Once Upon a River (19 page)

Margo picked up her knife and slashed through the bullhead’s spinal cord. Its body fell to the ground.

“I’m sorry I said it like that,” Michael said. “I’ve just never seen one struggle that way. Really, it’s okay.”

“I do hit them on the head, but sometimes they wake up.”

He was holding her ID between his thumb and finger. “You even take a beautiful driver’s license photo. God, Margaret.”

She stood quietly, headless fish in one hand, knife in the other. Silence had so far been her best response when Michael was upset.

“You told me you were turning nineteen when we met. You were sixteen. I slept with a sixteen-year-old girl. And now I’m with a
seventeen-year-old girl. Stop looking at me that way. It’s maddening when you stare.”

Margo looked beyond him, at the river.

“What is the age of consent in this state? I didn’t think I would ever need to know.”

Margo watched him cross the lawn and disappear into the house. When Michael was upset, he didn’t usually stay that way for long. She didn’t know if this time would be different or what that might mean. She finished skinning the fish, stinging her hand only once.

The winter had dragged on too long, and now that spring was here, hundreds of daffodils bloomed alongside Michael’s house. Thirty-some miles downstream, Joanna had planted hundreds of daffodils around the Murray house and yard, ones she called jonquils and narcissus and paper flowers, some etched with orange, so that every April the Murray place looked like a fairyland. Occasionally Margo thought of shooting their blossom heads off with .22 shotshells, but it was only to see the petals spray like fireworks, to create a different kind of beauty. Shotshell was what Annie Oakley used to explode glass balls in the air at exhibitions.

Margo was enjoying living with Michael, but after all these months she still had not dared unpack. She washed her clothes in his machine and stuffed them back into her army bag. She felt restless whenever she spent too much time indoors, but knew she would have a hard time living without Michael’s household comforts again, without furnace heat, hot water, and store-bought food. She had reshaped her life around Michael’s routines and his sensible habits so thoroughly that she could go for hours without thinking about her daddy or her old life, or even about Brian or Paul, despite the cabin being right across the way. Michael worked patiently on his projects in the evenings with her assistance, finishing the floors and installing the baseboards in room after room, striving to master the skills he needed to make his house perfect. The thought that he might finish the remodeling made her uneasy—she feared that when the house was to his liking he might turn his attention to improving her. Fortunately, he was nowhere near finishing the boat, so that could occupy him awhile.

Margo had been learning more about Annie Oakley ever since Michael brought her a copy of
Annie Oakley: Life and Legend
. It said that Annie had been born Phoebe Ann Mosey and changed her name as an adult. After her father’s death, the girl’s mother sent thirteen-year-old Phoebe away to live with a couple who had no children. They worked her hard, beat her, and didn’t feed her enough. She called them the Wolves. As soon as she could escape from the attic where they locked her, she ran home to her mother’s. Only then did she take the old family rifle off the mantel and start hunting, as a way to earn her keep.

Twenty minutes later when Michael returned, he was still agitated. Margo wiped her hands on her jeans.

“The age of consent is seventeen in this state,” Michael said. “But seventeen. It’s so young. Should we go talk to your relations in Murrayville? Maybe it’s time we track down your mother. What the hell is the matter with her, anyhow?”

Margo shook her head. She wasn’t desperate enough to go where she wasn’t wanted.

“Will you swim with me when it gets warmer?” she asked in a quiet voice. She wanted to change the subject.

“I’m not much of a swimmer. Maybe we should get married,” he said. He looked into her face.

“Why?” she asked.

“
Why?
For all the normal reasons. Love. I love you, Margaret Louise,” Michael said, “and maybe I’m a little afraid that if I don’t marry you, what we’re doing is wrong.”

“Would I have to go to church?” she asked. “Or school?”

Every Sunday Michael tried to get her to come with him to his hippie church. She had gone once, had listened to the minister. The man meant well, she could tell, but he was as dull as a schoolteacher. She had enjoyed the guitar music, but she didn’t like the way people wanted to shake her hand and talk afterward. She didn’t dislike people, she told Michael, but at church there were too many all at once. He said it was okay that she didn’t go, but he was disappointed she didn’t want to be part of his community. He was also disappointed that she didn’t show any interest in school. He thought Margo needed to set personal goals, that it was not enough to live a beautiful life on the river, fishing, shooting, and collecting berries, nuts, and mushrooms.

“You wouldn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to do. Okay, forget I asked.” He moved away from her. Then he said, “This wasn’t the right way to ask you. Or the right time, when I’m all riled up.”

Margo looked off downstream. People said Joanna and Cal had a solid marriage, and Margo was sure Joanna would say she was glad she had married Cal. Her own ma and pa were a different story.

“But if I did ask you, what would you say?” Michael knelt in the grass and took her hand, which was still sticky with fish guts. “This is a little better. Will you marry me?”

She looked down at him. He was still wearing his creased work pants. He had taken off his tie in the house, but his white shirt was still buttoned up to the neck.

Since she had been living with Michael, she talked more, said things even when she wasn’t certain she should, about her father and mother and some of the Murrays, but she hadn’t told him about Cal or Paul or Brian.

Usually Michael seemed happy to listen to her. Their life together was easy. They made love most nights, with no worry about getting pregnant. Despite the way she knew and loved Michael, marriage had never occurred to her.

“Why are you looking at me so strangely?” Michael asked. “Don’t people get married where you come from?”

“Okay,” she said.

“
Okay
what?”

“I’ll marry you.”

“The answer is
yes
or
no
,” Michael said and grinned. “
Okay
is a little less enthusiastic than I was hoping for.”

“Okay,
yes
.”

“Are you sure? I shouldn’t have asked this way. And I don’t even have a ring, Margaret. A man can’t propose without a ring.”

“Annie Oakley married Frank Butler when she was seventeen,” Margo said. “He was twenty-eight. Same as us. They spent the rest of their lives together. With dogs.”

“No kids?”

“Nope.”

“All right, then, if it’s good enough for Annie Oakley, it’s good enough for us. Now, what can we use for a ring around here?”

From what she had read, Margo knew there was some uncertainty about Annie Oakley’s real age. The Wild West Show had an interest in making her seem as young as possible. She also knew that Annie longed to have children, but was unable to.

Michael said, “God, a few minutes ago I was miserable with guilt, and now I’m the happiest person I know.”

He plucked a single dandelion, one of a few that had bloomed so far, and he asked to borrow her fish knife. He cut a slit in the dandelion stem near the flower’s head, looped the bottom of the stem through it, and pulled it tight around her finger, so her hand had a big yellow flower on top.

“We used to make these!” Margo said, delighted. “My aunt Joanna showed me how.”

“Do you want a church wedding?” He clasped her hand. “I guess I know the answer to that. We’ll have riverside wedding.”

She was feeling overwhelmed. She kept looking at the dandelion on her hand.

“We’ll keep it small, just us and a few friends and family. Maybe your mom will show her face.”

They kissed at the river’s edge with the quaking aspen fluttering its new silvery leaves above them. The breeze picked up coolness from the thawed ground and blew it past them into the warm air.

“Should we wait until you’re eighteen? Until the end of November? That’s seven months from now.”

She nodded. Michael sat down cross-legged in the grass and tugged her down beside him. “I’m sorry about the way I yelled at you earlier,” he said, and took both her hands in his. “I freak out sometimes.”

• Chapter Twelve •

Margo sat across the table from Michael, eating lunch dis-tractedly, keeping an eye on the activity upstream and across the river. Paul had been at the cabin since midmorning with Charlie and Johnny, and Margo planned to stay inside until they pulled away in the pontoon boat. Usually they were at the cabin just long enough to fill glass jugs from the blue drum buried behind the house, but Charlie was sweeping the cabin’s screen porch, and that made Margo worry that one of them might be planning on staying. She took some comfort in the fact that Paul’s eyesight was poor and that Michael’s house was set back from the river’s edge.

“It’s a hot one,” Michael said and took a bite of his grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich.

“Maybe King and I will fish downstream today,” Margo said, bringing her attention back to Michael and their lunch. Wednesdays were his late day, when he went in to work at noon and got home by eight-thirty or nine at night. “Do you want to have brown trout tonight? Maybe I can get a couple with night crawlers in the evening.”

“Don’t you ever want to do anything more than fish and shoot?” Michael said hesitantly.

“You know, Grandpa taught me to skin rabbits and muskrats. He said it was a skill that would benefit a girl. And you know I can cook.”

Michael laughed. “Your grandpa probably imagined you would have other skills as well, like math and history, on top of skinning animals.”

“He only went to school through the eighth grade. Annie Oakley only went through the fourth grade.”

“It was a different time. Now you need education to get anywhere.”

“I could be a trick shooter,” Margo said.

“Says here in the newspaper Murray Metal Fabricating is laying off another eighteen people. Tough times for manufacturing. Are you sure you don’t want to go visit the Murrays? I’ll go with you. It says here, Cal Murray has been in a wheelchair since he was attacked in that bar last year.”

“I told you, we don’t get along,” she said. “Not since my grandpa died.”

“Well, I wish I had met your grandpa. I mean, he was a man of the wild, but a businessman, too.”

“His father started the company. Grandpa never really wanted to be president, he said. But he made the company grow.”

“Sometimes people have to do things they don’t want in life.”

“Do you want me to make money?” Margo asked. According to the book Michael had gotten her, Annie Oakley supported her family through hunting and trapping. She killed animals and birds to eat and sell in town. Only later did she make her shooting a show.

“That’s not it. I want you to have the joy of learning new things. And sometimes it’s even worth it to tolerate what you don’t like in order to achieve your goals. You don’t have to graduate high school. I think you can get a GED and go to community college. You could get a two-year degree in biology or something like that. Maybe you could get a job working outside.”

“You said I didn’t have to go to school to learn. I could read books.”

“You don’t like any of the books I’ve gotten you other than the Annie Oakley book. Tell me what else you want to read.”

“I like the Indian hunter book, about the guy who lived in the cave up north,” Margo said. “And I’d like to read more about shooting, I guess. Trick shooting.” She glanced across the river. Paul seemed to be wiping down the seats of Brian’s boat with a bucket and a rag, and though it was hot, he was still wearing jeans and boots. While she watched, Johnny slipped out of his cutoffs and tennis shoes and posed naked at the end of the dock. His arms were tan from his biceps down, but his torso below the neckline was pale, and the sight made Margo smile. He dove off the dock with a pretty splash. Why hadn’t she swum this year? Margo wondered. It was already July. Why hadn’t she swum at all since she left Murrayville? Johnny emerged from beneath the surface.

“What about a vacation?” Michael said. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

“We could go up the river and camp overnight on Willow Island.”

“We should go see something new,” Michael said.

She shrugged. Johnny dragged his body out of the water and climbed onto the dock. He was grinning, no doubt, shouting something to Paul. His bottom was moon-white against the lush foliage around the cabin.

“Maybe I’ll swim today,” Margo said.

“After the wedding we’ll have to go on a honeymoon.”

“You mean like to the cabins in Heart of Pines?”