Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  I love you, he told her. Ev, I’ve always loved you.

  Oh, Georgie, she said, pitying them both. The years go. You can’t have them back.

  The Twelve did not reopen. In its heyday, most of its coal had been barged to Pittsburgh, processed into coke to feed the blast furnaces of American Steel. Now AmSteel had its own troubles. Its Pittsburgh plant had closed that summer. More and more, houses were heated with oil, with gas. The world could survive without Bakerton coal.

  The changes spread outward, like an epidemic. Ten families had lost fathers, husbands. Nine hundred lost paychecks, and more would follow. Baker Two was mined out; the Four and the Seven nearly so. Out-of-work miners sat on front porches. There was nowhere for them to go.

  Susquehanna Avenue had one empty storefront, then two. In a year, the whole block was dark.

  PEOPLE KEPT THEIR HEADS DOWN. They pretended not to notice. To Lucy, who had been away, the changes were astounding. It was as if a blight had settled, a deadly fungus passed from tree to tree.

  She’d been gone four years, nearly five. Nursing school, then a bachelor’s degree—school and more school, until the original purpose of her studies had been forgotten. Studies funded by Joyce, a savings account she’d fed for years with tens and twenties from her small paycheck. Started early, when she was still in the air force; still a young woman herself. In the selfishness of adolescence, Lucy had accepted this gift without question. Only later did she see how remarkable it was. At twenty, Joyce had already traded away her own future, invested everything she had in someone else.

  The savings covered her first year’s tuition. Then, scholarships and fellowships; somehow the money had always come. On school breaks, she worked—in the Student Union, in Pittsburgh restaurants and hotels. Summer jobs didn’t exist in Bakerton. Waitresses, cashiers at the Quaker—they were grown people who needed the paycheck, adults with families to support.

  It seemed to Lucy that she’d always been expected to leave—like her brothers, who’d roared out of Bakerton the first chance they got. It was the sisters who stayed: Joyce to care for their mother, Dorothy because she could not care for herself. They’d assumed Lucy would have no such limitations. The family’s slim resources had been lavished upon her, with no other expectation than that she would succeed in life. That she would go.

  She did her best to oblige, to do what was expected. She found a job the day before her graduation, at Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh; she shared an apartment with two of her classmates. For nearly two years she worked. She had herself fitted with an IUD, a small copper device no bigger than a quarter. She bought a car, a ’65 Ford Mustang, and every month or two she drove out to Saxon County for a visit. A boyfriend disappeared; another took his place. She grew older. Nothing changed.

  She might have gone on that way for years. Instead she went back to Bakerton, the one Novak who truly wanted to stay. For a long time she’d fought the desire, through all her years of schooling, that extraordinary privilege that felt to her like a kind of exile. When she broke the news to Joyce, she did it apologetically: There’s something I have to tell you. I hope you’ll understand.

  She found a job easily enough; she seemed to be the only one in Saxon County who could. After the war, during the coal boom, a new wing had been added to Miners’ Hospital. The annex overlooked the Number Twelve, the rusting iron skeleton of its abandoned tipple. The top floor was devoted entirely to pulmonary care. The only thing, she told her college friends—late at night, by phone, after a long, exhausting shift—that Bakerton was still producing: old men who couldn’t breathe.

  Except they weren’t old. Most were in their fifties or early sixties. A few saw seventy; invariably, they were the ones who hadn’t smoked. Black Lung could take ten or twenty of a miner’s healthy years. Black Lung plus cigarettes would cut them in half.

  The lungs died by degrees, silently, inexorably, a slow erosion of tissue. In the end they collapsed completely; the men died gasping for breath, their eyes wide with terror. After a few months on the unit, Lucy was familiar with the process; she understood just how little she could do. She gave the men steroids and lectured them about smoking. The acute cases she placed in oxygen tents. More and more, she helped them with their paperwork. A law had been passed: if you were persistent, if you hadn’t smoked, if you were smart enough to make sense of the forms and patient enough to spend hours filling them out, your widow might be awarded a small monthly check. The men wouldn’t see a dime, themselves. They would all be dead before the money came through.

  The men slept six to a ward, loud with the rush of oxygen tanks. The tanks breathed in unison, a sound like the rhythmic roll of the ocean. Weaving in between the beds, checking the men’s vitals, Lucy imagined herself aboard a battleship, ministering to wounded soldiers at sea. Her patients were all veterans; she knew it from their stories, their bearing, the greenish marks tattooed on their withering biceps. Listening to them, she thought of the father she couldn’t remember, the face she knew from a single photograph, taken on his wedding day. She recalled Angelo Bernardi’s deep laugh, his cigarette kiss on her cheek, his breathing audible from the next room. The two men who’d loved her had disappeared from the world, without ever knowing the person she had become.

  At the end of her shift she drove across the bridge, barely used since the explosion at the Twelve. She passed the abandoned tipple, the weathered outbuildings, the Towers still glowing in the distance, as though nothing had changed. Sometimes, driving into town, she passed Connie Kukla and Clare Ann Baran, still inseparable, walking home from their shift at the dress factory. Connie had married Steven Fleck, who worked for a strip-mining company in West Virginia and came home only on weekends. They shared a house with Connie’s widowed mother, which made sense to Lucy. She couldn’t imagine Connie being alone.

  Of all the differences between them, it was perhaps the most profound: Lucy’s life was solitary. She couldn’t imagine it any other way. She’d tried living on Polish Hill with Dorothy, but the memories paralyzed her, and Dorothy’s silence only amplified the emptiness of the house. Finally she’d rented a small apartment above a flower shop, in what used to be called Little Italy. The neighborhood distinctions had disappeared; now people lived wherever they pleased. More and more, that meant leaving Bakerton entirely, for steady work in Maryland or Virginia or the eastern part of the state. Next door to Lucy was the building that had housed Bellavia’s Bakery, its windows now dark. Across the street, the Sons of Italy and Rizzo’s Tavern still did a brisk business. Above Rizzo’s was the apartment where her mother had lived as a girl. At the end of the block was Nudo’s Pennzoil station, its concrete wall stenciled with large letters: TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST. TOUGH PEOPLE DO.

  On warm nights, in summertime, the neighborhood was still lively. Music spilled through the open windows; voices and laughter in the street. Infrequently, on a Friday or Saturday, Lucy had a drink at one of the bars. When a man approached her, she flirted out of habit; but always she went home alone. The need that had once possessed her—to be watched and listened to, noticed and approved—had simply vanished. She still felt hollow inside, cored like an apple; she still hated sleeping alone. Yet she no longer believed that love would fill her. Each night she ate supper at the window, listening to the radio. And sometimes, after a particularly long shift at the hospital, she smoked a single cigarette.

  It was summer when the motorcycle came. Dorothy heard it from her porch swing. She had visited the graves that morning, to avoid the heat. The afternoon stretched long before her. The late August sun was warm on her skin. Her eyelids fluttered, opened, fluttered again.

  She heard a gentle buzzing in the distance, like the drone of a bumblebee. At the top of the hill, a hunting dog bayed. The buzzing became a great roar, the sound rising in pitch. Then the Poblockis’ beagles joined in.

  A motorcycle shot up the hill at a speed that seemed impossible, chrome blinding in the sunlight. It roared past Dorothy’s house, then m
ade a sharp U-turn, spraying gravel. She shaded her eyes with her hand.

  The bike skidded to a stop. Tied to its sides were saddlebags and a scruffy bedroll. The rider was a young man in a denim jacket.

  “My word,” Dorothy said.

  The rider stepped off the bike. He wore a scruffy beard and dirty blue jeans, torn at the knees. His helmet was decorated with the Stars and Stripes. He glanced around as if he were lost.

  He climbed the porch steps and took off his helmet. “Aunt Dorothy,” he said, offering his hand. “How do you do?”

  ARTHUR MOVED INTO Joyce’s old room. The room where his mother had slept, tranquilized, during her one visit to Bakerton, where Sandy had ironed his monogrammed shirts the winter of the strike. The mattress sagged, but compared to the places he’d slept recently, Arthur found it exquisitely comfortable. After dropping out of Swarthmore, he’d spent several months riding: as far west as Nevada, he told his aunt; then south and eastward across Texas. His aunt fed him and listened to his stories. She seemed to enjoy them, although she sometimes looked at him strangely, as though she weren’t quite sure who he was.

  For his part, he remembered her vividly—the aunt who’d followed him through a snowstorm, her face wrapped in a scarf, her eyes tearing in the wind. His father’s sister who had never married, who’d lived in a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., until she went crazy and came back to Bakerton to live with her mother. She didn’t seem crazy now, just extremely quiet. Her house was messy, in a way that comforted him. He felt strangely at home.

  She asked no questions, which pleased him. He got enough of those from his father: When are you coming back? What will become of you? For God’s sake, have you lost your mind? Except for a couple of phone calls from the road, Arthur hadn’t spoken to him in months. He’d tried to make the old man understand that college was a dead issue. There was nothing he wanted to study, and he didn’t need the deferment. He’d failed his Selective Service physical. His asthma had bought him freedom, and possibly saved his life.

  Away from school, the world opened to him. There was plenty he could do. He knew everything about motorcycles, and he could fake his way around a lawnmower, a snowmobile, any kind of small engine. In Allerton, Texas, he’d stopped to help a biker broken down on the highway. They had shared a joint; then the biker, a wild-haired, Injun-looking guy named Grif, had offered him a place to sleep. There was plenty of floor space in his trailer. A buddy of his needed help in his garage.

  Arthur set up his bedroll in Grif’s trailer. Each day he changed oil and rotated tires. At night he and Grif shared joints, road stories and, oddly, books. On the Road, Siddartha and Doors of Perception, which Grif referred to, not unseriously, as The Oracle. Arthur read them all, glad his father couldn’t see him. The old man would have been entirely too pleased, which would have ruined Arthur’s enjoyment. That reading could be pleasurable was an astonishing discovery. He’d never voluntarily read a book in his life.

  One night, a little stoned, he telephoned his father. He didn’t mention reading, just rambled on about Grif, the desert heat, his job in the garage.

  The old man had nearly dropped the phone. “A grease monkey?” he said.

  “Don’t knock it,” Arthur told him. Cars, trucks, everything broke down eventually. A mechanic was like a doctor, or an undertaker. A steady stream of business was guaranteed.

  He stayed in Allerton a full month, until Grif decided to drive the trailer down to Mexico. “You’re welcome to come,” he said, but Arthur was already safe from the draft. They said their good-byes and Arthur hit the road, with Grif’s tattered copy of The Oracle stowed in his saddlebag. He crossed Texas in two days; then Louisiana and Mississippi, stopping to camp along the Natchez Trace. By August he was riding into Bakerton.

  HE EXPLORED THE TOWN. On hot days he climbed the hill to the municipal swimming pool, an old bath towel looped around his neck, The Oracle tucked under his arm. He borrowed other books from the public library—Great Expectations, The Last of the Mohicans, books he’d been assigned in high school but had never actually read. “How’s this one?” he’d ask the pretty dark-haired girl who stamped them at the front desk.

  “I liked it,” she’d answer each time, but that was the most he could get out of her. Her reticence baffled him. He’d never had a problem talking to girls.

  Finally he figured it out. “Will you cut my hair?” he asked his aunt. She sat him on the back stoop, an old bedsheet over his shoulders, and went crazy with a pair of kitchen scissors. His ponytail lay on the grass like a dead animal.

  “Can you get it any shorter?” he asked, and she kept cutting. Finally, she handed him a mirror.

  “You look handsome,” she observed, and Arthur had to agree. His head felt curiously light, an agreeable sensation. He thought: Now my brain can breathe.

  He liked talking to people. In the pool hall, the post office, the sidewalk in front of the fire hall, nobody was in a hurry. He was surprised when strangers recognized his name. Georgie’s boy, they said, their faces lighting with recognition. Mrs. Hauser’s nephew. Afterward they greeted him like a relative, these people he’d never seen before in his life. It was because of his father that he belonged here. The realization filled him with a strange gratitude. He found himself missing the old man—a feeling that had haunted his childhood, the long winters at school. He hadn’t missed his father in years.

  “Stay as long as you like,” his aunt told him. She wasn’t crazy, he decided; she just had trouble remembering his name. Depending on the day, she might call him Angie, Nicholas, Sandy or Chick.

  In the evenings they ate together at the big table in the kitchen. She cooked piles of noodles, fried eggplant, an Italian soup he couldn’t get enough of. “Have some more, Angie,” she said, refilling his bowl. He had never eaten so well in his life.

  She asked him, once, about his mother.

  “She’s fine,” he said automatically. A moment passed before he understood the question. She hadn’t asked how his mother was doing. She’d asked what is she like.

  “You never met her?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. She came once to visit, but I was living in Washington then. Joyce said she was a beautiful girl.”

  Arthur frowned. He would never have called his mother a beautiful girl. In recent years she had grown fragile and desiccated, her thin shoulders slightly stooped. It seemed incredible that they were talking about the same person.

  “They’ve been married, like, fifty years,” he said. “Maybe not fifty, but a long time. It’s weird that you never met her.”

  “Georgie has been gone for so long,” his aunt said. “And so far away.”

  Arthur considered this. Philadelphia wasn’t that far, maybe four hundred miles. He’d ridden twice that in a single day.

  “She’s a regular mother,” he said. “She likes nice things. Like all mothers, I guess.” As he said it, he realized it wasn’t right. There were other kinds of mothers. In Bakerton, mothers—like everything else—were probably different.

  “She likes art,” he said. “She collects antiques. And she likes to travel.”

  “Like you,” his aunt said.

  “I guess.” Arthur couldn’t imagine his mother riding a motorcycle across the country. She spent every spring at a spa in Switzerland, breathing mountain air.

  “You should phone her,” his aunt said. “Let her know where you are. She must be worried about you.”

  “She’s in Europe. She probably doesn’t even know I left home.”

  His aunt refilled his soup bowl. He cut them each a slice of bread. They ate the rest of the meal in silence, as they usually did. Then Arthur got up to clear their plates from the table. “They’re getting divorced,” he said.

  His aunt colored.

  “They should have done it years ago, if you ask me. I think they were waiting for me to grow up.” He rinsed the plates at the sink, his back to her. Still she didn’t speak.

  “They think I’m upset about it, b
ut I’m not. He’s always working, and she’s always gone. I don’t think they even like each other. I can’t figure out why they ever got married in the first place.” He filled the sink with water. “They both changed. That’s what my dad says.”

  “That happens sometimes,” his aunt said.

  Ten

  The town wore away like a bar of soap. Each year, smaller and less distinct, the letters of its name fading. The thing it had been became harder to discern.

  Whole neighborhoods went up for sale. School enrollment dropped. Every sort of job disappeared. There were fewer cars to service, fewer teeth to fill, no houses whatsoever to build.

  The landscape softened. One by one the tipples fell. The conveyors were dismantled. Aging machinery was carted away: longwalls, mantrips, shuttlecars. Outbuildings were demolished and sold for scrap, or left to rust in the weather. Black scars were left behind, as though the earth had been burned.

  In springtime a fleet of trucks climbed Saxon Mountain, dieseling loudly: a low convoy of blunt shapes, their purpose unknown. Gary Poblocki saw them and spread the word on his CB radio. His brother Bernie, back from Vietnam, suspected the army. Bernie always suspected the army, but this time no one had a better theory.

  The trucks funneled into the valley, their empty beds clattering. They circled the Towers and slowed.

  The morning was still; there was no breeze to ignite the bony piles. In the April sunlight they looked like what they were: two eighty-foot heaps of mine dirt, brought over by the truckload from the Three, the Five and the Twelve. Dug by pick and shovel, by longwall, by Lee Norse and Wilcox machines; hauled by donkey, by conveyor, by shuttlecar. By English and Irish, Italian and Slavish, the hands and backs and lungs of four generations of men.

  The Towers had proved that Bakerton was working. Their absence would prove the opposite. The piles would be leveled in three days and the dirt carted westward, to backfill a thousand acres of wetlands on the outskirts of Cleveland.