Crossing the River

by Fenton Johnson

  Miracle stepped over to the dogwood, where the feather kicked and struggled like some live thing trapped. He freed it gently, gave it to Talbott. “You never deserved my mother in the first place,” he said.

  “And I didn’t get her, either. So now we’re all happy, right?”

  Miracle turned and walked away. He stumbled blindly through the undergrowth, catbriar and the canes of last summer’s blackberries tearing at his jeans. Love, that was easy. He’d said it himself without much trouble in the saying, had heard it often enough on television, on the radio, had read it in the romance novels his Grandmother Pickett stole from the bookmobile and hid at the Miracle house once she’d finished their reading. But need? That was another place altogether. Miracle had to admit it—he’d understood Talbott there. Miracle tried to imagine himself saying to Rosamund Uptegrove, to anybody, “I need you.” No luck. Need was for the weak. A man didn’t need somebody unless he was weak, unless he was sick or laid up with a broken leg, or crazy maybe. And Miracle was a man, from strong stock, Miracle stock, who had the good sense to hold his tongue when that was the best and worst thing he could do.

  The problem was, he needed somebody right now. He sure could use a body right now. Would he ever be able to say that to another person, woman or man?

  Miracle walked a ways, how far he couldn’t say and didn’t care, until he tripped over a root and fell flat. The ragged edge of Strang Knob rose to greet him like an old lover. He lay against it, scratched and sore, above the bombs and flares of the mock war to the west.

  Martha was sleeping when Leo called. She stumbled to the phone. She tried to recall if she’d heard Miracle leave for the Inn.

  That was exactly what Leo wanted to know. Estill Mallory had called Leo from the store. For the first time in anybody’s memory the Inn was not open for the Louisville commuters. How could a working man be expected to drive an hour and a half each way without a six-pack of beer? Leo wanted to know, and how in the hell was he supposed to do something about it, with a cow about to calf and Dolores gone to the county seat to bowl, for Christ’s sake? In the middle of his tirade, Martha gently replaced the receiver. She dressed and drove to the Inn.

  The little tab of land surrounding the Inn was packed with knots of men standing and cursing in clouds of white vapor. Martha parked and weaved through the cars, meeting no one’s eyes. Inside, she flipped up the driveup window. “Sorry for the delay,” she called into the lot. “Miracle’s sick. Leo is busy. What can I do for you?”

  Silence. Several men (sons of the men who had walked out that first night Martha had walked into the Miracle Inn and ordered a beer) climbed in their cars and spun out of the lot. Among the rest there were sheepish faces and mumbled jokes, but they lined up. A gentleman proved his mettle in just this sort of trying situation. They were not to be caught with their manners down. More than one doffed his cap and squeezed her hand and told her how sorry he was to hear of Bernie’s death, now Miracle was sick, it never rained but it poured, my wife put in so much canned okra it’s running out our goddamned beg your pardon ears, I could drop it down to Miracle, he’s a good boy and the pride of his family, you’re lucky to have him thank you very much. Twenty of these speeches and Martha was on the verge of slamming the driveup window on some well-meaning hand.

  Then they were gone, in the way of the Inn’s schedule. She was alone. She wiped the bar and dusted the bottles. The morning stretched on. Squares of light turned across the floor and the north-slanting pool table. Still no one came.

  Martha delighted in the work. She emptied the coolers and wiped them out. She took the bottles from in front of the unbroken mirror and washed it down. Across that morning she worked, without thought of Miracle or Bernie or Talbott, until Leo arrived, just before the noontime rush. “What the hell’s going on here?” he said.

  Martha shifted a case of bottles to the cooler. “Open your eyes, Leo, you’d think you grew up with those blind fish in Mammoth Cave. It’s dinner time at the Inn. Where have you been?”

  “Some of us have a farm to attend to.’’

  “And some of us have a business. We can thank God there’s enough to keep us all working hard. Would you fetch another case from the stockroom?”

  Leo was at the door to the stockroom before he caught himself. “I mean, what are you doing here, Martha Pickett? Alone? Tending bar like some hoptown floozy. And where’s Miracle?”

  “He’s sick. A body has a right to get sick every now and then.”

  “Sick, hell. Bernie didn’t get sick in fifty-seven years.”

  “And look what happened to him. They’re different persons, or hadn’t you noticed? Bernie is dead. Miracle is alive. Leo, we’ll have some real live customers in about ten seconds and I want to be ready for them. Either get with it or kindly remove yourself to the other side of the bar.”

  Leo straddled the narrow aisle behind the bar. “You forget, Martha Pickett, who is in this family and who is not. I’ll be damned if I’ll let a woman—”

  “Haven’t you got a farm to attend to.”

  “This is Miracle business. Somebody from the family’s got to be here.”

  “Somebody from the family is here, Leo, or at least the side of it that has any gumption. You’re welcome to stay, if you keep out of the way.”

  Leo spread his bony hands in a wide fan, as if studying his fingernails for dirt. “OK,” he said. “But don’t think you’ve heard the last of this. Not from the Miracles.” He stomped out.

  Martha served the lunch crowd, cleaned up, was alone again. She moved to the window then, watching the construction crew across the old levee, as they paved over the turnabout where a few months earlier she had sat watching for Talbott and dreading Bernie’s appearance at this same window.

  She puzzled on how it was she got herself into such messes. Her parents built a house (not too large), bore children (not too many), feared God (not too much), and set out to live as prosperously as possible within the bounds of good taste and the Baptist Church. She traveled from one extreme to the next. Her parents’ lives stretched out before and behind them like Kansas, with only a dip here and a rise there to accommodate the traumas—death, birth, marriage, taxes—that no one could avoid. Her own life mapped out like Jessup County itself, full of sharp ups and downs and craggy limestone cliffs and sudden sinkholes where springs gushed forth, where the earth trembled endlessly from the mock battles fought just over the next hill.

  She worked through that day, until Leo arrived for the evening shift. She greeted him pleasantly. He grunted a response.

  At home she found Miracle asleep in Bernie’s chair, his hair matted and his jeans covered with sticktights and cockle-burrs. She covered him with a quilt and retired to a sound and dreamless sleep.

  She found him there the next morning, curled into a ball, the quilt tossed to one side. She left him sleeping. The Inn was hers, too, after all, Grandma Miracle said as much. It was Martha Pickett’s turn to run it now. She could run it now, better than the best.

  13

  Blood Talk

  She faced them all. When she had to, she faced them down.

  The next morning, Miracle rose with Martha. She ordered him back to bed. She would take the morning shift; he could come at noon. Miracle gave her a long look of disbelief, then he shrugged and returned to his room.

  After twenty-three years boldness did not come easy to Martha Pickett Miracle. Standing at the driveup window on the fourth or fifth morning, she could no longer offer Miracle’s illness as an excuse. Her stomach roiled; her palms grew icy. She welcomed them all, gave some a friendly smile, others a steely gaze.

  Mornings at the Inn became part of her life. The place had its way of working into the blood, and Martha welcomed it with an open heart. The talk, and the traffic; being part of the town; doing something she was not supposed to do, going places she had never been; she welcomed these. Some of the men refused to buy from a woman and stayed away. Most came every morning, though there were
complaints and jokes from outside the window.

  Martha took care to give them full chance to speak their doubts. She took that as her penance, for the years with Bernie when speaking had been possible and she had not spoken. Working at the Inn, where Bernie had spent most of his waking hours, she felt the old wounds begin to heal.

  The work was not a pleasure. It was dull, and there were always men who felt it their duty to remind her of her place and how she’d come by it. They did it casually and with a politeness due a widow and a woman. They conjured Bernie’s memory, referring in sly jokes to her affair with Talbott, or to the ways (always better) that Bernie had run the Inn.

  Martha listened and held her tongue. Working at the Inn she cleansed herself of sins, her own and Bernie’s, twenty years in the making.

  She was at the Inn reorganizing the shelves when a work crew arrived from Louisville unannounced, to install the new, custom-cut beveled mirror, replacing the mirror broken in the Christmas Eve brawl.

  Leo arrived for his dinnertime beer as the men were wrestling the crated mirror from their van. With a heavy scowl he stood about, eyeing the crew and the mirror from different angles. “A sorry looking crowd, if I do say so myself,” he said. “Two niggers, which means that whoever’s hiring in that company is hiring cheap. And if the white guy was any good at what he did he wouldn’t work with niggers. You wait and see.”

  Martha was handing change through the driveup window when she heard a workman grunt. Leo cursed. She whirled around to find Leo already through the hinged flap in the bar. One corner of the mirror rested on the bartop, where it had dug a scratch, a long sliver of white across the dark mahogany. Leo was lecturing one of the workers, a short squat man who might have been one of Ossetta’s long-removed sons. “Leo,” Martha called out sharply. “I asked you to stay out of the way.”

  “He was dropping it.”

  “Then he would have paid for it, or his company. Leo, leave. Go back to the farm. Please.”

  He gave her a look to clabber milk. “I’ll go, Miss Priss. But I’ll be back.”

  Martha watched him storm through the door. From the rear he might have been Bernie, the same narrow shoulders and slightly bow-legged Miracle strut, until he slammed the door, something Bernie, with his slow anger, would never have done.

  Martha and the workmen were washing the mirror of bits of putty and fingerprints when Leo returned. The first person Martha saw reflected in it was Grandma Miracle, being shoved through the door by her livid son.

  At the bar the old woman planted her feet. “Now goddammit, Leo, tell me what the hell’s going on here or take me home where I belong,” she said. “I told Bernie when I handed this place over to him I didn’t ever want to set foot in it again and I meant it. And I hadn’t, ’til you drug me down here.”

  “It’s her,” Leo said. “First she hired a no-good crew to replace the mirror—”

  “You broke a mirror? How on earth did you manage that?”

  “Then she won’t even let somebody who knows a chuck from a bit keep an eye on the job. The least she could do would be to have her son down here, but no-o-o—she’s got to have it all to herself. You leave it up to her, she wouldn’t let a Miracle within a mile of the place.”

  “Leo, I am a Miracle.” Martha said it as a weary concession to the facts of life in New Hope. Twenty-three years across the river and something had to give. She had tried to escape, but in the end the Inn proved stronger than them all. It had been here longer than any of them. It would be here long after they were gone.

  “The hell you say.” Grandma Miracle thrust out her sunken chest. Leaning on her gnarled cane, she crossed to the colored bar. “You’re as much a Pickett as you was the day I set eyes on you. You hadn’t done nothing but fight the Miracles for twenty years. Why give up now, when you got no reason to? Call yourself a Pickett if you want.” She thumped the planks with her cane. “Turn this place into a palace. Or tear the goddamn place down and put in a hamburger joint. I hear that was in the works anyway.”

  Leo turned bright red. “Who’s been spreading lies like that.”

  “Ossetta cleans my house as often as she cleans yours, only twice as good,” Grandma Miracle said. “And I’d think twice before accusing a sweet black lady of lying, especially as she’s old enough and smart enough to keep her mouth shut when it’s important. Which is more than I can say for some of the people whose houses she cleans.” She turned to Martha. “This place is yours, you earned it fair and square and if I can be allowed to say as much I ain’t sure it was worth the price. But you paid the asking price and it’s yours to do with what you want. Now Leo, get me back home and don’t come after me with such horse manure again.”

  Already she was across the ragged planks that had tripped Martha up, that first time in the Inn. Watching her from the rear, Martha saw for the first time that the peculiar walk, the bow-legged Miracle strut, was not of the Miracles at all but was her own, hers and her six dead Blanchard sisters.

  In the doorway Grandma Miracle turned and surveyed them all, Leo and Martha and the work crew behind the bar, putting up a good show of looking busy and listening to beat the band. “I had forgot,” she said after a moment, “the love that went into making those bars. Leo, get your mother home.”

  They left. Martha stared through the plate glass window after them, across the bottoms, plowed under now, showing their black earth to the sun.

  “Ma’am,” a workman said, “you mind if we have a beer? It’s getting on to dinner.”

  “Oh, no, on the house,” Martha said. She poured them drafts, one for each of the workmen. She poured a shot of whiskey for herself.

  14

  Answered Prayers

  No one ever learned who arranged the dynamiting of the Boatyard Bridge. The Fort Knox post commander told the Louisville papers he’d contacted the local authorities, who’d been eager to cooperate. The reporter returned to his desk and filed his story. The next day the men who lined up at the Inn’s driveup window talked of nothing else. After they’d left Martha walked up to Mallory’s to buy a paper for herself.

  “But New Hope doesn’t have any local authorities,” she said to Leo. He stopped in every morning now. He never bought liquor or stocked shelves but only sat, following her every move with narrowed eyes. Behind tight lips his jaw worked. “That don’t matter,” he said. “They’re going to dynamite it anyway.”

  “You act like you don’t care,” Martha said. “What if something goes wrong. We can’t be more than a hundred yards from the bridge. And who decided we needed to get rid of the old bridge to begin with? I don’t know a soul they talked to around here. I’d just as soon see it stay, myself.”

  “What makes you think it matters what you care, or anybody else,” Leo snorted. “We’re just people. They’re the Army. This is a war we’re in, in case you hadn’t noticed. If they needed to dynamite the whole damn Inn they’d just come over and do it, and I for one would stand back. That’s what happens in a war, in case you and your women friends never noticed.” He unraveled himself and stood, all angles and bones against the bright square of sunlight. “It’d be no worse than other things I seen happening around here.” He slammed the door and left.

  It happened too quickly for thought. One day everything was normal. The next there were signs posted near the Inn’s parking lot: Road Closed. Across the old levee the Highway Department erected bright orange sawhorses that fell over when the wind blew. Traffic was diverted to the new bridge.

  That Thursday, the Argus ran nothing but news from the south end of the county. On the front page, a banner headline proclaimed the bridge dedication, scheduled for the following Monday. Inside, the Army bought a full-page ad: the bridge would be cordoned off to unofficial persons as of Sunday, three p.m. The Army would dynamite at sunset. No one would be allowed near until disposal and mop-up operations were completed. People were welcome to watch the operation from the new bridge, a safe half-mile to the south.

  Mir
acle took that Saturday night’s shift. The Inn was crowded. The dynamiting was scheduled for the next day, the dedication of the new bridge would be Monday. People were in a mood to party.

  Bradford Uptegrove was back in town. He’d shown up at the Inn one evening, in full dress uniform and fresh from the bus from boot camp. He’d come straight to the Inn, without stopping to see Willie or Big Rosie or LaHoma Dean, living with her mother and five months pregnant with Bradford’s child.

  As near as Miracle could tell, Bradford was spending his days and nights at the Inn. He was there when Miracle replaced Martha at noon. He drank through the day. According to Leo, Bradford was there for closing at night.

  He was going to ’Nam, as he’d learned to call it. Two weeks at home and then off to California, twenty-four hours to play in San Francisco, then across the ocean. He’d heard that in Vietnam women were cheap and the best dope in the world grew by the roadsides like chicory. He wouldn’t be gone long, just long enough to kill some Viet Cong and make the California connections that he needed to set himself up on his return.

  Bradford had changed, and Miracle tried to figure how. Louder? Bradford had always been loud. More sure of himself? Bradford had never been one to have doubts. But he clutched to his chest like his last drop of whiskey that part of himself that Miracle had once known well, that had brought him that Christmas Eve to the Inn to plead for help with LaHoma Dean.