Crossing the River Read online

  Bernie sat up, folding his arms. “I’m the one who says what we can afford around here.”

  Martha turned her back. She lay silent, facing the wall, until Bernie grabbed her shoulder and turned her over. “I don’t want another baby,” she said.

  She might have asked for a divorce, or told him she was leaving the Church, or that the Miracle Inn had burned. His square jaw opened and his big eyes were so surprised and hurt that Martha laid a hand on his arm. He shook it off. “You got to,” he said. “The Church says you got to.”

  “The Church says we have to—lay together,” Martha said. “It doesn’t say we have to have sixteen babies.”

  He slapped her, hard. The baby began to cry. Martha jumped from the bed and ran to the crib, where she clutched the baby to her.

  “My mother had ten children and raised every last one that lived to be good, decent human beings,” he said. “I hope by God to do the same.”

  “You can do it with somebody else. One of those Catholic women that’s raised to breed.”

  His eyes closed and when they opened the hurt and surprise were gone. In their place was the hard stubbornness she’d seen before, that night at the Miracle Inn, when he’d watched his customers gather their dice to leave, and in her fights with Bernie over their son’s name. With the baby in her arms, she ran into the warm June night. Bernie did not follow.

  Since that argument, Bernie might have known her six years or sixty. Twice a year he bought her presents, on Christmas Day and Mother’s Day, when the ads in the Argus reminded him that presents were expected. On those days he walked to Estill Mallory’s and got the key to Mallory’s Merchandise from where he knew Estill kept it, on a nail above his gun closet. Bernie opened the store, where he chose a pair of nylon stockings and a useful gadget, a butcher knife or a can opener or whatever caught his eye. He scrawled a note to Estill (Pls chg 1 pr stockings and 1 bx Msn jrs to my acct Bernie), locked the store and returned the key. Martha would find the note tucked in the next month’s grocery bills. Her birthday, being unadvertised, he forgot.

  Once a month they lay together on a day chosen by Martha and signaled by her locking the bedroom door. His thin hips jerked with passion but it was over quickly and just as quickly Martha rose to douche and don her nightgown.

  He came to know her schedule as well as she but he never spoke in anticipation or in passion or in aftermath. She hated lying with him for the risk she ran in getting pregnant and she hated her coldness. She tried to make herself enjoy him but when he came at her naked and bony and hard her eyes closed and she saw only the look in his eyes when he refused her her right to be herself, a person apart from the wife of the owner of the Miracle Inn.

  Sitting in the Miracle mausoleum, resting her head against the damp marble, Martha wondered why it was they had done this crazy thing. True love and a measure of plain old horniness, she supposed. Two healthy people in heat, that was all. Add a little rambunctiousness (herself) and a fine-tuned will to self-destruct (Bernie). Nothing new under the sun.

  Then why couldn’t it be undone? The question came to Martha now, and once more she pushed it down and back. She’d pushed it down so hard and so often that soon enough it came only on those hot, breathless, tired days like this one. What’s done was done, she’d told herself. After that, you do what you have to do. And what she had to do, what she had chosen to do against all advice, was to be the wife of the oldest son of the New Hope Miracles, wife of the owner of the Miracle Inn.

  For months after their son was born, Martha had tried calling him Michael, his Christian name, but to no avail. Once it became clear there would be no more Miracles to follow, the town sided with Bernie. Their son became just plain Miracle.

  For the five years after his birth, Miracle broke the habits of their lives, or at least of Martha’s life. Then school started, and he was gone, leaving Martha alone.

  She settled into a pattern as certain as death and regular as the Angelus rung from the squat brick belltower of Assumption Church. She rose at six, to get Bernie off to the Inn by six-thirty, so he could greet the men who stopped at the Inn to buy six-packs of beer for the drive to factories in Louisville or jobs at Fort Knox, a winding one-hour drive to the west. At six-thirty Martha fixed a cup of Maxwell House while Earl Nightingale preached from the radio. At seven Miracle rose to go to school. She fixed him breakfast and saw him to the door. Then her morning, which went by fast enough, between cleaning and gardening and chopping wood.

  With the noon Angelus, Bernie came home for a sandwich and a beer. Martha longed to return with him to the Inn, not for his company but for the pleasure of belonging, in some small way, to the world she’d once raced around with such abandon. She watched him go without a word.

  Leaning against the doorjamb, watching Bernie go, she thought back to the rambunctious high school girl she’d been. She tried to puzzle out why she’d turned down any number of Baptist tobacco farmers to marry this ornery Catholic from across the river. The sun sank, Miracle was home from school, it was time to fix supper, and she’d found no answers, other than the heat of plain foolish love, a heat she no longer felt.

  Faced with the same problems, many of her women friends quietly took to drink. Other women, the no-count women of the hills and hollows, found their way to the far side of Strang Knob, to the ready love of some soldier stationed for a long year at Fort Knox. Every few months Rosie came across the river with tales of another hillbilly woman destroyed by love.

  Martha never repeated that sort of gossip. Probably the same thing had been said about her, after she’d married Bernie Miracle. On afternoons like these, fuming uselessly in the Miracle mausoleum, Martha was not sure that what they’d said wasn’t true.

  She wondered how these lost women had met the men who’d destroyed them; what moment of weakness (or strength?) had possessed these women to betray their husbands; how the couple managed to rendezvous, how the woman (who certainly knew better, whatever her upbringing) had decided that this man was different from the man she’d married, and from the housebreakers and heartbreakers she’d been warned against. No doubt these women, whom Rosie Uptegrove called “cheap” and “destroyed by love,” had done something like what Martha herself had done, that cold March evening when she’d left her friends and her family and her religion and her town, to strike across the ragged planks of the Miracle Inn, to meet and marry Bernie Miracle.

  Of all her mistakes, Martha was determined not to let that one happen again. She’d defied her family, changed her religion, given herself over once to love. Once was quite enough, thank you. Never again would she make a fool of herself for love.

  Sitting in the mausoleum, thinking on those women, thinking over her years with Bernie, Martha understood why they left everything they knew, to go against their own. Not from love—surely any woman who had been in love knew how little that was worth, and what it came to. They left instead because of their dreams, that things could be better, that this man might offer a way out: out of town, out of marriage, out of this life. That was the only chance worth taking.

  But where they had left, she had stayed, Martha Pickett Miracle; from duty, from love for her son, for the sake of the love—she knew no other word for it—that had first brought her across the river.

  In staying, she fought back. She had to, if only to prove to herself that she was still alive. She gathered herself up now from the mausoleum’s cold marble bench, dusting the spider webs from her hair with the bandana she’d brought from home. She stepped outside to stand in the sun, looking over the mausoleum stones, reading her own name engraved in pink granite, until her fury returned. Then she stormed up the cemetery drive and across town to the Miracle Inn, switching the bandana back and forth like a flag.

  Inside the Inn, she tossed the bandana on the bartop. “I won’t stand for it,” she said.

  Bernie was alone. The farmers were in the fields, the commuters off to work, the Fort Knox soldiers who brought the Inn much of its business
were on the firing ranges to the west. He took a towel from below the bar and began rubbing its mahogany surface in deliberate circles. “Stand for what,” he said.

  “Having my name carved on a grave forty years before I’m dead. Fifty years. It’s—morbid, that’s what it is. Tempting fate.”

  Bernie pulled his hair taut against his skull. He plucked at his elbows and lit a cigarette and drummed the bartop with his fingers. “We’ve done it for years. The only reason we hadn’t done it before is because I hadn’t had the money. The Miracles always do it. List the family all together. Great-grandpa Miracle started it, said it gave him comfort to know he was going to be buried with the family.”

  “It gives me the creeps.”

  “You can live with the creeps. Don’t the family mean anything to you?” Bernie’s hands danced across the bartop, wiping at invisible spills and years-old water spots. “I’m twelve years older than you, Martha Miracle. Who’s to say it don’t give me some comfort, knowing I’m to be buried with my family. Would you rather leave your name off? All my brothers and sisters there, with their wives and husbands and kids, and me by myself?”

  “You’re damn straight. That’s exactly what I’d want, if that’s what it came to.”

  Bernie flushed bright red. He worried the towel in his hands. “This family don’t mean a thing to you,” he said in a low voice. “You been part of it for over twenty years and it don’t mean beans to you. You use the name but you might as well call yourself Mallory, or Skaggs, or Pickett, or any other name that takes your liking. Look around you,” he said, waving the towel at the empty inn. “This place has been in the family longer than you or me. That mausoleum has carried our name longer than you or me. God and my son willing both the mausoleum and the Inn will carry the Miracle name after we’re gone.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Martha said, but she muttered that into the beveled mirror behind the bar.

  For the convenience of Baptist farmers too shy to come inside, Bernie had installed a driveup window, and now its buzzer rang. While he waited on his customer, Martha tried to calm her racing heart. When he returned, she spoke in an even voice. “I understand why you wanted to include me, and I’m . . . I’m touched. But you could have asked. Surely.”

  “Don’t need to ask. You’re my wife. You’re family, ain’t you?”

  Martha snatched the towel from his astonished hands. She searched the room for a target. She threw it at Bernie’s great-grandfather, staring from above the bar. “Damn the family!” she cried. “You have my name taken off that stone or I’ll take a hammer and chisel and take it off myself!”

  Bernie walked the length of the mahogany bar, picked up the towel from where it had fallen, folded it in a neat square. When he returned the color was gone from his cheeks, leaving them so white that every pore and scar stood out in relief. His eyes were glazed with stubbornness. “You do that,” he said, simply and quietly, “and you’ll be no wife of mine.”

  They glared across the bar. Through the bottles of bourbon and gin and vodka Martha found she was glaring at her own reflection. Her red hair tumbled wildly about, and in her blue Pickett eyes she saw a look she had never seen, not in herself: a stubbornness she’d learned from Bernie, the same hardness that set Bernie’s chin and filled his eyes.

  She dropped her eyes and stepped back. For more than twenty years she’d talked past this man, while he talked past her. As her son grew older and she grew older she found that worked less and less. There was no time for these games, the dodging and feinting and I-said-this, no-you-said-that. She was forty-five and growing older, old. The truth took long enough, God knows, without lies to complicate it. And yet here they were. Should she say something, break this thing open right here and now, in the Miracle Inn, under Bernie’s great-grandfather’s smile?

  She took the bandana from the bar. With a great effort she lifted her eyes. “I’m sorry I threw the towel,” she said. “Leave the tombstone the way it is. I’ll pretend it’s not there.” She left the Inn, tripping blindly over the uneven floorboards.

  2

  Picnic

  The next day, Martha threw her graduation picnic for Miracle, and the Great Society sent a blond Yankee to rebuild the Boatyard Bridge.

  Planning Miracle’s picnic was no easy job. It was important to find neutral ground, someplace where both the Picketts and the Miracles could appear without losing face. North of the bridge was out—too far from Pickett territory. But Bernie and the rest of the Miracles never ventured south of the bridge except to bootleg. Martha considered, half-seriously, floating her picnic in the Knobs Fork River, the only place she knew that was neither Catholic nor Baptist, Miracle nor Pickett, North nor South.

  In the shadow of the south levee, under the pilings of the Boatyard Bridge, Mount Hermon had mowed the smartweed, cleared the cows, and hung a sign reading Boatyard Park. It was the closest thing to a demilitarized zone Martha could find. She held the graduation picnic there.

  She invited them all, Bernie’s family and her own and Bernie’s friends. Of her Baptist friends from her childhood in Mount Hermon, she invited only Willie and Rosie Uptegrove, and their children, Bradford and Rosamund. From Ossetta, Martha had learned that her son Miracle had been mooning over Rosamund. Martha disliked Rosamund, and suspected that if asked Rosie Uptegrove would say the same about Miracle. Still, it was Miracle’s party. If he wanted Rosamund Uptegrove there, Martha would extend the invitation.

  Bernie saw her invitation list, scrawled across the back of a Campbell’s soup label. “You’ll never get them all there,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t sit at the same table as your mother for all the gold in Fort Knox.”

  “She’ll sit at the same table or she won’t come,” Martha said. “I refuse to argue about it.” They seldom argued about anything these days, but Martha took pleasure in refusing her husband the chance. She refused him everything she could manage, within the bounds of politeness and a reasonable honoring of her marriage bond. After all, when it mattered he had refused her, out of nothing more than that Miracle insistence on doing things the way the family, his family, had always done them. “I’ve never known a Baptist to turn down free food or a Catholic to turn down free liquor and there’ll be both,” she said. “You just keep the Catholics out of the river and the booze in paper cups, that’s all I ask. You’ll do everybody a favor and leave the Baptists to me. I grew up with them.”

  She sent Miracle ahead early, to meet Ossetta and figure out who would be sitting where. Ossetta was short and thick, the color of vanilla extract, and wore a nylon stocking over her hair when she worked for white folks. Always she trailed the faint odor of garlic and asafetida she wore wrapped in a cheesecloth at her throat to ward off germs and evil spirits.

  The Knobs Fork River was small, but the bottoms were swampy and the bridge was long, eight sections of webbed iron girders supporting a one-lane oak-planked roadway soaked in creosote. The road ran along a levee a half-mile to the towns on either side. The levee was so narrow the highway department built turnarounds, little tabs of land where farmers meeting in pickups could pull in their side mirrors, crank down their windows and chat. Ossetta and Miracle met on the south levee, at the last of the turnarounds, overlooking the park. Together they surveyed the field.

  Ossetta shook her head. “There ain’t enough room,” she said. “There ain’t a flat spot big enough in all Jessup County to hold the Picketts and the Miracles but if there is this ain’t it.” She pointed to a sassafras bush in the far corner of the field. “Put the beer over there,” she said. She pointed to the opposite corner, where a water maple whose trunk the cows had gnawed bare raised scrawny limbs. “And put the table over there. And go back home and get a chair for your Grandma Miracle.”

  “She’s not that old,” Miracle said. “She can sit at the table like everybody else.”

  “I’m not saying she cain’t,” Ossetta said. “I’m saying she won’t.”

  By the time Miracle had returned wit
h Bernie and Martha and a chair, nearly everyone had arrived. Scattered at picnic tables close by the river sat most of the Miracle clan: uncles and cousins, aunts and in-laws, nieces and nephews, great-grandchildren still in diapers. Closer to the center of the field the guests of honor were putting up a good show of peace.

  Martha sat with Rosie Uptegrove, called Big Rosie now, to set her apart from her daughter Rosamund and for more substantial reasons having to do with an imposing figure and a sharp tongue. She’d been virtuous enough that evening she dared Martha to buy a beer at the Inn—a clean Baptist, and dry as a soda cracker. Since then she’d grown older, bought a television, and grown wiser about the world. She cursed now, whenever it suited her ends. She carried vodka in a half-pint flask designed to look like a makeup kit. When no family were looking, she tipped little splashes into her soft drinks, with a sly wink to anybody who might happen to see.

  Next to Martha and Big Rosie Uptegrove sat Dolores Miracle, a frayed woman with hair the color and texture of binder twine. She spent much of her life agreeing with her husband Leo, Bernie’s youngest brother. Leo was sitting across from the three women. When Big Rosie laughed or waved her hands or said something in capital letters, the table tilted and Leo seesawed in the air.

  At the head of the table Martha’s mother Mrs. R. J. Pickett sat in a wicker chair, puckering her nose as if sin were hanging there for the smell. She was a thin, sharp-chinned woman whose concession to vice was bridge club on alternate Tuesdays. She hadn’t approved of her daughter’s marriage twenty-three years before; she saw no reason to start now.

  As far from Mrs. Pickett as Ossetta could manage sat Bernie’s mother, Grandma Miracle. She was a wiry woman whose cotton print dresses sank into her concave chest, and whose jaw kneaded a pinch of snuff tucked in her left cheek. She had raised a family on the edge of wilderness and herded them every Sunday to Mass, no matter what the weather. She had not held them together through Prohibition and bootlegging and her husband’s death to see them marry Baptists from across the river.