Once Upon a River. Bonnie Jo Campbell
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,”