Once Upon a River (25 page)

Margo put her hands on the carved wolverine, which was baring its pointed teeth. “Grandpa, you would not believe how much has happened since you’ve been gone,” she said. What a pleasure it would be to hear the old man’s voice again. “I’ve learned so many things. Seriously.”

She wished she’d spoken up more before he’d died, to ask him questions about hunting, about wolves, about the wolverine he’d told her about that had gotten into his camp up north and torn it apart. A glutton, as he’d called it, was an animal a man couldn’t hope to see, let alone catch. She wanted to ask her grandfather, would a deer eat a bird? Why would a heron stalk a .22 cartridge?

She hung the wet sleeping bag on the Old Man’s marker to dry in what was left of the day’s hazy light and then searched until she found a small engraved stone, flat against the ground. She traced the letters and repeated his name,
Bernard Crane, Bernard Crane, Bernard Crane
, like one of Joanna’s bead prayers. He was the only Crane in the cemetery. His mother, Dorothy Crane, had gone off to Florida to live with a cousin and died of what her father called
female cancer
and was buried there without Margo ever having met her.

“I’m okay, Daddy. Don’t worry about me. But I just can’t go back and live with the Murrays,” she whispered. “But don’t worry. I’m never going to kill anybody else ever again.”

Margo studied the grass around the marker and considered where the box of ashes might be. She saw that a rectangle of grass four feet in front of the carved stone was slightly sunken. She untied Brian’s little military shovel from her pack, unfolded it, and dug down more than a foot, until she met resistance. She continued to dig and clear away dirt. Finally she saw dull metal. She continued until she uncovered the edges of the box, similar in size to the one she’d pulled out from under Crane’s bed. She dug around the outside of the box until it came loose, cleared the dirt off the attached bronze-colored plaque that read B
ERNARD
C
RANE, 1947–1979
, same as the stone.

The box was heavier than she’d expected it would be, maybe eight or ten pounds, and she was pretty sure it had been made at Murray Metal, maybe by someone who cared about her father. The welded joints had been ground smooth, with great care. It was coated with a dark gray baked-on enamel. Cal had done right by Crane’s wishes. She brushed the rest of the dirt off and pressed her cheek against the cool metal. Having held the box, she could not put it back into the ground. She filled the hole with the dirt she’d removed and some silt from the river, combed the remaining dirt out of the grass, and replaced the sod as best she could.

She slept in the cemetery that night, next to the river. Not long after she drifted off to sleep, she awoke to screams, and it took her a while to realize they weren’t people or ghosts, but raccoons. The following morning, she awakened dew-soaked, to the vision of the big blue fabricating plant churning orange smoke across the river. A flatbed semi truck was backing into an open loading bay. The parking lot was half full, mostly with pickup trucks. She hung her tarp, sleeping bag, and wet clothes over gravestones to dry and kept watch on the river, something she never tired of doing.

When she finally set off walking, she tucked the ashes under her arm. The box was going to slow her down even more, but she knew she could not leave her father behind this time. She trudged downstream a few miles before resting in a windbreak beside a farmer’s field. She was beginning to fear she might have missed Billy rowing back upstream while she slept more heavily than she’d meant to. Or maybe he’d hidden the boat somewhere on the opposite side of the river, though she knew there weren’t any creeks over there. Maybe it was behind someone’s oil-barrel float, though she’d looked pretty carefully. She hiked farther until she heard the diesel thrum and whir of a big haybine. Somebody was mowing an alfalfa field. She camped at the river’s edge.

The following two days she continued downstream, covering only a mile or so between rest stops, and finally found herself in the state park, the Pokagon Mound Picnic Area. She realized it was night when she arrived only because of how brightly a campfire ahead of her burned against the darkness. She was about twenty-four miles downstream from the Murrays’, but she felt as though she had traveled farther, to another land.

She snuck as close as she could without letting the teenagers around the fire see her. Two of them were smoking cigarettes, a couple were making out, and one of the remaining two seemed focused on creating a line drawing with a pencil. She recognized some of them from her class at school; though their names didn’t come to her, she was sure they were Billy’s friends. Seemingly an eternity had passed in the last twenty-one months, when she would have passed these people in the hallway at school. Though she had never sought out their company before, she now wanted to be near their wood smoke and cigarettes, their mint gum, and even the perfume that used to irritate her in the classroom. She wanted to sit with them and let their voices roll over her, but she didn’t want them to tell Billy she had been there so she moved on. Margo unrolled her sleeping bag and tarp on the other side of the Pokagon Mound, a hillock maybe six feet high, twenty feet in diameter, that was full of Indian bones, if the stories about it were true.

The following morning Margo awoke dreaming of cinnamon bread and apple butter so vividly she could taste it. She investigated the fire pit where the kids had been sitting. There she found a stack of dark wood that somebody had cut with a chain saw. Beyond this pile was another pile.

“Oh, God. Oh, God.” It took her a while to realize that the moaning she was hearing was her own. She bent down and picked up an eighteen-inch-square chunk of wood that resembled a slightly curved cutting board. The wood was heavy, dense as stone. Teak. She hugged the piece to her chest and wondered how her boat had ever floated. Her ability to maneuver that boat had been magic, her grandpa’s magic passed down to her. She fished through the pieces until she found one that said
River Rose
with only a tiny bit of the first
R
cut off. She ran her finger across the embedded bullet, flush with the wood. She put the piece of scarred teak with her daddy’s ashes and her pack. She and Billy had come from the same place, had learned the same skills, and they had both killed someone. But Billy’s meanness and his desire for revenge had grown so strong inside him that he was willing to destroy even what he, himself,
loved.

The following night, the teenagers returned, again without Billy. They reduced the pile of slow-burning teak one piece at a time. From the shadows Margo listened to their chatter. One girl was going to the community college in the fall, and she sounded excited. Another boy was leaving town to go to a state university. A third was starting a job with an insurance agent. Margo admired how carefree they sounded, despite some of them not knowing where they’d live or how they’d get enough to eat. They grabbed and kissed one another, passed a joint around, talked and laughed.

Margo kept her own camp as small as possible, and when the teenagers stopped coming after a few nights, she was able to burn her own fire. She packed up her things every morning and hid them in a tree behind the Indian mound, along with a juice bottle she filled with water. The picnic area turned out to be a convenient place to be stuck while she figured out what to do next. Not only did it have running water in the public bathrooms, but it was within a half mile of a couple of big gardens where she could find vegetables, especially tomatoes. Rather than stealing, she wished she could trade with the gardeners, wished she had her fishing gear so she could provide fish-guts fertilizer or some bluegills for the gardener to fry up, but she figured she would cause more trouble if she tried to arrange a deal—it was better to lie low. Some domestic ducks wandered over every morning from a nearby farm; when Margo discovered the place where they occasionally laid eggs near the river, she built up the nest, lined it with cornhusks, soft grasses, and rabbit fur to encourage them to use it more often. In the field across the street there were plenty of rabbits. Margo found and ate some of the wild edible plants she’d read about in the Indian hunter book: ground-cherries, wood sorrel, and sunchoke (which Joanna called Jerusalem artichoke and grew on her property as a flower). The Indian book mentioned sweet acorns, but she had found only astringent ones. The black walnuts, hickory nuts, and apples were ripening, and when they were ready, she would find a way to store some for winter, wherever she ended up.

Margo washed at the river’s edge the way she had done as a little kid, but stopped shy of stripping and swimming, which would have made her vulnerable if someone came along. Sometimes she thought she saw Crane’s ghost hanging at the water’s edge or near his box of ashes, a brooding look about him. She wanted to tell him not to be angry with her or to feel sorry for her. She was doing okay. Loneliness was a small price to pay for not being locked in prison and not being at the mercy of the Murrays. Each night she spread her vinyl tarp out on the moist ground and unrolled the sleeping bag. She put the box of ashes between herself and the fire. Luckily, she did not encounter much rough weather; during a few rainstorms, she hung out in the bathroom beside the parking lot.

In the second week of September, the nights became cool. The disappearance of the hummingbirds and the arrival of a dozen white-throated sparrows, as well as the red tinge on the snakes of poison ivy spiraling the oldest trees, told her autumn was coming, soon to be followed by winter. She would have to figure out how to survive the season. The previous year, Michael had taken her in. Oh, what a heavenly thing it would be, she thought, to be invited into his house again, to be fed and given coffee, to climb into his big bed and make love and sleep and then get up and eat breakfast, day after day. How impossible and far away from where she was now—she had traveled on past Michael, and there was no reversing the current of her life. She wondered if Luanne might have written to Michael’s address in the last month, during the time Margo had been gone.
The time is right, Margaret
, she might have written.
Come live with me in my house on the water
.

One night she heard a young raccoon in the distance, crying like an abandoned baby. She studied the sky into the early hours of the morning, until the constellation of the man with his belt finally appeared on the southern horizon. She thought about the Indian hunter. He was living on his own, but his family was all the while hoping for him to return. No one was waiting for Margo. Margo had let herself become a person who was no longer connected to other people. She comforted herself with knowing that she did not carry with her a rage like Billy’s, or anger like her father’s. Either would have weighed her down more than her loaded pack.

• Chapter Fifteen •

Early one evening in September, Margo heard a car pull into the Pokagon Mound parking lot. She went ahead and sawed the front feet off the good-sized cottontail she had shot. She continued on with the back feet and then paused, listening to the ratcheting sound the car door made. After two months of living alone on the river, Margo was dismayed to find that her army knife had been rendered dull. She had tried sharpening it on some stones by the river, but that had made it worse. A dull knife made the work bloodier and more difficult than it would otherwise have been. She knew it was easier to cut herself with a dull knife, so she used great care.

At this time of the year, the local gardens were brimming with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. A few days ago, she had even snagged a small cabbage and managed to steam a few leaves in her pie tin. She gleaned some starchy sweet corn left in a farmer’s field across the road. She had pilfered three big Brandywine tomatoes, so ripe their skins were bursting. She would eat some alongside the rabbit, which she’d killed with one shot to its eye on a hillside upstream.

She was running low on ammunition, and would have to save her nine remaining cartridges for critical shots. Since she’d been here, she hadn’t had any paper targets, so she’d been practicing by hitting acorns and hickory nuts off the top of a fence post. Today she’d found the season’s first Osage orange, and she put it on the post and dry-fired at it whenever she felt the need to shoot, though she wasn’t sure if that was good for her Marlin’s firing pin. She was surviving fine as autumn approached, but she was in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign that would point her where to go next.

Margo slit the rabbit’s fur, groin to chest, and then did the same to the membrane below the skin and emptied the guts onto a paper bag. She scraped out the cavity with her fingers, finally tugging free the lungs. Suddenly a man was standing beside her. She slipped and almost jabbed her own wrist. She stood up, knife in one hand, eviscerated rabbit in the other, and took a look at the stranger who was standing way too close. He was probably Michael’s age, but he looked softer and slower.

“Good evening, miss,” he said, stepping back. “Don’t let me interrupt you.” He had a short, thick frame and black hair and was wearing a sweatshirt with a university crest on it. After he took another step back, she squatted down again and returned her attention to her carcass, cut around the tail and made a slit across the middle of the back left to right. This was not how her grandfather had taught her to skin a rabbit, but was Brian’s much faster method for retrieving the meat if you didn’t want to save the skin. She held the rabbit’s head in one hand and reached the fingers of the other into the slit she’d made and dragged the back half of the skin all the way off the back legs so only the tail area still had fur on it. She did the same with the front end, working her fingers underneath the skin, and then tugging the skin off the shoulders and front legs, up to the neck. She sawed off the rabbit’s head and twisted to finish disconnecting the spine. She kept an eye on the man’s loafers. She’d read in the Indian hunter book about slashing an enemy’s Achilles tendon so he couldn’t give chase.