Once Upon a River. Bonnie Jo Campbell
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