The River Wife

  The

  River

  Wife

  Also by Heather Rose

  White Heart

  The Butterfly Man

  The

  River

  Wife

  HEATHER ROSE

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Heather Rose 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  The author acknowledges the generous support of Arts Tasmania and Varuna, The Writers’ House

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  978 1 74175 742 2

  Original artwork by Marina Strocchi

  Set in 11/17 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Isabelle Ocean

  As the sun crests the dark line of land, I wake and step from the river, and that in itself is what is called magic.

  We have always lived here. We have been here since the lakes began. We have brought the rivers to the oceans since the world was cold. We are bound by a spell so old there may be none left who are caught by it, except for me. My father once said that any story of a place was a story of sadness because everything changed. So a story of belonging would always be a story of losing.

  I have walked beside the river all my life and listened to its music. I have climbed to the reaches where rivers are born and I have swum in all the lakes that rest in the hands of these mountains. I have watched lakes filled with sky, hurried by wind, hidden by mist, whispering in rain. Lakes that overflowed into one great river that slipped away from the mountains. The river ran, sometimes quiet and filled with light, sometimes shouting through rapids, growing as it tumbled down into the deep of forest, spilling over outcrop and boulder and around the roots of trees, swept into moss banks, glinting under the watchful gaze of trees, hastening over shallows until it reached the greatest lake, which stretched further than I could see by day. From there the flow of water became a broad penumbral river that moved through folded hills and cast its tributaries across the land.

  Water is a message. It is a truth that asks nothing, a story older than people and older than mountains, a holder and deliverer of memories beyond time. It runs away and never back and it takes with it everything we are.

  One day, when spring had taken the earth to her breast and warmed it, love lay down by the river. He slept in a blue shirt and through the afternoon he did not stir but dreamed with the river’s song beside him. When he woke he saw me.

  Love was not the pattern of leaves and the texture of bark, it was not the underbelly of river or the way of fish, though all that was here was part of it. Love was the passing of the sky across a face, it was the arc of conversation, the thought of forever, the yearning to go on and never back, the desire to be something other than I was. I see him standing there in farewell and my breath hurries to me, the day falling away behind him, the sky about his shoulders. I never thought to ask what belonging was, nor how I might be free of it, until I loved Wilson James.

  This is the story of a river and the making of stories and the nature of love. Some would say that any story of water is always a story of magic, and others would say any story of love was the same. And being a love story it begins with a broken heart.

  In the years before I was born, my father carried each stone from the riverbed to make the walls of the house. He felled the trees and made the beams for the roof and the chairs upon which we sat, and the table and benches where he prepared food. He carved the bed upon which he slept and a smaller bed he made for me when I was still inside my mother, though he was sure I would have no need of it at night.

  The shelves of the house held the carcasses of beetles, the bones of small animals, the lacework of insect wings. There were the plates and cups, the pots and implements he used for his cooking. The warm weather came late and left early, and my father lamented that little grew in the short summer. But in his walled garden he grew all manner of root and plant, and in the forest he hunted all the creatures that tasted good. The jars on the shelves were filled with dried foods—meat, roots, fruits—and these he would bring to life again in the soups and stews he made.

  When my father first came to the forest, the world he walked away from had left no colour in his heart, only the black and white of a fear which had stolen autumn and spring and summer from him.

  ‘I had seen things no human should ever see; I had done things that rent my heart in two,’ he said. ‘The young man I had once been I carried upon my back, heavy as stone, and the old man I would become bore the burden of that youthful heart. But beside me walked another man—a man who whistled a strange, captivating song. That man had no name nor any past or future, but tattooed on his face was a leaf. A colourless leaf. And one morning, as I awoke beside a pale stretch of road, the man with the leaf on his cheek was gone. Bending to bear my youth upon my back, I realised I had forgotten his name and even the day of his birth. I left him there asleep, the boy I had been, and I turned from the road and entered the forest and came at last to the lake. I climbed up, up, up to this part of the river and here I laid down and slept, and my heart made no sound.’

  He rubbed his cheek and the leaf with no colour moved under his fingers on skin made soft by time.

  ‘It is in the mending,’ my father said to me, ‘that the fabric of a heart is sewn.’

  ‘What do hearts get mended with?’

  ‘Sunshine, kindness, the touch of your child’s hand in yours, spring rain, the green wings of dragonflies, rainbow scales, the webs of spiders, the voice of a woman who loves you. For a long time I was afraid of so many things. I could not forget. I was haunted by dreams of the things I had seen and done.

  ‘Your mother took the lines from my face and wove them into stories that no longer belonged to me but were a part of the stories of men, and somehow that took the pain out of them but not the sadness. Sadness can inspire our hearts in surprising ways, but not pain. Few can hold the hand of pain and grow strong or kind.’

  ‘And then I was born?’

  ‘Yes, and then you were born.’

  ‘But what about your other family? Your mother and father?’

  ‘It was as if everything I had once been went away. I had no desire to be anywhere but here.’

  ‘And you will never leave the river?’

  ‘No, little fish, I will never leave you.’

  Such were our conversations, me with my feet shimmering in the water, Father twisting the lures he made with a snatch of fur, a trim of soft feather, a twist of hardly visible twine. These he made and sold in the days he still went to the town, when I was very young. Lures for fish he would never catch.

  Through the time of deep snow we would sit beside the fire and listen to the crack of flame, the creak of winter, the rasp
of a dark bird on a branch beyond the window, and my father had many questions to ask of me.

  ‘Where does the rain come from, little fish?’

  ‘Where does the snowmelt go?’

  ‘How old is this rock?’

  ‘What song did you sing the river as you woke this morning?’

  ‘What tales have you heard arrive on the footsteps of winter?’

  And I in turn had many questions for him.

  ‘Father, is it because I am a human like you that I like to be here by the fire, and not in the river, when snow is falling about the house?’

  ‘Father, is it because I am a human like you that I like to eat the soup you make?’

  Always he would consider my questions as if I had never asked them before.

  ‘Little fish, you are your father’s daughter and your mother’s too, and only time will tell if you are more one than the other.’

  ‘Tell me something about my mother,’ I urged. ‘Something you’ve never told me before.’

  ‘Your mother longed for a daughter so she made a shoe and placed it in the river. Every day she checked it. The river grass held it and the water lapped at it, finding a current around the heel, the water passing through the eyelets where laces might tie it to the foot of a man, the river moving it a little in the shift of gravel. That shoe was in the river a whole turn of the moon before I found it and slipped my foot into it—and that is why, it is said, I have never left the river. And why I am your father.’

  ‘There is nothing sung of a daughter born to a human and a river wife,’ I said.

  ‘You are your own song and every day you add a note to it.’

  And so I grew in the river and also in the stone-walled home with its wide-open fire that glowed red as I left it each night to return to the moonpool.

  My father was the footstep ahead of mine in the forest, the voice that hummed as he cooked, the scent of roasting food, the knock of axe on wood, the turn of chisel, the maker of necklaces, the one who braided my hair with the small feathers of young birds, who scooped me in his arms when I ran inside each morning. He was the one who knew me, who listened to me, and I was not alone.

  As I grew older we walked the upper reaches of the river and sometimes I settled the frog spawn back in the riverbank when it was loosened by storm, or cleared the sticks and leaves from spring surges and patterned the rocks to turn the river’s stories this way and that. On the banks and in the glades I spread the songs of water to the ferns and small trees that pushed up from the wet earth and took hold and grew tall, so that the world beside the river was deep with the knowing of water. The rhythm and pattern of the forest became known to me, each rise and fall of pathway through the trees or across the river rocks, the change of light that flowed past the river.

  We walked to where the ferns stood taller than me upon the shoulders of my father. We visited the highest lake where the mist hung so still in the air it was as if the clouds came each day to kiss the water. By the lake there were trees which knew words so old that all the other creatures had forgotten them. There were berries which grew red on four different plants and caves with webs of golden spiders. There were markings on stone of circle, dot, hand-print, circle. The markings were from the old people who are no longer here, but their songs are in the rain and in the river still.

  Father and I walked from the river’s birth to the great lake where people came to eat and walk. Father said it was far enough and I was happy not to go beyond the great lake. There on the water’s edge, when the world of daylight had disappeared over the horizon, and with it the people who came there, Father would walk and I would swim. My father played a flute he had fashioned from a finger of tree, the sound of it like the song of a white bird flown far from its homeland. All the forest stopped to listen when my father played and the moon bent her face to gaze upon the human who had slipped so far from his kinfolk to become a man of the earth.

  When my father still walked the river with me, the rain came in all seasons and the trees grew tall, so tall the flowering tops and dark canopies had songs all of their own which whispered and rumbled through the forest. In winter and even in summer there was snow deep about the house and in spring the slopes of forest glowed with leaves the colours of fire. The land was damp underfoot and the sky was brilliant above. In the passing of a day, a lake could glow as many shades of grey as there are sounds in the wind until it rested at last in the quiet of night where no bird shadow caught in its waters.

  The river and lakes had names. I did not name them. Father took note of everything that grew in the forest and lived in the river. He drew pictures of each leaf and petal, each pattern of stone, each winged creature, feathered or cased, large or small enough to rest on the tip of his finger, each tree and each and every form of moss, grass, fern and fungus. Later, when he put away all that he had written and read, he clasped the names of everything that happened upon the landscape more closely and would drop them from his lips as if they were the shape and form of the thing itself. But I laid the names aside as the years without Father walking in the forest stretched away. The names, and all they had once spoken of, slipped from me and I let them go. Would Father have understood? I do not know.

  I have wondered if these things of the world were also part of the claiming of me. The name of a tree, the weight of a shoe, the sound of an axe, the warm crust of a loaf, the smell of tobacco.

  My father told me that love was a perhaps-hand. He said a great poet had once said so and it was what he knew love to be. He had loved my mother, and there was so much of her that was perhaps, for my mother was a fish. A long-bellied golden fish, dappled with scales as black as night, who slept in the moonpool beneath the waterfall. My father liked to tell her he’d catch her and eat her for breakfast and some say he did. When my mother walked upon the land her feet were covered with scales, grey and pearly, all the way up from her toes. In company she wore crocodile-skin boots brought by a journeyman who knew something of the sense of humour of fish. The journeyman had come from the ocean reaches by way of the warm rivers when the way was still open. He had a long trail of white marks upon his back where the crocodile had fought him. The boots are finely made and I have them still.

  In the ocean there are fish as old as trees who have swum among the memories of all time and who know as many stories as there are to be known. I had thought, as I grew from child to woman, to visit with these fish, but I was not sure I could make the journey so far or, having gone so far, how I would ever get back. I had thought to travel downriver to see the ocean and walk upon the sands that rim the sea. I wanted to see what the river became, what the rain made possible. I thought to stand in the swell and listen for the songs of the river wives who went down to the sea and did not return.

  My father told me there was a story children learned about a river wife who gave her voice and with it all her songs for the chance to walk only as a woman and never again be a fish. He said in the end she died and floated away as sea foam. And that all children knew this, that when sea foam washed up on the shore it marked the passing of a river wife whose songs were the songs of all the stories that had ever been told.

  ‘Why did she so want to be only a woman?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she fell in love with a man.’

  ‘And he did not love her as a fish?’

  ‘He did not ever know she was a fish.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell him?’

  ‘She thought he would not have loved her if he knew. Remember, the river wife had given her voice so she could not tell him. And the man fell in love with someone else. When he married the woman he loved, the river wife died.’

  ‘It is a story of such sadness.’

  ‘We are as we are and we cannot be otherwise without paying a price, and that price may be too much for us to bear.’

  ‘And my mother? Did she ever wish to be only a woman?’

  ‘I do not think so. She walked as a woman and she swam as a fish and she was more be
autiful than any sky. Almost as beautiful as you. She never meant to leave you, I feel sure of that.’

  It was my father who took me to the river and laid me in the water on the day I was born. My mother had felt the flip of me inside her and the swish of my tail. She was surprised I was born on land at all. But she was not sure if this half-human child would change as she changed when darkness slipped across the land. My father knew. Of course he knew. So he laid me in the river at twilight where he was sure I belonged. And then she watched. And then she cried. Of course, I was just like her.

  As I grew I walked the river each day and Father did not always walk beside me. Many times he said to me, ‘Promise me you will never feed from the river in daylight, never swim in its waters until the sun is gone, little fish.’

  ‘Am I truly a fish or truly a human, Father?’ I asked.

  ‘Is the day the true light of the world or is darkness?’ he answered.

  ‘Would Mother have let you go, Father, even if you’d wanted?’ I asked him when I had grown old enough to know what it might have taken for him to stay and never venture from the forest again.

  ‘As if I could ever have left her, could ever have put her in danger.’ He laughed and then grew still again. ‘Are you asking me if I have regrets?’

  ‘I think I am. Or maybe I want to be sure I haven’t been the cause of you losing something that might have been yours. What I want to say now is, Father, if there is any place you wish to be . . .’

  ‘Ah, my daughter,’ he replied. ‘What could offer more than this? To see you step from the river. To see your mother come home again, though I know she never will. I didn’t realise it until I got here, but this is my home. It holds everything that is dear to me. My favourite memories. My most loved people. The sounds and smells and patterns that make me happy. How rare it is to find all of that. No, what I must work out is not how to go, but how to stay.’