The River Wife Read online

  Sometimes I thought of the river wives returning. But would they welcome me? Or would I seem so other to them they would not? I had seen strange creatures born and the mother walk away. I had considered that this was what my mother did. She walked away. And were it not for my father it would have been the death of me. Or so I liked to think in the long days of early youth when Father was not able to answer all the questions of a young fish and I was restless with my duties.

  ‘You were capable from the moment I laid you in the river,’ my father said, his hands tying the threads of a snare. ‘There was no need to tend you. You knew without any help from your mother what to eat in the river. It was on the land you were unsteady, as any young child. In the water there was no stumbling or falling.’

  ‘You said that human babies feed upon their mother’s breast.’

  ‘Well, there was none of that for you. It was my chest you rested on as the day disappeared, and then I would take you to the river and you and your mother would swim away to the moonpool. At dawn you would be at the water’s edge, your golden eyes watching as I came close, your silver scales rippling in the new light, and I would lift you and there in my hands, there against my chest, you’d become my warm-skinned baby again.’

  ‘And Mother? Did she not carry me about?’

  ‘I carried you and she sang to you, and that is how you grew. She sang to you, and if she was near or further up the river always you turned your face to the sound of her voice. Her hands were full of the tending of the river and the weaving of stories. You see, I think they never knew the baby stage, her kind. I did not ask about it much for it felt a thing so vast, the gap between what I was and what she was, and love doesn’t need many answers. But she made me smile with her questions. “They do not walk for a whole cycle?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “Sometimes longer.” And your mother said, “May the wind blow her upright soon, for she is fearless but never was life more fearful, to be so helpless.”

  ‘ “Ah, but I shall watch over her,” I said.

  ‘ “It is what humans do, this care of the young, isn’t it?” she asked as she gazed upon your face. “I had not understood the tenderness it takes. I have listened to the songs of mothers and never quite known what it is, this tenderness, until I see her and then I feel it.”

  ‘She loved you as much as any mother ever loved a daughter. Perhaps more, for you were such a wonder to her. You would think that listening all that time I would have learned the songs too. But I never could. I don’t have the ears you have. I don’t hear any words. Not even a tune really. But it’s beautiful. ’

  ‘When did I start singing?’

  ‘By the time you were running about.’

  ‘Did Mother ever hear me sing?’

  ‘She did. I promise. We were collecting kindling for winter. I didn’t even hear you start, for you babbled as any baby and I talked back, so when your singing started it was more like an extension of the conversation we’d been having. But the light in the forest had changed and the sticks I was bending to pick up were on a leaf mulch so bright and golden, and the moss had turned a green like no other earthly green, and the wind, it was suddenly full of voices, old and young, kind and full of tears. I was suddenly part of a great valley. The valley was full of memory and a power so strong nothing could hold it back. Your mother came and stood beside me, her hands wet from the river, and she took my hand and smiled into the sky and said, “Her singing has begun.” ’

  Long ago it is since the river wives came to this world. Every fish in the world is the descendant of those women who bore fish of every type as they swam in rivers and oceans. Some fish still swim upwards to the lakes, as if they remember that it is from the lakes that first they came, and there they lay their eggs and die. But we do not die. I do not know how many river wives still live and walk by day upon the shores of lake or river or ocean. I have never heard the voice of any other river wife in the rain or in the river.

  I thought when I was a small creature that I could hear the songs of others, sometimes faintly, in the flood waters of snowmelt, in the spring rush when ferns unfurled their fronds at the river’s edge, in the lazy river of autumn when leaves drifted upon the surface. But though my songs travelled down to the sea, no songs came back to me. I could hear only memories. Long-ago memories of river wives catching the stories of the world, singing and weaving them into water, threading them together through time so none were lost, and all were waiting to be heard.

  I did not know if other river wives took husbands from the people of the earth and gave birth to creatures such as me. My mother was gone before such things could be asked. I remembered that she swam beside me at night in the river. I remembered her dark shape sheltering me from the currents that moved over us. I remembered the line of her body, her fins frilling in the water, her watchful eye, her golden skin glowing as moonlight slipped between the folds of water.

  ‘Why did Mother leave us, Father?’ As I grew older he would still sit to answer me and sometimes he would take my hand and stroke it gently.

  ‘Perhaps there was somewhere else she needed to go. She never looked old, but she was. Older than the lake below and the lake above, and still I wonder at that for she was as young and as bright as summer to me. And you were born. Perhaps that was what she needed: a daughter to be here to carry on for her.

  ‘You will always be young, my little fish,’ my father said, ‘and one day I will be an old, old man.’

  ‘You will never be old, Father.’

  ‘I will, little fish, and there is nothing we can do to stop that.’

  ‘But you will stay with me?’

  ‘Forever and a day.’

  Wilson James followed me along the path and dipped his head a little as he passed through the door of the house my father had built. He ran his hands along the stone walls and gazed at the ceiling that was the wood of many trees. He moved about the room, trailing a finger along the table rubbed to a glow with beeswax, along the mantelpiece over the stone hearth. He looked out of the windows and rested his knee against the wide ledge where Father had liked to sit and watch the river.

  ‘Your father built this?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He is quite a craftsman. Is he about today?’

  ‘He is beside the river.’

  Wilson James observed me. His face had taken the colour of a man who knew the sky. He wore his shirt of blue lines and his feet wore boots that humans wore to walk in the mountains. I saw he had lost some of the softness that had startled me the day I saw him naked and sleeping. I felt a flush of warmth overtake me as he met my gaze. Wilson James turned from the window and his eyes found the bed and stopped. He walked over to it.

  ‘It’s a polar bear skin,’ he said. ‘It’s real. Unbelievable. Where did you . . . who gave it to you?’

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘Your husband?’ he said, and his voice was shallow. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He is not coming back.’

  Wilson James stood very still and ran his hand through the fur and then he looked at me.

  ‘What did he do, your husband?’

  ‘He was . . . a woodcutter,’ I decided.

  ‘Ah,’ said Wilson James.

  I smiled and said, ‘What sort of tea am I to make you?’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I smiled. ‘I will decide for you.’

  I stood and looked into his eyes and saw the circle of dark about the pupils. I saw the flecks of gold and cream that pulled out from the strands of deep blue. I saw the ache in his cheeks, the heaviness that lingered on his lips, the words that would not quiet in his ears, the whispers of childhood in the lines about his eyes. I saw his life waiting deep in his bones. I saw the food that had burned him from the inside, the sweats that worried him at night, the twitch at the edge of his face that was there when he awoke. I saw the gentleness in his skin that told me he had not found enough friends. I saw his eyes had not cried suffici
ent tears nor seen enough of what he truly loved.

  ‘What does your body need?’ I said aloud.

  ‘Coffee. Or a shot of Drambuie.’

  I made the tea to my mother’s recipe. Her recipes asked for many things and I had everything that was necessary. Bark, moss, leaf and river rock. I made the tea that would help the sadness in Wilson James’s eyes. It had not been made for many years, not since my mother made it for Father when first he came to the river. It had been long before I was born, but I knew every ingredient just as I had always known every song my mother had sung.

  Wilson James held the cup and sipped at the tea. He had settled into Father’s chair by the fireplace and the scent of him was the scent of somewhere far from here, where the world grew other trees. Dust spiralled in the open door as sunshine fell onto the floor stones. Steam drifted from the pan that cooled beside the fire. He sat forward and said, ‘You have not told me your name.’

  I looked into his face and said, ‘I have found in the naming of things that something happens.

  My father had names—the trees, the lakes, the mountains, the river, the small flowers and mosses. The butterflies. The fish. Each of them had a name that was fixed as lichen is fixed to a rock, but even lichen grows old and crumbles. I have lived for a long time now without the names of things, for when I name them they grow smaller. There are times now in the forest when a flower appears, berries grow, a certain fungus blooms, and if I name it I can pass it by as if I have seen it already. I do not want to pass it by. Every change is one of the sounds of the forest. Every fish is marked a different way. The bark of each tree has a pattern that is unique, a constellation of small creatures and plants which grow there and make it home, and it may have a neighbour which stands also in bark of a similar cloth, but it is not the same because its name is the same.’

  ‘Tree. Lake. Mountain. They are also names,’ said Wilson James.

  ‘But they are questions too.’

  ‘Perhaps I will think of a name for you.’

  ‘You may make a name but I will not be that every day.’

  Wilson James finished his tea and I poured more for him.

  It was the beginning of the summer when the sound of the river grew quieter to me than the sound of his voice, where the proximity of him made me consider how close they all were, people, to the forest. How long would it hold? Was it just him or would others soon be able to see me? I knew I must travel down to the greatest lake to be sure.

  I could have been afraid. I found the size of Wilson James in the cottage larger than I ever remembered Father being. But I had no fear of him. I wanted instead to lean against the arm of him so that I might feel the warmth under his shirt, put my head on his shoulder and watch the fire smoke weave faces in the air.

  ‘I am suddenly weary,’ he said, resting his head against the back of the chair.

  ‘Then I will tell you a story,’ I said.

  The story that came to me was the story of the white swan and the black swan, and as Wilson James sipped the second cup of sadness tea, I began.

  ‘It is said that one of the great rivers of the world is made from the tears of people who have wept over the anguish of time—too little time, time going too fast, time passing, time moving on. One summer day there came to the river a young woman who had promised herself that she would love no-one but Time itself. She washed her golden hair in the river, and sang the songs of day and night as the moon slipped between the branches of the trees and the sun turned the river white with its brightness. So long did she wait that Time stepped from the river in the cloak of a young man and said, “Why are you waiting? You grow older each day. One day your youth will fade and none will marry you. Why do you wait?”

  ‘ “I will marry only Time itself,” said the young woman.

  ‘ “Why is it Time that you want?”

  ‘ “I would live forever and see all things that pass and hear all songs that are sung if only Time was my husband. I will never lament the passing of time as others do, my children will never die and I shall be eternally happy.”

  ‘ “If you step into the water I will take you to Time,” said the young man.

  ‘The young woman liked the face of the young man, as it had a purpose in it she recognised as her own. So she stepped into the river. Deep did he take her, down into the coldest parts of the world, and long did they walk through the tunnels of the earth until they came to an underground lake so vast none could see its boundaries. Reflected in the lake were stars as bright as those in the night sky. It is said that the stars above the Lake of Time are the lights of children coming to the earth. The longer the child lives the more the star fades, for this is where Time begins and ends.

  ‘ “Long have you travelled, and many have been the days since you left the world behind,” the young man said. “Look into the water. You have walked with Time all these days and have I not been a gentle companion? Have we not talked and sung? Have we not been happy?”

  ‘And the woman looked into the water and saw she had grown old beyond recognition.

  ‘ “All women are married to me from the moment they are born. I am in your face as it grows from child to woman, in your womb that carries the children who will walk in your footsteps upon the earth, the grandchildren who will bury you and the land that will change about you in the passing of the seasons. But you have turned away from these things, these gifts of mine. Now time is in the furrows of your face, in your womb that will carry no children, in your eyes too old to weep tears and in your hands lined by the longing for things that cannot be caught.”

  ‘And in saying this he dropped the garb of a boy and took the form of a black swan that slipped onto the surface of the lake.

  ‘The woman stepped into the water and for a moment she felt the hand of the child she had never borne, the warmth of the grandchildren she would never hold, the cheek of her husband as he slept beside her; she smelled the summer grass and the fall of rain and the salt of the ocean before she slipped under the lake’s surface and was washed far away through the caves of the earth to the sea. There her spirit rose up into the sky and fell as rain and came at last to the great river, and there sat a young woman. The spirit of the old woman stepped from the river and said, “What is it you wait by the river for?”

  ‘ “I had thought to catch Time and make him my husband so that I might become eternal,” the young woman said.

  ‘ “Daughter,” said the old woman spirit, “go home to your village. Choose a man who will love you all of your life, bear children who will bring laughter to your days, enjoy the grandchildren who are the late fruit of the tree you have planted, remark at the seasons and the skies that change as the days go by, and with every breath know that you are married to Time from the moment you are born and by your side Time walks every day. While Time may bring the gifts of life, it is not life. Life is what you do with the gifts Time brings.”

  ‘And with that the old woman was transformed into a swan as white as snow, and to this day you will not see a black swan and a white swan swimming together, for one is Time and the other is Life and they have their own work.’

  By the end of the story Wilson James was asleep by the fireplace and the colours of his memories floated about him like the dust of pollen in spring air. Much later, when the day had almost passed, I went out and found the logs that stood still beside the house where my husband had stacked them and I made of them a fire of deep warmth, for Wilson James had grown very pale as he slept. I sat beside him as dusk fell over the river, and so many memories did that fire bring to me of Father and weather and the Winter King coming in from the snow.

  Wilson James slept on there in the chair and I slipped from the cottage to my place in the river. In the morning I found him still sleeping and I was happy to have him there at dawn with none to gaze upon his face but me. His sleeping face, his resting fingers on the blanket I had settled about him, his breath, his eyelashes, the skin beneath his shirt, his legs and feet. The smell
of him was gentle and keen all at once but I did not dislike it. If I had known he was to sleep so long I would have had him lie upon the bed—but then he did not know he was to sleep at all.

  I took the leaves from the bottom of his cup and placed them upon a shell on the ledge above the fireplace and patterned them into the shape he was seeking. I left them there where the warmth of the morning sun would reach them. He was still asleep at midday. I thought it best I did not make his tea so strong from then on.

  When he awoke at dusk he thought only a few hours had passed, not a whole day, and I did not tell. He unwound himself from the chair and stretched. ‘I missed your story,’ he said.

  ‘One day I will tell it again.’

  When he left he did not reach out and touch me, but his eyes touched my face.

  ‘I’m sorry I fell asleep,’ he said. ‘I feel quite strange.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘As if the forest is talking to me.’

  ‘Then perhaps you may find your story yet, Wilson James.’

  When it starts, love hides its ending well. But the symptoms are there of what will bring the dying and, like a withering branch or a greying leaf, the symptoms and the cause can be two very different things. I went about my work and Wilson James, with his footfall on the riverbank, remained. When I saw him it gave me rise to think again of him asleep in the chair by the fire, and though I left the tea leaves in a basket by his door, in case he wished to heal his sadness, I did not visit him and went first upstream and then down and then across the dark wetlands and forgot for days on end the cast of his eyes.