Miracle looked at Bernie quickly, then down at the pool table. He rolled the eight ball back and forth. “I guess if you don’t need me around here—” Bernie turned to the beveled mirror. “Rosamund is still waiting, and Bradford Uptegrove and Big Rosie and Willie—” Bernie did not turn around. Miracle left the eight ball sitting. As he walked outside he heard it drop with a solid thunk into the north corner pocket.
Martha gunned the accelerator as Miracle climbed in. “Let’s take this thing to town!” she cried gaily, and they were off. Miracle could not keep from glancing back at the Inn. Bernie was rubbing up and down the mahogany, not looking out the window or at anything Miracle could tell. With no customers framing him he looked forlorn and out of place, as if he’d stumbled behind the bar by mistake and was trying, like a fly trapped behind a windowpane, to find his way out.
Then they were on the bridge, flying between girders. Halfway across Martha screeched to a halt. “You were good,” she said. “Your mother’s son. You got any of that Wild Turkey left?”
Miracle reached under the seat. Martha took a swig from the bottle. Miracle thought he should be shocked, though he was unsure exactly what he should be shocked at. Before tonight he had never realized how pretty his mother was, with smooth white hands and hair that glowed red even in the dim light from the dash.
She handed him the bottle. “Have a drink. Come on. I know you’re not happy about leaving Bernie. I’m not happy about leaving him either. But if we’re neither one happy about it, if we don’t watch out we’ll end up back there, sulking in an empty bar. And what’s the point of that. So drink up. Did you get that Italian stuff to Rosamund Uptegrove?” Miracle shook his head. Martha wrinkled her forehead in annoyance. “I didn’t put it there for nothing. I guess I’ll just have to figure out a way to get you and her together. You pay attention, now, I’m not always going to be there to take care of your business. Take a drink,” she said, not a request but a command. “We’re about to get into trouble. We might as well toast the fact.”
Car lights flickered at the south end of the bridge. Miracle swigged. Martha stepped on the gas. “She’s not going to do you any good,” she said.
“Sure she is. She already has.”
“If you call being miserable doing you good, then you’re in seventh heaven. But they told me that, twenty years ago. It’ll take some doing to get her out of your system, and I’m not the one to do it.”
Miracle sat silent until they parked at the fairgrounds. He was too overwhelmed by his mother and the way she was talking, and by his own behavior, walking out on Bernie, to say a word. He liked her wildness and deep inside himself he felt a wild string vibrating in harmony. At the same time he wondered if he shouldn’t save his mother from herself. In her mood God knew where she might take them both.
At the fairgrounds the bare bulbs swung forlornly in the trees and the air was thick with dust and the rich smell of manure. Trash skittered along the ground. Stray dogs humped in the bushes.
“You stay on your toes now,” Martha said. “Be your mother’s son. It becomes you.” She put out her arm to stop him. “I’ll take Talbott. You get Rosamund. We’ll start with a little divide and conquer. I’ll go first. You talk to Talbott. Then after I’ve congratulated Rosamund and talked to the Uptegroves a second I’ll sashay over to Talbott. We’ll be gone before Rosamund figures out who’s where. After that you’re on your own, bud. A mother’s love can only go so far.”
Miracle shivered, a thrill of tension at this wild, crazy talk. For a second he thought on the firm kiss Talbott had given his mother at the graduation picnic. Here she was warning him about Rosamund Uptegrove, and she, Martha Miracle, was married and a mother, his mother. Should he be an accomplice in this? Where was she heading, anyway?
Martha stepped from behind the tree. Miracle passed a hand over his hair and followed.
In the bare space before the trailer, Willie Uptegrove wrestled with the tripod of cascading roses. Big Rosie sat on a folding chair nearby. With a copy of the Argus she fanned Bradford Uptegrove, whose head was tucked between his knees. No one else was in sight.
“Hoo boy,” Big Rosie said, waving at Martha with the paper. “Is she hot to trot.” She raised a paper cup.
“We came to offer congratulations,” Martha said.
“Too late,” Rosie said breezily. “She’s off with Talbott Marquand. Now Miracle there, he might do us a favor, if he could get this lummox in his car and home.” She poked her son. Bradford groaned.
“I’m not giving Bradford Uptegrove over to anybody,” Willie said. “Especially no Catholics and no Miracles. They’d have him out on the road and pumped up with liquor in less time than it’ll take him to sober up.”
“Hear, hear,” Bradford said. He did not raise his head.
They helped Bradford into the Uptegrove’s Lincoln. Willie and Big Rosie climbed in. They drove away, bouncing across the ruts, roses trailing from the half-closed trunk. Miracle and Martha were left standing alone in the sawdust, Miracle in a dirty white T-shirt, Martha in her brilliant red dress, while the fair’s last strings of bulbs bobbed and flickered overhead.
4
Fool for Love
A week later Martha was churning fresh-boiled tomatoes through a food mill when Grandma Miracle dumped the mail on the kitchen table. “Looks like a wedding invitation,” Grandma said. “Now I wonder who’s getting married this late in the summer? I ain’t heard of no weddings except for that Skaggs girl, she’s a shotgun, she ain’t got the time to print up an invitation and she ain’t got the money anyway.” She held the cream-colored envelope to the window. She pulled a bobby pin from her bun and pried its tines apart with her teeth. She stuck it in the envelope and tugged at the flap.
“Grandma! That’s my mail!” Martha snatched the letter from her mother-in-law’s hands.
“Listen, honey, if I wanted to find out what was in that envelope I’d find it out. I’d just rather do the looking in front of your face instead of having to buy beer for the post office clerk or waste good whiskey on that worthless Ossetta. What are you doing getting mail anyway? You’re a married woman.”
“There’s no law saying married women can’t get mail.”
“I never got a piece of mail in my life that wasn’t somebody asking for something I couldn’t afford to give. Open it.” She waved a gnarled hand. “Go on, I’m interested.”
Martha peeled back the flap. “It’s from Talbott Marquand, Grandma. Would you like to read it?”
“You got no need to get so huffy.” Grandma Miracle grabbed the table edge and pulled herself to her feet. “You read as long as you like. I don’t need to know no more, and if somebody don’t get that juice in the jar it’s going to get too cold to seal.”
It was an invitation, handwritten, for a drive. He needed somebody to show him the territory, and everybody else had turned him down.
Grandma Miracle filled a jar with juice and screwed on the lid. “You’ll say no,” she said.
“No to what?”
“To whatever bullshit he’s feeding you. I knew the second I laid eyes on him at that picnic he was bound to go after somebody. I just couldn’t figure who it was. I figured Rosamund Uptegrove, but I guess Big Rosie’s proved too much for a Detroit Yankee to swallow. Can’t say as I blame him there.” Grandma turned around, her chin tucked into the folds of her neck. “I can see why it’s you. He’s a wife-breaker, that’s his kind, probably keeps count of the couples he’s broke up. You still got your looks and you got more fire than all them Uptegroves piled in a pot.”
“Grandma, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If he’s after me it’s because he thinks there’s money to be had somewhere. Though where he got that idea is beyond me.” Martha fixed her eyes on the pair of cardinals feeding in the sunflower stalks outside the window.
The old woman slouched on one hip, a steaming jar of juice clutched in a jar grip. Martha felt her gaze and she refused to meet it. Let her wonder, she thought,
and high time. She stuffed tomatoes in the grinder and turned the handle as noisily as she could.
“I know my son’s a pill,” Grandma said, the moment Martha stopped churning. “He’s a Miracle. I knew his father and his father’s father and the father before that, a little, and every last one of ’em a trial and a cross to bear. At least you got that excuse—you never knew ’em, before Bernie. But they’re your family, his family and your own, and you took ’em on of your own will. That might have been a mistake, I don’t know. He’s older than you, I know that, and he’s got the Miracle heart, you can tell it in his face. He’ll be dead before you, long before you. Look at me. Why do you think it is that those Miracle men put our names on that mausoleum forty years before we’re dead? They want to make sure we’ll follow ’em to the grave, that’s why. I still wonder if Bernie’s father drowned in that river or if they scared his heart dead when they threw him in the trunk of that car. I guess it don’t make no difference now, but you mark my word—your time’ll come, soon enough, you’ll be free as a jaybird with twice as much money. For now, you’re a married woman. You might not like that—I don’t know—I can’t answer that for you. But you got married all the same, just like I done it and every woman that’s got a heart does it. Now you got to make the best of it. That’s what a woman’s got to do, make the best of the mess this world’s in. Because if she don’t do it, I ask you who will. I got to ask that.”
Martha turned around. Grandma Miracle gathered a wad of snuff into puckered lips and spat it into a pail of tomato skins and pulp. “I’ll leave you to your juice,” Grandma said. “You do it better than me anytime.” She tilted her head to repin her bun. “You can count on me to keep my mouth shut. You do what you think best. You’re a Pickett; you will anyway.” She stumped from the kitchen, leaving Martha puzzling over the last boiling tomatoes of August, the cream-colored envelope tucked in her apron pocket.
Talbott picked her up the next Saturday, on a day when Bernie was gone to Louisville to meet with his distributors, and when Miracle was at the Inn. Really, she hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened, in the way things do, she thought as she dressed, when they’re meant to be.
She reminded herself that she was a married woman. She chose a dress, a white cotton pleated affair, old-fashioned for 1967, but cooler than pants and more respectable than shorts. In the bathroom mirror she adjusted her hat, a broad-brimmed straw hat with a wide scarlet sash, loaned for the summer by Rosie Uptegrove to protect Martha’s fair complexion from freckling. It was an old-fashioned hat, it went well with the dress—too well, really, for a woman married twenty-three years. Twenty-three years! She considered. She repinned it, at an angle.
She watched the Mustang enter the drive, watched Talbott stop to wipe at a smear of dirt on the polished red paint. She wondered if he really was single, as Big Rosie assumed. She thought it unlikely. He seemed as solid as his waistline, dressed in clothes his wife bought to stay forever slightly out of style. Only his hat was unfaithful, a funny plaid hat with a feather tucked in its band. She could hear his wife’s objections. He must have bought it on the sly.
She met him in the drive. The gravel burned through her thin sandals and she found herself wanting to escape this valley in a way she’d not allowed herself to admit in years. She imagined them conspirators, hats tilted against prying eyes. She closed her eyes and sank into the seat. Through her pleated skirt the upholstery burned and stuck at once.
“Have you been to the mountains?”
She opened her eyes. “These are the mountains, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“No, I mean higher up. Eastern Kentucky. Past Lexington. It’ll be cooler there.”
“That’s a two-hour drive. I thought you wanted to look at the country around here.”
He shrugged. “You’ve got someplace else to be?” She said nothing. “Escape to the mountains!” he cried. “East!” This, she could see, was his notion of high adventure.
They shot through Lexington without stopping. In town Talbott kept his eyes fixed on the road, as if worried that someone might see him. They rode high over a viaduct, then down, past shanties with tin roofs. On their stoops black women rested spreading chins on thick hands, stirring the air with funeral parlor fans and marking the progress of that fancy car.
In a few minutes they left the city behind. Talbott pushed a button. The car’s top glided back. He drove carefully, so carefully she felt he drove to avoid talking. She herself had nothing to say and felt like saying nothing. She imagined the mountains, where she would ride with cool air full in her face.
He wore no ring but he was married, she was as certain of that as of her own husband. She thought on the source of her certainty. It came, she decided, from his certainness, his man’s knowledge of that most perfect of excuses waiting in the wings. She had that for an excuse, if it came to that; and as it had to come, was coming, to that, she realized how ridiculous she was. Her friends would worry, then talk, in their shrill, Southern voices, and they would be right to talk. She was old enough to know where this sort of thing led, and where it didn’t, couldn’t, lead. She pictured and heard her friends talking right now, as she headed to the ephemeral mountains.
She leaned forward to speak, to thank Talbott for the drive and to ask politely to turn back. She would say, the next day, that it was the heat, though she knew it was something more than that.
“Look,” he said.
Ahead a bank of Queen Anne’s lace bloomed with goldfinches. He slowed and honked. The flock scattered, fluttering black and yellow against the hot blue sky.
She turned the mirror to adjust her hat against the sun. She settled into her seat.
At a fork he turned left. The road narrowed. The shoulder gave way to a wall of vines sheared to the shape of the passing cars. Tentacles of sweet trumpet vine reached from the wall, slapping at the windshield. Each breath felt as if somewhere nearby a forest fire burned, robbing the air of oxygen and leaving only heat. She imagined the animals of the forest gathered by the roadside to savor the rush of a passing car.
Where the walls of vines broke the people were white, thin and pale as winter moonlight. At road cuts the tangle of vines gave way to black gashes that crumbled coal onto the asphalt.
They crested a hill and dropped in looping curves to a river bottom. The road took a sharp turn and they entered a town.
The town was a mile long and a roofbeam wide. The houses backed up to a cliff and opened to the river and the single street, jammed with people. He pulled into a service station, a small whitewashed castle with crenelated turrets and a single pump. “Lost,” he said. “Though we could turn around.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t have to be back ’til late.” She went inside, searching to escape the sun.
When she returned the car was gone. Standing in the sun with the attendant and the clustered children and the barking dogs, she felt exactly how alone she was. For twenty-odd years she had dodged that knowledge. Now it fought its way to the front of her heart. She thought back to the bitter June fight, three months after Miracle’s birth, when for no reason she could put a pen to she knew that the heat of first love she’d felt was no longer there and would never return, not with Bernie. Since that night it had only been a matter of waiting.
Talbott pulled up then, profuse with apology. He had moved the car to avoid blocking the pump, and had to drive to the edge of town to find a space big enough to turn around in. She took his arm for the walk to the car.
The town disappeared in a shimmer of heat before the first bend, then the desolation began. Life vanished. Shovels had turned the earth upside down, the black, coal-rich seams above leaching color into the blue clay below. Mounds of earth eroded into fabulous creatures threatened to swoop onto their heads. With no forest for shade, the heat blasted from the coal-blackened earth until she grew light-headed, separated from her sweating body. She felt at peace, at home, for the first time since she’d stepped from her cool kitch
en; maybe for the first time since she’d held Bernie’s hand, a moment after they’d married, and arched her eyebrows to his wink.
They left the mines as quickly as they had come upon them. The road twisted upwards like a sidewinding snake, climbing the spine of a ridge at an angle that pressed her back into her seat and lifted her eyes to the sky. The pavement broke, then ended at a sudden pothole. A swirl of gray dust rose behind them.
They passed a shack, where skinny children with hair white as sunlight rushed at the clearing edge pumping their fists. He honked. She liked him for that.
The light slanted at their backs when they crested the ridge. Gravel gave way to ruts. He braked at a curve; they were swallowed by their own clouds of dust. She coughed and he stopped the car to wipe his eyes.
They might have been waiting since creation, the faces that lined that porch. They appeared through the settling dust, like spirits made visible by a thin coating of dirt. At the far end of the clearing a square frame church squatted before a single spreading oak. The road ended at a graveled turnabout.
Every living person was gathered on the single porch, which ran the length of the shacks. The men sat in clean overalls and white shirts, their hands planted on their knees. The women stood in faded print dresses, their children at their sides. They stood still and unblinking as for a photograph and in the still summer heat Martha caught the scent of Ivory soap. It was Saturday night.
He parked the car—it was as long as the shacks were wide. He stepped down. She did not want to get out but it was the end of the road; where were they going if not here? And to drive the length of the porch, under those eyes, to circle the turnabout without so much as an acknowledgement—that was as impossible as the thought of snow. She stepped from the car and shook the dust from her dress.
The men nodded, slightly. The locusts thrummed and a gust stirred in the trees but in her ears there was only the beating of her heart and the metallic tick of the cooling engine. Could these people talk? Could she talk herself? she wondered, in this silent place at the end of the world.
Crossing the River Page 7