Crossing the River Read online

  Miracle moved next to Rosamund as she gathered dishes from the table. “Meet me tonight under the bridge,’’ he said. It rolled from his tongue like grace before supper.

  Rosamund didn’t blink but sat down, careful as a waitress carrying two plates on either arm. “What for,” she said.

  “Just to talk. We could talk about going away, getting out.”

  “And what makes you think I’d be interested in going with you?”

  “Not with me. I told you, I can’t leave. But we could talk about it, where you’d go.”

  “And where is that?”

  Miracle shrugged. “Meet me at the bridge. We’ll figure it out together.”

  She stood. “Sorry, Miracle, I’d be a liar if I said I’d make it. Not with Mamma forcefeeding me to Mr. Marquand.”

  “When can I see you again, then.”

  “Come to the county fair Jamboree contest. Watch me sing. Cheer me on.” She smiled past him, so big and bright that Miracle turned around.

  Bradford Uptegrove was herding the stranger in their direction. “This is the man I told you about, Miracle,” Bradford said. “This is the man that showed me the light. I’d still be shoveling shit except for this man’s advice.” He grabbed up the stranger’s hand. “Mr. Marquand, Mr. Talbott Marquand, there’s one person you haven’t met, the guest of honor. Miracle, meet Mr. Talbott Marquand, my future boss and builder of the new bridge. Miracle here, he runs the Miracle Inn with his father, the tavern you saw just the other side of the bridge.”

  “You’ve got yourself quite a spot there,” Talbott said. “That must turn a nice profit.”

  “We get by,” Miracle said.

  “Getting by is one thing. Getting rich is another,” Talbott said. “You and your father want to do something with that spot, you let me know. You could tear that shack down, put in a hamburger stand with a liquor license. Make a fortune. You’re sitting on a gold mine and you haven’t even sunk a pick.” He shook Miracle’s hand. “Talbott Marquand,” he said. He gave Miracle a card, then took Rosamund’s hand and led her to his car, a scarlet Mustang with bucket seats and a convertible top.

  “You see?” Bradford said. “That man has got the ways and the means to get you somewhere. You should’ve been more friendly, Miracle.”

  Miracle watched as Talbott lowered the top. He helped Rosamund into her seat and drove away. When they reached the levee he turned north, towards New Hope and the Miracle Inn.

  “He’ll be back, Miracle,” Bradford said. “If there’s money to be made or women to be had he’ll be back, and there’s both here. Next time be more friendly. You got to hustle people like him if you’re going to get anywhere in the world.”

  The Mustang crossed the Boatyard Bridge. Planks rumbled, girders creaked. Hands in his pockets, Miracle watched Rosamund sail through the girders and cables, her black hair streaming in the wind.

  Behind Miracle’s back, Martha watched, too, but her eyes were not on Rosamund Uptegrove. Through the first drops of Ossetta’s thunderstorm she followed Talbott Marquand, soft and thick, with his Yankee voice and his Yankee manners and his blond, blond hair.

  3

  Something Changed

  After graduation, Miracle started morning shifts at the Miracle Inn. Each day he rose at six to open the Inn for the men who bought beer for the two-hour drive to their jobs in chemical plants or distilleries in Louisville. All day he worked at the same chores that his father and grandfather had done before him and that (if Bernie had his way) Miracle’s sons and grandsons would do after he was dead.

  Miracle was working day shift when Talbott Marquand brought his bulldozers to begin the latest version of the Boatyard Bridge. From the Inn door Miracle watched the parade of machines. Everyone in town lined the street and pointed and nodded his head. It was like a circus come to a town that had never seen a circus. Miracle watched, wide-eyed as the rest, wearing a white apron and holding a broom, until Talbott drove by in a tractor trailer as long as the Inn, pulling a canary yellow bulldozer with Bradford Uptegrove atop it and a gleaming silver construction helmet atop Bradford. Miracle ran inside, to toss his apron and broom behind the bar.

  With construction underway, life changed around the Inn. New noises drowned the old morning routine. By the time Miracle reached the Inn, bulldozers were scraping great orange scars across the bottomland. Clay dust was thick in the air, except when it rained; then the dust settled in a soft, sticky veneer on the bottles behind the Inn’s bar. In the mornings the construction workers lined up at the Inn behind the commuters to the Louisville factories. Miracle was too frantic for conversation with the regulars, who grumbled about the poor service.

  Talbott came every day for lunch. He stood alone at the end of the colored bar, in clothes that looked as if they were taking a rest from Ossetta’s steam iron instead of having been at work building a bridge. He drank one Michelob and ate a single pickled sausage with saltines from the big glass jars at either end of the bar. Once a week he told Bernie how he should hire Marquand’s firm to tear down the Inn, pave the parking lot, and build a carryout restaurant with a liquor license.

  At five Bernie’s brother Leo came to take the evening shift. Miracle walked to the Boatyard Bridge, to watch the construction from under the north pilings. He could get liquor from the Inn storeroom but he kept a store of beer in a cool concrete crevice in the bridge pilings. At the end of these long days he sat drinking and watching the construction crew fold up for the day.

  Miracle had been making trips to the north pilings of the Boatyard Bridge since long before that summer. In high school he climbed down to the pilings to drink from his private stash of beer. He took a transistor radio and tuned in WLS, beaming across the plains (flat land!) between Kentucky and Chicago. He heard songs he didn’t understand, sung by a generation he was supposed to be part of, songs about drugs and sex and the sins of the flag. With WLS in one hand and a beer in the other, Miracle pondered the problems of his life.

  The beer and the melancholy rumble of the planks under the car wheels made Miracle feel sorry for himself for being alone and in high school and wanting to see the world and wanting sex. Usually he ended the evening by smashing his bottles against the north pilings and masturbating into the river. This gave him a great sense of relief. Across those years the brown glass surrounding the north pilings grew steadily higher.

  Miracle had just smashed an evening’s bottles and was relieving his other tensions, on the night he first met Bradford and Rosamund Uptegrove.

  Bradford had been setting bankpoles when he heard the bottles smashing. He suspected a group of Fort Knox soldiers, who drove from the base to buy liquor but had nowhere to go but New Hope to drink it. He explored with his flashlight. He caught Miracle pants down, working his pecker to beat the band.

  It was not yet June and Miracle shone winter white in the flashlight’s glare. He had Bernie’s square jaw and Bernie’s angular joints, with Martha’s hair the color of broken brick and eyes like chipped robin’s eggs. With his hair standing up and his bare knobby knees he looked like a poor relation to the great tufted herons that waded the river on long skinny legs.

  “What are you doing here,” Bradford asked.

  Miracle considered. “Swimming?”

  “Think again,” Bradford said. He was a thick, squat man, a head shorter and six years older than Miracle, with big arms and a barrel chest covered with hair that continued up his neck to become the black dots that covered his chin.

  Bradford turned around to find Rosamund had crept up behind him. She knew Miracle by reputation and was absorbing his nakedness with as much interest as Martha had surveyed the Miracle Inn on her first visit, years before. “Get back to the car, Sister,” Bradford said. She backed a few steps away.

  Bradford thought his sister ought to be embarrassed and that he ought to take steps to avenge the embarrassment she ought to feel. On the other hand, he recognized Miracle’s face from the Inn, and had known of him since his birth. B
radford solved this dilemma by tossing Miracle in the river, then helping him out.

  He handed Miracle a set of bankpoles. Miracle helped them finish setting their poles, though he baited the hooks so the bait would fall off. Mostly he kept his eyes on Rosamund.

  When Bradford struggled down the bank to tie up a line, Miracle, true to his mother’s blood, seized his chance. “So you’re Rosamund Uptegrove,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I know you. You sing. You sang last winter at the high school.”

  Rosamund smiled slightly, as if she were pleased in spite of herself to be known. “You’re right. I recommend you remember it.”

  “And why should I remember it,” Miracle said, though he had no intention of forgetting.

  “Because I’m going to be a star,” she said, as simple and positive as cornbread.

  “O-oh. On television? Or in Hollywood?” The smallest derision crept into his voice.

  She ignored his tone. “I’m starting in Nashville. That’s where my voice and my interests lead me. It’s easier to get established there. Then maybe I’ll move on. Depends on the offers.”

  “People don’t go from Nashville to Hollywood.”

  “People you know, maybe. Those people don’t include me.”

  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. Miracle wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder, so badly the tips of his fingers tingled. He considered. He wasn’t likely to see her again, not soon; she had her side of the river, he had his. He worked his hand along a branch behind her back.

  “We’d better help Bradford,” she said, “else he’ll not catch a single fish, I know him. Then he’ll blame it on me, just like he always does.”

  They finished by midnight. Bradford told Miracle to meet him in the morning to check the lines. When they parted in the light of the waning moon Miracle could have sworn that behind her brother’s back, Rosamund winked.

  After that night Miracle and Bradford hunted and fished and trapped together. Miracle kept an eye out for Rosamund, but Bradford never brought her along. Through the driveup window of the Inn, Miracle saw her many times, always in a crowd of men who looked old enough to know better. If she remembered the boy who handed her the beer through the window, she gave no sign of it. But for Miracle the memory of her wide eyes that evening when she caught him breaking bottles haunted the north pilings. He never returned there without seeing her face and conjecturing her body. From across the river Miracle decided he was in love.

  He had pursued her ever since, with the persistence and luck of a greenhorn on a snipe hunt. Working at the Miracle Inn, shoving beer through the driveup window to Baptist tobacco farmers, Miracle considered how much his pursuit of Rosamund Uptegrove was exactly like hunting snipe: the closer he thought he’d got, the farther away she was.

  The summer after Miracle’s graduation wound down, to the opening of the county fair. Miracle worked late night shifts at the Inn, so he could be certain to be free for Rosamund’s appearance in Saturday night’s Jamboree contest.

  On Saturday afternoon of the fair, business was slow. In the river bottoms the idle bulldozers and backhoes shimmered in waves of heat. Across the river Miracle could hear the grind and chatter of the ferris wheel.

  The Inn was dim but it held the August heat as nicely as any oven. Bernie thought this a good idea, as it made people drink more beer. He was drinking a beer now, rolling the sweating bottle across his flushed forehead and cheeks between sips.

  “I hope you’re planning to work tonight,” Bernie said to Miracle.

  Miracle watched the yellow stripe that wandered over the Jackson Highway before petering out at the one-lane levee. “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t,” he said, not looking at Bernie.

  “It’s going to be a big night. You know that. Leo can’t work. He’s got two horses to show. I can’t work. I’m judging the barrel races. You know all that. I told you that a month ago.”

  Miracle had known that but in all his planning he had pushed the knowledge to the back of his mind. He had no one to blame but himself.

  “You got to get used to that, “Bernie said. “You’re responsible for a business. People depend on you. People find out they can’t depend on you, they don’t come, they go someplace else. The Inn has been here longer than any place else in town because people know they can depend on me. And I give it over to you because I know I can depend on you. There’s nobody else I feel comfortable about turning this place over to alone, not even Leo.”

  “The Inn has been here longer than any place else because it’s the first goddamn place across the bridge,” Miracle growled.

  Bernie shrugged. “Maybe so. But that don’t change the situation. We got to have somebody here tonight. You’re the only one free. There’ll be other fairs. Take a extra day off next week. But when the business is there, you got to meet it.”

  Bernie left. For a half hour business was brisk, then everyone left for the fair. Miracle stepped out back and sat watching the sunset across the river bottoms. To the west the flare of the Fort Knox guns lit the underside of the clouds with brilliant flashes. To the south Miracle could make out the topmost car of the ferris wheel as it circled above the clumps of sycamores lining the river.

  The front door banged. Miracle cursed his luck, then resigned himself to an evening at the Inn.

  It was Martha, dressed in a sleeveless scarlet dress with thin arm straps. Miracle had never seen her dressed so. She looked as if in daylight she would be positively shocking.

  “I’ve come to take your place,” she said, leaning over the bar. “Pour me a draft before you go.”

  “I thought you and Father were going to the fair together.”

  “I met him at home. He told me you were down here. Stuck down here. I sent him on his way, told him I’d be over later.”

  With her foot propped on the brass rail and a beer in one hand, she looked alarmingly pretty for a mother, anybody’s mother, let alone Miracle’s own. Where Bernie’s hands never rested, hers stayed wrapped around her beer as if she expected it at any moment to fly from her grasp. While she sipped and talked she twisted in a slow circle, taking in every corner and shelf of the Inn, as if comparing it to other places she knew, or deciding how it might better be arranged. When she had turned in a complete circle she turned her eyes to him. “Stop that,” she said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Picking at your shirt. Bernie does that. Drives me wild.”

  “Oh.” Miracle dangled his hands at his sides. He searched for something to say. “So why did you come down here, if you knew he was coming home?”

  “I told you. I came to take your place. And I wanted to catch you here. I wanted to talk to you here.” She looked about, another slow circle. “I came down here because I want to do what I can to keep this place from getting in your blood. I can’t stop you from working here and I don’t want to. It’s a pretty rough crowd you’re traveling with here but I guess you know that. You can make some money and get some experience. But I want you to get out in the world before you settle down here. See some places I never saw. Go to college, next year, or the year after, if that’s what you want. I want you to promise me you’ll do that. Get out and see the world, anyway, before you settle into running the Miracle Inn.”

  “I’ll promise that,” Miracle said, remembering his conversation with Rosamund at his graduation picnic. Maybe I’ll go to Nashville, he thought. Maybe I’ll go with Rosamund.

  At the driveup window the buzzer sounded. The customer ordered two fifths of Wild Turkey and a bottle of Asti Spumanti. Miracle could not see the faces in the dark of the car, but in all of Jessup County only Rosamund drank Asti Spumanti and only Talbott talked with a Yankee accent. And Rosamund was driving; lacquered nails reached for the change. Then they were gone, the brand new Mustang
with a little Knobs Fork mud on the wheels screeching around the Inn and throwing gravel against the windows. Through the front window Miracle watched the Mustang taillights disappear onto the levee.

  This bar was as familiar to him as home, and he saw without seeing the pool table you played to the north, and the big windows, and the beveled mirror fronted with bottles, and the U of a bar that he thought of as a stock pen with himself as the penned steer, waiting dumbly for slaughter: half pale oak and half dark mahogany, this pen, and carved into the oak bar the sun that changed from rising to setting depending on how many beers you’d had. Only Martha made the scene any different from any slow night, in her scarlet dress like gashed flesh against the dark wooden bar.

  She nodded at the window. “It’s a good thing whoever that was didn’t come inside or I’d probably have cost us another customer.”

  “He doesn’t know about such things.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Talbott Marquand. With Rosamund Uptegrove at the wheel.”

  “Oh. Oh-h-h. So that was Talbott.”

  “Who else orders Wild Turkey. And Asti Spumanti. In this whole county Rosamund Uptegrove is the only person I know who drinks Asti Spumanti. I don’t like that man,” Miracle said. It was out before he thought about it.

  Martha raised her eyes from her beer. “Oh? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. His Yankee ways, I guess.” Miracle’s real reasons had to do with Rosamund, but he thought better of mentioning that. “Coming in here. Bossing everybody around. Acting like he owns the town, even this place. You know he talks about tearing this place down? Wants to put in a Dairy Freeze. Hunh.”

  “So let him talk. Talk never killed a Thanksgiving turkey.”

  Miracle frowned. Here was his girlfriend dating Talbott Marquand, and his mother taking up for the guy.