Once Upon a River

• Chapter Two •


A year later, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Margo was kneeling between two cedars in the predawn dark, just upstream of her house, watching a six-point buck rooting for acorns in the frozen leaf litter. Margo had all the time in the world to study the creature, its dark hooves and slender legs, its dusky chest, wide as a man’s, its heavy crown, white beard, and arrogant gaze. The buck lifted its head and flared its nostrils as it caught the scent of a doe. Margo lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, pressed her cheek against the stock. The river seemed to guide her arm and her eye as she aimed into the heart and lungs, touched the trigger, and bang. Only when she stood up did she notice her knee was wet and that ice was forming on the fabric of her jeans.

Her father’s bedroom light came on. By the time he dressed and put on his boots and came outside, shaking his head and grumbling, she had dragged the buck on a sled to the swing set frame behind the house. Her third kill in five days.

“This is it. No more hunting, girl,” Crane said and then helped her saw off the legs and string the beast up with a chain around its neck. He sat on an oak stump on the riverbank and raked his butcher knife across a sharpening stone. The water below him was black and cold. “You hear, Margo, about no more hunting? Speak up. You’re not mute.”

“I heard you,” she said, just above a whisper.

This summer and fall Margo had been taking 4-H shooting and hunting classes from Mr. Peake, and she had been relieved when he said her quiet nature would benefit her shooting.

“I’ll get you whatever targets you want, but no more deer.”

Margo nodded, but she caught sight of something in the gray fog, an orange paper stuck up on the beech tree beside the driveway. Among the maples, oaks, and pignuts was one smooth-skinned beech on which Luanne had used a nutpick to carve lines and ages for Margo’s height. Margo moved around the side of the house as stealthily as she could.

“The chest freezer’s full, Margo. We’ve got more than enough meat.” Crane squinted hard upstream, as though suspicious of the pink at the horizon.

Though Margo stepped lightly, the frozen leaves crunched under her feet.

“Being sixteen doesn’t exempt you from the law,” Crane said. He touched the edge of his knife blade to the edge of a pack of matches to test its sharpness and then dropped the matches into his pocket. He took a couple more swipes on the stone. Though he was a small man, his voice was strong, and it carried. “That hunting license pinned to your jacket entitles you to one buck, Margo, not three.”

On opening day, Thursday, they had dressed out her first buck, spent that evening wrapping a few chops and steaks in pale green freezer paper, but turning most of it into burger with a meat grinder clamped to the kitchen table, mixing the lean venison with beef suet from the grocery where Crane now worked, earning half of what he used to make. They had gutted the second deer she killed, and, after a few phone calls, they put the carcass in the back of the pickup, covered it with a tarp, and delivered it to a man who had eight kids and had just lost his job at Murray Metal.

When Crane glanced behind him and saw Margo sneaking away, paying no attention, he stabbed the tip of the knife into the stump so it stuck, and he stood up. “Goddamn it, girl. Even if you aren’t going to answer, you’ve got to listen when I talk to you.”

Margo reached up, but the orange paper was stapled too high on the tree. Then Crane was beside her, looking up at the hand-drawn sign.

Murrays Annual Thanksgiving Weekend Reunion, Friday Nov. 23, it said and gave the address on Stark River Road, as though every Murray didn’t already know it. There were simple line drawings of a pig, a turkey, and a pie, added by Aunt Joanna, no doubt—no one else would have bothered to decorate the invitations.

“Son of a bitch,” Crane said, and clamped his jaw so the muscle in front of his ear twitched. He jumped up a few times and grabbed at the paper, but couldn’t reach it.

Margo figured this was the work of her cousin Billy, who was almost as tall as Cal now, with ears that stuck out more than an inch on either side of his head, and who made Margo’s life at school hell. After he almost drove over her walking home a month ago—she had to jump into a ditch full of brambles—Margo put a road-killed woodchuck in the back seat of his Camaro in the school parking lot. For that, Billy had snuck up behind her in the hallway with scissors and cut off a good hunk of her long, dark ponytail. She’d lied and told her daddy she’d done it herself. Crane had shaken his head, and when she’d handed over the hank of hair, he coiled it around his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket, same as he’d done with her mother’s note.

Junior Murray used to look out for her at school, but the day after Cal had caught him smoking pot for the third time this summer, he packed him up and sent him away to a military academy out West. Before that, Margo used to sneak out and visit Junior at the abandoned cabin upstream that he called the marijuana house. On rare occasions Margo had taken a puff, but she didn’t like the dull way pot made her feel. Sometimes on the way up to the cabin, Margo saw her cousin Julie Slocum sitting alone on the riverbank, singing along with a transistor radio. Margo thought of talking to her. But if Julie had minded her own business a year ago, nobody would have known about Margo and Cal, and everything could have stayed the way it was.

After Crane stomped away, Margo ran her fingers over the scars on the smooth bark of the beech. Before Luanne had left, she’d measured Margo for age fourteen, and it turned out she hadn’t grown any taller in that year, so Luanne didn’t make a mark. “I guess that’s it,” she’d said. “You’re all grown up.”

Crane returned with his chain saw and yanked the starter until the motor roared. Margo stepped back just before her father jabbed the tip of the saw into the beech, thigh-high. Sawdust flew, and with one clean, angry slice, the tree was free from its roots. It had been taller than Margo realized, and the top got hung up on a big swamp oak before falling through and taking down one of the oak’s limbs with it. When the beech finally landed between Crane’s truck and the house, it smashed a spice bush that had always smelled sweet in spring. Crane put his foot on the downed trunk and cut a few stove-length pieces. When he reached the invitation, he shredded it with the chain. Margo was surprised how much shredding it took before the word Murrays was destroyed.

“Nerve of that bastard,” Crane said.

Margo swallowed.

“You got something to say, Margo, say it. I can’t handle that earnest, wide-eyed look so early in the morning.” Crane sliced a half dozen more lengths of firewood, and then he killed the motor and threw the chain saw into the bed of his truck. “You ready to talk about this yet?”

She stopped herself from shaking her head.

“Well, he’s not going to insult us this way,” Crane said before climbing into the cab and slamming the door. When he pulled away, carbon spewed from the tailpipe, and the Ford’s back wheels dug into the ice crust of their two-track driveway. After he was out of sight, Margo heard him kick up gravel on the road, and later she heard the truck’s noisy exhaust as it crossed the road bridge downstream.

No, she wasn’t ready to talk about it. And she wasn’t ready to send her Uncle Cal to rot in prison, as her father put it. She wished Crane could be patient with her. If he hadn’t gone crazy with the chain saw this morning, she might have stood in the stirrup of his two hands clasped, and he could have lifted her up to reach the paper. She would have tugged it down and burned it along with the kitchen trash. Now there were tiny bits of orange paper all over the place, and each bit would remind Crane of the invitation every day until the first big snow. And a few days after that, the construction paper would bleed orange into the snow, and pieces of it would still be there in spring when the snow melted.

Margo returned to the swing set, put her arm around her strung-up buck, and looked across the river. Maybe the invitation was not an insult aimed at Crane. More likely it was a suggestion that they forget about last year’s trouble for one day and join together for food, drink, and fun. Margo would be glad to see Joanna, who’d taught her to cook as her mother never had—Luanne could burn water, Crane used to say. Joanna would already be making her pies for Friday: mincemeat, apple, pumpkin, and black walnut. The boys were good at cracking the nuts open with hammers, but right away they got tired of digging nut meats out of the walnut-shell mazes, so that work had always come down to Joanna and Margo. Her cousins had been as good as brothers, apart from Billy, who would always be mad that Grandpa gave his teak rowboat, The River Rose, to Margo instead of to him. If Cal would apologize for what he had done and said, and if he would rehire her father as a foreman at Murray Metal, everything would be fine again. Her daddy could trade the aqua-blue grocery-store smock for his old shop uniform with CRANE stitched in red cursive on a white patch above the breast pocket, and they could afford to pay the dentist’s bill.

Margo retrieved the sharpened knife from the stump and returned to her buck, the biggest of the three she’d killed so far. She’d already tied up the bung, and she wanted to hurry and get the first long cut behind her, because she knew this third time would be no easier than the first or second had been. She’d be fine after that initial cut, after she turned the deer from a dead creature into meat. It had come as a surprise that the killing was the easy part. Crane would help her with the gutting and skinning if she asked, but Grandpa Murray had stressed how important it was to do a thing herself. She reached up and stuck the knife about half an inch into the flesh below where the ribs came together. Pulling down hard and steady on the back of the blade, she unzipped the buck from sternum to balls, tore through skin, flesh, and corn fat, and then, as the guts sloshed into the galvanized trough, she closed her eyes.

A rifle shot yipped from the Murray farm across the river, and Margo dropped her knife into the tub of curled and steaming entrails. A second shot followed. The Murrays’ four beagles began to bark and throw themselves against the wood and chicken wire of their kennel. The black Lab made a moaning sound that echoed over the water. Margo used to lie around reading with her back against that dog, used to row him in her boat and swim with him. This past summer, Crane had forbidden all swimming, as well as crossing the river for any reason.

A third shot sounded from the other side of the river.

Margo had feared this day would come, that Crane would kill her uncle. Then Crane would go to prison and she’d be on her own. Margo hadn’t heard from her ma since she went away a year and a half ago. Her note, on blue paper with herons on it, left on the kitchen table, had said, Dear Margaret Louise, I hope you know I’m not abandoning you. I want to bring you with me, but first I need to find myself and I can’t do it in this place. Take care of your daddy and I’ll contact you soon. Love, Mom. Margo had feared that if she didn’t handle the paper carefully, the dark blue ink would evaporate, the herons would flap off the page, and the paper itself would dissolve to leave only a puff of cocoa butter and a few drops of wine.

A fourth gunshot echoed over the water.

Margo looked into the hole she had dug in the half-frozen ground for burying deer guts. She knew she had to act fast to cover up her father’s crime by disposing of the evidence. She grabbed the shovel and bone saw, tossed them into the boat, and rowed to the other side. She tied off and climbed the riverbank. She got a sick feeling as she passed the whitewashed shed, but she kept going until she saw Cal’s new white Chevy Suburban. It was all sunk down on flattened tires. Cal stood alongside, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, yelling at the banged-up back end of her daddy’s departing Ford.

“Crane, you son of a bitch! Those were brand-new snow tires!”

Margo collapsed in relief against the shed.

Aunt Joanna stood beside Cal, wearing a dress with an apron and no jacket, holding an apple in one raw-looking hand and a peeler in the other. Margo would almost be willing to forgive Cal everything if it meant she could then sit with Joanna peeling apples in the big Murray kitchen with the woodstove going, listening to Joanna sing or talk about her 4-H cooking students, of which Margo used to be one.




Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, Margo was sitting on her side of the river watching the Murray place, when a buck came high-stepping down the trail beside the whitewashed shed, toward the river’s edge. It drank and then looked downstream, presenting Margo with its perfect profile. Margo lifted her shotgun, got her sight bead on a spot just behind the foreleg, and then she aimed slightly high to adjust for gravity over the distance. She calmly fired the slug into the beast’s heart and lungs and absorbed the recoil. She had not been sure she could hit at thirty yards, but the buck collapsed to its knees and fell forward onto the sand as though bowing. Margo waited a few minutes to see if any Murrays were roused by the noise, but no one came out to investigate. Margo carried the big knife across in the rowboat with her, dreading the prospect of finishing the buck off by slicing through the jugular—something Mr. Peake warned her she might have to do—but it was dead when she got there. Taking the buck meant Uncle Cal couldn’t have it, and neither could Billy.

She wrapped her arms around the buck’s chest and neck and tried to lift it, but it was too heavy. She was able to pick up the butt end of the deer and get it partway into her boat, but still she was unable to move the chest. She got the idea, finally, to crawl headfirst beneath the creature’s torso. She wiggled beneath the body in the cold mud until she was squeezed on her belly all the way under the deer. She smelled its musk and urine; she smelled blood and earth and moss and sweat, felt its warm weight on her neck and back. When the deer was on her and the mud was in her nose, inside her jacket, down her pants, and in her socks, she thought she would smother. She remembered Mr. Peake saying to calm herself before shooting, by slowing her breathing and heartbeat. She gathered all her strength, lifted her head up under the deer’s chin, and slowly raised her body. She got to her knees, so she was wearing the buck like a bloody cloak. And then she stood so that the buck slid off her back. It fell crashing across the prow of The River Rose. Two legs dangled in the water. On the way home, the weight made it hard to row against the current.

When Crane got home from work, Margo was dragging the warm, soft body of her ten-point buck by the antlers up onto the riverbank.

“What the hell?”

She stopped pulling and looked at him.

“You have got to stop this slaughter, child.” He shook his head. “They’ll fine us if you get caught, and I don’t have the money to pay. Lord, I wish I could have a drink about now, just one goddamned drink.”

Margo resumed pulling, but one of the deer’s hind legs was tangled in poison ivy roots. She tugged and tugged again, not wanting to let go of the buck, fearing it would tumble down the bank and she’d have to start all over.

“Listen,” Crane said. “The Murrays could make one phone call, and if those state of Michigan sons of bitches show up and find the meat we already got in the freezer, we’re in trouble.”

He didn’t need to worry, Margo knew. Cal had not even reported Crane for shooting out his tires the other day. She couldn’t expect her father to understand why she had to kill these bucks—she didn’t understand it herself—but when she got one in her sights, she had to take it down as naturally as she needed to take her next breath.

When Margo tugged again, Crane jumped down the riverbank and pulled the hoof and leg free from the roots. He shook his head as he pushed from below, helping her get the buck up onto the riverbank, and then into the air with the pulley.

“You are one hell of a hunter. I don’t know where you got your aim, but you sure hit what you’re shooting at.” He patted her back, wiped away some dirt, and rested his arm there. “Did you wrestle this buck in the mud?”

Margo smiled at him. She thought it was the first time he’d put his arm around her since she won first prize at the 4-H Rimfire Target Competition last month. She’d been standing right there when Mr. Peake had told her father that her shooting was uncanny, and also it was possibly a miracle, considering she was shooting with Crane’s old single-shot Remington 510 with iron sights.

“Don’t you ever forget, Margo, you’re the only reason I’m alive and sober in this world.” He sniffed at the air and then sniffed her jacket. “You look like an angel, but you smell like a rutting buck.”

When he went inside to get his knife, Margo sniffed her sleeve. She saw, across the river, Billy coming out of the barn, dragging the heavy pig roaster by its legs over the frozen ground a few feet at a time. The roaster was made out of a 275-gallon fuel-oil tank cut in half. Margo had been lucky to get the buck home without anybody seeing.

Aunt Joanna, meanwhile, came out of the house wearing insulated rubber boots and a long plaid coat and dragging one end of an orange extension cord. She walked out onto the oil-barrel float carrying a strand of colored Christmas lights that were already twinkling in her hands. Last year Margo had helped her screw in cup hooks around the edge of the float, so it would look festive after dark with the lights reflecting off the water. After the Thanksgiving party, the Murrays would pull their float up onto land and chain it to a tree to protect it from ice and floods.

“I know you miss your aunt Joanna,” Crane said when he returned. “I know it’s hard to be without a ma. But don’t you even think of going to that party.”

“I got a ma,” she whispered. “Somewhere.”

Across the way, Joanna dropped her string of lights into the river, and Margo saw the end waggle and sparkle a few yards downstream. Despite the risk of electrical shock, Joanna was probably laughing as she fished the lights from the cold current. Margo could hear Joanna’s voice in her head now, saying, Quit brooding and sing with me, Sprite! Nobody likes a sullen girl.

Joanna had been the one to pull the book Little Sure Shot off the hall shelf for Margo as soon as she’d taken an interest in shooting. The Murray boys had all refused to read about a girl. The cover drawing of Annie Oakley’d had a beard and mustache drawn on with a black crayon, but Margo had been able to scrub most of it off, leaving only a gray shadow over Annie’s face. Margo was curious about the strange clothes that covered Annie head to toe, including high collars and leggings under her skirts. Margo loved to study the melancholy expression on Annie’s face.

Margo knew Crane wanted her to make friends outside the family. And Margo was curious about other kids at school, but they took her quietness for snobbery, her slowness to respond in conversation as stupidity. Crane wanted her to speak more, but the calm and quiet of the last year had created in her a desire for more calm and quiet, and Margo wasn’t sure there was going to be any end to it. Silence allowed her to ruminate not just about Cal and what had happened last year, but also about her grandfather, to know again the papery feeling of his skin and the sadness and fear he’d expressed on the sunporch when he was dying. Silence brought back the sound of her mother sighing when she felt too dreary to get out of bed on winter days. Margo wasn’t sure she could move forward in time, when the past kept calling for her attention the way it did.

“You don’t seem to understand what’s been done to you by those people,” Crane said when he saw how intently Margo was watching Joanna. He grabbed her shoulders. “If you would have spoken against Cal, we could have sent him to jail. Damn it, he raped you! That Slocum girl told me.” He let go of her and stomped off toward the house, shaking his head.

Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus. She had not objected to Cal’s actions in the shed, had even been curious about what was happening. For the last year, however, it had been gnawing at her, and Margo had been forming her objection.