The River Wife Read online

  When I returned home, I looked for the light of his house beyond the trees but the light had gone. The tea was not upon his doorstep and his house was closed shut against the night and the day. Music with a lone mournful voice ran up and down inside the house like a bird felled by an arrow. For many long days it was this way, and I saw nothing of him. At night a faint rim of light marked the windows and I saw the merest flicker of a shadow and knew he was within. When he came out upon the riverbank at last an ache lay upon his cheek and the smell on his skin was of something dying.

  I waited upon the stone steps that led to the river path, and when he saw me he smiled against his sadness.

  ‘Ah, you have returned again,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is a sign.’

  I said, ‘There is a new reflection of yellow flowers at the lower bend.’

  ‘Is there?’ he said. ‘You must show it to me.’

  We took the rocks and found the bend. He gazed into the flowers shimmering there at the water’s edge, the breeze quivering their heads a little and the reflection making of the flowers twice what they were on land. The river had taken a new current to its centre, turning the water like the hair of a drowned woman warrior. We sat together, though the scent from his skin was strange and unsettling, and Wilson James placed stones one upon another until they tilted and fell. I wondered at a life measured by a span of years. I saw that if words were what he sought then the years were short to find them all and catch them on his page.

  He said, ‘What are you seeing?’

  ‘I am seeing the late morning upon you.’

  ‘Thank you for not being truthful with me,’ he said, his hand curled against his mouth, his shoulders heavy that day with weariness as if he carried a burden in his arms.

  The river wound its song about us and the small creatures of forest and water went about their days as heat began to fill the air. The ferns bent to the river and whispered shade and light, shade and light. The grasses stood upright, unfolding from the earth, reaching for a breath of breeze to give them movement. Bushes white with flowers bowed and dipped, rustling with the wings of birds seeking nectar. Far above, the heads of the tallest trees rumbled with coming weather. And no word passed between us for a long time.

  ‘I must set about my tasks,’ I said at last. I looked at him still sitting there.

  ‘Are you going away again?’ he asked, staring into the river.

  ‘This is my home. I never leave.’

  ‘I do not always see you. I have never seen your father.’

  ‘We are always here,’ I said, ‘beside the river.’

  I looked into his blue eyes, the shadow of hair that marked the edge of his jaw, the way one of his hands lay over the other between his knees. I thought how Wilson James’s face would look if he saw me slip into the water.

  ‘Are you my muse?’ he asked. ‘Have you brought me a story?’

  ‘You will find your story, Wilson James. I cannot find it for you.’

  Standing upstream in the river alone I watched the scales form on my feet and hands. Silver, green and gold.

  ‘What story have you brought me, Wilson James?’ I whispered. ‘Is this what it is to be human?’ I asked the river. ‘To feel this restlessness?’

  Leaves shivered and the shiver passed on, reflected in the surface of the lake. The sky lay low on the hills and the air was so quiet in the mist that no sound other than our breathing came to us. Across the sheen of lake came bubbles of light floating towards us, rainbow domes of swirling pink, gold, palest green, mauve, the finest fabric water can make, each bubble holding within it the breath of the lake. They passed us by, that fragile flotilla, and drifted onto the shore, still whole, still rainbow lined.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Wilson James, his breath no more than a whisper, as if his voice might burst the fragile membranes that held the rainbow spheres afloat. ‘Where have they come from? Is it something in the lake causing it?’

  ‘They are the dreams of children that have risen from the Lake of Time,’ I said, for that is what my father told me. As a fish I had watched them form beneath the lake’s surface, the cold and warm currents spiralling in long strands until they slipped free and rose into lines of bubbles transporting the sky’s smallest rainbows.

  Wilson James closed his eyes. The bubbles vanished mutely one by one. When he opened his eyes again Wilson James said, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘That is not a question I can answer,’ I said.

  ‘I thought not,’ he said.

  Brushing off the crumbs of food he had eaten, he said, ‘You do not feel the cold, you are not dressed for this place and yet you seem more of this place than the trees.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you eat? I saw no food in your house.’

  ‘I liked the bread of my father and the soups he made. But he has no need of such food anymore and neither do I.’

  He nodded. Wilson James had taken the human path that was marked with red shapes on trees. For a little way the music of the river followed the path through the lichen-covered trunks of the forest. But the path left the river behind as it climbed higher. Once Father and I climbed the mountain to the west and he thought it was a walk we could do from sun-up to sundown and that it would be safe for me. There were small streams and water pathways, but as soon as the river’s voice was gone I felt a darkness about me as if I was entering a world where I was blind. I chose never to walk the human way again but took always the river’s path.

  I found there was much I wished to ask Wilson James as we sat upon the shore. Wilson James, I had discovered, had words for every thought and colour, each mood or expression. It reminded me of Father and the words he had kept for each plant in the forest, each colour and texture of rock. Words were the clothes Wilson James wore, as if in speaking he cast a cloak about the world and it kept him safe as he walked.

  ‘Where are your parents?’

  ‘Oh, my father died last year—a stroke. He was on his way to an appointment. And my mother died some years back. Cancer.’ He looked up at the sky and rubbed his thumb against his other hand. The deepest sadness in Wilson James was still buried like a treasure inside him.

  ‘Is your heart broken?’ I asked Wilson James. ‘Are you in need of moss and spider web and rainbow scales?’

  He looked startled. Then weary.

  ‘My heart is as it is. I am not sure there’s much to be done with it,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about the sound of your river.’

  Wilson James sighed. ‘The river is as wide as this lake and the colour of yellow mud. It has roads and bridges and high-rises built beside it. There is one big park right in the middle of the city that has lots of trees. But not like these trees. I’ve never really had much interest in trees. Until I came here I’d never sat on the edge of a river. I used to go fishing on the coast with my father as a kid. But we only went a couple of times. It’s very strange to find myself here. It’s so quiet. Yet I am occupied. Occupied in a different way. I have mastered an axe. I watch the sky. I am befriending solitude. It scared me at first, but slowly I have started to feel as if I can breathe and no-one will take that breath away.’

  ‘How old are you, Wilson James?’

  ‘I am forty-seven,’ he said.

  ‘Have you mastered many things?’

  ‘No. Perhaps nothing. In forty-seven years I have written one good novel, two bad novels and one novel everyone seemed to think was brilliant. The good novel followed the brilliant novel and then the two bad ones followed that. The manuscript I wrote last year hasn’t even found a publisher. My own just shook her head. And what was worse was I couldn’t see it was bad and I had no idea how to fix it. None of the greats grew worse over the years—their books got better. Not mine. It’s enough to make any publisher, and my agent, very nervous. “Wilson James is the great un-read. People think they ought to own his books but they can’t bear to read them because they’re just awful.” That’s what one reviewer said about me. I’ve becom
e a critic’s expression when a novelist pulls off a good second or third novel—“So and so has proved he’s not suffering from the James effect.” The James effect? You see, in some ways it’s worse to fail later than earlier because people have expectations. They pay good money. And then if you let them down they’re not kind. I had a neighbour stop me in the street and say, “I read Narcissus Lives and it made me very sad.” And I knew it wasn’t the book that made him sad, but my failure. When you’ve written well and then you go into decline, it’s as if you haven’t been trying hard enough. As if the muse has run off, appalled at your inadequacy.’

  ‘Have you always been alone, Wilson James?’

  ‘No, surprisingly, I’ve been married twice.’ He smiled with the merest lift of his mouth. ‘My second wife left me after an interview that went horribly wrong was published in a magazine. I’m afraid that I am about to find that my best living, and my best writing, is done. That there is an awful stretch of loneliness ahead of me. That I will live always with a sense of a life missed or avoided. That, after all, I had no real or lasting ability at anything. That it was all something wishful.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘No comfort,’ he said.

  I had written no books. I had tended the river and I had never wondered for how long I would do these things. But I wondered then.

  He looked far off across the lake. His lips were a steady line marking two shallow hills. His nose was sculpted to suit him. His teeth were white when he smiled and the hairs that grew on his chest sprang up grey and white and brown over the fabric of his shirt.

  On the surface of the lake a ring appeared, and another, and beneath its surface I saw the flash of a fish as it rolled.

  Wilson James said, ‘It’s as if I was swimming— for forty-seven years—and then suddenly one day I looked up and saw that I was swimming and that took all the joy out of it.’

  ‘You don’t like to swim?’

  ‘It’s all I know how to do and I am tired of it.’

  ‘Of swimming?

  ‘Of being. I think of just being.’

  ‘I like to swim,’ I said. ‘It’s what I love to do.’

  ‘In the lake? It’s freezing. When do you swim?’

  ‘At night.’

  ‘That I have to see.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you swim today?’ asked Wilson James.

  ‘Later,’ I said.

  ‘I will wait on the riverbank until you appear.’

  ‘Then you will be bitten by many mosquitoes,’ I said.

  ‘Shall we walk back together?’ laughed Wilson James.

  ‘Until the next lake I will walk by the river with you,’ I said.

  When we parted company and he went on along the path he said, ‘I am running low on supplies. I’ll be gone a couple of days. I’m happy to get anything you need.’

  Father had brought tools for the house from the town I had never seen. Father said town was full of things people needed. He said once you started needing things from town, you never stopped.

  ‘I will not be needing anything, Wilson James,’ I said to him.

  Summer played gently on the lake’s edge, nesting in the long evenings and the pearl dawns. Creatures brought their young to the lake’s edge. The grass plains above the forest were filled with yellow-winged butterflies as I walked the open pathways between river and lake, singing to the small tributaries and streams that ran towards the river, clearing them of stones and sticks that had tumbled there, singing to the little creatures the stories of the world and the river which was their mother.

  Wilson James came by the river late in the afternoon and called to me. He carried a cloth wrapped about something in his arms. When he unwrapped it on a fallen trunk I saw it was bread, bread sending its smell like a memory into my bones.

  ‘The first two times it didn’t rise. And then . . .’ he said.

  The sound of my father’s voice was clear again to me as if he stood just beside me, the knife in his hand, the loaf upon the cutting board. ‘Be careful, little fish. It is human food and I am not sure it is what you need. Eat it slowly now.’ And I had. Nibbling at its hard edges, the crumbs falling into my lap, the warm, fragrant centre of it soft in my fingers. Father had made for himself stews of meat, but for me he made a clear soup and I would dip tiny pieces of bread in it and let them soak on my tongue.

  ‘Here, try some,’ said Wilson James. He pulled from his back pocket a knife and then the blade was hovering above the loaf, waiting to bite the crust.

  ‘The berries are ripening all about,’ he said. ‘Do they make good jam?’

  ‘I do not know it,’ I said.

  ‘Jam? Goes on bread.’

  I shook my head.

  He handed me a slice and I took it and smelled it. It was still warm. He watched me and there was a happiness on his face, buzzing about him like a visiting fly.

  He cut a slice for himself.

  ‘I don’t have any butter. Nor honey,’ he said.

  ‘Honey, yes,’ I said, leaping up. Something about him watching me made me want to buzz like a fly too. I darted over the riverbank and into the house, and found there, upon the shelf, one of the glass jars Father had stored. Bringing it back into the light I saw the honey had turned dark gold in the passing of time.

  Wilson James lifted away the rusted lid and sniffed. Using the knife he dug a chunk from the jar the colour of amber quartz. When he tasted it, his eyes closed and he shook his head. ‘That is the most amazing flavour. Where is it from?’

  ‘From here in the forest. You may take the jar. I have more.’

  ‘What happened to me?’ he asked suddenly, clouds moving across the forest above him though there would be no rain. ‘One day I was in a city with a schedule and friends and withering reviews, and now I am here and it is as if the world I have known no longer exists. Every day this place is different. I can’t rely on anything. Like the sky. How did the sky get so big here? In the city it’s grey. It’s grey every day. But here the sky is blue. Incredibly blue and so close. Like it’s right here with us. Not far away. Sunshine makes just about anything pretty. I never noticed things like that before. I thought I was noticing but I wasn’t at all.’

  He watched me nibbling at the bread. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I think this is how loving a child tastes. New and tender yet like a habit as old as the seasons.’

  As I said it a purple veil threatened to close over Wilson James. But he held and gripped.

  ‘Do you have children, Wilson James?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘No,’ I said. But it was not the truth. A river wife can bear only one daughter and my only daughter was no longer with me. If ever I went from this place there would be no daughter of mine, no river wife left to weave the songs and stories of the river.

  ‘I found a couple of old books in town on fly-fishing,’ he said at last. ‘Do you fish?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I heard a story when I was down there about a man who built a house up here but no-one’s ever found it. Apparently the guy was seen in these parts for a long time. Too long. Made people think he was a ghost. But there’s a case down there with some of the lures he made. I wondered if that was your father, the one they talk about?’

  I said nothing. Wilson James nodded.

  ‘I heard there are giant fish in here too but of course no-one’s ever caught one. Too many deep holes and currents. The river below the big lake is easier, they say. Browns and rainbows. Will you come with me one day? Trying to catch a fish may be a perfect distraction from writing.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Sometime?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you would be luckier without me,’ I said.

  ‘Why would that be?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t I find your house when you are gone? I go and
look for it but I can never find the path. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘You must take the bread with you,’ I said. ‘I will not eat it alone.’

  The water was not cold, although Wilson James said it was freezing. He took off his boots, unlacing each one and putting them side by side on the shore. He slid off his socks and stood in the shallows in the brown spin of water. Wetness glistened off the smooth stretch of skin beneath his ankle, along the arch of his foot. The hair on his legs was dark against his skin. He sat beside me with his trousers pulled up over his knees and water pooled on the white gravel beyond our feet. The air hummed with insects that he waved away with his hand.

  ‘So many things go on that are invisible, so many things happen that you would never know,’ he said. ‘There are swarms of flies that rise off the water. There are fish which leap for no reason.’

  ‘They leap for food.’

  ‘The river is liquid but it is airborne,’ he said. ‘All this moisture that rises off it, the mist and spray, it must get breathed in by everything here— trees, ferns, moss, fungi, flowers. This whole place relies on water. It’s like water is its air.’

  I said nothing, listening only to the sound within his voice that reached for me and drew me closer. His voice ahead of me on the path, the cadence of his stride a rhythm that suited, the air between us coloured with words, the mist of river that settled on his hair and curled it. These are the particles that love can gather from.

  ‘The summer is passing into autumn and I think that I will stay on a little longer,’ he said.

  Then, ‘How did you meet him, your husband?’ he said suddenly, and in the suddenness of it I answered him truthfully.

  ‘He came from the mountains,’ I said.