Once Upon a River

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “Holy shit,” Brian said. “A guy has got to respect that.”

  Afterward, he exchanged his M1 for a shotgun, an old Winchester 97 twelve-gauge pump-action with a full choke. He shot at some frozen hunks of driftwood he’d dragged over from the edge of the river, and she saw that the buckshot created a tight pattern of holes only a few inches wide at thirty feet. With her first shot, the kick of the thing knocked her back. After that, she jammed it tightly into her shoulder and absorbed the recoil with her whole body. She loaded and shot until she knew she would be bruised. Though the sound was muted by the ear protectors, each blast moved through her and settled and soothed her.

  Brian offered to stay at the cabin with her the following day, but said there was two hundred bucks cash if he cleaned the roof and gutters at an apartment complex. There was no road leading to the cabin, meaning a boat was the only way in or out, and this made Margo feel easier about being alone there. If anyone came for her, she would see him coming on the water. Brian said that if the river froze over this winter, they’d be stuck, so they needed to keep their supplies of food, bait, and ammo laid in, and the prospect of winter preparation seemed to please him. After he disappeared upstream, Margo found a piece of a rope that was too short to use for much of anything, so she unraveled it and then set about braiding the sections to create a rifle sling.

  That evening, Brian visited Carpinski and got a report on Margo’s mother. After a few months of living with Carpinski, Luanne had apparently gone off with a truck driver. Carpinski provided an address in Florida, but the first letter Margo wrote came back the next week to Brian’s post office box with a note handwritten across it, No longer at this address. Brian said he would keep asking around, would talk to Carpinski again to see if he remembered anything else. According to Brian, the man was still pretty broken up about Luanne more than a year after she had left.

  Brian was a storyteller, recounting his own tales and others he had collected, and in the evenings he often told about growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in logging camps, about damming creeks to catch fish, about dipping smelt, about men who were killed by walking too close to the edge of the road when a wagon full of logs was passing. There was a long, complicated story about killing and eating rattlesnake in Idaho. He told her about two men who went out in a boat with one of their wives and came back without her, neither of them realizing she was missing, so relieved had they been by the quiet. She’d shown up hours later, having walked from the other side of the lake, mad as hell. He told a story about a Michigan Department of Natural Resources official going out with his friend fishing in the middle of a big lake. The DNR man watched his friend light a quarter stick of dynamite and toss it into the water. After the blast, twenty fish floated up dead, and the man collected them. When he lit another stick of dynamite, the DNR man said, “You know I’m going to have to arrest you for this.” So the guy handed the DNR man the lit dynamite and said, “Well, are you going to talk or fish?”

  The nearest neighbor downstream on Brian’s side of the river was a half mile through wild woods. And it was a lonesome sort of relief not seeing the Murray farm across the way as she had her whole life. Upstream on the other side was a plain white clapboard house, apparently unoccupied during the winter months. A few hundred yards downstream, separated from the white house by an empty lot tangled with small trees and brambles, was a tidy yellow house, in which there lived a man who drove a green Jeep, a woman who wore a slim-fitting white winter jacket, and a big loopy dog, maybe a yellow Lab–Irish setter mix. The house was built way back from the river, but the dog hung around at the river’s edge and gazed into the water. Margo had never had her own dog—the no-pets policy had been a rare point of agreement between her parents—but she had spent so much of her youth with the Murray dogs that she had come to see dogs as her natural companions.

  It was after the new year when Margo came up with the idea to write to the occupant of her mother’s old address in Florida, asking him or her for information about Luanne. Brian said she should offer a fifty-dollar reward—he would pay for it, he said. The reply came to Brian’s PO box. The address the man provided was not in Florida, but in Michigan, Lake Lynne, a town west of Murrayville and north of Kalamazoo. Margo worked for days to write the simplest note she could, giving no details about her life, telling her mother that she was doing fine and would like to visit her. Brian mailed it to the new address.

  Over the course of the next few months, Margo was grateful that nobody came around looking for her. If the police or the Murrays were searching at all, they weren’t looking very hard. She’d seen a sheriff’s boat traveling upstream a few times, but the craft had always sped toward Heart of Pines and then back downstream a while later. Nobody ever came to the cabin to inquire about a missing girl. Sixteen was the legal age for dropping out of school in Michigan—maybe sixteen was also the age when folks stopped worrying about you. Margo had a feeling that Cal and Joanna didn’t really want to find her.

  During those cold months, Margo worked on leading, shooting just in front of running rabbits and squirrels. She also shot, plucked, and cooked the occasional nonmigrating duck, from among the half-domestic oddities that appeared on the river. Brian worked odd jobs in town for cash, especially snowplowing, for which he used a four-wheel-drive truck he kept somewhere in town. He and Paul owned a stand of woods south of Heart of Pines, and so he cut trees, split logs with a hydraulic splitter, and delivered cords of firewood around the county. He also was able to fix cars, but he hated to do it in winter unless he could use somebody’s heated garage. Once a week or so, he visited his kids in town, one of whom was just three years younger than Margo, he said, which meant the boy was only one year younger, really. He invited Margo along on some trips, but she did not want to risk encountering the police or the Murrays. At first Brian had seemed uneasy about leaving her alone, but he soon took for granted that when he returned, she would be there. He said he felt like a better man knowing she was waiting for him at the end of a day of digging trenches or cutting down trees. She was his salvation, he said, his reason to settle down and mend his ways. Sometimes, when he said this sort of thing, his grin took on a ferocity that scared Margo.

  The letter that came in March was in a yellow envelope. The paper folded inside featured cartoon bumblebees. After reading it a few times, Margo noticed it smelled like flowers and honey. There was no return address on the envelope. Folded inside the paper was a postal money order for two hundred dollars. The letter read:

  Dear Margaret Louise,

  Thank you for writing to me, Sweetheart. I’m glad to hear you are fine and still living on the river. I know you always loved the river. I could not endure that mildew and smell. Though it breaks my heart, I cannot encourage you to visit me at this time. My situation is delicate. I will write to you soon and arrange to meet with you.

  Love, Your Mama

  p.s. Don’t tell your daddy

  or Cal you heard from me.

  Margo couldn’t speak at all that evening, but she nodded in agreement with Brian when it made sense to do so, and she fell asleep early. The following day, when Brian went to work, Margo loaded up his twelve-gauge and went into the woods dragging the heavy-duty sled Brian used for firewood. Though it was not deer hunting season, she tromped downstream through the snow until she found a deer trail cutting to the river. She sat against the trunk of an oak tree and waited. A few hours later, the first deer to follow the path down to the water was a doe, and a second doe followed, her belly swollen. Margo watched them drink at the river and then jump back up the bank and nuzzle the snow for buried acorns before continuing on. She watched them chew disinterestedly on saplings, and finally they wandered away, still unaware of her presence. A little after noon, a bigger deer, surely a buck that had dropped its antlers, went down to the water to drink. Margo focused on the muscle movement in the deer’s shoulders and neck, the twitching of the ears and the tail. She pushed thoughts of her mother into the
quietest place within herself, until she was inside the sound of leaves rustling and the wind-sound of the moving surface of the river. The deer jumped back up onto the bank, and Margo calmly followed its motion. When it stopped and nuzzled the ground, she aimed into the heart and lungs and pressed the trigger.

  The deer fell hard. When Margo went to the animal, she found that she had shot the slug into a doe. From its musculature, she had been certain it was a buck, but now she could see its sex and its slightly swollen belly. Though her aim had been perfect, the doe was not dead. It attempted to lift its head, watched Margo, terrified, through a big, clear eye. The creature kicked with its back legs as though trying to run. Margo took the army knife out of her pocket, unfolded the biggest blade, and sliced through the deer’s jugular, an act that took some strength. She folded up her knife with the blood still on it, wiped her hands on her jeans, and only then did her hands start shaking.

  Margo sat down cross-legged beside the doe’s warm body, sick about what she’d done. She stroked the rough fur stretched across the cage of ribs as the body grew cool. After a while, she heard the approach of another deer. She remained still while it passed close to her and went down to the water. She watched it drink its fill, lift its head, and look around. She wondered how the deer could be completely unaware of the dead doe and of Margo when both were so near, not twelve yards away. The deer climbed the bank, and Margo was once again almost sure it was a buck. It paused and sniffed the bark of a wild apple tree and took interest in something. It pawed at the ground. It reared up and put its front hooves on the tree, so it was standing on its back legs, exposing its chest and balls. Then the buck nosed upward and bit at something in the crook of the tree. Margo fired her second slug into its heart. As the deer hit the ground, it seemed to sigh. From its mouth tumbled a gray bird, a mourning dove, with its dark eyes bulging and darting and then closing.

  She suppressed a cry of surprise. She’d never seen or heard of a deer eating a bird. There was still more to learn about life along the river. She moved in and nudged the deer’s chest with her foot to make sure it was dead, and a flurry erupted beside her as the dove woke up and launched itself into the air.

  Margo had to sit still for a while and survey the mess she’d made. After killing the doe, she should have unloaded the shotgun. She was hunting out of season, so killing either deer was already a crime. She promised herself if she ever killed a doe in the future, she would gut it and skin it, same as a buck. She ate female rabbits and squirrels all the time. But not this time, not this doe. She covered its body with leafless branches, frozen leaves, and snow and hoped no one would come upon it. She rolled the buck over onto the big sled and pulled it slowly upstream, over the snow.

  By the time Brian got home, after he’d had a few beers at The Pub in Heart of Pines, Margo had dressed out the deer on a vinyl tarp and deposited the guts in the river, hoping they would float away.

  At first Brian seemed shocked to find her with a deer out of sea-son, but he produced a hacksaw and helped her take off the legs. They tied a rope around its neck and strung it up in a tree behind the

  house, out of sight of passing boats. He offered to help her skin the thing and seemed glad when she declined his offer. He sat on a stump, sipping from a half-pint bottle, while she worked. He told her a story about his buddy skinning a deer by tying up a golf ball inside the

  deer’s skin between the shoulders and making a knob out of it. Then his buddy tied a rope around the knob, tied it to a four-wheel-drive truck, and drove slowly.

  “Hide peels right off in a minute,” Brian said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Wish I could show you.”

  “Did you ever hear about a deer eating a bird?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen a deer eat a fish. Paul said I was crazy, but I know what I saw.”

  She nodded.

  “It was when we was kids, and I’d caught some carp nobody wanted to eat, and I dumped them in my ma’s garden. I’ll be damned if I didn’t look out my window that night and see a deer eating them.”

  “Why would it eat fish?”

  “I don’t know. Protein? Calcium? Because it tastes good? Same reason we eat fish.”

  “How about a bird?”

  “I haven’t heard of that.”

  Margo liked having something new to wonder about, how or why one deer might need something different than what the others needed. More happened in this world than a person would come up with on her own. When she was finished skinning and the deer’s hide lay crumpled like a towel on the ground, Brian drank the last of his whiskey and let the bottle drop.

  “Maggie, you’re the kind of girl I want to spend my old age with,” he said and pulled her onto his lap. He put his arms around her, not seeming to notice or care that she was gripping the burned handle of his butcher knife with the ten-inch blade. “If I am so fortunate as to have an old age, that is. What should we do with the head?”

  “Sink it in a gunnysack full of stones,” she suggested. Brian’s talk about their growing old together made her feel queasy. She liked living with Brian, loved feeling protected in the cage of his embrace, but she didn’t mean to stay forever. Her mother would contact her soon and tell her to come. From her mother’s place, she would be able to figure out what to do next. “Have you got a gunnysack?” she asked.

  “That’s it, Maggie. I’m giving you that twelve-gauge. That’s your shotgun now. You’re a better shot than I am. Anyway, I got a new shotgun in my truck in Heart of Pines. So that one’s yours.” He was slurring his words a little.

  “Thank you,” Margo said and sighed. “I wonder why my ma doesn’t want me to come see her.”

  “People have all kinds of complications, Maggie. I bet she writes to you again soon.”

  Margo nodded.

  “You don’t think that son of a bitch Cal raped her, too, do you?” Brian asked.

  “No.” She answered before she could let herself think about it.

  “All right. I’m hungry. Let’s get this deer under cover on the screen porch.”

  Margo slept twelve hours that night, soundly, the way her mother used to.

  • Chapter Eight •

  From Brian, Margo learned to thin-slice half-frozen venison across the grain and dry it on the woodstove to make jerky. He explained to her the qualities of different types of firewood: hickory burned the hottest and smelled the best, but was hardest to split. He taught her about keeping under the radar of the authorities, insisting that she park her boat behind his and cover it with a green canvas tarp whenever she wasn’t using it. Margo was grateful for all she was learning and for a place to stay where she could be herself. She loved to have someone to cook for; Brian appreciated all the foods her daddy had liked. Margo was getting an idea that maybe she loved Brian, that love was different than she’d expected, that it was something ordinary. If you knew every detail of a person, if you studied his pink-skinned, black-bearded face every day for hours, if you knew the feel of his soft hair and knew how he felt in his skin when you touched him, if you listened to every word a man spoke, his truth and his lies, then you couldn’t help but love him. And loving a new person might even eventually dull the pain of having lost the people you had loved before, even if it didn’t happen as quickly as you wanted it to.

  On most days, she spent hours shooting with the Marlin, going through the stack of paper targets Mr. Peake had given her. She’d sighted in her Marlin for the Winchester long-rifle cartridges at thirty to fifty feet for hunting small game, and she was learning to adjust her sight picture to other distances and ammo. Brian brought her mostly longs and long-rifles, but occasionally shorts or something like low-velocity CB cartridges, which fired quietly and didn’t penetrate the target as deeply. She shot enough with her left hand that she became fairly

  accurate—Annie Oakley had been able to shoot expertly with both hands, according to Little Sure Shot. For plinking, Brian had gotten hold of a four-tang auto-reset target similar to the one she’d had in
Murrayville. Once in a while she took out the shotgun Brian had given her and blew apart plastic bottles and pieces of trash she’d found floating in the current. This variety of targets helped her resist shooting another buck out of season, though she saw them often enough drinking at the river.

  When Brian forgot to get her ammunition, Margo didn’t want to bother him about it. A couple of times she put his outboard motor on The River Rose and went upstream to Heart of Pines to the grocery store to get a brick of ammo and some food. Before going inside, she pulled a stocking cap over her long hair, and no one at the store paid her any special attention. She loved the freedom of traveling alone. She spent the forty dollars she had and wanted to cash the money order from her mother, but she feared for her name coming up at the post office. As far away as she felt from home, Heart of Pines was only thirty-five miles upstream from Murrayville. The DNR official who she feared would find her dead doe was the same guy who could have nailed her for killing more than her fair share back home. She had visited the doe’s body all spring, kept her covered with branches, and noted, day by day, how much of her the coyotes, raccoons, and crows had eaten, how her skeleton collapsed with the cartilage fetus inside, how her bones disappeared from the heap one after another. Last week, she had been able to pluck her deer slug from the flattened remains.

  As the weather warmed and the ground thawed, Brian picked up jobs removing trees, landscaping, and digging, either using machines he rented or a shovel when it was a tight space or when folks were worried about the ornamental bushes over their septic tanks. Margo didn’t miss her father any less as the weather warmed, but by then her body had absorbed the habit of sadness, so that sadness flowed all through her and became a natural part of her movements. Missing her mother was different; her mother was an agitation and a puzzle. She tried to imagine situations her mother might be in that were so delicate that they couldn’t meet, not even for a visit. Was her mother being held prisoner? Was she taking care of some man’s children, a dozen of them, so that she couldn’t take care of one more person? Luanne should have known that Margo didn’t need much taking care of.