Once Upon a River (43 page)

“Then stop splitting wood,” he said. “Use the propane. That’s why Smoky vented that propane heater out the side. I’ll bring you another bottle of gas when you need it. I told Smoky I’d help you. And your ma will help. Have you gone to see her again?”

“Not yet,” Margo said.

“I don’t know if Smoky was a good influence on you, always saying you should live any way you want. There’s a lot to be said for trying to live a normal life.”

“You know a lot about little kids, don’t you?” Margo asked.

“Oh, I got more kids and grandkids than I can count. And now great-grandkids,” Fishbone said. “I wish you teenage girls could wait till you had a husband.”

“I’ve met the neighbor lady who lives across from the barn up there. I found her standing in her yard holding out birdseed, trying to get a chickadee to eat out of her hand.”

“Mrs. Rathbone?” he said.

“Rathburn, I think. She says she has baby clothes I can have. She said she’d watch the baby sometimes if I needed her to. She says she loves babies.”

Fishbone nodded.

“Her youngest daughter has a giant rabbit she takes for walks like a dog. Its ears are this long.” Margo flattened out her hands and made rabbit ears out of them.

“I don’t suppose you told her what you usually do with rabbits.”

“No. But I could eat good on that rabbit for two weeks.” Margo laughed. She noticed Fishbone had beard stubble today, something that was not usual for him.

“What’s that you’re doing with that carp over there?” Fishbone gestured with his chin at the table on the boat’s deck. She was using her piece of teak boat as a cutting board. The asymmetrical curve of the thing made the juices run off over the words
River Rose
and through the bullet hole
.

“Making jerky. I put too much salt on it, I think. It changed the texture. Maybe I should can fish in jars like tomatoes?”

“Maybe the venison would be better for canning.” He pulled some bills off a roll in his front pocket and paid her for the hides. He took his cigar out of his mouth and studied it one more time. “I don’t know if you’re really trying to live like days gone by, but my ma used to can meat and fish. I can ask my older sister about it on the phone, see if she remembers how our ma did it. I think you’ve got to boil the jars under pressure. And my wife has pint jars she don’t use. Smoky’s got a pressure cooker somewhere, I’m sure. You’re going to have to sort through all his junk.”

Margo nodded. She would learn everything she could from people who were willing to share what they knew. She would use the tools she was given to make her own kind of life. In one of the
Foxfire
books, she’d just read about how to make bootlaces out of woodchuck hide.

“My babies were born at home,” Fishbone said, “but people don’t do that anymore. You’re going to have to go to the hospital.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital.” She could not imagine the people from
Foxfire
going to the hospital for their babies. Her Grandpa Murray had not been born in a hospital, and Annie Oakley was born at home, too.

“It doesn’t matter what you want to do, young lady. You’ve got to get your baby his shots so he don’t get sick. And if you don’t take care of your baby, I’ll call social services, and they’ll take him away from you. If you put your child in danger, I’ll take him away myself. That’s the same as I told my granddaughter.”

Margo looked up at him in surprise.

“And you need to get a birth certificate at the hospital. Where else you going to get one?”

“You don’t have to help me, you know.”

“I need a place on the river.” Fishbone squinted against cigar smoke going into his eyes. “And maybe I’ve got a soft spot for a baby.”

“What about Nightmare?” Margo asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about that. He’s in the truck.”

“Can I see him?” She held up her hands as if to show there was nothing in them.

“My wife wanted him for protection, but he just lies there, won’t move. He growls all day and all night. I promised Smoky I’d take care of him, but he’s lost fifteen pounds and his eyes are bloodshot like he’s drunk.”

“He’s a river dog,” Margo said. “River dogs have to be on the river.”

“Let’s say he lived with you. How would you feed him?”

“He can eat meat, same as me. I’ll cook the muskrats for him. Take the glands out. And I’ll get him dog food, too, if that’s what he wants. I saw big bags at the grocery for five dollars.”

“Maybe you’d want to cook the muskrats outside. And you couldn’t use the leg traps anymore. And he’d fill up that houseboat as long as you’re staying there. You’d be stepping over him all day.”

“I’ve just been using the drowner line, and I live-trap the coons, toss the whole cage into the drink and drown them.” In fact, she’d never even set the leg traps Smoke had given her, for fear of catching up a stray dog.

“And he’s going to bark and growl at every man comes around. And I’m not sure he won’t bite a man who doesn’t suit him.”

“He’ll be happy living with me.”

“Are you sure you want this?”

Margo was more certain about the dog than she was about the house, which sounded like a fairy tale. Maybe she felt as much certainty about Nightmare as Luanne felt when she packed her bags and finally left Murrayville to make a new life. Maybe it was what Joanna felt when she swore at her wedding to honor and obey her husband, to forsake all others. Maybe when Smoke headed down that hill toward the river to drown he was as certain as Margo was about this dog.

Margo pushed the carp into a bucket with a tight-fitting lid, splashed some springwater from another bucket over the cutting board. She grabbed her rifle, slung it over her shoulder, and followed Fishbone along the trail to the barn. Nightmare was sitting in the driver’s seat of the pickup. When the dog saw Margo, he put his front paws against the window. When Fishbone opened the door, Nightmare leapt heavily to the ground, bowed before Margo, wagged his massive tail, and barked once. He then turned back to Fishbone and growled.

“For crying out loud, dog,” he said and shook his head. “I’m not your enemy.”

Margo hugged the dog and petted him. His ribs stuck out through his skin. “Be nice, Nighty. We’ll fatten you up.”

“I guess you’re sure about this,” Fishbone said. “With that tail he kept knocking everything off my wife’s coffee table.”

Margo nodded. She had worried about Johnny showing up, coming along the riverbank. She had feared his scent was a key that could unlock her whole body, and it was his nature that he would try her. But not with this dog beside her, a barking and growling reminder that she wanted something more, that she had something worth protecting.

“Do you know anything about a dog star?” Margo asked.

“That would be Sirius. Your brightest star most nights.” He removed his burned-down cigar and put the holder in his pocket.

• Chapter Twenty-Four •

On the first hot morning in May, Margo woke up with the feeling that the river was fast rising from the previous night’s rain. Not flooding, exactly, but coming up to meet her on the boat. She had awakened dreaming about her daddy. He had not been angry or disappointed this time, not even afraid for her. He had been sitting on a stump beside the Kalamazoo River sharpening a knife. Her sense in the dream was that he was her companion, as he had been before Luanne left, before all the trouble with the Murrays, and it made her feel at peace. She lay in her bed and listened to the high-pitched whispering and whistling all around her boat: a flock of cedar waxwings resting during their northern migration. She whispered and whistled back to them in their secret language. As far as she could tell, every language was a secret language, secret and manipulative and hopeful, starting with the nursery rhymes she’d been repeating lately because of the books Mrs. Rathburn loaned her. Sometimes Margo had been unable to find a language that worked for her, but she was pretty sure she was speaking one now.

Through the open window, Margo heard the meow of a catbird returned from wherever catbirds went in winter, and then the catbird changed its tune, began to whistle in imitation of the waxwings. The big dog on the floor whistled and wheezed in his sleep.

Through the window screens, Margo was feeling a warm wind, and for the moment she felt relaxed in her skin. Some nights now she lay in bed for hours pitching side to side, to the sound of critters chirping, trying to situate her expanding self. Last night, even without a fire in the stove, it was so warm she couldn’t stand clothes or even sheets touching her belly, and she slept naked. Listening to a spring symphony of peepers, frogs, toads, and crickets was sometimes too much, but last night the rain banging on her tin roof had drowned out everything else, and she had slept so hard her eyes now felt swollen shut.

She could move into Smoke’s house anytime she wanted, but she wasn’t ready to leave this boat yet. Fishbone would come in a few days and together they’d drag the houseboat back upstream with the help of his aluminum boat and whatever else it took. He said he wished he had some mules like the ones that used to pull the barges up the river in Ohio when he was a boy. For the sake of the baby, she would move into the house—Mrs. Rathburn reminded her about the washing machine and running water so she wouldn’t have to lug bottles—but Margo had grown happy on the
Glutton
, as happy as she could remember being. With her own safe and snug place on the river, she had been able to study herself the way she’d once studied the blue herons and the kingfishers, and the dogs and men she’d known. Nowadays she was able to puzzle through her troubles, not to solve them like problems, but to brood more deeply upon them to figure out what they could show her. She hoped Smoke was wrong about people being unknowable. She hoped that she could crack herself open like a nut and know herself, at least. Then she’d be able to start figuring out everybody else.

She swung her feet down onto Nightmare’s rug beside her bed, patted the dog, and nodded good morning to her rifle on the rack by the door. She wrapped herself in a sheet, poured a bowl of dog food, and carried it out onto the boat’s rubber-coated metal deck, which was warming up in the sun. She studied the churning surface of the river, which was running high, if not as dramatically as she had dreamed. Now that Crane’s ghost was with her, he might someday tell her he’d like his ashes spread over the water. She wasn’t ready to let them go yet.

The waxwings and some rowdy warblers were gathering in trees in the farmer’s windbreak, descending from the sky and landing in branches, and then lifting off and settling again. When they alighted they became dark specks against a sky the color of heavenly blue morning glories, like the ones Joanna planted every spring at the river’s edge. One waxwing after another flew down like a little masked bandit from its high perch to dip its beak in the spring water. The migrating birds would carry a bit of the Kalamazoo up north with them, maybe up to the Stark River, where they’d drink again before continuing their journey north, where they’d build nests and breed and possibly even see wolverines, who were not fouling traps or destroying camps, but just going about their business of finding food, shelter, and companions.

She heard equipment humming in a distant field. The farmer had survived the winter for a new season of work. She and he had been aware of one another all these months, but he’d not come to her boat until a few days ago, when he’d delivered the papers for the crop-damage permits. As soon as the farmer planted these fields, Margo was free to shoot all the deer she wanted, legally. She had finally met the farmer’s wife when she’d been visiting Mrs. Rathburn, and the three of them had sat in the Rathburn kitchen and had coffee. Margo hadn’t said more than a few words, but that was okay, since both those other women had plenty to say, and Margo enjoyed the music of their voices.

The catbird landed only ten feet from her, on one of the taut ropes tethering her barge to land. It wagged its tail to keep its balance, meowed a few more times, and then resumed its whistling mimicry of the waxwings. Margo wondered if the imitation was pure fun for the catbird, or if the bird learned something new with each borrowed note.

She crossed the gangplank and made her way barefoot along the riverbank and down to the water’s edge. It was the first time she hadn’t put on her boots before venturing off the boat. For the first time this year, for the first time ever, she felt the silt of the Kalamazoo squeeze through her toes. The fresh chill of it was electric. She walked to where the animals drank at the spring and left her footprints beside the four-toed signatures of songbirds.

Margo took off her sheet, wadded it up, and tossed it onto the deck of the boat. Only then did she think to look around and make sure no one could see her. She waded in up to her knees, and then to her thighs, felt the river weeds brush against her like a mother’s long hair. Back in Murrayville her daddy had wanted her to wait to swim until the air was seventy degrees by the screen porch thermometer, but when he was at work, Luanne had let her swim as soon as she could brave the cold.

“All right, baby, welcome to the river,” Margo said. She stepped away from shore so the water went over the tops of her thighs, and before her feet could sink into the muck, she pushed off. The floor of the river gave way, and she submerged herself up to her neck. As her belly slid through the water, she felt a moment of uncertainty about her ability to swim. Her limbs didn’t move right, didn’t seem rightly proportioned for supporting herself in the water, and her head went under. She was being swept downstream. She struggled until she remembered to relax in the current, let it flow around her. She righted herself and began to sidestroke back upstream. She was lighter in the water—the river was a paradise for a girl swollen up the way she was. She buoyed herself with her belly and backstroked. She grabbed hold of an iron bar attached to the front of her barge and let her legs float. Her naked belly stuck up and out of the water like the finest puffball mushroom in the river valley.