Crossing the River Read online

  Praise for

  Crossing the River

  “Full of sharply observed border-state talk and manners. . . . Maturity of vision, plus writing excellence, is rare in a first-time novelist. Crossing the River is an unusually promising debut.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “About as close to that mythical ‘great American novel’ as I ever expect to see. . . . Uniquely American in the tensions it highlights.”

  —Mark Salzwedel, San Francisco Sentinel

  “A brilliant new novel about bridges . . . between a woman and her husband and, then one day, her lover; between present and past; between North and South; bridges that lead to love and destruction. Martha Pickett Miracle is as tough and beautiful and poignant a Southern protagonist as any in contemporary fiction.”

  —Shirley Abbot, author of Womenfolk

  “The blood of the flamboyant Southern storyteller flows in [Johnson’s] veins. What a hand he has, too, for rural American life and vivid characters, outsize and, at once, comic and tragic.”

  —Johnson Leggett, author of Wilder Stone

  Crossing the River

  Crossing

  the

  River

  A Novel

  FENTON JOHNSON

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  Copyright © 2016 by Fenton Johnson

  Chapter 4 of this novel appeared as a story, “Crossing the River,” in the Spring 1984 issue of Fiction Network magazine.

  The author gratefully acknowledges James A. Michener and the Copernicus Foundation for their financial support in completing the first draft of this novel.

  Published by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6647-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6649-0 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6648-3 (epub)

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  For Mother and Father

  The better storytellers

  Foreword

  In a pivotal scene in Crossing the River, Fenton Johnson’s 1989 debut novel, one of the main characters tells another: “Everybody has dreams. Lots of them. . . . Some people keep their dreams a little close to the chest. But everybody dreams about something.”

  As readers, we care deeply about dreamers, and Crossing the River is full of them: the fierce heroine of the story, Martha Bragg Pickett Miracle, who refuses to kowtow to anyone and certainly not to a man; her sensitive and selfless son, Miracle, who longs for a girl he can never really have and a life unbound by duty; even the seemingly stoic and even-minded Bernie, who hopes to have his wife by his side for eternity—literally. There’s the petulant and teasing Rosamund Uptegrove, who dreams of becoming a Nashville star; she won’t settle for men fighting over her in her hometown because she wants the whole world to love her.

  This lovely novel is also about the dream of place—the way place can take up residence in us, the way rural life, particularly in small-town Kentucky, marks us in ways profound and joyous and sorrowful. At least one of the characters realizes that her dream has always been the place: the river, the little town, the hills surrounding it, the local language and ways of being. Crossing the River is an ode not only to people who are pining but also to a way of life. It is an elegy for community in all its wonder and awfulness.

  This achievement is articulated in prose that announced a major new American talent back in 1989. The San Francisco Sentinel even claimed that the book came “about as close to that mythical great American novel” as anyone might have hoped. Publishers Weekly immediately named Johnson “a storyteller of distinction.” Since then, Johnson’s writing has continued to be acclaimed. He has published three more celebrated books that are known for their careful attention to craft and are profound in their explorations of love, loss, faith, and doubt.

  All the earmarks of a natural-born storyteller are evident in Crossing the River. Every sentence is a keeper. Johnson allows us to experience dusk by describing it as follows: “The sycamore shadows crept across the river and the water flowed the color of blackstrap molasses.” Listen to the way Johnson takes us into the center of a summer night in the country: “Overhead the canopy of water maples and sycamores was alive with the grind and chatter of katydids and locusts. Miracle and Rosamund were surrounded by lightning bugs, their numbers doubled in the river’s glossy black mirror.” We can see the changing of the seasons through his eyes: “Summer passed into fall. The hills flamed with scarlet sumac and gold hickory and an occasional bright red sugar maple. . . . The mist from the river rose to blend with the smoke left from the Fort Knox firing practices, coloring the western sky gray.” No flashy stylistic feats or thesaurus words. Instead, Johnson does what the best writers do: he gives us vivid images built by strong nouns and verbs.

  But despite how wonderful the language is, what keep us most invested are the characters. Johnson’s major achievement here is the creation of Martha Bragg Pickett Miracle, who never does anything we have come to expect from Southern female characters. She won’t be told what to do. She won’t settle. And she won’t stop dreaming. Through it all, she transcends the stereotypes and emerges as one of the strongest and most memorable characters in the literature of Kentucky. And our hearts also belong to her son, who, although good-natured, refuses to be a pushover. Miracle is the kind of boy who lies in a grassy field, “studying this family, and the people that made him who he was and held him down, all at once.” All the people living along the shores of the Knobs Fork River become very real to us, but it is Martha’s and Miracle’s dreams that cause us to examine our own because we come to care for them so deeply.

  That’s the kind of novel Crossing the River is, and the kind of writer Fenton Johnson is: one who makes us care, who allows us to luxuriate in language, who takes us to a place so powerful and vivid we may never forget it.

  Silas House

  Author of Clay’s Quilt and Eli the Good

  Prologue

  1944

  She with Her

  Eyebrows Arched

  Martha Miracle was still Martha Bragg Pickett in 1944, three years out of high school and no more than three generations and several cousins removed from the Confederate general whose name she carried like a flag. He had advanced into Kentucky, General Bragg, had fought his bloody battle at Perryville, and retreated, unaware that the Yankees had fled north and that Frankfort and Louisville and the entire renegade state were his for the taking. Martha was convinced that had she led the charge, the battle would not have been lost.

  She had blue eyes and
enough red hair that neighbors in Mount Hermon asked where it came from. The Braggs and the Picketts both denied it. When anyone raised the question they ran distraught fingers through their brown hair, and rolled their brown eyes to the sky. “From General Bragg himself?” Martha’s mother asked.

  The question in her voice gave her away. She had no idea where this wild daughter had come from. She had raised a daughter to go to Mount Hermon Baptist Church Sunday school and socials looking for a man, to humor once she’d got him. If she insisted she could do as she pleased, but only behind her husband’s back.

  With Martha, only the doing as she pleased part stuck. She rode motorcycles and smoked cigarettes and kept company with older men who ought properly to have been in Europe making the world safe for democracy. With girls from less respectable families she sneaked across the river to buy beer from the Catholics.

  Her mother held stony silence longer than Job, dropping only darkest hints that the Boatyard Bridge, and those Catholics, would be her daughter’s downfall.

  Martha’s mother was right. One cold March night, after two beers and a dare, Martha Bragg Pickett drove her friend Rosie Uptegrove across the river, to buy a beer and fall in love in the New Hope Miracle Inn.

  Crossing the river was nothing new to Martha Pickett. She’d been born to cross borders; there were plenty of borders to cross, in any direction she turned.

  In high school she’d had a history teacher from the North, a balding bachelor from Ohio with a liberal education who had proved to her class that by World War II there no longer existed a North and a South. Pulling a mutilated map from a ceiling tube, he’d pointed out that places you’d expect to be South (like northern Kentucky) were really North, and places you expected to be North (like southern Indiana and Little Egypt in Illinois) were really South.

  This sounded good in class and had the map to support it, but Martha and everybody else knew the North ended and the South began at the Boatyard Bridge.

  Catholics lived in New Hope, north of the bridge. Liquor was legal north of the bridge, all the way north to Louisville along the old Jackson Highway (named after the seventh president of the United States). Living rooms north of the bridge were garnished with pictures of the Pope and the Virgin Mary. Men fought with guns and married late and had big families, a child a year beginning ten months after the wedding. Black women worked cleaning white women’s houses and black men hung out at the Standard Station, drinking moonshine and smoking and looking for work that never came except during the tobacco harvest.

  The Boatyard Bridge separated New Hope and the North from Mount Hermon and the South. Baptists and foot-washing fundamentalists lived in Mount Hermon, Martha’s own Pickett clan among them. The town was as dry as September, with no legal alcohol to be had for tears or money all along the Jackson Highway (named after the Confederate general) from Mount Hermon to the Tennessee line. Parlors south of the bridge carried Norman Rockwell cutouts from The Saturday Evening Post. Men fought with knives and married young. Their wives had their first baby seven months later, with a single brother or sister to follow. Black women worked cleaning white women’s houses, and black men hung out at the Gulf Station, drinking moonshine and smoking and looking for work that never came except during the tobacco harvest.

  The towns needed an ocean between them but all they had was the Boatyard, a wide riffle in the Knobs Fork River that marked the inland limit of flatboat travel from the Ohio. The first two bridges over the Boatyard burned within a month of being built. The third was blown up a half hour after John Hunt Morgan used it to lead his Confederate Raiders north. For seventy-four years after, a rickety wooden structure stood, until the Great Flood of 1937 swallowed it whole, along with much of Mount Hermon and New Hope.

  That summer, both sides were too occupied with their own miseries to bother with the bridge. Then Franklin Roosevelt solved the problem by declaring the Jackson Highway a federal road and erecting the long narrow webbing of iron girders and concrete pilings and plank flooring, the bridge that on that cold March evening in 1944 carried Martha Pickett and Rosie Uptegrove across the river to the Miracle Inn.

  No woman, Catholic or Protestant, white or black, set foot in the Miracle Inn. This fact weighed heavily on Martha as she struck out from the Inn parking lot. Rosie, the coward, stayed quaking in the car.

  Inside, Martha tried to ease the door shut. It swung to with a heavy bang. Two men hard at a craps game looked up, into the beveled mirror that backed the liquor bottles for the length of the bar. Bernie Miracle polished glasses, his back to the door.

  A twelve-point buck or a federal marshal with his badge displayed might have crossed the room unnoticed. Not a woman. The men swiveled their bodies and stood, backs against the bar, their heels hooked on its brass rail. No one spoke.

  Hearing the misstep, Bernie raised his head to the mirror. Between reflections of bottles and backs and his own bony face, he was uncertain of what he saw. He figured, stopped, figured again, turned around, stared.

  Martha stood at the opposite end of the bar from the men. “A beer,” she said. Her voice squeaked.

  Bernie jerked his head towards the men. “Down there,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Leave her where she belongs,” one man said. His partner snickered.

  “I can’t serve you there,” Bernie said. “That’s the colored bar.”

  “Oh,” Martha said. “Sorry.”

  “You said it, honey,” the second man said.

  Martha moved on frozen feet to the other end of the bar. She forced one foot onto the rail. “A beer,” she said, more firmly.

  “You ain’t serving her where you’re serving me,” the second man said.

  Bernie spread bony hands on the bartop. “Ma’am . . .”

  “No ‘ma’am’ to her,” the second man said. “Get her out.”

  Bernie wadded the towel in his hands and flipped it onto the bar. A stubborn look came into his eyes that Martha came later to know too well. “I make the rules around here,” he said.

  “If your father was alive he wouldn’t of let her cheap ass past that door,” the first man said.

  “Since he’s dead I guess he don’t have much say,” Bernie said. “You got money?” Martha fumbled in her purse and put a dime on the counter. “You got your beer.”

  The men gathered their dice and left. At the door the second spat a wad of tobacco juice on the jamb.

  Martha sagged against the bar and sipped her beer. Over the rim of her glass she surveyed the Miracle Inn.

  The bar formed a long shallow U, broken by a hinged flap that raised to let the bartender out and that separated colored from white. The white bar was rich brown mahogany, carved in a plain pattern of rectangles and squares. The colored bar was golden oak, supported by pilasters elaborately carved with fruits and vines and clusters of grapes. In its center a sun rose, or set, between wooded hills. Above the beveled mirror hung a large oval daguerreotype of a clean-shaven, square-jawed man, dressed in Union blues. He fixed her with a calm, stubborn stare. Except for his uniform he might have been the twin of the man who stood before her now, rubbing his bartender’s towel in furious circles.

  Bernie saw her looking up. “My great-grandfather,” he said, snapping his towel at the picture. “Built this place. Fought under General Grant and sold whiskey to Confederate soldiers on the side. Not much different now, I guess.” From under the bar he pulled an engraved silver flask. “Have a swig,” he said. Martha blushed and shook her head. “Go on,” he said. “It was his, Great-grandfather’s. It’s not everybody that walks in here gets it offered, I’ll tell you that.”

  She closed her eyes and raised the flask to her lips. In the burning clearness that followed, she saw it all plain: pure hellfire, this, that twenty-two years of Baptist preaching had contrived to keep her from. For a single sharp moment, she felt deliriously evil. She took a second swig. “I guess I cost you a couple of customers,” she said, to break the silence.

&nbs
p; Bernie delicately lifted the flask from her fingers and tucked it under the bar. “Nobody I mind losing. It’s good for them to figure out who’s boss. They think just because they knew my daddy they got the run of the place.”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  “No need,” he said cheerfully. He ducked under the flap and leaned next to her, too close. “He was a Miracle. Live hard, die young. He got what was coming to him. They found him floating in the river out back, the day Prohibition ended. ‘Stroke,’ the coroner said, ’swhat done it, but in these parts pretty much anything that’s not done by a car or a gun they call a stroke.”

  “I think I’d best be going,” Martha said. “I don’t want to cost you any more business.”

  “How come so soon? You just got here.” Bernie cocked his head in a sideways stare.

  “Somebody’s waiting,” she said, thankful it was true.

  “Suit yourself. Next time bring your friend in.”

  She stepped away carefully, watching the floor for cracks in the planking. When she reached the door he was there. “You didn’t tell me your name,” he said. “Surely for the price of two customers I get to meet the first girl to set foot in the Miracle Inn.”

  “Will you let me out.”

  “Sure. I’m just being social. That’s a bartender’s job.”

  She looked him over carefully. She knew who he was, of course, but if she hadn’t anyone with open eyes could spot a Miracle a mile away: a hawk’s nose, big brown eyes, a jaw formed with a T-square, framing a wide mouth with horse’s teeth the color of grits. Taken one by one his features were mismatched but as a whole they fit together in a way that was engaging, if the light wasn’t too good.

  The light was dim enough that night in the doorway of the Miracle Inn. Martha felt the full weight of twenty-two unmarried years in Mount Hermon, with a mother who smelled sin any time the wind blew from across the river and with Rosie Uptegrove, her best friend, already married two years. Martha risked a second glance. In the half light she thought she saw blond lights in his hair—just a few. She was a sucker for blonds. “Martha,” she said. “Martha Bragg Pickett.”