Bonnie Campbell - Once Upon a River

When he went inside to get his knife, Margo sniffed her sleeve. She saw, across the river, Billy coming out of the barn, dragging the heavy pig roaster by its legs over the frozen ground a few feet at a time. The roaster was made out of a 275-gallon fuel-oil tank cut in half. Margo had been lucky to get the buck home without anybody seeing.

Aunt Joanna, meanwhile, came out of the house wearing insulated rubber boots and a long plaid coat and dragging one end of an orange extension cord. She walked out onto the oil-barrel float carrying a strand of colored Christmas lights that were already twinkling in her hands. Last year Margo had helped her screw in cup hooks around the edge of the float, so it would look festive after dark with the lights reflecting off the water. After the Thanksgiving party, the Murrays would pull their float up onto land and chain it to a tree to protect it from ice and floods.

“I know you miss your aunt Joanna,” Crane said when he returned. “I know it’s hard to be without a ma. But don’t you even think of going to that party.”

“I got a ma,” she whispered. “Somewhere.”

Across the way, Joanna dropped her string of lights into the river, and Margo saw the end waggle and sparkle a few yards downstream. Despite the risk of electrical shock, Joanna was probably laughing as she fished the lights from the cold current. Margo could hear Joanna’s voice in her head now, saying, Quit brooding and sing with me, Sprite! Nobody likes a sullen girl.

Joanna had been the one to pull the book Little Sure Shot off the hall shelf for Margo as soon as she’d taken an interest in shooting. The Murray boys had all refused to read about a girl. The cover drawing of Annie Oakley’d had a beard and mustache drawn on with a black crayon, but Margo had been able to scrub most of it off, leaving only a gray shadow over Annie’s face. Margo was curious about the strange clothes that covered Annie head to toe, including high collars and leggings under her skirts. Margo loved to study the melancholy expression on Annie’s face.

Margo knew Crane wanted her to make friends outside the family. And Margo was curious about other kids at school, but they took her quietness for snobbery, her slowness to respond in conversation as stupidity. Crane wanted her to speak more, but the calm and quiet of the last year had created in her a desire for more calm and quiet, and Margo wasn’t sure there was going to be any end to it. Silence allowed her to ruminate not just about Cal and what had happened last year, but also about her grandfather, to know again the papery feeling of his skin and the sadness and fear he’d expressed on the sunporch when he was dying. Silence brought back the sound of her mother sighing when she felt too dreary to get out of bed on winter days. Margo wasn’t sure she could move forward in time, when the past kept calling for her attention the way it did.

“You don’t seem to understand what’s been done to you by those people,” Crane said when he saw how intently Margo was watching Joanna. He grabbed her shoulders. “If you would have spoken against Cal, we could have sent him to jail. Damn it, he raped you! That Slocum girl told me.” He let go of her and stomped off toward the house, shaking his head.

Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus. She had not objected to Cal’s actions in the shed, had even been curious about what was happening. For the last year, however, it had been gnawing at her, and Margo had been forming her objection.

ON THANKSGIVING, MARGO and her daddy had a meal of turkey breast, grocery-store stuffing, potatoes, and cranberry sauce shaped by the can. They played Michigan rummy until Crane fell asleep in his chair. On the following morning, Friday, Margo served him scrambled eggs and toast. The phone rang, and when Crane hung up, he said, “Brian Ledoux’s going to come get the venison. He’ll give you some money for it.”

Margo nodded.

“You keep the money. You earned it. You probably need it for ammunition. But I can’t have you killing any more deer, Margo. I’m taking the shotgun. I don’t have to take the rifle, too, do I? Nobody else is going to kill a deer with a single-shot .22, but I’m afraid you might.”

She shook her head no.

“Promise. Say it, or I’ll take the rifle.”

“I promise,” she whispered.

“I guess you need something to protect yourself if one of them Murrays comes over here,” he said. “But don’t you do anything unless you got no other choice. You think before you shoot. You consider the consequences.”

Margo nodded.

“And you know better than to go to that party. If you even set foot on that Murray property, I’ll drive over and drag you home by your ear.”

She nodded again, didn’t know how much longer she could stand her imprisonment here. Next summer she would swim, no matter what he said.

“I’ll be home at seven. We’ll have dinner together, Margo. We’ve got the leftover turkey, and I’ll try to get us an apple pie if they got one left in the grocery deli. That’s the best I can do. You know you’re the only reason I’m still alive on this earth. Don’t you?” He looked at her until she nodded, and then he slid the twenty-gauge into its case and folded down the truck seat to place it back there. Margo was glad for his affection, but maybe it was too much to be the only reason another person was alive.

After Crane went to work, Margo took his rifle out and shot at the auto-reset target he had welded together for her at his old job. It had four hanging targets along the bottom that flipped up when struck, and when she shot the fifth target on top, it reset all five. She repeated that cycle twenty times without missing, reloading for each shot. She even wore the spongy yellow earplugs that Mr. Peake had insisted on; he’d given her a big plastic bag of them, along with a stack of paper targets. Then she got the little shaving mirror out of the bathroom and held it against the butt of the rifle and shot over her shoulder, copying one of Annie Oakley’s tricks. After twenty-some rounds going awry into the side of the hill, she hit the paper bull’s-eye affixed to a piece of plywood, and then she hit it ten times in a row. The shooting warmed her enough that she could unzip her Carhartt jacket—one of her daddy’s that she had claimed.

At noon she sat on the riverbank and ate a fried egg sandwich on store-bought bread. Joanna would have baked at least a dozen loaves fresh for the party, plus a cinnamon loaf for breakfast tomorrow. Margo raised her rifle and aimed across the river at each person who showed up at the Murrays’. After a few hours, when the wind shifted, she smelled the meat roasting. She could hear the music coming out of the outdoor speakers. She aimed at Billy.

“You planning to take out some partygoers?”

The man’s voice startled her. He was in the driver’s seat of a pontoon boat, maybe sixteen feet long, that was drifting toward her. It said Playbuoy across the siderail. She had been focusing so intently that she hadn’t heard the boat approach. She lowered her rifle and moved down to the water’s edge and out onto the dock. When the boat drifted near enough, she reached out and grabbed the side. Two of the three men on board had beards and curly black hair; they were so similar that one might have been a copy of the other. The third man, thinner and blond, was sleeping across a bench seat on the port side. The black-haired man behind the wheel was Brian Ledoux, Grandpa’s friend, though he was Crane’s age. The man standing beside him had the same giant’s body, but his skin was pale, and that made his dark hair seem more striking. There was something strange about his eyes.