Once Upon a River Page 0,34
and the deer’s hide lay crumpled like a towel on the ground, Brian drank the last of his whiskey and let the bottle drop.
“Maggie, you’re the kind of girl I want to spend my old age with,” he said and pulled her onto his lap. He put his arms around her, not seeming to notice or care that she was gripping the burned handle of his butcher knife with the ten-inch blade. “If I am so fortunate as to have an old age, that is. What should we do with the head?”
“Sink it in a gunnysack full of stones,” she suggested. Brian’s talk about their growing old together made her feel queasy. She liked living with Brian, loved feeling protected in the cage of his embrace, but she didn’t mean to stay forever. Her mother would contact her soon and tell her to come. From her mother’s place, she would be able to figure out what to do next. “Have you got a gunnysack?” she asked.
“That’s it, Maggie. I’m giving you that twelve-gauge. That’s your shotgun now. You’re a better shot than I am. Anyway, I got a new shotgun in my truck in Heart of Pines. So that one’s yours.” He was slurring his words a little.
“Thank you,” Margo said and sighed. “I wonder why my ma doesn’t want me to come see her.”
“People have all kinds of complications, Maggie. I bet she writes to you again soon.”
Margo nodded.
“You don’t think that son of a bitch Cal raped her, too, do you?” Brian asked.
“No.” She answered before she could let herself think about it.
“All right. I’m hungry. Let’s get this deer under cover on the screen porch.”
Margo slept twelve hours that night, soundly, the way her mother used to.
• Chapter Eight •
From Brian, Margo learned to thin-slice half-frozen venison across the grain and dry it on the woodstove to make jerky. He explained to her the qualities of different types of firewood: hickory burned the hottest and smelled the best, but was hardest to split. He taught her about keeping under the radar of the authorities, insisting that she park her boat behind his and cover it with a green canvas tarp whenever she wasn’t using it. Margo was grateful for all she was learning and for a place to stay where she could be herself. She loved to have someone to cook for; Brian appreciated all the foods her daddy had liked. Margo was getting an idea that maybe she loved Brian, that love was different than she’d expected, that it was something ordinary. If you knew every detail of a person, if you studied his pink-skinned, black-bearded face every day for hours, if you knew the feel of his soft hair and knew how he felt in his skin when you touched him, if you listened to every word a man spoke, his truth and his lies, then you couldn’t help but love him. And loving a new person might even eventually dull the pain of having lost the people you had loved before, even if it didn’t happen as quickly as you wanted it to.
On most days, she spent hours shooting with the Marlin, going through the stack of paper targets Mr. Peake had given her. She’d sighted in her Marlin for the Winchester long-rifle cartridges at thirty to fifty feet for hunting small game, and she was learning to adjust her sight picture to other distances and ammo. Brian brought her mostly longs and long-rifles, but occasionally shorts or something like low-velocity CB cartridges, which fired quietly and didn’t penetrate the target as deeply. She shot enough with her left hand that she became fairly
accurate—Annie Oakley had been able to shoot expertly with both hands, according to Little Sure Shot. For plinking, Brian had gotten hold of a four-tang auto-reset target similar to the one she’d had in Murrayville. Once in a while she took out the shotgun Brian had given her and blew apart plastic bottles and pieces of trash she’d found floating in the current. This variety of targets helped her resist shooting another buck out of season, though she saw them often enough drinking at the river.
When Brian forgot to get her ammunition, Margo didn’t want to bother him about it. A couple of times she put his outboard motor on The River Rose and went upstream to Heart of Pines to the grocery store to get a brick of ammo and some food. Before going inside, she pulled a stocking cap