The River Wife

The
River
Wife

Also by Heather Rose

White Heart

The Butterfly Man

The
River
Wife

HEATHER ROSE

First published in 2009

Copyright © Heather Rose 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act
1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author acknowledges the generous support of Arts Tasmania and Varuna, The Writers’ House

Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
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www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

978 1 74175 742 2

Original artwork by Marina Strocchi
Set in 11/17 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Isabelle Ocean

A
s the sun crests the dark line of land, I wake and step from the river, and that in itself is what is called magic.

We have always lived here. We have been here since the lakes began. We have brought the rivers to the oceans since the world was cold. We are bound by a spell so old there may be none left who are caught by it, except for me. My father once said that any story of a place was a story of sadness because everything changed. So a story of belonging would always be a story of losing.

I have walked beside the river all my life and listened to its music. I have climbed to the reaches where rivers are born and I have swum in all the lakes that rest in the hands of these mountains. I have watched lakes filled with sky, hurried by wind, hidden by mist, whispering in rain. Lakes that overflowed into one great river that slipped away from the mountains. The river ran, sometimes quiet and filled with light, sometimes shouting through rapids, growing as it tumbled down into the deep of forest, spilling over outcrop and boulder and around the roots of trees, swept into moss banks, glinting under the watchful gaze of trees, hastening over shallows until it reached the greatest lake, which stretched further than I could see by day. From there the flow of water became a broad penumbral river that moved through folded hills and cast its tributaries across the land.

Water is a message. It is a truth that asks nothing, a story older than people and older than mountains, a holder and deliverer of memories beyond time. It runs away and never back and it takes with it everything we are.

One day, when spring had taken the earth to her breast and warmed it, love lay down by the river. He slept in a blue shirt and through the afternoon he did not stir but dreamed with the river’s song beside him. When he woke he saw me.

Love was not the pattern of leaves and the texture of bark, it was not the underbelly of river or the way of fish, though all that was here was part of it. Love was the passing of the sky across a face, it was the arc of conversation, the thought of forever, the yearning to go on and never back, the desire to be something other than I was. I see him standing there in farewell and my breath hurries to me, the day falling away behind him, the sky about his shoulders. I never thought to ask what belonging was, nor how I might be free of it, until I loved Wilson James.

This is the story of a river and the making of stories and the nature of love. Some would say that any story of water is always a story of magic, and others would say any story of love was the same. And being a love story it begins with a broken heart.

I
n the years before I was born, my father carried each stone from the riverbed to make the walls of the house. He felled the trees and made the beams for the roof and the chairs upon which we sat, and the table and benches where he prepared food. He carved the bed upon which he slept and a smaller bed he made for me when I was still inside my mother, though he was sure I would have no need of it at night.

The shelves of the house held the carcasses of beetles, the bones of small animals, the lacework of insect wings. There were the plates and cups, the pots and implements he used for his cooking. The warm weather came late and left early, and my father lamented that little grew in the short summer. But in his walled garden he grew all manner of root and plant, and in the forest he hunted all the creatures that tasted good. The jars on the shelves were filled with dried foods—meat, roots, fruits—and these he would bring to life again in the soups and stews he made.

When my father first came to the forest, the world he walked away from had left no colour in his heart, only the black and white of a fear which had stolen autumn and spring and summer from him.

‘I had seen things no human should ever see; I had done things that rent my heart in two,’ he said. ‘The young man I had once been I carried upon my back, heavy as stone, and the old man I would become bore the burden of that youthful heart. But beside me walked another man—a man who whistled a strange, captivating song. That man had no name nor any past or future, but tattooed on his face was a leaf. A colourless leaf. And one morning, as I awoke beside a pale stretch of road, the man with the leaf on his cheek was gone. Bending to bear my youth upon my back, I realised I had forgotten his name and even the day of his birth. I left him there asleep, the boy I had been, and I turned from the road and entered the forest and came at last to the lake. I climbed up, up, up to this part of the river and here I laid down and slept, and my heart made no sound.’

He rubbed his cheek and the leaf with no colour moved under his fingers on skin made soft by time.