Once Upon a River
A girl with a gun fights for survival in the American wilderness, in a tale that will enthral fans of The Hunger Games and True Grit.After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother.But the river, Margo’s childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman travelling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to deciding what price she is willing to pay for her choices.
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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Once Upon a River
To All the Children Raised by Wolves
My home is on the water, I don’t like no land at all.
Home is on the water, I don’t like no land at all.
My home is on the water, I don’t want no land at all.
I’d rather be dead than stay here and be your dog.
—“SEE SEE RIDER,” TRADITIONAL
Contents
Epigraph
Map
Part I
Chapter One
THE STARK RIVER flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the…
Chapter Two
A YEAR LATER, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Margo was…
Chapter Three
ON THANKSGIVING, MARGO and her daddy had a meal of…
Chapter Four
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS the job seemed done. She and Cal…
Chapter Five
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Junior Murray came into the house without…
Chapter Six
WHEN MARGO HEARD three shotgun blasts in succession, the sound…
Chapter Seven
IN THE MORNING, Margo faked sleep while Brian got up…
Chapter Eight
FROM BRIAN, MARGO learned to thin-slice half-frozen venison across the…
Chapter Nine
ONE DAY IN AUGUST, Brian went to town and did…
Chapter Ten
WHEN NIGHT MUSCLED IN, Margo used her last match to…
Part II
Chapter Eleven
MARGO BROUGHT IN THE MAIL from the box. It was…
Chapter Twelve
MARGO SAT A CROSS THE TABLE from Michael, eating lunch…
Chapter Thirteen
WHEN MARGO ARRIVED AT the marijuana house, the midnight crickets…
Chapter Fourteen
BACK AT THE MARIJUANA HOUSE, Margo devoured Joanna’s bread with…
Chapter Fifteen
EARLY ONE EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, Margo heard a car pull…
Chapter Sixteen
THE INDIAN TURNED INTO A driveway marked by a wooden…
Chapter Seventeen
MARGO HIKED BACK DOWNSTREAM. She lugged big rocks from the…
Part III
Chapter Eighteen
TWO WEEKS AFTER the Indian left, Margo didn’t start flowing…
Chapter Nineteen
MARGO FOLLOWED SMOKE’S DIRECTIONS for registering the boat. She filled…
Chapter Twenty
“YOUR MA A RICH LADY?” Fishbone asked as they pulled…
Chapter Twenty-One
CHRISTMAS EVE AT DUSK, Fishbone entered Smoke’s kitchen without knocking.…
Chapter Twenty-Two
“LESS THAN TWO WEEKS,” Smoke told Margo one morning in…
Chapter Twenty-Three
AFTER SMOKE’S DEATH, the snow and ice storms continued, and…
Chapter Twenty-Four
ON THE FIRST HOT MORNING in May, Margo woke up…
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
PART I
• CHAPTER ONE •
THE STARK RIVER flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart. She rowed upstream to see wood ducks, canvasbacks, and ospreys and to search for tiger salamanders in the ferns. She drifted downstream to find painted turtles sunning on fallen trees and to count the herons in the heronry beside the Murrayville cemetery. She tied up her boat and followed shallow feeder streams to collect crayfish, watercress, and tiny wild strawberries. Her feet were toughened against sharp stones and broken glass. When Margo swam, she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her.
She waded through serpentine tree roots to grab hold of water snakes and let the river clean the wounds from the nonvenomous bites. She sometimes tricked a snapping turtle into clamping its jaws down hard on a branch so she could carry it home to Grandpa Murray. He boiled the meat to make soup and told the children that eating snapping turtle was like eating dinosaur. Margo was the only one the old man would take along when he fished or checked his animal traps because she could sit without speaking for hours in the prow of The River Rose, his small teak boat. Margo learned that when she was tempted to speak or cry out, she should, instead, be still and watch and listen. The old man called her Sprite or River Nymph. Her cousins called her Nympho, though not usually within the old man’s hearing.
Margo, named Margaret Louise, and her cousins knew the muddy water and the brisk current, knew the sand and silt between their toes, scooped it into plastic cottage cheese tubs and sherbet buckets and dribbled it through their fingers to build sagging stalagmites and soggy castles. They hollowed out the riverbanks, cut through soil and roots to create collapsing caves and tunnels. If any kid stood too long in a soft spot and sank above his knees, he just had to holler, and somebody pulled him free. They spent summers naked or nearly naked, harvesting night crawlers from the mossy woods and frogs’ eggs from goo in underwater snags. They built rafts from driftwood and baling twine. They learned to read upon the surface of the water evidence of distress below. Once, when Margo was eight and her favorite cousin, Junior, was nine, they rescued an uncle who’d fallen in drunk.
They all fished the snags at the edges of the river for bluegills, sunfish, and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river—some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through floorboards and the gaps around their doors.
