Once Upon a River Page 0,93

bag with a drawstring and a simple bead design, and inside was a folded note and a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

Goodbye, Margo, the note began. I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife in the three years we’ve been married. I’m going to forget what happened between us. I hope you will do the same. Remember you have options in this life. Go back to school. The note was dated September 14, 1981, but signed only XXX.

“Jerk,” she said. A big carp surfaced and a smaller carp did the same, and then both returned to the depths. She sat as still as a bird on a nest of eggs for hours that afternoon, clutching her rifle, but with no inclination to shoot anything, not even a squirrel when it scampered over her sleeping bag. She was drunk with the Indian’s scent, hungover with him, was half in love with him after just two days, but she thought she would be okay once she worked him out of her system. He had come to her for help, and she had helped him. She had fed him, and he had paid her for the food. Sex with him had been like nothing she had known, but if he had stayed any longer, they might have hurt each other. She needed to get some rest and think about how she would survive until her mother wrote to her. The Indian had left enough money for her to buy a boat. That evening she ate the soup she’d made from their leftovers.

PART

III

• Chapter Eighteen •

Two weeks after the Indian left, Margo didn’t start flowing as she should have, and one afternoon she realized what that meant, that she was with the Indian’s child. She had been foolish to trust her instincts when she was feeling lonesome. She had been foolish to follow her body’s desire and inclination in this strange new place. She did not stop crying for a long time, until she looked up on the ridge and saw a tall, thin man looking down at her.

The farmer owned the land where she had camped alone for two weeks. During this time, he and the men working for him were harvesting the nearby fields of soybeans. Upon spotting him, she stopped crying instantly, the way a baby bird stopped piping for food when a predator was near. Though her hands itched to lift her rifle, she sighted him only with her gaze. After a good long look, she turned away and set about combing out her loose hair with her fingers. She wound it up and twisted it against the back of her head and fixed it with her barrette. Her sleeping bags and camping pad were already rolled together into a thick bundle. She folded her tarp and collected her other things. The small amount of food at her campsite was piled into the big pot she’d gotten from the old man, and that was already hidden away in the windbreak, with the lid tied down against animal invasion. Her father’s ashes were in their metal box beside it. She was bothered that she could no longer pick up and carry everything she owned. Having the extra gear made her more self-sufficient, but less able or willing to run away from trouble, should there be any.

Though her fire was more or less extinguished, she filled a gallon jug in the river and doused the ashes to show the farmer her presence was not a fire hazard. She tied her oversized bedroll and tarp onto her pack and walked a little upstream. After she entered the cover of trees, she turned to see, through the branches, the figure still silhouetted there, although now he appeared to be looking off over the field.

Margo would return to the campsite this evening. She liked the privacy this place afforded and hoped to stay until she had a boat or another plan. Sometimes the sound of the river moving past her made her feel free in a way that the Stark River had not for a long time. She occasionally heard shots in the distance, but she was down to one cartridge and needed to brave going into town to buy more. Between the fish, game, black walnuts, and garden pilfering, she was doing fine foodwise, and she got her clean water at the hand pump in the barn.

Margo hid her pack away in the branches of a tree in the windbreak and continued upstream with only her