Once Upon a River Page 0,16

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