Once Upon a River (8 page)

“I don’t need any damned help,” Cal said in a strained voice.

He got into the front passenger seat, and Junior got into the back seat. Finally, one of the twins climbed from the back to sit between his parents. None of them looked in Margo’s direction. The Christmas lights on the oil-barrel float were still on, their colors muted in the early evening light. Saturday evening Mass would keep them away from home for at least an hour and a half. Usually Joanna went alone or with the littler kids—Cal had about as much interest in religion as Margo’s father’d had—but today Joanna might have convinced them that they ought to pray for Billy and have their souls worked on. Maybe Joanna thought there was something to be gained by showing the family in public at this time. Maybe Cal wanted to show he had not been crippled.

Margo climbed the steps, found the door key under the flowerpot where it had always been, used it in the lock, and replaced it. The kitchen was warm from the woodstove, which someone had damped down to last until they returned. The house smelled of cinnamon bread. Margo smelled turkey soup, too, which meant that Joanna, despite last night’s events, had boiled turkey carcasses as she always had done the day after the party. Margo had last been in this big, bright room last Thanksgiving when she was helping Joanna with the dishes, before she’d gone out to join the party. Margo ventured into the living room, where she’d argued with Billy for years without feeling uneasy—it was only in the last year that Billy had become strange and scary to her. The Murray house never did feel empty, even when everybody was gone. Always the place was full of scents, warmth, and energy. This evening she could feel the Murray spirits hiding around corners, hanging from the ceiling and wall fixtures. Even when she’d been welcome in this house, she had preferred to stay in the kitchen. When she’d gone into the living room to watch TV, she sat on the floor beside Cal’s chair, and he had sometimes patted her head and said, “Good girl.” Billy had whispered, “Good dog,” or “Good Nympho,” whenever Cal did it, but she hadn’t cared.

But she couldn’t stay here now, after what had happened. Where would she sleep while she waited for her mother to come?

She found a sheet of paper and a pencil and wrote a note.
Dear Joanna and Cal: Thank you for your generous offer to let me stay with you. My mother wants me to come to her, but she asked me not to say where she is. Please don’t tell anyone. Love, Margaret.
She left it on the kitchen table.

Margo walked into Cal’s office, a room she had never entered. Kids were not allowed, and it was a rule they all followed. The room smelled of Cal, of leather and gun oil and citrus shaving cream. It also smelled a little of sweat and whiskey.

The gun cabinet was closed but not locked. Maybe in his rattled condition, Cal had forgotten to lock it, or maybe he was so confident no one would mess with his guns that he never locked it. She opened both doors. Inside were a dozen rifles and six twelve-gauge shotguns, but not her daddy’s twenty-gauge with his initials burned into the stock.

Margo’s heart pounded as she extracted the Marlin, the gun Cal had let her use on special occasions, because it was like Annie Oakley’s, he said. Margo ran her hands over the squirrel carved into the walnut stock, the chrome lever. Cal had kept the gun oiled and polished. An electrical charge passed through her as she touched the gold-colored trigger. When she had last shot with it, there had been a tooled leather strap attached, but it had been removed, leaving only the sling swivels. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and pointed it out the window. She pressed her cheek against the stock and looked over the iron sights at a bit of orange plastic ribbon stapled to a fence post. If she was going to leave this place and all its familiar landmarks, she would have to take this gun. She pocketed a box of .22 cartridges and gripped the Marlin in her left hand. She felt the ghosts of Murrays watching her as she returned to the kitchen. She grabbed the loaf of cinnamon bread off the counter and then headed out the same way she’d come in. The black Lab chained outside barked, and though she knew she should hurry away, she dropped to her knees on the ground beside him, held the bread away from his jaws. “Oh, Moe, I’ve missed you terribly. I should have come over to see you, I know.”

She pulled herself away from the dog, and he barked behind her. The beagles barked in their kennel. When she reached her boat, she was shaking so badly that instead of dropping the rifle onto the back seat, she dropped it into the icy river. She pulled it out quickly, but not before it was entirely submerged.

She shook the gun and wiped it as best she could with a towel from her pack. Braced now by the cold and her fear of being seen, Margo laid the rifle on her tarp and swaddled it as she would a baby. She thought the sound of her getting into
The River Rose
echoed all across the river and through the woods. She took a few bites from the loaf of bread, the first thing she’d eaten all day. When she set out onto the water, she felt an urge to let herself go with the current, to slip effortlessly downstream. Her mother was upstream, though, so she began to row.

• Chapter Six •

When Margo heard three shotgun blasts in succession, the sound rattled her, made her want to shoot in response. It would still be deer hunting season for a few more days. When she saw the Slocum camping trailers on the north bank, she rowed as hard as she could to pass quickly and avoid being seen. A few hundred yards beyond that, the river curved, and Margo heard voices and laughter coming from outside the abandoned cabin that Junior called the marijuana house. She ran her boat onto the sandbar just below the place and decided to wait for full darkness, rather than risk being seen. She took off her leather work gloves and breathed onto her hands. The tiny cabin here was owned by the Murrays and until three years ago had been used by one of Grandpa’s brothers for weekend fishing. Margo listened to the teenage voices. A girl’s laughter exploded like automatic weapon fire and then was muffled by a closing door. When all was quiet for a while, Margo climbed up on the bank for a better look.

A white-tailed buck approached the river only twenty-five yards away, near the dock. Margo loaded six cartridges from her pocket into the magazine tube of the Marlin, chambered a round as quietly as she could, and cocked the hammer into the safety position. The loaded rifle felt good in her hands. When the buck stopped at the riverbank and turned to look in her direction, Margo slowed her breathing. With the rifle resting on one knee, she studied the creature, counted ten points, saw a raw V-shaped tear on his cheek, maybe a wound from fighting another male. Her hands stopped shaking. She could take it down with the .22 if she hit it in the eye or the temple. The deer lowered its head to drink from the river. The lever-action Marlin was slightly heavier than her daddy’s bolt-action rifle, but while she aimed the gun, she felt weightless and free from her exhaustion.

“Don’t shoot!” a female voice whispered loudly from behind her. The deer started at the sound, doubled up its legs, and bounded from the water’s edge.

Margo jumped back down the bank, climbed into her boat, and pushed off.

“Hey, are you Junior’s cousin? Come back and hang out with us!” the girl shouted. Margo kept rowing. The girl said to someone else, “I think that was Junior’s cousin.”

Margo recognized her voice. She was one of Junior’s friends, a girl Ricky had once referred to as a slut. She cleared her throat and managed to say, “I got no cousins. My name is Annie.”

Margo rowed upstream, warmed herself against the current. She was glad the girl had stopped her from shooting the buck. The meat would have gone to waste on the riverbank. Margo rowed harder when she realized she had left the Murray house unlocked in her hurry. She wondered if Joanna would make her family another loaf of swirled cinnamon bread to replace the one Margo had taken. After about two hours of hard pulling in the dark, she found a shallow stream, maneuvered herself a few yards up into it, out of view of river traffic, and tied her boat to the roots of a tree. She curled up in her sleeping bag on the back seat of her boat as she used to curl on the couch to wait for Crane to come home, and fell asleep. Rocked by the motion of the river, she slept hard and for a long time, until the sun was high the following day. She woke up cold, stiff, and confused about where she was, and also grateful no one had bothered her. She’d heard no one shouting her name, but she felt eyes on her. She moved her toes to warm them inside her boots and saw on shore a big buck. When she sat up and made a noise with the tarp, the buck turned to show a V-shaped gash and then walked a few yards deeper into the woods. She ate half the loaf of cinnamon bread and began rowing again.

In the middle of the afternoon, Margo sighted ahead a riverside gas station where boats refueled, and where a person who was not afraid of being seen could tie up and buy a sandwich and some chips without going more than a few yards from the water. Margo hid out in the channel of an island cottage just downstream of the place. Nobody was home. She wondered what it would be like to live on a little island like this, with water flowing around her on all sides. She was about twelve miles upstream of Murrayville, and she knew she could only cover about a mile an hour when rowing against the current.

At dusk she saw a ten-point buck approaching, so she set out rowing again. Behind her she felt the flapping of a big bird’s wings, but turned and saw nothing. She passed the gas station unseen, and after that she mostly passed moonlit woods and fields, houses and cottages with floating docks and oil-barrel floats not yet taken out for the winter. In the dark, her rowing became as constant as her breathing. She saw the backs of car dealerships and machine shops. Some places were familiar: a cliff in which swallows dwelled in summer, a stone wall and tower that her grandpa had said were built by Indians, some ancient trees whose branches hung over the water in ways that seemed to Margo generous, the way Grandpa had been generous, or big and graceful the way Aunt Joanna always seemed big and graceful. The shimmer of security lights on the surface of the water reminded Margo that her mother was up ahead. She rowed much of the night, taking bites of bread until it was gone. When she was too tired to stay awake, she pulled over at a snag and slept again.

She awoke the next morning to a splash beside the boat, and when she looked into the dark water, she saw her father’s angry face reflected there. But then it was her own weary face, framed by dark hair. Her cheeks and lips were chapped from the cold, and her muscles ached. She set out slowly, switching sides of the river whenever it curved, knowing how the water was shallow and slow-moving on the outside of curves, and fast and deep on the inside where it was in the process of wearing away the riverbank. As she traveled around an oxbow, she remembered what Grandpa used to say, that such a bend in the river was a temporary shape, that eventually, over thousands of years, the river would reroute itself to the most direct path, never mind the houses folks had built in its way, never mind the retaining walls or the concrete chunks, the riprap they’d piled along the riverbank. The river persevered, Grandpa had said, and people would eventually give up. Margo remembered thinking she would not give up on making the river her own. It occurred to her now that Grandpa might have been speaking about his own house, the big Murray house, being eventually swept away. He might have been saying that the Murrays would not always be kings of the river. What had seemed permanent to Margo, the Murray river paradise, could have seemed fleeting to the man who’d created it.

By the afternoon of that second full day of rowing, she was tired and hungry beyond any exhaustion or hunger she had known. With each pull of her oars, she felt herself liquefying. A few times she paused and put her hands into the water to soothe them. When snow began to fall around her, she wondered if she might dissolve before she got where she was going, like the big flakes that fell on the water. When her legs cramped, she slipped backward with the current for a while, watched the same trees she had just struggled to pass fall behind her. She slipped easily by a whitewashed dock she had inched past with such effort a few minutes ago. She passed a great blue heron, four feet tall, standing in a few inches of freezing water, and the sight startled her awake. Before she let herself get carried away, she guided her boat to a sandbar. She turned to watch the heron, which should have flown off south months ago. The bird stiffened all the feathers on its head and neck and then stabbed at the water. It gulped down a finger-length fish and flew off upstream. Margo opened the plastic bag Junior had given her. She took the joint out and lit it with a safety match from her backpack. She smoked half of it, hoping to numb herself, and when it made her feel sick, she tossed the rest of it into the water. Within minutes, she was even hungrier.

She was light-headed at dusk. The marijuana’s pleasant effects had worn off hours before, and she was left with an emptiness that began in her growling stomach and stretched all through her. The water jug, too, was empty. It was well into night when a familiar cabin on stilts rose before her like a miracle, with its windows of dim, wavering light. She rowed past it to give herself room to maneuver, but when she stopped rowing she slipped downstream too fast and had to approach again. She tried to flex her fingers on the oars, but they had frozen into a curled position inside her leather gloves. The times she had seen this place with Grandpa, it had been daylight. The flickering lantern light made the cabin look mysterious. Brian had invited her to come for a visit, but she’d imagined sneaking in while he was gone. From here it was only a few miles more to Heart of Pines.