More customers came, some with guests in town for the bombing. Cars waited at the driveup window. By the time the crowd began to clear, Miracle’s head throbbed. When spare moments finally came, he found himself thinking on Rosamund. Her memory nagged at him with the persistence of the cockroaches that lived behind the pickled eggs. Just when Miracle was certain that he had his memory under control, when a whole hour had passed without a thought of Rosamund Uptegrove, he’d hear a snatch of Loretta Lynn and memory would scuttle from his mind’s dusty cracks.
The driveup window buzzed. Miracle stuck his head out. It was Rosamund.
She was alone in Talbott’s Mustang, her hair strewn about from driving with the top down. When she saw Miracle she half stood in her seat, reaching to plant a kiss on his cheek. He drew back, bumping his head on the window frame.
Rosamund sat back. “Come on, Miracle. It’s not the end of the world. It’s only getting married.”
“You could have let me know. You could have written.” You could have married me, he added to himself.
“OK, I should have let you know. I’m sorry about that. But what would have changed? You would have said don’t marry him. I would have done what I had to do. We’d still be right here.” Miracle pulled his head inside the window. Rosamund seized his hand. “Come on, Miracle, this is how your father would act. Be yourself. Do something different.”
“Like what.”
“Like giving me the chance to say I’m sorry.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“You think so. You really think so. Miracle, you know me, a little, anyway. Easy for Rosamund Uptegrove to say she’s sorry? I am sorry, Miracle. I’m sorry I didn’t treat you better. I’m sorry I couldn’t treat you better. What more can I say? I’m sorry I’m myself?”
Miracle pulled his hand back, gently.
“The bridge dedication is Monday,” she said.
“I know.”
“They’ve hired me to sing.”
“Good for you.”
“I hope you’ll be there.”
“I expect I’ll be somewhere around.”
She stuck out her hand, almost to the windowsill. He turned away, facing the long shallow U of the Miracle Inn bar, his arms folded, his fingers working furiously, clenching and unclenching, picking at his sleeve buttons. For one miserable moment, he made this concession: letting something break, absolutely, for the sake of decency and wisdom, for the sake of this black-haired woman he loved. He turned around and took her hand. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll buy your records.”
She pulled his face down to peck his cheek. “I really am sorry, Miracle.”
He pulled away. “You’ve been around me too much. You’re starting to sound like a Catholic. Saying you’re sorry for something you couldn’t do anything about.”
Rosamund gave a little toss of her head. “Well, it was me you all were after.”
“Oh yes,” Miracle said. “It was you.” He lowered the window and turned his back.
The Sunday morning of the dynamiting Miracle rose early. He made enough noise to give Martha the idea he was leaving for early Mass. Instead he walked to the Boatyard Bridge.
He sat in his old haunt, under the north pilings, near the crevice where he stored his beer. A fat black garden spider mended the edge of the web she’d woven across the entrance to his stash. Near the web’s center an iridescent June bug, the first of the season, struggled to free its wings. With one thin, jointed leg it grasped a nearby twig, righted itself, spread its wings to fly, only to have its struggles entangle it more completely, until it fell with an angry buzz into the web’s center.
With a twig Miracle cleared the web. The spider scurried into the hole, dragging her prize. Miracle reached in the crevice and found the last of the last summer’s beers. When he opened it, beer exploded in a foamy shower.
He could sit by the river for hours, emptying his thoughts into the slow flow of green ribbon, endlessly unwinding past. But he did not have hours. In a few hours the bridge would be gone for good.
And so would he. On his last sip of beer he decided: he would go, that night. The Inn would be closed; the Army had declared it off limits to everyone, even the Miracles, because it was too close to the old bridge. No one would miss him until Monday morning.
He took aim with the bottle. It shattered with a satisfying pop, scattering shards of brown glass. For the last time Miracle rose and climbed through the rocks and debris of the north pilings.
After Sunday Mass Martha walked along the old levee, past the Road Closed signs to the Boatyard Bridge. In the April sun the planks gave off the faint scent of creosote. Martha remembered that evening twenty-four years before, when on Rosie Uptegrove’s dare she’d driven across the Boatyard Bridge to buy a beer from Bernie Miracle.
Cliff swallows darted in and out of the netting of cables and girders. She quelled an urge to return to the Inn for a shovel to dislodge their nests. They would die, Jessup County’s first casualties in this latest war.
In the middle of the bridge she stopped. She squeezed her face between a cable and a girder and looked down to the water. She shared more than history with this bridge. They were alike, kindred spirits, always going from one place to another, never quite getting there. Not Catholic, not Protestant, not North, not South, not New Hope, not Mount Hermon, not Pickett, not Miracle. And what had it got the bridge, this constant journey? Eighty years of reliable service, only to be blown to the sky in thirty seconds. The same might be said of herself, minus the fireworks.
“But I’ve got the Inn, and I’ve got my son, and by God I’m not giving them up,” she said aloud, to the green water rolling by. She took strength from the thought. She stood on the bridge, her face squeezed between the girders, lost in her dreams, until the crash of glass breaking against concrete, somewhere below the bridge, startled her into life.
She walked back to lock up the Inn. Ahead of her, the girders framed the road, overhead the sky arched blue, and it was as if she walked down a long tunnel, the end of which was barely in sight.
They assembled at sunset on the new bridge, all of New Hope and Mount Hermon. Leo and Dolores were there early. Leo was anxious to poormouth his uppity sister-in-law to anyone who would lend an ear. Over Leo’s objections Grandma Miracle came along. Her husband, her connection to the Miracle Inn, had been thrown from the Boatyard Bridge. For all she knew, it was the last thing in God’s good world on which he’d laid his eyes. She would see it to its ruin.
Willie and Big Rosie came, nosing a path through the crowd in another shiny new car, this one a Lincoln as long and black as a hearse, with side pockets on the passenger doors where Rosie stashed her vodka. Willie parked smack in the middle of the new bridge, where everyone could see his car. The Uptegroves didn’t get out but pushed chrome buttons to lower the windows and held court right there, with Rosie pouring little dumps of vodka into her Coke when Willie wasn’t looking.
Talbott and Rosamund came, with the top down on the snappy little Mustang. Rosamund climbed atop the back seat like a homecoming queen, waving and smiling and flourishing her diamond engagement ring at the women who flocked about.
Bradford Uptegrove weaved through the crowd, wearing his uniform, his pupils bright and tiny as the evening star. This night and the next, and then it was off to Vietnam. He left LaHoma Dean standing at the railing and circled through the crowd, kissing women full on the lips with no more than a nod to their boyfriends or husbands.
Ossetta came with the few black folks, mostly as old as she, who had not moved to Louisville or Detroit or been installed in the cemetery. They made a place for themselves to the rear and to one end, where no white folks stood because the view up the river was not so good. They stood in a little knot, talking of the sons and now daughters, gone away to another war.
At the last minute Martha appeared. At home she’d searched for Miracle, only to find his duffel bag packed with his clothes and stuffed under his bed. She did not st
op to think what that might mean, but rushed down to the new bridge. Once there she scanned the crowd for him, but at dusk it was hard to tell one face from its neighbor.
Dusk or daylight, it was harder now to tell who belonged where. Most of the Baptists gathered on the south end of the bridge and most of the Catholics stayed on the north, but the young folks met in the middle and talked and sooner or later some of the kids from one side ended up on the other. Martha pushed through the crowd, searching people’s faces. She met Baptists on the north side and from a distance she saw more than one Catholic face to the south. More than one Catholic boy talked with a Baptist girl. Martha knew they were flirting, right under their parents’ noses.
Martha Pickett knew, at heart, that if she had not crossed the river, someone else would have. If she hadn’t stumbled into the Inn, another woman would have. The times sat on New Hope like they sat on everywhere. There was nothing anyone could do to escape them. Somebody was always there to come along.
But she had come along, she had been the first to step across the river. Because of her, in some small way things would never be the same. She turned to the bridge railing to hide her smile, a cheek-splitting grin of satisfaction.
To the west the sun touched the top of Strang Knob. The shadows flowed eastward, swallowing hillsides dusted with spring green, pink and white patches of dogwood in full bloom, the dark uncoiling river lined with sycamores still winter bare, their trunks showing patches of white. The mountain’s shadow reached the Boatyard Bridge. To Martha, surveying the scene from the bridge railing, the shadow hesitated a single long moment, while the rusted girders and cables glowed blood red with living fire; then night crawled east.
Talbott climbed onto the hood of the Uptegroves’ Lincoln, and Martha knew something was afoot. Willie was protective of his cars, the sort of person to straddle the stripes when angle parking so as to make sure nobody got so much as a chance to dent his doors. Yet here was Talbott, climbing in leather-soled wingtips over the Lincoln’s shiny finish as if it were no more than a piece of construction equipment. He held a microphone, wired to a box and battery held by a soldier in dress uniform. Talbott cleared his throat, quieted the noisy crowd. Watching, Martha felt the crawling in her gut that she had known at that bright sunny picnic where Talbott had stared at her with undressing eyes across the Miracle masses. She turned her back.
Talbott rambled a little, thanking the people of New Hope for bringing in a Yankee for this job that might have been done—“though not as well or as fast”—by somebody local. He issued a special thanks to the Army, to the politicians of the state of Kentucky and Jessup County, to the owners of the Miracle Inn, where he and his crew had stocked up before and after so many long days.
Martha felt on her back the eyes of the men and women standing nearby. She thought to turn around and face them down with the coldest stare she could muster. She turned instead to the river’s dark line of trees, the intricate geometry of the bridge cables and girders, the cry, growing closer, of a blue heron out for some early evening fishing.
“Through modern technology and the cooperation of the United States Army Armored Division headquartered at Fort Knox, we can explode the dynamite from right here,” Talbott was saying. “And I have asked my fiancée, your own Rosamund Uptegrove, to throw the switch.” A scattering of applause, whoops, wolf whistles, and the crawling inside Martha’s skin became a sharp stab to her chest. She wondered where Miracle was; wondered if, so much younger and a man, he was hurting the same way as herself. Or was it so different, across generations and sexes, that they could never share even this? Used to so many years of not feeling, then caught up in the storm surrounding herself and Talbott and Bernie and Bernie’s death, she had never thought to ask this of her son, this boy now a man. She felt suddenly a knife of fear turning in her heart, the deepest stab of loneliness that can come only when surrounded by the most familiar people: family, friends, neighbors. It was that great guilt, come again: had she failed her son?—and it was more. She stood washed over by Talbott’s magnified Yankee words, his narrow i’s and nasal a’s. She had only one blood tie left in this town, and that was her son. She stood here about to watch the destruction of the link between the place where she was and the place where she had come from, and she had no notion of where Miracle was or what he was feeling, with Talbott’s accent harsh on his ears and the picture of Rosamund climbing to the Lincoln’s black hood fixed in his eye. She watched and listened and scanned the crowd for her son, while her fear and aloneness grew.
Rosamund smiled across the crowd and bent from sight. The crowd drew a single sharp in-suck of breath.
Martha thought she screamed. Many women did and men too, though Martha never heard one admit as much. In the same instant a blinding flash of light and searing heat struck the crowd. For a single second Martha saw all eight sections of the bridge silhouetted against the glare. Flaming planks floated high in the air, where they turned end over end in lazy arcs against the black flank of Strang Knob.
The full length of the bridge burned, until Martha could not tell where one section began and its neighbor ended. She stepped back from the bridge railing. Her knees buckled. Only the crowd pressing against her kept her upright. She took her hands from her ears, where she had clapped them with the first explosions. Above the pop and roar of the flames rose the first human sound, a cry that might have come from the dying in the wreckage. It came again, this time more like a whoop. It was Bradford Uptegrove, standing atop the bridge railing and letting fly his rebel yell.
The sound stirred the crowd to life. Another yell arose. In the red light Rosamund danced on the Lincoln’s hood, her black hair flying. Talbott blew short blasts on his horn. North and south, black and white, Catholic and Baptist, the crowd screamed with pleasure.
Martha turned to look for the Inn. A breeze carried billows of smoke between where she stood on the new bridge and the old levee. She strained her eyes, shading her face from the fire’s glare. She saw nothing.
Through the babble of voices Martha fought her way. She was not thinking but acting, now, from fear; and her fear was for the Miracle Inn.
At the bridge she hesitated, a single moment. Miracle was in this crowd, somewhere. The image rose to mind of his duffel bag, a fat, packed, olive-drab worm. She turned, once towards the crowd, once towards the smoke billowing between the Inn and herself; then she plunged north towards the Inn, onto the new levee.
The smoke roiled above her head, but a rain of ashes and cinders fell on her face and blouse. At the Y, where Talbott’s new levee joined the old Jackson Highway, she encountered the roadblock. A group of soldiers sat in jeeps, guns at their sides, smoking cigarettes. Only one sat up in response to her request to pass. He was blond, with cheeks that glowed red in the light from the sky. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “No passage ’til the fire dies down. Not ’til tomorrow morning, I ’spect.” He spoke with a Southern accent, a deep South accent, Mississippi or Georgia, as different from New Hope’s mountain twang as Talbott’s Yankee voice.
“I have to see about the Inn,” Martha said. “I own a piece of property out there, the tavern.”
One of the soldiers laughed. “I thought I recognized you. You’re the woman that runs the Miracle Inn!” He shined a flashlight in her face. She faced him, head on. “What’s a little lady like you doing running a roughneck joint like that?”
“Selling booze,” Martha said. “Something I’d like to do more of. Surely to God I can walk out far enough to make sure it’s all right. What if it’s on fire?”
“What if it is? This is a war, lady.” The soldier turned the light down, along her legs. She felt her temper rising. She spoke in the most matronly voice she could manage. “It is not a war. At least not here. I could call the fire department if it was burning. Please.”
The Georgia blond swung himself into his seat. “Climb in, ma’am. Just far enough out to make sure it’s OK. No entry, even if you think something’s wrong.”
Martha climbed in. They swung around the orange sawhorses and onto the old levee. She peered ahead, into the smoke.
They were on it before she saw it. “Here!” she cried, “turn here!” They circled the lot, stopping before the plate glass window. Inside, the green-shaded bulb above the pool table cast its circle of light. Miracle stood at the bar, his foot propped on the rail, his back to her.
The Georgia soldier leaned forward, peering into the window. “Now how the fuck—beg pardon, ma’am, but we’re under strict orders. Nobody is supposed to be out here.”
“It’s OK,” Martha said. “He’s my son.”
“It is not OK. If the lieutenant hears about this—”
Martha laid a hand on his arm. “He won’t hear about it, though.” She felt his resistance. She laid a finger to her lips. “For a daughter of the South?”
He grimaced, then grinned. “For a daughter of the South. Only.” She was out of the jeep and inside the Inn before he could stop her.
How long had it been since Martha and Miracle were in the Inn alone? Since the hot August night of the fair, when Martha sent her son after Rosamund Uptegrove and took herself after Talbott Marquand.
Martha stood for a moment in the door, watching him from behind, noticing how much older he looked. He looks more like a Miracle every day, she thought, he grows more sharp edges. Since the summer he had pulled deeper into himself until he seemed to belong to no one. That, too, was like Bernie. Only his hair set him apart, that wild mop red as fall sumac, growing redder even than her own hair, as the rest of him grew more and more like Bernie.
She stirred herself. He was trying to leave, time was short. They were alone. She would speak of her plans for the Inn, of her love for him, how she had loved Bernie and Talbott, in her way. She would talk of how love worked, and how it didn’t. She would talk of her love for the Inn itself, for this place that had been there before any of them, and that would be there after they were gone. “Miracle,” she said.
Crossing the River Page 17