FICTION: COMING-OF-AGE
Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Once Upon a River” is a singular coming-of-age story, set against a haunting backdrop of nature. The young woman at the heart of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story is resourceful, but more importantly, is humanly vulnerable and strong.
The banks of western Michigan’s fictional Stark River are home to the extended Murray family. The river and its surrounding woods anchor their lives, and provide something deeper than sustenance for Margo Crane. She fishes and hunts, adopting as a role model the Annie Oakley described in a children’s book, “Sure Shot.”
Her father, Bernard, is the illegitimate son of Old Man Murray. Until Margo was born, beautiful and green- eyed, the Cranes had been held apart from the Murray family. Living across the river from Bernard’s half-brother Cal, the families seem united until the death of Old Man Murray. It “hit the whole family like one of those late winter floods, chilling everything, washing away that old generation and whatever invisible glue and strings that had been holding the Murrays together.”
It is barely past Margo’s 15 birthday when she and her father join Cal’s family for the customary Thanksgiving gathering. It is the first since Old Man Murray’s death, and since Margo’s mother deserted her family.
Somewhat unmoored, Margo ignores her father’s warning to always stay away from any man drinking. Given her love of hunting, she thinks little of the invitation from Uncle Cal to join him in the shed to learn how to skin a deer. A younger cousin sees the rape in progress through a window and calls for help.
Her father attacks Cal, and the last strand tying Margo to the family breaks. “It had started with the death of Margo’s grandfather in January and the departure of her mother in July, and now the severing was complete. Even her daddy, bleeding from his cheek and mouth beside her, telling her to stand up, seemed far away.”
Margo refuses to bring charges or even talk to her father about the incident, instead hunting deer compulsively. There is no contact between the families until the following Thanksgiving. Then, against her father’s wishes, Margo takes a rifle and crosses the river, intending only to observe the gathering from a distance.
A chance opening gives Margo an opportunity for revenge. A crack shot, she wounds her uncle in an ironically appropriate portion of his anatomy. Her father, who has come to take her home, is mistaken for the attacker and is shot dead by one of Cal’s sons.
Margo is presented with two alternatives: take her chances with Social Services, or move into Cal’s home. She acquiesces to the latter long enough to steal Cal’s best rifle and load the small teak boat left to her by her grandfather with “an army sleeping bag, two life vests, a vinyl tarp, a gallon jug of water, and her daddy’s best fishing pole.” She pushes off and heads upriver, toward the town where she thinks her mother might be.
Her mother proves elusive, and the next two years are spent in a search, helped along by strangers who aren’t necessarily kind. Perhaps it is the way she grew up, introverted and self-sufficient, or maybe it’s because she takes to the woods and water the way that a hawk takes to the sky; she survives all that life throws at her with peaceful equanimity, rolling with the punches the way her boat rolls over a wake.
Campbell has written a quiet novel, compelling but hardly pyrotechnic. Its power lies instead in a heart that is as unceasing and irresistible as the current in the Stark River. Margo is compelled by the search for her mother, but to the reader, that search is secondary. To us, the magnet is Margo: Her willingness to live on her own terms and her single-minded pursuit of a quest. She learns from, but is never embittered by, the vagaries of fate.
Her journey toward adulthood takes the reader into a world that is, like Margo’s mien, mysteriously quiet and calm. For all that her surrounds may be unfamiliar, her struggle to untangle its secrets is both uniquely hers and universally ours.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer living in Centennial.
Meet the author
Bonnie Jo Campbell will read from and discuss “Once Upon a River” at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday
