Once Upon a River

• 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.

She had felt the baby startle at her contact with the river, had felt it jostle as she began to swim, and then the baby relaxed. As Margo floated, the baby floated with her. The black dog left his food bowl and jumped off the side of the gangplank, came splashing down into the river. He walked in up to his knees and lapped at the water. Smoke would turn in his grave to see his dog drinking from the river. Margo laughed and held on so as not to be swept away.



• Acknowledgments •


Thank you, Heidi Bell and Carla Vissers, Andy Mozina and Lisa Lenzo, for being smart and generous readers and fine writing friends. Thank you, Bill Clegg, for going above and beyond for this book. Thank you, Jill Bialosky, for your shaping, your fine tuning, and your plain good sense.

The following kind souls helped me by reading one or another draft of this novel: Gina Betcher, Jamie Blake, Glenn Deutsch, Godfrey Grant, Sheryl Johnston, Lindsey Kamyn, Mimi Lipson, Susan Ramsey, Diane Seuss, Melvin Visser, Shawn Wagner. Thank you Gary Peake, Master Bull’s-Eye Shooter, for sharing your expertise and philosophy and for your exquisite attention to every shot Margo takes. I’m indebted to my grandpa Frank Herlihy of Red House Island, who lived long enough to know more than anyone else on the river, and granny Betty Herlihy, who knew plenty her husband didn’t. And my dear Unca Terry Herlihy, who keeps a toe in the water.

Many people helped me with this book. A more complete list of acknowledgments appears on my website, www. bonniejocampbell.com.

Every person and place Margo encounters in this story is pure fiction. Even many aspects of the Kalamazoo River have been reimag-

ined. Once Upon a River includes material from two short stories. “Family Reunion” was first read aloud on WBEZ’s Stories on Stage and first published at Mid-American Review and then in American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009); “Fishing Dog” was originally published in North Dakota Quarterly and then in Women & Other Animals (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

Thank you, Susanna, for always being there, and for being just the mother a writer needs.

Thank you, darling Christopher, for everything, always.