Once Upon a River Page 0,132

worried about Johnny showing up, coming along the riverbank. She had feared his scent was a key that could unlock her whole body, and it was his nature that he would try her. But not with this dog beside her, a barking and growling reminder that she wanted something more, that she had something worth protecting.

“Do you know anything about a dog star?” Margo asked.

“That would be Sirius. Your brightest star most nights.” He removed his burned-down cigar and put the holder in his pocket.

• Chapter Twenty-Four •

On the first hot morning in May, Margo woke up with the feeling that the river was fast rising from the previous night’s rain. Not flooding, exactly, but coming up to meet her on the boat. She had awakened dreaming about her daddy. He had not been angry or disappointed this time, not even afraid for her. He had been sitting on a stump beside the Kalamazoo River sharpening a knife. Her sense in the dream was that he was her companion, as he had been before Luanne left, before all the trouble with the Murrays, and it made her feel at peace. She lay in her bed and listened to the high-pitched whispering and whistling all around her boat: a flock of cedar waxwings resting during their northern migration. She whispered and whistled back to them in their secret language. As far as she could tell, every language was a secret language, secret and manipulative and hopeful, starting with the nursery rhymes she’d been repeating lately because of the books Mrs. Rathburn loaned her. Sometimes Margo had been unable to find a language that worked for her, but she was pretty sure she was speaking one now.

Through the open window, Margo heard the meow of a catbird returned from wherever catbirds went in winter, and then the catbird changed its tune, began to whistle in imitation of the waxwings. The big dog on the floor whistled and wheezed in his sleep.

Through the window screens, Margo was feeling a warm wind, and for the moment she felt relaxed in her skin. Some nights now she lay in bed for hours pitching side to side, to the sound of critters chirping, trying to situate her expanding self. Last night, even without a fire in the stove, it was so warm she couldn’t stand clothes or even sheets touching her belly, and she slept naked. Listening to a spring symphony of peepers, frogs, toads, and crickets was sometimes too much, but last night the rain banging on her tin roof had drowned out everything else, and she had slept so hard her eyes now felt swollen shut.

She could move into Smoke’s house anytime she wanted, but she wasn’t ready to leave this boat yet. Fishbone would come in a few days and together they’d drag the houseboat back upstream with the help of his aluminum boat and whatever else it took. He said he wished he had some mules like the ones that used to pull the barges up the river in Ohio when he was a boy. For the sake of the baby, she would move into the house—Mrs. Rathburn reminded her about the washing machine and running water so she wouldn’t have to lug bottles—but Margo had grown happy on the Glutton, as happy as she could remember being. With her own safe and snug place on the river, she had been able to study herself the way she’d once studied the blue herons and the kingfishers, and the dogs and men she’d known. Nowadays she was able to puzzle through her troubles, not to solve them like problems, but to brood more deeply upon them to figure out what they could show her. She hoped Smoke was wrong about people being unknowable. She hoped that she could crack herself open like a nut and know herself, at least. Then she’d be able to start figuring out everybody else.

She swung her feet down onto Nightmare’s rug beside her bed, patted the dog, and nodded good morning to her rifle on the rack by the door. She wrapped herself in a sheet, poured a bowl of dog food, and carried it out onto the boat’s rubber-coated metal deck, which was warming up in the sun. She studied the churning surface of the river, which was running high, if not as dramatically as she had dreamed. Now that Crane’s ghost was with her, he might someday tell her he’d like his ashes spread over the