Once Upon a River Page 0,74

out of the water and chained it to a tree to await spring outside her bedroom window. The new oars Michael had bought her were covered with a shiny preservative that made them move through the water smooth as glass without ever giving her splinters. She had rowed silently in the water with those oars, the way the Indian hunter with the heart of a wolverine stalked silently through the woods.

It took Margo until early evening to hike to the Murrayville cemetery, though it was only a few miles downstream. She had searched both sides of the river along the way and was certain Billy had not brought the boat upstream past her.

The cemetery was located right across the river from the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, and the biggest thing in the cemetery was Grandpa Murray’s memorial, a six-foot-high stone, which he had commissioned himself, with two leaping trout and a buck’s head sculpted in relief on the front and a bear and a wolverine carved on the back. She had seen a bear her grandpa had brought home from up north—it had nearly filled the back of his pickup truck. She had helped him skin it, and she had felt spooked and thrilled when the skin was off, when the body looked like a man’s.

Margo put her hands on the carved wolverine, which was baring its pointed teeth. “Grandpa, you would not believe how much has happened since you’ve been gone,” she said. What a pleasure it would be to hear the old man’s voice again. “I’ve learned so many things. Seriously.”

She wished she’d spoken up more before he’d died, to ask him questions about hunting, about wolves, about the wolverine he’d told her about that had gotten into his camp up north and torn it apart. A glutton, as he’d called it, was an animal a man couldn’t hope to see, let alone catch. She wanted to ask her grandfather, would a deer eat a bird? Why would a heron stalk a .22 cartridge?

She hung the wet sleeping bag on the Old Man’s marker to dry in what was left of the day’s hazy light and then searched until she found a small engraved stone, flat against the ground. She traced the letters and repeated his name, Bernard Crane, Bernard Crane, Bernard Crane, like one of Joanna’s bead prayers. He was the only Crane in the cemetery. His mother, Dorothy Crane, had gone off to Florida to live with a cousin and died of what her father called female cancer and was buried there without Margo ever having met her.

“I’m okay, Daddy. Don’t worry about me. But I just can’t go back and live with the Murrays,” she whispered. “But don’t worry. I’m never going to kill anybody else ever again.”

Margo studied the grass around the marker and considered where the box of ashes might be. She saw that a rectangle of grass four feet in front of the carved stone was slightly sunken. She untied Brian’s little military shovel from her pack, unfolded it, and dug down more than a foot, until she met resistance. She continued to dig and clear away dirt. Finally she saw dull metal. She continued until she uncovered the edges of the box, similar in size to the one she’d pulled out from under Crane’s bed. She dug around the outside of the box until it came loose, cleared the dirt off the attached bronze-colored plaque that read BERNARD CRANE, 1947–1979, same as the stone.

The box was heavier than she’d expected it would be, maybe eight or ten pounds, and she was pretty sure it had been made at Murray Metal, maybe by someone who cared about her father. The welded joints had been ground smooth, with great care. It was coated with a dark gray baked-on enamel. Cal had done right by Crane’s wishes. She brushed the rest of the dirt off and pressed her cheek against the cool metal. Having held the box, she could not put it back into the ground. She filled the hole with the dirt she’d removed and some silt from the river, combed the remaining dirt out of the grass, and replaced the sod as best she could.

She slept in the cemetery that night, next to the river. Not long after she drifted off to sleep, she awoke to screams, and it took her a while to realize they weren’t people or ghosts, but raccoons. The following morning, she awakened dew-soaked, to the vision of