Once Upon a River Page 0,88
last hairlike feathers and made a stink that took a while to dissipate. Margo thought she did not need a big kitchen to eat well, just a few more things that she could buy, trade for, or shoot for, maybe a heavy kitchen knife like the one she’d secretly borrowed from the old man, as well as a big metal stirring spoon. If only there were a river’s-edge cave around here, she might even be able to survive the winter.
As the air was beginning to cool, Margo spotted something white in the windbreak: a giant puffball mushroom twice the size of a human skull, something she could eat for a week. She felt she had been looking for such a puffball for years. She’d last gotten one this size on the day her mother left Murrayville. Normally it would’ve had to rain for a puffball to grow this big, and that suggested to her that the dew along the river would be heavy.
When the Indian finally returned, the sun was setting. He said he’d spent the afternoon at the township library, talking to the librarian about local history and looking at old documents. Margo found a decent-sized hickory stick and whittled off the bark in order to use it as a spit. She skewered the duck and got it balanced over the fire. When a bit of duck fat began to drip onto the coals, Margo caught it in the Indian’s frying pan so she could use it for cooking a slice of mushroom. She considered herself lucky—mallards usually had no fat. Maybe this duck had been living well on the farmer’s corn.
Margo instructed the Indian not to leave the duck unattended, and she hiked up to the car to get her pack. As she was closing the trunk of the station wagon, she saw a woman the size and shape of her aunt Joanna come out of the house right across the road to fill a bird feeder and spread seed over a patch of her lawn. Before she even stepped away, a half dozen cardinals fell upon the seed, four blood-red and two military-green. The woman, maybe ten years older than Joanna, wore her gray-streaked hair long on her shoulders, and she had on an old denim barn coat. When the woman looked up and saw she was being watched, she regarded Margo in a good-humored way, as though she were accustomed to seeing all sorts of people, but had not yet seen one quite like her. Beside the house was a big garden, and Margo could see rows of eggplants and tomatoes. The woman waved at Margo, and Margo automatically waved back.
Only then did Margo see the teenage girl in the yard, lying barefoot in a lawn chair. She was wearing frayed cutoffs and a purple sweatshirt and looked to be about Julie Slocum’s age. The girl was reading a book, and it took Margo a few seconds to make out what it was she had on her stomach: a giant rabbit, weighing maybe twenty pounds. She was using that rabbit to hold her book up. The rabbit’s ears were longer than the girl’s hands, and they twitched, but otherwise the rabbit just sat there. Margo laughed out loud. She put on her pack and picked up her box of ashes and her piece of The River Rose and headed toward the river.
When the sun was setting orange downstream, Margo and the Indian were sitting beside the fire eating the duck and some salted tomatoes the Indian had bought at a farm stand. In the frying pan was a thick slice of puffball mushroom Margo had browned in the bit of duck fat, along with some butter from foil-wrapped packets the Indian gave her.
“You know I’m not touching that mushroom,” the Indian said.
“I don’t care. I’ll eat it all. You still owe me five dollars for the duck.”
“I don’t want to be hallucinating. And I’d rather you didn’t, either, not with that rifle.”
“It’s not that kind of mushroom,” Margo said. The rifle was wrapped in its tarp near the fire. “Your cousin said the duck would release its feathers, but it was dang hard to pluck.” She had never really been good at swearing, so she was trying out the Indian’s words, heck and dang.
“Oh, that’s just a story.” He handed her a ten. “Keep the change.”
“I’ll make you breakfast,” she said and put the bill in her front pocket.
“How’d you get so clean?” the Indian said.
“Took