Once Upon a River (42 page)

Once inside her boat, she laid her rifle on the table. After breaking off two safety matches against the box, she lit the third and touched it to the balled-up newspaper she had placed there the previous day, beneath the teepee of dry kindling. Two small, dry chunks of firewood sat atop the stove. She stripped naked and wrapped herself in the scratchy wool army blanket, yellowed with age but very warm.

She wondered if Nightmare was still barking. She was envious of the dog for the simple way he would grieve for Smoke. She could grieve for him by cutting her moorings and heading down the river, but she knew that coming back up would be impossible with only her small and unreliable motor.

Soon the cabin was warmed from twenty degrees to fifty-five, according to the thermometer on the back of the door, and Margo dressed in dry pants, shirt, and socks. She fed a bigger piece of wood into the fire and continued listening for sirens, but there were no sirens. There was only her memory of the anger and sadness on Fishbone’s face and the relief growing in her that the thing was done, that her debt to Smoke had been paid and he was no longer suffering. The sky was fully lit now, and the wind had calmed.

Throughout the last few months, since she’d stopped being sick every morning, the business in her belly had flowed with her movements, had drifted fishlike within her, had swum her like a river, but now, as the fire gradually warmed the boat’s living space, the baby sloshed inside her like an angry bullhead in a bucket. After the fire warmed the room to sixty degrees, enough that Margo should have been comfortable, the baby twisted, pitched, and heaved, fought like a fish on the end of a line. This baby was furious, Margo thought, furious at her for almost killing it, furious at Smoke for taking them with him to drown in freezing water. Margo absorbed the creature’s anger, and she found she no longer wanted it to slip away. It had been her constant companion these months, had endured wood chopping, roof raking, and muskrat trapping in the cold water. The baby had held on to her through all her trouble, and this morning, maybe it had saved her life. She had given the baby every opportunity to leave, but it had stayed, and she would not let it die now.

She put her hands on her stomach to calm the struggle. So many times she had gone to someone else, had begged at someone else’s table, and now she had someone to take care of. Margo would do at least as good a job as one of those wolves who raised human children. She could do as good a job as her own mother—and she would not abandon her child in a selfish effort to find herself. And maybe there would even come a time when Luanne would want to be a grandmother, if not a mother.

She tried praying to God, but it felt better when she put her hands on Crane’s ashes and asked for his help. She also asked for help from Smoke, and from Grandpa Murray, and by the time the snow finally tapered off, she thought they had given her strength.

Her parka was still soaking wet on a chair by the stove, so Margo put her Carhartt jacket on her shivering shoulders, wrapped herself in the wool blanket, and trudged back to the pasture. She was unable at first to find the place where she had rested, but she kicked at the snow along the fence line until she found the shotgun. She brushed the snow off and stuck it under her arm.

Across the pasture, she saw a figure duck between strands of barbed wire and then wave in her direction. It was a tall man in a stocking cap. He waved again, eagerly. Margo thought she recognized him as the farmer. She didn’t want to talk to him or anyone now. She began to walk away.

“Wait!” The voice was Johnny’s. She turned to see him approach, almost at a jog, and she found her reaction time had slowed too much to run away, and so she stood like one of those cows in heat. Her grip tightened on the shotgun. She knew Smoke kept the thing loaded, with four shells in the magazine.

“Fishbone sent me. He told me to tell you that Smoke drowned in the river,” Johnny said. “Looks like he did himself in like he always swore he would. I’m sure going to miss that old fart.” He was speaking in a subdued tone and nodding gravely, but Margo could feel excitement coming off his body in waves. He wouldn’t let sadness hold him back. She was tempted to become a part of his fun, to lose herself in him for a while and let it dull her sadness. And then where would she be?

“Drowned,” she said and swallowed. Her eyes welled up.

“Why are you dressed like an Indian in that blanket?” he asked. “Let me come back with you to Smoke’s boat, Margie. We’ll warm each other up.”

Margo recalled the jolt to her belly, willed it to come again to give her strength. She said, “Stay the heck away from me.”

Johnny’s eyes widened. “Fishbone sent me to check on you. Don’t you remember me? I’m Johnny. We met at Smoke’s.”

“It’s not Smoke’s boat anymore. It’s mine.” She raised the shotgun to her hip, stepped away from him. “And if you step on the deck of my boat, I’ll shoot you and dump you in the river.”

“Isn’t that Smoke’s shotgun?” Johnny reached for the barrel as though to take the weapon.

Margo stepped away. “Smoke gave me this gun.”

She imagined how Johnny would feel pressed up against her, how his hands would feel on her breasts, how his hair and the back of his head would feel in her hand, how her cheek would press against his chest. His neck would smell sweetly of sweat.

“Here’s your warning.” She racked the pump, which made a loud
ka-chung
sound. “Put one foot on my boat and they’ll find your body in Lake Michigan.” She was out of breath when she finished speaking those few words. There might come a time when she wanted what Johnny offered, but this wasn’t it.

“I don’t know what anyone has told you about me, but I’m a nice guy.” Johnny stepped away, but continued looking at her with those fine gray eyes. He managed to smile.

Margo turned away, walked to the river’s edge, and made her way back around the fence on shivering legs, exhausted from freezing and thawing, exhausted from a whole life of holding herself up. She made her way back to her boat and spent the evening cleaning her guns by the light of the oil lamp, and her belly continued to settle. She rubbed linseed oil into the rifle’s stock, into the carved squirrel. She polished the chrome until it gleamed. She ate a can of corned beef she’d found in the back of the cupboard, something Smoke had left in there. She decided that the next day she would shoot a squirrel and cook it in her pot on her stove. Or maybe a rabbit, and with that rabbit’s skin she would start a new blanket. It wouldn’t take many skins to cover a little kid.

• Chapter Twenty-Three •

After Smoke’s death, the snow and ice storms continued, and the sun didn’t come out for three weeks. On the morning the clouds finally lifted, Margo cooked a big carp on the woodstove. She was boning and processing it on the deck of the
Glutton
that afternoon when she saw a man coming down the path from the old barn. The slim figure approached, and Margo saw by the hat that it was Fishbone. She was cutting the fish into strips that she hoped she could smoke, dry, and store for later. The meat was shredding, though, and by the time Fishbone reached the riverbank, she was starting to question the wisdom of the project. She was wearing her father’s Carhartt jacket because she didn’t want to stink up her mother’s parka, which she wore into town when she went to check her PO box and to buy potatoes and onions and tins of corned beef, for which she’d recently developed a craving.

Margo wiped her bare hands on a cloth wired to the table and grabbed the six muskrat hides she’d strung together with baling twine. She made her way across her gangplank. She held out the skins, clean and dry, all with perfect eye holes. Fishbone took a folded garbage bag out of his jacket pocket, slid the skins into it, and rested the bag near his feet. Margo thought she could feel the snow around them melting as they stood there. Fishbone stuck one of his little cigars into his plastic holder and lit it.

“I was curious about your rifle, so I looked into it,” he said.
“Presentation-model Marlin 39A. Five hundred of them made in 1960 with that squirrel and chrome. Marlin’s ninety-year-anniversary rifle. You’re probably the only person shooting with one. Everybody else keeps the thing in a box.”

Margo tugged on her jacket, pulled it down over her belly. Fishbone took a drag off his cigar. Snowbirds landed near the fire pit. The neighbor lady had given her a paper bag of seed and told her to see what kind of winter birds she could attract near the water.

“Smoky called me that morning, you know,” he said. “Woke up my poor wife, scared her with his voice all wheezy. Now I think he was calling to say goodbye.”

“He said he didn’t want to die alone.” Margo put her hands in her jacket pockets.

“After you left, I called the cops, and they found the note in the kitchen. No doubt about what it said. Cops asked me about suicide, and I told them Smoky’d talked about it plenty. His favorite topic.”

Fishbone was wearing his usual slim-fitting leather jacket over a thin wool sweater, and though he was more than three times Margo’s age, he was not shivering the way she was. She had moved and reset her underwater traps this morning and had still not recovered. She would not be completely warm until this evening, when she would stoke the fire in her cabin. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed by the comfort she could create in her little home on the water, whether she was sitting up working or lying in her own bed reading with the woodstove blazing.

“You didn’t come to the funeral,” Fishbone said.

“I walked into town. I even went into the building. But I couldn’t stay with that many people. I didn’t want to see him dead, anyway.” The gray-and-white snowbirds rose suddenly and took off upstream. A half dozen cardinals flew in and fell upon the seed.

“Farmer Harland was there, and his wife. Old customers from the print shop, too, people I knew. I wish you could have met him before the emphysema. He knew how to shoe horses, take care of sick cattle, build a boat, set type. He could do about anything.”

She nodded.

“He helped a lot of people in different ways. I still owe him money. He told me I owed it to you now.”

“You don’t owe me,” she said.

“Yes, I do. I should’ve done more to take care of him. He took care of me whenever I needed it. But I just couldn’t.”

“Smoke said you were a tough nut to crack.”

Fishbone inhaled deeply on his cigar, something he usually didn’t do. He exhaled a rich stream of smoke and warm breath into the winter air. “It’s a great big wide world, isn’t it, young lady?”

“Did you love Smoke?”

He paused as though he were going to say something complicated, but said, “He was a good friend.”

They were both silent for a while.

“I loved sitting and talking with you and Smoke,” Margo said. “It was paradise to me.”

“Funny paradise.”

“I liked listening to the way you guys argued.”

She thought she might tell him how she’d tried to save Smoke, and how, in the end, it had been a relief to realize she had to let him go. She wanted to tell Fishbone how she’d dreamed that night about Smoke being with her in her bed, about how his ghost had climbed inside her with the baby, but she couldn’t imagine how to get started saying such a crazy-sounding thing.

“Smoky made a new will. Did you know that? He put you in it.”

She squinted. “What for?”

“For his house. He changed it right after you came back from your ma’s. He had me take him to the lawyer. The house isn’t worth too much.”

Margo didn’t think Fishbone would joke with her about this, but she studied his face for a sign. She had missed his company.

“I’ve got a favor to ask you,” he said. “Can I keep my boat at your place? You can use it anytime you want.”

“Smoke said you didn’t visit him anymore. You came to visit the river.”

“I visited him, all right.”

“How come you want to be on the river?”

Fishbone snorted. “I grew up on a river down in Ohio. We would have starved if not for hunting and fishing and trapping.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I came up north to get a job, but it turned out I couldn’t work in that auto plant. It would have killed me. Smoky saved me by giving me a job, and by letting me keep a boat at his place.”

Margo nodded. With Fishbone’s boat she could row upstream or down and find the nearest heronry—every river had one, surely. And there would be a creek where she could find snapping turtles and watercress. She would practice moving the oars through the water without making a sound.

“My own kids had no interest in fishing or the river, grandkids neither, but maybe my great-grandkids will.” Fishbone looked at his half-burned cigar.

“I can help teach them to fish if you want. Are you sure about Smoke’s house? I never thought.”

“Better place for a child than this boat. You glad now you’re keeping that baby?”

She wouldn’t try to explain why she was keeping her baby. It wasn’t some point of principle—it was personal, between herself and the
child.

She would cook something for Fishbone next time she saw him. She had flour and sugar from the store, and she would have raspberries in June, mulberries when she had a boat for getting across to the other side, wild gooseberries from the woods, and maybe wild strawberries, too. She would make a deal with the farmer to trade deerskins and venison for eggs year-round. She nodded, though she’d already forgotten what Fishbone had just asked her.