“Where are you off to?” she asked.
“I got to get out of here before Willie Uptegrove skins my hide for rolling in the hay with his engaged daughter. Not that Willie would care about anything so idealistic.”
“Oh, Miracle, you’re mad. That’s another thing about Catholics, you’re so damned touchy.”
Miracle struggled into his pants. Slivers of mud showered onto the carpet. He shoved his arms into his sweater and it fought back.
“We’re both dreamers. Can’t you see that?” Rosamund said. “You and me. And your mother. All three of us. It’s just that what I’m after is real. Nashville is real. Money is real. You and your mother—you’re after love. And love is not real. Only a class ‘A’ dreamer would row across the river in a March flood for love. That’s just you, and your mother. You’d never catch me doing that for love. For a recording session, maybe. Not for love.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t catch me at it in the near future,” Miracle said. “I’ll see you at the wedding. If I’m invited.” Before she could answer he tiptoed from the room.
Across the muddy fields he raged at Talbott, at Nashville, at Rosamund, at himself. Last summer there had been a river, barely a creek, separating him from Rosamund. Now there was a flood, a mile-wide muddy mess of uprooted hopes and broken dreams.
Slogging through the cold water, Miracle stoked his heart on thoughts of revenge. Its promise gave fire to his blood. He would tell Talbott of this night, spent with his fiancée, at her invitation. If that made Talbott break the engagement, Miracle couldn’t care less. That was Talbott’s affair. Miracle wanted only to sow, as thickly as possible, the seeds of unhappiness that filled his heart.
Earlier that night, Martha had heard Miracle when he set out south on the Jackson Highway. With the understanding of one who had crossed the river herself she knew where he was going and guessed how he would get there. She thought of stopping him, because it was dangerous and because she did not consider Rosamund Uptegrove worth the risk of life, limb, and peace of mind.
She raised her hands over her head. “Let him go,” she said. Since Bernie had died she talked to herself, sitting at her bureau mirror, under the gaze of the twin wood mosaics of Jesus and Mary of the Seven Sorrows. “Talbott Marquand was hardly worth risking life and limb for. And Bernie Miracle. And here you are.” She composed her hands in her lap.
The night that followed was the longest of her memory, longer than setting watch while Bernie lay in the funeral home, longer than the night so many years before, when in the same bed and under the same pair of Sacred Hearts bleeding drops of cherry blood, she had turned her back on Bernie Miracle.
From the point of view of nearly everybody she knew, she had betrayed both sides of the river. In Mount Hermon they thought she had left her family and religion to marry a heathen who made his living trafficking in sin. In New Hope they thought of her as an outsider with loose morals and liberal ideas that no doubt had their source in divorce or some equally radical Baptist notion.
“You got to run with the foxes or run with the hounds,” Ossetta had told her once, before Miracle was born. Martha had been run by them both and now she felt cornered, treed with no strength to run and no place to go if she’d been able.
Across that white night she sank down. She moved to the armchair, Bernie’s rocker, and breathed Bernie’s faint and fading smells from its antimacassar. She sank to the depths alone, so far down that some part of her feared for her return. She had been certain that for her there was no defeat. Now she was defeated.
Down into the wreck; many wrecks, really, piled atop each other like the layers of fires and flint and bones left by the Indians in the limestone crevices of Strang Knob. Her marriage to Bernie; the child born to neither side but somewhere in between, who looked more and more as if he would be content to stay in this town; and worst of all, Talbott Marquand, who had pressed her for an answer that she had refused to give. Strewn through these wrecks were her hopes for her new religion, for the incense and candles and mystery of the Church.
Back in the bedroom, she stared at the wood mosaics. They had hung there since before she moved into the house. Grandma Miracle had hung them there, because every bedroom should have its Jesus and Mary, and because she hadn’t trusted this new, Baptist bride to do her job. They were terrible faces. Looked at closely, something in the grain of the wood, tortured around the eyes, gave forth the pain hidden behind the beatific smiles.
Looking at them she touched bottom, in a different, deeper place than after Bernie’s death. Then the bottom she had touched was as soft as Knobs Fork clay in a spring flood. She had lain there wallowing in regrets and recriminations until now. Sitting under these suffering gazes she found her strength, the hard, bedrock place inside herself, the place that she’d leapt from when she crossed the river that first time, and when she’d walked into a Catholic church, and when she’d fought with Bernie to have their single child and no more.
Once she had loved being alive. She loved being wild, she took pride in the rumors and the sideways glances and the knowing that things were changing, even here, because of her. For twenty years that pride had shamed her, when she dared face it at all. Now, sitting below the wood mosaics, she embraced it, as part of who she was.
She rose and put on a coat. Her own coat, not Bernie’s, she made sure of that, with a mental note to call the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and give them everything that ever belonged to her dead husband. In the first gray light of dawn she set out in search of Talbott.
She did not look long. He was at the Inn, alone at the bar. She entered and shut the door softly. She crossed the room and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. “You son of a bitch,” she said.
For a moment he spread his hands—asking for help? Then he stuffed his hands in his pockets, as if he’d been caught at some shameful act. “I was hoping I’d see you, Martha. We need to go somewhere and talk.”
“Talk.” She waved at the empty room. “We can talk here, if that’s what you want.”
He put his hand over her mouth. “Leo is here, passed out in the back room. We might wake him up.”
“I’m not afraid. What have I got to be afraid of? Go ahead, talk. You got an audience.”
Talbott turned to his beer. She counted, one, two, three . . . “I loved you,” he said finally.
He said it, she’d known he would, now that it was safe to say it, now that he was home free. “Love,” she said bitterly. “That word. What right do we have to it, either of us.” His hands searched for hers; she drew them away. “No, you didn’t love me, at least not according to anything I’d call love. But I didn’t love you either. You were going somewhere you needed to go. I was a handy way to get there. If that sounds terrible that’s OK, because it’s a true fact. I know it’s true because the same thing is true for me.”
“No,” Talbott said. “For whatever it’s worth, no. I understand what you’re saying. It’s what all those women in New Hope are saying. Love—you’re right, it’s the wrong word. But when I think back on those mornings, when I told everybody down here I was going to buy some shit at Mallory’s and I got in the car and I prayed that you’d be at home alone and sometimes I got lucky and you were, I think back on that and I think about putting a name to it, some word to pin on it, and I don’t know of any other word to use. You got a better word, I’m listening.”
She heard some sense in what he was saying, and even as she heard it she knew that the time would come when she’d be able to acknowledge that sense. But that time was not now, not here, in the place that once had been Bernie and that now was her, herself and her only son. “Maybe there is no word,” she said. “But there’s trusting somebody and treating them with decency, there’s saying no sometimes to yourself because that way you can say yes to somebody else. There’s needing somebody—saying to somebody, once in a while, ‘I need help. I need you.’ That’s what I’d call love. Is that what you felt on those mornings when you were hellfire t
o come out to the house?” Her voice rose. “Is that what you felt when you took off to Nashville?”
Twenty-four hours, twenty-three years of maintaining and suddenly she was overwhelmed. She’d felt this coming when she put on her coat, when she left the house, but she trusted in herself, in the strength of Martha Pickett, to ward it off, to keep things under control. Now she saw Leo Miracle in the storeroom door, his jaw slack as a scarecrow’s, and in seeing him she broke. Take it all in, she thought, for a long delirious second before she reeled back her hand and slapped Talbott’s ruddy fair cheek as hard as she could, so hard that his hat, that funny, dumpy hat, flew from his head to land on the bartop. Then she turned and left, stepping carefully across the uneven floor, shutting the door as softly as when she’d first come in.
Outside, the river had begun to fall. Empty milk cartons and a single forlorn glove marked the high water line. Farther out a heron waded among the stubble of last summer’s corn, a pale blue tear against the muddy brown backwash. To the south, fighting the current that surged around the bridge pilings, she saw Miracle rowing a dull, battered boat.
He moved forward a few feet. The current spun the boat around and tangled it in a mass of matted snags and branches and trash. He stood halfway, his hands on his hips, surveying the mess that entangled the boat. He cursed; she saw his head jerk in angry spasms.
From where she stood, atop the Inn’s dry tab of land, he looked so fragile against the flood. At any moment a surge of current might tip the boat and throw him into the water, smashing his head against the pilings. “Miracle, sit down!” she shouted. With the wind against her words she was certain he did not hear.
As if on cue he sat. He took an oar from its lock and pushed at the tangled limbs. Suddenly he drifted free, turning and bobbing in the current, and then he was in calm backwater, growing larger as he rowed closer, until she could see his familiar square chin, Bernie’s chin, and that Pickett red hair, her own hair.
The boat crunched into the gravel of the parking lot. He turned around. “I don’t know where you’ve been to get looking like you are, but I won’t believe any story you could make up so don’t bother,” Martha said. “Get yourself home and get changed and get back down here. You’ve got a business to run, and I’m here to help you do it.” She meant to sound like a conspirator. Instead she sounded as if she really cared that his clothes were muddy and that he was late to work.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She quailed before the razor’s edge in his voice. “Oh, Miracle,” she said, but he was tugging the boat ashore and Leo was yelling at them from the lot and Talbott was tearing out of the drive in his red Mustang.
Too much to say, and so she said nothing. How could she expect her son to forgive her? How could they talk, with Leo shouting in their ears? The moment slipped from her as surely as time. Martha trudged home, leaving Miracle cursing and struggling at the water’s edge.
12
Hunting Snipe
The river dropped. Before the week was out Talbott was back on the new bridge. Standing at the Inn’s window, Miracle watched him pace the length of the bridge’s white concrete, shouting, arguing, pointing. Only the last smooth concrete and asphalt skin remained to be laid.
A morning came when Miracle rose earlier than usual. Instead of walking to the Inn, he turned onto the levee that Talbott and his crew had constructed for the new bridge. He found Talbott among the machinery, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. “I want to take you for a walk,” Miracle said.
“I’ve got business to attend to, Miracle,” Talbott said.
“So do I. They’ll get along without us. You’ve left your business alone plenty of mornings. I know that and I know where you went when you left. You went there on and off since September, as far as I can tell, every morning you could get free that my father was at the Inn. You can give me a little time in exchange.”
“Miracle, you don’t just go off and leave—”
“She’s my mother, Talbott Marquand, and Rosamund Uptegrove was my girlfriend.”
“I have to wonder what Rosamund would say to that.”
“I know the answer to that. I can give it to you here, in front of anybody that shows up. Or you can come along.” Miracle turned around without waiting. Talbott crumpled his cup into a wad, tossed it behind a bulldozer and followed.
Across the fields Miracle heard the sweet tolling of the morning Angelus. He should be at the Inn by now. He could name the men already lined up at the driveup window.
He climbed Strang Knob, pushing through the brown stubble of last year’s teasel and sagebrush. At his back he heard Talbott’s labored breathing. Miracle pressed on, climbing harder and faster.
“You’re responsible for a business,” Bernie said at his ear. “People depend on you. People find out they can’t depend on you, they go somewhere else. The Inn has been here longer than any place else because people know they can depend on us. And I give it over to you because I know I can depend on you.” Miracle climbed on.
At the cliff edge Miracle paused to let Talbott catch up. Below, Miracle picked out the red tiled roof of Assumption Church, and to the south the white clapboard siding and steeple of the Mount Hermon Baptist Church, poking from the square. Between the towns the river twisted and turned like an emerald snake. In the river bottoms the Inn sat alone, a tiny black cube on a tab of earth projecting from the levee. A line of trucks and cars wound from its lot.
“They’ll go to the Inn and have a drink on us, whether they know it or not,” Bernie said at his ear. “Maybe they’ll get to where they don’t feel so bad about themselves and the world.”
Miracle turned his back on the Inn. He crossed the spine of the ridge to a limestone outcropping on its western face. Talbott followed.
Beyond the western foot of Strang Knob, on the firing ranges of Fort Knox, the grayness began, a vastness of burned and blackened tree stumps. The river disappeared green behind a ridge and emerged to wind gray and brown through scarred fields. Older craters, left by bombs, had eroded to brown holes, but red clay bled forth from new gashes.
Talbott sat on a stump, panting. “I hope this is worth it,” he said. “I don’t go for morning walks for recreation.”
Miracle wheeled around then, to face Talbott head on. “Why have you used us like you have? First my mother, then Rosamund Uptegrove. Why can’t you leave us alone? When I finally figured out what you were up to I didn’t believe it. Partly I didn’t believe it because I didn’t want to believe it. Mostly I didn’t believe it because it didn’t make sense. Here we are out in the middle of nowhere and this guy comes in with a little bit of money and a red car and screws up our lives. And what the hell for? I thought about it until finally I couldn’t think of any reason for it at all except that you saw two more women to add to the list. Just nothing but meanness, pure and simple.”
“Meanness,” Talbott said. “Well.”
A jet streaked overhead, so low its roar drowned his voice. Talbott removed his hat, the dented plaid hat with the feather tucked in its brim. He fanned his flushed cheeks.
The jet faded to the south. “I told them,” Talbott said. “I told them both early on that I was married, that I had a wife.”
“So that makes it all right.”
“No. There’s no way to make it all right.” Talbott stood, planted his feet, crossed his arms—he might be lecturing a tardy worker. “Now you listen to me. You think about how things were. Just my taking this job, just my showing up changed everything, here and back in Detroit. I went back there after my first weeks down here and I ran into a whole lot of choices. I could try to fix my marriage up, and if I got lucky I might get it back to the mess it was in before I left to come south. I could stand back and do nothing but help my wife pack her bags. Or I could figure out what I wanted and come back here and try to get it. I came back from that trip north and I asked your mother to go for a drive to the mountains. And she said yes, because she wanted to go.”
&nbs
p; “Then why didn’t you finish it out!” Miracle cried. “My father’s dead now, you could have asked her to marry you. But no, you had to go after Rosamund Uptegrove.”
Talbott picked at the feather in his hat. “Rosamund Uptegrove I understand. That’s why I proposed to her. It’s why she said yes. This time I know what I’m doing. With my wife, with your mother—I was never sure. With Rosamund, I can say I’m sure about something. We’ll get married, build a house, have a kid or two, she’ll settle down. We’ll fit together just fine.”
“What about her going to Nashville?”
Talbott laughed, something like a hoot. “She just thinks she wants to go to Nashville. She doesn’t know what she wants. That’s what I can do for her—help her figure out what she really wants, not just what she thinks she wants. Rosamund needs a man, needs me. I don’t expect you know this, but I asked your mother to marry me. Every time I asked—”
“A lot of asking for somebody who’s spent two of the last three months in Detroit,” Miracle said scornfully.
“—every time I asked she said no. She had these conditions. Imagine you ask a woman to get married and she says, ‘Only if you need me.’ Not that I wanted her, not even that I loved her, but that I need her. That I need her.” Talbott beat his hat against his leg, until the feather came loose and flew towards the lip of the cliff. “That’s when I headed for the door.”
The draft that rose up the Strang Knob cliff carried the feather up, until it tangled itself in the limbs of a dogwood just threatening to break into bloom. Miracle watched the feather thrashing in the branches—it was stuck fast. He thought of himself with Rosamund, the last time he’d seen her. His fingers bent slightly, recollecting the curve of her breasts, how round and full each had rested in his cupped palm; all the while she was contemplating which nail polish would best match the next morning’s blouse. Miracle saw her touching liquid pink to each nail’s pale crescent, and in that same moment he saw the barn door of things, that had been staring him full in the face: the worst thing Miracle could do to Talbott was to keep his own mouth shut, to leave Talbott to figure Rosamund out on his own. And he would, soon enough—he wasn’t that dumb, and anyway, how dumb could you stay with Rosamund Uptegrove as a teacher? Down the pike—two years? three years? Long enough for the ink to dry on the papers, long enough for the paint to dry on the columns of the new brick house; long enough for Rosamund to figure out the next step and go for it.
Crossing the River Page 15