Once Upon a River Page 0,76

or how they’d get enough to eat. They grabbed and kissed one another, passed a joint around, talked and laughed.

Margo kept her own camp as small as possible, and when the teenagers stopped coming after a few nights, she was able to burn her own fire. She packed up her things every morning and hid them in a tree behind the Indian mound, along with a juice bottle she filled with water. The picnic area turned out to be a convenient place to be stuck while she figured out what to do next. Not only did it have running water in the public bathrooms, but it was within a half mile of a couple of big gardens where she could find vegetables, especially tomatoes. Rather than stealing, she wished she could trade with the gardeners, wished she had her fishing gear so she could provide fish-guts fertilizer or some bluegills for the gardener to fry up, but she figured she would cause more trouble if she tried to arrange a deal—it was better to lie low. Some domestic ducks wandered over every morning from a nearby farm; when Margo discovered the place where they occasionally laid eggs near the river, she built up the nest, lined it with cornhusks, soft grasses, and rabbit fur to encourage them to use it more often. In the field across the street there were plenty of rabbits. Margo found and ate some of the wild edible plants she’d read about in the Indian hunter book: ground-cherries, wood sorrel, and sunchoke (which Joanna called Jerusalem artichoke and grew on her property as a flower). The Indian book mentioned sweet acorns, but she had found only astringent ones. The black walnuts, hickory nuts, and apples were ripening, and when they were ready, she would find a way to store some for winter, wherever she ended up.

Margo washed at the river’s edge the way she had done as a little kid, but stopped shy of stripping and swimming, which would have made her vulnerable if someone came along. Sometimes she thought she saw Crane’s ghost hanging at the water’s edge or near his box of ashes, a brooding look about him. She wanted to tell him not to be angry with her or to feel sorry for her. She was doing okay. Loneliness was a small price to pay for not being locked in prison and not being at the mercy of the Murrays. Each night she spread her vinyl tarp out on the moist ground and unrolled the sleeping bag. She put the box of ashes between herself and the fire. Luckily, she did not encounter much rough weather; during a few rainstorms, she hung out in the bathroom beside the parking lot.

In the second week of September, the nights became cool. The disappearance of the hummingbirds and the arrival of a dozen white-throated sparrows, as well as the red tinge on the snakes of poison ivy spiraling the oldest trees, told her autumn was coming, soon to be followed by winter. She would have to figure out how to survive the season. The previous year, Michael had taken her in. Oh, what a heavenly thing it would be, she thought, to be invited into his house again, to be fed and given coffee, to climb into his big bed and make love and sleep and then get up and eat breakfast, day after day. How impossible and far away from where she was now—she had traveled on past Michael, and there was no reversing the current of her life. She wondered if Luanne might have written to Michael’s address in the last month, during the time Margo had been gone. The time is right, Margaret, she might have written. Come live with me in my house on the water.

One night she heard a young raccoon in the distance, crying like an abandoned baby. She studied the sky into the early hours of the morning, until the constellation of the man with his belt finally appeared on the southern horizon. She thought about the Indian hunter. He was living on his own, but his family was all the while hoping for him to return. No one was waiting for Margo. Margo had let herself become a person who was no longer connected to other people. She comforted herself with knowing that she did not carry with her a rage like Billy’s, or anger like her father’s. Either would have weighed her down more than her loaded