CHAPTER 3

Into the Eyes of the Devil Standing There

Trees around the blue factory fence pull moisture from the ground. Their roots are thin reeds sucking water, desperate to bloom. A sparrow in love perches on my low windowsill, listening to rain in his sleep. It’s a Friday in 1985, two days before St. Patrick’s Day, and everywhere, the muddy signs of spring present themselves. I am still eight years old and the world is perfect, for now.

In Mrs. Swan’s second-grade class we’re cutting out shamrocks—green construction paper so coarse you can see the grain. Mrs. Swan is tall and thin. She speaks in that voice only elementary school teachers have. The school scissors are dull metal with red rubber covering the circles where your fingers belong. Our classroom is decorated with paper lions and lambs because March comes in like a lion, and out like a lamb. At the beginning of the month, we were able to choose which one we wanted to make. I chose a lamb and got to use cotton balls for her wool, pink crayons for the soft insides of her ears.

I want to be a meteorologist when I grow up, so I like sayings that deal with the weather. When my father was my age, they didn’t have weathermen on TV. They didn’t even have TV. They had to look at the sky to see if rain was coming, had to lick a finger and raise it in the air to find the direction of the wind. Now my father loves weather reports. He loves barometers and thermometers, low-pressure­ systems and cold fronts, nimbus clouds and hail and blizzards. He loves watching the radar picture on the evening news. I stare at the animated green and white mass as it moves over the tristate area, the outline of West Virginia’s panhandle a little chimney, dividing us from Ohio.

That night, I watch the eleven o’clock news with my father. His favorite station is KDKA, the oldest news station in the country, broadcast from Pittsburgh, fifty-seven miles away. In Pittsburgh, people break into houses that look a lot like ours—brick ranches with porches and wooden fences, front yards with bare trees, branches like bony fingers reaching into the sky. But our city is smaller, a small doll nesting inside larger cities, protected. Nothing bad ever happens here.

“This town is dying,” my mother announces. “But you’re smart, Karen. And you’ll get out of here when you’re older. An Ivy League graduate won’t want to live around a bunch of goddamned has-beens.”

My mother has already decided that I’ll attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. She pictures me becoming a female version of Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler. Lee Iacocca is from Allentown, proof that you can rise above the mines and mills of Pennsylvania and make something of yourself. Another acceptable alternative would be to marry the son of Andrew Mellon, from the rich Pittsburgh family that owns Mellon Bank.

“After you two get married, they’ll have to change the jingle to Karen Bank, a neighbor you can count on,” she sings as she twirls around in our orange and gold kitchen, the mushroom curtains dancing with her in the damp breeze.

The factory work schedule is taped to the wall next to the harvest-­gold telephone that matches the harvest-gold refrigerator and stove, and the mushroom canisters that were in style in the 1970s, when I was born. When something important comes up, either Linda or I have to check the schedule—a long skinny paper creased a million times, encoded in cryptic letters and numbers, a mysterious eye chart. I run my finger down, tracing the days of my dance recital, my chorus concert, my birthday. First I have to determine if one of my parents is off that day. If not, the second step is to decide who will call off work, and that’s usually my mother. I’m told that since my father makes more money, it makes sense for him to work as much as possible. But even if that’s true, we all know the real reason and that is simple—Mother is in charge. She controls every aspect of our home life—from which brand of paper towels to buy, to which trees to pay the landscaper to plant in the yard, to whether or not we answer the door when the doorbell rings unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon.

I don’t need to consult the work schedule much lately, because my father isn’t working right now. He’s on sick leave from the factory because he’s having bowel trouble as my mother puts it. He’s going to doctor’s appointments at a big hospital in Pittsburgh, where they put scopes and tubes and needles in him, run test after test. So far, they think he might be lactose intolerant, so my mother buys lactose-free milk for him. My father is a big milk drinker, at least three glasses with every meal, and he hates the taste of the lactose-free version, refusing to drink it after a few sips. “I only like the real thing,” he says. “That’s why I won’t drink that new Coke, either.”

So far, even after giving up milk, he’s still got the trouble, the family nickname for his sickness right now. It keeps him in the bathroom most of the day, a stack of fishing magazines on the floor next to the toilet. Even though my mother thinks it’s tacky to have reading materials in the bathroom, she’s letting it slide this time.

My mother tells me family secrets, and one of them is that dad’s sickness is just nerves. One of the foremen at the factory gave him a hard time recently, scolded him, saying something vague like “I don’t like the way you move.” While my father doesn’t like to speak up for himself, my mother is the opposite. She is loud and opinionated and doesn’t let people “shit all over her.” She thinks my oldest sister, Pam, is a pushover, a doormat.

“She takes so much shit, she should just change her name to Pam Brown,” my mother says. Pam is mom’s daughter from her first marriage, and she’s fifteen years older than me. Pam got married one week after her high school graduation and moved out of the house. I was only three years old then, so I grew up seeing Pam as a second mother instead of a sister. I took to calling her “Mama Pam Pam.” Pam and her husband, Luke, were high school sweethearts. They only stayed married for three years, long enough to have a little girl named Samantha, who is my niece, even though she’s only four years younger than me.

My father adopted Pam when he and my mother got married. Pam’s real father is a man named Leroy who lives in Indiana. My mother doesn’t talk about him much, but when she does, she says Leroy cheated on her with other women and has probably fathered close to a dozen children himself, although he’s never remarried. My father likes to tell the story about how he rescued my mom and Pam. When my dad came over to their apartment for the first time, they had only ketchup in their refrigerator. He showed up the next day with two sacks full of groceries.

My father is shy; so shy that he didn’t even have the nerve to ask my mother out on a date thirteen years ago. According to the story, my mother approached one of my dad’s friends at the end of her shift and said, “Tell Charles I want a date with him!” And that was that. My father was thirty-five at the time and still living at home in the hollow with my grandmother Zelda and his sister, my aunt Babe.

Nicknames are mandatory in my father’s family. He is “Manny” to anyone who knew him before he married my mother. He was given that nickname as a child, because everyone thought he acted just like a little man. My father has three older sisters and one younger brother whose nickname is Honeyboy. Honeyboy is a big man with a long reddish brown beard like the guys from the band ZZ Top. He looks gruff and mean but inside he’s a softie. He has a dog named Booey (who also has a nickname, Hutch). He teaches Hutch tricks. When my dad takes Linda and me to visit Honeyboy, he shows us how Hutch can identify the various stuffed wildlife on the wood-paneled walls of his small den.

Honeyboy says, “Where’s the turkey?” taking care to hold out the word where’s like an auctioneer, and Hutch’s golden-haired head snaps, turns abruptly to look at the wild turkey feathers spread out and nailed to the wall like a giant fan. “Where’s the deer?” Honeyboy asks, and Hutch looks at the sad mounted dear head, its neck disappearing as if the rest of its body could be found inside the wall, its glass marble eyes shiny but empty. My dad has two stuffed deer heads in our basement. They are mounted on pieces of wood shaped like shields and I like to pet them when no one’s watching, talk to them as if they’re still alive.

Honeyboy still lives in Lemont Furnace, about twenty-five minutes from our house in Connellsville. Honeyboy doesn’t work, and when I ask my mother about it, she says he’s on disability because he has agoraphobia, which is an official way of saying he is afraid of being in public, around other people. He waits at home while his wife, Janette, goes into the hunting supply store. She buys several hunting jackets for Honeyboy, takes them home for him to try on. Then Janette goes back to the store and returns the ones that don’t fit.

My dad started working at Anchor when he was eighteen, hitching a ride in the back of a neighbor’s pickup truck five days a week. He’s forty-seven years old now, has almost thirty years in, and is pretty high on the plant seniority list, a list that is the subject of much dinner table conversation between my parents, along with molds and plunger tests and union meetings.

Anchor only goes on shutdown two days a year: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. On those days, a worker with high seniority can bid on a fire-watch shift. On a fire-watch shift, you simply hang around and check on the furnaces from time to time, making sure nothing ignites. Although no glass is being made, the furnaces can’t be turned off, so someone needs to be there, sitting on a metal folding chair, watching. Workers are paid triple time for fire-watch shifts, so it’s a very prestigious position in my mother’s eyes, a position my father will be eligible for in a few years, once a few of the older men from The Hot End retire.

I’ve been inside the factory once, when they opened it up for tours in honor of their anniversary. My mother was recruited as a tour guide, and Linda and I got to be in her group. We all had to wear hairnets and foam earplugs and safety goggles to walk down the metal staircase that leads underground. At first I was worried about exposure to nuclear radiation because I’d seen the movie Silkwood with Cher and Meryl Streep on HBO one night, but my mother assured me it wasn’t that kind of plant. Before the tour, I’d pictured the Anchor workers in white bodysuits, puffed up like astronauts. We’d been learning about NASA in IMPACT, the gifted program I’m enrolled in at school. We studied the parts of the space shuttle, and I became fascinated with the solid rocket boosters, the bright orange external tank, the orbiter, the only part that returns to Earth.

It’s Saturday, March 16, 1985, and I wake up to the sound of bacon sizzling in the kitchen. Mother is off today, and she’s making a big breakfast. Pancakes made with cornmeal instead of flour (her own special recipe—we call them corncakes) and extra-crispy bacon. Mother likes to cook before we wake up, so I never get to see the bacon transformation. Somehow it goes from long, flat, pink and white strips to brown hardened curls. They are snowflakes. No two are alike.

Linda is still sleeping. She’s eleven years old, and a heavy sleeper. She doesn’t normally wake up on weekends until noon, and she hates breakfast unless it’s pancakes or French toast. “Go get your sister,” Mother says, her right hand holding a pair of greased tongs.

I go into Linda’s bedroom, where it’s always dark, even in daylight. My bedroom is the opposite, the sheer curtains always letting the outside in. I pretend that her windowsill is a stage and pull open the drapes with their little rope and pulley system. I’m performing my version of Annie, my favorite movie. I have two different Annie albums—the original Broadway cast recording and the motion picture soundtrack. Both albums open up like a book to reveal color photo collages of all the characters.

“Act One: The Orphanage,” I announce to the silent room, then break into my rendition of “Maybe.” As the almost spring sunlight hits her face, Linda covers it with one pillow, then tries to throw the other one at my head. I finish my song and pull the curtain closed, and Linda rolls over, determined to go back to sleep. But the show isn’t over yet. “Act Two: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,” I say, followed by a spirited chorus of “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” Linda is not amused. She pulls herself out of bed, hugging her stuffed Pink Panther as she stumbles into the bathroom. I run down the hallway and back into the kitchen, where my mother is now juicing oranges. “Linda woke up all on her own,” I report.

The dining room table is covered with a vinyl tablecloth, the kind that makes a whooshing sound when you wipe it down with a wet dishrag. The table is set for three. My father is still in bed. The trouble keeps him up at night. I hear him padding up and down the basement stairs throughout the night, the bathroom door closing with a soft click, a sliver of light shining through the crack above the floor. Linda emerges from the end of the hallway and sits down at the table. She begins pouring a river of maple syrup on her stack of corncakes.

Mother runs into the living room to turn off the stereo. She’s been listening to 3WS, her oldies station, while she cooks, but she doesn’t like music on while we eat. I think it would be fun to listen to the radio during a meal, and promise myself that when I grow up, my house will be wired with a sound system, speakers in every room, so I can listen to whatever I like whenever I like: Culture Club with breakfast, Olivia Newton-John with lunch, Michael Jackson with a midnight snack.

I have a system when it comes to corncakes, and there are multiple steps I must take before I can eat. First, I have to butter each cake and stack them one on top of the other. Then, I must cut them up into nine little squares with a knife and fork. Then, and only then, can I cover them in syrup. Linda is just the opposite, and it makes me nervous to watch her douse her corncakes in Log Cabin, then jab at them with her fork, stuffing misshaped bites into her mouth without counting. I’m finally getting around to taking my first bite when the telephone rings.

Mother goes into the kitchen, picks up the yellow trimline, and says hello. She listens for a minute or so, then bursts into a loud shrieklike noise, clapping a hand over her mouth with such force it sounds as though she’s been slapped. Linda and I both stop mid-chew, curious but not alarmed. Mother is very dramatic when she’s on the phone with her friends. One of my favorite pastimes is eavesdropping on her phone conversations. I usually sprawl out on the living room floor with a coloring book, listening to the one-sided conversation, playing the role of the caller inside my head. My mother talks like I’m not there. She swears and gossips and talks about people I don’t know but I can imagine as if they’re characters in some invisible play.

This call feels different. It actually feels like something bad has happened. I wonder if it’s got something to do with Grandma Zelda. My mother says Zelda’s a hypochondriac, because she always thinks she’s sick, even though she’s healthy as a horse. Finally, my mother hangs up the phone. “There’s been a shooting at Anchor,” she says, nearly choking on the word Anchor. She bounds down the hall to wake Dad, and Linda and I sit there staring at our breakfast, unable to speak. There are moments that separate before from after, minutes in time that freeze like a photograph, capture a flash that indicates change. I start to realize that everything I’ve lived so far has been the before. I don’t know what the after will be.

My mother is on the phone most of the morning, while my father decides to get out of bed and drive by the plant to check out the scene. I beg him to take me along, afraid he’ll be shot if I’m not there to protect him, even though I’m not sure how I’ll make my small body useful, become a child-size shield. I climb into the bucket seat on the passenger side of the Chevy Blazer, and we drive down Pittsburgh Street until it dead-ends at the factory gate. There are people milling around their parked cars in the gravel lot—men still wearing their dark coveralls, women still in hairnets and gloves. There are police cars, but no yellow tape wound around the trees like I imagined on the way over. There is no blood, no paramedics wheeling black body bags into an ambulance. The factory stacks look the same, billows of dark smoke streaming into the sky. My father doesn’t stop to talk to anyone, just circles the parking lot slowly and then drives away.

Back at home, it takes hours and many conversations with different women for my mother to piece together what happened, but this is what she knows so far: A man named Sonny, who works in The Hot End, left his work area to talk to his wife, who works in The Cold End. One of the foremen saw him and called him into the office along with two other foremen and the plant manager. Sonny was suspended without pay for leaving his work area for personal business while not on a break. He was told he would have to file a grievance with the union and come back for a meeting next week. My parents are always talking about grievances, and my mother says there are certain employees who are grievance-crazy. “Some people will file a grievance if they don’t like the way your shit smells in the bathroom,” she says.

Sonny left Anchor after being suspended, and he went to the coffee shop at Pechin Shopping Village in Dunbar, where he ran into some other guys from work who were off today. Sonny told them about getting suspended, and the men spent a few minutes complaining about their bosses. Then Sonny said, “I should just go home and get my gun and shoot them.” All the men laughed, but an hour later, Sonny walked into the factory and killed four supervisors before turning the gun on himself.

My mother says Sonny is a quiet man, like my father. He keeps his mouth shut and does his work. He doesn’t get involved in plant politics. “He’s just not one of the loud ones,” she says. “Well, now I guess I should say he wasn’t one of the loud ones.” The expression on her face falls a bit, the corners of her mouth sagging, because she’s realized she’s talking about a dead person now. There’s a certain way to talk about the dead, a certain feeling that must be observed, a remembrance.

My mother’s cousin Vivian was at Anchor when it happened. She said because the factory floor was so noisy, a lot of workers didn’t know what was going on. They could barely hear the gunshots. Glass started falling off the lines as workers ran for cover and machines jammed. The men in The Hot End had no idea, so they kept sending bottles and jars out to The Cold End, where glass began piling up on the floor, tumbling off the lines, smashing to the ground, piles of amber and green and flint everywhere. A group of women hid in the ladies’ restroom and cried in panic.

When Sonny was finished killing people, he walked to the south end of the factory, to an area that smells like cardboard and grease—The Carton Department, they call it, where women pack bottles into cartons to ship off to the Rolling Rock Brewery or the Beech-Nut baby food plant. Sonny’s wife ran up to him. She yelled something no one could understand. Sonny looked at her as he pointed the gun to his head, pulled the trigger. Some workers still didn’t know what was going on as Sonny lay there in a pool of his own blood, his wife screaming.

The factory only closed until Sunday afternoon. When my mother returned to work the next day, men were there painting over trails of dried blood on the concrete floor, patching the hole in the foreman’s office window with cardboard and duct tape. Everyone just went back to work. There was no meeting, no company memo, no explanation of what had happened, what went wrong. Sonny’s wife was given three days off for bereavement, and then she was back to work, too. Connellsville made the evening news in Pittsburgh that night and a few days after. My father sat in the basement, staring at the TV while the newscaster read off the names of the men who died.

At school on Monday, as we complete our daily writing, Mrs. Swan kneels down beside my desk, strokes my long dark hair for a moment, and says, “I’m glad your parents are okay.” Some of my classmates stare at me, as if they’re waiting for my reaction, as if I have something to do with all of this.

I look up at the classroom ceiling and I can’t see the lambs. The lions are orange and gold, their manes radiating out like sunbeams. They’re taking up all the space in the room. Suddenly, I’m worried for my lamb. She’s suspended from the ceiling with a paper clip and invisible fishing line. Her cotton wool hangs dangerously, the glue losing its stick. I smile at Mrs. Swan, say, “Thank you,” and turn back to my work—those faint blue lines, that paper so coarse you can see the grain.