At the northern tip of Bakerton, along the winding country road called Deer Run, lies a sloping parcel of land once cleared for farming. A century ago, a family named Hoeffer owned it, got rich on corn and soybeans and—briefly, during war rationing—even coal, after Quentin Hoeffer found a shallow bed in his back forty and took a pick and shovel to it. Then Hoeffer’s son-in-law, no farmer, tried his hand at raising sheep, with disastrous consequences. Saxon Savings repossessed the property and let the place go to seed.
By the time Sunny Baker bought it in the 1970s, the Hoeffer farm had lain dormant for a full generation, and a young forest had taken root: fast-growing paper birches and Norway spruce; a spongy ground cover of aggressive kudzu; in the deep shade, soft pockets of fern. She lived in the old farmhouse barely visible from the road, surrounded by what resembled, from a distance, a dense jungle of metal and plastic. Passersby on Deer Run could pick out two junk cars, several old refrigerators, a decrepit lawn tractor, a busted generator, a ramshackle aluminum shed. A child’s swing set, an old Victrola, a toilet, a motorcycle, a snowmobile, and a rusted dinghy filled with dirt. At the edge of the property, with weeds growing up between them, lay piles of building supplies: ten-foot lengths of PVC piping, a heap of warped two-by-fours. Waterlogged parlor furniture—armchairs, a sofa—clustered at the center in a conversational grouping, as though a family might sit there watching television.
Sunny’s junk was an eyesore, but for a long time no one was looking. Her nearest neighbor was a dairy farmer a mile down the road. The farmer’s wife noted Sunny’s comings and goings. Her car, a twelve-year-old Thunderbird, looked much like the others propped up on blocks in the front yard, yet it ran well enough to get her into town a few times a month. In the A&P and the state liquor store, she was instantly recognized by her general dishevelment and the jacket she wore regardless of the weather—a plaid hunting coat, red-and-black-checked, left behind years ago by one of her men.
The town, Bakerton, wasn’t named for Sunny or even her great-grandfather; but for the coal mines he’d dug in that valley. Mines brought miners, miners built camps. Mining camps multiplied until someone called them a town.
Bakerton.
Did Sunny hear her own name when the town was mentioned? Or was Bakerton no more than an address, like any other place in the world?
Over the years her junk multiplied, covering a full acre. A horse trailer appeared; rolls of chicken wire; a doghouse. Certain objects were discernibly Sunny’s own: a ten-speed bicycle she’d been seen riding, a beautician’s sink she’d acquired from her aunt Rosalie, the actress, who’d hired a local hairdresser to keep her in pin curls. Other items—a crib and high chair, a green plastic Inchworm—were presumably connected to Sunny’s children, back when she still had them, back before someone—their father or her aunt or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—intervened to save them, since they weren’t grown enough to run away themselves. But most of the junk was plainly masculine, a rusty scat trail: the unsightly droppings of Sunny’s men, who’d met her in one bar or another and figured out who she was, or had been.
The first was a man she’d brought back from Oregon, a hippie type who might have loved her when she was young and less obviously crazy, before she’d drunk away her looks and her health and what Baker money she could wheedle out of her aunt, Virgie Baker having clutched the purse strings even on her deathbed. The hippie had tooled around Bakerton in a dilapidated van, amber-colored, with an iridescent starburst airbrushed on one side. Sunny was pregnant then, her second: the hippie’s, probably, though there had been no wedding as far as anyone knew. The new baby, a girl, was seen eventually in town, strapped to the hippie’s back like an Indian papoose. After a year or two the hippie disappeared, taking (it was thought) the two babies but leaving behind the beginnings of Sunny’s own private salvage yard: the starburst van, a nonfunctioning rototiller. He’d been an enthusiastic gardener, as hippies were.
There had been, locally, some goodwill toward this hippie, seen picnicking at Garman Lake when Sunny was immensely pregnant, helping her up tenderly from the grass. That meant something, the women agreed: if a man loved you at eight months, tired and bitching and big as a bus, he loved you to the very end. Later, though—in the revisionist history of Sunny Baker, the story as it was told after the ending was known—the hippie would be judged more harshly. It was the hippie who’d left the first junk on Sunny’s lawn, who’d pioneered the leaving of junk, and paved the way for the rest.
She was the last of the Bakers: a spoiled lonely girl without siblings, without cousins, raised by two maiden aunts who’d lost everything—one histrionically, the other in silent bitterness—and invested all their hopes in her.
Sunny’s great-grandfather Chester Baker had thrown the first shovel; but it was Chester Junior, known as Chessie, who grew the two Baker mines—in a few decades, with the help of two wars—into twelve. Chessie was a mine operator, and only that; the planet, to him, the scene of a cosmic shell game. Its land masses existed for one purpose only, the hiding of bituminous coal. He kept the company name, Baker Brothers, though he’d long been brotherless. (Edgar Baker had been killed at the Somme.) From his youth, Chessie lived only for his mines, a man so single-minded that he’d never once gone to the pictures, never watched a single game played by the Baker Bombers, his company’s baseball team.
Yet he found time to marry and raise three children, or at least get them started. There was a clever girl named Virginia, a pretty one named Rosalie. The boy, Chester III, was known in the family as Third or simply The Youngest, a title shortened in childhood to the tender moniker Ty. These names were part of Sunny’s childhood, each matched to a framed portrait on the parlor wall of the Baker house on Indian Hill. The house referred to, in town, as The Mansion, with audible capitals, and by the Bakers as the big house or simply home.
For all of Sunny’s girlhood, the wall was laden with photographs. Chester and Elias (known as the Brothers) posed before Baker One in string ties and muttonchops, the coalman’s uniform of the day. There was a stern portrait of her grandfather Chessie, in his vest and round spectacles, and a lovely one of Chessie’s lost brother, a slender blond boy in tennis whites. There were the aunts who’d raised her, each captured at the time of her greatest happiness: Virgie in tweed and cashmere, crossing the quadrangle at Wellesley College with her great friend Tess Drew; Rosalie under a velvety layer of Max Factor in a publicity still for The Edge of the Universe—the David O. Selznick extravaganza, never released, that was to have made her a star.
At the center of the display—the place of honor, the fulcrum around which the others were balanced—hung a wedding portrait of Sunny’s parents. Its mahogany frame had cost a hundred dollars, back when a dollar bought dinner and a hundred could get you a car. The photo was taken in a church in England where the couple had been married. Ty Baker wore his dress uniform, decked with medals; his blond hair waved back from his forehead like the actor Leslie Howard’s. Nola, his English bride, was draped in white.
Of these parents—dead before her fifth birthday—Sunny had two memories. The first: sitting at the dressing table in her mother’s bedroom, Nola painting her mouth with lipstick (Hold still, darling) while demonstrating the proper position, lips puckered for a kiss. The second: Ty and Nola in the foyer of the big house wearing hats and long wool coats, dressed for one of their trips. Sunny had been distraught, overcome with the exhaustion that came when you’d cried so long that you couldn’t remember the feeling of not crying. She’d crouched on the staircase, peering through the banister, and shrunk away when her mother bent to kiss her. Nola had protested wearily—Beatrice Emma, don’t be tiresome—but Sunny wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t let herself be touched.
Let her sulk, then. Ty Baker nodded curtly and led Nola to the door.
Had it been their final departure, Sunny’s last glimpse of her parents? Her whole life, the possibility would haunt her: that she’d been so sulky and unpleasant, they’d been glad to be rid of her; that she’d refused her mother’s final embrace on the day their plane went down. The question tore at her. It also made her angry. She felt wrongly judged, the victim of a gross injustice: branded a tantrumming brat when in fact she’d been a jolly child, earning her nickname.
Only Sunny’s mother, in an irritable mood, had ever called her Beatrice.
After her parents were gone, she became Poor Sunny. There was no way to make up for all the child had lost, but her aunts did their best. Her girlhood was filled with hugs and kisses, bedtime stories and unexpected treats. There were darling dresses, music lessons, a pony. One Christmas brought dolls from all over the world, dressed in exotic costumes—Balinese princess, geisha, Eskimo. The everyday gifts were, in a way, even more extravagant: the full attention of two grown women with nothing else to live for, who spent their days dreaming up entertainments for her. Like three little girls, they hunched over dolls and jacks, Parcheesi and checkers and Saturday-morning cartoons. Summer brought picnics and croquet and rides on horseback—with both aunts, when Rosalie was still able, and later with Virgie alone.
At fourteen Sunny was sent, as her aunts had been, to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut, an endless train ride. She was an excellent student, well rounded and popular; a thoroughly well-adjusted girl, until she wasn’t. Halfway through her final year at Miss Porter’s, a nurse was sent by train to bring her back to Bakerton, the first of many such rescues. In later years nurses would be dispatched to New York; to Atlantic City; to Berkeley, California. Each time the mission was the same, to calm and cajole and, if necessary, sedate her; whatever was necessary to bring the last Baker home.
The men took the long way out of town, with Dick Devlin—president of the Bakerton Borough Council, owner of the reopened Commercial Hotel—at the wheel. Beside him sat Chuck Helsel, a bigwig with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections; in the backseat, Dominic Nudo of Nudo Construction, the state’s contractor. They looked uncertainly out the window as the Jeep roared up the hill, its old engine straining.
“Man, these Jeeps are something,” Nudo said.
“I’ll say.” Helsel shifted in his seat. “I drove one in the army. I swore never again.”
Dick kept quiet. His new son-in-law drove a Land Rover made by Mitsubishi. Matt claimed they were all over the roads in Maryland, where he and Katie lived. Dick had driven it once and was impressed by the smooth ride but couldn’t bring himself to buy one. A lifetime ago, after high school, he’d spent three years on an assembly line for Fisher Body, making chassis for Chevys. He bought American. He was, he knew, a dying breed.
“Wears like a tank, though,” he pointed out.
“Rides like one, too,” Helsel said.
It was a false spring day in March. Garman Road—a rocky trail marked out with red dog—was sloppy with snowmelt. Rust-colored mud spattered the Jeep’s winter tires.
“Not much of a road, is it? Hard on the vehicle.” Helsel was big and blond, a former police officer or maybe a prison guard. Dick could spot the type a mile away—the sort of man who drove his vehicle to his residence; who lived his whole life in the language of cops.
Dick gave his politician’s smile. “Won’t be bad in summer. If it ever comes.” The weather, a safe topic. “I guess the little bastard saw his shadow.”
Helsel frowned. “Does that mean spring or more winter? I can never remember.”
“More winter,” Dick said. Punxsutawney was just fifty miles away; as a boy of ten, he’d been taken to see the groundhog come out of its hole. He’d expected a silent snowy forest, the creature, driven by some ancient instinct, popping furtively from the ground. The reality—the noisy crowd, the stunned rodent tossed out in front of a throng of cameras—depressed and perplexed him. Why go through the motions if everyone knew it was a sham?
As an adult, he understood the reasons. Punxsutawney—like Bakerton, like the entire western half of Pennsylvania—was down on its luck, its population dwindling, its mines and mills closed. All of Punxsy’s businesses, in fact, were struggling. (Dick’s own restaurant was outfitted with secondhand ductwork from a failed Punxsy diner. He’d saved himself a bundle there.) But for a few days each February, every motel in Punxsutawney was booked; at the Mobil station, a dozen rental cars idled in line. The TV crews bought breakfasts and newspapers, coffee and cigarettes. When Groundhog Day coincided with a lake-effect snowstorm, the local True Value sold out of ice scrapers and rock salt. It was no replacement for real industry, the union jobs that once supported local families. But a few days each year, the groundhog nonsense attracted national attention, a chance for Punxsy to trumpet its other virtues: low cost of living, tax breaks for new business, a heartbreakingly eager workforce. For Bakerton there was no TV coverage, no famous rodent, but Dick trusted in the resiliency of the American economy. He believed—he had to—that deliverance would come.
At the top of the hill, he parked. The proposed site was fifty acres, half covered with forest. The land was bordered to the north and east by pastures belonging to Dickey’s Dairy. The owners—the former Marcia Dickey and her husband—had promised their support.
“And to the west?” Helsel asked.
“A private landowner,” Dick said. He charged ahead, preempting further questions. Water and sewage would be handled by the borough, the roads serviced in winter by Carbon Township. The township owned just three plows but would gladly buy another, to be used solely on the roads around the new prison.
“We’d need to get that in writing,” said Helsel.
“No problem,” Dick said.
They piled back into the Jeep. “I’m not thrilled about this road,” said Helsel.
“We could have it paved inside a week.”
“Still, it’s pretty narrow. All these sharp curves.”
Nudo looked up from the topo map in his lap. “Looks like there’s a more direct way back to town. What’s Deer Run?”
“An old mining road,” said Dick. “Needs some patching.”
“Is it paved?”
Dick nodded.
“Let’s take it,” Helsel said.
Later, back at the Commercial, Dick’s wife brought out their lunches: burgers for Dick and Nudo; a chef’s salad for Helsel, who’d had one coronary and was watching his weight.
“Geez Louise,” said Nudo. “That was some spread. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a mess,” Dick agreed.
“You never tried to make her clean it up? Send an officer out to the residence?” Helsel salted his salad. “I’m surprised the neighbors haven’t complained.”
“There aren’t any neighbors. I think that’s why she bought the place.”
“What’s the matter with her? A woman, especially. She must be crazy to live that way.”
“She’s had her troubles.” It was known in town that Sunny Baker had spent time in Torrance and, later, a private mental hospital. Though what had precipitated these stays, the exact nature of her affliction, no one could say.
“How long has she lived out there?” Nudo asked.
“Twenty years. Maybe longer.”
Helsel clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “I’m surprised you let it go on that long.”
For Pete’s sake, Dick thought, who’s she hurting? It’s her own business if she wants to live like a pig.
“We can’t be running a state facility next door to that.”
It’s a prison, Dick thought.
“I don’t think the inmates are going to complain,” he joked.
Helsel did not smile. “Well, we can’t have the COs driving past that every day to work.”
“Of course not. She’ll clean it up, of course.”
“She’ll have to,” Helsel said.
The Bakerton Borough Council met the first Monday of each month. A century ago they’d been called the Town Bosses, eight men handpicked by the Brothers themselves. (All of Bakerton, in those days, spoke the language of mining, in which every sort of authority was conveyed by the title Boss.) Under Chessie Baker, the system was codified, the Bosses duly elected. But by then the town was full of immigrants who viewed voting with suspicion. The voting minority—English-speaking males—chose people like themselves, the same Bosses Chessie himself might have picked.
In the spring of 2000 the council included two women, a fact that would have shocked Chessie. Neither would he have chosen Leonard Stusick, the town doctor, with his foreign-sounding name. Davis Eickmeier, who’d taken over Dickey’s Dairy after marrying Marcia Dickey, was at least a businessman, though his surname, too, was troublesome. (Chessie’s brother had been killed by Germans.) The other councilmen were even more objectionable. Leo Quinn was a barman, naturally. (In Chessie’s view, the Irish were constitutionally alcoholic.) Eleanor Rouse wore trousers. The undertaker, cop, and beautician were all Italian. To Chessie, it was nearly the same as being black.
The council met in a conference room at Saxon Savings and Loan, by long tradition: in Chessie’s day, the Bosses also meted out the mine’s payroll, and it was deemed safest simply to meet at the bank. Ruth Rizzo, the beautician, read the minutes. So little had happened at the last meeting that her report lasted, in fact, just a minute.
“That’s it?” Dick asked when she’d finished.
Ruth nodded.
“Well, then. On to new business. I’ve been in touch with the Department of Corrections.” He paused, savoring the moment. Like his father—a long-standing president of the Mine Workers’ local—he was a natural public speaker, happiest in front of an audience. “We took a walk of the proposed site. They had some questions about snow removal, which I answered. Also, they want Garman Road paved.”
“Hang on there,” said Davis Eickmeier, the dairy farmer. A famously slow talker, he needed a moment to formulate his question. “How come you took them up Garman? Deer Run goes right to the highway.”
It was the first night of baseball season, Cleveland at Baltimore. Jerry Bernardi, the undertaker, looked at his watch.
“They figured that out eventually.” Dick hesitated. “They got a good look at Sunny Baker’s.”
“Oh, dear,” said Eleanor Rouse, the school nurse.
“I tried taking them the back way, but they smelled a rat.”
“Well,” said Eleanor, “it was worth a try.”
“For the love of Mike,” said Leo Quinn. “They’re prisoners. What are they going to do, stage a walkout?”
A few titters around the table, a shudder of mirth. Leo Quinn was a comedian the way Dick Devlin was a politician, by temperament and by blood. His physiology, even, seemed engineered for it: the broad pliable face, the twinkling blue eyes.
Dick shrugged. “It’s the guards, I guess. The DOC doesn’t want them to drive past a dump on their way to work.”
“They have a point,” said Ruth Rizzo.
“They don’t, either, Ruth, and you know it.” Eickmeier sat back, arms crossed. He was known to be country-stubborn. “I drive past it every day, and it hasn’t hurt me any. Hell, I don’t give a care.”
“How did you leave it with them?” asked Dr. Stusick, who could summarize a half hour’s worth of blather in a single terse sentence. This habit irked Dick Devlin, with his love of oratory, though no one else seemed to mind.
“I said we’d make her clean it up.”
A silence fell. Leo Quinn chuckled in disbelief. Ruth Rizzo put down her pen.
“We will, will we?” said Leo, grinning broadly.
Dick ignored the satiric tone. “Someone will have to talk to Miss Baker.”
“Well, good luck with that.” Davis Eickmeier reached into his pocket for a tin of Skoal. Eleanor Rouse grimaced with distaste. “She’s been my neighbor twenty-five years,” he said slowly, his lip packed with snuff. “And I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen her come out of that house.”
Another silence.
“Anyone?” Dick glanced around the room, appealing for help. “Jerry?”
“I got nothing to offer here,” said Jerry, who was missing the game.
“The Bakers have always kept to themselves,” Ruth observed.
The council remembered, all at once, Ruth’s special connection to the Baker family. Even in her old age, Rosalie Baker had kept up appearances. For many years she’d had a standing appointment on Monday morning, Ruth reporting to The Mansion by a back door to do Miss Baker’s wash and set.
“I was hoping you could talk to her, Ruth,” Dick said.
“Oh, I couldn’t. What on earth would I say?”
There were nods of agreement. It wasn’t just a question of approaching a Baker, any Baker (let alone Sunny, who was known to be cursed). It would have made for awkward conversation between any neighbors: Your yard is a pigsty. Even rapists and murderers refuse to live beside it.
“It’s private property!” Davis Eickmeier nearly shouted.
The council started. Davis never raised his voice.
He spat deliberately into a coffee mug he’d brought for the purpose. “Now, I don’t like looking at all that junk. I don’t guess Miss Baker likes smelling my cows, either, but in twenty-five years I haven’t heard a peep out of her. To me, that’s a good neighbor.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Andy Carnicella said.
Seven heads turned in his direction. He was the town cop, known all over Saxon County as Chief Carnicella, despite having no Indians. (The borough’s budget provided for a police force of one.) The youngest council member by twenty years, he’d been silent for the entire meeting. Dick had forgotten he was there.
The chief leaned back from the conference table. He had a habit of rocking in his chair, like a restless schoolboy. “I can take the cruiser out there tomorrow. Write her a citation, if I have to. Should of done it years ago, if you ask me.”
Ruth Rizzo looked aghast.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” said Dick.
“Come off it, Dick. I don’t know what you’re all afraid of. To me, she’s just an old crazy lady. A crazy old drunk.”
“Andy, that’s enough,” Dick said.
There was silence.
“Miss Baker has had her problems. We all know it.” Dick took his time, pleased to have regained the floor. “And it might not be so good for her to have a police car show up in her front yard with the lights flashing. I’m no expert, though.” He nodded toward Dr. Stusick. “Len, what do you think?”
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 was 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.
“Sunny?” he called.
A bird whistled in the distance, the sound low and airy, like blowing across a Coke bottle.
“It’s Dr. Stusick. Anybody home?”
He circled around to the back of the house, the wet grass soaking his pant legs, and spotted a faint trail through the weeds, in the general direction of the back door. The back porch appeared rickety but intact. A new satellite dish, clean and modern, had been bolted to its roof.
Len knocked firmly—once, twice—and listened. Voices inside, a faint music. Somebody was watching television.
“Sunny, are you there?”
The doorknob turned easily in his hand.
Marcia Eickmeier was scrubbing out the percolator at her kitchen sink—white vinegar, her secret weapon against coffee stains—when Dr. Stusick drove past in his van. Later the sirens attracted her attention: first the ambulance, then the volunteer firemen. Finally the police cruiser screamed down Deer Run Road, sending gravel flying. Chief Carnicella had been listening to the scanner when the ambulance was dispatched, and was the last to arrive.
Marcia and Davis rode over together in the pickup. By then Deer Run was lined with parked cars. “I’d a loved to get a look inside that place,” she said later to anyone who’d listen: her daughters-in-law, her sisters, the ladies at the church. But by the time she’d arrived, a yellow tape cordoned off the property. The paramedics had already left.
Sunny Baker, too, was gone.
Dr. Stusick had found her on the sofa in front of the television, dressed in her plaid hunting jacket. The TV, at high volume, was tuned to the Travel Channel. The smell was indescribable. Judging by decomposition, she had been dead over a week. Had already been dead—Len learned this later—when Dick Devlin led the prison officials on their site walk, past the junkyard on Deer Run Road.
Despite the court’s best efforts, Miss Baker’s children could not be located. Her estate would spend years in probate, but Dick Devlin wasn’t about to wait. Within a week her property was cleared of the motorcycle and snowmobile and junk cars; the tractor and generator and swing set; the hippie’s starburst van. The beautician’s sink was refused by Ruth Rizzo, who had her own, thank you, she didn’t need a piece of crap that had spent ten years on somebody’s lawn. Everything else went straight into a Dumpster: the ruined furniture and rusting appliances, the warped piles of lumber, the high chair and bicycle, the busted table saw.
The haulers were paid by the Borough of Bakerton.
In the fall of 2000, Deer Run State Correctional Facility was built.