The River Wife Page 12
I might never have known about it at all if I had not heard the whisper of a story come on a fine mist one morning. It was the story of a man who had swum in the sea and been lost, and when his body was found his legs had become a fish tail. It was told that as a young man he had once been saved from drowning by a mermaid and had borne scales upon his feet ever since. Some said she had claimed him back, and others that he had gone to find her again. Other stories came of a man who had been a great writer and each morning he caught the stories he wrote from the sea, as a fisherman might catch his breakfast. And there was one story of a woman who waited by the shores of a river for her fish husband to return, and by day she sang songs to him and by night she slept in the river and awaited his return.
At night I swim as an old fish swims, gently in the moonpool. I have begun to feel the cold. My hair reflected in the water is the colour of snow. Death awaits me and accompanies me and death is my awakening. How beautiful the brush of clouds above the trees. How bright the catch of water as it breaks over rocks in the river. How the leaves move the whole forest in a single note of breeze. Death wheels above me like a great bird, whispers to me as quiet as the wings of a moth, and holds my hand like a needy lover. What might I have done differently? What the same?
I no longer wonder if I am more fish than woman or woman than fish. My life is governed by the span of a human life and I have found in this a simple truth that had never come when all of time stretched out before me. I am a creature of this world. Soon I will return to the earth and so I will never leave here. How fleeting has been all that I held dear. All those I have loved, each one, has been lost to me. How long love goes on for, long after voice and touch and eyes and smile are forgotten. Once I am gone from here, what I have known will continue to change and all it has been for me will not.
The river has grown quieter and the days warmer. Frost has not kissed the earth for many seasons and the mountains bear no snow. Rain bursts from the sky in wild storms and then does not visit at all. One day the forest will be grassland and the river will be gone. The tallest trees have fallen and the forest is dry in the bare sunlit patches. Perhaps my daughter will return and summon the rain to wrap itself about the mountains and fill the lakes until the land is running with water once more. Perhaps the moonpool will be deep again and other fish will come to swim in its depths. Perhaps the forest will again grow quiet and green, alive with leaf and moss and tree and creatures of every colour and pattern of movement.
There is a wonder in this world that has no words. It is the wonder of things visible and invisible, human and other. I am not one or the other, the world is not one or the other, we are both.
I have cast the stories I have heard upon the river, not woven deep, but floating within bubbles of air, helical and rainbow-infused. So light that sunshine will snap them open. See how the light catches on them? So many I have launched in their fragile air carriages. Still I may not finish with them all before it is my time to flow on. Each story that leaves me makes me lighter. Each story unfolds like a flower cast upon the water and each one has its own purpose. Each story has its place and time.
I will never see the people who will pause and listen at the side of a river, who will take the time to sit on a patch of earth in a forest, those who will watch the sky or listen as the rain comes down, those who will turn their face to hear the sea or pause before they drink. But we will all be part of each story that unfolds upon the earth.
A story is always in the listening.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
BIGING READING