Crossing the River Read online

  Martha drained her beer and set it on the bar. She ducked under the flap. “On the other side,” she said. Miracle balked, unable to decide whether his mother was drunk or simply making a fool of him. “Come on, I need some practice running this place. Get over there and order something.” Miracle ducked under the bar. Martha took up the towel. “I’ll have a fifth of your cheapest whiskey, to go,” Miracle said.

  “I can’t wait on you there. That’s the colored bar.”

  Miracle snorted. “Since when have there been enough coloreds in New Hope to set aside a whole bar? All that stopped ages ago.”

  “So Bernie does change some things around here,” Martha said. “I’ll be damned.”

  “I don’t know that he had much to do with it,” Miracle said. “More like recognizing the facts. Ever since Ossetta’s kids moved to Lexington there’s hardly any coloreds left to drink, and the ones left have figured out better places to do it. Can’t say as I blame them there, if you want my opinion.”

  Martha bundled the liquor with clumsy hands. “You’re using the wrong size sack,” Miracle said.

  “Miracle. Please.” She laid the sack on the counter. “On the house. Now get out of here and get over to the fair and have a good time. If you make it snappy you can catch the Jamboree contest. Don’t let Bernie see you, whatever you do. He’ll find out anyway but I’d just as soon tell him on my own sweet time.”

  “What about closing? What about the register?”

  “You ask too damn many questions,” Martha said. “Whose son are you anyway. Get going before I change my mind. And don’t forget your bourbon.”

  He was outside before he stopped to think. Through the front window he saw her lean her elbows on the bar, watching, wearing the dress she must have put on for this occasion, a bright red blossom in the dim light.

  On the bridge he pulled the bourbon from the sack. There were two bottles, the second double-wrapped and tucked beside the first. He pulled the sack from the second bottle. Next to a fifth of Wild Turkey was a bottle of Asti Spumanti.

  At the fair Miracle climbed to the farthest, darkest corner of the grandstand, just as Rosamund was accepting her award. The outcome had never been in doubt. She had written her own songs and music, she had the best voice in the county, she was the daughter of Willie Uptegrove, who sat on the County Fair Central Committee.

  She wore blue, a floor-length royal blue gown of some filmy material, cut low in front and back, with a bodice of blue sequins. In the glare of the track lights she looked pale, but the rose in her cheeks stood out and with her black hair flowing across her breast and her pale skin blushing she looked like Barbara Allen come to life.

  A cascade of roses with legs sticking out walked around one end of the grandstand. Miracle could not see the person behind the flowers, but very few men in Jessup County could afford that many roses and only one would spend that kind of money on flowers.

  They were all together on the stage, Willie and Big Rosie and Rosamund and Talbott Marquand, looking more like a family portrait than Miracle liked to think. The Jamboree band took the stage behind them. Rosamund sang “Fox on the Run” and “My Elusive Dreams” and finished with “The Great Speckled Bird,” drawing coughs and catcalls from the Catholic side of the bleachers. Then she asked her friends to visit her at the backstage trailer and she stepped down, elegant and measured as the queen of England, her right hand lifting billows of blue chiffon, her left hand in Talbott Marquand’s.

  Following Rosamund, Miracle lost himself in the crowd. Outside the backstage trailer he stood behind a pile of rabbit hutches from the 4-H. He tucked the Asti Spumanti under a bale of hay. Feeling like a lowland Democrat in a crowd of mountain Republicans, Miracle moved forward. He decided he would leave all moves to Rosamund. If she ignored him, he would retire to the bridge pilings and cry into his whiskey until time to meet Martha at the Inn.

  Rosamund saw him through the crowd. She lifted Talbott’s arm from hers and crossed the sawdust. She threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. She seized his hand. “I’m going!” she cried. “I’m on my way! You have to visit me. Give me your promise.”

  Miracle was blinded by sequins and love. She was beautiful, exotic, famous, as different from New Hope and the Miracle Inn as Catholic from Baptist, North from South, sweet sin from dull virtue. “You let me know when you’re going to be there, and how long,” he said. “I’ll come.”

  “I’ll be there ’til hell freezes over.” She shook his hand loose. “I’m going places, Miracle, if you hadn’t figured that out by now you’re slower than I thought. You talk to Talbott. He’s been to the Grand Ole Opry more times than you’ve crossed the bridge and he says I did as well as anybody he’s seen there.” She lowered her voice. “He’s promised to help me out once I get there.” She flounced her dress. “I told you you’d see me up in lights. You will.” She craned her neck, long and white. Her breasts surged against the blue sequins. “I wonder where Talbott went. He was right over by the roses.”

  But Miracle had not heard. His eyes were stuck on Bernie, approaching across the sawdust with the grim steadiness of a Fort Knox tank.

  In the Inn a Budweiser clock hung above the bar, with ducks flapping eternally across a mountain waterfall. Martha endured the steady slap of the duck wings for longer than she thought possible before searching for the plug. She was crouched behind the bar, searching, when she heard the door open. She scrambled to her feet.

  It was Talbott Marquand. Surprised, Martha met his eyes. She kept his glance a moment longer than she ought; then a moment longer still.

  He did not give her the chance to look away. “The Uptegrove party is celebrating. A rising star on the southern horizon,” he said. “They sent me to replenish the cooler.”

  “No need to order. I know what they drink.” Martha bagged vodka for Big Rosie and a soft drink for Willie. She set the sack on the bar with a hard thump. “Anything else?”

  His eyes held hers. “I’ll have a beer,” he said. “Something local.” She pulled an Oertel’s from the cooler and set it on the bar, avoiding his eyes. “So,” he said. “Why is a beautiful woman like you shoving beer across a bartop in the backwoods of Kentucky?”

  Oldest trick in the book, Martha thought. Ten answers putting him in his place sprang to her lips. She said none of them. A rise out of her—that was what he wanted. She thought of Bernie, and the twenty-three years since the last compliment she’d heard from a man. She fixed Talbott with a hard glare, empty of flirtation. “Because of love,” she said. “You want a glass?”

  He flinched. Bernie, or any other man Martha knew, would never have flinched. Martha felt a wave of remorse. She set a glass on the bar, opened and poured his beer. In her answer she heard those years with Bernie, without love. Was that this man’s fault? Her heart resisted the question with the stubbornness she’d learned from Bernie. She’d not be caught making the first move. She said nothing.

  Talbott took up his beer. “I guess I should have known before I asked,” he said. The joking was gone from his voice. “It’s the only possible answer, when you think about it.”

  “I try not to.”

  “I’m here to tell you that doesn’t work. But I guess you know that. The real question is, why did you tell me? I’ve been down here almost three months and that’s the first straight answer I’ve got from a soul.”

  “Straight,” Martha said with a grimace. “What is straight.”

  “The truth. Told straight on. No devious sidetracks. No obscene references to racial heritage. No grand embellishments.”

  “You’re looking for that? Here?”

  Talbott pointed his beer glass at her. “You told the truth.”

  “I have a reputation for that.” In the dim bar light his blond hair stood out like a patch of frost against the dark. Martha felt stirring in her the queasiness of the day of Miracle’s graduation, when she first met this blond Yankee.

  He gave her no time to rest, or think, or retreat t
o the storeroom. “Then life with Bernie Miracle is all that bad,” he said.

  “No,” Martha said. She pressed her thumbnail into her beer label, tearing it free in crumpled strips. She should tell a man anything, because he was fast and free with his compliments? Certainly not. Yet she felt heavy as sin the need to tell someone something, her side of the story. “It’s way more complicated than that,” she said.

  “So? I got the time.”

  She smiled, shaking her head. “Sorry. Twenty years you ain’t got.”

  He reached across her beer to touch her fingertips. “Neither do you.”

  She pulled her hand away, but she told him her story then. She took a cigarette from his pack, the first she’d smoked in years. After one puff she left it sitting, its smoke curling around the nape of her neck.

  She told him how she’d grown up Baptist, how she’d crossed the river on a dare, how she’d fought with Bernie, how everything had been so different from what she had hoped.

  He laid his hand across hers, too firm for her to slip it away. “So why did you marry him?”

  “Love,” she said, not quick and hard, as she’d said it earlier, but slow and thoughtful. “I married Bernie Miracle because I thought things would be different, and better, across the river. I came into a Catholic church, Assumption Church, and it was so full of mystery, after my life. I smelled the incense and saw the candles, and that was so new, and different. And it was so positive, so certain what was right and what was wrong. Bernie was part of that. He lived across the river, he was Catholic. I was tired of being comfortable, I wanted to stir up the bucket, I saw and met a man I could do that with. I thought. All that, and love. I just plain fell in love.”

  “With all the wrong reasons for falling in love.”

  “Then you must know the right reasons. Tell me, please.”

  He said nothing. She sighed and drew her hand from his.

  “Bernie Miracle is a good man. I’ve got as good a marriage as there is in this town, or so my friends tell me, and I believe them. Bernie provides well, I can usually depend on him to be where he says he’ll be, give or take an hour or so, he goes to church, even if he falls asleep once he’s there. Me, I’ve stayed away from drink, which is more than most women I know. I’ve stayed away from Fort Knox soldiers. I was young and rambunctious and I did something stupid, maybe, but less stupid than what a lot of women have done. And at least I’ve learned—you haven’t seen me trying it again, and you won’t, either. I do my share of staring out the window, but there’s a lot of that around here.”

  She turned to the register, pretending to count cash. She wondered why she had opened her heart to Talbott Marquand, a Yankee with whom she’d shared a friendly beer at the Miracle Inn.

  She would like to believe that earlier that evening she had chosen this dress because it was festive, and in New Hope she had so few chances to be festive. It wasn’t every night she tended bar at the Miracle Inn. She would like to believe she was here only to give her son a chance to get Rosamund Uptegrove out of his system. Unless that happened there was no moving on for him, and only by spending time with her would he get her out of his system. Experience taught her that.

  All this she would like to believe, and no more. All this was true, Talbott would call it the truth, and once, years before, she could have believed it and stopped there. But she knew herself too well now to ignore what stirred beyond and behind Talbott’s truth. After twenty years the time and the place were right. She was wanting something, some change, as restless as the birds that soared aimlessly above lush August fields, their chicks raised and nothing to do but wait for winter’s coming. Her restlessness had no name that she could put in words but it stirred her heart as surely as years before it had driven her across the river.

  She turned to the mirror and caught a glimpse of herself between bottles of whiskey and sloe gin. A married woman, a mother, forty-five years old, in a scarlet dress resurrected from the attic. She thought of her first mistake so long before, crossing the river to marry a man for all the wrong reasons. Never again, she thought. Never a fool for love.

  “So now it’s my turn,” Talbott said. “Why I came to New Hope. Why I came to the Miracle Inn.” He started, stopped, studied the floor. “I came because of love. Or lack of it, I guess. If you’re interested.”

  “I’m not,” Martha said. She faced him, square and cold again. “You want another beer, you got to pay for the first.”

  “Yes, sir.” Talbott laid a dollar on the bar. “Two more. On me.” Martha shrugged and bent to the cooler. It had been long enough since anyone had bought her a drink or anything else. She would allow him this much. No more.

  Then the front door slammed and she lifted her eyes. Across the bar, she met Bernie’s stare, cold and hard as broken glass.

  Outside in the Inn parking lot, Miracle read the Budweiser clock through the window. It was eleven-thirty. Inside, Talbott Marquand stood with his back to the door. Miracle saw no sign of Martha.

  At the fair Bernie had been bright red, the veins on his nose standing out in mapped relief. When Miracle told him Martha was tending bar Bernie had turned gray. He’d sat heavily on the trailer step, holding his head in his hands. Miracle was on the verge of asking if he needed help when Bernie raised his head and walked to the car.

  Bernie was waiting at the screen door now. When Miracle reached the door Bernie let it fall to, in Miracle’s face. Miracle caught the door and eased it shut behind him. He turned around.

  Martha emerged from under the bar. Talbott raised his beer to Bernie from across the room, flashing a wide grin. “How about one, Bernie? On me.”

  Bernie did not raise his voice, though Miracle heard ground glass under his words. “It’s closing time, I came to close.”

  Martha set two beers before Talbott. “Closing can wait,” she said, without so much as a quaver. “He just bought those beers.”

  “Get a third,” Talbott said. “Four. One for the boy. We got to celebrate. We saw a star rise on the southern horizon.” He was drunk. Miracle realized with a start that they were all drunk.

  “I don’t want a beer,” Bernie said. “He don’t want a beer.”

  “You might let the boy speak for himself.”

  “He’s my son,” Bernie said. “I can speak for him. It’s closing time. The law says I got to be closed by midnight on Saturdays.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard anything about law in this town,” Talbott said.

  “Finish your beer,” Bernie said.

  “Take your time,” Martha said. She set two glasses on the bar, tilted a beer into one. She took a sip. “Tell me about the contest.” She leaned on her elbows.

  Miracle moved to stand beside the pool table. He felt as if he were walking through deep water, growing deeper every second, where each move took longer than it ought.

  Bernie ducked under the bar flap. His hands fluttered in constant motion along the bar, searching along independent of his vision or thoughts until they located a small object, a salt shaker or an ashtray or one of the crisp white slices of raw potato that the Catholics liked to eat with their beer. He picked it up, whatever object he’d found, and pored over it with his hands, turning it this way and that like a squirrel with a nut, until his hands were satisfied and he moved on to the next object in reach. When he got to the end of the bar he stood silent, playing with his shirt sleeves, folding and unfolding his cuffs and picking at his elbows.

  “I guess I should be going,” Talbott said.

  “Take your time,” Martha said.

  “I guess I’ll go,” Talbott said. “I told those folks I’d be back in ten minutes.” Bernie said nothing. Talbott picked up his sack and spilled some change onto the bar. The quarters jingled. One fell to the floor. Martha bent to pick it up. “See you later,” Talbott said. Martha stood. “Come back,” she said. Talbott eased the door shut. “Anytime,” she said.

  Talbott’s Mustang pulled quietly onto the levee and turned s
outh. Martha picked up the beers and glasses. “So now I get to learn to close. I told you you didn’t need to worry, Miracle.”

  “What the hell are you doing here,” Bernie said.

  The air thinned. Miracle caught his breath. “I called her,” he said.

  “You stay out of this,” Bernie said.

  “No,” Miracle said. The eight ball was near a side pocket and he rolled it from one hand to the other across the green baize, keeping his eyes carefully on the ball. “I wanted to see the races. So I called her and asked her to come down for an hour or two. I got caught up in the contest and wanting to see Rosamund Uptegrove sing and I didn’t get back.”

  “Sure you did,” Martha said. “Here you are. High time, too. I was just about to close myself.” She raised the flap in the bar.

  Bernie caught her hand. “A married woman. My wife, tending bar. In a dress like that.” He reached across the bar to pluck at one of the scarlet spaghetti straps.

  Martha drew back. “I can’t see how this dress is going to hurt business. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? Business?”

  Bernie slammed the flap down. Miracle jumped. The eight ball rolled from his hand. “You’re trying to ruin this place,” Bernie said. “That’s your plan. You close the place down and then there’s nothing left to pass on and you can send that boy anywhere you want.”

  “Bernie calm down,” Martha said. Miracle retrieved the eight ball, keeping one eye on his mother.

  In those few minutes with Bernie something changed. Suddenly things moved too fast instead of too slow. Martha lifted the bar flap and let it slam behind her, harder than Bernie had slammed it before. She strode towards the door, talking as she went. “Five people came in tonight. Two were in town for the fair, I’d never seen them before. I told the others Miracle was sick and you had to judge and they thought nothing of it.” She picked up her purse midstride, with a swoop of her hand. At the door she paused. “You coming,” she said to Miracle.

  “Where to?”

  “The fair,” she said. “I can still hear the ferris wheel.”