Once Upon a River

• Chapter Fourteen •


Back at the marijuana house, Margo devoured Joanna’s bread with jam and wiped the jam jar clean. As kids, Margo and Junior used to pile the chunky peach preserves on their toast as thick as pie filling. The food fired something up in her, and it took her a long time to fall asleep. The following morning was hazy, and Margo slept late. She wanted more bread and jam so powerfully that she couldn’t bring herself to eat the vegetables she’d collected and so went hungry. While she packed up all her things, she was feeling dopey, and because of the hazy sky she couldn’t get a sense of what time it was. She parked her boat downstream from the Murray house, by the shed, and snuck up close enough to lie on her belly and spy. She saw Joanna at the window over the kitchen sink. After about twenty minutes, Joanna stepped outside, wiped her hands on her apron, and searched the horizon. Margo was happy to know that Joanna was looking for her. Soon she would stand up, walk to the house, and rest the Annie Oakley Marlin in the rack on the porch, but for just a little longer she needed to observe this place, to let it sink in that she was returning home, at least for a visit. Joanna tilted her head as though hearing something, the baby crying perhaps, and she hurried back inside. Margo knew how badly Joanna needed her help, so maybe she would find a way to bring Margo back to the family. After school, Margo would come home to babysit and care for the Down’s baby. Margo would help cook bread and pies for the Murray men and boys, and Joanna could teach her to cook soups and stews this winter, ones Margo hadn’t yet attempted. Joanna knew how to cook everything. Maybe Margo could learn from Uncle Hank how to smoke pork and make bacon.

She lay for a long time in the cool, damp grass, waiting for another glimpse of Joanna. If Joanna went out to the overgrown garden to pick tomatoes, Margo would join her there and pick beside her. After a while Margo noticed the front of her shirt was soaked from the grass. She sat up and aimed her rifle at the kitchen door. She thought she smelled cinnamon across the distance, maybe from a pie or tomorrow’s cinnamon bread. She let her rifle lie in her lap. This was the time of year Joanna might be making more peach jam. Apples would be ripe soon, the golden delicious for eating and the tart Jonathans for making pies. Some years Joanna made apple butter, cooking the fruits down until they had a smoky, caramel flavor and then adding spices. Margo had never tired of peeling apples in the Murray kitchen.

Margo would always have enough to eat if she could return to the Murrays’, and she would not be lonely for people. Too bad there would be no Junior to crack jokes and commiserate with, no dogs to pet. Probably she would not have a rifle of her own. Still Margo’s mouth watered for all the delicious foods she would cook and eat, and she would have Joanna’s companionship in the kitchen. Margo looked forward to the rowdy dinner conversation she had always loved listening to.

“Nympho!” shouted a voice from the river, a man’s voice.

Margo stayed low as she moved toward the shed and her boat. There, standing at the prow of The River Rose, gripping some kind of long gun in one hand, was Billy. Joanna was right that he’d grown taller than Junior. He froze as he listened for a response, but didn’t see Margo twenty-some yards away. She flattened herself on the ground the way the Indian hunter did when stalking. As she took aim at Billy, her breathing slowed. She could shoot Billy through the back of his neck, sever his spine without his ever seeing her. She knew it must be river fog or her hunger for bread and jam making her hallucinate, but she thought she saw several other Murrays standing alongside Billy. Real Murrays were never truly alone, she thought.

“Bang,” she whispered to herself, to release a little of what was pent up inside her. She had been so distracted and in such a hurry to see Joanna this morning that she had left the oars in the oarlocks, left the oar blades resting on the back seat, flanking her backpack, which sat so that the stenciled name CRANE faced up. She hadn’t even placed a branch over the boat to camouflage it.

Billy squatted at the river’s edge. He touched the prow, pressed his hand where The River Rose was burned into the wood. People considered .22 rifles to be squirrel guns, but a .22 bullet in the temple at this range would penetrate Billy’s skull, bounce around and scramble his brain, and he wouldn’t make any more trouble for anyone. Something scratched her throat. She had to resist coughing with such effort that her eyes watered.

Billy looked on the other side of the prow and probably saw the discoloration where the registration numbers were before she pried them off—a boat with no motor did not need to be registered, and since she’d left Brian’s, she’d had no motor.

“Nympho!” he shouted. He stood and looked around. “Where are you?”

Margo hated the way the nickname echoed over the river. He might disturb Joanna and the baby. Didn’t he know how hard it was to get a baby to sleep sometimes? When he turned more or less in

her direction, she saw that he was wearing, under his jean jacket, a black T-shirt with a rock-and-roll decal resembling a bull’s-eye, directing her to shoot just above his solar plexus. The sun was at the top of the sky behind the haze, so this was as bright as the day was going to get. He shouted again, not quite as loudly or with such confidence, “Nympho?”

“Get away from my boat,” she said and stood up. From this angle, she noted that the gun in his hand was his old pellet rifle, the one he’d gotten for his fourteenth birthday. He could take out an eye with a lucky shot, but he wasn’t going to kill anything more than a bird or a squirrel.

“You’re supposed to be in summer school,” Margo said. Every muscle in her body was tensed to slide the Marlin up to her shoulder and press the trigger. If only her eyes would stop watering. She swallowed again to get rid of whatever was in her throat.

“This morning Ma asked me what if you wanted to stay with us for a while, how would I feel about that? I said no way. I figured that meant you were hanging around. That’s why I skipped school today.”

Margo wished she had anticipated this situation and thought it through so her brain wouldn’t feel so muddled now.

“This is a Murray boat,” Billy said. “You know it was never meant for you. And because of you, Dad’s crippled. Everybody knows you told that guy to beat Dad up.”

She wanted to protest, to say she was a Murray, too, and she had not wanted Cal beaten up. Instead she said, “I could shoot you easy.”

“Go ahead and kill me. You’ll rot in prison. I’ve been in the juvey. I know what it’s like.”

“Your ma said you didn’t go to jail.”

“I went to the juvey this year, for two months.”

“For what?”

“A little problem with a fire getting out of hand.” He smiled, but it seemed forced. “We were just trying to keep warm, but nobody would believe us.”

“Why’d you have to shoot my dad?”

“You know why, Nympho. That ain’t no kind of thing for a man to do, shooting my dad that way. That ain’t something you do, shooting a man’s dick.” He spat into the river.

Margo wondered again if there was anything to be gained by telling the truth.

“And I don’t care if you shoot me. Go ahead. Life around here sucks, anyway. We’re poor now. Junior went away to Alaska, and the new baby’s a retard.”

Margo aimed and fired, right at the butt of his pellet rifle, knocking it out of his hands. He yelped, and the rifle hit the prow of the boat and fell onto the sandy muck. She expected him to run or at least beg her not to shoot him, but he stood his ground. When he reached down and picked up the gun, she shot the stock again, knocking it into the boat this time. Billy pulled his hand away as though he’d been stung by a wasp. Margo could feel his fear, but he did not outwardly express any. He let the gun lie on the prow seat and stood up and crossed his arms. “You been off with your ma? You two should stick together, seeing how you’re both whores.”

“You don’t know anything about my ma.”

“Junior saw her with Dad once. In the barn. He said not to tell you, but I don’t care.”

“Shut up.”

“I know she ran off with a man and didn’t care nothing about you. That’s what Ma said.”

Margo fired once more past him, so he would hear the bullet whiz two feet from his ear before it went into the water. She hoped he would shut up and run away, but he hardly flinched.

“Aren’t you even sorry you killed my dad?” Margo was surprised to find herself asking this question, so similar to the one Michael had asked her about Paul. She felt the muscles twitch in her arm.

“I didn’t have no choice. He was going to kill Dad.”

When her arm twitched again, she lowered the gun.

“You were there,” he said. “He already shot Dad once, and he was pointing it at me, pointing it at Dad. You saw him, Nympho. You told the police the same thing.”

“He wasn’t going to kill your dad. There wasn’t even a bullet in that rifle. He was just trying to save me. I’m the one who shot your dad.” Margo heard some blue jays fussing, and one made a sound like a crow. She smelled wood smoke from the Murray house. She wondered if Joanna were calming the baby. She reminded herself to stay focused on Billy.

“You’re lying, Nympho. Your dad came over and shot my dad’s tires out. He was crazy. We all saw him do that from upstairs. All of us were too scared to come down ’cause he might kill us.”

“He only shot the tires, though. Not any people.” Margo wanted to convince Billy how wrong he was, how they all were wrong about her dad, but the energy was going out of her. It occurred to her that she might have been wrong, too, about what Paul had been doing to Michael.

“He shot dad’s dick,” Billy said, and his voice took on an angry urgency. “What kind of man does that, Nympho? A crazy man, that’s who. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I had to.”

Margo began to feel tired, too tired to lift her rifle. Billy was a jerk, had always been a jerk, and was no doubt a criminal, but he was not a cold-blooded killer. She thought back to the day her father was shot. Crane had been holding the rifle as he’d helped her to her feet, and then he’d lunged toward Billy. Billy should have known Crane wasn’t trying to shoot anybody, that the gun wasn’t even loaded, but everything had happened so fast. Billy had fired, thinking he was saving himself and his dad, just as Margo had been thinking she was saving Michael from Paul. Billy was a lousy punk, but he didn’t deserve to die for doing what he thought he had to do. And Margo did not want to kill her cousin. When she had shot Cal beside the shed, she had felt calm and confident in every cell of her body that she was doing what was right and necessary. Before she had fired at Paul, she had felt that certainty again. She did not feel any such calm or certainty now.

“You can go ahead and shoot me if you want. I’ll stand right here. In the juvey, I bet guys money to burn my skin with cigarettes, and I never moved. The smell of it made them gag before I’d make a sound.”

She held down the hammer and slowly pressed the trigger to put the Marlin into safety position, and then she let the rifle hang half cocked at her side. She thought of Cal and Joanna, how sad they would have been if she had killed Billy, how miserable Toby or Tommy would have been if either had come upon their brother’s body while digging night crawlers or fishing in a snag. She felt plain relief at Billy’s not being dead. The whole world would have changed, as profoundly as it had changed when her own father died or when she shot Paul. And if she had shot Billy for what he had done, then maybe somebody would have had to shoot her for what she’d done to Billy. She took another deep breath and let it out.

“I’m taking this boat,” Billy said. He had always wanted The River Rose. Not long after Grandpa Murray died, Billy had taken the boat from her, and Cal had made him return it.

“Grandpa gave it to me,” Margo said.

“Grandpa was out of his mind and you tricked him. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me, and if you kill me, you’ll go to prison because you’re seventeen now. Ma probably already heard you shooting. She’d be out here except for the retard is probably crying.” Margo thought she saw those Murray ghosts again, standing beside Billy, supporting him, whatever he decided to do.

“Please don’t take it, Billy.”

“Too late, Nympho. It’s mine now.” He pushed off from shore and jumped into the boat as it was moving away. Margo laid her rifle in the grass and ran down the bank and into the water. She grabbed hold of the back of the boat and got dragged into deeper water by the force of Billy’s rowing. She was slowing him down, almost stopping him, but then, with both feet, Billy kicked her pack off the back seat and onto her, and she had to let go to catch it. He rowed hard toward the center of the river.

“I’ll get it back,” she said, standing hip-deep in water, trying to hold her pack and sleeping bag out of the current. “There’s nowhere you can hide that boat, Billy. I know every hiding place on this river. If you lock it to a tree, I’ll chop the tree down.”

“You’ll never touch this boat again,” he shouted. “How dare you shoot at me with Dad’s rifle.”

“Uncle Cal will make you give that boat back, and you know it.” She didn’t feel as confident as she was trying to sound—Cal might not side with her against his own son this time. The other time, when Cal had made Billy return the boat, Billy had given it back with four snakes in it, including one orange-and-white milk snake that was halfway through devouring one of the three smaller garter snakes. At the time, Margo had simply lifted the mess of snake flesh out with an oar and flipped it into the shallow water, but that memory sickened her now.

Margo climbed onto the riverbank and threw down her damp pack with the folded tarp, sleeping bag, and little shovel attached. She picked up her rifle, cocked the hammer, and got Billy in her sights again. As she watched him, her rage doubled, tripled, and she had to shoot at something. She aimed and shot at the prow of her boat, between the words River and Rose.

“All I care is that you don’t have it, Nympho,” he shouted. “And if you shoot me, you won’t have your precious boat in prison, either.”

She had to admire Billy’s coolness. She could never have let herself be burned with cigarettes to prove a point. He slipped downstream, along with her fishing gear, the kerosene lantern, and her water jug.

“There’s nowhere you can hide The River Rose that I won’t find it!” Margo shouted, though Billy was too far away to hear. She wiped tears from her eyes and looked toward the big Murray house. If she walked up to that door, Joanna would greet her and cook something delicious for her, might even ask her to move in. Margo imagined Joanna welcoming her, embracing her, the way she’d always embraced her sons after their troubles. But Joanna was not her mother. In that house Margo could only be a ghost of herself, an overaged tenth-grader with no rifle, at the mercy of Billy’s temper, following the rules Cal and Joanna would set for her. Trying to make her life with the Murrays would be like trying to back up the current of the river, like gathering up the water that had already flowed over the dam, into the Kalamazoo, and out into Lake Michigan and bringing it back to the Stark. Margo couldn’t bear to see Joanna again, not even to say goodbye. She would never again help Joanna in the kitchen. Instead, she had helped Joanna one last time in a way Joanna would never know about. She had not shot Billy as a gift to Joanna and the family who had once cared for her.

Margo wanted to walk along the riverbank after Billy, but she reconsidered. If Margo didn’t show up at the house, Joanna might be worried enough to contact the police or to send somebody out looking for her. Margo dug a pen out of her pack and wrote on the back of her last paper target. Dear Joanna. You’re right. I need to go to my ma’s house. My friend will take me. Thank you for the bread and jam. Love, MLC. Margo pinned the note to the clothesline beside a row of little T-shirts.

With her wet pack and sleeping bag, her progress over land was slow. Billy had rowed out of sight, but she figured she would see the boat wherever he might park it or when he headed back upstream to the Murray house. Nobody was going to try to wrestle that heavy boat onto a trailer, so it had to pass her on the water.

In the nearly four years since Old Man Murray had gotten sick and given her the boat, Margo had not gone a day without seeing it. When the river had threatened to freeze, she and her father had winched the boat out of the water and chained it to a tree to await spring outside her bedroom window. The new oars Michael had bought her were covered with a shiny preservative that made them move through the water smooth as glass without ever giving her splinters. She had rowed silently in the water with those oars, the way the Indian hunter with the heart of a wolverine stalked silently through the woods.

It took Margo until early evening to hike to the Murrayville cemetery, though it was only a few miles downstream. She had searched both sides of the river along the way and was certain Billy had not brought the boat upstream past her.

The cemetery was located right across the river from the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, and the biggest thing in the cemetery was Grandpa Murray’s memorial, a six-foot-high stone, which he had commissioned himself, with two leaping trout and a buck’s head sculpted in relief on the front and a bear and a wolverine carved on the back. She had seen a bear her grandpa had brought home from up north—it had nearly filled the back of his pickup truck. She had helped him skin it, and she had felt spooked and thrilled when the skin was off, when the body looked like a man’s.

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 BERNARD CRANE, 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.