Crossing the River

by Fenton Johnson

  Miracle’s breath came in clouds and under his coat his sweat sat in cold puddles. He had barely warmed up when Bernie came from the house to stand in range of Miracle’s ax. Miracle held off chopping.

  “I want you to promise,” Bernie said.

  Miracle leaned on the ax handle. The day was cold and gray, colder than Christmas in the Knobs ought to be. The smoke from Bernie’s cigarette rose straight up, without so much as a coil, until it passed Bernie’s gray-flecked hair.

  “Promise what,” Miracle said.

  “Promise me what I want.” From his coat pocket Bernie pulled the silver flask, engraved with the initials of his great-grandfather, the man who built the Miracle Inn and set his mausoleum on the biggest knoll in the Catholic cemetery. “Have a drink,” Bernie said. Miracle drank, and handed the flask back to Bernie. “Keep it,” Bernie said with a wave of his hand. “I got it from my father when I was your age. It was the only thing he ever gave me before he died. ‘This goes to the Miracle that runs the Inn,’ he said. It was the last thing he gave me, too, except for the Miracle Inn.”

  “Give it to me when you’re ready to die, then,” Miracle said.

  “If you waited for that you’d never set hands on it. Leo would have it from my pocket before my butt was cold. Don’t give me any shit. Take it. It’s yours.” Miracle stuck the flask in his hip pocket. Bernie stuffed his hands deeper in his pockets and stared at Miracle with a brown intensity. Miracle leaned his ax against the log he’d set upright and turned to look west to Strang Knob. “You promise?” Bernie asked of his son’s back.

  “I can’t promise if I don’t know what you want.”

  “You know what I want. I want to know that my son will follow me like I followed my father. I want to know that the Miracle Inn will stay in the family, instead of getting sold off to some no-count Yankee who wants to put in a Dairy Queen and a car wash. I heard talk already. Leo thinks Talbott Marquand’s got the best ideas for running the place. If I turned it over to Leo, he’d have the place wrecked for the dime it cost him to call the wrecker. He won’t say that now, but I know. I know by the look in his eye, I knew it the day they opened my father’s will and they read where the Inn was to be all mine, only mine. My father did a lot of stupid things in his time and he paid for them I guess, but he knew what he was doing when he gave that Inn to me. And I know what I’m doing now.”

  Miracle did not turn around, even when he heard Bernie grind his cigarette beneath his heel. Bernie cleared his throat and spat. “So you won’t promise.”

  “I can’t promise to do something I’m not even half sure what is. I’ll run the Inn when you need me. Next year—hell, I might be in college next year. I might get drafted. I might be in Vietnam, next year.” I might be in Nashville, with Rosamund Uptegrove, he added to himself.

  “Not if you’re running the Inn. The Army won’t draft a mother’s sole support.”

  “I’m not my mother’s sole support. You’re my mother’s sole support.” Miracle picked up the ax. With a clean blow he split the log before him. “I hear they’re talking snow. If I don’t get this wood put up now we’re not likely to get it up ’til we need it.”

  “You,” Bernie said. At that voice Miracle stopped. He looked at his father in the gray failing December light. Bernie’s face was bright red. On his nose the tiniest veins stood out.

  “You do what you think best,” Bernie said. “You will anyway. That’s what makes you a Pickett, I guess.” He turned. “I got to go inside. I’m not up to stacking wood, not now.” He shuffled to the house, picking his sleeves as he went.

  Miracle chopped, hard, sure strokes, until he heard the thunk of the storm door closing. Then he buried his ax in a stump and sat, crossing his arms and keeping his back to the Miracle house. Was it so much on Christmas Day, to promise a father what he wanted? For a week, or a month, or a year, Miracle could have made Bernie happy, and Bernie, a Catholic and a Southerner, was not a happy man by nature. It was little enough for a son to make a promise that a year later, with any good excuse, he could break. Lots of things changed in a year, even, just possibly, Bernie.

  Miracle shook his head and stood. He pulled the flask from his pocket and lifted it to the gray sky. “To the family,” he said, and drank.

  Martha was never so aware of herself as an interloper to the Miracle family as when she bent to the stove. Whatever measure of acceptance she’d gained in twenty years she could lose in a moment, by putting bacon in the fried apples or leaving marshmallows off her candied yams. The feast would be set out on the table, the endless family lined up to feed. One by one they would pass her dish by. A sister-in-law might exclaim, “Well, I never. Hard-boiled eggs in the tuna salad! Martha Pickett, you always got a new idea,” meaning, “Twenty years and she still lays a Baptist tuna salad!” Loyal Dolores would take a tablespoonful. At meal’s end the table would be ravaged, littered with corpses of empty dishes. Only Martha’s contribution would sit pristine, untouched except for her own helping and Dolores’s daring tablespoon.

  Talbott was gone, home to Detroit for Christmas. When he’d told her he was leaving, she’d thought of it as time to make a break. He would go away; out of sight, out of mind. She would compose herself and a speech for his return, when she would announce that it was over between them.

  Then he left, and she found herself counting the days until he returned; looking with longing at the telephone, knowing that she could find his number, she could call, if she wanted to be so brazen. Desire raged against good sense.

  She had been in this place before, when Bernie Miracle asked her to cross the river. How often and how hard did a body have to endure lessons before it finally took them to heart?

  When Bernie entered the kitchen, she was mixing up caramel icing for the jam cake she was to take to the Miracle family dinner. He stood under the bright kitchen light, passing nervous hands across his hair, cut like the stubble of winter straw. Martha noticed how gray his hair was, how much grayer it had turned in the last several months, or was that her imagination? She had been so swept up in Talbott, in the changes in her own life, that she’d hardly looked at Bernie in a longer time than she could remember.

  He was smoking more and drinking more coffee, she knew that because she emptied the ashtrays and bought the Maxwell House. His cheeks were flushed, they’d always been that way, but now the blush stood out in two bright red roses against his skin. Above these the bruise from the Christmas Eve fight swelled blue and yellow.

  But the icing was on the flame, and the memory of too many grainy icings served to too many Miracle women weighed on her hands, and though she could not remember the last time Bernie had approached her alone to talk she kept her mind and her eye on the bubbling pot.

  “I want you to promise,” Bernie said.

  “Promise what?”

  “That you’ll be buried next to me. In the Miracle family plot.”

  With great deliberateness Martha dripped icing from her spoon into a bowl of water. She fingered the glob of sugar and butter: too soft. She did not turn to Bernie until the icing was back over the flame. Then she spoke with no more heat than if she were bidding clubs in the Tuesday night bridge circle. “Bernie, I don’t give a damn where I’m buried. You got my name on that gravestone, you put me there. That’s as good a place as any, and with a view. Though given my druthers, I’d as soon be in the garden out back, if I had an opinion on the subject which I don’t. Now let me finish my icing in peace. Please.”

  Bernie remained unmoved. “That’s not the same as a promise, saying you don’t care. I know you don’t care. I care.”

  “Then do what you want.”

  “I won’t be here to do what I want. You got to promise to do what I want.”

  “Bernie Miracle, I don’t got to do what anybody wants. I do things because I want to do them, or because I think they’re the right thing to do even if I don’t want to do them.”

  “Which one’s the reason why you stayed with me for t
wenty-three years, then.”

  In little plops and hisses the icing bubbled. Outside Miracle’s ax fell on seasoned oak in a steady thunk.

  Martha turned to face her husband. “I try to live an honest life, Bernie Miracle. If I have learned one thing it’s that it’s not easy to be a good woman or a good man in this world. You can stick your head in the sand or you can lift it out, but you can bet if you lift it out you’re going to get things thrown at it. I could have stayed in Mount Hermon, you know that. I could have married a good Baptist boy and by now he’d have built me a nice split-level ranch house with an all-electric kitchen and a dishwasher. You could have married a good Catholic girl who’d have given you bean soup every Friday and all the children you wanted and then some. I married across the river, and I married into the Church, and I did both because I thought they were the right thing to do. I have always thought that you did the same thing for the same reasons.

  “You didn’t know what you were getting into then, neither of us did, but we’ve figured it out, some, anyway, since. And you ought to know, you can’t ask me that kind of promise. Maybe once, twenty years ago. Not now. I’ve learned a little about myself, Bernie. I can’t give you that promise any more than I could have married that nice Baptist boy with the split-level and the dishwasher. If I promised you I would be lying, I know that and you do too. Most of the time I can’t figure out what’s right or what’s wrong. I’d be a fool to do the wrong thing when finally a time comes when I know what’s right. So I won’t promise, because I can’t promise.”

  “A good wife would promise.”

  “Bernie, I can’t promise, can’t you see that?”

  Bernie’s hand passed over his hair, fingered his earlobe, touched the swollen place below his eye and rested there, kneading it lightly as if caressing the pain. “I wonder how much you love me,” he said reflectively. “I wondered it then. I wonder it now. I guess I always will.” He left the kitchen as quietly as he had entered.

  If in twenty years he’d used the word “love,” she couldn’t remember it. Now when forced to say it, he asked for it in tablespoons or ounces or cups, measured out as surely as butter and brown sugar.

  It’s not fair, she wanted to cry. She stood pointing her wooden spoon like a weapon at the place where Bernie had been, until stirred back to life by the smell of her icing, ruining over the flame.

  The rights and wrongs of it all stayed floating in the air, but about the facts of his situation Bernie won out. The next day, as he and Leo stacked cases of pink champagne at the Miracle Inn, Bernie dropped a case and sat on it, gray and glassy and clutching his side. His heart stuttered once, then twice again, quick as boxer’s punches, while Leo shoveled his brother’s limp body into the cab of his pickup and careened across the river to Mount Hermon Baptist Hospital.

  Leo might as well have taken his time. Long before he pulled into the emergency dock, Bernie’s heart had stopped, as still and dead as the river bottoms on a clear cold winter night.

  8

  Free at Last . . .

  She had wanted to be free; now she was free.

  Across four days Martha sat with the casket from nine a.m., when the funeral home opened, until the last visitor had left and there was only Grandma Miracle and herself and her son. She would like to have believed that she stayed from love, but her conscience allowed no part of that. She stayed from guilt, and anger, and fear of feelings that she kept at bay by immersing herself in the Catholic way of dying.

  Bernie died on Thursday; Catholics were not buried on Sundays. Grandma Miracle’s stern gaze did not allow so much as the thought of burying Bernie two days after he died. He had instead to lie in state. Every man from Jessup County to the Tennessee line who had lifted a beer to his lips came to pay his respects. The women and the dries came, too, to make certain that the object of their vilifications had in fact gone to his punishment. All Bernie’s family came: brothers, sisters, in-laws, cousins, nieces, nephews. Every moment of every day was filled with people, most of them connected to the Miracle name in some way, either by blood or by law. With every visitor Martha felt judgment like the stab of a maple sword to her heart.

  For certainly they knew. If Grandma Miracle knew, if Ossetta knew, if Rosie knew, then the word would have filtered out: Bernie had been a martyr to his wife’s philanderings. “She just plain broke his heart.”

  There was food. Martha would return from the funeral home to find her doorstep littered with Jello salads and jam cakes and fried chicken and noodle casseroles. She filled the refrigerator and the freezer and covered the back porch with food and still it kept coming.

  And there were prayers, more prayers even than food. Every night a rosary and the Litany of the Saints, at Grandma Miracle’s request the long version, forty-five minutes kneeling. At night Martha soaked her soft Baptist knees in a hot bath and then lay through the night staring at the ceiling, fearing her dreams and praying for sleep. She was afraid to pray for more. She told herself that the God for whom she’d crossed the river was nowhere to be found, but she was afraid to do much looking.

  From her dresser their wedding photograph directed accusing glances. She with her eyebrows arched, Bernie with his wink. How could she have known that it was the closest moment they would ever share? That first night she turned it to the wall.

  In bed alone (the only time of those long days when she was alone, the time she most needed company) she tried to convince herself that her imagination was running wild, that she exaggerated the suspicion and contempt that she felt from all sides. But imagination proved stronger than will. In brief snatches of uneasy dreams she was pursued by tall, spare figures whose features she never saw, except for the jaw that jutted as sharp and cold and square as a cube of ice.

  When morning came she rose to bear alone the burden of her reputation. Talbott was still away, and she was grateful for that. Had he been in town she would have been too tempted to ask for something foolish. She thought of fleeing with him to someplace bigger, more northern, where snow fell from November to April and where she had no name and no husband about to be laid in his grave.

  Not that Talbott would agree to such a thing. He would shake his blond head and fear would rise behind his eyes and she’d likely never see him again. But that old perversity rose again, the desire to do something that was not done. Because of it she wanted to leave.

  She stayed. At the worst moments, when she caught a stare held a moment too long, or overheard the conversation stage-whispered for her benefit, she made herself stay. At those moments she thought not on her grief, nor on her guilt, but on what she would call hatred, if she dared name it at all. She made herself believe that Bernie had chosen the time and place of his dying; had waited twenty-three years until she broke from his grasp, so as to be able to retaliate in the surest way. In believing that of him, she survived.

  Miracle moved through the days as if sleepwalking. Being Catholic, he looked for someone at whom to point the finger, to burden with the blame. He blamed himself for the fight at the Inn, which he saw as the incident which brought on Bernie’s heart attack. He blamed his mother for her affair with Talbott, which he saw as the general source of Bernie’s troubles. In his own uneasy dreams he blamed the Inn.

  On the second night after Bernie’s death Miracle dreamed that he returned to the Inn. The door banged open in the winter wind. Inside the floor was a mess of broken bottles and bent cans. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and flat beer. Behind the bar, in front of the starburst hole of the shattered mirror, stood his father and grandfather and the great-grandfather whom Miracle had never known but whom he knew now instantly, not from the oval portrait above the bar but from his Miracle jaw and bones and flesh and blood.

  They ignored him. They walked in a circle, surveying the damage, shaking their heads. From the door Miracle spread his hands and tried to explain: the awful Christmas Eve, Rosamund Uptegrove, Martha and Talbott, it wasn’t his fault. His throat was dry as ice. Only a raw cr
oak emerged.

  In his waking hours Miracle avoided Martha. If she entered the room he left. If he found himself drawn into a conversation with her and their relatives he excused himself politely. He spoke nothing. He said volumes.

  Throughout all, Grandma Miracle hovered at Martha’s shoulder like a referee, ushering her through the motions as a mother might lead a bride. In the first days Martha shied from the old woman, wondering what was in this for her; wondering when Bernie’s mother would seize the moment to draw Martha aside—if she bothered to be so discreet—and speak her mind about Talbott Marquand.

  By Saturday evening Martha found herself grateful for Grandma Miracle’s presence. An old hand at death, Grandma Miracle insisted on the particulars of ritual. Everything was to be exactly so, down to the choice of mysteries for the Sunday night rosary (Joyful) and the liquor to be served at the wake (beer only until six, then whiskey for the family). She made it perfectly clear where Martha was to be and how she was to act, and though the strain of performance was exhausting, Martha was grateful that it was all so unthinking, like following another’s footsteps in heavy snow. She need only lift her feet and set them down in the old woman’s prints.

  For the moment Martha followed. Dogging her steps was the suspicion that when Bernie was irretrievably in the ground, when the family was back to Louisville and Lexington and the hills and the hollows, when Martha was left alone with Miracle and Talbott and New Hope and Mount Hermon, the snow that provided her a trail would melt away, leaving the muddy, trackless ground of her conscience to cross alone.

  As if to bear these thoughts out it snowed, the first snow of the year, on that Sunday night between Christmas and New Year’s. Sleet pinging against the panes stirred Martha from her dreams, and she rose to watch it turn from ice to thick snow, until the porch light cut a white arc through the whirling flakes. All night it snowed; all night she watched it snow.