Once Upon a River

• Chapter Twenty-Two •


“Less than two weeks,” Smoke told Margo one morning in early February. His voice had become rougher, and sometimes Margo had to lean close to make out his words. His speech was often fractured by long wheezing breaths. A family court decision was pending, and Smoke was certain he would not be allowed to stay in his house. Margo was fearful about other things, that Smoke would fall down or that he would cough so hard he would simply stop breathing. She reached out and brushed a toast crumb from his whiskered cheek.

Fishbone, who rarely stayed more than a few minutes at a visit now, before or after taking out his boat, insisted the nieces were taking Smoke’s case before the judge because they cared about him and they couldn’t stand to see him killing himself. “They’re harsh ladies,” he said, “but they’re your family, and they love you.”

“Save me from their f*cking love,” Smoke whispered to Margo as soon as he could do so without Fishbone hearing. But Margo understood how his nieces might think he was not taking care of himself. She felt lousy about Smoke’s deterioration, found that she could not stop worrying about him, whether she was with him or away from him. She felt helpless in the face of his pain and difficulty. She thought Nightmare, too, seemed haunted; for hours the dog would stare at his master, sometimes going most of the day without eating.

“I can stay with you, Smoke,” Margo said, as she poured him more coffee from the percolator, “and your nieces will see I’m taking care of you.”

She sat beside him at the kitchen table, so they were both looking out at the river. A thaw had melted the ice and compacted the snow. Margo had shoveled the patio a few days ago, and it was still clear.

“You can’t go back on a deal,” Smoke whispered.

“I won’t do it,” Margo said, more loudly than she wanted to. Smoke’s hearing seemed to be failing even as his voice grew more quiet.

“It hurts to breathe, kid.” The dog became agitated and stood up and went to the door. “I can’t even have real coffee in that place. They only got Sanka.”

“Maybe if they make you move, you could stay with one of your nieces.”

He shook his head. Margo, too, hated the thought. She let Nightmare out and sat back down. She spread on her toast some strawberry jam Smoke’s sister had made. He said his sister had had brain cancer and had died in the nursing home within a few months of arriving. Smoke said his sister “went off to that shithole like it was some goddamned party.” She had liked the nurses fussing over her, he said, treating her “like a damned baby.”

“My neck aches,” Smoke said. “From holding up my damned head.”

“It’s better to be alive, Smoke.” Margo bit into the toast and chewed, though her appetite was slipping away. “We have to think about the consequences.”

“What about the consequences to living?” Smoke reached in his shirt pocket and pulled something out, pushed it into Margo’s hand.

“What’s this?” she unfolded five twenty-dollar bills.

“For the boat. It’s what you gave me. And take my shotgun. It’s yours. Fishbone’s right. I need it like a hole in the head.”

“You already gave me too much, Smoke,” Margo said. She didn’t know how to explain to him how having killed someone made it more important that she never do it again.

“What the hell am I going to do with a shotgun?” he said. “You’ll keep it clean, won’t you?”

Margo arranged a piece of toast with jam, some scrambled egg, and a bite of sausage on her fork.

“I deserve to die, damn it,” he said. “You need to respect that.”

“But I haven’t figured out how to live yet.”

“You’ve figured it out as well as I ever did.”

“If you go, I’ve got no friends.” Margo heard Nightmare scratch on the outside door, and she got up and let him in, along with a blast of cold air. The weather was supposed to warm throughout the day because a storm was coming tonight. Nightmare lay down on a piece of rug between Margo and Smoke.

“Then you’d better start making friends,” he said. “Nothing wrong with being a hermit, so long as you have friends when you need them.”

“I just want you.”

“I don’t know if I would’ve made it without you these last few months, kid. Your company has almost made life worth living.”

Now that Smoke was getting sicker, it was harder for Margo to go home and leave him all alone. When she had come this morning at ten o’clock, Smoke had still been lying in bed. Margo had lifted him and helped him into his clothes and shoes.

“Fishbone will help,” Smoke said. “After I’m gone, he’s taking Nightmare. For protection for his wife.”

“Fishbone calls me you people. He thinks I should go live with my ma. He’s always talking about me having the dang baby.” Margo’s heart sank at the thought of Fishbone taking the dog away.

“Don’t give up on your ma,” Smoke whispered. “She might come around. And it doesn’t look to me like you’re putting any distance between yourself and that baby.”

Margo nodded. She went home that afternoon, checked her traps, and found them empty. She couldn’t think about the baby, who was safe inside her for now, but only about Smoke, who seemed so weak. He also sounded more serious, spookier than ever before. If tonight’s storm dropped a lot of snow, Margo was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get through the field to his house in the morning to help him. She also wanted to tell Smoke that she was not giving up on her ma, not really, not the way he thought. After dark, when the winds started picking up, Margo let her wood stove burn all the way down, and she laid another fire with newspaper and sticks, got it all ready, but didn’t light it.

Margo locked up the Glutton and tramped back through the snow-covered cow pasture. The river sounded strange, as though glass were breaking all along its edges. Smoke’s patio door was not locked, so she went in. She took off her boots and parka and walked quietly to Smoke’s bedroom. Though the rest of the house was cluttered, his bedroom was sparely decorated and almost empty. She climbed into the double bed in her long underwear and lay beside Smoke. The housekeeping aide had changed the sheets the day before, and they felt clean. Margo had been putting off washing her own sheets, since she would either have to carry them down to Smoke’s or wash them in her canning kettle and freeze-dry them outside.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said in a loud whisper. “I don’t want you to leave me.”

“I’m not your ma.”

“I know.”

“I’m a tired old man.” At first Smoke was rigid beside her, and then Margo felt him relax, as her grandpa had warmed and relaxed beside her on the sun porch. At the end, her grandpa had been weak and thin like Smoke, though he’d had lumps like tree knots on his armpits and neck and groin. Smoke’s lumps were inside his lungs. Margo moved her hands across his shoulder blades. He shivered and then sighed. She lightly caressed his shoulders, his ribs, the small of his back. Through his long underwear shirt, she felt the heat of his pressure sores.

She and Smoke lay that way for a few hours, neither of them quite falling asleep because of the strangeness and sweetness of being beside another person, until Smoke began to cough. He sat up on the edge of the bed and coughed for more than forty-five minutes according to the clock by the bed. The minute hand on the lighted clock face had moved slowly, but Margo didn’t dare shift or speak or touch Smoke, for fear of making it worse. She knew she could put her arm around Smoke’s neck and close his throat, stop his choking by stopping his breathing. Margo could bring Smoke peace, and if she pressed her thumbs over his windpipe, he would not struggle. She could end his pain right now, but she did not want to be his angel of death. Nightmare lay silent but awake on the floor. The dog’s brown eyes glistened in the dark as he watched his master.

Smoke tipped up a bottle of codeine syrup to get the last drops. He readjusted his tubes and folded himself so his body seemed like a leathery shell surrounding his brittle lungs. After the coughing subsided, he breathed sharply through pursed lips. He disconnected his oxygen and lit and smoked a cigarette. He lit a second cigarette from the first, and finally a third. Margo saw how cigarettes were Smoke’s slow-acting angels of death, the agonizingly slow hands of his strangulation. After putting out the third cigarette in the ashtray on the floor, Smoke lay back down, and Margo placed a hand on his shoulder. She leaned in and kissed his cheek.

“Smoke, you shaved. You’re so smooth.” She took his hand in hers, and they fell asleep.

Margo awoke alone to the sounds of Smoke’s wheelchair squeaking in the other room. She heard the door to the patio opening, wind roaring, and Nightmare whining. The door closed and she heard windowpanes rattling against the storm. These days she had a hard time pulling herself out of sleep, even to feed the woodstove, because the creature in her belly always tried to drag her back to dreams, sapping her consciousness until she’d gotten eight, nine, even ten hours of sleep. She shook off her exhaustion, dressed, and gathered together her things in order not to leave any evidence in case Smoke’s nieces stopped by. A long time ago, back in Murrayville, she had sometimes awakened early like this from a dead sleep with a desire to hunt. Back then she had awakened fully with the abruptness of a light switched on. She’d dressed in silence, gotten her daddy’s shotgun from behind his truck seat or out of his closet, and set out into the woods. Now when that feeling came—and she felt a ghost of it even this morning—she found she could simply imagine shooting a buck and the feeling would subside, or she could go out and check her traps for muskrats or coons.

Margo went into the kitchen and did not see Smoke, but found Nightmare sniffing at the door. The lighted clock read six-twenty. Margo checked the bathroom, but Smoke was not there. She had earlier dreamed he had growled into the phone, or maybe it had not been a dream. The predawn sky was brightened by the blowing snow, but Margo did not turn on any lights in the house, did not spoil her night vision. She put on her fake-fur-lined parka, picked her rifle off the rack in the kitchen, and hung it over her shoulder. Though Smoke had given Margo his shotgun, Margo had left it in the rack, worrying that taking it away would make him feel diminished. She did not let Nightmare out because he would run down to the water and howl at the wind, and she would have to wait for him to return before she could go to sleep again. If Smoke was out there, Margo would get him back inside in a matter of seconds.

She stepped outside into the swirling snow and found him sitting in his wheelchair at the edge of the patio, looking down the steep hill toward the water. He wore only his glasses, his long underwear, and an unbuttoned work shirt with his name on it. Snow was accumulating on his shoulders and bare head, and the wind must have been biting his face, but he didn’t behave as if he were cold. Margo took one of his half-clenched hands in both of hers and warmed it.

“You shouldn’t be out here in a snowstorm, especially without your jacket. And without your oxygen,” Margo said. “Come back to bed.”

Nightmare barked.

“Sunrise in a few minutes,” Smoke whispered through puffs of breath, sounding stronger than he had the previous day. “I think the neighbors are out of town.”

“You want to see the sunrise in a snowstorm? Pink sky in the morning?”

Smoke sighed, and Margo felt his gaze move from the river, to her, and to the river again.

“Come sleep a little more. The sun rises every day.”

“My jacket. My smokes,” he finally said with those quick puffs of voice. “Don’t let the dog out.”

Margo went into the house and tried to calm Nightmare. “I’ll get Smoke back inside, and we’ll all go back to sleep,” Margo said. She grabbed the cigarettes from the bedroom, the jacket from the back of a kitchen chair. There on the table, she saw the note. She switched on the table lamp to read the heavy, neat print: To my busybody nieces. I cannot go to All Saints. I will not go. She stopped reading, dropped the cigarettes and the jacket, and after a brief struggle to keep Nightmare inside, she stepped outside into the storm. Smoke was gone.

Margo had not considered how close he had been to the edge of the patio. He must have pushed against the wheels with a burst of force strong enough to move him off the patio and to the edge of the hill. Once descending, it would have taken no strength to roll down the snow-covered hillside on the upstream side of the concrete steps and the dock. She followed the wheelchair tracks down the hill. In the pale light reflecting off the blowing snow, she thought she saw Smoke push his wheels once more. At the river’s edge, one wheel caught in the gap between the lawn and the retaining wall, stopping the chair abruptly. Smoke, however, continued moving forward through the blowing snow and onto the river, breaking through the slushy ice on the upstream side of the dock. Margo’s boots slipped out from under her as she was running down to help. She inadvertently kicked the chair forward, along with its oxygen tank, so it tumbled off the wall and into the water on top of Smoke’s legs. The oxygen slid away and disappeared. The current dragged Smoke’s body and the chair against some branches that had gotten caught under the dock. He was tangled in the debris there.

Moving with what felt like slow, clumsy motions, Margo crouched on the retaining wall and leaned down and tried to drag the wheelchair out of the water, but her position was all wrong, and she could not lift its weight. She slid her rifle off her shoulder and stuck its butt end into the snow. She wished she had left it in the house. She braced herself against the dock and the retaining wall and tugged at the chair again, but still she could not lift it off Smoke’s legs. When she moved the branches, Smoke’s head went underwater. Inside the house, Nightmare was barking.

Margo jumped off the retaining wall, through the slushy ice into knee-deep water, and her calves clenched at meeting the cold. She stepped into deeper water, up to her thighs, and her legs burned. She pulled Smoke’s head and torso from beneath the water.

“I’ll come visit you if you go to that place. I’ll sit with you, Smoke. I’ll sneak you coffee and cigarettes,” she said. “Let’s get you out of the water.”

Smoke’s dark glasses had been swept away, and his eyes were closed. His legs were stuck under the wheelchair. They did not come free when she pulled as hard as she dared. Meanwhile the bottom of her parka floated around her and soaked up icy water.

Looking into Smoke’s face, Margo felt foolish. She hadn’t realized how much she loved him. What she felt was no less than what she’d felt for her grandpa, maybe even for her daddy.

“Let me go under.” Smoke tipped his head back and opened his red, raw eyes. The sky was growing pink and Margo saw snowflakes fall on his eyelashes, but he didn’t blink. The current tugged at the soggy fabric of Margo’s parka, making her whole body feel heavy. She should have left the jacket on shore with her rifle, so it would have been dry when she put it on again. Smoke seemed heavier than he should have been.

“I need to go get help.” Margo pressed her cheek against Smoke’s cheek, spoke to him at such close range that their lips were almost touching. “I need to get your other bottle of oxygen.”

“Please don’t leave me,” Smoke whispered in a thinner voice. “I don’t want to die alone.”

“I have to,” Margo said, but she didn’t budge. She knew the current would drag Smoke under, and he would drown before she could return. She held him above the surface. His shirt was waterlogged, but that didn’t explain his heaviness in her hands. Margo pulled her feet out of the muck into which they were sinking, one, then the other. The cold of the river reached up through her and chilled her belly. Nightmare kept barking from the house.

“Let me go under.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Smoke.”

He whispered into her cheek, “This isn’t killing, kid. You can do this.”

Margo felt the vibration of Smoke’s mouth against her face, heard words flowing out of him, but she didn’t know if he was saying them aloud. His face was growing purplish.

“Let me go under,” Smoke whispered again, and he took hold of her free hand with a fierce grip. The water beaded and fell from his thick silver hair, tinted pink by the light. His lips had gone colorless. She noticed then a leather thong tied around his shoulder and under one arm. She felt around him with the hand that was supporting him and found, tied to it, the bag of lead type he’d kept on the kitchen table. She tried to yank it off, but couldn’t manage with one hand, and he still gripped her other hand tightly.

Margo kicked at the wheelchair again and it broke free from the branches and moved downstream under the dock a few inches. Margo saw how one of Smoke’s feet was caught in it, and she thought maybe if she let go of him and wrenched her hand from his grip, she could possibly free his foot before he drowned. If he were still alive after that, maybe she could lift him onto the retaining wall. Maybe she could get him up the hill. If he were still alive when the paramedics came, he might survive another hour, or a day or a week in the hospital or nursing home, probably with pneumonia. His forehead was twisted with pain.

She looked at him one long, last time. She kissed his cheek and let go. He slipped below the surface. His coughing stopped and his chest convulsions slowed and stopped. Margo felt his tension and pain slip away, and his grip on her hand gradually loosened.

She wanted to lift Smoke’s body out of the river and onto land, but she had to get out of the freezing water. She climbed onto the retaining wall and stood dripping, her teeth chattering. The blowing snow had already covered her tracks and the wheelchair marks. The water on her pant legs and parka quickly froze, and the snow stuck to her. Water beaded on the outside of her greased leather boots, but it had soaked in through her laces and into her socks so that her feet were blocks of ice. She looked up at the house and saw through the snow a thin man in a fedora walking across the patio. Then he was staring down at her, his arms crossed over his chest. She inhaled sharply, and it hurt.

Margo plucked her rifle from the snow, put the strap over her shoulder, not pausing to tap the snow out of the barrel, and moved up the steps. At the top, she stood before Fishbone and tried to say something, but his stony gaze stopped her from trying, and Nightmare’s wild barking overwhelmed her. She made her way onto the porch, stomped the snow off, and moved inside. Nightmare followed her across the kitchen, agitated but silent. She grabbed her cloth bag from the kitchen, took the bottle of shampoo from the bathroom, two pairs of new socks from Smoke’s bedroom drawer, a shirt with a label that said Smoke from the closet, and the rest of the jar of strawberry jam from the refrigerator. She grabbed the Remington from the gun rack and dropped two boxes of twelve-gauge shells into her wet pockets, where they weighted her like anchors. Before she walked out, she crouched and hugged the big dog and scratched his ears and his neck. “Goodbye, Nightmare,” she said. “I wish I could take you with me. I wish I could take care of you.”

She walked back outside. Through the blowing snow, she saw Fishbone’s figure down at the water’s edge. She clutched the shotgun in her bare hand—her gloves were in her pockets, soaking wet, under the shells. She set off on stiff legs downstream along the path toward the Glutton. For a long time, Margo heard the dog barking behind her. She wondered if the police might notice her tracks. Or was Smoke right when he had said nobody would care enough about the death of a sick old man to investigate?

Margo managed to slip through the barbed wire without snagging her parka. She slowed as she moved on her numb feet across the pasture, where no livestock were about. When she had almost reached the far side, she stumbled over something, maybe a frozen cow pie under the snow and fell to her knees. She crawled forward for a while, but had to rest before continuing on. She studied the river, could make out only gray and white blurs. The river was too cold even to stink, and according to last night’s radio weather report, it might freeze again tonight after the storm. Her Marlin remained on her shoulder, but she had somehow dropped the shotgun into the snow. She felt around, but couldn’t find it. She would rest for just a minute.

She was exhausted beyond anything she could remember feeling. She thought she had survived losing her father, but she had not yet survived it, nor any of her other losses. She pressed her cheek against the snow, felt the snow compress and melt slightly. Snow began to accumulate on her other cheek. She would lie there for a moment, until she was rested, until she understood what had happened this morning, and what had happened in her life. Her obligations had been met, and she was free, more free than she had ever been. Within minutes she was hardly feeling the cold. If she could return to her boat, she would start a fire to thaw herself out, or else she would remain right here, at rest.

She was awakened by a jolt, as though someone had kicked her from behind, but when she opened her eyes and looked around, she saw she was alone. The jolt had been as painful as an electrical shock.

After the sensation passed, Margo closed her eyes and returned her cheek to the snow, only to receive another blast of electricity so strong her eyes flew open. She rose to her knees and found she was beside a fence post near the water’s edge, closer to the fence and to the river than she had thought. She pulled herself up to standing. She must have grabbed the electric fence with her bare hand and shocked herself, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the jolt had come from inside her own body. She continued toward the river, and she negotiated her way around the fence somehow without falling into the water. She made her way slowly to her boat through snow that now glowed pure pink from the rising sun. She was carrying her bag over one shoulder and her rifle over the other, and she was weighed down by her frozen parka.

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.