Crossing the River

by Fenton Johnson

  “It was OK, his leaving,” she said. “Everybody has a right to turn his back on somebody. Once.”

  “Even somebody you love?”

  “Especially somebody you love. It has to happen,” she said grimly. “It’s the only way to learn.” Then she poured two beers; she made herself do it. She set them on the bar. “A beer on the Inn, before you go.”

  Talbott raised the glass. His eyes avoided hers. “Here’s to the Miracle Inn,” he said. “May it sell booze forever.”

  She seized on the subject, anything to turn their talk from him and her. “Now that’s a change of tune. What happened to the hamburger joint and the car wash you and Leo had planned?”

  “That was then. This is now. Too many beers later. You get to love a place.” He took a sip, then set the beer on the bar. He turned to go. Framed by the lintel, washed in spring sunlight, looking over the Jackson Highway to the new bridge, he stopped, “I came down to give him a message, to give to you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” she said, to an empty room. He was gone.

  She slumped over the bar. For a long while she peered through the beer glasses at the Jackson Highway, watching the beer go flat, testing the sinking hole in her stomach. She felt its edges, how sharp they were, how big the pain was, how it had grown over the years, with Bernie and Miracle and Talbott. And she was left with the echo of her words, and then only with herself, and the Inn, and the hole in her gut.

  She knew of only one way to fill a hole that big. She retrieved a bucket and an apron from under the sink. She filled the bucket with soapy water. Miracle’s bar towel still sat where he’d left it, neat and square, good bartender that he was.

  She worked through the afternoon and into evening. She had no reason or desire to return home. If she were to open the Inn Tuesday morning she had a full day’s cleanup ahead of her. She got down to it. She could hardly count on anyone else, or anyone better.

  In every corner she saw things to do, things to change, ways she would make the Inn her own. Light from the rising moon filled the Inn’s east window before she lay down her mop and rags. Over a beer she surveyed her work.

  For one night, anyway, she was satisfied, but she would not quit yet. She searched the storeroom for a hammer and chisel, loading them in a burlap sack emptied of the sprouted eyes of the last potatoes Bernie had grown. She left the Inn, stopped, returned. From the register she took the silver flask, carved with Great-grandfather Miracle’s initials, her son Miracle’s gift. She tucked it in her pocket.

  Of the two sides of the river, the dead Catholics had the better view, a thought that occurred to Martha every time she climbed the low hill to Bernie’s grave. The air was warm with the first hint of summer. The moon was nearly full. Below, the towns spread to the river bottoms, washed in hard white light. To the south the white concrete of the new bridge fairly glowed.

  A few yards short of the Miracle mausoleum she stopped. From her pocket she pulled the flask and drank. She coughed, a loud harrumph, in the direction of the mausoleum. Satisfied that it was empty, she went about her job.

  In the white night there were no colors, only shades of gray and the thick black of the shadows. The polished granite headstone reflected the moon’s bright disk. By its light she read the engraved names.

  FRANCIS BERNARD MIRACLE 1910–1967

  MARTHA PICKETT MIRACLE 1922–

  MICHAEL PICKETT MIRACLE 1948–

  Martha knelt before the stone, her toes digging into the soft mound of earth. From inside the sack she drew a hammer and chisel. She placed the chisel’s point inside the leg of the “M” of her name, and with care and deliberation struck the first of many blows.

  The job took more time than she’d expected. By the time she finished, her arms and back ached. She left the tools by the grave and stepped into the mausoleum, to rest on its little iron bench.

  The recess smelled of stale beer and cigarettes and urine. The moonlight shone through the gate’s iron filigree, throwing its floral pattern onto the floor. Martha took the flask from her pocket for a sip. She rested her head against the cool marble wall.

  The family would be up in arms. She would deny it—kids defaced the cemetery sometimes—but they would know. Why her name and not Bernie’s, or Miracle’s?

  Why indeed? Grandma Miracle’s name remained untouched, though she had far more right than Martha to remove it. She had lived alone more of her life than she had lived with a Miracle, any Miracle.

  Things seemed simpler then, back when Grandma Miracle buried a husband and ran the family, when Martha Pickett crossed the river. Bernie Miracle had not been the first man interested in her, but he was the first, and likely the only, from across the river. It had been easy enough to go with him; just a simple matter of making him into the person she wanted him to be, new and exotic enough to satisfy her dreams.

  Now the world, once so far away, was as close as the bombing range the back side of Strang Knob. There were no dreams, no mysteries anymore. You listened to television, and a war a half a world distant came into your home easier than the neighbors and harder to get rid of. The Mass was in English, the prayers set forth in the same words you used to pledge allegiance and call the pigs.

  As for the dreams that had brought her across the river, they were as battered in the face of this new world as her hopes for her love for Bernie. Dreams had been easier come by, then, when the world was so far away that it lived more in her imagination than in her life, and it had been possible to believe that she could transform herself and her world with a move of a few miles.

  She had lived across the river. She had had a son and a husband and an affair, as Big Rosie called it. She had learned, the hard way, the only way, the price of holding on to dreams: how much larger her eyes were than her stomach, how much grander what she had dreamed than what she might ever do. She had best take Big Rosie’s advice: forget the hocus-pocus and get about living in the real world.

  She stretched her arms above her head. She had learned all that and now she had more dreams than ever. She wanted to make the Miracle Inn her own, into a place only she could imagine and create and manage.

  She stirred herself with her recollection of her resolve. If there was such a thing as the right time and place, it was now. She had a chance, again, to do something nobody had done before, the chance to blaze a trail.

  She would tear out the driveup window. She’d clear a passageway through to the rear and install a Dutch door, with a window. Customers could drive around back and be served directly from the storeroom. Firmly and politely she’d boot Leo out. She’d hire a bartender to take his place; she’d put an ad in this week’s Argus. She would take out the pool table and have live music and dances, give people something to do besides brawl and drink. She would draw people from the county seat and the new interstate highway and maybe even from Louisville.

  She would open the Inn to women. She would shock them all, New Hope and Mount Hermon alike. They would all say it couldn’t be done and she would do it. They’d all shake their heads and moan and grumble and gossip, and then they would fall in line and follow. Sooner or later they always did.

  She rose, muttering to herself. “So what could happen—”

  She left the mausoleum and gathered the tools from Bernie’s grave. The sharp moonlight etched the letters of Bernie’s name and her son’s name. A ragged black hole filled the space where her own name had been.

  With a clink of hammer against chisel she slung the bag over her shoulder and hurried down the hill. The gravel under her feet gave forth a satisfying crunch. Below her the river wound through the whitewashed farms and fields. Above, the jagged edges of the moonlit limestone cliffs cut like broken bone into the night sky.

  Nearer the gate, a movement in the shadow of one of the larger stones caught her eye. She hesitated mid-step, torn between curiosity and fear. She peered into the shadow. A boy and a girl crouched, barely visible, their heads bent, one body wrapped about the other. Martha shif
ted the bag to her other shoulder and stepped quickly on. At the gate she turned for a quick backwards glance. The couple scurried hand in hand down the drive, towards the mausoleum.

  Standing at the cemetery gate, she remembered her own courtship, in the Miracle mausoleum; and before that, to the night, so many nights ago, when she had taken a dare and struck across the ragged planks of the Miracle Inn to buy a beer. She saw the Inn as it was that night: its polished bars, one dark and opulent, one rich with light, and behind them the skinny, square-jawed man she was to fall in love with and marry.

  The Miracle Inn door banged shut behind her. At the white bar, the two men playing craps raised their heads. Bernie Miracle lifted his eyes to the mirror. In the silent second before the men spoke, she heard the rattle of their dice, already thrown, landing on the gleaming mahogany bar.

  Afterword

  For serious writers and readers, our subjects choose us as often as the reverse. As the youngest of nine children, I was chosen by fate to take family as my subject, though I had to write Crossing the River to arrive at that subject: the families that we are chosen for, the families we choose, and the uneasy relationship between these.

  Crossing the River is a book by a young man. To write this afterword I read the novel for the first time in more than twenty years and thought, “Who was that person who wrote this book?” All the same, the novel contains revelations of the sort that justify writing a novel, all novels, even those novels that remain in desk drawers.

  Until I wrote Crossing I had not known that I was obsessed with rivers—that of all natural features rivers, with their embodiment of eternal presence and ceaseless change, are my central metaphor. Until I wrote Crossing I had not understood that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism represent two ways of being in the world, namely—at the risk of oversimplifying—mysticism and reason. Crossing taught me that one route to wholeness is through embracing both traditions, seeing them as interdependent and interrelated and not at all incompatible, centuries of murder and mayhem notwithstanding. Years later that lesson would launch me into writing Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, a cross-cultural exploration of what it means to have and keep faith.

  I am a child of a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother who converted to Catholicism because she loved the music (and my father). Crossing taught me that there was some rationale for the Roman Church’s historical opposition to “mixed marriages”—children of such unions can struggle to reconcile their superficial contradictions—but I also came to realize that being raised with access to both traditions provided a childhood encounter with a truth central to Zen Buddhism: However contradictory the doctrines of Roman Catholics and Protestants may seem, at their hearts they contain no duality, no contradiction, no division between the inseparable heart and head. They are different but not exclusive ways of being in the world; different but not exclusive paths to truth.

  From Crossing I learned respect for the well-written country-western ballad—so simple on its surface, and yet so hard to pull off. In earlier drafts I imagined Rosamund singing lyrics of her own composition at the county fair, but the songs I churned out were overwritten schmaltz, and in the end I gave up, defeated by the challenge.

  And the writing of Crossing began a lifelong process of learning that the urban stereotyping of rural people was, like most prejudices, rooted in envy. In my first ventures from the Kentucky Knobs into the wider world, I assumed those who subscribed to the stereotypes knew what they were talking about—they were educated, they were prosperous. Writing Crossing brought me to understand the beauty and character of the time and place where I grew up, a priceless gift I briefly misplaced in my first years in glamorous California. Writing taught me to appreciate the people—my people.

  To write as much is not to discount or forget the region’s racism and sexism and homophobia and the underlying assumption, less apparent today but still palpable, that violence is an acceptable means to address a grievance. It is not to discount the violence against women and children, and against anyone perceived to be different—a violence I address in my new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds. I am saying only that writing Crossing taught me that I had been born to a shaping remembrance: the beauty of the world that is always at hand if we open our eyes and look, even if the looking leads to sorrow at the ways in which we are destroying it.

  A word about words, and their power: The 1989 edition of Crossing the River contains three instances of the word nigger, each time in dialogue. I recall the struggle I had at the time of writing the book—whether to use the word, however much I hated it. The unhappy fact is that in the 1950s and 1960s, the years of my growing up, it was virtually the only word white men and many white women used to refer to people of color.

  In this new edition I have kept two of the usages by way of reminding the reader and me of those times and also reminding us that, though change is slow, change happens. Even in the hills, few white people use that word today, and though prejudice still abounds, nonetheless, the change in usage is indicative of a larger change, a sea change in the relationship between Anglos and people of other races and nations. I like to think of Martha Pickett Miracle as one of the countless unsung agents working to bring about that change.

  In my isolated youth I knew that I was different, and though I did not yet know in what way and did not possess the words to name that difference, I vibrated like a tuning fork to the ever-present threat of the gun or the fist. I cannot know now how much of that threat was real and how much generated from within, the product of internalized fear and shame, born of my dread of being different at a time when I had not yet learned that being different would become a great strength and asset. The events of Crossing push Michael Miracle and his mother, Martha Bragg Pickett, toward an understanding that in their difference lies their strength; and if Martha ends up in a humbler situation than her intelligence and talent warrant, my hope for her is that the bar at the Miracle Inn becomes a stage from which she becomes an agent of change. As for Michael, he is on his way to becoming Raphael, chief among equals of the many characters of my second novel, Scissors, Paper, Rock. Crossing poured the foundation for writing that novel, which would engage one of the great crises of its century—the AIDS pandemic and its far-reaching impact.

  Fenton Johnson

  KENTUCKY VOICES

  Miss America Kissed Caleb: Stories

  Billy C. Clark

  New Covenant Bound

  T. Crunk

  Next Door to the Dead: Poems

  Kathleen Driskell

  The Total Light Process: New and Selected Poems

  James Baker Hall

  Driving with the Dead: Poems

  Jane Hicks

  Upheaval: Stories

  Chris Holbrook

  Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

  bell hooks

  Crossing the River: A Novel

  Fenton Johnson

  The Man Who Loved Birds: A Novel

  Fenton Johnson

  Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel

  Fenton Johnson

  Many-Storied House: Poems

  George Ella Lyon

  With a Hammer for My Heart: A Novel

  George Ella Lyon

  Famous People I Have Known

  Ed McClanahan

  The Land We Dreamed: Poems

  Joe Survant

  Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War

  Richard Taylor

  At The Breakers: A Novel

  Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

  Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel

  Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

  Nothing Like an Ocean: Stories

  Jim Tomlinson

  Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

  Frank X Walker

  When Winter Come: The Ascension of York

  Frank X Walker

  The Cave

  Robert Penn Warren

  The Birds of Opulence

  Crystal Wilkinson
r />