News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Haigh Jennifer

Author:Haigh, Jennifer [Haigh, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780062097385
Amazon: 0062097385
Goodreads: 15819280
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-01-29T08:00:00+00:00

In the afternoon the rain stops. Agnes pulls on her boots and walks down the muddy lane to the road. Deer Run is high and winding, overlooking a deep valley. The abandoned coal mine looms in the distance, the rusted tipple of the old Baker Twelve. Years ago, PennDOT resurfaced Deer Run every year, for the hundreds of miners who drove it each day to work. Now the road is poorly maintained, the asphalt crumbling in places. Moving here was Luke’s idea. On Deer Run they’d have no prying neighbors. Their trailer is invisible from the road.

Agnes climbs the hill to the mailbox, one of several mounted on an old railroad tie. The other mailboxes are unused, unlabeled—relics from an earlier time, when the property was covered with trailers. Five years ago a strip-mining company, Keystone Surface, descended on Saxon Mountain, peeling back the trees and vegetation and extracting what coal they could. They brought their own trailers and stayed just a year, but you can still see the imprints they left behind, rectangular depressions in the bare earth. Luke and Agnes’s trailer is the only one left; they rent it from a man named Jay Wenturine, whom Luke calls my old buddy. Luke speaks often of his old buddies, boyhood friends he’s tracked down since returning to town. He was a teenager when his father was laid off and moved the family to Maryland. Luke reappeared in Bakerton ten months ago and met Agnes soon after. In that time she’s met no old buddies except Jay Wenturine, who stops by the trailer on the first of each month.

In the mailbox she finds a phone bill addressed to her, a sale flyer from the grocery store. Behind them, wedged at the back of the box, is a slender packet of photographs.

I thought you might want to have them.

Greedily she shoves the envelope into her pocket. She walks fast and sticks close to the road. It’s the first week of buck season, and the woods ring with gunshot. She should have worn Luke’s orange jacket.

Back inside, she opens the packet. The first photo makes her throat ache. Agnes and her mother at the kitchen table, rolling dough for noodles. They sit shoulder to shoulder, Agnes in an old sweatshirt, Mae in one of her flowered housedresses. Their large hands are crusted with flour. They wear the same shy smile.

The next photos are from Terri’s wedding, a day Agnes has no particular interest in reliving. It’s disorienting to see her mother in the dress Terri chose for her, a pale blue sack covered with a tent of sheer lace. She is bigger than Agnes remembers, and Dad looks smaller. His tuxedo is a size too large. Terri stands between them in her frilly white dress and picture hat, which was the style at the time. Agnes herself lurks at the edge of the photo, in her nursing smock and slacks. That day, as always, she worked the second shift, though she could have swapped with someone if she’d wanted.

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