Once Upon a River (29 page)

• Chapter Seventeen •

Margo hiked back downstream. She lugged big rocks from the woods and the river to encircle her fire pit. A carp jumped out of the middle of the river and splashed down. People called carp trash fish, but Margo thought they tasted fine if you could work around all the bones. Sometimes she even thought they were beautiful in their iridescence. She sat by the water’s edge and cooled her duck in a plastic bag. Brian had always soaked a duck in salt water overnight, but Margo didn’t have that much time, and for salt she had only the little packets she got from the Indian. She watched the birds drink at the sandy place where the spring trickled in, blue jays first, then a red-bellied woodpecker, followed by a few tree swallows that glided over from across the river. Three crows landed in a tree and looked down at her. One by one they rose from their perches and resettled in an adjacent tree. Watching the crows move their wings made Margo’s desire to row a boat so powerful that she let her head fall back and closed her eyes. She relived shooting the cigarette out of the old man’s mouth. When she opened her eyes, she admired her new canning kettle, big enough that she could heat water in it for a sponge bath, big enough to boil a few gallons of maple sap down to a cup of syrup, as she and her cousins had done in one of the Murray sheds, rendering everything sticky. The canning kettle was something she had earned by her own skill. This was how Annie Oakley must have felt when she discovered her shooting was not just fine, but profitable.

She figured she wouldn’t start cooking the bird until the Indian returned—nobody liked overcooked duck—but she got the fire started. By singeing the plucked bird in the flame, she removed the last hairlike feathers and made a stink that took a while to dissipate. Margo thought she did not need a big kitchen to eat well, just a few more things that she could buy, trade for, or shoot for, maybe a heavy kitchen knife like the one she’d secretly borrowed from the old man, as well as a big metal stirring spoon. If only there were a river’s-edge cave around here, she might even be able to survive the winter.

As the air was beginning to cool, Margo spotted something white in the windbreak: a giant puffball mushroom twice the size of a human skull, something she could eat for a week. She felt she had been looking for such a puffball for years. She’d last gotten one this size on the day her mother left Murrayville. Normally it would’ve had to rain for a puffball to grow this big, and that suggested to her that the dew along the river would be heavy.

When the Indian finally returned, the sun was setting. He said he’d spent the afternoon at the township library, talking to the librarian about local history and looking at old documents. Margo found a decent-sized hickory stick and whittled off the bark in order to use it as a spit. She skewered the duck and got it balanced over the fire. When a bit of duck fat began to drip onto the coals, Margo caught it in the Indian’s frying pan so she could use it for cooking a slice of mushroom. She considered herself lucky—mallards usually had no fat. Maybe this duck had been living well on the farmer’s corn.

Margo instructed the Indian not to leave the duck unattended, and she hiked up to the car to get her pack. As she was closing the trunk of the station wagon, she saw a woman the size and shape of her aunt Joanna come out of the house right across the road to fill a bird feeder and spread seed over a patch of her lawn. Before she even stepped away, a half dozen cardinals fell upon the seed, four blood-red and two military-green. The woman, maybe ten years older than Joanna, wore her gray-streaked hair long on her shoulders, and she had on an old denim barn coat. When the woman looked up and saw she was being watched, she regarded Margo in a good-humored way, as though she were accustomed to seeing all sorts of people, but had not yet seen one quite like her. Beside the house was a big garden, and Margo could see rows of eggplants and tomatoes. The woman waved at Margo, and Margo automatically waved back.

Only then did Margo see the teenage girl in the yard, lying barefoot in a lawn chair. She was wearing frayed cutoffs and a purple sweatshirt and looked to be about Julie Slocum’s age. The girl was reading a book, and it took Margo a few seconds to make out what it was she had on her stomach: a giant rabbit, weighing maybe twenty pounds. She was using that rabbit to hold her book up. The rabbit’s ears were longer than the girl’s hands, and they twitched, but otherwise the rabbit just sat there. Margo laughed out loud. She put on her pack and picked up her box of ashes and her piece of
The River Rose
and headed toward the river.

When the sun was setting orange downstream, Margo and the Indian were sitting beside the fire eating the duck and some salted tomatoes the Indian had bought at a farm stand. In the frying pan was a thick slice of puffball mushroom Margo had browned in the bit of duck fat, along with some butter from foil-wrapped packets the Indian gave her.

“You know I’m not touching that mushroom,” the Indian said.

“I don’t care. I’ll eat it all. You still owe me five dollars for the duck.”

“I don’t want to be hallucinating. And I’d rather you didn’t, either, not with that rifle.”

“It’s not that kind of mushroom,” Margo said. The rifle was wrapped in its tarp near the fire. “Your cousin said the duck would release its feathers, but it was dang hard to pluck.” She had never really been good at swearing, so she was trying out the Indian’s words,
heck
and
dang
.

“Oh, that’s just a story.” He handed her a ten. “Keep the change.”

“I’ll make you breakfast,” she said and put the bill in her front pocket.

“How’d you get so clean?” the Indian said.

“Took a shower at an old man’s house.”

“You make friends fast. I think your hair changed color. It matches the river now.”

She pulled some of her hair out in front of her and studied it. It seemed to have grown longer, too, since she took the shower. She smelled the old man’s Breck shampoo.

“You’re way too pretty a girl to stay out here alone,” he said. “You’re too vulnerable.”

Margo ate some more puffball.

“But don’t worry, beauty fades eventually.”

“I shot a cigarette out of the old man’s mouth. That’s why he let me have a shower.”

“You what?”

“He was in a wheelchair, and he said if I shot the end off his cigarette, I could have this big pan.” Margo regretted that she hadn’t nabbed one of his buckets, too, while he was sleeping. “I’m going to make soup with our leftovers.”

The Indian let himself roll backward, and he lay there on the ground, hugging his knees, laughing. “You could have killed him. I mean, it’s not funny, but . . . oh, Lordy.”

“I wish you’d stay here for a little longer. One more day.” She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth, for the way they made her sound like a beggar. She knew the Indian wasn’t going to stick around, whatever she might say.

“In one week I’ll be teaching, and in two weeks I’m cohosting a math conference. I’m leaving tomorrow. And why aren’t you enrolled in college?”

“I didn’t finish high school.”

“You can’t get ahead in this life if you don’t finish school.”

“I don’t want to get ahead. What’s so great about getting ahead?”

“I loved school,” he said. “I was bored out of my skull at home. I was an only child, and my adoptive parents were old and boring.”

“I liked school when I was little. But later I couldn’t figure out what the teachers wanted. They said I was too quiet.”

“You don’t seem all that quiet to me.” He took another bite of meat and said, “I’ve always thought of duck as tender.”

“Not old wild duck.” Margo made herself keep on chewing through the tough, slightly gamey meat. He was right—she wasn’t quiet. The realization made her laugh.

After they finished eating, Margo put into the kettle the rest of the meat, the bones, and the wing parts she’d managed to pluck. She added fresh water from the Indian’s jugs and put the pan on the fire to simmer. Margo then carried heaps of pine needles from beneath the evergreens in the windbreak and piled them around the fire to make soft places to sleep. They unrolled their sleeping bags on opposite sides of the fire. The Indian produced a quart juice bottle with masking tape around the lid. The contents were the color of apple juice. He unscrewed the cap and sipped from the wide mouth. His whole body shivered visibly as he swallowed. He said, “It’s bitter. Raw. Must have something in it besides mash.”

“You don’t have to drink it,” she said. “Do you? If you don’t like it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. Here, taste it.”

She shook her head, but he held it out and kept holding it there until she accepted the bottle. He watched until she pressed it to her closed lips. It burned worse than siphoning gasoline. She handed it back.

“I should only drink about half of this,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story if you promise to stop me at half the bottle.”

She nodded. By the firelight, she could see all the details of his face. His cheekbones were wide and his features, like his hands, seemed soft.

“My cousin told me this story his great-uncle told him. It probably happened on this very river. There was a girl who was marrying age, maybe your age. She loved growing corn and beans and squash. So there was a boy from another tribe a week’s walk away, and he wanted to marry the girl, but there were no gardens where he was taking her, because the land was wooded and the soil was rocky. He told her she would gather food in the woods and she would make him clothes and raise children and preserve meat for winter.” The Indian looked at Margo as if to make sure she was listening. He reached out and touched her hair, smoothed it over her shoulder.

“The thought of giving up gardening broke this girl’s heart. She said she had to wait to marry him until the corn was harvested.” He took another drink of whiskey and shivered.

“Was it Indian corn?” Margo asked. “My aunt grew Indian corn for decoration.”

“Yup. It was a big harvest, and the corn kept coming. Nobody understood how, but new ears sprouted on stalks that were already finished, and the new ears became ripe in weeks instead of months. But the girl knew that bits of her broken heart were generating the ears of corn, and the corn silk was made from the strands of her hair. She knew that soon her heart would be gone, and she would have to marry the man and leave her home.”

“And she’d be bald-headed,” Margo said.

“Yup,” said the Indian, apparently not registering what she’d said. He took another drink. “When her heart was finally gone, she threw herself into the river and drowned. An opossum dragged her body back up onto land, and her family buried her in her garden. And they say that corn continued to grow above her body, and even when the white people marched the Indians away to Kansas, the corn grew. Though the farmers tried to plant wheat for their cereal and oats for their horses, only corn would grow.”

“How did a possum drag her body onto the riverbank?” Margo stretched her legs in front of her, alongside the fire, and moved Crane’s ashes farther away. The sky was dark and starry.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It just did.”

“I mean, a possum weighs like eight pounds,” Margo said. “And its hands are tiny. Like doll hands. I’ll shoot one and you can look at it.”

“Maybe he had help from his possum friends. Or maybe he was a really big possum. I don’t think you’re getting what’s important out of the story, focusing on the possum.” The Indian stretched his own legs out and nudged the toe of her boot with his loafer.

“Possums wouldn’t help anybody.” She felt strangely cheerful to be arguing with this drunken man in a way she never would have argued with her father or Brian. Even Michael had seemed distressed when she had disagreed with him. She said, “Possums have their own plans. They don’t even walk. They waddle. And they have three rows of sharp teeth.”

“Maybe I don’t have the story right, but you’re missing the point. The girl wanted to have her garden and not have any man. If she moved up north to marry, she’d have to give up gardening.”

“I’d rather hunt.” For the first time in her life, she was getting the idea that talking was as pleasurable as shooting. She thought of things she might like to tell the Indian if she got the chance, that a deer can eat a fish or a bird, that a heron can swallow a snake and the snake can still slither free. It warmed her to know she had things to say that he would argue with.