Once Upon a River Page 0,5
to guide her arm and her eye as she aimed into the heart and lungs, touched the trigger, and bang. Only when she stood up did she notice her knee was wet and that ice was forming on the fabric of her jeans.
Her father’s bedroom light came on. By the time he dressed and put on his boots and came outside, shaking his head and grumbling, she had dragged the buck on a sled to the swing set frame behind the house. 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