The River Wife (13 page)

‘It’s the sugar. I’m sorry. You probably shouldn’t eat it. Don’t cry. It’s not good to cry when the sun is shining.’

‘Yes, the sun is a friend of mine,’ I said through my tears.

‘What do you mean?’ said Wilson James.

‘No day goes by that it is not by my side, upon my cheek, at my back, lighting my way. Though there are clouds and rain and storms, always the sun is hiding there. In all my life it has been my most constant companion.’

He took my hand then and said, ‘My, you have been alone a long time.’

There had been so much time when there had been no-one to walk the riverbanks with me. When I forgot the sound of my own voice talking. There had been a time when I wanted only to be a fish, for as a fish I could not miss my people nor lament their passing. There had been a time when I railed against the river and my duty to the songs and stories of people I would never know or see. There had been years when I grieved at every story that told of a mother and daughter, every story that told of winter, every song that spoke of eternity, for eternity is no friend to those who are abandoned. My cycle was so long and undulating I could barely glimpse it. But Wilson James’s cycle was written in the lines of his hands, the fragments of darkness in his eyes, the smooth rocks in his voice. I felt the net of my humanity catch me. I wanted to love him. I wanted to feel my human heart.

‘Kiss me,’ he said. ‘Turn me into a frog if you must but kiss me.’

The earth does not care for humans. The wind, the rain, the moon, the birds, the sunshine, the fall of light and dark, these things are not bound to humans. They are and they go on and that is the only duty they have, to be the cycles of growing and replenishing and falling away.

Wilson James was a whole landscape even in his face. I saw the two parts that I had first observed; the half that was gentle and the half that was hard were no longer distinct. His eyes had settled. His skin upon his cheeks, his whole face had become something clearer. The small hairs that grew from his skin were grasslands my fingers rippled through. His warmth came from deep within him. His eyes were bright and watchful and I looked into his face and his mouth flickered with words he might say.

Wilson James slipped his hand along the fabric of my dress and peeled it back to bare my skin below my neck and this he kissed.

‘Let me make love to you,’ he said.

‘You ask to know me and you think it the most intimate thing you could know, but it is not.’

‘Tell me what it is I need to know.’

I drew breath and said, ‘If you will sit by the river at sunset and watch me swim. If you will return to the river and meet me at dawn, and if at dawn you still wish to lie with me, then I will make love with you. But if you choose at any time to walk away, then I will not try to hold you to me.’

He kissed my mouth. ‘What are you?’ he said.

‘Are you brave, Wilson James?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Soon you will.’

I
wondered how my mother had faced this moment. In all the stories she had left me, there was none for the journey of love between a river wife and a man. The only story of such a bond was that of my mother and my father, and I could only guess at the price each had paid. Would they still have loved each other if they had known the price? Would I still have loved Wilson James? Love seemed a world where the sun did not rise twice in the same place, nor the seasons travel one after another. Love had colours and textures all its own.

Wilson James stood upon the riverbank and the rain caressed his face, curling his hair, polishing his skin, softening his eyes.

‘Do not be afraid,’ I said. I did not kiss him and he moved to reach out his hand once before I went but we did not touch.

And then I stepped into the water. I swam as a fish and came back to the shore and Wilson James was still standing there, though I could not make out his face. I fed near the waterfall, as was my habit, and I slept in the moonpool. I did not think of him for that is not the way of fish. In the morning, when I stepped onto the riverbank, he was there, and I could see he had spent all night beside the river. The long coat he wore was entirely wet, his hands were bitterly cold and snow was falling on him. He looked more aged than Father had ever looked.

‘Come inside,’ I said. ‘You will become ill. We must warm you.’

I made a fire and slowly I took from him the coat, his shirt, his shoes, his socks. He pulled me against his skin and a ripple went through his body strong and sharp and then another, as if someone had sent a stone into the depths of him and the waves of it were washing ashore.

‘The world is not as I thought,’ he murmured.

‘It is not.’

‘You are a fish,’ he said.

‘I am of the earth and of the river.’

He held me to him and his skin stole warmth from the closeness of our blood. The days of longing for him, the coldness of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the stretch of his legs, the colour of his eyes, the texture of his breath on my skin, the weight of him above me and in me and with me, so sharp and sweet was the relief of it, so deep and urgent and shuddering. And then he held me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

We drifted in wetness. My hair laced his cheek and his arms held me to him. He slept and I slipped from him and clothed myself for the day. The snow had stopped and a sky blue and cloudless was high above the forest and so I cast a dress in a colour to match. I returned to stroke his cheek before leaving to tend the river. His skin was running with water and as hot as fire.

‘Wilson James, I think you are unwell,’ I said, but he did not wake. ‘Wilson James, you must rouse yourself.’

I brought him water to drink but his head rolled on his shoulders and his eyes did not stir beneath their lids. I wrapped him in a blanket of skins and when it was too wet I dried it by the fire and wrapped another about him. All day I dried the blankets and wiped his body until I was sure there was no more water inside him. Grey grew his skin. And then white, until I was sure he would die, so cold and silent was he.

Night fell and I did not wish to leave him. Though I kept the fire and it burned high and bright, his body was seized with shivers that came and went like cold wind through him. Then the trembling began and his breath came harsh and rattling. Several times he cried out with a desperate anguish.

I could not wake him. I could not get him to drink.

‘Wilson James, I must leave for the river,’ I said, but I did not.

Again I changed the blanket soaked by his skin. Water no longer seeped from him but beaded on his skin as leaves are beaded at sunrise with dew.

A wind blew up outside and sticks and leaves clattered at the windows. The fire shivered and I fed it more wood until it roared as loudly as the wind about the cottage. I tended Wilson James and, as the darkness of night descended, my mouth grew dry, scales emerged and shone on every part of me and each breath of air became more painful than the last. Still I stayed. His face was translucent, so pale had it become. His breath quiet and infrequent.

‘I have killed him,’ I said. ‘I have taken him from life.’ I had thought only to love him, not to hurt him. Where was it told that a river wife would kill a man if she lay with him? My father had not died. Where was it told that I might not know what it was to be a human and love as humans do? Why was I made human if I could not be, could never feel what others felt? Why bring him here at all to the river, why have him slip through only to have this, his death?

Death comes every day to the forest and the river. Death has its own stories and its own keepers. I had not needed such a conversation in all my years, but I pleaded with death that night to turn its gaze from Wilson James. And I pleaded with something more eternal than me, something fierce and hopeful, that would hurry death away.

My own life was leaving me the longer I stayed from the river. Every breath of air was a punishment, as if I breathed hot coals. My legs grew in agony as my fish body tried to return. At last I left him, for death or life, I knew not.

The few steps to the riverbank were a shock of pain like none I had ever known. I fell into the shallows, flipping and gasping for water deep enough to catch my breath, tearing my underbelly. At last the final belated transition of legs into tail, and I was swimming slowly, swept against the river’s flow, until I reached the darkness of the deep pool beneath my father and, floating there on that moonless night, I was not able to cry.

A day and a night passed for Wilson James and it passed for me. I did not step from the river, too battered was my body, too weary and, in truth, I forgot him for a day and another night so far into my fish self did I go, as if in trying to deny the ancient spell that called me each night to the water I had strengthened it even more. I fed and swam and I was not human at all. When I stepped from the river on the second day at dawn the wind had subsided. A mist of rain had closed in the forest and I could see no further than a few steps ahead. I looked down to find my human skin was red and torn, my flesh coloured green and purple with the beating of rocks. I had no strength to clothe myself that morning with the light of the day. I wished only to tend my wounds and sleep.

I crossed the dark earth patterned with snow-melt and went inside the cottage. Wilson James was turning logs in the fireplace.

‘You are alive,’ I breathed. I felt my nakedness but had no strength for anything but to rest.

‘What has happened to you?’ he asked.

‘I stayed too long from the river.’

‘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.

T
he 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.