Bonnie Jo Campbell
Once Upon a River

To All the Children Raised by Wolves

My home is on the water, I don’t like no land at all.

Home is on the water, I don’t like no land at all.

My home is on the water, I don’t want no land at all.

I’d rather be dead than stay here and be your dog.

—“SEE SEE RIDER,” TRADITIONAL

Contents

Epigraph

Map

Part I

Chapter One

THE STARK RIVER flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the…

Chapter Two

A YEAR LATER, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Margo was…

Chapter Three

ON THANKSGIVING, MARGO and her daddy had a meal of…

Chapter Four

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS the job seemed done. She and Cal…

Chapter Five

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Junior Murray came into the house without…

Chapter Six

WHEN MARGO HEARD three shotgun blasts in succession, the sound…

Chapter Seven

IN THE MORNING, Margo faked sleep while Brian got up…

Chapter Eight

FROM BRIAN, MARGO learned to thin-slice half-frozen venison across the…

Chapter Nine

ONE DAY IN AUGUST, Brian went to town and did…

Chapter Ten

WHEN NIGHT MUSCLED IN, Margo used her last match to…

Part II

Chapter Eleven

MARGO BROUGHT IN THE MAIL from the box. It was…

Chapter Twelve

MARGO SAT A CROSS THE TABLE from Michael, eating lunch…

Chapter Thirteen

WHEN MARGO ARRIVED AT the marijuana house, the midnight crickets…

Chapter Fourteen

BACK AT THE MARIJUANA HOUSE, Margo devoured Joanna’s bread with…

Chapter Fifteen

EARLY ONE EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, Margo heard a car pull…

Chapter Sixteen

THE INDIAN TURNED INTO A driveway marked by a wooden…

Chapter Seventeen

MARGO HIKED BACK DOWNSTREAM. She lugged big rocks from the…

Part III

Chapter Eighteen

TWO WEEKS AFTER the Indian left, Margo didn’t start flowing…

Chapter Nineteen

MARGO FOLLOWED SMOKE’S DIRECTIONS for registering the boat. She filled…

Chapter Twenty

“YOUR MA A RICH LADY?” Fishbone asked as they pulled…

Chapter Twenty-One

CHRISTMAS EVE AT DUSK, Fishbone entered Smoke’s kitchen without knocking.…

Chapter Twenty-Two

“LESS THAN TWO WEEKS,” Smoke told Margo one morning in…

Chapter Twenty-Three

AFTER SMOKE’S DEATH, the snow and ice storms continued, and…

Chapter Twenty-Four

ON THE FIRST HOT MORNING in May, Margo woke up…

Acknowledgments

Other Books by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

PART I

• CHAPTER ONE •

THE STARK RIVER flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart. She rowed upstream to see wood ducks, canvasbacks, and ospreys and to search for tiger salamanders in the ferns. She drifted downstream to find painted turtles sunning on fallen trees and to count the herons in the heronry beside the Murrayville cemetery. She tied up her boat and followed shallow feeder streams to collect crayfish, watercress, and tiny wild strawberries. Her feet were toughened against sharp stones and broken glass. When Margo swam, she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her.

She waded through serpentine tree roots to grab hold of water snakes and let the river clean the wounds from the nonvenomous bites. She sometimes tricked a snapping turtle into clamping its jaws down hard on a branch so she could carry it home to Grandpa Murray. He boiled the meat to make soup and told the children that eating snapping turtle was like eating dinosaur. Margo was the only one the old man would take along when he fished or checked his animal traps because she could sit without speaking for hours in the prow of The River Rose, his small teak boat. Margo learned that when she was tempted to speak or cry out, she should, instead, be still and watch and listen. The old man called her Sprite or River Nymph. Her cousins called her Nympho, though not usually within the old man’s hearing.

Margo, named Margaret Louise, and her cousins knew the muddy water and the brisk current, knew the sand and silt between their toes, scooped it into plastic cottage cheese tubs and sherbet buckets and dribbled it through their fingers to build sagging stalagmites and soggy castles. They hollowed out the riverbanks, cut through soil and roots to create collapsing caves and tunnels. If any kid stood too long in a soft spot and sank above his knees, he just had to holler, and somebody pulled him free. They spent summers naked or nearly naked, harvesting night crawlers from the mossy woods and frogs’ eggs from goo in underwater snags. They built rafts from driftwood and baling twine. They learned to read upon the surface of the water evidence of distress below. Once, when Margo was eight and her favorite cousin, Junior, was nine, they rescued an uncle who’d fallen in drunk.

They all fished the snags at the edges of the river for bluegills, sunfish, and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river—some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through floorboards and the gaps around their doors.

The Murrays were a stubborn tribe, and Bernard Crane was no less stubborn for being born the bastard son of Dorothy Crane and Old Man Murray during his bout of infidelity, forgiven in time by a wife who, despite (or perhaps because of) her forgiving nature, died young. The old man begged Dorothy Crane to give their child his last name, but she put on the birth certificate father unknown. Some said Dorothy was part Indian and that was why Bernard was so small, and others said that she had begrudged her baby sufficient milk at her breast because the old man would not leave his lawful wife, while others, including Cal Murray, denied that Bernard was in any way a Murray. Years later, however, when Bernard Crane, whom everyone called simply Crane, and his wife, Luanne, gave birth to a beautiful green-eyed daughter, a spell of reconciliation was cast across the river, and all the Murrays claimed Margo. The girl’s mother even enjoyed the favor of the other women for a while. More often, they referred to Luanne as a “free spirit.” They did not mean it as a compliment.

When the weather allowed, Margo and her cousins swam all day long. Even when drought made the river shallow enough to walk across, they swam to the big Murray farmhouse on the north bank, where Aunt Joanna was hanging laundry or baking bread and where Uncle Cal might let them shoot skeet with shotguns or plink targets with .22 rifles. Swam straight across to the heavily shaded Crane house, where Luanne was often lying flat in a reclining chair at the end of the floating dock in the only sun on the place, wearing an unfastened bikini. Luanne lay browning like one of Joanna’s loaves of bread, lifting her head and opening her eyes only to drink the watered-down white wine she kept in a mason jar full of melting ice. Her scent of cocoa butter drifted out onto the water, and the boys could not take their eyes off her.

In the evenings, Margo rowed, swam, or floated home, and her mother woke up, anticipated the girl’s return, and stood, perhaps unsteadily, on the dock, holding a towel for Margo, her favorite towel, oversized, with a pattern of jungle greens. Margo’s teeth would chatter as her mother wrapped and hugged her. Only then would Margo smell the sweet breath of wine inside the cloud of cocoa butter. Luanne would say, “Hold on, Margaret Louise,” as they made their way in an embrace down the dock, along the bank, and into the house. They checked Margo for bloodsuckers on the screen porch and doused any stragglers with salt. After they had both showered, Luanne might go to bed with her bottle of wine and watch TV, or begin her twelve-hour sleep, but Margo curled on the couch and waited for her father to get home from the second shift at Murray Metal Fabricating, sometimes thumbing through her book about Annie Oakley, whose somber face she never tired of studying. Annie looked so natural with her rifles and shotguns, and it seemed to Margo that any girl would want a long gun at her side. When she’d said that to her ma, Luanne had said tiredly that she didn’t know how Annie Oakley could have “fired so many times without killing anyone, without killing the whole damned lot of them,” and Margo hadn’t brought it up again.

After a big storm or a sudden thaw, the river could become a passionate surge, dragging along debris from upstream: ill-secured boats or pieces of floats and docks that had been dashed against trees. All manner of stuff might be dragged up onto the riverbank—fifty-five-gallon drums, mildewed buoys on nylon ropes, animal carcasses. And the floodwaters washed away what the Murrays had not secured or could not secure: sand from the sandbox, pig shit from the half dozen pigs in the pasture, garden stakes and tomato cages left out from the previous summer, toys and dog dishes, thousands of shotgun shells and bullet casings from beside the barn. The yearly floods scrubbed the muskrat caves, drowned the moles, carried away burn barrels, wore away land, and swept clear portions of the earth. One February after an early snowmelt, the Cranes lost a whole cord of firewood that was stacked too close to the water’s edge.

The death of Margo’s grandpa, when she was fourteen, hit the whole family like one of those late winter floods, chilling everything, washing away that old generation and whatever invisible glue and strings had been holding the Murrays together. Margo had stayed by Grandpa’s sickbed on the sunporch whenever they’d let her. After the funeral, she went out with Uncle Cal, loaded his lever-action .22 Marlin like Annie Oakley’s with fifteen long-rifle cartridges, threaded her arm into the sling, and took aim through the iron sights. After her first shot went awry, Cal suggested she sit cross-legged and pull the sling tighter. The following fourteen shots hit the paper target just left of center in a tight cluster. Twelve of the shots created a single hole a little more than half an inch across. “What the hell was that?” Cal said, running his finger over the torn paper. “I’ve never shot like that in my life. That’s unholy.” Uncle Cal claimed credit for teaching her to shoot, but while Margo had felt his guidance, she had felt just as strongly the guidance of the gun itself. It held her steady, and then sadness perfected her aim.

When Cal Murray took over as president of Murray Metal Fabricating, he called upon his sons to work in the summers rather than exploring the river all day. At about this time, Margo’s mother began to put on makeup and disappear for hours in the afternoons. She always returned home at dusk, until one July evening when Margo found herself alone at the dock. Her oversized minnow net contained a giant puffball, white as the moon, bigger than her own head. Margo rose from the river, stood on the dock holding the skull-white mushroom, which she would slice and fry for dinner. The Cranes’ little house was dark. When she turned on the kitchen light, she found the note on the table. She read and reread it, but could not crack its code. So many times, Luanne had said she could not bear living in this place, but there she had always been. Margo scratched her ankle and found a fat bloodsucker. She didn’t have the patience to shrivel it with salt. Instead she took a butcher knife, smashed the end of the wooden handle into the creature’s head, and twisted until the bloody pulp fell onto the kitchen tile.

MAYBE THE DECLINE of Murray Metal Fabricating after Old Man Murray died and the resulting unemployment in Murrayville was inevitable, given the economic trends of the late 1970s, or maybe Cal’s bad management was to blame. Maybe what happened with Uncle Cal and Margo the day after Thanksgiving was bound to happen, too. After Margo finished washing a second sinkful of dishes, her aunt Joanna kicked her out of the kitchen.

“Go out and join the party, hang out with the other kids,” Joanna said. “Shoo.”

“Let me go change into jeans,” Margo said. She was wearing a long-sleeved dress, something Joanna made her wear when she went along to church, even if it was just to donate canned food. The dress was not bad on top, but it hung below her knees.

“What’s wrong with dressing like a girl?” Joanna said. “Go out there and tell your cousin Junior to stop playing rock-and-roll records. Give us some country music.”

The party was in full swing, and “Smoke on the Water” was coming over speakers mounted on the trees. Joanna led her to the door, pushed her jacket into her arms, and sent her out into the cold. Margo hiked up her dress and folded it over at the waist to shorten it. This was the first party without Grandpa Murray, and Margo missed his big presence. She wandered across the frozen grass to her father, who was engrossed in a conversation about welding. She couldn’t get his attention, so she moved to where the roast pig had been ravaged. The uncle that Margo had saved from drowning, Hank Slocum, was cutting away ribbons of pork and putting them in a big aluminum pan. Margo watched a long white bone appear as he trimmed the meat close. Hank Slocum lived with his wife and their six kids in a pair of camping trailers a half mile upstream on the Murray property. Julie Slocum, who was thirteen and still a tattletale, was flirting with their cousin Junior, who sat cross-legged at the record player, ignoring her. Billy Murray, a few months older than Margo, was bossing around some little kids, including his twin brothers, Toby and Tommy. While she watched, he instructed them to crawl on hands and knees to where the men were tossing horseshoes and to spit into their foamy draft beers. The men didn’t notice, and each time one of those men tipped a plastic cup to his lips, Billy and the kids shrieked with pleasure. Margo was lying with the black Lab, Moe, having a conversation of growls and barks, when her uncle Cal nudged her rib with the toe of his boot. “Hey, Sprite, if you want to go hunting, first you’re going to have to learn to skin a deer.”

Margo stood and tugged the dress up at the waist again. Cal was known to compliment the girls if they looked pretty, so they all tried to.

“If you want to learn right now, I’ll teach you.” He was slurring his words.

Though her father had told her to stay away from men when they were drinking—himself included—Margo followed her uncle Cal into the whitewashed shed. She smoothed her hair to make sure it wasn’t sticking up. The woodstove had gone out, but the room was still warm, so Cal took off his jacket and tossed it on the dirt floor. She hadn’t expected Cal to pull her against him, and when he did, she tripped and knocked him into the gutted carcass, making it swing, releasing a blood smell into the air.

When Cal kissed the top of her head, Margo pressed her face into his big chest, felt his thick flannel shirt against her cheek. She loved the leathery smell of him, though it was tinged with pork and beer. He reached down, tightened his arms around her, and lifted her whole body so she was in front of his face, something he might have done when she was a little kid. She had just turned fifteen.

“You want to come out hunting with me tomorrow? Five a.m.?”

Margo nodded, though she had seen the horror on Aunt Joanna’s face when Cal suggested a few days ago that he would take Margo hunting on opening day rather than one of their five sons. Margo kicked her legs as though swimming.

While still holding her a foot above the ground, Cal kissed her mouth. He whispered, “How’s that? Is that so bad?”

Margo swallowed a gasp. She had kissed a few guys in the stairwell at school and had kissed a friend of Junior’s in the abandoned cabin upstream, had tried out all kinds of kissing—soft and hard, fast and slow. When they were sure Junior was passed out, Margo and that friend of his had undressed. Margo thought nobody knew she’d gone all the way with him, but maybe Cal knew. Cal moved her in his arms so he was carrying her like a bride over a threshold. He was the handsomest man—her mother had said it all the time. When Cal laid Margo down on his big jacket on the dirt floor, Margo tried to keep breathing normally. When Cal’s hands were on her, she reminded herself of when he was first showing her how to shoot, adjusting her hands and arms, telling her to press, not pull the trigger. Firing the gun should come as a surprise to the shooter, he said, though everything he was doing was moving him toward it.

“You’re so lovely,” he whispered. “It’s unholy.”

Cal was the finest man in this town, her mother had said, but where was her mother to explain what was happening now? Margo knew it was all messed up, and she knew her father would be furious, but she didn’t say no. Saying no would be like releasing a bullet from the chamber—there would be no way to take it back. Shouting no was something she might practice, once this was over, but for now she would trust Cal. The jacket beneath her head slipped, so when she turned to look at the door, her ear was pressed against the dirt. She smelled blood and mold and mouse piss as Cal moved on top of her. The golden light from the window to the west was warm on her cheek, and she saw a girl’s face in the window. At first Margo thought it was her own reflection, but it was Julie Slocum. The girl’s hand went to her mouth, and then she disappeared.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Cal said afterward.

She knew Cal didn’t expect her to say anything. Nobody ever expected her to say anything. Not even her teachers. Before she could answer a question posed in the classroom, she always had to figure out how a thing she was being asked connected to all the other things she knew. She might answer hours later, when she was alone in her boat studying water bugs on the river’s surface. It was easier to practice math problems in her head while she rowed, easier to understand how cells divided while she was underwater.

Had it been so bad? Margo slipped her underpants back on. She thought that if she didn’t concentrate on her breathing, she would forget to breathe. She looked around to see what else had changed. Not the deer carcass, not the cobwebs or the blood smell. Uncle Cal smiled his same smile. She needed to get out of this shed, to look at it from outside and figure out what had just happened.

Then Margo’s father burst through the door. Cal was getting up, buttoning his fly, when her father, barely taller than Margo, kicked open the door and kicked Cal in the mouth with a work boot. Margo heard bones crunch, and two red-and-white nuggets—Uncle Cal’s teeth—bounced on the ground. The half-brothers, famous for their tempers, growled at each other like bears. Cal punched Crane in the jaw hard enough that Margo heard a bone break.

Aunt Joanna entered the shed just after Margo’s daddy head-butted Cal hard enough to crack a rib. A dozen or more people gathered and watched, some from inside the shed, others through the open door or the dirty window. Julie Slocum slipped in and rubbed her hand over Margo’s hair. Margo could smell kerosene on her from the space heaters her family used in their camping trailers. Cal lay on the ground now, and Joanna’s long spine curved over his body. She wiped blood from his mouth with a handkerchief and whispered something angrily to him. Then Cal whispered his defense to Joanna, but everyone went suddenly quiet. “The little slut lured me in here, Jo, but I swear I never touched her.”

Everyone stayed still and quiet until Julie backed away toward the door. Someone coughed, and people began to murmur.

Joanna looked at Margo. “Damn you,” she said.

Margo squinted at Cal, studied him as though over the Marlin’s iron sights, waiting for an explanation or a wink, even, that would suggest he had not meant what he’d said. It had started with the death of Margo’s grandfather in January and the departure of her mother in July, and now the severing was complete between Margo and all the rest of them. Even her daddy, bleeding from his cheek and mouth beside her, telling her to stand up, seemed far away.

IN THE FRONT SEAT of the truck, her daddy demanded she tell what had happened, but she said nothing. He drove her to the police station parking lot and begged her to go inside with him. He briefly tried to drag her out of the truck, but she gripped the gearshift knob with her left hand and the armrest with her right and held fast. She had not resisted Cal, but resistance was a lesson she was learning quickly. At home that night, sleepless in her bed, she heard an owl call, Who-who, who cooks for you? She whispered in imitation. She imagined aiming and shooting the bird off its foolish perch in the cedars. From her window, she saw lights still shining at the Murray house across the way and heard music quietly playing.

The next morning, Margo awoke to her daddy moaning through the wall. She forced open his locked door with a butter knife and found him in bed, smelling of blackberry brandy, his face swollen and crusted with blood. He asked her to bring him a beer. Margo took his unopened twelve-pack from beside the refrigerator and kicked it off the porch and end-over-end into the woods outside his window until the cardboard busted open. She cracked one beer and let it foam all over her hand, took a big slug of what remained, and spit it out. She set the can on a stump. She put a second can, unopened, in the crook of a tree and paused to listen to a mourning dove coo from the frosted earth. Using its own sad call, she told the bird to go away. She placed a third can of beer beneath a cluster of barbed raspberry spears. She went on to set up all twelve cans in the woods. In one hand she had her daddy’s twenty-gauge shotgun, and in her pocket she had a dozen shells. She stood a few yards away, loaded four shells in the magazine, chambered a round, pulled the trigger, and pulverized the first can. She absorbed the recoil without flinching. She racked the pump, jammed the butt tighter against her shoulder, fired again, and watched the second can explode. Beer foamed eight feet in the air. One by one, in the dim light, she blasted the cans of beer to smithereens, pausing only to reload. She inhaled deeply the sweetness of the gunpowder. Each shot echoed through the woods and across the water.

A light came on in her father’s bedroom. She would get him to the hospital. As she waited for him to come outside, she listened to the water flowing beside her in its journey down the Stark, heading toward the dam at Confluence, beyond which lay the Kalamazoo River and, finally, Lake Michigan. Her ears were alive with her blasts. Her shoulder throbbed.

• CHAPTER TWO •

A YEAR LATER, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Margo was kneeling between two cedars in the predawn dark, just upstream of her house, watching a six-point buck rooting for acorns in the frozen leaf litter. Margo had all the time in the world to study the creature, its dark hooves and slender legs, its dusky chest, wide as a man’s, its heavy crown, white beard, and arrogant gaze. The buck lifted its head and flared its nostrils as it caught the scent of a doe. Margo lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, pressed her cheek against the stock. The river seemed to guide her arm and her eye as she aimed into the heart and lungs, touched the trigger, and bang. Only when she stood up did she notice her knee was wet and that ice was forming on the fabric of her jeans.

Her father’s bedroom light came on. By the time he dressed and put on his boots and came outside, shaking his head and grumbling, she had dragged the buck on a sled to the swing set frame behind the house. Her third kill in five days.

“This is it. No more hunting, girl,” Crane said and then helped her saw off the legs and string the beast up with a chain around its neck. He sat on an oak stump on the riverbank and raked his butcher knife across a sharpening stone. The water below him was black and cold.

“You hear, Margo, about no more hunting? Speak up. You’re not mute.”

“I heard you,” she said, just above a whisper.

This summer and fall Margo had been taking 4-H shooting and hunting classes from Mr. Peake, and she had been relieved when he said her quiet nature would benefit her shooting.

“I’ll get you whatever targets you want, but no more deer.”

Margo nodded, but she caught sight of something in the gray fog, an orange paper stuck up on the beech tree beside the driveway. Among the maples, oaks, and pignuts was one smooth-skinned beech on which Luanne had used a nutpick to carve lines and ages for Margo’s height. Margo moved around the side of the house as stealthily as she could.

“The chest freezer’s full, Margo. We’ve got more than enough meat.” Crane squinted hard upstream, as though suspicious of the pink at the horizon.

Though Margo stepped lightly, the frozen leaves crunched under her feet.

“Being sixteen doesn’t exempt you from the law,” Crane said. He touched the edge of his knife blade to the edge of a pack of matches to test its sharpness and then dropped the matches into his pocket. He took a couple more swipes on the stone. Though he was a small man, his voice was strong, and it carried. “That hunting license pinned to your jacket entitles you to one buck, Margo, not three.”

On opening day, Thursday, they had dressed out her first buck, spent that evening wrapping a few chops and steaks in pale green freezer paper, but turning most of it into burger with a meat grinder clamped to the kitchen table, mixing the lean venison with beef suet from the grocery where Crane now worked, earning half of what he used to make. They had gutted the second deer she killed, and, after a few phone calls, they put the carcass in the back of the pickup, covered it with a tarp, and delivered it to a man who had eight kids and had just lost his job at Murray Metal.

When Crane glanced behind him and saw Margo sneaking away, paying no attention, he stabbed the tip of the knife into the stump so it stuck, and he stood up. “Goddamn it, girl. Even if you aren’t going to answer, you’ve got to listen when I talk to you.”

Margo reached up, but the orange paper was stapled too high on the tree. Then Crane was beside her, looking up at the hand-drawn sign.

Murrays Annual Thanksgiving Weekend Reunion, Friday Nov. 23, it said and gave the address on Stark River Road, as though every Murray didn’t already know it. There were simple line drawings of a pig, a turkey, and a pie, added by Aunt Joanna, no doubt—no one else would have bothered to decorate the invitations.

“Son of a bitch,” Crane said, and clamped his jaw so the muscle in front of his ear twitched. He jumped up a few times and grabbed at the paper, but couldn’t reach it.

Margo figured this was the work of her cousin Billy, who was almost as tall as Cal now, with ears that stuck out more than an inch on either side of his head, and who made Margo’s life at school hell. After he almost drove over her walking home a month ago—she had to jump into a ditch full of brambles—Margo put a road-killed woodchuck in the back seat of his Camaro in the school parking lot. For that, Billy had snuck up behind her in the hallway with scissors and cut off a good hunk of her long, dark ponytail. She’d lied and told her daddy she’d done it herself. Crane had shaken his head, and when she’d handed over the hank of hair, he coiled it around his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket, same as he’d done with her mother’s note.

Junior Murray used to look out for her at school, but the day after Cal had caught him smoking pot for the third time this summer, he packed him up and sent him away to a military academy out West. Before that, Margo used to sneak out and visit Junior at the abandoned cabin upstream that he called the marijuana house. On rare occasions Margo had taken a puff, but she didn’t like the dull way pot made her feel. Sometimes on the way up to the cabin, Margo saw her cousin Julie Slocum sitting alone on the riverbank, singing along with a transistor radio. Margo thought of talking to her. But if Julie had minded her own business a year ago, nobody would have known about Margo and Cal, and everything could have stayed the way it was.

After Crane stomped away, Margo ran her fingers over the scars on the smooth bark of the beech. Before Luanne had left, she’d measured Margo for age fourteen, and it turned out she hadn’t grown any taller in that year, so Luanne didn’t make a mark. “I guess that’s it,” she’d said. “You’re all grown up.”

Crane returned with his chain saw and yanked the starter until the motor roared. Margo stepped back just before her father jabbed the tip of the saw into the beech, thigh-high. Sawdust flew, and with one clean, angry slice, the tree was free from its roots. It had been taller than Margo realized, and the top got hung up on a big swamp oak before falling through and taking down one of the oak’s limbs with it. When the beech finally landed between Crane’s truck and the house, it smashed a spice bush that had always smelled sweet in spring. Crane put his foot on the downed trunk and cut a few stove-length pieces. When he reached the invitation, he shredded it with the chain. Margo was surprised how much shredding it took before the word Murrays was destroyed.

“Nerve of that bastard,” Crane said.

Margo swallowed.

“You got something to say, Margo, say it. I can’t handle that earnest, wide-eyed look so early in the morning.” Crane sliced a half dozen more lengths of firewood, and then he killed the motor and threw the chain saw into the bed of his truck. “You ready to talk about this yet?”

She stopped herself from shaking her head.

“Well, he’s not going to insult us this way,” Crane said before climbing into the cab and slamming the door. When he pulled away, carbon spewed from the tailpipe, and the Ford’s back wheels dug into the ice crust of their two-track driveway. After he was out of sight, Margo heard him kick up gravel on the road, and later she heard the truck’s noisy exhaust as it crossed the road bridge downstream.

No, she wasn’t ready to talk about it. And she wasn’t ready to send her Uncle Cal to rot in prison, as her father put it. She wished Crane could be patient with her. If he hadn’t gone crazy with the chain saw this morning, she might have stood in the stirrup of his two hands clasped, and he could have lifted her up to reach the paper. She would have tugged it down and burned it along with the kitchen trash. Now there were tiny bits of orange paper all over the place, and each bit would remind Crane of the invitation every day until the first big snow. And a few days after that, the construction paper would bleed orange into the snow, and pieces of it would still be there in spring when the snow melted.

Margo returned to the swing set, put her arm around her strung-up buck, and looked across the river. Maybe the invitation was not an insult aimed at Crane. More likely it was a suggestion that they forget about last year’s trouble for one day and join together for food, drink, and fun. Margo would be glad to see Joanna, who’d taught her to cook as her mother never had—Luanne could burn water, Crane used to say. Joanna would already be making her pies for Friday: mincemeat, apple, pumpkin, and black walnut. The boys were good at cracking the nuts open with hammers, but right away they got tired of digging nut meats out of the walnut-shell mazes, so that work had always come down to Joanna and Margo. Her cousins had been as good as brothers, apart from Billy, who would always be mad that Grandpa gave his teak rowboat, The River Rose, to Margo instead of to him. If Cal would apologize for what he had done and said, and if he would rehire her father as a foreman at Murray Metal, everything would be fine again. Her daddy could trade the aqua-blue grocery-store smock for his old shop uniform with Crane stitched in red cursive on a white patch above the breast pocket, and they could afford to pay the dentist’s bill.

Margo retrieved the sharpened knife from the stump and returned to her buck, the biggest of the three she’d killed so far. She’d already tied up the bung, and she wanted to hurry and get the first long cut behind her, because she knew this third time would be no easier than the first or second had been. She’d be fine after that initial cut, after she turned the deer from a dead creature into meat. It had come as a surprise that the killing was the easy part. Crane would help her with the gutting and skinning if she asked, but Grandpa Murray had stressed how important it was to do a thing herself. She reached up and stuck the knife about half an inch into the flesh below where the ribs came together. Pulling down hard and steady on the back of the blade, she unzipped the buck from sternum to balls, tore through skin, flesh, and corn fat, and then, as the guts sloshed into the galvanized trough, she closed her eyes.

A rifle shot yipped from the Murray farm across the river, and Margo dropped her knife into the tub of curled and steaming entrails. A second shot followed. The Murrays’ four beagles began to bark and throw themselves against the wood and chicken wire of their kennel. The black Lab made a moaning sound that echoed over the water. Margo used to lie around reading with her back against that dog, used to row him in her boat and swim with him. This past summer, Crane had forbidden all swimming, as well as crossing the river for any reason.

A third shot sounded from the other side of the river.

Margo had feared this day would come, that Crane would kill her uncle. Then Crane would go to prison and she’d be on her own. Margo hadn’t heard from her ma since she went away a year and a half ago. Her note, on blue paper with herons on it, left on the kitchen table, had said, Dear Margaret Louise, I hope you know I’m not abandoning you. I want to bring you with me, but first I need to find myself and I can’t do it in this place. Take care of your daddy and I’ll contact you soon. Love, Mom. Margo had feared that if she didn’t handle the paper carefully, the dark blue ink would evaporate, the herons would flap off the page, and the paper itself would dissolve to leave only a puff of cocoa butter and a few drops of wine.

A fourth gunshot echoed over the water.

Margo looked into the hole she had dug in the half-frozen ground for burying deer guts. She knew she had to act fast to cover up her father’s crime by disposing of the evidence. She grabbed the shovel and bone saw, tossed them into the boat, and rowed to the other side. She tied off and climbed the riverbank. She got a sick feeling as she passed the whitewashed shed, but she kept going until she saw Cal’s new white Chevy Suburban. It was all sunk down on flattened tires. Cal stood alongside, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, yelling at the banged-up back end of her daddy’s departing Ford.

“Crane, you son of a bitch! Those were brand-new snow tires!”

Margo collapsed in relief against the shed.

Aunt Joanna stood beside Cal, wearing a dress with an apron and no jacket, holding an apple in one raw-looking hand and a peeler in the other. Margo would almost be willing to forgive Cal everything if it meant she could then sit with Joanna peeling apples in the big Murray kitchen with the woodstove going, listening to Joanna sing or talk about her 4-H cooking students, of which Margo used to be one.

WEDNESDAY, THE DAY before Thanksgiving, Margo was sitting on her side of the river watching the Murray place, when a buck came high-stepping down the trail beside the whitewashed shed, toward the river’s edge. It drank and then looked downstream, presenting Margo with its perfect profile. Margo lifted her shotgun, got her sight bead on a spot just behind the foreleg, and then she aimed slightly high to adjust for gravity over the distance. She calmly fired the slug into the beast’s heart and lungs and absorbed the recoil. She had not been sure she could hit at thirty yards, but the buck collapsed to its knees and fell forward onto the sand as though bowing. Margo waited a few minutes to see if any Murrays were roused by the noise, but no one came out to investigate. Margo carried the big knife across in the rowboat with her, dreading the prospect of finishing the buck off by slicing through the jugular—something Mr. Peake warned her she might have to do—but it was dead when she got there. Taking the buck meant Uncle Cal couldn’t have it, and neither could Billy.

She wrapped her arms around the buck’s chest and neck and tried to lift it, but it was too heavy. She was able to pick up the butt end of the deer and get it partway into her boat, but still she was unable to move the chest. She got the idea, finally, to crawl headfirst beneath the creature’s torso. She wiggled beneath the body in the cold mud until she was squeezed on her belly all the way under the deer. She smelled its musk and urine; she smelled blood and earth and moss and sweat, felt its warm weight on her neck and back. When the deer was on her and the mud was in her nose, inside her jacket, down her pants, and in her socks, she thought she would smother. She remembered Mr. Peake saying to calm herself before shooting, by slowing her breathing and heartbeat. She gathered all her strength, lifted her head up under the deer’s chin, and slowly raised her body. She got to her knees, so she was wearing the buck like a bloody cloak. And then she stood so that the buck slid off her back. It fell crashing across the prow of The River Rose. Two legs dangled in the water. On the way home, the weight made it hard to row against the current.

When Crane got home from work, Margo was dragging the warm, soft body of her ten-point buck by the antlers up onto the riverbank.

“What the hell?”

She stopped pulling and looked at him.

“You have got to stop this slaughter, child.” He shook his head. “They’ll fine us if you get caught, and I don’t have the money to pay. Lord, I wish I could have a drink about now, just one goddamned drink.”

Margo resumed pulling, but one of the deer’s hind legs was tangled in poison ivy roots. She tugged and tugged again, not wanting to let go of the buck, fearing it would tumble down the bank and she’d have to start all over.

“Listen,” Crane said. “The Murrays could make one phone call, and if those state of Michigan sons of bitches show up and find the meat we already got in the freezer, we’re in trouble.”

He didn’t need to worry, Margo knew. Cal had not even reported Crane for shooting out his tires the other day. She couldn’t expect her father to understand why she had to kill these bucks—she didn’t understand it herself—but when she got one in her sights, she had to take it down as naturally as she needed to take her next breath.

When Margo tugged again, Crane jumped down the riverbank and pulled the hoof and leg free from the roots. He shook his head as he pushed from below, helping her get the buck up onto the riverbank, and then into the air with the pulley.

“You are one hell of a hunter. I don’t know where you got your aim, but you sure hit what you’re shooting at.” He patted her back, wiped away some dirt, and rested his arm there. “Did you wrestle this buck in the mud?”

Margo smiled at him. She thought it was the first time he’d put his arm around her since she won first prize at the 4-H Rimfire Target Competition last month. She’d been standing right there when Mr. Peake had told her father that her shooting was uncanny, and also it was possibly a miracle, considering she was shooting with Crane’s old single-shot Remington 510 with iron sights.

“Don’t you ever forget, Margo, you’re the only reason I’m alive and sober in this world.” He sniffed at the air and then sniffed her jacket. “You look like an angel, but you smell like a rutting buck.”

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.

• CHAPTER THREE •

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.

“You got a buck for me?” Brian said.

She pointed to the deer, gutted and skinned, laid out on a blue tarp under the swing set.

“I talked to your papa last night. I hear you’ve become quite the hunter, Maggie. A crack shot with that rifle, too.” He winked.

She didn’t know why Brian called her Maggie, but she liked the way he grinned.

The two big men hoisted the carcass onto the boat and put their own tarp over it. She had been to Brian’s cabin with her grandpa, usually when nobody else was there. The cabin was more than thirty miles upstream on a wild section of the river, with no road access or electricity. His cabin seemed to lean on its stilts as though wanting to be even closer to the water than it was. The trees there, Margo remembered, were tall and mossy, snaked with poison ivy vines. The time she remembered best was when somebody had caught a possum in a live trap. Grandpa had been ready to shoot it when Margo pointed out the babies stuck in the wiry fur, a dozen tiny pink clinging creatures with bulging eyes and translucent limbs and noses. He had seen how fascinated she was and let the clumsy mama amble off.

“I admired the old man, your grandpa, may he rest in peace,” Brian said, “but I’ve got to tell you, girl, I’m not so fond of some of them other Murrays of Murrayville.”

“Brian knocked out a couple of Cal’s teeth,” the other bearded man said, squinting one eye. His voice was thinner than Brian’s and nervous sounding.

“Hey, the sonbitch fired me,” Brian said. “Didn’t have the nerve to do it himself, sent his secretary. So I went into his office and told him what I thought. Said he didn’t like my attitude, so I figured I’d better show him some attitude, just so’s he’d know next time he saw it.”

Mumbled words came out of the man passed out on the bench seat of the boat. He shifted on the seat cushions, and Margo saw he had a mustache.

“Will somebody wake that asshole up? Or throw him overboard,” Brian said. Both men laughed.

“Darling, no,” the drunk man moaned.

“They seem to have put the teeth back into Cal’s mouth,” Brian said. “It makes me want to knock a few more out just to see how that works, putting them back in.”

Margo wondered if Brian knew Crane, too, had knocked out Cal’s teeth. She wondered if they had knocked out the same ones.

“Meet my brother, Paul. Pauly, meet my dream girl. Prettiest thing on the river. If you’d put on your glasses, you’d probably faint dead away like Johnny here.” And then to Margo, “I’m keeping my brother off the drugs. No need for speed out here on the river, unless it’s in your boat motor.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Paul said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t worry, she won’t say anything,” Brian said, and winked. “I’ve about got him cured of all that junk, Maggie.”

“Will you shut the fuck up, Brian?” Paul turned so he was looking at Margo out of his left eye, and she wondered if he might be blind in the other.

Margo accepted two twenties from Brian—more than she had hoped for—and shoved them into her jeans pocket. Her jeans were getting tight, but she didn’t want to waste her ammunition money on new ones.

The man lying in the boat moaned again.

“Five bucks says Johnny falls onto that deer,” Paul said.

“He can rub up against it if he feels romantic,” Brian said. His big hand was resting on the boat’s steering wheel again, and Margo saw the back of it was covered with scars, white lines, as though somebody had cut him and cut him, but was not able to hurt him. She would have liked to touch him, see what those scars felt like.

“You come upstream and see us sometime, Maggie,” Brian said. “You know where the cabin is.”

The blond man rolled over, fell off the bench seat and onto the tarped deer, but didn’t wake up. Brian and Paul roared with laughter. When the man’s open hand moved across the buck’s haunch, Margo had to smile, too.

“Let’s get going,” Paul said finally, looking back and forth from Margo to Brian. “If you and jailbait here can bear to separate.”

“I just can’t get enough of a girl who don’t talk,” Brian said to Paul and started the boat’s motor with a roar. “Goodbye, Maggie.”

The men headed upstream. Margo watched their boat get smaller until it disappeared around the curve. Directly across the river, Junior Murray arrived at the wooden steps leading to the kitchen door of the big house, maybe just home from the military academy. Joanna, who was outside, put down the pan she was carrying and took him in her arms, held him for a long time before ushering him up the stairs and inside.

When Margo could no longer sit still, at about five o’clock, she got into her boat. She laid the rifle across the back seat and floated a bit downstream, so no one across the way would see her coming. She then moved upstream and tied The River Rose at the willow near the whitewashed shed where all the trouble had started. She kicked at the frozen grass to warm herself. She aimed her rifle at patches of frosted ground a few times, pretending she saw rabbits. When she saw a squirrel pause on the ground near the shed, she closed her eyes, lifted the rifle to her shoulder and her cheek, aimed it blindly where she had been looking, and then opened her eyes. Her sighting was almost perfect. The squirrel scampered off. She listened to the clinks and shouts from the horseshoe pit, listened to Hank Williams Sr. wailing. The next song was Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” She wondered what would happen if she walked up and took a can of pop off the table, served herself a slice of apple pie, and acted like everything was okay. Like she was part of the family again.

Back home, across the river, there was movement. Crane’s blue Ford pulled into the driveway, hours before he was supposed to return home. He got out of his truck, went into the house, came right back out, and looked across the river. She realized Crane would notice her boat tied on the wrong side of the river, so she hurried down to the water to wave and let him know she was not at the party, but by the time she got to where he would have seen her, he was already back in his truck. Crane’s tires spat mud from beneath the crust of frozen ground. Margo was grateful Cal was nowhere to be seen. But then, as if conjured by her thoughts, Cal appeared on the riverside path, walking in her direction, looking drunk. Maybe Crane had seen him, maybe that was why he was driving here instead of just yelling across the river. Margo silently backed away and then hoisted herself into the apple tree above her and up onto the wooden platform Grandpa and Junior had built a few years ago. She knelt and watched and listened as Cal approached. When he stopped beside the shed, he was only twenty feet away, close enough that she could see him blink, close enough to see that one of the buttons was missing from the plaid shirt he wore under his unzipped Carhartt vest. She wondered if there might be a girl in the shed, but through the dirty window glass she saw only a skinned deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell, but it looked smaller than any of those she had killed this year.

Cal stood facing the river. He put his plastic cup of beer on the window ledge next to the door, so he was in profile between her and the white shed wall. Margo heard Crane’s noisy exhaust on the road bridge downstream, but Cal lit a cigarette and did not pay any attention to the sound. She watched Cal inhale, saw his chest rise and then fall as he exhaled a blue cloud. The air was colder than it had been last Thanksgiving. The platform was just high enough off the ground that Margo could see the roof of her daddy’s Ford when it pulled up to the rail fence a few hundred yards away. Cal fumbled with his fly. He didn’t seem to hear the truck door creak open or slam shut. He drew on his cigarette and stared down at his pecker in his hand, waiting for something to come out. Margo shifted to sit cross-legged, nestled the butt of the rifle into her shoulder, and looked at her uncle Cal over the sights.

She slowed her breathing and heartbeat in order to focus more clearly. Her daddy had threatened to kill her uncle, and that was likely what he was coming to do. Margo thought Crane could not survive being locked up for the crime he was about to commit. She also knew Crane wouldn’t shoot a man who was hurt or lying on the ground. She wondered if she should take Cal down herself before Crane got there, injure Cal rather than kill him. Margo took aim at one of Cal’s insulated work boots. At this distance, her bullet would cut through the leather and insulation to strike his ankle bone.

Margo lined up the side of Cal’s right knee, saw how she could shatter the kneecap.

She aimed at his thigh. For a split second Cal would not know what hit him. A stray horseshoe? A hornet’s stinger? If the bullet grazed the front of his thigh, it could continue on through the wooden siding of the old shed, bury itself in the dirt floor.

Years ago, Billy and Junior had held Margo down and put a night crawler in her mouth, and she, in turn, put dozens of night crawlers in the boys’ beds. Junior had stopped picking on her after that. The time she had revenged Billy with the dead skunk he’d put in her boat, she had to endure Joanna’s tomato juice bath—a consequence she had not considered, as her daddy pointed out—and she stank for a week anyway. But it had been worth it to rub that skunk in Billy’s face and hair. Her cousins had teased her, enjoyed her shrieks when they could elicit them, but they were also scared of her because she always evened the score. Except that she had not done so with Cal.

As Crane reached the place where the path widened, Margo realized he had left his shotgun in his truck. Seeing him unarmed now was as shocking as first seeing him without his beard a year ago at the hospital—they’d shaved his face for the stitches on his cheek and along his jaw, and he’d never grown it back. The grocery store didn’t allow employees to have beards. Under his Carhartt jacket he still wore his aqua smock. He hadn’t left work for the day—he had only come home to check on her. And he had not come to get revenge—he was here to bring her home by her ear as he’d said he would. Her daddy, angry as he might be, was never going to shoot Cal, never in a million years. And it was better this way, better that she would do this thing herself.

Her father would beg her, Think before you act, but she had thought long enough, and now she had only a short time to do something.

Margo fed a cartridge into the breech silently and the bolt made a gentle tap when she engaged it. Cal was still concentrating on peeing. He looked out over the river. She studied the side of his head and knew an apology was not what she was looking for. She lowered her sights to a patch of Cal’s chest and then looked away again, at her father approaching, empty handed. It was amazing Crane had been able to hurt such a big man last year. If they fought again, Margo feared her father would get more than a broken jaw.

Margo had made a shot like this from ten paces a thousand times with these Winchester long-rifle cartridges. She had shot from this very tree stand in years past, had shot and missed running squirrels, but Cal was a nonmoving target. Margo aimed the muzzle of her rifle down at Cal’s hand, still loosely clutching his pecker, from which a poky stream dribbled. She aimed just past the thumb of that hand. Cal had taught her to shoot tin cans, crab apples, and thread spools off fence posts, and she was steady enough to take off the tip of his pecker without hitting any other part of him. And then Cal let go with his hand, lifted his beer off the windowsill, and took a drink, leaving her a clear shot.

The shout of her rifle was followed by a silent splash of Murray blood on the shed’s white wall. She kept her arm steady through the shot, did not blink, and heard one last horseshoe clink from the pit. Cal’s mouth was open in a scream, but it must have been a pitch discernible only by hunting dogs. Margo grasped the branch above with her free hand to steady herself. She gripped the rifle firmly in the other. She closed her eyes to lengthen that perfect and terrible moment and hold off the next, when the air would fill with voices.

• CHAPTER FOUR •

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS the job seemed done. She and Cal were even, and they could all resume their lives as before the trouble. She saw her father arriving, but didn’t notice Billy running toward them, gripping a shotgun in one hand. Crane reached up into the tree and grabbed Margo’s hand. He pulled, and she fell onto him. He took the rifle into his own hands awkwardly as he tried to get her on her feet, despite her jacket being twisted around her. Billy saw Crane holding the rifle. He saw his father down and blood splashed on Cal’s pants and the shed wall. Blood was smeared on Cal’s face. Billy aimed his shotgun at Crane’s chest.

“Put that down, Billy!” Crane yelled and moved toward him. “You hyperactive punk!”

“You shot my dad, you bastard.”

Cal was trying to zip his pants.

“Put the gun down now,” Crane said.

“Billy, no,” Margo said, but her voice didn’t carry. Maybe Crane didn’t realize how he was pointing the Remington as he approached Billy. And Billy was focused only on Crane, so he did not see how Cal was getting to his feet and urgently gesturing to him.

“Put the damn gun down,” Crane said, “before somebody gets hurt.”

Margo found her voice as Billy fired. It came out as a dog’s howl. Crane staggered backward. Billy grinned at her as if to say she was not the only one with dead aim, but the smile fell away instantly.

Crane landed hard on his back, and Margo crouched beside him. She smelled metal, as though the blood rolling out of his chest were liquid iron, as though he had worked for too many years at Murray Metal Fabricating to be regular flesh and blood anymore. Grandpa Murray had died slowly, gradually disappearing and giving Margo time to imagine life without him, but Crane, whose eyes had flown open at the blast, was dead in an instant. Cal fell to his knees. He spoke to Billy in a strained voice. “You dumb little fuck! What did you do?”

Billy looked stunned. “He shot your dick, Dad. He was going to shoot me.”

Margo saw pain in Cal’s face, and fear, and then she saw calculation.

“Call an ambulance,” Cal said thinly. He lurched forward and grabbed the shotgun out of Billy’s hands. “Somebody run get Jo. Tell her a man’s been shot. Jesus fucking Christ. Run!”

At Cal’s command, two Murray kids and two Slocums who’d been lurking nearby took off running.

Crane’s chest was torn open. The fabric of his aqua-colored work smock was soaked with blood. Joanna arrived at her husband’s side and put an arm around him.

“You’re covered with blood,” she said, breathless. She touched the crotch of his pants.

“I’m fine,” Cal whispered, “but Billy just shot Crane. The dumb little fuck just shot a man in the heart with a deer slug. Call an ambulance.”

“I did,” Joanna said. She gasped when she saw Crane.

One of Cal’s cousins, a former military medic, got between Margo and her father and placed both hands on Crane’s chest. He pushed rhythmically, causing more blood to pump out, but gave up on CPR in less than a minute. He moved away, and Margo moved to take his place.

“He shot Dad,” Billy said and began to whimper. “Look at the blood on Dad. He had that rifle. I thought he was going to kill me. And kill Dad.”

Margo let her face fall to her daddy’s chest, but she felt Cal’s gaze on her. When she turned and met his eyes, she saw there a look she knew from her own father, a look that said, Be careful, think about the consequences. Cal’s face was wet from tears, though he wasn’t crying exactly.

“Cal?” Joanna said. “Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Cal said weakly. “Crane shot me. I thought he might shoot again. Billy was protecting me.”

Joanna moved as though in slow motion. She took off her long plaid coat, lifted Margo up—she felt incapable of resisting—and draped the coat over Crane’s head and chest. Margo pressed her face onto the plaid wool. Joanna moved to Billy, took him in her arms. He folded himself into his mother’s embrace and sobbed. Junior appeared. He took the shotgun from Cal and leaned it against the shed. Margo had not seen Junior in five months. He knelt at her side and put an arm around her for a few moments, before Joanna asked him to go get the car.

The two county cops assigned to Murrayville arrived a few minutes later, as dusk gave way to darkness. They confiscated Crane’s rifle and Billy’s shotgun and wrapped them in plastic. They said an ambulance was on its way. The bigger cop said, “Somebody bring a washrag to clean that poor girl’s face,” and Margo let Aunt Carol Slocum wipe her with a warm, wet cloth. Margo listened to Cal lie to the officers in a pinched voice. He said between shaky breaths that Crane had been upon him with the rifle, that Crane had shot out his tires a few days ago. Cal had been afraid something like this would happen. Cal guided Margo through the lie that condemned Crane but saved Billy and her. He said the girl was welcome to stay with them until they could find her ma.

After that, the officers spoke softly to Margo. She nodded in agreement about her father shooting Cal and pointing the gun at Billy. She repeated in a whisper what Cal had said. She hated involving the cops, and even if she had been inclined to tell what had really happened, she didn’t have the strength to disagree with Cal. And what would have been the point? Her father was dead, and nobody alive had any use for the truth. She did not want Billy imprisoned for murder. She wanted to deal with Billy herself, as she always had. An officer led him away. Junior and Joanna followed the police car out of the driveway in the family’s white Suburban.

When the ambulance first arrived, the paramedics checked Crane for vital signs and shook their heads, and one of them made a phone call. They countered Cal’s objections, convinced him to get into the ambulance, leaving Margo and a dozen others waiting in the cold for the medical examiner. Aunt Carol Slocum urged Margo to go inside the house and get warm, but she would not leave her father. The longer she clung to his body, the more the others seemed wary of her, as they had been wary when she sat with her grandpa during the weeks when he was dying. The rest of the family had avoided Grandpa at the end, and Margo had pitied them for not seeing the last part of his life, when pain made the big, opinionated man quiet and thoughtful.

They were all Murrays gathered around her now. For the first time in a year, she was, horribly, part of the family. When Julie Slocum came close to her, Margo reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Let go of me.” Julie pulled against Margo’s grip.

Margo looked her in the eye.

“Ma, she’s hurting my arm,” Julie yelled, and everyone looked over.

Margo whispered, “Why’d you have to go and get my dad?”

“You’re covered with blood,” Julie said. “You’re getting it on me.”

“Last year. That’s why all this happened,” Margo said. She held Julie’s arm like an oar handle. The girl was thicker now, with heavy breasts. She had a toughness in her face.

“Cal doesn’t want you anymore,” Julie said and pounded on Margo’s wrist with her free hand.

When Margo let go of her, Julie scrambled to her feet and moved away.

The police seemed satisfied with Margo’s minimal testimony. They also seemed to think Margo was with family, so she would be okay for the night. Why would a Murray kid need a social worker or a place to sleep in Murrayville? Carol Slocum grabbed Margo and wiped her face again with a warm rag. It was two hours before the medical examiner arrived in a white van. By then Margo’s fingers felt brittle with cold. The examiner’s assistant lifted her gently away from her father. They wrapped him in a plastic sheet and loaded him into the van. She watched the van depart. The river flowed in the direction of the funeral parlor, which was five miles downstream, beside the cemetery and across the river from the big Murray Metal shop building, which covered five acres of Murrayville under its metal roof.

Some of the women milled beside her. The men who remained were drunk or dumb with excitement. A few exhausted children stared with glittering eyes. Their ears were red, and their cheeks were flushed. Margo thought somebody should get them to bed.

“You’ll stay here tonight?” a woman said.

Margo shook her head and spoke as clearly as she could. “First I have to go home.”

“Do you know where Luanne is?” a woman asked eagerly from a few yards away. Margo was at first startled, thinking somebody knew and might tell her, but nobody knew. When her mother had first disappeared, Cal often asked Margo where she was. He said he’d like to set her straight about abandoning her child, he’d like to drag her back home.

When a woman Margo didn’t know snaked an arm around her, she slipped away and headed down to the water and into The River Rose. She wished she could have carried her daddy’s body with her across the river, as she had carried that buck’s carcass. In what there was of the moonlight, she paused to study the Red Wing work boots Crane had bought her a few months ago when he figured her feet had stopped growing. Some drops of his blood pooled on the oiled leather. She pushed off with an oar.

Once she reached her own dock, she climbed out and tied up her boat. The water was inky black. At Grandpa’s graveside ceremony last January, everyone had been lost in grief: Luanne wept nearby with Cal and his older sister, and Joanna tried to comfort her sons. Margo had felt the desire to step into the icy river and flow downstream. The only thing keeping her from doing it had been the solid body of her father beside her.

Margo took off her jacket and boots and put them at the base of the dock. She rolled off her socks and stuck them in her boots. Her feet were already numb from the cold. She eased into the water. She let her bare feet slide into the cold muck, stepped out farther from shore, sank deeper into the river’s bottom, screamed without making a sound when the water rose to her thighs. She walked out until her water lily—her mother’s phrase—was electrified by the cold. People across the way were milling under the yard lights, and she kept quiet so no one would notice her and think she needed rescuing. Margo’s hips pressed against the current, and her belly clenched when the cold reached it, and finally her heart rattled inside her chest. She shivered inside the electricity formed by her own body, felt carp and stinging catfish whipping by her. She imagined water snakes and black snakes coiling around her legs. Instead of feeling trapped by the river, which might freeze her or drown her, she felt terribly, painfully free. Without her father, she was bound to no one, and with the water flowing around her, she was absolutely alive.

She imagined the scent of cocoa butter in the cold air, that smell that had never quite left her mother’s skin, not even in winter, when she smoothed on cocoa butter lotion after showers. Margo held on to the floating dock and was able to pull her right foot free of the muck. She pulled the other bare foot free with as much difficulty, almost forgetting about her father in her own struggle. She dragged herself to shore.

She carried her boots into the kitchen and found the room bitterly cold. Crane had disconnected the furnace to save money, figuring they’d be fine heating the place with wood. Margo had meant to split kindling today, but hadn’t gotten to it, and now she didn’t know if her frozen fingers worked well enough to grip a hatchet or even to ball up newspaper. She looked around the kitchen. There were three pine chairs. And in the corner there was the wooden baby chair, made of maple. Margo retrieved the axe from the screen porch and struck the baby chair with the side of the blade, and then struck again. After the chair’s old joints rattled loose, she continued busting the wood into kindling on the kitchen floor. With those dry pieces and sheets of newspaper, she was able to start a fire.

She warmed her hands in the flames, and then took the axe to the other chairs. As the fire crackled, she stripped off her wet clothes and wrapped herself in a blanket. The wood from the chairs created such heat that the creosote must have burned clean out of the chimney. Eventually she put on two split logs from the screen porch and climbed into her daddy’s bed. As she went to sleep, she smelled cigarette smoke and sulfur from matches, spice shaving cream, and the mildew of their river house. She smelled the river in every corner of the house, in every molecule of the air, in every pore of her own body. Even the fire smelled of the river, even the flames.

• CHAPTER FIVE •

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Junior Murray came into the house without knocking, something that was normal within the Murray family, though it had driven Margo’s daddy crazy.

“It’s after noon. Everybody’s worried about you,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed where she was lying. “I came over to tell you that the cops are on the way.”

“What?”

“Ricky’s working in the township office, so he heard they were coming over. That’s Ricky in the kitchen.”

“Why are they coming here?” Margo heard a vehicle pull into the driveway.

Junior said, “That sounds like a cop car to me. They probably want to ask you a few more questions. They have to make sure you’re okay. It’s the law that cops have to hassle people who don’t want them around.”

“Cops are here,” Ricky yelled from the other room. Ricky was their youngest uncle, Cal’s littlest brother, twenty years old. He was studying to be a paralegal.

Margo wrapped the covers around herself, sat up, and leaned against her cousin. She was afraid that Junior would go away if she didn’t say something. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

“I’ve missed you, too, Margo,” Junior said and put an arm around her. “I’ve missed everything and everybody. It makes me suicidal to even think about going back to that academy.” Someone knocked on the door, and when voices sounded in the next room, Junior stood up. “You’d better cover up those tiny titties before you come out.”

Margo adjusted her blanket. When he left the room, she put on a pair of Crane’s jeans, one of his turtlenecks, and a flannel shirt. She went into the kitchen, where two officers were talking to Junior, who was taller than either of them. The smaller cop, whom everyone at school knew as Officer Mike, said, “We wanted to make sure you were okay, Margaret.”

“See, everybody was worried about you, Margaret,” Junior said. Margo had the feeling he was making fun of the cop, but she didn’t understand exactly how.

“We need to look around, see if there’s anything here to help us figure out why Mr. Crane would have been shooting at Cal and Billy Murray. Did he keep anything like a diary?”

Margo shook her head. The most they would find from Crane would be a grocery list jotted on an empty matchbook. His anger at Cal would not be written on anything they could find.

“Any other firearms here? Any unregistered pistols? Can we look around?”

She shrugged, and they took that as a yes.

“Cal Murray said if your daddy didn’t have any money, he’d pay funeral expenses,” said the bigger cop, when the two had given up on finding anything of interest. “Can we give you a ride to Cal’s?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

“I want to row my boat over there,” she said. When they kept looking at her, she began to fear they wouldn’t leave. “My mom will come to get me. When she hears about my dad.”

“We’ll get her over to our house, Officer Mike,” Junior said, adopting a trusty Boy Scout demeanor.

“Let us know as soon as your mother contacts you,” said Officer Mike. “We may need to talk with her. And we’ll contact you again in a few days if we need an additional statement.”

“And if there’s anything for your ma in the estate, we’ll have to track her down,” Ricky said.

Margo knew there’d be no estate. Crane still owed payments to a guy on his ten-year-old Ford, and he owed the dentist, too. He had sent Margo to get her teeth cleaned every six months—even when he had been drunk and unemployed, he’d sent her with a twenty-dollar bill against the account.

“There won’t be a trial, will there?” Junior said.

“Nobody’s denying what your brother did was self-defense, but he did kill a man. Someone’s evaluating him now.”

“I’m sorry, Margaret,” Officer Mike said. He held up a business card and placed it on the counter. “Call my number if you need a ride to Cal’s. Or if you need anything.”

“We’re sorry for your loss,” the bigger cop said.

When they closed the door, Ricky Murray spoke up. “We ought to find your dad’s papers, any official documents. If he’s got a will, you’ll want to locate that.”

Margo’s eyes were swollen from crying, and when she leaned down beside her father’s bed, her head ached. From beneath it, she produced an army-green tin box. It felt like a violation putting it on the kitchen table and opening the lid in front of Ricky and Junior. The first thing she saw inside was her cut-off ponytail, wrapped in wax paper. In a bulging envelope, she found dozens of photos of her mother smiling ear-to-ear at the camera. While Luanne had rarely smiled enough to show teeth in real life, she had smiled that fake way for every camera snap. There were no photos of her parents together, not even a wedding photo. The only picture of Crane was a tiny dark image on his Murray Metal Fabricating employee ID card.

A business-sized envelope contained a piece of lined yellow paper on which was handwritten, Last Will and Testament. Please cremate me and don’t waste money on any service. Give everything I have to my wife and daughter. Sorry it’s not much. Signed, in full faculties, Bernard Crane, October 14, 1971. Margo would have been almost eight years old then. Nothing bad had happened yet.

“That’s clear and simple,” Junior said. “Are the cops all the way out the driveway?”

“The Man is gone,” Ricky said.

“Then it’s time to light up.” Junior dug something out of the pocket of his jean jacket. It was a plastic baggie containing several joints. He sat on the kitchen table. “What happened to your chairs?”

Margo shrugged and sat next to him.

“They shouldn’t have let you come home last night.” Junior straightened out one joint carefully and lit it with a white lighter. He took a long toke and held it out to her.

“I don’t know.” Margo let her legs dangle beside Junior’s. She noticed how her cousin’s hair had been cut short at the military school, so it no longer curled down his neck. She’d heard last night that he’d be going back to the academy again right after the holiday weekend, so this might be her only chance to see him.

While still holding his breath, he elbowed her and said in a squeaky voice, “This will help you. I stayed high for three months when Grandpa died.”

Margo accepted the joint, took a long draw, and coughed. She passed it to Ricky, who inhaled as he studied the will, turning it over several times, though the back was blank.

“Too bad this will isn’t notarized,” Ricky said.

The next time Junior passed her the joint, Margo inhaled deeply and held the smoke. She didn’t like to feel disoriented, but she hoped the pot would dull her feelings. They passed the joint in silence until it was gone. Then Ricky began to rifle through the papers in a more serious way. “Divorce papers,” he said. “Finalized eight months ago.”

Margo wished she could puff on the joint once more. Crane had never mentioned anything about a divorce.

Junior was reading over the land contract with an absurd intensity. On the third page it was signed by both their fathers.

“Are you going to stay with Cal and Joanna?” Ricky asked.

“Ma said you’ll have to stay with us,” Junior said. He was gazing intently at Crane’s employee ID card now. “You can’t stay alone when you’re fifteen. Where else are you going to stay?”

“I turned sixteen on the twentieth.”

“If you’re staying with an aunt and uncle,” said Ricky, “maybe the cops won’t have to get social services involved.”

“Social services?” Margo took the ID card out of Junior’s hand. She had heard that kids who got involved with social services ended up living in group homes and with strangers who did weird things to them. And she was sure it would mean living far from the river. “I wish you were going to be home, Junior,” she said in a voice that felt slow. “Then it would be easier to stay at your house.”

“Me, too. I’ll be back at Christmas. Maybe then I can talk them into letting me stay home after that.”

Ricky and Junior seemed to move in slow motion as they pulled papers from the box—birth certificates, the title to the Ford. Margo noticed something else: a pink envelope with a handwritten address in the upper left corner, an address in Heart of Pines, Michigan. Her mother’s name was not written above the address, but Margo recognized her loopy, back-slanted handwriting.

“Daddy kept some of his papers on the counter by the toaster,” she said, and when Junior’s and Ricky’s eyes went to Crane’s pile of bills, Margo slipped the envelope out of the box and into her back pocket. She took out her own birth certificate and Crane’s and set them aside.

“Do you know about any other assets?” Ricky asked. “We need to get information on what he owned.”

“You’re not a lawyer, man,” Junior said.

“So? Somebody’s going to have to figure this out. And Nympho here can’t afford a lawyer.”

“He’s got his truck and a chain saw and his tools,” Margo said. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She didn’t mention his rifle or shotgun.

“Savings account?” Ricky asked. He went into the bathroom and came out with a roll of toilet paper for Margo to use as a tissue. She unrolled a handful of it.

“He paid all his spare money against the land contract. Or to the dentist.”

“According to the land contract, it looks like the house goes back to my dad after two missed payments,” Junior said. “That’s bogus. I hope the dentist doesn’t want your teeth back.”

“Life insurance?” Ricky asked.

She shook her head.

Junior picked up one of the many photos of Luanne and nodded his head. “Do you know where your ma is? Dad always says we should drag her ass back to Murrayville. Maybe she’ll come back on her own now.”

“Look at this,” Ricky said, holding out a full-body photo of Margo’s ma smiling in a two-piece bathing suit. “She looks like a movie star. I remember her lying in the sun with her top off.”

Margo blotted her tears with her shirt sleeve.

“Show a little class, man,” Junior said and kicked at Ricky.

“I’m sorry, Nympho. You know we all miss her.”

Margo wished she could find a photo of her mother looking the way she remembered her, smiling sadly or frowning, even. Luanne used to lie in bed sometimes through whole winter days. She had let Margo cuddle with her or read a book in the bed. Luanne had seemed to take comfort from Margo’s presence.

Ricky Murray pulled from the tin box a new chocolate-colored leather wallet, identical to the one her father carried, and he handed it to her. Margo took from her pocket the wadded-up twenty-dollar bills she’d received from Brian Ledoux, straightened them, and put them into the wallet. She put in the Murray Metal ID card and the folded birth certificates, too.

“Did you know your dad wanted to be cremated?” Junior said.

She shook her head. “There’s no money for it.”

“You heard the cops. My dad will take care of it.”

She nodded. Though her sadness was powerful, the smoking had helped—Junior was right. Maybe she could survive her daddy’s death if she stayed outside herself this way.

Junior lit a second joint, and after his first exhalation, he said, “I won’t get to smoke again until Christmas. It’s hard as hell to smuggle anything into that prison. I’ll promise Mom and Dad anything if they let me come home. Or I’ll figure out a way to run off to Alaska and work on a fishing boat like Uncle Loring.”

“Do you think Billy will go to prison?” she asked.

“I don’t know what’ll happen to my hotheaded little brother. I know he’d end up in solitary if he went to my school.” Junior stood up. “I’ve got to go home, Nympho—I mean, Margo—and Ricky’s got to get back to work. He’ll drop us off at the house. Come on.”

“I want to bring my boat.”

“Grandpa’s boat? We can come back for it later.”

“I need to take a shower first. Please, just let me be alone for a little while.”

“All right. Don’t wait too long,” he said. “You’ll want to get there in time for Ma to make you go to church with her tonight. She really wants everybody to go.”

“I promise I’ll come along soon. Just go.”

He hugged her, gave her a joint in a baggie, and said, “Just in case.” He put a wintergreen candy in his mouth, popped one into hers, and left with Ricky.

When Margo was alone, she took the envelope out of her back pocket, opened it, and smoothed out the letter, one small pink page that matched the envelope, featuring a cartoon flamingo:

Dear Bernard,

I’m sorry it had to be this way with the divorce. You know I never belonged there with you people. I don’t think I can bear to see Margaret Louise right now. It would be too painful. I’ll contact you again, soon, when I’m in a better situation, and she and I can visit. Please don’t use this address except for an emergency, and please don’t share it with anyone else.

Love, Luanne

More important than what she said was the address on the envelope: 1121 Dog Leg Road, Heart of Pines, Michigan. Heart of Pines was the town thirty-five miles upstream, just beyond Brian Ledoux’s place, a town with lots of rental cabins and restaurants and bars, a place where you could buy hunting and fishing supplies. It had been an all-day trip when she’d motored up there and back with Grandpa. Beyond Heart of Pines the river was too shallow to navigate.

She went through the tin box one more time, chose three photos of her mother and closed them in the pages of Little Sure Shot. She put the book in her daddy’s old army backpack with Crane stenciled on it. She loaded the pack with her favorite items of clothing, plus a few bandannas, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, some tools and paper targets, and what her daddy called female first aid. When she stepped outside, she could not take her eyes off the sparkling surface of the water; maybe it was the pot she’d smoked, but the river was shimmering in the late afternoon sun as though it were speaking to her with reflected light, inviting her to come out and row. She loaded up The River Rose, tossed in an army sleeping bag, two life vests, a vinyl tarp, a gallon jug of water, and her daddy’s best fishing pole. She climbed in, fixed her oars, and pushed off.

Margo headed across the river toward the Murray place, rowing at first in slow motion so she ended up downstream and had to struggle back up. As she tied off her boat, she felt her daddy’s disapproval of the Murrays sift over her. Without him, she could cross the river and swim if she wanted, and she could pet the Murray dogs without getting yelled at. Crane could no longer get angry, and she would no longer be the reason for his or anyone’s living. Maybe if she kept reminding herself of this, she could survive without him. The thought of surviving without him made her cry again.

Margo made her way to the whitewashed shed—someone had rinsed the blood off the wall and placed a blanket-sized piece of mill felt over the ground where her father had been lying. Margo picked up the trail that led to the road. When she saw the Ford truck still parked on the gravel driveway, the scene was so ordinary that she expected to see Crane sitting behind the wheel. After a few deep breaths, she opened the door of the truck and folded down the bench seat, but found no gun there. If the police had taken the shotgun, as well as the rifle, she knew she was out of luck. If Cal or someone from the family had taken it, she would find it in Cal’s office off the living room with the rest of his guns. Margo wondered how she would be better off now, with the Murrays or without them.

Margo moved closer to the house and hid behind some maples. The dog Moe pulled against his chain and whimpered. If Margo moved in with the Murrays, she would have to wait for her mother to come get her, and there was no telling how long that would take. It was hours later when Joanna walked outside and started the Suburban. Margo ducked down. She heard boys’ voices arguing, maybe the twins. Junior came out of the house, held the door open for Cal, and walked slowly beside him down the stairs and to the driveway. Cal was taking small steps, as though just learning to walk. Junior opened the front passenger door and held out his arm as if to support his father.

“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.

She rowed past the cabin again, guided herself toward the water’s edge, and then grabbed the wooden dock as it came toward her, almost pinching her hand between the boat and the dock. She tied up beside the Playbuoy pontoon she’d seen a few days ago. Tied on the other side of the dock was an aluminum bass boat. The pontoon tapped against her boat a few times, but its prow was tucked close to shore. She approached the cabin on foot, carrying only the rifle and making as little noise as possible. She could hear men’s voices as she climbed the wooden steps. The smoke churning from the cabin’s chimney smelled of cherry wood. She noted a hip-high stack of split logs filling the space between two trees a few yards from the cabin. The primitive place seemed all set for winter, giving the impression that somebody was planning on living there rather than just visiting on the weekends. A clothesline was strung near the dock. There was a five-quart plastic bucket of clothespins just outside the porch door, under the overhang of the tin roof. Margo entered the screen porch silently and stood outside a glass-paneled door for a few minutes. She made out Brian and his brother Paul inside, with their black hair and beards. So much had happened since three days ago when she had seen them. Brian got up and opened the door, still holding a hand of cards. “Who’s out there?”

Margo inhaled.

“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” he said and folded his cards into a stack. “Am I seeing a beautiful ghost, or has the maiden of the river come upstream to bless me? Come in out of the cold and shut the door.” He returned to the table, sat down, and leaned back in his chair to take a wider view of her. He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by Margo’s presence. Paul was sitting with his back to the door, looking over his shoulder. He squinted one eye. “Jesus, Brian. What’s a woman doing here with a gun? Is she going to shoot us?”

“Put on your glasses, Pauly. It’s Maggie Crane,” Brian said.

Margo might have cried in relief at being anywhere she could rest. She was grateful to be out of the elements, but the sheer size of the two men spooked her. Both of them were as tall as Cal and bigger around. She was at their mercy. If they didn’t feed her, she would starve; if they sent her away, she would probably freeze; if they wanted to force her to do anything with them, they might well succeed.

“Put down your rifle, Maggie, and come sit.” Brian pulled a chair away from the table and patted the seat with his hand. She rested the butt plate of the Marlin on the pine floor and leaned the barrel in a corner, next to a broom. She sat in the chair beside Bryan.

“You came just in time for my winning hand,” Paul said.

Margo didn’t know why she had earlier thought the two men seemed alike. They were the same size and their features were similar—black hair, beards, and blue eyes—but where Brian was broad-shouldered and solid in the middle, Paul was rounded in his shoulders and belly. Brian’s hair was too short to go into a ponytail like the one Paul wore. Paul’s face was thinner and paler and intensely focused on his cards, which he now put down reluctantly. He fished a pair of glasses from the pocket of his sheepskin-lined vest and put them on. One eye looked big through the glasses, and the other was half closed. Margo couldn’t stop looking at him.

“One hand isn’t going to drag you out of your five-year losing streak, you sorry bastard,” Brian said.

“I beat you last week.”

“Like hell you did.” Brian turned to Margo. “We heard the news about your daddy. We’re so sorry. I worked with him for a couple years in heat-treating. Old Man Murray said he was smart and very careful. That’s what he always said about him. Loved him like a son. I mean, he was his son, I guess. I never knew the story there.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Paul said. “I never met him, but that’s a rough business.”

Brian said, “Paul and I lost our daddy five years ago, and it wasn’t easy, not even for us grown men. Even though the son of a bitch used to beat the hell out of us.”

“He sure did,” Paul said. “That mean bastard beat us and made us tough.”

“Made us the mean bastards we are today,” Brian said.

Paul smiled and took off his glasses. One eye remained squinted.

“Why don’t you leave them on so you can see?” Brian said.

“The damned things give me a headache. Worry about your own eyes, Brian.”

“When we were kids, I shot my brother in the eye with a BB, blinded him in his right eye, so I have to take care of him now,” Brian said.

“You don’t take care of me, asshole.”

“Kept him out of Vietnam. Probably saved his goddamned life,” Brian said.

“Can we just finish the game?”

“The other eye went blind for the usual reason. Too much yanking his own chain.” Brian winked at Margo. “The priest warned us.”

“Will you shut the fuck up, Brian?”

Margo took off her leather gloves and laid them on the table. They remained in the shape of her curled hands.

“Oh, poor Maggie. Paul, this child is freezing. Look at her fingers.” Brian took both her hands in his and exhaled hot breath on them. Earlier, when she had breathed on them herself, it had done little good, but Brian’s big body—even his lungs must be big—created real heat. Even as she felt wary, she wanted to lean her head against him.

Paul said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Miss Maggie, but isn’t your family wondering where you are right now?”

“Her family’s the Murrays, Pauly. Would you want to be with them Murray bastards?”

“Still, her family’s got to want her,” Paul said. “What about her ma?”

“Her ma run off and left her a year and a half ago, run off with a man from Heart of Pines. Maggie, is that who you’re trying to get to? Your ma?”

Margo inhaled sharply. She hadn’t considered Brian might know her mother.

“Give me two cards,” Paul said.

Brian let go of Margo’s hands and gave Paul two cards, took two himself. Paul gripped his cards so tightly his fingertips whitened.

“We’ll get you on your way tomorrow, wherever you want to go,” Brian said. “Don’t you worry. You’re fine here tonight.”

“I understand a woman might leave her old man,” Paul said, anger coming quickly into his voice. “But what kind of woman would leave her kid? Her daughter especially? My wife would die before she’d leave one of my kids behind.”

“Ours is not to judge,” Brian said and picked up Margo’s hands again. After he rubbed them on and off for a few minutes, the pink began to return. Margo wanted to go stand by the woodstove, but she knew if she did she would never want to leave its intense warmth. As if reading her mind, Brian stood up, surprising her again with his great size, and fed the stove some split logs from a pile behind it.

Paul spoke up again. “There’s something else I heard rumor of. Brian heard it, too. Is it true, Maggie, that your papa shot Cal Murray’s dick off?” Paul’s voice was uneven. She was grateful to be sitting near Brian, who seemed steady and calm.

“No need to be crude, Pauly,” Brian said, grinning to show that he appreciated this particular sort of crudeness. Then he frowned. “But maybe it’s good you know the kind of rumors that are flying, Maggie.”

“Can I have some water?” Margo whispered.

“So she does talk!” Brian said. “I never heard you talk before. Well, don’t you say anything you don’t want to say. We’ll figure it all out tomorrow.”

“Brian don’t believe your daddy did what they said,” Paul said.

“Never mind all that,” Brian said. “You stay here tonight. We’ll get you where you need to go. Or stay as long as you like. Will you have to get home for the funeral?”

Margo shook her head. There would be no funeral, no fuss.

Brian poured a glass of water from a kettle on the counter. “We boil the well water here just to be safe,” he said.

Margo drank the glass down and accepted a refill.

“Let’s get some food into you, Maggie,” Brian said. “We’ve got some leftover trout and a piece of venison steak from that deer of yours. I took it to do your daddy a favor, but now I’m glad, because I haven’t gotten a deer myself. Maybe beautiful girls are luring away all the bucks, leaving nothing for us big, ugly men.”

Though Paul complained about another delay in the game, Brian lit the propane stove, and within a few minutes he presented her with an orange plate containing meat, a section of fish with the bone in, a couple of chunks of potato, and some greasy green beans with bits of bacon on them. While Paul and Brian played, she ate. When Brian handed her a piece of store-bought white bread, she wiped the plate clean with it.

“You sure can eat,” Paul said, “for a little gal.”

“She’s a good eater, all right,” Brian said.

She stopped chewing the bread.

“Don’t stop,” Brian said. “It’s good you have an appetite. You don’t live if you don’t eat. Some people give up and waste away in hard times.”

With the last bite of bread, she scraped a last bit of fish off the comb of its bones.

“Pauly, can you believe this vision of loveliness has come to us for help?”

“I got to say, Brian, I’m not feeling good about that. How old do you think she is?” Paul spoke as though she weren’t sitting right there.

“Eighteen,” Margo said quietly.

“Are you coming to stay, then?” Brian asked and winked at her. “To cook me pancakes every morning and tell me I’m a handsome man? Because I’ve been looking for a girl like that.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Paul said. “How much have you had to drink? If she’s eighteen, she’s half your age. And I’m not so sure she’s eighteen. You got to watch out for my brother, Maggie. He finds trouble for himself.”

“Can we get you more food?” Brian asked. He took a slug of ginger brandy out of a pint bottle that was almost empty and held it toward her.

She shook her head no to the bottle and was less certain about saying no to more food.

“Poor lost lamb.” Brian screwed the cap back on the bottle.

“You should be with your mama right now,” Paul said, shaking his head, “not out here.”

“You said you know where she is,” Margo whispered. She fumbled in her pocket, opened her wallet, and got out the envelope with the address on the corner.

“More than a year ago she was around,” Brian said after studying the envelope. “I saw her a dozen times in Heart of Pines with a man named Carpinski. That could be his address. I never said so to your papa, but she was a real looker. She left here after a few months, I think. Somebody said she went to Florida. You’ve got to stop crying, honey.”

“Of course she’s crying,” Paul said. “She’s a little girl.”

Margo wiped at her eyes with the paper towel she’d been using as a napkin.

“We’ll find your ma for you. I’ll go talk to Carpinski. He’s an okay guy, lives in a little A-frame on Dog Leg Lake. You can stay here until we find her.”

“Brian, are you crazy? You’re going to get yourself arrested.”

“Eventually I’ll get arrested for one thing or another, and if I get it for helping a girl, well, that’s better than some other reason.”

Brian smelled like cigarette smoke and ginger brandy and the river, and his stoking the fire intensified the cabin’s food smells. It warmed the room so much that Paul took off his sheepskin-lined vest.

“Cal Murray is a son of a bitch,” Brian said again, shaking his head, “and his bad nature got bred right into the next generation in that boy Billy. Is he going to jail for what he did?”

“He’ll pay,” Margo said quietly.

“Did you hear that, Pauly? This girl’s going to get revenge. That’s how you make it through this, Maggie. Your daddy was a good man, and Cal Murray and his kid, neither one was fit to lick his boots.”

Margo let herself focus on Paul’s mismatched eyes one more time. When she sensed annoyance, she looked away and took comfort in Brian’s shoulder like a sturdy wall beside her.

“You telling us nobody’s looking for you right now?” Paul said.

She shook her head, though she couldn’t be sure.

“How old are you, really?” Paul said.

“Eighteen.”

“Contrary to my brother’s ideas, I haven’t fooled around with an underage girl since I was fifteen,” Brian said.

“Shit,” Paul said and shook his head.

“Pauly, what’s got into you? We were raised to take care of lost souls. Are you saying we can’t help her because she’s too pretty?”

“I’m just saying you ought to be careful in your situation.” Paul turned to look at Margo. “And she ought to be careful of you.”

“As long as you aren’t storing drugs here again, you’ve got nothing to worry about what I do, Pauly.” Brian put an arm around Margo and pulled her close for a moment.

“I’m telling you, Brian. She needs her ma or somebody like that,” Paul said.

“Don’t worry, Maggie, we’ll find your ma, wherever she went. It’s rare for people to just disappear,” Brian said.

“Try as they might.” Paul shook his head.

Margo shivered. Her blood was racing to her full belly. She flexed her fingers and wiggled her toes in her boots.

“Goddamn it, Brian. You’re looking for trouble. They’ll report her missing.”

“I’m not looking for trouble,” Brian said. He let loose of her to lay down his cards. “But trouble does find me somehow or other, little brother, doesn’t it?”

“You make your own trouble,” Paul said. “Ask any of them guys you picked a fight with lately. If they’re still breathing.”

Brian drew hard on his cigarette. Margo felt the air in the room change, fill with tension, until Brian shook his head. He laughed out a puff of smoke. “Listen, Paul, I’m not kicking this little girl out into the cold, so get used to her sitting here at this table for as long as she wants to stay.”

“Well, some of us have to work tomorrow,” Paul said. Before he left to go home, he brought in Margo’s backpack from The River Rose. Brian made up the couch with a slightly musty sheet and a heavy quilt he brought from the bedroom. As she got under the covers, he fed the fire again and put more wood on top of the stove to dry, and then he knelt on the floor beside her. He tucked the quilt around her to protect against drafts. When she finally closed her eyes from exhaustion, he kissed her mouth. She was too tired to be startled, and she let him kiss her.

“Don’t worry about anything, Maggie,” he said after he pulled away.

She knew that until she found her mother, she had nowhere else to go, and she wondered if she could make herself welcome here. She reached up and took hold of his beard, which was soft, and gently tugged him to her. Though only her and Brian’s mouths touched, she felt as though he were kissing her with his whole body, and it both frightened her and made her skin come alive. When his tongue slipped into her mouth, the hair on her arms and legs stood on end. He was still kissing her when she felt she was awakening from a long sleep, though surely only a minute or so had passed. The steady kissing quieted her sadness. She thought she could live and breathe inside this dampening kiss. When he finally pulled away, her lips felt swollen.

“Oh, Maggie,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d better get some sleep.” He pushed her hair back from her face, kissed her forehead, and went into the bedroom. She was grateful he left the door open. It made her feel less alone.

When Margo awoke, it was still dark outside. The room was lit by the kerosene lamp turned down low. She listened for an owl, but heard nothing. She realized all over again what it meant that her mother had left Heart of Pines. Of course her mother would want to go to Florida, a place where she could be warm year-round. Winters had been hard on Luanne.

Margo had shot Cal, and so Billy had killed Crane. By this middle-of-the-night reckoning, Margo had as good as shot her own father in the chest. She sat up on the couch. She did not want to be in her own skin right now, and she did not want to be alone. Though it must have been hours ago that she had kissed Brian, she was still feeling the force of his mouth. His scent permeated the quilt and the air around her. She could still taste the smoke and ginger-candy flavor of the liquor he had been drinking. She could still feel his beard on her neck.

She tucked the quilt around herself, but the wind coming through the windows was too much for the woodstove when it was damped down for the night. She would help Brian put plastic on the windows if he would let her stay here for a while. She would feed his fire and keep it going when he was away. She stood up from the couch, fed a log into the stove, and put another on top. She turned up the wick on the lantern. She draped the quilt over her shoulders and moved to the doorway of the cabin’s bedroom. She did not know if Brian would force a girl, but he couldn’t force her if she went to him on her own. She stood beside the bed until she saw Brian’s eyes glittering in the lamplight.

Brian pulled back the covers—a sleeping bag and a sheet—to open up a place in his double bed, and she moved across the floor of the little room. She let her jeans fall from her hips, and climbed into his bed in her underwear and T-shirt. She pulled the quilt over them both.

“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” Brian whispered. “Look what you’ve brung me. Are you sure about this, Maggie?”

She nodded.

“Say it,” he breathed, “and I won’t send you away.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she whispered. She was sure this was the best defense against the cold of winter, the best way to make sure she wouldn’t get sent back to Cal and Joanna or to social services. The best thing for her right now when she could not endure lying alone. Her body was already warming to Brian’s, flushing wherever he touched her.

“Have you been with a man before?”

She nodded and then whispered, “Yes.”

He ran his hands up her arms and down her rump and her thighs, and she let herself be reshaped and warmed. She watched Brian, and he watched her. When she had been with Junior’s friend, she’d felt clumsy, but Brian was easy to follow. When her muscles stiffened, Brian’s hands continued to move over her, and a memory of Cal fell away. When Brian’s hands moved underneath her T-shirt, the cotton fabric seemed to dissolve, and when he pushed her underwear down by her knees, it seemed she had willed them away. His hand was between her legs, his mouth was on her mouth and then on her belly, and then his body was on top of hers. Despite his size, he was not heavy on her. Margo gripped his arms, and she saw how he formed a house around her, how his big body became a dwelling in which she could live and be safe. His eyes were open, still watching her, reflecting orange from the light of the kerosene lantern in the other room. She noted the way he studied each part of her, and this made her admire each part of herself. While she was touching him, her arms seemed as powerful as his arms, her small, blistered hands as capable as his big hands.

Her body tensed as he entered her, but then she relaxed and moved with him. She ran her swollen hands up and down his arms. She touched the spaghetti-ridged scars on the back of his hand with her fingertips. She wanted to feel the scars against her face. When the pleasure got to be too much, she closed her eyes.

• CHAPTER SEVEN •

IN THE MORNING, Margo faked sleep while Brian got up and fussed around in the main room of the cabin. A while later, he brought a bucket of warm water into the bedroom and placed it on the floor beside the little table with the mirror. He also brought in her army backpack and leaned it against the wall. Once he left the room and closed the door, she sat up and looked through the window at the milky light on the water. The cabin was on the south side of the river, as was her father’s house in Murrayville. She moved to sit before the dim mirror. Her face seemed old, not as though she herself had aged, but as though she were a person from another time in history. Even after she had washed her face, her reflection reminded her of the sepia-toned photographs of Annie Oakley.

Margo didn’t regret what she had done with Brian. Her body felt different, as though she had been taken apart, piece by piece, and put back together in a new way. She washed her arms, which were swollen, and between her legs. Her shoulders hurt when she lifted her arms and hurt again when she released them. Her hands curled as though still gripping the oar handles. Just a few days ago she had been eating breakfast in her kitchen with her father, surrounded by familiar dishes and furniture, and now she was in a stranger’s house, and her future was uncertain. She brushed her dark hair and let it fall loose over her back, and then she took aim at herself in the mirror with her own double-barreled gaze.

She used to like being naked or mostly naked around the river, at least when the weather was warm, but now she wanted to cover every part of herself as Annie Oakley had. Margo had the feeling that her newly shaped body had a power that she needed to keep secret. She put on clean underwear, a turtleneck shirt, and her fresh pair of jeans.

With the door closed, the bedroom grew gradually cooler, until finally Margo was starved for the stove’s warmth.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Brian said when she stepped into the main room.

When she saw her rifle in the corner, her heart pounded. “I dropped my rifle in the mud. I have to clean it.”

“We’ll eat first,” Brian said, “and then we’ll clean and oil your rifle. Everything will be okay.” He held out his arms until she sat on his lap and let herself be kissed. Despite all she had eaten the night before, she was ravenous.

She followed Brian outside to a hand pump, where he began to refill the galvanized bucket. The iron pipe was wrapped in insulation to keep it from freezing. He pointed the way to an outhouse a few yards farther on.

When she returned to the kitchen, she watched how Brian battered and fried the fish fillets he took from a cooler, so that she could cook them next time. The smell of frying fish and bacon was so powerful that she felt light-headed. For as long as she needed to stay, she would make herself handy, helpful to Brian, and not take anything for granted. Brian placed the plate of fish, bacon, potatoes, and toast in front of her. He sat beside her rather than across from her, as though they were sitting at the drugstore lunch counter in Murrayville, and he ran his scarred hand along her arm. Her muscles were loosening up, but she couldn’t eat with him touching her, so she reluctantly put down her fork.

“I’m sorry,” he said and let go of her. “Eat!”

While they drank their second cups of instant coffee, he kept reaching out and touching her shoulder or her face or petting her hair. He told her again how he’d been fired from Murray Metal Fabricating in the last round of layoffs, how he’d fought with Cal and knocked out his teeth. She didn’t mind hearing the story again, because it meant that, already, something was familiar between them.

They washed the dishes in a big aluminum roasting pan full of water they heated on both burners of the propane stove, and finally Margo and Brian sat down with her rifle. Margo showed him how removing one screw revealed all the moving parts of the Marlin, as Cal had shown her.

Upon studying the chrome and the carving of the squirrel on the stock, Brian said, “I think this is a limited edition. It’s probably worth something. Was it your papa’s?”

“Cal’s.”

“Good girl.” He laughed.

She let Brian separate the stock from the barrel. They spent the morning disassembling the Marlin and reassembling it, drenching the air in the room with the heavy scent of solvent and then gun oil. When Brian wasn’t explaining something or telling stories, he often was humming popular songs from the last decades, Beatles songs especially. For a long time, he was humming “Norwegian Wood.” They found a few drops of water in the barrel, but no harm had been done. They put the rifle back together, well oiled. Then she and Brian went out in the pontoon boat, parked at a snag, and caught bluegills for dinner.

“So why would your papa have shot Cal’s dick? Did Cal Murray mess with you?” Brian asked, while Margo was cleaning the fish in the sink.

Margo said nothing, even when Brian turned and looked right at her.

“He did, didn’t he? Cal raped you.” It wasn’t a question by the time he finished asking. “Holy shit. That’s why you took the man’s gun.”

She grimaced. She still didn’t think that word made sense in relation to what had happened.

“Your papa was revenging you. Well, it’s not enough. If I see Cal, I’ll knock another tooth out of the son of a bitch’s head. I’ll knock them all out.”

While Brian was frying the fish, Margo stood at the window and searched the river until she saw a shadow fly across—a red-tailed hawk, maybe, or at least a crow—and she was able to imagine following its flight path with the barrel of the Marlin. She figured that whatever Brian wanted to do to Cal, it had only a little to do with herself. She might be the spark that got Brian riled up, but any fire would be all about Brian and Cal and whatever was already between them.

“ALL RIGHT, MAGGIE, let’s test your rifle, make sure it still works,” Brian said after breakfast the following morning. Margo carried the Marlin, wishing again it had a sling, and Brian carried a bigger rifle, an M1, something from World War II. While they were cleaning the Marlin, he had mentioned that he’d been in Vietnam, but volunteered only that his “damn M16 jammed about every fucking day.” Knowing how Crane had not wanted to talk about his Vietnam experience, Margo didn’t consider asking Brian about his. Brian set up a couple dozen empty beer cans and plastic bottles on a railroad tie twenty-five paces farther down the river and handed Margo the pair of ear protectors he had on his arm. He loaded the big rifle and fired eight rounds. He went through two more clips, and when he was done, after twenty-four shots, he’d hit about half of the targets. He replaced the cans and bottles he’d destroyed with new ones, including two sardine cans he propped up. “I think I’m out of practice,” he said. “Maybe my sights need adjusting.”

Margo lifted her .22 with some difficulty. Her arm muscles were still strained from rowing. She experienced some kind of electrical shock when she first pulled the trigger, and she missed the first can. She focused and dinged it on the second shot, and then caught the top on the third, sent it flying. She inhaled the faint smell of gunpowder. She reloaded the Marlin with fifteen of the long-rifle cartridges she’d carried from Cal’s gun cupboard and listened for a moment to the river. Holding the rifle steady would have been easier with a sling, but she held her arm up until her body remembered it as a natural position. She hit the next can and each can after that, and she reloaded and knocked all the bottles from their perches. And in that several minutes of intense focusing, she felt peaceful. Margo lowered the gun, pressed the barrel against her face to feel its heat.

“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?”

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