The River Wife Read online

  I watched carefully to see if he was breathing and soon he turned. His skin was white and the hair that grew on his body was the colour of button grass. His body had a softness to it, as if Wilson James couldn’t outrun a butterfly. There was not a part of him that looked strong. Rather, he looked as if the food he had eaten and the water he had drunk had weakened him. He had none of the uprightness of a tree nor the form of a branch about his arms and legs.

  I wondered if this was what a man was. Had my father looked like this before he lived here? Had he been a soft thing like a river snail without a shell?

  Wilson James did not die. The next day he was again at the river’s edge. He whistled and threw small stones into the water. He looked about him into the trees as if he expected to see me. He came by the house Father had built but he did not see it. He even called out, as if he could sense that I was near, ‘Hello? Hello?’ I watched and would almost have called to Wilson James but I did not. The veil of the house held and all we had made here, Father and I, remained unseen.

  I watched Wilson James from the forest at nightfall when light spilled from the windows upon the lawn and the moon contemplated summer. I saw the silhouette of him sitting. He was reading from a book. My father had books when I was still small but he did not tell me the stories from them. The trunk beside my father’s bed had been full of books and I had liked to lift the lid and smell them. They had a withered smell, as if the plant they had once grown on had dried there in the sunshine.

  ‘Can I not learn to read your words, Father?’

  ‘Little fish, you have the stories of the world inside you. These things that keep me company at night when you are gone to the river, these stories are as if we sat one day under a certain tree and all the stories were of its fruit and flowers, its bark and roots, its seasons and ageing, the grass beneath, the sky above. And all the feelings were of what we experienced as we sat—anger, sadness, joy, loss, passion. But the river’s stories are as if you are a bird flying above an enormous forest, as wide as the eye can see, and I would not rob you of the landscape you know, yet I fear I would, if I made you settle by the tree with me.’

  All the pages in my father’s notebooks were used up with drawing and words before he took them with his other books and buried them somewhere in the forest, for one day they were gone from the house.

  ‘I am done with the words of the world and now I am with the world,’ Father said that evening. Hail clattered on the river rocks and the birds that had stayed beyond the last warm breeze were silent in the grey light. We had made a fire and Father sat close beside it as if he was cold.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ I asked.

  ‘I am very well, little fish. I am simply alone.’

  ‘I am here,’ I said.

  ‘It is not my body which is alone. Nor my heart. I have let the last of it go, that which I knew, and I find myself strangely alone, like a branch which has fallen from its tree into the river and been washed ashore far away on the river’s edge. I have no hope of returning. That time is past but this old branch finds that it is part and has been part of all things, not simply the tree. If I am to stay here with you and not grow old as men do, then I must let go of what I anticipate, and step into whatever may be beyond this limited knowledge I have collected from the books I have read. Now tell me a story, little fish, before you go to the river, and I will soon be warm again.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘today I found a story of a boy who came to catch a fish. When he caught the fish it was so large it filled his basket and, well pleased, he carried it home on his back. As he walked the basket grew heavier and heavier until at last he could carry it no more. He took it off and discovered a young woman sitting in the basket.

  ‘ “What are you doing in my basket?” the boy asked.

  ‘ “You caught me and brought me from the river.”

  ‘Now the boy was scared, but the woman was young and beautiful, so he said, “Surely you were a fish when first we met. What am I to do with you? I thought I had found food for my family.”

  ‘ “If you will carry me back to the river there will be food upon the table for your family and the crops will grow plentiful in your fields.”

  ‘The boy did as the young woman asked. He carried her on his back to her home in the river, and when he returned to his family he found the table laden. For a whole turn of the seasons the crops grew plentiful, the trees were heavy with fruit and the boy was greatly celebrated for catching the river goddess. But after a year life returned to normal. The bounty faded, the crops and trees gave only their usual yield. So the boy’s older brother thought to also win the regard of his people.

  ‘He went to the river and he caught many fish and each one he carried in his basket back along the path to the village. None was the young woman his brother had spoken of and each of the fish he flung down on the path. All day he fished until at last, as the sun was sinking to rest among the mountains, he caught a black fish with scales of gold. When he carried the basket on his back it grew heavy so he laid the basket down and from it stepped the young woman. She looked about her and saw the dead bodies of all the fish the young man had thrown away and she was dismayed.

  ‘ “What is it you seek from the river?” the girl demanded.

  ‘ “You can bring bounty to our table and plenty to our crops.”

  ‘ “You have taken food from the river and you have wasted it. You must return me to the river and no food will sit upon your table and your crops will fail,” she said.

  ‘But the brother bound the young woman with a rope, saying, “I will bring you to our home and you will make sure the table never runs low and the crops are plentiful, and because you are more beautiful than any girl in the village I shall consider making you my wife and I will rule over the village.”

  ‘He carried her on his back but when he arrived home, instead of a woman on his back, he bore the skeleton of a great fish.

  ‘The younger brother was so distraught at what his older brother had done, he carried the bones of the fish back to the river. He laid the fish upon the water and the bones turned to mist and rose into the sky. When he returned to the village his brother and all the people who had lived there were gone. Water came no more to the land and it has been that way to this day.’

  My father nodded.

  ‘Father, when I die will I be a fish or a woman?’

  ‘I am not sure you will ever die.’

  ‘Only if I leave the river?’

  ‘You belong to the river. We both know that.’

  ‘Mother left the river.’

  ‘Yes, little fish.’

  ‘Do you think she went to the sea? Is that where river wives go?’

  ‘Perhaps, little fish.’

  ‘Do I look like her?’

  ‘You do, so much like her. But of course she was not human at all. So when I held her it was like holding time itself.’

  My mother had gone when I was so young I had few memories of her. I longed for her but she was not here with us, and I hovered between wanting to know everything about her and wanting to know nothing.

  ‘Will I really live forever, Father?’

  ‘My not-so-little fish,’ and here he held me gently against him with his arm about me and looked into my face with his smiling eyes, ‘you are life in some form I could never have anticipated. You are my own flesh and blood, yet you are so much more than that. How late it has come, this understanding that I have been entirely shaped by my human brain and all the limitations it has. How far we might go if we could reach beyond our form, and yet I suspect the very notion of reaching beyond is part of the human condition as well. Ah, it is a riddle, life. I cannot see the future but I know I will never leave you. Even if you are here forever.’

  I saw life. I saw it in flies swarming, in butterflies, in bubbles floating on the river, in fog lifting, in the breeze with its gentle invitation to move. The river changed and change was its pattern, the tumble of cycles one upon the other like a st
one thrown into the lake at dawn when the surface was pulled tight with silence. Only the sun was constant, and the sun owned me. By day I could walk upon the land or swim as a fish, but when the day was gone and I stepped into the river I became a fish and could not be a woman again until the dawn returned.

  ‘It is a great riddle,’ Father said. ‘You are the riddle we might happily never solve.’

  Wilson James was a flash of colour in the forest. He was the sound of twigs breaking, leaves crushed underfoot, damp earth imprinted with the mark of a shoe. The lingering scent of his clothes and skin settled in the air with the drift of smoke from his house, the banging of a door, dissonant in the hush of mist through the trees. He stepped about the forest like a large animal. He trod heavy upon the paths and watched with a face as keen and blind as wind. Often he did not wake until the sun was playing in the centre of the lake, and as night slipped through the forest the unclothed windows of his house emblazed the trees.

  Rain fell as it had not fallen for many seasons. Melt from the mountains found the river, and when the river could carry no more it overflowed into the fern-filled rock cascades beside the river’s course. Loud was the river and loud was the rain and with the fremitus of the river came stories, each one to be sifted, untangled and tended. Wilson James was the unfamiliar bird whose call I did not recognise. I did not know its food nor the purpose of its flight, but it settled into the forest and brought no more disturbance than its own discordant music.

  On the days when clouds walked down from the mountains but brought no rain, he came every day to the river. He wore a green jacket and a soft black hat and he had with him a notebook. After a while he seemed to find a thought to his liking. I crept a little closer. Wilson James’s pen caught the sunshine and sent it dancing on the tree trunks. He scratched lines black as wet sticks across the page. The pen flew and rested. He wrote words and made drawings of fern fronds and rock forms. His pace was unsteady, stopping and starting, his head cocked like a bird observing a certain call, a note upon the air which I could not hear.

  Spring captivated the forest with the invitation to grow and bear. Insects fled the constraints of their shells, flies awoke early from the dark places they had slumbered. In the afternoons Wilson James often fell asleep against a tree. Insects flew in his breath and the notebook stirred on his lap as a breeze played with the pages. At last I could bear it no longer. When I could have left him there to sleep undisturbed I did not. I had all those days avoided contact with him, preferring to observe the flow of his daily ritual, his lightening tread upon the paths, his increasing assurance as he stepped from rock to rock. I had stood close enough to touch him. I had sat in a tree above him. I had waited behind him on the riverbank in the gloom of green sunlight and he had not glimpsed me. What made me reach forward, disregarding entirely the words of my father?

  I thought I had taken the measure of him in small observations, as if in the accumulation of patterns and rhythms I had a picture of the whole. I did not know that in the span of a human life, shorter than the cycle of a tree but much longer than that of a bird, flows an undercurrent deeper than it is possible to understand unless we choose to swim in it.

  ‘What are you saying in your book?’ I asked.

  Wilson James jumped like an afternoon fish. He dropped his pen and book and picked them up and then dropped them again. He stood up and then sat down again. Small flies flew up from the rock where they had settled beside him.

  ‘You have returned,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’

  I saw his eyes were not the same, that his face was two faces, one half each. Wilson James had a face that was as soft as a leaf and as hard-edged as a flint of stone. He had curves in his cheeks that ran down from his nose. His face had many journeys in it and I wondered if he would die before he became an old man.

  I said to Wilson James, ‘When are you going away?’

  ‘Well, I don’t exactly know. I was planning to stay three months.’

  ‘You have stayed longer than the others.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure I’d like it here.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Have you seen many places?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Have you seen the ocean?’

  Wilson James looked more keenly at me. I could not tell what both sides of his face were thinking.

  ‘Have you?’ he asked.

  I saw that it would not be wise to answer him.

  ‘Why did you come to this place?’ I asked before he could say another word.

  ‘I’m writing a book—or avoiding writing. More the latter. I have been trying to find a story but all the stories have run away from me and are hiding.’

  ‘Perhaps you need the snow to come,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘In the breath of winter it is possible to hear the oldest stories.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but I am looking for a new story,’ he said. ‘The old ones have all been heard before and no-one wants to hear them again.’ He threw a stone in the river.

  ‘Why do you need a story?’

  He sighed. ‘I am a writer. Writers need stories.’

  ‘You have found stories before?’

  ‘I have written four novels.’

  ‘I would like to hear one of your stories,’ I said.

  ‘They’re long and complicated,’ said Wilson James.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, now,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, they’re novels.’

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘Yes, long stories.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I will try then,’ he said, and rolled his damp moss in paper and lit it with a red-tipped flint from a box in his pocket.

  ‘I gave it up years ago and then I found this packet of tobacco in the house and it seems to go with being up here,’ he said.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not cold. Perhaps it’s the being alone. A cigarette is good company.’

  ‘My father, when he put his stories away, he also grew cold. It will pass.’

  Wilson James looked across the river where the frothing water plunged and ferns shivered in a pale grey mist. The day was warm and the rocks on the riverbank glowed. Two large bronze-winged insects hovered together under the far bank which curved out over the river. Blue and white flowers dipped their heads towards the sound of the water as it rushed and danced by our feet.

  ‘You are a ghost, aren’t you? Or some kind of apparition?’

  ‘I think you may be the apparition, Wilson James.’

  ‘Surely one is true and not the other.’

  ‘Oh, I cannot be sure. I cannot be sure of anything at all since your arrival.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I will wake up.’

  ‘You are quite awake and you are going to tell me a story.’

  He looked away and smiled. ‘Then I will begin,’ he said. He began and began again. He said, ‘They are easier to write than they are to tell.’

  ‘You do not trust them.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not.’

  ‘When cold lies on the land like a secret you will hear stories too fragile for the light of day.’

  He gazed at me with his blue eyes. ‘It is very remote here, for a woman.’

  I skipped a small pebble across the river and downed one of the bronze-winged flies and almost leapt in to eat it but thought better of it.

  ‘Do you live with many people?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said. His eyes went flat and his face revealed a grey shadow. ‘No. Well, yes. When I open my door I’m in a city of thirty million.’

  ‘Is it a good place?’

  ‘A good place, a bad place. Hell, it’s a city.’

  ‘It must have many stories.’

  ‘That’s one way to describe
it.’

  ‘Who tends your forests and rivers while you are here?’

  ‘Well . . . nobody. There aren’t any forests.

  And the river . . . well, it’s not like this at all.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘How is it possible you don’t know? Please don’t tell me you’ve been here your whole life.’

  I said, ‘I have been to the mountains that way and to just below the great lake that way.’ It was not really an answer, but how could I say, ‘While you have been measuring time in the passage of a human life we have been here and always here before your people were ever upon this earth’?

  Wilson James picked up a rock and rubbed it in the palm of his hand.

  ‘You are serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My father said it was a failing of mine.’

  He stopped rubbing and looked at me for a while and I looked back and then he started on the rock again.

  ‘He about, your father?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I would like to meet him.’

  When he put the rock down it glowed with the heat of him, and the colour he left on it was pale blue with a yellow edge.

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She has not been here since I was a child.’

  He sat very still. Gently, very gently, he reached over and laid his hand on mine. Just for a moment the dry warmth of his skin moved into me. Then he removed it.

  ‘You are real,’ he said. ‘Cold but definitely real.’

  ‘You must come to my house, Wilson James.’

  ‘Is it safe for me to come? Is it made of gingerbread? Will you turn me into a beast?’

  ‘I think that it is safe for you to come,’ I said.

  ‘When shall I come to your house?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Fish are both solitary and seek company. They are colourful in light and drab without it. Trout in particular are prone to melancholy. Some of the memories of fish are as vapour, for they have no need of remembering their own lives, and the world above the water passes them by without remark. They can forget in a day the taking of one of their kind from the river by a fisherman, but they can remember my mother and the long years back, for every fish born is born with this memory, of the river wives who birthed them and the songs that they sang. The stories are in the water for any fish to listen to. Fish spend a great deal of time listening to the water’s stories. They move about in the river catching first this one then that. They are so entranced by the stories, so filled with wonder at a story of love or sanctuary or belonging, that sometimes they do not remark the man upon the shore, the feathered trick that skids and lands, skids and lands again above their swimming place. Almost in irritation do they snap at it, so that it will be still while they hear the story, and then they are caught and the stories end.