Crossing the River

by Fenton Johnson

  The next morning the window sill was buried. In the side yard the cardinals who made their home in the neighbor’s hackberry tree perched close together on a bare redbud limb, their feathers ruffled and their bills tucked in their breasts.

  The car was snowed in. She and Miracle pulled on boots and trudged wordlessly the half-mile to the funeral home, the buckles on Miracle’s clumpy black galoshes jingling with every step.

  At the funeral home the undertaker was late. When finally he arrived he insisted on delaying even more, to let friends and relatives arrive. The priest started a rosary. No soul would lose heaven because of negligence on his part.

  But almost no one did arrive. The Jackson Highway was closed north and south. Grandma Miracle made it, and Leo, on a grader driven by a second cousin once removed who headed the county road crew. When Martha’s parents called, she begged them to stay home. They were too old, and the tension that came when they and Grandma Miracle occupied the same room was more than Martha could bear. A few other friends who lived nearby and who’d dug out their tractors knelt for the last rosary.

  No one came from across the river until at the end of the rosary the door opened. Bradford Uptegrove and Talbott and Big Rosie entered, brought across the bridge in a four-wheel-drive pickup Talbott had commandeered from the construction site.

  Martha found herself wrapped in Rosie’s arms almost before her eyes had registered the fact that her old friend was there. Cold air washed from the folds of Rosie’s fur. Past differences were there—Martha could feel Talbott’s presence without seeing his face or hearing him speak—but something larger and older brought Martha and Rosie together: the knowledge that they were women, and that women suffer.

  In Mount Hermon and New Hope there are two kinds of weddings: big weddings, where the bride controls her invitation list like a weapon, and only the brashest come uninvited; and small weddings, when the bride is pregnant, or of a different faith than the groom, or perhaps, in Mount Hermon, divorced.

  There are only big funerals. For a funeral everyone turns out, rich, poor, timid, brash. All the relations come. After the relations come the elderly who live near the church, who know the deceased only as a face in the post office or by a family resemblance. They come to remind each other that they are still alive, and to mark the shrinking of the community of people who knew life as they knew it. They come to become familiar with death, in the way they might visit a bar the better to know its owner.

  Whatever their reasons for attending the funeral all expect a wake, with food and (in New Hope) drink and, if the deceased were decently old, perhaps a singing session to follow. Grandma Miracle had planned her oldest son’s funeral on that scale. There was the crowd who would come because they knew Bernie or were related to him. Twice again their numbers was the crowd who came to see the crowd, the freeloaders and out-of-office politicians of half a state.

  It was an occasion not to be missed, and nearly everybody missed it. Martha prayed fervently throughout the priest’s rosary, but she prayed not for Bernie’s soul—surely burdened past need with prayers—but that the road crew would not plow the Jackson Highway through to the outside.

  Her prayers were answered. The snow was too deep. The undertaker nodded at the priest. Under pretense of looking at the flowers, Martha counted the living: there were twenty-two.

  She felt a knobby claw at her elbow. It was Grandma Miracle. “What do you think, child?” she asked.

  Martha pretended to give the matter long attention. “The arrangements have been made,” she said at last. “The grave is dug. The food is set out at home. I think we should go ahead.”

  “You’re damn right we should go ahead, but not for none of them reasons. This is a Miracle affair and we’ll run it exactly how we please. If those no-count children of mine let a little snow stop them from their brother’s funeral, why, I say to hell with them, is what I say. Eh?”

  Why was it that everybody Martha knew constantly demanded agreement? Grandma Miracle knew what she felt—God knows if anybody knew what she felt it was Grandma Miracle—why did she want Martha’s opinion? It was the old family need for a unified front: us against them, whoever they were. “Yes,” Martha sighed, with more resignation than agreement.

  “I know how you feel, child. You forget I hadn’t always been a Miracle.” The claw at Martha’s elbow tightened. “Only men ever belong to families, really. They get a name and they grow up with it and they know it will always be theirs, they own it and it owns them. I was a Blanchard. That don’t mean nothing to you, from across the river. And there’s no more of us anyway. There were seven of us, all girls; my daddy tried and tried for a son, he broke hisself and my mamma out trying for a son, and every damned one of us girls. We were a reproach to him, a living mortification. He looked at us and he saw the curse of Job.

  “And I looked him back square. That name meant more to me than it ever meant to him because it was mine alone, mine and my sister’s, and I watched it disappear and knew that I was the last generation to carry it as my own. I was a Blanchard after I married into the Miracles. We was peaceful folks, Blanchards were, as peaceful as a graveyard under a new moon, and this Miracle crowd seemed like the sons of Sodom to me. I was a Blanchard until the day they brought my husband, Bernie’s daddy, up from the river. Then I stood in the Miracle Inn, with all my children around me, Bernie and Leo among ’em, trying to figure out who was going to run the place and if we was going to stay open in the face of those Chicago bootleggers that was cutting people and shooting people and whatnot, and that day I took over the Miracle Inn.

  “I expect Bernie never told you I ran the Inn, those years before he was old enough. He was ashamed to have an outsider running the Inn, and a woman at that. I ran it better than him or anybody else before or since, I’ll tell you that. Or maybe I should say it ran me. Times was different then, it was harder on a woman. I don’t expect you’ll have that problem.”

  Martha stifled a spasm of anger. “You won’t see me stepping through that door for love nor money. That’s the Miracle Inn, in case you hadn’t noticed. I leave it to the Miracles. They can chop the place up and use it for firewood, for all I care.”

  The claw loosened. “I know you,” Grandma said. “You’ll do what’s got to be done. That’s what every woman does. She sees what’s got to be done, and she does it.”

  Martha felt the old woman’s eyes level with her own, but she kept her own eyes fixed on nothing, somewhere above a floor lamp that diffused light through an inverted saucer of frosted glass. She did not shift her gaze until the old woman yielded her grip.

  “That Inn is yours now, and you got a son who’s got the name. He’s Bernie’s son, he’s the son with the brains, your brains or mine, I might add, they didn’t come of no Miracle that I ever knew, and by rights the Inn is his. I never asked no questions about why one single child and I don’t want answers now. You could of had a dozen, it would of been the same by me. But you had one, and he’s a man, and he’s a Miracle.” She took Martha’s elbow again. “Let’s get in there and get this show on the road before the rest of those no-counts show up and find out what they’ve missed.”

  There were not enough stout men to serve as pallbearers. In the end the undertaker himself lent a hand, to Miracle and Leo. That left Bradford Uptegrove and Talbott Marquand. And so a Baptist and a Yankee helped Bernie Miracle to his grave.

  PART TWO

  Crossing the River

  1968

  9

  At the Slate Bed

  Martha slept a great deal that winter. Hibernation, she called it to Rosie when she called at nine or ten to find Martha asleep; but each morning she woke less rested than the morning before.

  Through January she rose with Miracle to fix him breakfast and see him off to the Inn, but he never ate what she fixed and never spoke beyond a few curt words. He left for work and Martha found herself sitting alone with a cooling cup of coffee for company and the long empty day stretching before her l
ike the heart’s desert. A morning came when she shut her alarm off bang! and lay, eyes open, through Miracle’s stirrings in the kitchen. She had not risen for him since.

  She woke early, stayed in bed late. The terror of rising and the awful responsibility of being alive and alone held her down as surely as any sickness. As long as she lay in bed, the day had not really gotten underway. Some days she lay in bed until noon.

  She slept after lunch, dozing in the easy chair whose leather still smelled of Bernie’s sweat and aftershave. She buried her nose in the smell, a little penance for her sins. She watched television, hoping to fill the empty hours, but on these clear winter days the reception was terrible. At night she fixed herself a strong drink and sat before the buzzing and flickering images of demonstrations, bombings, big city riots. Behind Strang Knob, at Fort Knox, mock battles raged. With every explosion the television image jumped. She hardly cared. She sat half asleep before the images of another, farther world, until the crash and blare of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sent her to bed, to toss and turn until the coming of another day.

  Lying in bed she spent whole mornings avoiding thoughts of Talbott. She had not seen him since the funeral. She had no one to ask of his whereabouts. If Big Rosie knew what he was doing, she was kind enough to keep the knowledge to herself. That left only Ossetta.

  Martha had no reason to see Ossetta. Being alone much of the day, Martha had no need for help with her butter or her cleaning. More than once Martha had thought to seek out the old black woman, but always her courage failed her. Ossetta, after all, had been the first to tell Big Rosie about Talbott. Martha could easier imagine stopping the fine ladies of Mount Hermon, the girls she’d gone to school with, married now, to doctors and tobacco farmers and preachers—respectable professions, every one. Martha shuddered at the thought of talking to any of them.

  A day came when winter broke, achingly blue and almost warm. Martha lay in bed, staring out her window. From the neighbor’s hackberry the cardinals called, purty, purty, purty. In midmorning Martha threw back the covers and flung on some clothes. She did not know where to go. She knew only that she was driving herself crazy here.

  She walked along the Jackson Highway into town, but the sight of the same stores and street signs and the caution light with its single dead eye was too ordinary and familiar for her to endure. This was the town that Bernie had grown up in, where she had been Miz Miracle for more than twenty years. There was only one place in New Hope that she had ever chosen for herself, and where she could go to escape judging eyes. She went to Assumption Church.

  The church was empty. The altars had been stripped bare for cleaning and their Tennessee marble glowed in great splashes of color streaming from the stained glass windows. Martha sat in a hard oak pew, searching for the God who had brought her across the river.

  She prayed, first in the memorized prayers of her Catholic Church, then in the person-to-person prayers of her Baptist upbringing. She heard only silence, from without and within.

  The windows’ dappled light wheeled across the altar in a great arc. Late that afternoon the priest hurried across the nave, dipping briefly in the sideways genuflection of worshipers on the run. Martha fled down the dim aisle to the vestibule.

  She paused at the holy water font. In that moment Ossetta entered from the choirloft door.

  She wore a navy dress with a small dotted print and a veiled hat Martha had passed on years before. They were alone in the vestibule: the fine-boned, red-haired white woman, smelling of scented soap, and Ossetta, short and stocky and dark as a whiskey barrel, trailing her faint smell of garlic.

  Ossetta pretended not to see her. Martha was overcome by rage, against the God she could not find, the husband who had never loved, the son who refused to speak, the lover who had disappeared. She cornered Ossetta under the chalk statue of Saint George, piercing his dragon with a chipped sword.

  “Where is he,” she demanded.

  Ossetta stepped back. “Where is who, Miz Miracle.”

  “You know who. Talbott Marquand.”

  Ossetta shrugged. “Talbott Marquand. Talbott Marquand. All of a sudden everybody got to know about Talbott Marquand.” She turned to the door.

  Martha seized her arm. “So where is he.”

  Ossetta sighed, her breath rustling her veil’s thin curtain. “Miz Miracle. I don’t know much. What I do know, you don’t want to know and don’t need to know. You know it already, if you let yourself believe it. But you don’t let yourself believe it. That’s all right, but if you don’t believe yourself, how you going to believe me? Hnnh? So don’t axe me questions I can’t answer.”

  “You won’t answer.”

  Ossetta eased herself from Martha’s grasp. “That’s OK. That’s all right, ma’am.” She edged from the vestibule.

  Martha stepped between her and the door. “Ossetta, why did you tell Rosie Uptegrove?” She’d meant to ask it kindly. It came out as an accusation.

  Ossetta stood still, her veil quivering, “Tell her what?”

  “You know what. About Talbott. Ossetta, I thought you were my friend.”

  Ossetta puckered her lips. “Friend! Friend don’t have nothing to do with it. I get axed a question straight to my face, I tell the truth, much of it as I knows. Miz Uptegrove axed me did I know if Mr. Marquand came by your place from time to time of a morning, yes or no, and I answered the truth. I don’t lie, not for you nor the devil nor Abraham Lincoln.” She swept past Martha, her chin upturned. “Friend,” she muttered, loud enough for Martha to hear. “I don’t count no white person as a friend.” She slipped out the side door, leaving Martha alone in the vestibule, cursing and wondering in the dark.

  Suns and moons passed. Miracle discovered that accepting the loss of Bernie to death was easier than accepting the loss of Rosamund to love. Bernie was in his grave. If Miracle needed proof he had only to visit the fresh mound of earth in the Assumption Church graveyard, where proof of Bernie’s death was chiseled into pink granite:

  FRANCIS BERNARD MIRACLE

  1910–1967

  With Rosamund, Miracle never knew for certain that things were finished. At Bernie’s wake Big Rosie dropped the information that Rosamund was back to her fancy apartment in Nashville—that Talbott had come back a day early from Detroit just to drive her down, and with the weather threatening, no less. If Rosamund got her big break, she never sent word to Miracle. He knew better than to expect word—she’d not written from August to December—but each time a handwritten envelope fell from the Miracle Inn mailbox his heart leapt.

  Rosamund sent no letters. Instead Miracle found each day reminders of Bernie. The postman filled his box with an odd mix of letters addressed to Bernie and bills addressed to himself, Michael Miracle, as proprietor of the Miracle Inn. There was the black hole in the mirror behind the white bar, with its starburst of broken silvered shards. Miracle called a Louisville glazier to fix it, but the beveled glass had to be cut to order and weeks went by with him staring into the hole with each sale he rang up.

  He was working a cold February morning shift, shoving beers though the driveup window to the Fort Knox commuters, the day Bradford Uptegrove did not show up for work.

  They all came to the Inn looking for him, one at a time. Talbott came first. His blond hair stuck out from beneath his cap and he had mud on his trousers, the first mud Miracle had ever seen on those trousers. For an hour he had been working the backhoe he had trained Bradford to use. Miracle did not take his eyes from the driveup window while Talbott asked about Bradford.

  Big Rosie came next, trailing Willie. She dwarfed the door and made the Inn seem a less respectable place than it was. Under her searching Protestant eyes, tobacco stains and peeling walls and the north slant of the pool table all seemed larger than life. Miracle did not tell her that Bradford had talked of going to Nashville. He did not tell her what Bradford had said about LaHoma Dean. After ten minutes she left, trailing doubt as tangible as the scent of Ossetta’s asafetida.<
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  Martha called next (on orders, Miracle was sure, of Big Rosie). Since Bernie’s death she had not set foot in the Inn, for which Miracle was immensely grateful, especially now. Under her searching blue gaze he would have given way, said something about Bradford’s Christmas Eve blabber. On the phone he found it easy to refuse her so much as a word. She hung up angry. Miracle wanted to call back, to tell her that really he knew very little. Then he thought of her waiting for Talbott, those mornings when Miracle was working at the Inn, not a mile away. He hardened his heart. He stayed behind the bar, picking at his sleeves, his nervous hands wandering over his shirt buttons.

  The lunch crowd was slow. Talbott had laid off much of the crew until the return of dry weather. Miracle looked up from reading the Argus to catch LaHoma Dean standing in the door.

  He had hardly seen her since his graduation picnic. She was paler and more moon-faced than ever. She hung at the door, silhouetted against the gray winter light, until he crossed the room to her.

  “Where is he, Miracle?” she asked.

  Miracle stuck his hands in his pockets and looked out over the bottoms, where the wind whipped corn stubble and broken branches over the ground. “I don’t know,” he said.

  She wore a thin sweater and she wrapped it closer about her, folding her arms. “I promise I won’t go chasing after him. I just want someplace where I can send a letter. He’ll come back if I send a letter, I know he will.”

  “I wish I could say, LaHoma Dean,” he said. For the first time that day he wished it were true. “He dropped some hints about leaving, he talked about going to California, but you know that.”

  “I know that. He wouldn’t go to California without me.”