The River Wife Page 9

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I need to sleep,’ I said, and rare though it had been that I slept in that house, sleep I did. When I awoke, long was the afternoon quiet that slipped across the floor. Wilson James was lying beside me, watching me. He had in his hand a jar and with his finger he marked each cut and scratch with the pale yellow contents.

  ‘I do not know if it works for fish, but certainly it works for humans,’ he said. The ointment felt soft and good on my skin.

  ‘I thought to find you dead today,’ I said.

  ‘But I am not dead, and somehow I feel better than I have ever felt,’ he said.

  ‘I am not sure this is wise.’

  ‘Wisdom may be overrated,’ he said, gathering me close to him, tender for the scrapes and bruises on my belly and arms and legs. He found my mouth and kissed me. And together we found what has been true ever since people have been. That there is no pleasure more sweet or sad, no touch more urgent or gentle, no taste more exquisite, no sound more dear, than the pleasure we take in the skin and the shape and the touch of the one we love.

  The words of love threaded themselves about us as snow settled on the mountains and in the forest. The breath of love was upon every ripple of skin, every mark and crease and line, every wrinkle and crevice and pale softness of skin. Each sound of breath, each texture of touch, each expression and glance and pattern did we bind together into a story that was ours.

  Wilson James brought me wine the colour of late sun on wheat grass. It made me feel like a song would burst right out of me, like the water inside me would bubble up with my heart.

  I said to him, ‘Stay with me all night, lie with me in the river and tell me your words.’

  ‘It is winter,’ he said. ‘And I am just a man.’

  So together we sat upon a rock while the scales slowly took the place of my skin there in the twilight, and he told me stories of fishing in the ocean from a boat and how the fish were as big as men and bigger still. He told me how black cockatoos only ever travel in odd numbers, three or five or eleven, never in pairs or even numbers. He told me that words were his lovers and he could never leave them. He told me that in all his life he had only written three sentences he had liked. He told me that for many years he fell in love each autumn and sometimes he had fallen in love with the same woman all over again. He told me he wished he had known his son better. He told me that the colour of my eyes reminded him of moss he once saw beneath a waterfall. He said he couldn’t believe I did not die of hypothermia. I told him I was a fish. He laughed and said he sometimes still did not believe it and so I transformed for him and dived deep and watched him as he turned this way and that on the rock. He shouted and then he waited and then he held his hands under the water. He laid his fingers wide and I swam into them and he cradled my fish body and moved his fingers along the length of me and his tears made circles in the water.

  ‘You’ve spoiled it for me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I shall never eat fish again.’

  ‘It is not quite like that . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There are fish that are fish and there are fish which are other than fish. Like birds. And spiders. And trees.’

  ‘Trees? Like your father?’

  ‘Yes, it is not always as it seems . . .’

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’

  ‘You will know.’

  ‘How can a man know such things?’

  ‘They are gone, mostly, the ones who could change.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t change back? He has always remained as he is?’

  ‘Perhaps it is not his time yet.’

  ‘Tell me you are not the last.’

  ‘I think I am the last.’

  On the river’s edge, he walked. Within the river, I swam. Each day’s end came fast and each morning was relief to find him still there. Snow fell and melted. The sun climbed further along the edge of the mountain. The grasslands erupted in flowers. Yellow and white and pink and brown petals arrived in the forest. The river rushed from every shelf and tarn and lake. The forest was loud with water but loud too was the quietness of companionship. By day I wove the water’s stories and he wove his.

  At dawn, when I returned, sometimes he would be asleep on the bed and other days the cottage would be empty and those days I did not go to him at the house at the river’s bend, though I longed to hear his voice. I found that in not being with him there grew a kind of thread that pulled tighter and tighter until we sprang back together.

  Night after night he worked, the scratch of his pen silent across the page but for the tiny dry twitchings at the edges as he turned and began again. He would not say what it was he was writing. The river flowed. Love flowed. I began to sense the rhythms of his body in new ways. The need he had for me, for silence, for conversation, for touch, for sleep. His eyes brightened and his body hardened. He mastered the tools and snares he found about the cottage. He refilled the jars long empty. He restored the pathway to the river from the house. He repaired the cracks that had appeared in the walls and the holes in the roof and about the windows. He tilled the garden and encouraged food to grow.

  By summer he had closed up the house at the bend in the river and his clothes hung beside the bed in the cottage. His books lined the shelves and I looked at the pictures upon them. A strange bird I had never seen. A woman on a long stretch of land. A pair of shoes. Someone standing in shadow beside a tree. A man with a long narrow face. Some had no pictures. And all of them were filled with words. I did not ask to hear their stories and Wilson James did not offer to tell them to me.

  He took to making small birds of pebbles and wood. Each observed the world uniquely. Some were curious. Others forlorn. Some bright and filled with song. He made a mask of a woman’s face from tree bark and hung it by the door. Larger birds he made along the pathways, each with its own gaze and plumage of rock and wood. Inside the house he collected wings of silver thread, a body of black shining parts, a curved husk still legged but empty, a spider’s carcass, a shell from the river, small bones and leaves that had called to him as he passed.

  How short and deep the days, how fast came the sunset. I took to drinking tea or soup while he ate his lunch. I had a little bread with him at night. Were it not for having to slip to the river to sleep, I might have convinced myself that truly I was more human than fish. But the river called me. I would wait until the scales burned on my hands and feet before I slipped to the water. I did not want to leave him.

  On the bright nights of full moon I swam back and forth watching the light in the house, holding to my woman form until I could no longer hold on. And there were nights he stood at the riverbank and watched the moon’s reflection hide me from him. Sometimes he sat long into the night on a rock, watching the river and the sky.

  How I wanted one night, just one night, to sleep with him from dark until dawn and not be taken from him. To spend one night upon the earth. I searched for stories where such pacts could be made but there were few. There was a woman who was bound as a white deer but was finally released by the love of a man. There was a man who lived as a bear in a cave until he was freed by the craft of a bird. And there was a king turned into a mountain until he was found by his daughter.

  But none of these were for a single night. It would be enough, I convinced myself. One night, so that I might know what other lovers knew and treated as commonplace: the simple notion of lying side by side and dreaming. And beyond dreaming, waking to the touch of the other, the breath and slumber and waking face of the other. The new light of day catching upon the fall of cheek, the first whisper of voice, the heat of skin.

  I grew restless.

  ‘I think I would give anything to sleep just one night together,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure my snoring is worth it,’ said Wilson James.

  ‘It is not your snoring I had in mind,’ I said. I had heard that well enough in the afternoons when we had taken to the bed and
loved and slept before dusk, or in the mornings when I awoke and slipped from the river to find him still sleeping.

  ‘What is it that you want from the night?’ Wilson James asked.

  ‘I think to feel as a woman feels.’

  There were so many signs I didn’t see. I was accustomed to observing the paired leaves of flowers and the petals of tree blossoms, the blades of new grass and the withering of fronds. I was used to the bright flecks in granite, the shards of rock which hide the spirals and tendrils of fossils, the softness of rain-soaked earth and the light touch of fog blown in from the lake. Now his face was the terrain I watched most carefully.

  By the second winter we shared together Wilson James had grown used to the cold. His body had grown broad and strong, his face bright with the forest’s air, his movement had about it the lift of a light bough, the rustle of a breeze. No step did he make that was unsteady or rough, no noise did he make as he moved along a path, climbed a track, crossed a fallen tree or rock fall. He was nimble and light and the earth had befriended him.

  When I found the run of scales upon his ankle I looked at his face. He seemed no worse for them. I traced the small line of them as we lay on the bed. Pearl with an edge of pale green.

  ‘You have rubbed off on me,’ he said. ‘A fish tattoo.’ He did not seem unhappy as he ran his fingers across the opal edges. ‘Now there is a story. Not the woman who gave up her fish tail but the man who grew one. Perhaps you may have me for a night after all when I join you as a fish in the river,’ he said.

  When he slept I checked his wrists, the insides of his arms, his toes, but they were nowhere other than his right foot. We made light of it and at first there were no more scales.

  Summer came with red-winged dragonflies. Heavy black lumbering flies erupted from the lake shores. Boats plied the waters of the great lake and the noise of people drifted through the forest. But still we were undisturbed.

  Sun fell between the trees and lit the forest with brightness. The lakes blinked blue and still and many days we swam in the highest lake with our skins white beneath the water. And then amber painted the leaves and autumn was upon us again. We deepened in our ways together as we prepared for winter. Sometimes I found us humming beside each other and he would reach for me and kiss my mouth and he had never looked so alive.

  One morning I came from the river to find the first frost upon the ground. Time had not occurred to me before as anything but a pattern that was behind and ahead of me, but I had come to understand it was much more than that. Time was a vessel that held all manner of memory and hope.

  Wilson James was sleeping deeply upon the bed. His naked back was beautifully marked with scales all the way up his spine.

  ‘See,’ I said, and guided his hand when he awoke.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. On his ankle it had been a small sign of our union. But upon his back it seemed that Wilson James was undergoing his own transformation.

  ‘Am I to be a fish?’ he asked. ‘After all this, is my destiny so clear? Did you know this would happen?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘I thought there on my ankle it was a way of knowing I belonged somehow, here, with you. I have tried to pretend it would pass. That it would go if ever I left here. And that while I stayed with you it made me safer.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is this what happened to your husband?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Where is your husband?’

  ‘He is with my daughter. He is not a fish.’

  ‘Your daughter?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘You have a daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you never told me.’

  ‘I could not.’

  ‘I have told you everything that has mattered to me.’

  ‘I could not speak of her.’

  ‘Where is she? Is she a fish?’

  ‘She could swim as a fish but she walked also as a bear for her father . . .’

  ‘He was a bear?’

  ‘Yes, and also a man but not—’

  ‘It’s his skin. On the bed. All this time—’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘He left his skin behind when he . . . when he and my daughter went away. I didn’t know they were leaving. I would be with them still, but I am bound to the river . . .’

  I should not have said it. It was as if by wishing myself with them I had wished him away. He turned from me and said, ‘But now you will have me to keep you company.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We will make it stop.’

  ‘Really? I am not so sure. Will it stop if I leave? Can you make it stop?’

  ‘I do not know,’ I said.

  ‘I am not like your husband or your daughter. I am just this one thing. I can’t be as you are. I am just a man.’

  Wilson James checked his arms and legs. He ran his hand behind him over the scales and they shimmered as they moved.

  ‘How much time do I have?’ he asked.

  ‘We can’t be sure.’

  And then he said, ‘You asked me once if I was brave. My love, I am not this brave.’

  My father hunched in a land far from the river. He said he hunched where the leaves were as big as branches and heat dripped from the sky. He had been with a group of men and other men found them and killed all of them except my father. My father hid so silently in the bushes they did not know he was there. He squatted low on his heels in the greenness and the men set up camp right beside the bushes he waited in. They stayed there for three days. He stayed there for three days too. To move was to die. So he didn’t move. They made food and told stories in a language he did not understand and for three days he waited. He had to take sips of water, he needed to eat, he had to sleep, and all these things he did as slowly and quietly as if he was a flutter of breeze, so still did he become. On the third day they packed up camp and left without ever knowing he was there. So slow was he by then that it took him three weeks to walk back to camp, and though he walked past other fighting, and other killing, he was invisible.

  They let him go home then. They said he had done enough. And that was when he came here. He walked into the forest with nothing in his mind but a quiet place where no-one would ever find him again. I thought of my father standing by the river, the mark of the leaf tattooed on his cheek, and I saw that the desire to stand so still that death would overlook him had not started with Mother, or ended with me, but came with who he was when he came to the forest. His love for me simply made it easier and gave it purpose.

  ‘You are going somewhere?’ Wilson James asked.

  ‘I must take a journey.’

  ‘Don’t leave me yet. Not yet. Perhaps it is all as it should be. Perhaps this is my journey to be with the river, as you are. Perhaps I can be this thing. Perhaps it is possible.’

  ‘I was born to this.’

  ‘Does that mean I cannot do this? Your father is a tree.’

  ‘In all the stories that are told there is an order. We cannot vary from it without consequence. I think that is what happened to my mother. She bore a child with a human. Such a thing was not foretold. It had no place in the order of things. And I think she paid a price for that. And this is our price. My price. I am half human and yet it seems I am also eternal and it is not the order of things. So I have lost all that has been dear to me. My father and mother, my husband and daughter. And now you have crossed into the world of the unseen and you too are beyond the order of things.’

  ‘But who determines this? Who says what is the order and what is not?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Yes, they.’

  ‘They are . . . like you?’

  ‘No, older than river wives. Older than time itself. That is what is told.’

  ‘And where are they?’

  ‘In the Lake of Time.’

  ‘And where is the Lake of Time?’

  ‘Beneath every river
there is another river and all of them flow into the Lake of Time.’

  ‘It’s a story. There are no—’ ‘Wilson James, you ought to know by now the power of story.’

  ‘So what must we do?’

  ‘It is told that where a lake does not flow to the sea there is the way to the oldest ones.’

  ‘Is there such a lake?’

  ‘My father talked of a lake he had found high up in the mountains. It was covered in ice when first he saw it, and later he climbed again to it in summer but no water flowed from it. There was no sign of waterfall or river below it. He called it the unknown lake.’

  I looked to the furthest reaches where the white peaks appeared and disappeared between threads of cloud.

  ‘We will go together. When the winter leaves us, we will go together,’ he said.

  It is not possible to glimpse the end of love when we begin. All we know is that it will end, by action or error; no effort will hold back the ever-present death that love carries with it. It is a fatal journey, one ended either when life itself ends, or simply by an unforeseen flaw which fractures the ground love was built upon.

  I saw too late, too long into the journey, that somehow I had given away some part of myself to make room for him. Some part of me was gone that he had never asked for, nor would ever keep safe, and it was lost somewhere in the distance between his body and mine. It wasn’t in the water. It wasn’t in the air. Part of me had slipped away and I had no way to find it or bring it back. I heard its missing as I sang the early songs of morning, the songs of snow and ice and the forest sleeping as winter laid its cloak about us, the evening songs that saw the river’s creatures return and wake and settle. They felt it too. All about me I sensed the gap. The missing. But most of all I felt it in myself. The aching space I mistook for love which might have been called longing.

  A frog can never be a tadpole again.

  Being loved by him, loving him, we mistook our similarities for shared purpose. The rain does not love to fall. It falls. The river does not love to hurry down from the mountain. It hurries.

  The snow does not settle on a particular leaf and frond, choosing one over the other. It settles. The crow does not fly from joy or concern. It flies. The wind does not blow as warning or lullaby. It blows. The tree does not fall from tiredness or despair. It falls.