Miracle wished he himself were so sure. She was not looking at him, but staring out at the tops of the trees along the river, tossing in the wind. “Go home, LaHoma Dean,” Miracle said. “This is no place for you to be. You’ll catch your death.”
“That’s the way they did it in the old days.”
“You’re talking foolishness.” Miracle wished she would turn around. Facing her stolid back he felt guilty somehow, as if the weight of one man’s sins ought to be borne by them all. He should tell her something, part of him argued, though speaking up would violate every rule of loyalty to his sex and his friend and his Miracle blood. “Maybe he’s hunting,” he said, hearing the falseness in his voice.
“In February?”
Miracle plunged. “Maybe he’s gone to Nashville, or someplace like that. Louisville. Bowling Green. He gets a wild hair.”
“I know that.”
Miracle meant to pat her shoulder, but his pat turned into an awkward little shove. “You go on home,” he said. “He’ll be back in a week or so.”
“You really think so.” She did not turn around.
“Sure,” Miracle said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I see him. If you don’t see him first.” He stayed outside, watching her struggle against the February wind, across the levee, across the Boatyard Bridge to Mount Hermon.
Martha woke from an afternoon nap to the sound of someone knocking on the kitchen door. Rosie, she figured, come to grill her again about Bradford. Martha rose, mumbling groggy curses, wrapping a housecoat about her.
It was Talbott Marquand. He stood outside the back door, the jaunty plaid hat perched atop his head, his shoulders hunched against the wind that swept across the valley and through the bare trees. She saw him before he saw her. She considered for a moment, drawing back into her bedroom; then she went to the door.
“I want to see you,” he said.
She waved him inside. “Wait here,” she said. In her bedroom she put on her clothes slowly. She had no need to hurry. Dressed, she pulled on an old hunting jacket of Bernie’s—she’d always worn it for walks in the fields. By the time she noticed what she was wearing, by the time she smelled Bernie’s familiar smell, she was in the kitchen, with Talbott. “We’ll go for a walk,” she said.
“Somebody will see us.”
“They won’t see anything they haven’t already seen. Or imagined.”
They climbed the neighbor’s barbed wire fence and followed a cowpath to the river. Devil’s walking sticks and the black husks of last summer’s blackberry briars grew thick about them. They walked in single file. They did not stop or speak until they reached the river bank.
To the west the mottled flank of Strang Knob rose up, edged with a ragged fringe of bare sumac. Martha sat on the patchy white trunk of a fallen sycamore. Talbott picked up a stick, to scrape at the mud caking the soles of his shoes. “I want you,” he said abruptly.
“What about your wife?”
“I’m getting a divorce. That’s why I came back early at Christmas. That’s why I’ve come back now. I’ve been back in Detroit since Christmas, working it all out. She’s agreed to it.”
“Should I be happy?”
“You should feel however you goddamn please. That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Anyway, I didn’t get it for you. I got it for me. It’s been coming for months. Years. My wife agrees.”
“And what about Rosamund Uptegrove?”
Only the faint slap of the water against the slate bed broke the silence that followed, until they both spoke at once. Martha gave way.
“I want her, too. I want you both. I know that sounds bad but it’s the truth and you of all people should go easy on me for telling the truth.”
Martha thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat. She pulled out spent shotgun casings, scraps of paper, a supply list (in Bernie’s illegible scrawl) on a bit of paper sack. This last she stretched flat against the tree’s smooth trunk, edging out its wrinkles with her thumbnail. “So what am I to do about this truth. What is Rosamund Uptegrove to do about it.”
Talbott shrugged. “That’s up to you. You see who I came to first.”
“So I should be complimented. Rosamund Uptegrove is younger and prettier, after all. Richer, too, for that matter.”
“You love me more. You know that.”
She did know that. Her question came before her thoughts. “Then do you love me more?”
He took his hat from his head, turning it around and around in his hands, studying its flybait feather. “There are times when you terrify me,” he said.
Below them the river flowed greenly, as cold and sterile as she felt. Talbott took her hand. “It’s too soon after—it’s been too soon for me to come to see you. It’s just that the time seemed right. I’ve been back and forth to Detroit. I talked it out with my wife. We finally agreed. I had to tell somebody. I told her about you.”
“And not about Rosamund Uptegrove.”
“No.” In his voice she heard the smallest hint of pride. “Only you.”
“And was she happy to hear about me?”
Talbott heaved a patient sigh. “Of course she wasn’t happy. Any happier than I was to hear about the boyfriend she’d got herself while I was down here. It just seemed right, that we give each other reasons why we wanted a divorce.”
“You wanted a divorce.” Martha folded in neat quarters the little brown paper covered with Bernie’s handwriting. “So like you, to plan this all out, with reasons here and reasons there. Every move lined up with a plumb bob.”
“What can I say. I’m an engineer.”
“Yes. I suppose you are.” She stuffed Bernie’s list, neatly folded, back into the pocket of his coat. She rose and turned to climb the bank.
Talbott caught at her hand. “Don’t leave,” he said. For the first time in her life she thought she heard real asking in a man’s voice. Or was she hearing, again, what she wanted to hear? Her heels dug into the half-frozen clay. The touch of his soft thick hand brought back other afternoons, that first afternoon in the mountains, when Bernie was off to Louisville and Miracle was at the Inn and Talbott had taken her far away from New Hope.
She looked down at his face, as round and full as a hard-boiled egg. His hat slumped to one side, its feather rustling in the wind. A wisp of hair, palest blond, curled from under its brim.
She started up the bank. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Back to my house.”
He started to speak. She covered his mouth with a gentle hand. “Not a word.”
They climbed the bank, slipping and sliding on the half-frozen clay. At the top Martha stopped at a sycamore sapling, waiting for Talbott (in his slick-soled city shoes) to catch up. Inside the pocket of Bernie’s hunting jacket she turned over the neat square of paper, pressing its corners into her fingertips.
Talbott slipped. His hand flew out. She grabbed at it. His warm hand closed around her own, that had not touched another’s since Grandma Miracle’s, the day of the funeral.
He stood at her side, panting, brushing mud from his trousers. She tucked the paper square into a crevice in the sycamore trunk, and took his free hand in her own.
That night it rained, and the television reception was unusually clear. Sitting before its jump and jabber Martha reflected on the afternoon. She had taken Talbott to her bed to fill the emptiness that was there. He came and went, and she was emptier than before. Was this his fault, or her own?
“Fault, fault. You sound more and more like a Catholic,” she said aloud to the faces on the screen. She sipped the bourbon at her side. She searched for whatever she’d felt only in November, three short months ago, when Talbott and she had risked much more for an afternoon alone.
Where had he been, those months since the funeral? In Detroit, he said. She didn’t believe that, any more than Bernie believed her own tales, across September and October and November. She didn’t believe it, and still when she touched his hand, when the wind blew his blond
hair about, her blood rose and she wanted him hard against her. She wanted only that, nothing more, until that passed.
Then they lay under the wood mosaics, in the same bed where she had turned her back again and again on Bernie. Talbott pressed her for an answer, yes or no.
“Yes or no to what.”
Talbott had shrugged, a quick movement of his shoulders so unlike Bernie that it pierced her, a short sharp stab, and for a single moment she hated him for being here; then for a longer, cooler moment, she hated herself: for asking Talbott to her bed; for betraying Bernie, to whom she’d given her word, the man she had married, who had never said, not once, that she was important to him, that he needed her. “Tell me you need me,” she said to Talbott: a command, not a question.
“Need?” The bewilderment in Talbott’s voice was real. “What has need got to do with it? Either you marry me or you don’t.” Then she said nothing, until he rose and dressed and left her lying there, alone and shivering and afraid.
Did he need her? Did she need him? Or had they lain there because it was just that time again, like rutting dogs? Need, love—they had never exchanged these words. Much like Bernie and herself, until that day when she’d burned the icing and he’d questioned her love. Now she was here with Talbott, and there was only desire, the same longing that years before had brought her across the river to marry Bernie.
But that was something, she’d felt it strong enough to say yes to Bernie, and then to Talbott, to invite him into her husband’s bed. Whatever that was, it had moved her to act, twenty-three years ago and now. Did Talbott feel it in return? He had said, “I want you.” To be wanted was something. Was it the same as being loved, as being needed? Surely not.
She knew all that, had known it on that first drive into the mountains, had known it today on the river bank when his blond hair had curled from under the brim of that ridiculous hat. Could she have been such a fool as to fall for a hat?
“Surely not,” she said. The pictures on the screen danced on, oblivious.
At the Inn, Miracle closed that Saturday night’s shift early. He counted out the money in the register, pocketed all of it, down to Monday morning’s change. He stopped in the doorway where he and LaHoma Dean had talked. He knew where Bradford Uptegrove was, at least for right now. Bradford was a Southern man, broke and on the run. He would go to his family to hide.
Miracle locked the door, turned off the lights. This was his own time to run, to leave this crazy family, and his faithless mother, and this building that sat on his shoulders like original sin. It was his time to leave this town, to declare himself for who he was: Rosamund Uptegrove’s suitor, free of his family, shut of his past, with nothing ahead but the wide open spaces of the future.
10
City Lights
As a child, Miracle went to the city exactly once a year, when Martha took him to have his eyes checked. That took a half hour, leaving Martha with a small boy and a full day of errands for herself and half the bridge club. On the third or fourth of these trips Martha discovered that she needn’t drag Miracle around. Left with an escalator or an elevator, he entertained himself for hours, riding up and down. In later trips she scheduled Miracle’s eye appointment early, with a doctor who kept his office on the top floor of the city’s tallest building.
Miracle pretended to blurred vision long after it was clear he would never need glasses. The city drew him back, and the ophthalmologist was his only excuse to go. The idea of a place with traffic, movie houses and neon, people who couldn’t tell your family history from the cut of your jaw—all these set the city apart. Things happened there. People who lived there moved as part of a larger world. They made money, lost money, robbed banks, betrayed lovers, swept up broken glass, and built mansions as part of something bigger than themselves. Their smallest gestures took on importance. They were cogs in the larger gears that drove the world of men’s affairs.
Miracle’s own grandfather had been murdered, dumped in the river in a small, out-of-the-way battle with bootlegging gangs from the city. There were no headlines, no police investigations, no testimonials from outraged politicians. Life went on in its relentless way. Out in New Hope, under the jagged lip of Strang Knob, you could do something small or something big, kiss a man or kill him, it made no difference. It was only in the city that things mattered.
Cruising into Nashville, sitting high on the Greyhound local, Miracle felt that same sense, intensified. Here was a city he’d never seen. He saw it bigger and brighter and cleaner even as the bus negotiated dark and narrow and litter-strewn streets.
Outside the Greyhound station, Miracle bought a clean shirt, a cheap razor, and a doughnut. In the Greyhound bathroom he shaved with cold water. He bought a bunch of yellow daisies wrapped in green florist’s paper. He bought himself a map and set off for Rosamund Uptegrove’s apartment.
Trash skittered in the February wind. Along the sidewalk the trunks of the few trees were scarred and nicked with slogans and initials. Black men huddled in doorways, scowling when Miracle stopped to ask directions.
Rosamund lived nearby, in a building that looked as if it had not housed a girl of Rosamund’s style since before the Civil War. Miracle clutched the flowers in a vise grip and pressed the button. Footsteps approached. He stood back. The door opened. He thrust out his daisies, into the round, stubbled face of Bradford Uptegrove.
“It’s been hard, Miracle.” Bradford crumbled marijuana onto a cigarette paper, rolled it with one hand, licked the glue. “Want to smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’s the Catholic in you, Miracle. Come on, give it a try.” Miracle shook his head. Bradford lit the joint and poured them both drinks.
Across the afternoon they drank. They talked football and weather and women. With the respect of Southern gentlemen for sensitive topics neither mentioned or asked about LaHoma Dean or Rosamund. The light fell to a late gray February dimness. Sprawled on the couch, Bradford fell asleep.
The daisies drooped yellow heads between the slats of an overturned orange crate. At sunset Miracle heard the door at the end of the hall open. He half-stood and reached for the daisies. The key turned in the lock. He let the daisies lie. She was here, the woman of his dreams.
Rosamund dropped her purse at her feet. “Bradford Uptegrove, are you smoking my goddamn pot again?” She rummaged in the coat closet. Hangers tinkled. “It looks good,” she said over her shoulder. “His father’s a sound man for Decca. He said they need backups for sure in the next two weeks and he would definitely give me a call.” She turned around. Miracle cleared his throat. “Welcome home,” he said.
She froze, still as a cat surprised in mid-chase. She eased herself into a Naugahyde easy chair whose arms were patched with gray duct tape. She tapped exactly one cigarette from her pack. Miracle stirred himself to light a match. His hand trembled. Hers did not. She leaned her head back and blew a thin stream of gray smoke into the dark. In the arch of her neck, in the light down edging her cheek, Miracle felt himself losing something he would need to deal sensibly with her and with himself. “So,” she said, “what brings you to Nashville?”
“You.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“You asked me to come.”
“I’m glad to see you, Miracle, really I am. It’s just that it’s been a long day and I have to go to work in an hour and I come home to a dump of an apartment with Sleeping Beauty on the sofa bed.”
Miracle swallowed hard. This hardly sounded hopeful. But he had come a long way, for one reason. An image flashed across his mind: his mother, striking boldly across the planks of the Miracle Inn to order a beer from Bernie Miracle. He spoke. “I came to—stay with you.”
She bent to her purse and pulled out a brush. “It’s not your fault. It’s just that your timing was a little off.” She ran the brush through the underside of her hair. In the twilit room bright trails of static flew from the brush. She tilted her head at Bradford. “Did they send you after
him? Or me?”
Was she listening to him? He spoke louder, more insistently. “No. I mean, neither. I came to stay with you.” He waited for her to ask him why he’d come, what he meant to do in Nashville, all questions with answers he’d prepared on the long bus ride down. She said nothing. “Where are you working,” he said.
“Music City Burger Palace. Graveyard shift.” Miracle did not mention the recording contract. “Don’t look so morbid,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t say anything to Big Rosie and Willie. Nobody hits it big right away. You got to make connections, get squired around, meet the right people. It just takes time, that’s all.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. Longer for us, Miracle. We got twenty years of catching up with people who grew up knowing how to use a pay telephone.” She stubbed her cigarette out. Ashes overflowed, sprinkling at Miracle’s feet. “Make yourself at home. I’ve got to change for work.” She stepped into the walk-in closet and shut the door.
The doorbell gargled. Rosamund called from the closet. “Get that, Miracle, would you? I’m not decent.”
In the hall it was dark, and he fumbled at the knob. The door stuck, then flew back suddenly in his face. Talbott Marquand held out roses, the largest bundle of flowers Miracle had seen since the fair. Talbott wore a foolish grin. With a shock Miracle recognized a part of himself, fading from the face of the man he most despised. No doubt Bradford Uptegrove had seen the same look on Miracle’s own face earlier that day. Only the flowers were different.
Miracle reached for the roses. “Won’t you come in?”
“Miracle. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Houseboy. You’ll come in? Of course you will.”
“Sure, Miracle.” Talbott ducked through the door. In his foolish hat, with traces of his grin hanging at the corners of his lips, he looked young, almost kind-hearted. Miracle turned abruptly and walked down the hall. “Wake up, Bradford Uptegrove,” he said. “You got company.” He knocked on the closet door, opened it a crack and stuck the roses through. “From a secret admirer, Rosamund.”
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