The River Wife (15 page)

‘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.

I was eternal and the world was not. I was a fish and Wilson James was not.

O
ne morning I stepped from the river to find Wilson James sitting in the rain. I took his hand and saw the scales that had formed there. I saw his feet. I saw the edges of his hair, his beautiful chest now patterned with scales beneath the fabric of his shirt.

The river carries the stories of air and mountain, of season and creature. Trees line the river and bend their words to it and the river fills with the music of birds, the nature of flight, the formation of clouds. The branches of trees arch out over the river and the river learns of longing and surrender and waiting. The creatures within the river are born and grow from egg and pupa and the river learns of belonging and kinship. Rocks lie on the bed of the river and whisper their old complaints of ice and crush and struggle and the river learns of strength and the weariness of age. The river flows and fish swim up it and the river learns of struggle and passion. And all creatures die and melt away into soil that is washed through by rain that travels down to the sea and is swept back up into the sky where it falls again as rain into the river. So the river learns of eternity and cycle and of coming home.

I understood that his life was simply one life, a thing that would be washed away, but it was
his
life, and I wanted him to have it yet.

‘It is time you came to the water,’ I said. ‘Tonight, when the sun sinks beyond the mountains, we will go together.’

‘What must I do?’

‘If it is as I suspect then it will be like this. You will feel the water take you and all of you will long to breathe beneath the river and you will slip into the river as easily as the grasshopper leaps or the bird takes wing. You will shed your human skin and find you have a swimming body with fins and a tail and these will guide you. The river will hold you and you will breathe as you have never breathed before. The colour of water and rock will meet you. You may be hungry and you will feed. The night will pass over and you will see its passing like a far world you can hardly remember, but you must remember. For when the daylight comes you must recall the warmth of the sun and the touch of earth beneath your feet and then you will step from the river and shed the skin of fish and walk again as a man.’

I took his hands. ‘Tonight you may be a fish but in the morning we will step onto the land again. And then we must leave for the mountains.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘For what are you sorry, Wilson James?’

‘I interrupted your world. I thought I had brought something good, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come here at all.’

‘I did not know you had any say in the coming.’

‘I longed for a way I could follow my son. I wanted to stay beside him forever, but I lost him and found myself here instead. If that has brought you harm or danger then I am sorry.’

‘We must go to the unknown lake,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

He packed food and prepared but the day had a feeling of dying about it. The stories I wove as the rain continued were all of love lost and abandoned. I did not know if that night he would die as a fish, or if tomorrow we would begin a journey from which he might never return.

In the afternoon one last time did we lie together, one last time did our human bodies slip together, and so deep and sad and tender and raw was it that I felt as if my heart had broken into a hundred pieces and these I sewed in all the secret places of Wilson James. There where he had been lonely as a child, there where his God had hurt him, there where his son Eustace walked, there where the sound of the sea reminded him of loss, there where he had forgotten how to find a story that was his alone, there where he worried that death would take him young, there where he thought he was not worthy of love, there where he worried his life would be unremembered, there for when he was on the doorstep to death that he might feel no fear. One hundred places I found for love, and one hundred pieces of the fabric of my heart I sewed there to travel with him.

‘It has been good to love you, Wilson James,’ I whispered.

‘This is not the end,’ he said.

We stepped into the river and Wilson James slipped under the water and became a golden-bellied black fish with deep-circled eyes. Together we swam to the moonpool. I had wanted to stay with him one whole night. And he had wanted to find a story. He had come to the river and now he was part of it. I showed him the creatures which live on the river bottom and underneath the river rocks and are good to eat. We swam together through the river’s currents and I leapt above the surface for the flies that hovered in a rise there near the waterfall. Wilson James leapt with me, a little leap at first, and then higher. All night he shimmered beside me in the moonpool, and deep and quiet was the night. Above the river’s surface stars spun across the sky chased by the moon, and rain fell in mist about the forest, but in the moonpool I was aware only of the shift of him and the watch of his gaze beside me. In the morning I found the face of his fish-self in the brightening day. I swam with him to the water’s edge and stepped from the water. But Wilson James did not step onto the river’s edge. He flipped and turned but he stayed as a fish.

I stepped back into the water and coaxed him to remember himself as a man.

‘You must try, my love. Please try. You are a man. You love this earth. You are a writer. You make bread. You like to feel the sun on your face.

You cannot do without coffee in the morning. Oh, please, my love, come back to me. Please step from the river. You are Wilson James and you need to remember. Please.’

I implored the fish before me to become the man I loved. But already he was swimming away as if he had quite forgotten me and the riverbank and the place where we had lived as a man and a woman. I swam after him but he slipped fast downstream and soon we were both in the great lake, and from there I lost any trace of him. All day I swam, ignoring my duties to the river, and all night too I searched for him. Day after day while rain deepened the lake and mist held close the sounds of birds calling and fish jumping, I searched for him. I did not know if he would ever find his way back to me, nor to the man he had once been. The world he had brought to me was silent. It was as if he had never been. I was beyond songs I knew or any stories I had heard.

I
t is said that at dawn there is a moment women know that is neither day nor night, and there a doorway may open. It is known by young queens seeking victory in battle, by fallen brides seeking the halls of their ancestors, by crones waiting for the visit of death, by mothers waiting for the breath of a dying child to return. It is said that in the moment of dawn it is possible to glimpse the world as a brief flicker of nothing more than light and all of us upon it as creatures of light, and there it is possible to ask for anything and have your wish granted.

I did not know if I could find the oldest ones. I did not know if they would help, but I knew I must ask. Perhaps they would laugh at the foolishness of a river wife taking a man into her world. Perhaps they would turn away and let Wilson James die as a fish. Perhaps they would take my life for his.

I did not know the way to reach them. All I could do was hope that my father had been right. That the stories were right. And that the unknown lake was a doorway to the Lake of Time.

I could not leave my love in the river. I imagined what a mighty catch he would be to the fishermen downriver, the fish whose scales were gold against his black skin.

‘What fish is this?’ they would wonder.

‘One of the big fish from further upriver.’

And they would not eat him but mount him on a wall, as Father had told me. And my love would live no longer.

And so at nightfall I began my journey to the mountains and the unknown lake alone, swimming up and up, drawn higher and higher, my fish body strong against the flow of water that sought to wash me away. Above the highest lake I chose the deepest of the rivers that flowed from the mountains, and I swam through the crevasses and up waterfalls new with snowmelt. But I knew soon enough I must leave the river and make my way as a human high into the mountain peaks, and there was no easy way to traverse the rugged slopes that lay above me.

The story of the river wives was mine and mine alone, and I wished I had told it to Wilson James when I had the chance. But there were stories of older creatures, who were here before the river wives arrived. They lived far from light and it was said they cared not for people. These oldest ones governed not stories but time, and time was their river. It was they who set the span of years for man and woman, for tree and flower, for beast and bird. When time was sought, more or less, time beyond what the day and night could give, time for finishing or starting, for beginning or ending, for chance or luck or even death, it was to these oldest ones that all beings turned.