“Café’s open,” the man nearest them said.
There was a sign, she saw it now, weatherworn and pocked with birdshot. They moved toward it. There was no “no” in that clearing. Time was the only excuse, and that was no excuse here.
Inside the dark pressed welcome as a damp cloth against her skin. A long bar ran down one side of the room, backed by a cracked mirror. To one side a rainbow of neon arched over the playing compartment of a jukebox. A dark square of floor framed a pale circle worn by dancers’ feet. Martha sat away from the jukebox. Talbott crossed to the bar to order.
The men moved in from the porch. In the dark room they peered at her like raccoons from a knothole. The older men moved straight to the bar before turning to look at her, but the young men—the young men!—eyed her from the door, before turning their heads in a slow circle to check for her companion.
She had worn her hat inside to protect herself from curious stares. Now she pulled the pins that held it in place and set it on the table. The red sash drooped over her legs.
Talbott stood at the bar, his foot propped on its brass rail, his funny hat tilted at an angle that made the feather stand out. She was sorry that she so clearly belonged to him. Otherwise she might belong to these people. One of the pale young men might approach her, talking to her in a sharp twang whose words she would not need to understand, and out of place and time who knew what she might do? Could do? A high school memory returned: an evening waiting for a call that never came.
He brought her beer and a sandwich soaked in grease from its slab of ham. He excused himself to the men’s room, apologizing for leaving her alone. She busied herself pouring her beer until he was off.
At the bar the café owner brought out dice. The younger men drifted to the bar and ordered beers. A ruddy boy with a washboard stomach and a painter’s cap fed quarters to the jukebox, playing plaintive songs sung by women backed by slide guitars. He leaned his buttocks against the jukebox, his head bent and swaying in time with the music. Between songs he sipped his beer and smiled at her when she gave him the chance.
They all looked alike to her, these men, all glittering dark eyes and dull brown hair, in need of sunshine and a hot meal. All shared some angle of pale jaw or nose until she felt as if she were a stranger amid an immense extended family’s reunion.
Only the ruddy-complexioned boy at the jukebox looked different. She pretended to adjust the hat’s sash while looking over the brim. In the poor light she imagined his hair was blond, bleached pale by the sun.
A snappy tune came over the loudspeaker and she found herself tapping her foot. The ruddy boy looked at her and smiled. It was like marrying Bernie: she was out on the floor before she could say no.
She was not herself, she might say to the women in New Hope and Mount Hermon, though she felt more herself than she remembered ever feeling. It was the heat; it was the drive, so far from home; it was the blond lights in his hair.
He was a good dancer. They moved like a dream, she remembered fancy moves from a high school class, she used her feet and kept her eyes somewhere behind his back and shy of the men at the bar. For three minutes she belonged to him, showing off for eyes she hoped were looking.
Then it was over. He took her hand and she dropped his, she left him standing, she was alone at her table. She sat with her back to him and the bar, watching the curved arm in the jukebox travel under the rainbow, to the next selection.
The dice no longer rattled. The room sat quiet as a pasture before a July storm. The owner grumbled something under his breath. His neighbor laughed. Outside the café she heard the evening chatter of the birds and the shrill hum of the tree frogs. She leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. When Talbott moved from the shadows she rose and offered him her arm.
Outside the sun slanted through the trees. The women had moved with their children from the porch to the steps of the church, whose doors were open. They took her in with a single glance. She sat quickly, folding her hands in her lap. Circling the turnabout she felt in their brown eyes a mixture of envy and jealousy and fear that was as close to hatred as anyone could get in half an hour, closer than those first terrible days after her marriage to Bernie, when she was alone in New Hope and the life she’d left in Mount Hermon could have been a universe away. She wanted to leave the car, join the women on the steps and explain: the car; the heat; Talbott’s wife; the dance, about which somehow she was certain they knew. Her head turned slightly, as if invisible threads connected her eyes to theirs. They looked at her, unsmiling.
The car passed the café. The ruddy boy stood on the steps. In this clear evening light his hair lay across his forehead, as flat and dull brown as a sparrow’s back. In his hand, at his side, she saw her hat, the ribbon a red gash against his blue overalls. Talbott did not see him. She did not turn her head.
They regained the gravel, then the pavement. The sun slipped into a bank of clouds and the sky glowed like fire opal.
“You could have gotten us into a fight,” Talbott said.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s OK. I liked knowing I was with you. Every man in the place had his eyes on you and they all knew you were with me. I haven’t felt like that in a long time. Maybe ever.” He turned his head to look straight at her. “The bartender told me only fallen women came inside that place. He actually used those words: ‘fallen women.’” He rested his hand on her knee.
They inched down the ridge. At sharp curves he used both hands on the wheel, leaving a cool print of sweat on her knee. On straight stretches he replaced his hand.
They came to the mines. He slowed and turned down a gravel lane. Overhead the Milky Way arched like a sequined shawl against the velvet sky. He parked, tossing his hat in the rear seat. The ruined earth rose around them, barren and black; the air hung stale. They might have parked among the craters of the moon.
He moved to the back seat without speaking. She followed. On her knee his hand was moist and cool. She leaned her head back. Against the sky she framed like a moving picture the image of her dancing, a slow and elegant foxtrot to the twang of the slide guitar . . . she kept her eyes closed.
Back on the road, they drove in silence. They passed the crenelated gas station, empty and dark and still. No one walked the street; the crowd that day might have been ghosts. Where the road turned a caution light blinked, a yellow cat’s eye against the black mass of the mountain.
The land flattened. Lights appeared through the trees, barnyard mercury lamps, surrounded by haloes of swarming moths.
He cleared his throat. “I have a wife.”
She raised a finger. “The lightning bugs are beautiful tonight,” she said.
Then the sky glowed, the fluorescent glow of Lexington, and they were back among the tin-roofed shanties, over the viaduct, into the city, the only car on the streets.
Back in New Hope, he stopped in the lane below the Miracle drive. The house was dark. To the west the tanks and guns of Fort Knox lit the sky as brightly as sunset.
In the desperate grind of the katydids, in the touch of coolness under the warm air, she felt a hint of fall. She shivered. He laid a hand on her arm. “When can we get together again?”
In the dim light his blond hair seemed so ordinary and defenseless it pained her to look at him. He stirred a part of her that years before she had left behind for dead.
But then who was she? A stranger on the empty lane in front of her own house, a foolish woman with too much explaining to do.
She squeezed his hand. “I enjoyed the ride.” She shut the car door carefully and entered her kitchen, alone.
5
In Between
Summer passed into fall. The hills flamed with scarlet sumac and gold hickory and an occasional bright red sugar maple. In the morning air the walls of the valley pressed in on Miracle as he went to work. He felt as if he were walking in an open bowl of flame. The mist from the river rose to blend with the smoke left from the Fort Knox firing pra
ctices, coloring the western sky gray. Miracle thought that hell must look something like New Hope: with the colors and the smoke and the rumble of the guns behind the hills.
Days were tense. Bernie never referred to the fair while making it perfectly clear that a son who sided with his mother in an argument violated the most basic principles of human decency and social order. On top of that Miracle had not seen or spoken to Rosamund since the night of the fair.
The fair ran in Miracle’s mind long after the ferris wheel folded and the trees flamed red. Big events had happened, big in his life anyway. For a while Miracle waited for big changes to result.
But nothing changed, not for Miracle anyway. At lunch Talbott came to the Inn like always, to eat his pickled sausage and crackers and beer. Bradford Uptegrove talked about what a dog LaHoma Dean was and dated her every Friday night. Rosamund was nowhere to be seen, but on Saturday nights Talbott bought Wild Turkey and Asti Spumanti.
Only Martha had changed, and she made no attempt to conceal it. Miracle decided that either Bernie was blind or he was deliberately ignoring her. Working in the kitchen she sang little tunes, “Paper Moon” and “Tea for Two” and “Barbara Allen.” She wore Sunday clothes around the house and put on lipstick in the mornings. Once Miracle found her staring into her bureau mirror, her head tilted to one side and resting in the cup of her hand.
Miracle mistrusted these changes. Something was afoot that he should be fearing and fighting . . . then Rosamund Uptegrove left for Nashville, and in the misery of the moment Miracle put thoughts of his mother from his mind.
Miracle and Rosamund hadn’t been speaking, or at least Miracle hadn’t been speaking to her. Rosamund seldom spoke first to anybody, and Miracle could not really say she wasn’t speaking to him now. He expected somehow that she would say good-bye to him before she left. In one plan she came to the driveup window alone, apologizing for ignoring him and asking to meet at the mausoleum at midnight. In another plan she sent a note through Bradford, asking Miracle to meet below the bridge. She would reveal that she had been saving herself for Miracle. She might give herself to him then; at least she would plead with him to visit her in Nashville.
On the evening before Rosamund left for Nashville she drove up to the driveup window. Miracle was alone behind the bar with no customers but for Estill Mallory and a farmer from the near side of Strang Knob, trying to make two beers last the night. Miracle’s heart leaped when he saw her at the window. He leaned out over the little shelf that stuck outside.
It was the last warm evening of the year. The air held fall and Rosamund was dressed for it, wearing a gold scarf wrapped gypsy-like around her black hair, and a cashmere sweater. She drove Talbott’s Mustang, with the top down. She was alone.
“Hi, Miracle,” she said. “Two fifths of Asti Spumanti.”
He ducked inside. The shelf was empty of Asti Spumanti and he had to search the stockroom. He emerged with dust balls clinging to his clothes. She drummed her fingers on the window. “Add a fifth of Wild Turkey to that, please,” she said. He got the bourbon.
“Twenty-four ninety-five,” he said. She gave him a fifty. As he changed the bill he saw in the mirror a little trail of dirt stuck against his ear.
Faced with a topless Mustang his courage wilted. At the picnic he had been moved to ask Rosamund to meet him at the bridge, but then he had thought of them on even terms. Now she drove Talbott’s car and was on her way to being a star in Nashville. He moved back to the window on reluctant feet. “When are you leaving for Nashville,” he said.
“Tomorrow. I’m stocking up.”
“They have liquor in Nashville.”
“I know that. But I’ve developed a taste for this Italian stuff. Who knows where I can find it there. Besides, there I wouldn’t be able to buy it from you.” She took her change from his hand and she was gone.
More often than not, when Martha saw Talbott he was with someone else. She saw him on the Jackson Highway in front of Mallory’s Merchandise, talking with Estill about his tool stock. Or she saw him at the construction site as she waited at the levee turnabout for a car from the south side of the river to clear the bridge. Sometimes she pretended a car was coming when there was none in sight so she could sit at the turnabout, watching Talbott from a distance. He was easy to pick out. His was the only blond head in the lot. When he wasn’t bareheaded he was wearing the jaunty hat he’d worn when they drove to the mountains. She’d said she liked it, one morning when he wore it to her house. After that he wore it whenever he came to see her.
Sitting on the levee watching him was dangerous. With only a little craning of his neck Bernie could see the turnabout through the Inn windows. But every encounter she had with Talbott was dangerous, and she thrived on the danger. In chance meetings (not so chance, really, since they plotted where each would be and arranged their coincidences) she felt herself talking too loudly, gesturing too much and too widely. She would glance around the room, searching for his eyes, to find them already on her, his steady blue gaze meeting her own in a way that Bernie’s had never done. With Bernie that gaze had been a puzzle, then a challenge. With Talbott it was the mutual exchange of desire, pure and simple.
Sitting at the turnabout, watching Talbott, Martha remembered those years with Bernie. Now they hardly seemed long at all. Instead they had passed faster than memory. One day Miracle was a baby, and she and Bernie were beginning to set into their hard and fast ways. The next she was throwing Miracle’s graduation party on the banks of the Knobs Fork, and flirting, yes, flirting, with a married Yankee contractor. Did this happen because it had to happen, its time had come, and anyone would do? Or because Talbott Marquand appeared, the right man at last, with his blond hair and Yankee ways? The question haunted her as she sat on the levee, waiting for an imaginary car to clear the bridge, watching Talbott climb in and out and among the muck and men and bulldozers.
It was risky, but it was better than waiting at home. There she never knew for certain when he would appear. He would promise to come in the morning, when Bernie and Miracle were off to work. Then there’d be a crisis at the site and she’d sit for an hour, two hours, drinking coffee until her nerves sang before she gave up on his coming. Or Bernie would return after the morning rush to work at home on his accounts. From the kitchen window Martha would see Talbott drive slowly up the Jackson Highway, pausing for a moment before her own drive; and, seeing Bernie’s Rambler, speed on.
On mornings like that she snapped at Bernie and Miracle for no reason. Once when Bernie asked in his rough, joking way if she had ants in her pants, she ran from the house to the barren garden rather than let him see her cry. She stood in a drizzle, overlooking the river valley to the gray outline of Strang Knob, until she heard the Rambler start and drive away.
More than once she and Talbott and Bernie were together, just the three of them. One especially awful day Bernie returned to fetch a checkbook or a ledger or some trivial object he’d left behind, to find Talbott sitting at the kitchen table, calmly drinking the coffee Martha had thrust into his hands when she saw Bernie drive up. They’d acted as calm and unflustered as if nothing at all were amiss. Bernie had asked after the construction; Talbott replied that it was fine, that a man had to get away from time to time and he’d felt like taking a walk. Bernie had nodded, sympathized. Martha believed he suspected nothing, but he sat to coffee, twiddling his fingers, scratching at his ears, smoking.
Over Bernie’s head Martha’s gaze caught and lost Talbott’s. She was afraid that if she met her lover’s eyes too long that she would laugh, or break into tears, or that Bernie, even thick-skinned Bernie, would feel the longing passing from her to Talbott and back. She stared out the window, at the cardinals pecking at the sunflower heads she’d hung in the bare redbud branches.
When Bernie rose to go he offered Talbott a ride. Talbott accepted. Martha shook his hand (Yankee Talbott always shook the women’s hands, even from that first day at Miracle’s graduation picnic). She watched fro
m the window, her hand tingling. They crossed the drive together, her lover and her husband. The cardinals, startled from their roost, fluttered to the top branches of the neighbor’s hackberry, two gashes of fresh-drawn blood against the gray November sky. Watching the men go, Martha was overwhelmed by despair.
But there were other mornings, when Bernie left town for the day and Miracle was stuck at the Inn. Talbott would appear at the back door, having snuck from the rear of the pool hall along the L & N line to the river, and from there up through the fields. Then they would fall on each other, taking no time for explanations.
They went to Martha and Bernie’s bedroom, where if Bernie returned they would hear his tires on the drive or his feet on the doorstep and have the chance of regaining enough clothes and respectability to avoid a confrontation. Opposite her bed there hung two wood mosaics, presents from Grandma Miracle at Martha and Bernie’s wedding: the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the left, with rays of red cedar emanating from his dark walnut chest; and Mary, Mother of Sorrows, on the right, with seven swords of palest maple stuck in her rich cherry heart. Under their beatific gaze, Martha and Talbott made love.
It was only love, at first. After Bernie’s hard, angular joints Talbott was thick and substantial. Martha’s thumb and forefinger encircled Bernie’s wrist with an inch to spare. With Talbott her whole hand rested like a child’s in his own. Bernie’s skin was scaly and red and raw, by blood inheritance and from years of work. Talbott was blond and fair and smooth as he could afford to be. Lying with him she took her greatest pleasure from looking at, and touching, as lightly as she could, his fair, thick body.
It was love; then she added hope. She felt sharp as swords the discoveries that were happening from within. She was forty-five years old, for more than twenty years she had lived with a man who begrudged her love and with whom she begrudged her body in return. With Talbott’s every visit that part of her tucked at the back of her heart—the part that felt—emerged a little farther into the light.
Crossing the River Page 8