The River Wife (4 page)

‘I will be safe, Father. You have no need to ask it. Of course I will be safe.’

‘Ah, my daughter, my little fish. You must keep the stories strong for as long as you can. Keep them strong.’

I had tended the water and sung the songs that sifted the stories one from the other. If the river was quieter, if the banks were higher, it was not because I had not sung the songs. I had done what I could to keep the world as it was.

Pebbles were shifting a little in the river flow. There would be rain tonight. ‘I must go upstream, Wilson James. You will not see me again.’

‘Now why would that be?’ he said, jumping up.

‘You are still dreaming.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. Then, ‘Where do you live?’ as I stepped back into the forest. ‘What’s your name?’

Those eyes could not be bad. That hand, that skin, it held nothing I thought was bad. But as I slipped into the trees I felt how my skin had grown tiny prickles that nibbled at me. I should never have spoken to him, never have touched him. How was it possible? How had he come through?

‘Father,’ I said in the last light of afternoon, with golden shadows floating in the air between the trees, ‘a man has slipped through and I do not know why. Has he come for me, Father? Like you came for Mother? Do you think he is broken? Shall I help him?’

I sat on the river’s edge beside my father and I said very softly, ‘I do not think he means me harm, Father. He may be gone tomorrow and I shall have no more trouble with him.’

I wove the river to sleep that night and my eyes watched the face of the moon smile gently through the water. I thought of Wilson James’s question—
What’s your name?

I had lived in the river and beside the river and I had never known how to be other than the river.

What’s your name?

My name is the river and the river is my name.

F
ragments of darkness lay upon the path. Moss lifted its colour first to the day and later ferns offered their fronds and rippled with the gift of sunshine. I stepped from the river and that day I thought of Wilson James before I thought of the song I must sing. Was he still here? Was he at the house by the river bend? Would he be able to see me again?

No human, other than my father, had ever seen me. That was the way it was. My father said my mother had put her hand through the veil to touch him. She had done it to nurse him back to health when he was dying. I had not meant to break the veil. I did not know how to repair it, as my mother must have done. If I was visible to this man who else might see me?

And then a memory, so misted over I had almost forgotten it, swam to the surface. I was a young fish, a child on the shores of the lake playing with my father and learning the effect of songs. A man was seated on a rock. He said to my father, ‘What strange creature plays there at the water’s edge? I thought I saw her for a moment like a trick of light. She was neither nymph nor fairy but some other being. Can you see her? There! What strange translucence she has, and scales upon her feet. You see her, do you not? I would like to draw her for surely she is something from the world of old stories.’

When Father turned to go I walked to the man and rested my hand upon his shoulder. He was mixing colours in a box with a brush and water. He drew a child with long dark hair standing upon the shore, and in her hand was the orb of the sun as if it was a ball she had caught in a game. Father was very grave when he saw me there and made me promise never to go near the man again.

When we came back to the lake some days later Father found the man sleeping beside the shore. Father said he would not wake again. Not ever.

‘What felled the man, what took his breath?’

‘Perhaps it was his time,’ my father said.

‘Perhaps it was me.’

‘No,’ my father said. ‘Do not think that. Don’t ever think that.’

But I was sure. My touch was surely the cause of it. I think Father carried the man to where his own people might find him, though he never spoke of it to me. Slowly I forgot the man and only with the arrival of Wilson James did I think of him again. A man on the edge of water.

I waited for Wilson James to step out onto the rocks, but he did not come. I listened to the forest, for any sound of Wilson James. And what I heard was the part of me that had always believed, or hoped, a human man would come to me. The part of me that longed for the shape of a hand to hold mine, a voice that knew nothing of the vast reach of time.

Eternity is a river and the span of a human life is a cup that comes to drink from it. When love arrives to the eternal it comes in the form of eagles and lightning, as horses and thunder, as a white bear in the snow. But human love, I discovered, comes in the simplest way. As a man or a woman seeking their heart. Love is a restless wind. It is as skittish as a willow sapling, as vapid as a newborn trout, as urgent as a buzzing bee mad with the simple pleasure of a fragrance. I had thought I understood the pattern of things—the moods of silver the lakes threw back at the sky, the impulse of green that changed by day and sometimes by moment here in the forest, the tremor of raindrops, the voices of wind. But that first day, when I knew Wilson James was in my world, I had not even begun to glimpse his quest nor the nature of my own, and love was still far from us both.

Had I killed him? It was, I thought, such a happy thing to speak to another after all this time. A bird would not forget how to sing, and neither had I forgotten how to speak. I was still able, I thought, to be my father’s daughter, not simply my mother’s. But Father would say that I was not to go near Wilson James. Not to speak with him. ‘You must promise me,’ he had said, ‘that you will not seek a human for company.’

Shadows played in the crevices of grey and pale bark. In the morning breeze the river laughed at me for my thoughts. Wilson James was not beside the river. He was not among the ferns. I followed his footsteps over the rocks and through the forest to the house set back from the river. There the light caught the uppermost windows and shone the sun back at the sky. All was quiet. I stepped onto the verandah.

There was a bench there I had once liked to sit upon when the days were warm and the house empty. If people came to the house, they had come for tiny fragments of time. They took the fish from the river and sometimes let them go and then those people went away again. I had known the house before the fire and after the fire. For a long time the house had been closed. Now the windows were open and there, asleep on the bed, his body quite naked, was Wilson James.

I watched carefully to see if he was breathing and soon he turned. His skin was white and the hair that grew on his body was the colour of button grass. His body had a softness to it, as if Wilson James couldn’t outrun a butterfly. There was not a part of him that looked strong. Rather, he looked as if the food he had eaten and the water he had drunk had weakened him. He had none of the uprightness of a tree nor the form of a branch about his arms and legs.

I wondered if this was what a man was. Had my father looked like this before he lived here? Had he been a soft thing like a river snail without a shell?

Wilson James did not die. The next day he was again at the river’s edge. He whistled and threw small stones into the water. He looked about him into the trees as if he expected to see me. He came by the house Father had built but he did not see it. He even called out, as if he could sense that I was near, ‘Hello? Hello?’ I watched and would almost have called to Wilson James but I did not. The veil of the house held and all we had made here, Father and I, remained unseen.

I watched Wilson James from the forest at nightfall when light spilled from the windows upon the lawn and the moon contemplated summer. I saw the silhouette of him sitting. He was reading from a book. My father had books when I was still small but he did not tell me the stories from them. The trunk beside my father’s bed had been full of books and I had liked to lift the lid and smell them. They had a withered smell, as if the plant they had once grown on had dried there in the sunshine.

‘Can I not learn to read your words, Father?’

‘Little fish, you have the stories of the world inside you. These things that keep me company at night when you are gone to the river, these stories are as if we sat one day under a certain tree and all the stories were of its fruit and flowers, its bark and roots, its seasons and ageing, the grass beneath, the sky above. And all the feelings were of what we experienced as we sat—anger, sadness, joy, loss, passion. But the river’s stories are as if you are a bird flying above an enormous forest, as wide as the eye can see, and I would not rob you of the landscape you know, yet I fear I would, if I made you settle by the tree with me.’

All the pages in my father’s notebooks were used up with drawing and words before he took them with his other books and buried them somewhere in the forest, for one day they were gone from the house.

‘I am done with the words of the world and now I am with the world,’ Father said that evening. Hail clattered on the river rocks and the birds that had stayed beyond the last warm breeze were silent in the grey light. We had made a fire and Father sat close beside it as if he was cold.

‘Are you unwell?’ I asked.

‘I am very well, little fish. I am simply alone.’

‘I am here,’ I said.

‘It is not my body which is alone. Nor my heart. I have let the last of it go, that which I knew, and I find myself strangely alone, like a branch which has fallen from its tree into the river and been washed ashore far away on the river’s edge. I have no hope of returning. That time is past but this old branch finds that it is part and has been part of all things, not simply the tree. If I am to stay here with you and not grow old as men do, then I must let go of what I anticipate, and step into whatever may be beyond this limited knowledge I have collected from the books I have read. Now tell me a story, little fish, before you go to the river, and I will soon be warm again.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘today I found a story of a boy who came to catch a fish. When he caught the fish it was so large it filled his basket and, well pleased, he carried it home on his back. As he walked the basket grew heavier and heavier until at last he could carry it no more. He took it off and discovered a young woman sitting in the basket.

‘ “What are you doing in my basket?” the boy asked.

‘ “You caught me and brought me from the river.”

‘Now the boy was scared, but the woman was young and beautiful, so he said, “Surely you were a fish when first we met. What am I to do with you? I thought I had found food for my family.”

‘ “If you will carry me back to the river there will be food upon the table for your family and the crops will grow plentiful in your fields.”

‘The boy did as the young woman asked. He carried her on his back to her home in the river, and when he returned to his family he found the table laden. For a whole turn of the seasons the crops grew plentiful, the trees were heavy with fruit and the boy was greatly celebrated for catching the river goddess. But after a year life returned to normal. The bounty faded, the crops and trees gave only their usual yield. So the boy’s older brother thought to also win the regard of his people.

‘He went to the river and he caught many fish and each one he carried in his basket back along the path to the village. None was the young woman his brother had spoken of and each of the fish he flung down on the path. All day he fished until at last, as the sun was sinking to rest among the mountains, he caught a black fish with scales of gold. When he carried the basket on his back it grew heavy so he laid the basket down and from it stepped the young woman. She looked about her and saw the dead bodies of all the fish the young man had thrown away and she was dismayed.

‘ “What is it you seek from the river?” the girl demanded.

‘ “You can bring bounty to our table and plenty to our crops.”

‘ “You have taken food from the river and you have wasted it. You must return me to the river and no food will sit upon your table and your crops will fail,” she said.