Crossing the River Read online

  His arm dropped. “I’ll be damn,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re from across the river.” She fled.

  His invitation arrived two weeks later. It carried a New Hope postmark, and was scrawled in a hand as spindly and angular as Bernie himself.

  March 14, 1944

  Dear Miss Martha Bragg Pickett,

  I would appreciate the honor of taking you to next Sunday Mass. I know you are not a Catholic but that is OK by me if it is OK by you. Please answer to the Miracle Inn, Jackson Highway, New Hope.

  Sincerely,

  Francis Bernard Miracle

  She’d got the letter not in the mail but from Ossetta, the black woman who cleaned houses on both sides of the river. Ossetta gave it to Martha out behind the wild cherry trees, where the two of them were hanging out the day’s wash.

  Martha tapped the envelope on Ossetta’s shoulder. “Where did you get this?”

  Ossetta stuck two clothespins in the corner of her mouth. “Found it,” she said, through the pins.

  “With a postmark?”

  “Mailman must of dropped it.”

  Martha held the envelope to the sun. “There’s not a speck of dirt on here.”

  With a loud snap Ossetta shook the wrinkles from a shirt. She plucked the pins from her mouth, pinning at the shirt seams and smoothing the material with a last pat of her palm. “I got butter to tend to,” she said. She stumped toward the house, trailing the faint odor of garlic. Under the tall straight trunks of the wild cherries she turned. “You want your mamma to find that, you just let me know. You just let me know. I let it be.”

  Martha stood under the spring green buds of the cherry trees, tapping the envelope’s sharp corner into her palm. She had never been inside a Catholic church. She had never dated a Catholic man, much less a man from a family that made a living selling liquor and (if her mother’s tales were to be believed) bootlegging south to the dry counties.

  She considered exactly one minute. She would go, in secret and in style.

  A week later she was at her first Mass.

  It was the fourth Sunday in Lent. Martha told her mother she had a headache and lay piled under blankets until her family left for Sunday school. Then she wriggled into her best blouse and stood at the window, pressing Kleenexes to her armpits and waiting for Bernie to drive by and honk, his signal to meet in the back alley.

  At Assumption Church she balked, until Bernie slammed the car door and stalked in alone. He thought she was scared. She was terrified, but she wanted to do this alone. She had always been one to do things alone. She had entered the Inn alone. She would enter this church alone, Bernie Miracle or no.

  When the church doors had cleared and she was certain the service must be underway, she slipped up the steps. In the vestibule she bent to peer through the single clear pane where the inside doors’ stained glass had been broken and replaced.

  A marble altar gilt in gold and inlaid with mosaic spanned the nave. Ranged above and around it were figures swathed in purple. She decided they were mummies, saints embalmed until ritual called for their unwinding. In the midst of these gloomy figures the priest stood, dressed in bright pink, his arms raised and his back to the people. He mumbled in what she took to be Latin. The congregation responded in the same spiritless and haphazard mumbling. She heard no organ, though the pipes ranged behind the altar in polished brass splendor. The whole affair seemed ragged around the edges compared to the tidy services at Mount Hermon Baptist Church.

  But incense and mystery filled the air. The vestibule smelled faintly of it, a smell she began then to associate with things Catholic. The silence, the enshrouded figures, the priest in pink, the smell of the place, all promised mystery, something under the surface and larger than life: exotic, mysterious, deep.

  When Mass was over she met Bernie on the steps. She had never touched him before; she seized his arm now, in full view of the stares of all Assumption Church. “What was that all about? I want to know.”

  With sideways glances Bernie edged her down the stairs. It was one thing to flirt alone, in the Miracle Inn. It was another to display yourself on the church steps, before half the town and all his family. He pulled her towards the car. “What was what about?”

  “Church. The Mass. Does he always wear pink? Is that how you talk Latin? Who are the mummies?”

  Bernie stopped dead. “Mummies?”

  “In purple.”

  “Oh. The statues.”

  Martha’s jaw dropped. “You dress up statues?”

  “Well, it’s Lent, see.”

  “That doesn’t explain dressing up statues.”

  “You just do, that’s all,” Bernie said. “Everybody does. Every year. Something about being sorry.”

  “They’re sorry?”

  “We’re sorry.”

  “So you dress them up.”

  “It’s not dressing them up,” Bernie said impatiently. “It’s covering them up.”

  “Oh.” Martha sensed she’d gone too far. She bit her lip. Bernie glanced about, then patted her hand. She risked another question. “But I don’t understand—”

  “You’re not supposed to understand. You just do it, that’s all. That’s what religion is about.” There was an unmistakable note of finality in his voice.

  Martha settled into herself. That wasn’t what her religion was about, but after twenty-two years of the Mount Hermon Baptist Church and its socials she was ready for something she didn’t understand. Bernie’s explanation was enough, for now. It seemed like her kind of church, incense and pink cloth and mystery.

  And here she was, walking with Bernie Miracle, a man who made his living selling demon rum. She felt a hundred pairs of eyes following them down the walk. This was life, she thought. This was love. She squeezed his hand, and smiled when he looked into her eyes.

  For the next week she mulled these things over. Bernie Miracle was the most exotic man she’d met. The inside of the Catholic church was the least understandable place she’d been. By the end of the week she’d built a vision of them both, Bernie in a cutaway and herself dressed in white, stepping to the marble altar and saying their vows in Latin, to the dismay of the Pickett clan and the horror of Mount Hermon.

  Their courtship set the tongues of Jessup County wagging, distressing Bernie no end until he saw that business at the Inn was actually picking up. For every diehard whose business he lost, he gained two paying customers who couldn’t resist the lure of good gossip.

  Martha had never been courted by a Catholic. Later she thought she should have seen the problems coming, but at the time she figured this was how they did it, north of the river. It was new and different and she loved it for that. She loved Bernie for that.

  He courted her in the family mausoleum, built three generations before by the great-grandfather whose portrait stared down from the Miracle Inn wall. It was a big Tennessee marble cube, that crowned the highest knoll in the cemetery, looking west over the valley to the broad wooded flank of Strang Knob. Its rusting gates of iron filigree led inside, to a small dark room with a single bench. In front, flush with the earth, she saw the names of three generations of Miracles carved into flat, polished granite gravestones. Next to their names were the names of their spouses and children, living and dead, patiently in attendance.

  Surely, she thought later, that should have told her something. But she was in love: meeting on the sly, in the dark, under the Catholic cemetery’s greening persimmon trees, she was in love, for many reasons. Bernie was one of them.

  Martha would have had her way, with a wedding as big as Jessup County had seen, but she discovered that no one acknowledged that she was marrying. On both sides of the river she might as well have dropped from the face of the social earth. When three months later she said her vows in English, she wore the same plaid blue suit and black-and-white spectator pumps she’d worn to her first Mass.

  No one from her family attended. At the last minute Rosie Uptegrove agreed to stand
as witness. She sobbed so loudly through the Mass that Martha almost turned around to tell her to shut up. Of Bernie’s enormous family, only his youngest brother Leo came, pressed into service as the second witness. He scowled so fiercely when Martha offered her cheek that she pretended she was adjusting her hat.

  The priest took the single picture. Rosie and Leo stood stiffly to either side, looking not into the camera but at some point in the far distance. As the priest bent his head to the viewfinder, Martha clutched at the tips of Bernie’s fingers. He turned his head towards her. She arched her eyebrows; he gave a broad wink.

  PART ONE

  Done with Smoke

  and Mirrors

  1967

  1

  Genealogy

  In May of 1967, Martha Pickett Miracle turned forty-five. That same month, her son Miracle graduated from New Hope’s Assumption High, only a year late—not bad, Martha figured, for the only heir to the Miracle name. Through high school, at Bernie’s insistence, Miracle had worked evenings and weekends at the Miracle Inn—not the easiest place to do homework.

  Martha planned a graduation picnic for Miracle, the afternoon of the ceremony. A day earlier, she was laying in a store of fried chicken, a blue bandana wrapped neatly around her red hair, when Miracle came home with the news that their names had been carved into a new gravestone in front of the Miracle mausoleum.

  At first Martha thought she’d misheard. She laid her spatula on the stove top and drooped in an undignified slump against the oven. “Straighten up,” she said to her son. “You stand like that, you’ll grow up to be a hunchback.”

  A stubborn hardness came into his eyes. “For God’s sake, Mother, I am grown up. If I was going to be a hunchback it would have happened by now.”

  Martha straightened. He was grown, no doubt about it, and while his hair had turned brighter red than her own, his jaw stayed as Miracle square as ever. It seemed impossible that her child could have become a man without her taking note of it, but across twenty-three years of marriage to Bernie Miracle she had settled into the habit of daydreaming. Life around New Hope passed her by, without her much remarking on it. More than once Grandma Miracle had startled her from a walking sleep, and blunt Rosie Uptegrove had asked outright if she had taken to drink.

  “I’m getting old, I forget these things,” Martha said. “Now what are you saying about a tombstone?”

  “We’re on it, you and me. And Father. There’s a new one, pink and flat. Set in the ground in front of the mausoleum.”

  “The Miracle mausoleum?”

  “Come on, Mother, what other mausoleum is there?”

  Martha jerked the bandana from her head. “This I have to see.” She pushed Miracle ahead of her. “So help me, if you’re telling a lie, Miracle—”

  Miracle sidestepped her shove. “Father’s got me on a beer run south. Besides, what’s the big deal? It’s all in the family, is what Father’ll say.”

  “Your family. Not mine.” Martha pushed out the door, leaving the screen door to slam behind her.

  She walked along the Jackson Highway to the cemetery. In the glare of an early summer sun the asphalt shimmered and pooled. Along the river the trees gave off a dusty green haze. On these sorts of days Martha dreamed of being elsewhere, north or in the mountains, someplace where the sun stayed low and you could walk a half-mile without getting lightheaded.

  She walked down the cemetery drive, beneath persimmons that twenty-three years earlier had lifted limbs over her courting. At the mausoleum she pulled open the filigreed iron gates and sat on the bench inside, thankful to escape the sun for its clammy coolness.

  She shaded her eyes against the blinding square of summer sun that beat through the mausoleum gate. Outside she saw the old gravestones, sunk flush with the earth, with three generations of Miracle names carved into their broad granite tops. Next to them was a new stone, one Martha had never seen, a pink granite slab carved with a weeping angel and the names of Bernie’s father, long since dumped in the river, and Grandma Miracle, with a blank space left for her date of death. Below those names were carved the names of Bernie’s brothers and sisters, each with the birth year followed by a blank. After each Miracle child’s name came the name of the wife or husband; under each couple were carved the names of their children, with empty lines allowed for expanding families.

  Heading the list, first under Grandma Miracle and her dead husband, came Bernie, their oldest son. Next to Bernie’s name she saw her own, and their son’s:

  FRANCIS BERNARD MIRACLE 1910–

  MARTHA PICKETT MIRACLE 1922–

  MICHAEL PICKETT MIRACLE 1948–

  There were no extra lines below their names.

  Martha slumped against the mausoleum wall and took her head in her hands. She was drowning in this family, that divided the world into two camps; for or against, Miracle or no. Like a drowning woman, the more she struggled against the sea around her the more it swallowed her up, flooding her lungs and heart and blood.

  She had married Bernie Miracle at a time when marriages did not fail, especially in Kentucky, especially between Catholics. Both families made that clear, though they gave them precious little help elsewhere. She’d married with no more thought of what freedom meant than a cardinal or a whitetail deer might have. Then she found herself alone, with a man who wanted children, as many as a cottontail and the sooner the better.

  To Bernie Miracle romance was a necessary but temporary affliction, like Sunday sermons or Republicans in the statehouse. A month after his wedding he’d sloughed it off as surely as a snake’s summer molting. He was older than his wife, more than twelve years older. When in those first months after they’d married she fixed him with her steady blue gaze after dinner or before weekday suppers, he was likely to drop what he was doing and make for the refuge of the Miracle Inn. He saw romance as foolishness, over a pleasure meant more for men than for women and more for making babies than for pleasure at all. In those first few months he followed his wife into the bedroom, only to have a neighbor knock or Leo call from the Inn. Bernie would leap from their bed, tugging at his trousers, to realize that at two p.m. there was only one excuse for looking like he’d just jumped from bed. It was not an excuse he was willing to give.

  He was too old and too set in his ways for such nonsense. A Sunday came when he plucked Martha’s hands from his shoulders. “On a Sunday afternoon,” he snorted. “I’ll be at the Inn, cleaning up.”

  Months passed, and a year or two, and Martha Pickett found herself more and more alone. Her conversion angered the Baptists, who turned away if they saw her approaching on the street. Her enthusiasm for her new religion embarrassed the Catholics, who nodded knowingly to each other and waited for her to yield to the prevailing lethargy. On both sides of the river she became a fixture, like the furniture, acknowledged but not necessarily given the time of day.

  Had Martha’s child arrived sooner, things might have been different. When years passed without a child, Bernie grew exasperated, then resigned. He settled back into the bog of his habits: work at the Inn, work in the garden, work all day, work at night.

  Almost four years after they’d married, their son Michael Miracle arrived on the scene. Martha hoped that with a son things would grow better; instead they grew worse. First she and Bernie fought over what to name him; then they fought over what to call him.

  Their fights stopped short of shouting, because always Martha gave way. She was not afraid of Bernie; she was afraid of herself. She knew her own fear, she felt the same fear in Bernie: One word too many and this fragile thing between them might shatter. Then where would they be? Alone with the I-told-you-so’s of both sides of the river. So she gave way, again and again, until the night when they fought over how many children were to follow this first son.

  Martha had tucked their son into his crib, while Bernie watched from their bed, propped on thin elbows. When she climbed into bed, he put a callused hand on her breast. She shivered and drew away. “Don�
��t, Bernie,” she said.

  “It’s been long enough since Miracle was born,” Bernie said. “I asked the doctor.”

  “Not now,” she said. “Later.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because I say why not, that’s why not,” she said. “Now go to sleep and let me be.” She turned out the fringed lamp that hung at the side of their bed. He reached over her shoulder and turned it on. “I say now,” he said.

  “And I say no.”

  “Why not.”

  “Because I’m at my time, if you must know.”

  “That don’t make no difference to me.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of time,” Martha said. Her face matched the rose shade that covered the lamp.

  “Well what other kind of time is there,” Bernie said, propping himself on one elbow. “Making time? That’s what I’m interested in.” He nestled a cold hand between her thighs.

  She pushed his hands away. She searched for words that said what she wanted to say, but if they existed she had not heard them or could not put them together in a way that she could bring herself to say. She had been a wild woman, wild enough to marry a Catholic and cross the river, but she was a lady, raised in a substantial, Baptist family. Wherever she’d dreamed of going when she met Bernie in the back alley that Sunday in Lent, it was not here, married to a man who cared more about his family’s precious tavern than about his wife. “There’s times, and times,” she said finally. “Times for babies and times not for babies.”

  “So? We’ll have another baby.”

  “We can’t afford it.”