. The prison would hire sixty full-time corrections officers and nearly that many janitors, secretaries, and cooks.

  “Not union. Not like our dads had,” Dick admitted. “But no one in their right mind thinks those are coming back.”

  The doctor nodded. Even after a drink, he was a man of few words, a trait that made Dick talk too much.

  “Hell, I wouldn’t mind one of them for Richie,” he continued. His oldest son—the only one who’d stayed in town—earned minimum wage driving a truck for Miners Medical, delivering oxygen tanks. It wasn’t much of a job.

  “I worry about his generation. We all want to keep our kids around, but . . .” He trailed off, remembering that Len had no children. “My point is, we need that prison. It seems crazy to lose it because one lady won’t clean up her yard.”

  Leo Quinn shut off the ball game. He had never been a Cleveland fan—the Pirates were his team—and loyalty, like drink, was essential to the spectator’s enjoyment. Watching baseball without benefit of either, he found himself agreeing with what his wife had said for years. It was, essentially, a slow and tedious game.

  He’d left the council meeting in a dark mood, not even bothering to needle Dick Devlin about the late hour. In truth, he hadn’t had the heart to: the old windbag had seemed as dejected as everyone else. The discussion of Sunny Baker had cast a pall over the room. Andy Carnicella’s outburst, the way he’d resorted to name-calling, was a shameful lapse of civility, beneath his dignity as an officer of the law. Leo forgave him, a little. Rash judgment was a young man’s sin. He’d been guilty of it himself years ago—free with his opinions, worked up about Communists and so forth. It had taken him sixty years to understand that compassion was the only virtue. He’d been raised to count faith, hope, and charity, but the years had eroded his confidence in the first two: his Mary was the true believer, and hope seemed foolish at his age, when life was all over but the singing. That left only charity, to the suffering especially. And who had suffered more than Sunny Baker?

  Not that Leo knew her personally. Nobody did. But he’d run a tavern for thirty years. If he were a different sort of person, he could have told tales on half the town.

  After her hippie boyfriend vanished, Sunny had lived alone for many years. Men came and went from the farmhouse at odd hours, according to Davis Eickmeier’s wife; but who they were or what became of them, no one could say. Then out of nowhere, a rumor blossomed: Sunny had taken up with a local, or a near-local. Her new man came from Erie, a few counties to the north. His pickup was seen parked on Deer Run, its bed loaded with lumber. Sunny had hired him to work on her house. The pickup, a battered Ford with Pennsylvania plates, won the town’s warm approval—a workingman’s truck, the exact same model a Bakerton guy might drive.

  The new man’s name was Judd Crombie. Unlike Sunny and her famous family, he seemed at home in the town. On Monday nights he brought her to Quinn’s, where they could get comfortable at a dim corner table and close the place, running up a steep tab. They were night owls, and why not? Sunny’s kids were gone by then—off with their hippie father, some said, or with some distant Baker relative. (Were there Baker relatives? Or had the whole clan died off as this local branch had, its final fruit, Sunny herself, plump and dangling from the vine?)

  Her plumpness was a new development, unusual in a Baker. Her aunt Rosalie, the actress, had been famous for her tiny waist, and even in her old age, Virgie was thin as a whip. The whole clan seemed congenitally slender, the men included, and certainly any women they deigned to marry. Sunny’s mother, the English war bride, had a lovely figure, though few could claim to have seen her in person. Old-timers remembered the wedding portrait reproduced in the Herald: Ty Baker dashing in uniform, the beautiful Nola extravagantly gowned.

  Sunny herself had been a slip of a girl, until Judd Crombie roared into her life.

  The town agreed later that Crombie had been her downfall. True, the hippie had impregnated her twice, out of wedlock—a phrase still used in Bakerton without irony—and left a decrepit bus on her front lawn. But Judd Crombie had done her a greater disservice. It was Judd Crombie who taught her to drink.

  Leo Quinn had been present at her ruination—had even, it could be said, facilitated her downfall. That first night at his bar, Sunny had ordered a glass of wine. (Bakerton women snorted at this detail, but the men found it touching: it made Sunny seem somehow virginal, despite the births out of wedlock; too innocent to order a real drink.) Leo tore apart his stockroom looking for a bottle but came up empty. Miss Baker thanked him for his trouble and asked for a Pepsi until Crombie interrupted: She’ll have a whiskey and soda. Later she drank a second, and in the end Crombie half-carried her to his pickup, shamelessly paying the tab from her purse.

  From that night onward, they drank often at Quinn’s. Crombie, the working man, seemed on permanent vacation: Sunny’s farmhouse was still falling to pieces, though his truck was parked there seven days a week. Their weekly tabs grew steeper. Soon Sunny—once so hammered on two whiskeys that she could barely walk—matched Crombie drink for drink. As women did, she wore it badly: her face round as a pie plate, her potbelly high and hard as a man’s.

  At first their Monday nights were gay and flirtatious. Sunny’s laugh was never loud or ugly, never a drunk’s laugh. After paying the tab, she left arm in arm with Crombie, her hand in his back pocket a kind of sight gag, as though she knew and didn’t care what everyone said, that his hand was always in hers. Later they stopped flirting and started arguing, softly at first. More than once, Leo Quinn brought a
fresh round and saw Sunny crying, silent tears streaming down her cheeks.

  One Friday night in the spring of 1984—a date remembered for obvious reasons, the town drinking away its sorrows—Crombie came into Quinn’s alone. He sat at the bar like anyone else, drinking Iron Cities instead of whiskey—a frugal choice, with no rich girlfriend to pick up the tab. He chatted briefly with Leo: the game on television, the rising cost of fishing licenses. Sunny’s name was not mentioned, Crombie sensing, probably, that it would be a breach. That the Bakers, while not exactly beloved, belonged to the town in a way no one else did, just as the town had once belonged to them.

  For an hour or two he sat alone at the bar, until Barb Vance sat down beside him.

  She was a local girl, a tough, skinny blonde with full-body freckles and a tiny heart tattooed on one shoulder. At the time in Bakerton, tattooed women were a rarity, and naturally Crombie noticed. Barb was freshly divorced then—her second—with a knockout figure she didn’t mind showing.

  Sunny had turned forty that year, her birth enough of a local event that the town would never lose track of her age.

  Crombie and Barb left separately that night, an hour apart, but the next Friday they met again at the bar. A local band, Reagan Cheese, had a standing Friday gig at Quinn’s, but the two did not dance. Instead they rose periodically to shoot pool, Crombie standing close behind her to point out the sight lines, arms around her to steady her cue.

  He had his defenders. They pointed out that Sunny was a drunk, a repeat customer at the state mental hospital, a woman so unstable or incompetent that someone else was raising her kids. Others blamed Crombie for her troubles. No one had forced him to quit his job and subsist on what was left of the Baker wealth, charging groceries and liquor to Sunny’s credit card. He was making a fool of her with Barb Vance, and somebody ought to tell her. Of course, no one did. Sunny’s phone number, if she had one, was unlisted. Anyway, who would have the nerve?

  She had always been a recluse. And recent events had isolated her further, clipped the delicate filaments connecting her to the town. That winter Baker Eleven had closed, the largest Baker mine and the most productive. The official explanation, reported the Herald, was predictable: the Eleven was mined out, its coal depleted. The official explanation was crap. According to men who worked there—Mitch Stanek, Lou Berks—there was plenty of coal down deep, if Baker would spend the money to get it. New equipment was needed, an investment of capital. But Baker Brothers had never recovered from the disaster at the Twelve. The company had lost a fortune, and lost its nerve.

  Suddenly nine hundred men were out of work, nine hundred families living on food stamps. In the school cafeteria at Jefferson Elementary, the free lunches outnumbered the paid ones. On Saturday mornings at the American Legion, the line extended out the door and around the block. Men who’d recently earned a union wage stood waiting for free food, the humiliating block of government-surplus cheese.

  What did any of this have to do with Sunny Baker? Nothing, maybe: her legal relationship to Baker Brothers was not known. Her aunt Virgie had, until her death, sat on Baker’s board of directors, which met quarterly somewhere in Pittsburgh. The meetings, summed up in a single dry paragraph in the Bakerton Herald, attracted little notice. (Though in those years, with the town glued to the TV for Dallas and Dynasty, board meetings came to seem glamorous, full of conniving rich women in power suits, showing décolletage.) Now, with Baker in real trouble, its board meetings had ominous consequences. Was Sunny sitting at the table where the decision was made, nine hundred men put out of work? Was it guilt that accelerated her drinking, driving her further into seclusion? Or had she simply guessed the truth about Judd Crombie?

  That summer Crombie’s pickup roared out of town, leaving behind a crashed motorcycle, a busted table saw, an old Plymouth he’d been meaning to work on. A new generation of junk took root on Sunny’s lawn.

  It was nearly midnight when Dr. Stusick pulled into his driveway. The house was dark, an oversight. Usually he remembered to leave a light on. He’d been widowed a year and had adjusted to his aloneness, yet somehow the dark windows returned him to a state of fresh bereavement. He’d rather spend the evening at home alone than drive up to an empty house.

  Inside, he poured himself a second whiskey, though what he really wanted, really wanted, was a Halcion. Without it, sleep was unlikely. The conversation with Dick Devlin had set his mind churning. Even a third whiskey wouldn’t make it stop.

  His father and Dick’s, the famous grudge that had outlived them.

  The idiot police chief.

  Miss Baker has had her troubles.

  A police cruiser tearing down Deer Run, sirens blaring, to the ramshackle farmhouse where Sunny Baker lived.

  It was a well-kept secret in a town that believed it had none: years ago, in the early seventies, a much younger Sunny Baker had been Len’s patient. He’d been leaving the hospital one night when Virgie Baker approached him in the parking lot. Though they had never met, he recognized her immediately—a tall, lean woman with an equine face, her gray hair cut short as a nun’s. Her niece was suffering a depressive episode, she explained. She needed medical attention but refused to leave her room.

  Len followed her back to The Mansion, where Sunny was holed up in a dark bedroom—a slender blond girl, younger than Len, lovely despite her greasy hair and unwashed face. He found her stubbornly mute, unresponsive. When Len introduced himself, she turned her face to the wall.

  Later, over coffee, Virgie Baker explained the particulars. Her niece had been volatile since childhood, prone to crying fits, tantrums, rages. In adulthood the problem had worsened. When Sunny was happy, her exhilaration was boundless. At other times, despair swallowed her like a sinkhole. To the Baker family, both extremes were alarming. In both states, calamities occurred.

  Naturally she’d seen doctors. Medications had been prescribed. Unmedicated, Sunny swept through life like weather: arrests for shoplifting and vandalism, for public intoxication, a situation with fireworks in Atlantic City, Virgie never got the details. There were car accidents in New York and Philadelphia and Berkeley, California—years ago, when Sunny was still allowed to drive. Finally a doctor in San Francisco had prescribed lithium, and for several months Virgie received polite, coherent letters in Sunny’s handwriting. Then, abruptly, the letters stopped. From long experience, Virgie awaited the telegram, the late-night phone call—this time from a hotel manager in New York City, where Sunny had been living. She’d been taken by ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital, for reasons unclear.

  The reasons, it turned out, were the usual ones. Sometimes drugs were involved, sometimes drink. Sunny had complained for years that a stranger was following her. Occasionally she heard voices. She had never recovered from the loss of her parents. In Virgie’s estimation, she had always been a troubled girl.

  Len saw her twice that spring and again a few years later. Each time the girl was nearly catatonic. Twice Virgie had her committed to hospitals in Pittsburgh. In between, Sunny fled like an exotic bird bound for milder climes. When, exactly, had she stopped flying? What made her retreat to the decrepit farmhouse at the far edge of town, her wrecked life piled up around her?

  What he wanted, really wanted, was a Halcion.

  Deer Run was a piecrust road, crumbling in places. That morning—cloudless, the trees bare—Len could see for miles. From the high ridge he had a clear view of the old Baker Twelve, the mine where his father had died. After the accident, the investigation and hearings, the tipple had been cleared away. Forty years later the valley was filled with clover.

  Nature was willful, patient. Over time it always had its way. In Africa this had seemed a curse. Irrigation, road building, the earnest industry of the missionaries: untold months of human busyness could be wiped out overnight in a storm. He had spent three years there on a church-sponsored mission to Madagascar, his wife’s idea—except for nursing school in Pittsburgh, Lucy had lived her whole life in Bakerton; and wa
s restless. Len had needed little convincing. They were young then, and the great world beckoned. They were young.

  Their clinic was a small one, the only hospital for miles. Like the roads and bridges, the huts and primitive sewers, it was regularly swamped by nature: cholera and dysentery, malaria and giardiasis; the starving girls miraculously pregnant; the rampant infections unstoppable in the heat. To Len’s eye, it was all the same, cells replicating stubbornly, mindlessly. The defiant persistence of life.

  In every case but their own.

  Lucy’s desire for a child would never abate, but in Madagascar she made peace with it. Life sprang up where it could, illogically, without wisdom or prejudice. To take it personally was a kind of insanity, but Len knew better than to say so. In Madagascar Lucy came to the realization all on her own.

  He rounded the bend past the Eickmeiers’. No car in the driveway, but he knew Marcia well enough to treat the kitchen window as a security camera. A strange vehicle on Deer Run would not escape her notice. He gave the house a wave and continued up the road.

  Even at this distance, the squalor of the place astonished him. The farmhouse looked deserted, the windows dark, the curtains drawn. He parked and plodded through knee-high grass. It had rained overnight, and the ground felt spongy beneath his feet. Galoshes would have been a good idea, or maybe the fishing waders hanging in his garage. How did Sunny do it, for God’s sake? Did the woman wear gum boots to get in and out of her own house?

  When he reached the front porch, he saw that two of the steps had caved in completely. The remaining ones, moist with rot, would crumble under a man’s weight.

  Well, now what? he thought, eyeing the wreckage. He sensed some scuttling beneath the porch: a raccoon if he was lucky, a skunk if he was not. Off to his left, a movement startled him. The animal was bigger than a cat or squirrel: a groundhog poking its head through the weeds.