Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  The boy walked a few paces ahead. A fierce wind smacked his left cheek. In the hall closet he’d found a red stocking cap Lucy had knitted. The tail blew out to the side like a wind sock. Dorothy hunched along behind him, her hands in her pockets.

  “Georgie!”

  He’d begun to doze off in his chair when his name roused him. His sister Dorothy stood in the doorway, her eyes wide with panic. Her coat was crusted with snow. Beside her stood Arthur in a red Santa hat.

  “What are you doing here?” George took her arm and helped her off with her coat. He felt the tremor in her back, in her shoulders. “Arthur, are you all right?” The hat gave him an elfin appearance. His left cheek was bright red.

  George guided his sister to a chair.

  “Angelo is down there. Georgie, why didn’t you call me?”

  “The phones are out,” George said. “Knocked out in the explosion. There’s no way to reach anybody.”

  “I’ve been trying to get here for hours.” Her voice rose indignantly. Again the heads turned. “I couldn’t find a ride anywhere. None of the neighbors were home.”

  “So how’d you get here?”

  “We walked.”

  “You’re joking.” The route was six miles, maybe seven, including a steep hike up Saxon Mountain. In good weather the trek would be rigorous. In the wind and snow, it seemed nearly impossible. “All the way from Polish Hill?”

  “Halfway,” said Arthur. “Then we hitched a ride in a hearse.” His eyes went to the door. Jerry Bernardi stood there stamping snow from his boots.

  Other people noticed, too. A hush settled over the room.

  “Relax,” Jerry said, to no one in particular. “It ain’t business.”

  A few laughs; again people started talking.

  “That’s Angelo’s cousin,” Dorothy whispered. “The whole family is here.” The Bernardis had taken over a corner of the room: his brothers and sisters, his father and cousins. A small, pretty woman Dorothy didn’t recognize, her curly hair tinged with gray. Julia, she realized.

  “Lucy’s around here somewhere,” George told her. “She and Leonard showed up about an hour ago.”

  “What do we do now?” Arthur asked, removing his hat.

  No one answered. There was nothing to do but wait.

  LUCY STOOD BEHIND THE TRAILER, shivering. Her frozen fingers curled around a cigarette. The other hand fingered a silver crucifix that hung at her throat. The cross was no bigger than a thumbnail, the Christ figure surprisingly detailed. Its hands and feet were sharp as tacks.

  Angelo had given her the necklace the day she left for college. Joyce had bought her sheets and towels, a portable typewriter; but only Angelo had thought to give her a real gift. He’d wrapped the box himself, using too much Scotch tape. I should have left it to the professionals, he told her, grinning. She lifted her hair, and he clasped the delicate chain around her neck. She’d kept, but never used, the velvety box from Schoenberg’s Jewelers. She wore the necklace to bed, in the shower, everywhere. In two years she’d never taken it off.

  What the hell is that? she’d been asked more than once. Always by Catholic boys, she’d noticed, Italians and Irish, who found it dangling between her breasts when they unbuttoned her blouse.

  Leonard emerged from the corrugated shack and handed her a foam cup. “Drink this. It’ll warm you up.”

  She butted her cigarette.

  “Where are your gloves?” he asked.

  “I left them in the truck.” The cup warmed her right hand. She shoved the left into his coat pocket. Inside she felt keys, a slip of paper. “What’s this? Some girl’s phone number?”

  “Not likely,” said Leonard.

  She withdrew the paper: a tiny comic from Bazooka bubblegum. A smile tugged at her lips.

  “There’s another rescue crew coming,” he said. “From West Virginia. They have better equipment, I guess.” The floodlight cast a glare on his glasses. She could not see his eyes.

  The waitress at Keener’s had told them. They had sat in the booth a long time, Lucy smoking, waiting for Connie and Steven Fleck to leave. There had been an awkward moment at the cash register as they both reached for their wallets. Then the thought occurred to her: He thinks we’re on a date. She’d stared at him dumbly, her face frozen in shock. Then the waitress asked him: Aren’t you Gene Stusick’s boy?

  “Dad was sick this week,” said Leonard. “Mom told him to stay home, but he wouldn’t listen. He hasn’t missed a day of work in twenty years.”

  Lucy fingered the crucifix at her throat.

  “He gets a cold every winter. Then he gives it to the rest of the crew. Mom says he should stay home and keep his germs to himself.” Leonard jammed his hands into his pockets. “I can drive you to Joyce’s, if you want. You don’t have to stay here all night.”

  Lucy slid her hand back into his pocket, curling her fingers around his.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  Through the long snowy night, the silent morning, rescuers dug. Another crew was bused in from Kentucky. A supply chain was started. Power lines were handed down, hydraulic drills, hardware, wooden roof supports.

  They dug six men to a crew, air supplies strapped to their backs. On eight-hour shifts they inched forward, hammering in roof posts, rebuilding the corridor as they went. Periodically they tested the air. Carbon monoxide; methane gas. The rescuers sweated in the damp. They feared another explosion. A single spark would be enough.

  The first man, Patrice Randazzo, was found four thousand feet from the mine face—nearly a mile from where the crew had been working, from where he should have been. He was carried that far by the impact. To the other families waiting aboveground, this was the worst news yet.

  The men had been killed instantly. That’s what the mine secretary said. No one had a reason to doubt it, though you had to wonder how he knew.

  Found at the mine face, two miles from the Deer Run shaft, Baker Brothers Number Twelve:

  One Lancashire longwall machine, circa 1951. Its back end had been hit by rockfall, but the chassis wasn’t even dented. The longwall was perfectly intact.

  Four mismatched mining boots. The force of the blast had blown them a hundred feet. Four men had died in their socks.

  A pair of horn-rimmed glasses, mended at the temple with electrical tape.

  Ten dinner buckets, firmly closed and tied with twine. In recent weeks, someone on the Deer Run crew had been stealing snuff from the other men’s buckets. The wives had responded with security measures. The buckets were airtight. Two massive explosions hadn’t blown them open.

  Tip Kelly and Ab Kovacs, who had bolted roofs in the One, the Three and the Four. They were the oldest miners on the crew. They had each been married for forty years. They’d been partners for forty-one.

  John Terence Sullivan, who’d once studied for the priesthood, and John Patrick Quinn. Joe Kukla, known as Footlong. Father of six blond daughters, one of them a Fire Queen.

  One Yurkovich twin, Peter or Paul, whose mother had baked a hazelnut torte for their third birthday and sent it to Rose Novak’s house instead. The other twin was found five hundred feet down the corridor, his body deposited there by the blast.

  Eugene Stusick, once known as Eugenius. Husband of Evelyn, father of four. Past president of Bakerton Local 1450, United Mineworkers of America. Old friend and bookmark of George Novak, who now knows how it all turned out.

  Angelo Bernardi, father of four, Friday companion of Dorothy Novak. An autopsy would show his lungs black with pneumoconiosis. He was found wearing bright yellow gloves. Underneath them, his hands were perfectly clean.

  Nine

  Everything froze.

  Christmas came and went. A federal injunction halted mining at the Twelve. You didn’t speak of what would happen next. You knew Randazzo from the Knights, Kukla and Stusick from St. Casimir’s. You’d seen Quinn and Kelly playing cards at the Vets, the Yurkovich twins at the fire-hall dances, walking the Bak
erton Circle. Kovacs’s wife ran a press iron at the dress factory. Angie’s uncle had buried yours. You knew them from the Legion, the ball field. There was no escaping all the ways you knew them. The ways they were just like you.

  Funerals were held all over town. Stoner and Bernardi drove their hearses back and forth, back and forth. Classes were canceled at the high school. Some people attended three masses in one day.

  The explosion had happened four days before Christmas, a fact the newspapers would emphasize. As though March or July would have been preferable, the timing a comfort: at least it didn’t happen at Christmas.

  For months afterward, mine investigators toured the Twelve. They interviewed employees and conducted tests. Reports were filed. Then public hearings were held.

  Methane gas was a fact of miners’ lives. Most days it escaped from coal seams at a minute trickle; the levels were influenced by atmospheric pressure, which fluctuated with the change of seasons. The pressure had dropped sharply that December, after four days of freakish summer temperatures. A flood of methane had been released.

  Ten months of investigations, and that was the size of it: you couldn’t blame Baker for the weather. Meanwhile the Twelve had been closed for a year. Production was off by eighty thousand tons. Enough to heat all of Bakerton that winter, as Gene Stusick might have said.

  His widow attended the hearings, her son at her side. She remembered the crocuses blooming in her front yard that December. For the rest of her life, the sight of yellow flowers would make her sick inside.

  EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Dorothy Novak walked to the cemetery. She visited Angie first. Then Nicholas Annacone, the boy crushed by a car as he chased a ball into the street. Buried seven years that October, the day Angie had first taken her for a ride.

  Every week she left flowers on Angie’s grave. His headstone was large and handsome, the name engraved in bold block letters: ANGELO FRANCESCO, 1916–1963. SOLDIER, HUSBAND AND FATHER. The family had refused the army’s free headstone, believing Angie deserved something more impressive. His uncle had chosen the best his suppliers had to offer, a massive slab of pinkish granite. In the bottom corner a design had been added, the crude outline of a bat and baseball.

  Angie had been recruited out of high school to pitch for the Bombers. It runs in the family, he’d told Dorothy: the famous Ernie Tedesco was a distant cousin of his father’s. The team went undefeated, and Angie was spotted by a scout for the New York Giants, signed to play for their minor-league club in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He spent a season with the team, traveling the flat states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Illinois. We were on a bus every night, he told Dorothy. Getting paid to play baseball. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I robbed a bank. The money was lousy, half what he’d earned in the coal mines; but he’d have played for nothing. Are you kidding? he told her. I would have paid them to let me play. Finally Julia had laid down the law. She was jealous; she didn’t trust him out on the road, drinking and carousing. They were engaged to be married. It was time he grew up.

  Don’t you wish you’d kept playing? Dorothy had asked him. Don’t you wonder what could have happened?

  Angie shrugged. Maybe later, after his lungs got bad, he had some regrets; but what was the use in thinking like that? The war would have put a stop to it anyway. In those years nobody played ball.

  Now, standing at his grave, Dorothy couldn’t shake the thought: If he’d kept playing baseball, he would have stayed out of the mines. There would still be an Angie in the world.

  Some Fridays, she found another bouquet at his grave. She laid her own flowers beside it. The other half of his headstone was engraved with a name: JULIA MARIA, 1920–, the date to be filled in later. The place where his wife would someday lie.

  Dorothy had recognized them at the funeral, sitting in the front pew: the son and three daughters who’d broken his heart, the wife, weeping, who had poisoned them against him. They’d pretended not to notice Dorothy, which suited her. None of that mattered anymore.

  Walking home from the graveyard, she thought often of Nicholas Annacone. A weeping angel had been cut into his gravestone. An Italianate angel, with dark eyes and curly hair, how Nicholas himself must have looked. How Angie might have looked as a boy.

  For a month, two months, she thought she might be pregnant. Her body allowed her to believe this. Since Joyce had moved out of the house, Dorothy bled only rarely. Angie had been careful, but mistakes happened. Lying in bed at night, she massaged her flat belly, and hoped.

  TWICE A WEEK Joyce brought her a few bags of groceries, a casserole or a pot of homemade soup. You’ve got to eat, she pointed out. Dorothy’s dresses hung on her. She seemed to be wasting away.

  They sat outside in the long summer evenings, on the new porch swing Ed had hung. Behind them the house was dark. Dorothy used electricity sparingly, aware that Joyce still paid the utility bills. They never spoke of Angelo Bernardi. The subject made Dorothy weepy, Joyce uncomfortable and a little ashamed. She understood, too late, that her sister had lost the only thing she’d ever valued. That her own response to that thing, the disdainful way she’d treated it, had been obstinate and heartless.

  Dorothy, always frail, now seemed broken. When Joyce telephoned her each morning, she answered in a hoarse whisper, sounding slightly panicked, as if she expected bad news. She wore ragged housedresses in summer; in winter, baggy men’s trousers cinched at the waist with a belt. (They’re warm, she explained when Joyce inquired. She liked to keep the furnace turned low.) Joyce offered to give her a home permanent, but Dorothy couldn’t be bothered. Her hair was wound into a bun at the nape of her neck. In the past year, gray had choked out the brown.

  The house, too, had fallen into disarray. The place wasn’t dirty, just overrun with clutter. Magazines—Silver Screen, TV Guide, Screen Stars—were stacked in every corner of the parlor, arranged by size and date. The kitchen counters were covered with empty margarine tubs, or soup cans, or mayonnaise jars, which Dorothy had washed and arranged on towels to dry. In a cupboard Joyce discovered two large grocery sacks filled with empty prescription bottles. ROSE NOVAK, one of the labels read. OCTOBER 1, 1955.

  “She doesn’t throw anything away,” she told Ed afterward. “She must spend the whole day organizing and sorting this stuff.”

  “Well, why not?” he countered. “It gives her something to do.”

  At one time the clutter would have driven Joyce crazy. Now she understood how little it mattered, and held her tongue. She entertained Dorothy with the latest town gossip—births and marriages, illnesses and deaths. Acquaintances or strangers, it didn’t matter: Dorothy’s memory was encyclopedic. She could always conjure forth the name of the groom’s uncle, the bride’s cousin, connecting each new event to someone they both knew.

  You’re alone too much, Joyce sometimes told her.

  I keep busy, Dorothy said. She had the television; every afternoon she took a long walk. Sunday mornings she went to church. Joyce had offered a dozen times to teach her, but she would not learn to drive. She had always been a homebody. There was no place she wanted to go.

  OFTEN, IN THE SUMMER, Evelyn Stusick crossed the street with a basket of Early Girl tomatoes, a bag of the cucumbers that grew faster than she could pickle them. Every spring she planted too much, more than one person could possibly use. Her daughters were married now, with houses of their own. Leonard was in medical school and visited only on holidays. Like Dorothy Novak, Ev was all alone.

  She sliced the vegetables in Dorothy’s kitchen and sprinkled the tomatoes with sugar, the way Rose had liked them—a sweetly grainy, acidic treat.

  “How is Nicholas doing in school?” Dorothy asked. “Isn’t he almost finished by now?”

  “Leonard,” Ev corrected. “He has another year of medical school.” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice. In four years her son would be a doctor. It was as if she had raised a president, or a pope. Gene, if he had lived, would have felt the same way.

  “I�
��ll have to tell Georgie,” Dorothy said. “He called this morning. He asked after you.”

  “He did?” Ev rose and arranged the extra Early Girls on the windowsill.

  “He always does,” said Dorothy. “You should write him a letter. Or call him sometime.”

  “I’ll leave these green ones here to ripen,” Ev said. “They’ll be ready in a day or two. Don’t let them wait too long.”

  She crossed the street to her empty house. She’d deny it if anyone asked, but the silence wore on her. You don’t have to stay there, Mom, her daughters told her periodically. And she’d had offers. Some she’d talk about—Rebecca, her oldest, had invited her to come live in Maryland—and at least one she’d never mentioned to anyone.

  The spring after the Twelve collapse, George Novak had asked her to marry him. Like his proposal—by her watch, twenty-eight years too late—Ev’s answer was slow in coming. She was simply too stunned to speak.

  There was the disrespect to Gene, dead just four months; a death so sudden and violent that no one—not Ev or his children or anyone who knew him—would ever recover from it. He thought the world of you, she told Georgie—after the initial shock, when she’d regained the power of speech. He still called you his best friend. Then there was the fact that Georgie, for all his talk, was still legally married. Where are we, Utah? she asked. Excuse me if I don’t know the proper etiquette. I’ve never been proposed to by a married man.

  Later, she realized that none of this was surprising, that the proposal was perfectly in Georgie’s character. He had always followed his heart, in whatever foolish direction that organ led him. Oblivious to the other hearts—hers, Gene’s, his mother’s—he broke along the way.