Rosamund stepped out, wearing fishnet stockings and a bow tie and an orange skirt with “Burger Palace” emblazoned on one pocket. She pecked Talbott’s cheek. “The roses are lovely, Talbott, and I had no idea both of you were planning to show up or I’d have worked something out but since we’re all here we might as well make the best of it. Bradford, roll a joint. Miracle, there’s a fifth of Wild Turkey in the freezer and some glasses in the sink. Talbott, have a seat while I put these beautiful roses in something.”
In the kitchen Miracle emptied ice trays while Rosamund arranged flowers in an empty peanut butter jar. “Since when has he been coming here?” Miracle hissed.
“Since you started coming here. Can I help it if you both decide to come on the same night? Without saying a word? If you show up by surprise, you can’t be surprised by what shows up.”
“He’s been here before.”
“If he says that he’s just bragging, that’s all. Anyway, I’ll see him if I want to see him.”
“You won’t see him around me.”
“The door’s open, I’m not holding you back.” She ran some water in the jar and started for the living room. Miracle stepped in front of her. “Miracle!” she said. “This is my apartment and I’ll see who I want. If you have problems with that you can go home and tend to your bar. Otherwise, sit back and try to be a gentleman. You might learn from the exposure.”
“A gentleman wouldn’t keep two women on the string at once.” The whiskey and the scent from Talbott’s roses hit Miracle all at once. He seized Rosamund’s shoulders. “For Christ’s sake, Rosamund, he’s seeing my mother. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Rosamund tilted her chin and pursed her lips. “Why should it mean anything to me? She’s your mother. And he might still be seeing her—that I don’t know—but I can tell you this: he’s not seeing her before me. And who cares who he’s seeing after me? As long as he’s seeing me first, he can see half the world later. Probably is. Including your mother.” She swept past Miracle, roses trembling and trailing faint summer smells.
Miracle poured himself a stiff bourbon and leaned against the sink, contemplating the pattern on the wallpaper. He felt like a rat who’d spent eighteen years learning the ins and outs of a maze, only to emerge into the jaws of a trap. He remembered LaHoma Dean, clutching her sweater about her, hesitating at the door to the Miracle Inn. To cross the river and enter a place she considered hell’s vestibule had hardly been less of a journey than his own trip to Nashville; and yet there she’d come.
Thinking about her, shivering in the November wind, Miracle cast aside something he’d grown up with, about what he should do and shouldn’t do. He went to the kitchen door and beckoned at Bradford.
He entered, pinching the joint between his thumb and finger. “I thought we sent you after drinks, Miracle.”
Miracle plunked ice in two glasses. “You should go back, Bradford.” He did not look up. “You owe it to LaHoma Dean.”
“The hell you say.”
“I’m not saying you should marry her, Bradford. That’s up to you and her, and I can think of better matches. But you should go back to figure it out, to let her know something. You owe her that.”
Bradford lifted the glass from his hand. “Thanks but no thanks. When I get settled down here—when I have myself some money—I’ll think about it then. You just leave that up to me.” He poured a dump of whiskey in his glass and fled.
Miracle poured a second drink and followed. He handed it to Talbott and picked up his coat, “Time to go,” he said.
“Oh, Miracle, it’s late,” Rosamund said. “Be a sport. Stick around. You can sleep in my bed, I have to work til six a.m. anyway.” She did not rise.
“You can ride back with me,” Talbott said. “Really, I’m heading back first thing in the morning. This was just a business jaunt.”
“On Sunday?” Miracle said. “I have the business. I have to be at the Inn by six a.m. tomorrow. Nobody there to hold the fort but me.” He left, hoping they would call him back. He heard nothing.
He walked to the bus station in a rage of shame and anger. He bought his ticket north with the money he’d taken from the Inn. He’d brought enough for tickets each way, plus a few dollars for daisies and such. Hardly enough missing to matter.
And who would notice anyway? Not Leo, who only checked the register when he needed quick cash for a poker game. Not Martha, who refused to cross the Inn threshold. There was only himself. He boarded the bus north with pain closing like a fist around his heart.
Miracle was not alone in returning north. Within the week Bradford Uptegrove was back, living at home and submitting to his wedding preparations. From Ossetta, Miracle gleaned that someone had given his whereabouts away to Willie and Big Rosie, who’d hauled him north under threat of revoking his inheritance. Miracle tried to suspect Talbott. When he gave the matter thought Miracle knew the culprit to be Rosamund.
The wedding day came, spitting frozen drizzle. LaHoma Dean wore an off-white dress, a shade shy of virginal. Bradford Uptegrove wore a brand-new double-breasted blazer with gold buttons and wide lapels. Their wedding was small and dismal.
The minister conducted a shotgun ceremony, plain and simple and quiet. LaHoma Dean stood with Bradford before the big glass baptismal tank. Bradford’s thin “I do” might have been the water lapping against its sides. Big Rosie’s shoulders heaved as if she were mourning the death of her only son, which, Miracle figured, was exactly how she looked at matters.
Bradford Uptegrove was marrying a girl from the hollers. Tomorrow he was off to boot camp in Texas. In a stormy session with Big Rosie and Willie, he had agreed to marry LaHoma Dean on the condition that he could leave for military service whenever he wanted. Willie agreed. Bradford set himself up to leave the day after his wedding.
The minister smiled, the couple turned to kiss, an embarrassed kiss that carried no joy, no love, no light. Miracle watched, and felt the cold weight of depression sink through his heart and settle somewhere above his spleen.
The service ended. The photographer held the couple at the altar. The first bulb popped. In the flash the image froze in Miracle’s mind as if his memory were coated with Kodachrome: Bradford Uptegrove, his lips frozen in a curl, bearing up with the grace of a tortured man facing the firing squad: happy to escape where he’d been, uncertain of where he was heading to. Next to him, LaHoma Dean, quiet and peaceful, her thin cheeks already filled out with the slight thickness of pregnancy, more beautiful than she thought herself to be or would ever be again.
11
Sweet Dreams
The herons returned with the March rains. Martha heard their throaty cries at sunrise as she listened to Miracle, bumping around the kitchen before going to the Inn. She had not heard them since years ago, before she crossed the river, when she had swum under the Boatyard Bridge and startled the leggy blue-gray birds from the slate beds.
One day the rain never stopped its steady drumming on the Miracle Inn roof. That night the creeks came down. The river spilled its banks. Miracle arrived the next morning to find the Inn perched atop its little tab of land like Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat. Crows huddled in black clumps in treetops poking from the flat brown sea. Pigs and chickens, escaped from pens in the river bottoms, rooted in the Inn’s muddy lot. Bits of upstream lives floated past. Washing machine innards, tractor tires, broken dolls, animal corpses parked themselves at the fringe of the levee, until an eddy picked them up and swirled them on their way downstream, to a riffle or sandbar or to the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles south.
Overnight, New Hope became an island. A foot of water covered the Jackson Highway at the Boatyard Bridge. Ten miles north, a creek washed out a culvert. No one could get to work. The town converged on the Inn to get drunk and watch the river rise. By noon every fishing boat in town was docked at the edge of the Miracle Inn parking lot.
Late that afternoon Talbott entered. Across the crowd he caught Miracle’s eye and Miracle knew
something was wrong, wrong for him, not for Talbott. Talbott crossed to the bar. “A round for the house,” he said, and Miracle knew that news about Rosamund rode behind that smile.
The Inn grew quiet, except for shuffling feet and the clink of glass against glass as Miracle poured beers. He covered the top of the white bar with drafts, then moved to the colored bar. When both bars were full Talbott spoke.
Miracle heard though he did not listen, and two minutes later he couldn’t have repeated Talbott’s words. He heard the men laugh—Talbott must have made a joke—and the cheer from the crowd—that would be Talbott announcing his engagement to Rosamund. Miracle poured drafts, two at a time, until Leo came to spell him for the evening.
Miracle left the Inn to Leo that night. He sat at home before a blank television screen. He was sure his mother had heard the news. She closed her bedroom door and came out only to ask if he wanted supper. He did not.
The silence drove Miracle crazy. He turned on the television and the radio. He poured himself a whiskey, then a second.
It seemed so easy, in principle, to get somebody out of your heart—you just didn’t think on them. But his Pickett heart had a mind of its own, traveling worlds apart from his head’s wishes and demands and desires. And his heart’s mind, his more powerful mind, was fixed on Rosamund Uptegrove.
Miracle considered this through his second drink. At the Inn Talbott had said that Rosamund was back in town, for the formal announcement of her engagement. Fortified by whiskey, led by perversity, Miracle rose at midnight, drove to the Inn, and parked in the middle of the Jackson Highway.
The blue hum of the parking lot’s mercury light overlaid the silence. In the middle of the river Miracle saw the black webbing of the Boatyard Bridge against the paler black of the sky. He untied Leo’s boat. He fit the oars in the locks and rowed.
He landed a mile downriver from Mount Hermon, in a feed lot empty of cattle but knee deep in soggy manure. He struggled to a tiny island of solid earth at the base of a fence post. The bourbon he’d drunk had long worn off. The muck slurped at his boots. He clung to the post and measured the distance to firm land: twenty yards or more.
This, Miracle thought, is what they call love.
He fought his way through a mile of muddy fields and barbed wire fences to Mount Hermon. At the Uptegroves, Rosamund opened her window at his first knock. She raised a finger to her lips. “You can come through the back door,” she said. “But take off those shoes. God, Miracle, you think you’d been wallowing in a pigpen.”
Inside, she stood him in the center of her room. “Don’t move, and don’t sit down, whatever you do. I’ll be back in a second.”
In his visits to the Uptegroves, Miracle had never been in Rosamund’s room. It was large, patterned with roses. Scattered among the roses were signed photos of Nashville stars, a regular Saturday night lineup at the Grand Ole Opry. Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, even Minnie Pearl, her hat covered by a corner of a photo of the great Patsy Cline edged with a strip of black ribbon.
“You smell like a feed lot,” Rosamund said from the door. “Take those things off and put this on.” She handed him a bathrobe trailing the faint smell of men’s cologne.
She wore a long robe, edged with roses and cinched at her waist, the same sort of high-waisted, low-cut gown that caught his breath last summer at the county fair. It caught his breath now. “So what took you so long,” she said.
Miracle’s heart rose; this sounded promising. “How was I to know you wanted to see me. You didn’t exactly throw out the welcome mat in Nashville. You disappeared after Bradford’s wedding. You never wrote. There was Talbott hanging around—” In the struggle to get where he was, Miracle had forgotten Talbott’s announcement of the engagement. The suspicion occurred to him, as unmistakable as the scent of cologne about his bathrobe, that Rosamund was used to receiving guests through her bedroom window.
“What does it matter what I think,” Rosamund said smoothly. “If you wanted to come, you should have come.”
Miracle knew this argument had flaws at the same time he couldn’t put his finger on them. Rosamund gave him no time. “What are you waiting for? Get out of those pants.” She sat on her bed. “Come on, climb in. You’re freezing.”
“But what about Talbott! You’re engaged! To be married!”
“So I am. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re freezing. Climb in.” She lay back, pulled the covers into a high tent with one hand, pointed under them with the other.
For a moment Miracle hesitated, staring at the floor, overwhelmed by conscience and duty and honor and religion. Then he raised his eyes and looked, and was lost.
They made love. Rosamund gave him condoms she pulled from a music box covered with roses. With Rosamund’s breasts round and full in his hand, Miracle gave himself over to sex.
She was sweet and soft and full. She took him like he’d not been taken, even in his dreams, in those holy, lonely nights under the north pilings. She touched him here and there until he thought only of wanting her, wanting to be inside her. Then he was inside her, and his mind went away and he rode her hard, hard as a stallion fucking a first-time mare in the hot hard light of the stock pen, so hard some small part of him feared he was hurting her, and he rode her harder still, emptying his jealousy and anger and lust and fear into her body. When it was over he fell back, tears rolling from his eyes. He hid his face in her rose-covered quilt. Ah, yes, he thought. This is what they call love.
They lay together, Miracle with his arm about her shoulders as calmly and naturally as if he had slept with Rosamund for the year since his graduation. Rosamund crooked one arm behind her neck. “Open that nightstand drawer and hand me that little blue box.” From the box she pulled some tissues and an array of bottles with pointed caps. She smoothed the quilt between them and spread a thick Cosmopolitan flat. She arranged the bottles in a semicircle and took the top from one. The heady smell of acetone filled Miracle’s head. With exquisite care she spread the fingers of her left hand, brushing each red-painted nail with polish remover. In the calmness his questions returned. He stared at the ceiling, spent and afraid, stumbling about for a way to begin. Rosamund saved him the trouble.
“Miracle, I’m marrying Talbott Marquand for a lot of different reasons, but only one counts. He can get me to Nashville. He doesn’t have the connections he said he did, but he’s got the money, Big Rosie has that one checked out. He’ll get me out from under her thumb, at least. After that, I’ll make the connections. I’m good at that. I can have a career with him. No screaming babies, no dirty diapers. Marrying Talbott Marquand kills so many birds with one stone I feel like I’m dove-hunting a baited field.”
“Is that what getting married is about?”
Rosamund shrugged. “We’ll get divorced if it gets too messy. I’ll write a song about it.”
Miracle’s face gave his heart away. “Oh, Miracle, don’t look so mortified,” Rosamund said. “You’re as bad as Mamma. She acts like singing in Nashville is just a stage I’ll grow out of as soon as I find my Talbott Marquand to fuck it out of me. Or buy it out of me, one. Really! You’d think they never had a dream in their life, none of ’em, except for living in a new brick house with four white columns and a little chalk jockey at the end of the drive.”
“Rosamund, everybody has dreams. Lots of them.” Miracle’s words came tumbling from his lips, jarred loose by the sharp slap of Rosamund’s attack. “Some people keep their dreams a little close to the chest. But everybody dreams about something.”
Rosamund rolled her eyes. “Miracle, it’s the Catholic mentality. You’re cursed with it,” she said patiently. “Complicated, in your case and your mother’s, by the Pickett heart.”
Miracle sat up. “Now what the hell does that mean?”
“Head in the clouds. Crazy ideas. Marrying for love. People with circles floating over their heads.”
“Halos.”
“Whatever. Everybody I grew up with wants a nice, solid bri
ck house with four white columns.”
“That’s not true. I know people from Mount Hermon who grew up with dreams as crazy as anybody’s.”
“Such as?”
Miracle shifted his weight away from Rosamund, to stare at the rose-patterned wallpaper. “Such as my mother.”
Rosamund screwed the top on the acetone. “My point exactly.” She took up a violet tissue and stripped each nail of its scarlet sheath. “Your mother wanted love. She left everything she knew behind for that. Took off like a bat out of hell. And look what happened to her.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened to her,” Miracle said. “You still got to do it. It’s something you got to do, and you do it.”
“You do it.”
“It’s the love that matters. It’s natural to love something you can’t hold in one place and measure with a ruler.”
“So what do you love?”
“You,” Miracle said.
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Rosamund twisted open a bottle of rose-colored polish. With perfect steadiness she touched the brush to each clean fingernail. Then she lay back, fanning her freshly painted nails back and forth. “I care about you, Miracle. You can’t help caring about somebody you catch jacking off under the Boatyard Bridge, the first time you meet them. I like you a lot. But that won’t get me to Nashville.” Miracle dropped his head to the sheets. “Oh, come on, Miracle, I want to be a star. You understand what it means to want something so bad you’ll do anything for it.”
“Yes,” Miracle said. “Oh, yes.”
“Then make it easy for me, OK? Shake my hand. Blow me a kiss. Wish me luck. Buy my records.” She leaned across the bottles to kiss him, holding her still-glistening nails high above his head.
The window framed a pale gray sheet of sky, and Miracle realized that it was dawn, that he had spent the night, for the first time in his life, in a woman’s bed. He sat up abruptly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He felt tears returning. Rosamund Uptegrove was the last person he wanted to see him cry.
Crossing the River Page 14