Margaret had the best driveway in the neighborhood for bike-riding, paved with tar each spring. It’s not that I never met her, but that she had always been there—cross-stitching on the front porch with the hobble bushes blossoming, or reading the Bible past suppertime in August when the goldenrods bid us goodbye and the pale winter heart set the wind to sough through the trees. I always waved, but never spoke more than a hello as I ran the bike’s wheel off that smooth black inertia and onto the bumpy sidewalk home.

One Saturday afternoon in late March, after a week’s warm weather melted snow banks high as houses to muddy caps and swept the sand and salt into slushy ditches, I drove my bike to her place and knocked with a plate of cookies I'd baked. She smiled opening the door. Smiled as if she’d been waiting for a long time and a long time passed after her back disappeared into the hall. I removed my galoshes. When I lifted my head I smelled mothballs and banana bread. She returned with a tiny hand-painted tray depicting a red barn and rooster. Piled on top: two glasses of milk, my plate of cookies (hard as hockey pucks), and a steamy apple pie.

When I found myself mad or embarrassed, scared or just throwing a tantrum, I'd play a game called “mute.” You don’t speak in the game of “mute.” And I was playing “mute” with Margaret. Silence for over twenty minutes. I sucked the apple chunks one by delicious one, letting each dissolve in my mouth. Sentences gathered and scattered in my mind like robins in a tree when the wind changes direction. What was I supposed to tell this liver-spotted woman? That I learned to French kiss this winter by watching television?

That’s when I sneezed. A terrible gunshot of a sneeze that fired snot all over the pretty tray, the kind of sneeze you try to subvert by sucking back in as much as you are able to inhale in a whiff. And that wasn’t a bubble in her milk.

“God Bless You!” Margaret hollered.

I swept the mess into one rolled coat-sleeve while Margaret wiped down the table.  “Do you know that river?”  She asked.  “Not the Raquet, but the big river back behind the cornfield?"  I nodded and she continued, "Well I was born in a house that is now buried at the bottom of that river.”

Natives called it, The River that Walks, serene and gentle, tucked between tall spruce, cedar and pine trees.  Two tribes downstream, it was ferocious with cyclone rapids hidden beneath the deep black water, and known as The Garden of the Great Spirit.  Margaret encouraged me to eat another slice of pie as I listened intently to my neighborhood on the St Lawrence River rolling backwards eighty years.

It was the first decade of the 20th century.  The man who knocked on Margaret’s door wore a suit. She’d never seen a man in a suit before and when he came to the door her mother began to sob hysterically until he assured her that her husband and sons were safe.  Margaret heard the man in the suit repeat the word “project” as she boiled water for coffee in the kitchen.

I interrupt her, “But why did you have to leave?”

She explained how the builders paid the landowners in the area a cash sum for their property that same day while Margaret’s father and brothers rode into town.  No choice.  Sign here and “Your evacuation is the week of…”

The houses were never torn down.  The valley was deep and they cut a hole in the hillside, put up a dam, cranked the latch, and opened the door.  I would dream about that river all spring.  Little baby dolls floating inside the empty house, glass shattered by the water's pressure, a dinner plate cracked on the kitchen floor, Margaret’s tiny made bed and the filling it would give.  I’d stare into my lit aquarium at night with the white angelfish concealed inside the ceramic house and shudder.

I noticed the blackish-blue knot under Margaret’s chin while visiting one afternoon.  I didn’t give it much thought, she was ninety and waddled like my best friend Jessica’s Mom did when she was ready to deliver Jessica’s little brother Jeremy, who cried often and spit up after every bottle feeding.  So I sat next to Margaret on the couch, glancing at the knot jutting below the surface of her thin skin like a small black pearl.  But I soon forgot about it, like I forgot the tangerine shade of her curtains as she spoke of how the Indians came into the village at dusk to rob the white people.  Her mother hid the money inside pies.

The blackish-blue knot grew larger that summer and by the end of August its weekly increase was exponential until Margaret looked like a blue-throated bullfrog mid-croak.  I only asked her once. Margaret didn’t believe in medicine.  She married a Mohawk chief’s son against her parents’ wishes and her only child, a son, died during childbirth.  There was no one except me to imagine what the blue knot under her chin could mean.  Dying, Margaret told me, was like wearing glasses of recognition when you didn’t know you needed them.  Suddenly you could see the black whisker mark on a sitting bittern or hear fragments of Chopin bowed between cricket legs.  When I asked her what it felt like to die, she said, “You are only dead when there is no one left to remember you. We are all born again in memories, even after our bodies no longer inhabit the earth.”

The nurse told my mother when she found Margaret dead the following October— there were lit candles surrounding her room, like a shrine, as if she knew the time arrived.  That night I dreamt I was walking across rocks in a shallow stream.  The sun filtered through the tall oaks into the water and wavered mosaics of light over a bed of chalky oyster shells partially buried in the dirt.