Baker Towers
Authors: Jennifer Haigh
J
ENNIFER
H
AIGH
In memory of my father,
Jay Wasilko
If grief could burn out
Like a sunken coal,
The heart would rest quiet
.
P
HILIP
L
ARKIN
All the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous.
I
NSCRIPTION ON A TOMB
IN
W
ESTMINSTER
A
BBEY
The family is the country of the heart.
G
IUSEPPE
M
AZZINI
,
T
HE
D
UTIES OF
M
AN
Softly the snow falls. In the blue morning light a…
Years later, when her time in Washington had receded from…
They came back in the summer, weighed down with treasures.
The town grew.
The Bakerton Volunteer Fire Company sat at the corner of…
Fall froze into winter. The Monday after Thanksgiving, men donned…
Just before Christmastime, Gene Stusick presented a new contract to…
Forever after, when the story is told—in newspapers and…
Everything froze.
The town wore away like a bar of soap. Each…
E-book Extra
An Interview with Jennifer Haigh
E-book Extra
Reading Group Guide
S
oftly the snow falls. In the blue morning light a train winds through the hills. The engine pulls a passenger car, brightly lit. Then a dozen blind coal cars, rumbling dark.
Six mornings a week the train runs westward from Altoona to Pittsburgh, a distance of a hundred miles. The route is indirect, tortuous; the earth is buckled, swollen with what lies beneath. Here and there, the lights of a town: rows of company houses, narrow and square; a main street of commercial buildings, quickly and cheaply built. Brakes screech; the train huffs to a stop. Cars are added. In the passenger compartment, a soldier on furlough clasps his duffel bag, shivers and waits. The whistle blows. Wheezing, the engine leaves the station, slowed by the extra tons of coal.
The train crosses an iron bridge, the black water of the Susquehanna. Lights cluster in the next valley. The town, Bakerton, is already awake. Coal cars thunder down the mountain. The valley is filled with sound.
The valley is deep and sharply featured. Church steeples and mine tipples
grow inside it like crystals. At bottom is the town’s most famous landmark, known locally as the Towers, two looming piles of mine waste. They are forty feet high and growing, graceful slopes of loose coal and sulfurous dirt. The Towers give off an odor like struck matches. On windy days they glow soft orange, like the embers of a campfire. Scrap coal, spontaneously combusting; a million bits of coal bursting into flame.
Bakerton is Saxon County’s boomtown. Like the Towers, it is alive with coal. A life that started in the 1880s, when two English brothers, Chester and Elias Baker, broke ground on Baker One. Attracted by hand-bills, immigrants came: English and Irish, then Italians and Hungarians; then Poles and Slovaks and Ukrainians and Croats, the “Slavish,” as they were collectively known. With each new wave the town shifted to make room. Another church was constructed. A new cluster of company houses appeared at the edge of town. The work—mine work—was backbreaking, dangerous and bleak; but at Baker Brothers the union was tolerated. By the standards of the time the pay was generous, the housing affordable and clean.
The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things.
Chester Baker was the town’s first mayor. During his term Bakerton acquired the first streetcar line in the county, the first public water supply. Its electric street lamps were purchased from Baker’s own pocket.
Figure the cost of maintaining them for fifty years,
he wrote to the town bosses,
and I will pay you the sum in advance.
After twenty years Baker ceded his office, but the bosses continued to meet at his house, a rambling yellow-brick mansion on Indian Hill. A hospital was built, the construction crew paid from a fund Baker had established. He wouldn’t let the building be named for him. At his direction, it was called Miners’ Hospital.
The hospital was constructed in brick; so were the stores, the dress factory,
the churches, the grammar school. After the Commercial Hotel burned to the ground in 1909, an ordinance was passed, urging merchants to “make every effort to fabricate their establishments of brick.” To a traveler arriving on the morning train—by now an expert on Pennsylvania coal towns—the hat shop and dry-goods store, the pharmacy and mercantile, seem built to last. Their brick facades suggest order, prosperity, permanence.
O
N THE SEVENTEENTH
of January 1944, a motorcar idled at the railroad crossing, waiting for the train to pass. In the passenger seat was an elderly undertaker of Sicilian descent, named Antonio Bernardi. At the wheel was his great-nephew Gennaro, a handsome, curly-haired youth known in the pool halls as Jerry. Between them sat a blond-haired boy of eight. The car, a black Packard, had been waxed that morning. The old man peered anxiously through the windshield, at the snowflakes melting on the hood.
“These Slavish,” he said, as if only a Pole would drop dead in the middle of winter and expect to be buried in a snowstorm.
The train passed, whistle blowing. The Packard crossed the tracks and climbed a steep road lined with company houses, a part of town known as Polish Hill. The road was loose and rocky; the coarse stones, called red dog, came from bony piles on the outskirts of town. Black smoke rose from the chimneys; in the backyards were outhouses, coal heaps, clotheslines stretched between posts. Here and there, miners’ overalls hung out to dry, frozen stiff in the January wind.
“These Slavish,” Bernardi said again. “They live like
animali.
” At one time, his own brothers had lived in company houses, but the family had
improved itself. His nephews owned property, houses filled with modern comforts: telephones and flush toilets, gas stoves and carpeted floors.
“Papa,” said Jerry, glancing at the boy; but the child seemed not to hear. He stared out the window wide-eyed, having never ridden in a car before. His name was Sandy Novak; he’d come knocking at Bernardi’s back door an hour before—breathless, his nose dripping. His mother had sent him running all the way from Polish Hill, to tell Bernardi to come and get his father.
The car climbed the slope, engine racing. Briefly the tires slid on the ice. At the top of the hill Jerry braked.
“Well?” said the old man to the boy. “Where do you live?”
“Back there,” said Sandy Novak. “We passed it.”
Bernardi exhaled loudly. “
Cristo.
Now we got to turn around.”
Jerry turned the car in the middle of the road.
“Pay attention this time,” Bernardi told the boy. “We don’t got all day.” In fact he’d buried nobody that week, but he believed in staying available. Past opportunities—fires, rockfalls, the number five collapse—had arisen without warning. Somewhere in Bakerton a miner was dying. Only Bernardi could deliver him to God.
The Bernardis handled funerals at the five Catholic churches in town. A man named Hiram Stoner had a similar arrangement with the Protestants. When Bernardi’s black Packard was spotted, the town knew a Catholic had died; Stoner’s Ford meant a dead Episcopalian, Lutheran or Methodist. For years Bernardi had transported his customers in a wagon pulled by two horses. During the flu of ’18 he’d moved three bodies at a time. Recently, conceding to modernity, he’d bought the Packard; now, when a Catholic died, a Bernardi nephew would be called upon to drive. Jerry was the last remaining; the others had been sent to England and
northern Africa. The old man worried that Jerry, too, would be drafted. Then he’d have no one left to drive the hearse.
“There it is,” the boy said, pointing. “That’s my house.”
Jerry slowed. The house was mean and narrow like the others, but a front porch had been added, painted green and white. One window, draped with lace curtains, held a porcelain statue of the Madonna. In the other window hung a single blue star.
“Who’s the soldier?” said Jerry.
“My brother Georgie,” said Sandy, then added what his father always said. “He’s in the South Pacific.”
They climbed the porch stairs, stamping snow from their shoes. A woman opened the door. Her dark hair was loose, her mouth full. A baby slept against her shoulder. She was beautiful, but not young—at least forty, if Bernardi had to guess. He was like a timberman who could guess the age of a tree before counting the rings inside. He had rarely been wrong.
She let them inside. Her eyelids were puffy, her eyes rimmed with red. She inhaled sharply, a moist, slurry sound.
Bernardi offered his hand. He’d expected the usual Slavish type: pale and round-faced, a long braid wrapped around her head so that she resembled a fancy pastry. This one was dark-eyed, olive-skinned. He glanced down at her bare feet. Italian, he realized with a shock. His mother and sisters had never worn shoes in the house.
“My dear lady,” he said. “My condolences for your loss.”
“Come in.” She had an ample figure, heavy in the bosom and hip. The type Bernardi—an old bachelor, a window-shopper who’d looked but had never bought—had always liked.
She led them through a tidy parlor—polished pine floor, a braided rug
at the center. A delicious aroma came from the kitchen. Not the usual Slavish smell, the sour stink of cooked cabbage.
“This way,” said the widow. “He’s in the cellar.”
They descended a narrow staircase—the widow first, then Jerry and Bernardi. The dank basement smelled of soap, onions and coal. The widow switched on the light, a single bare bulb in the ceiling. A man lay on the cement floor—fair-haired, with a handlebar mustache. A silver medal on a chain around his neck: Saint Anne, protectress of miners. His hair was wet, his eyes already closed.
“He just come home from the mines,” said the widow, her voice breaking. “He was washing up. I wonder how come he take so long.”
Bernardi knelt on the cold floor. The man was tall and broad-shouldered. His shirt was damp; the color had already left his face. Bernardi touched his throat, feeling for a pulse.
“It’s no point,” said the woman. “The priest already come.”
Bernardi grasped the man’s legs, leaving Jerry the heavier top half. Together they hefted the body up the stairs. Bernardi was sixty-four that spring, but his work had kept him strong. He guessed the man weighed two hundred pounds, heavy even for a Slavish.
They carried the body out the front door and laid it in the rear of the car. The boy watched from the porch. A moment later the widow appeared, still holding the baby. She had put on shoes. She handed Bernardi a dark suit on a hanger.