The River Wife Read online

  He held my face and kissed me. His body was like a cave I wanted to curl up in, his mouth a pool where I could taste sunlight.

  ‘I want to make love to you.’

  ‘It won’t help,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘We cannot.’

  Ilingered in rain as it settled on my arms and nose, and licked the mist from my fingertips. I ran my fingers over bark. I touched the hairs of unfurling ferns and the skin of new leaves. I rested my cheek on vivid moss. I thought of how Wilson James had looked before he kissed me. I thought of how the lines that marked his forehead were deeper than any other lines on his face, and when we laughed together it was as if we were young and saplings.

  ‘What is unseen has always been the greatest challenge to humans,’ my father said, and I understood him as I never had before. Wilson James had drawn a thread across my skin and it pulled me towards him. I resisted.

  As a fish I did not think about skin and touch. I was a creature of watchfulness. I was absorbed by movement. I sought food. I sought shelter. To live in water is to understand submission. As a woman I was consumed by the need to touch. I felt the rush of yearning, the flow of desire, but I would not submit to it.

  After some days his face receded. I stayed upstream and focused again on ripples and whorls caught in water, and the weaving and folding of stories before the river flowed on, carrying with it the alchemy of told and untold things. The moon filled and emptied and Wilson James did not rise up except when I chose to think of him. Then I found myself quite still, as if listening, but instead I was watching the pictures I had gathered of him.

  I had not tested the visibility I had with Wilson James upon another human. But I had to know if others might see me too. If others could reach out and find my skin. Had the years of living with none for company called up in me the capacity to slip beyond my domain and enter at last the world of humans? Is this what my loneliness had made? A pathway to others who were like me?

  I darted and tumbled through rapid and rock fall, over waterfall and through crevasse, until I was carried into the greatest lake. The mountains were fired by dawn. I swam across the lake and slipped into a quiet finger of river. There I stepped from the water and took my woman form and waited to test this Wilson James effect. I smiled for he would like to think that his name had another purpose. The James effect—to see people from the world just beyond the reach of human sight.

  The heat of the day had passed before a man came through the trees and stepped onto the riverbank. His face was shaded by the brim of his hat. As he stood in the water he made small hissing noises through his teeth. Sometimes he mimicked the songs of birds in answer to their calls in the forest beyond.

  Dragonflies came and inspected his fly trick that skimmed across the water’s surface. The man adjusted his rod and waited. The silt in the water stirred at his feet and settled back to the river bottom. He went quietly downstream into the deep ponds, clambering over unseen rocks in the river. Again the feather darted across the water. I saw two trout turn and move upstream, leaving a small circle on the river’s dark skin.

  Leaves gathered and moved slowly downstream. Between the grasses on the river’s edge spiders spun their webs. A frog sounded and then another, reciting their small poems over and over again. Insects hopped right into the river and were eaten before they were wet. The man caught his web in the leaves of a tree and pulled for its return. I stepped from behind a tree and he did not glance at me. I moved closer to him along the riverbank and still he did not appear to notice me. I stepped into the river and I remained invisible to him.

  His hat was the colour of trees that grow tall in the snow. He could sense a fish close to his legs but the day was too warm and the fish was not interested in him. I said to him, ‘A river wife knows every fish and no fish would be caught while she is watching.’ The man heard nothing. But I knew I must make a final test and this was more difficult. I placed my hand on the man’s arm. He did not even remark it as a thread of hair or a passing fly.

  In the shallow light of the water I looked at the face that looked back at me. My face had not aged as my father’s had. The dress I had cast as I stepped from the water that morning was the yellow green of summer grass with a tiny leaf pattern on it. My hair was as dark as water in shadow.

  I stood beside the man and saw fish were feeding on a wash of dead flies that had drowned in the rapids upriver. Birds were singing coming- home songs. I watched the man spin his web and it made patterns in the sky one more time before I slipped back upstream to where the river rushed and tumbled. Only Wilson James could see me and touch me and hear me, and I could touch him. The mystery of it deepened. And I was happy thinking that somehow Wilson James had come through for me.

  My daughter was born in the river and from the river I carried her. Deep and early was the snow that fell that day and brought the Winter King to hold his baby girl for the first time. I had carried her inside me and large had grown my belly and dark my skin so that I thought to burst, so full did I feel with the creature inside me. When she was born I was surprised to find I could feed her the milk from my breasts and I worried at her humanity. Would she change shape and form? Blue were her eyes and soft was her skin. She was, from her earliest days, her father’s daughter, but at night she was mine. In the moonlight I carried her to the river and together we swam to the moonpool and fed as fish do. At dawn I brought her with me from the water and together we would lie and watch the sun descend into the forest and catch the brilliant gleam of snow among the dark trunks of trees.

  As soon as her legs had found her she was running. By the following winter she was gone from my breast. As soon as the sun touched the water she was out of the river and she would not return by day, wanting only to be in the mountains finding colder and colder places, searching out new valleys and higher rivers, each one further than the next.

  ‘I do not like to be warm,’ she said.

  ‘We need to tend the river for all seasons.’

  ‘It is better to be higher. To be colder.’

  My daughter trembled on hot days. Through late spring and all through summer she was restless. She lay in her human form in the deepest pools, yearning for cold, and would not settle to her songs. She was happiest when the winter returned and her father with it. She loved the forest, but she ached for mountains bigger and further than I could ever go.

  ‘Could I go there with Father to the mountains that are made of ice?’

  ‘I do not know if you can leave the river.’

  ‘I would go with Father to the far reaches if he would take me.’

  I knew what it was to love the man who held your hand in the forest and rubbed his cheek against yours before sleep. How could I hold her to me when she strained to walk in her father’s footsteps, to be gone from the binding of night and day, forest and river, darkness and light? She was my heart and she was the river’s creature but she was born for a different story.

  One late afternoon, as her father’s companions played the music of snowfall, she fell asleep at the table. I put her in the small bed my father had once made for me. As she slipped into dreams she became a bear, a white bear cub, there on the bed, and her father cried. Though she could swim as a fish, though she had the luminescence of fish, soon she could change her form to bear and even bird at whim.

  As she grew older I saw that in the making of her we had created a creature more strange and wonderful than I had ever imagined. She was not bound as I was bound and I cannot be sad for her that it was so. For the binding to duty is both a gift and a burden. The burden is heavy and the gift is bright. She knew the songs of the river but she knew the songs of winter too, and the scent of cold drew her ever to return to her father’s lands. And finally she did. When the Winter King left, something more precious than winter itself went with him. My daughter.

  A river wife bears only one daughter and that daughter is born with all the knowledge she holds inside her. Our daughters are the
making of songs and the keeping of songs and the passing of songs on through time without end. Every day new worlds are born and new rivers begin to flow and we are called to our rivers and there we are bound to tend the stories of time. Our daughters are born as river wives, they do not choose it or learn it, they and their purpose are one.

  My daughter visited my life for such a tiny fragment of time. I see her shadow through the trees, her laughing voice, her wings as she flew, the shape of her beside me in the moonpool at night, close beside me, watching the weaving of water. When I lost her face from my days, I felt as if I began to grow old and the tears I cried flowed into the Lake of Time, for time was all I wanted. Time to be with my daughter again.

  And all this I lived again as I thought of my desire to love Wilson James.

  Wilson James left small cairns of rocks along the riverbank one morning, and in each cairn he had placed a stem of flowers. I walked in his footsteps about the forest and saw how he had come close to the house but had not crossed into the garden. I wondered how long it would be before I found him at my door. What would I do with him then? Was love so hard to allow?

  One late afternoon we stood together on the edge of the river where I had first found him. Only the small orange pods of a nearby tree added colour to the green of deep autumn. Fine rain descended lightly, dissolving as it touched the water. Wilson James said, ‘Why do you touch me so deeply? Why do I find myself with no other thoughts than the picture of your face? When I wake I listen for the sound of your voice singing by the river. I long for the sight of you by day, your footfall at night on my verandah.’

  ‘What do you need, Wilson James?’ I asked him.

  ‘Other than sex?’ he smiled. ‘Simple things. A decent bed at night. Shelter. Food. I need to be held every now and then. I need a notebook and a pen.’

  His hand turned mine over and he touched the course of all my fingers. It was as if no other thing moved in the forest. I found myself looking at his lips with their trace of grey in the centre.

  ‘I do not know how to reach out to you,’ said Wilson James, and I felt the river rise in him and almost wash over him so deep did he sigh, as if the cup of his soul was unsteady.

  ‘You must not.’

  ‘Do you not feel this way?’

  ‘It would be entirely unwise.’

  ‘Where is your father?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘He is here.’

  ‘No, he’s not here. I have never seen him. You talk about him as if he’s alive, but where is he?’

  ‘He is by the river.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You should not be here in the forest. You should never have spoken to me that day on the riverbank. But still you are here. Are you ready to know the forest?’

  ‘Why should I not be here?’

  ‘I have never known another man but you.

  Other than my father.’

  ‘But you had a husband.’

  ‘He was not a man as you are a man.’

  ‘These are all riddles. Let me meet your father.’

  And so I took him. We stood there on the banks of the river and the ancient skin of my father was pale in the green of forest. Wilson James shook his head.

  ‘This cannot be your father. He built the house, yes? He was a man.’

  ‘Yes. He promised he would stay. And so he has.’

  ‘It’s not possible. I understand if he has died and this is how you cope with it. But this is a tree.

  See? It’s a tree. A man cannot become a tree.’

  ‘You do not need to be frightened,’ I said.

  ‘So is the river your husband? Or is that very rock? Did you turn him to stone waiting for you?’

  ‘I cannot do such things. It was my father’s choice.’

  ‘To be a tree?’

  ‘If you cannot understand this then you will never understand the river. You will never belong here.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to belong here. I have tried to leave. But I cannot. I pack my bags and then I find myself unpacking again. I am walking in a dream that has no end. Is it you who holds me here? If I can’t understand then let me go. I do not know what it is you want of me.’

  ‘I am not holding you here, Wilson James. If you are here still it is not my doing but entirely your own. You have come here to the river and it has made me remember stories I have tried hard to forget. You are all that I have learned to be afraid of.’

  ‘I came here because I didn’t love anything anymore. I thought that if I went far enough away I might learn again. You are right, I don’t belong here where everything is familiar to you and strange to me. You frighten me. This tree frightens me. Even the river frightens me. But I don’t know how to leave.’

  He pulled from his pocket a small white rock and turned it over in his hand before throwing it hard across the river.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Wilson James to my father, ‘I am sorry I cannot hear your stories. Perhaps they would answer all the questions your daughter will not. But it does not matter anymore. I will leave this place. I will leave and I will not return.’

  And with that Wilson James was gone, his footsteps heavy on the forest floor, the shape of him disappearing quickly in the dark light of forest. I stayed there quiet and after a little while I slipped into the river, and only then did I settle.

  Wilson James did not leave and the silence that fell between us was louder than all the words we had spoken. I knew I could have gone to him. His anger would have disappeared as clouds disappear. But he would want to know the story of my father, and of my mother, and then it would come, the story of me. I could not do that. I knew that path. One day he would go.

  I had lived the years when winters came without my daughter and my husband and I remembered how long those days had been. I had waited for my husband to lift me again from the river, for smoke to drift from the chimney at dawn, welcoming me back. I had listened for my daughter’s steps upon the river rocks, her voice joining with my song. For longer than some humans live, I had watched for any bright face between the trees. Winter after winter I waited and they had never returned. I would not live that way again.

  I took to standing in the river through the days until I could not feel the water at all and even the last of the flies ignored me. The rustle of the leaves became simply the rustle of leaves, not Wilson James moving through fern fronds to find me.

  I climbed upstream. Clouds came past, being faces and messengers. I watched the sky and wondered why humans and trees and even fish become dry bones. I swam in the highest lake as a woman and let fish slip and slide over my belly. I watched as new flies rushed like a ghost bird along the surface of the water. A fish leapt skyward, parting the ghost bird into a hundred tiny creatures, seizing two, and arced back into the lake, the rings of its surfacing drifting away. The sky bled away into darkness and cold slept on my silver-scaled skin all night.

  The hum of Wilson James accompanied his footsteps along the river. He watched the river. Pools eddied and stilled and turned on his bare feet. Wilson James stared across at the place he knew my house to be though he could not reach it alone. The light flared in the trees and sent back nothing but the forest to him.

  I climbed the hill behind his house until the rooftop was like a wing out into the trees and I could have tied myself to it and fluttered above the green. One evening I stood within his garden and smelled his tobacco smoke. He stood out on the deck watching the hello-moon clouds. I saw him move from room to room, his hand on his chin, his shirt crumpled. I knew his eyes searched for a sign of me, and although I was there he denied his senses and turned away.

  Long after I should have been at my pool in the river I watched him sleep and I wished I could hush myself into the air about him and run my breath along his sleeping skin. I sat naked upon the wet rocks and the low moon bathed my skin and filled me with the quiet of water once again. I wished for rain that would fall so long it would wash the heat away from me.

  Why had he come? What w
ould I do if he could not leave? If he left what would he take with him when he went?

  I rested my cheek against the fur on the bed and tried to find the smell of my husband, remembered him coming as a bear into the house and dissolving into a man with his wild hair, his big laugh, his shining face. Together we had once been happy as the snow fell and the house was quiet with the tumble of burning logs in the fireplace, our daughter asleep between us in the quiet of afternoon, then waking and urging us outdoors to see the first stars, bending her face over the moonpool in the morning, saying ‘Mother, Mother, wake up, the day is here.’

  The weight of stories lingered with me as autumn turned its face to winter and beckoned home.

  Wilson James chopped wood for my house and stacked it on the pathway. He left bread on a stone by the river for me. One morning I waited for him and we stood together, the breeze cool on our faces. Though the water between us was calm again, my heart seemed to race inside me as if it was in a hurry to go somewhere on its own.

  ‘Have you ever listened to the conversation of ants?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, I can’t say I have,’ he said.

  ‘They always talk of family.’

  ‘I don’t think I have small enough ears to hear them.’

  ‘They speak loudest in the morning,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me one of your stories.’

  ‘What story would you like to hear?’

  ‘Oh, something about a man and a woman,’ he smiled.

  ‘Well then,’ I said sitting upon a rock. Wilson James took another nearby, laced his fingers and stared into the river.

  ‘Once there was a woman who had two shoes and one of them she laid in the river. The shoe nestled between the river grasses and slowly over the days the woman sang to the shoe so that she might have a husband. The shoe grew first a baby and then a boy and then a young man until at last the woman came to the river and found a fully grown man sitting on the river’s edge.