The River Wife (6 page)

Sometimes I thought of the river wives returning. But would they welcome me? Or would I seem so other to them they would not? I had seen strange creatures born and the mother walk away. I had considered that this was what my mother did. She walked away. And were it not for my father it would have been the death of me. Or so I liked to think in the long days of early youth when Father was not able to answer all the questions of a young fish and I was restless with my duties.

‘You were capable from the moment I laid you in the river,’ my father said, his hands tying the threads of a snare. ‘There was no need to tend you. You knew without any help from your mother what to eat in the river. It was on the land you were unsteady, as any young child. In the water there was no stumbling or falling.’

‘You said that human babies feed upon their mother’s breast.’

‘Well, there was none of that for you. It was my chest you rested on as the day disappeared, and then I would take you to the river and you and your mother would swim away to the moonpool. At dawn you would be at the water’s edge, your golden eyes watching as I came close, your silver scales rippling in the new light, and I would lift you and there in my hands, there against my chest, you’d become my warm-skinned baby again.’

‘And Mother? Did she not carry me about?’

‘I carried you and she sang to you, and that is how you grew. She sang to you, and if she was near or further up the river always you turned your face to the sound of her voice. Her hands were full of the tending of the river and the weaving of stories. You see, I think they never knew the baby stage, her kind. I did not ask about it much for it felt a thing so vast, the gap between what I was and what she was, and love doesn’t need many answers. But she made me smile with her questions. “They do not walk for a whole cycle?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “Sometimes longer.” And your mother said, “May the wind blow her upright soon, for she is fearless but never was life more fearful, to be so helpless.”

‘ “Ah, but I shall watch over her,” I said.

‘ “It is what humans do, this care of the young, isn’t it?” she asked as she gazed upon your face. “I had not understood the tenderness it takes. I have listened to the songs of mothers and never quite known what it is, this tenderness, until I see her and then I feel it.”

‘She loved you as much as any mother ever loved a daughter. Perhaps more, for you were such a wonder to her. You would think that listening all that time I would have learned the songs too. But I never could. I don’t have the ears you have. I don’t hear any words. Not even a tune really. But it’s beautiful. ’

‘When did I start singing?’

‘By the time you were running about.’

‘Did Mother ever hear me sing?’

‘She did. I promise. We were collecting kindling for winter. I didn’t even hear you start, for you babbled as any baby and I talked back, so when your singing started it was more like an extension of the conversation we’d been having. But the light in the forest had changed and the sticks I was bending to pick up were on a leaf mulch so bright and golden, and the moss had turned a green like no other earthly green, and the wind, it was suddenly full of voices, old and young, kind and full of tears. I was suddenly part of a great valley. The valley was full of memory and a power so strong nothing could hold it back. Your mother came and stood beside me, her hands wet from the river, and she took my hand and smiled into the sky and said, “Her singing has begun.” ’

Long ago it is since the river wives came to this world. Every fish in the world is the descendant of those women who bore fish of every type as they swam in rivers and oceans. Some fish still swim upwards to the lakes, as if they remember that it is from the lakes that first they came, and there they lay their eggs and die. But we do not die. I do not know how many river wives still live and walk by day upon the shores of lake or river or ocean. I have never heard the voice of any other river wife in the rain or in the river.

I thought when I was a small creature that I could hear the songs of others, sometimes faintly, in the flood waters of snowmelt, in the spring rush when ferns unfurled their fronds at the river’s edge, in the lazy river of autumn when leaves drifted upon the surface. But though my songs travelled down to the sea, no songs came back to me. I could hear only memories. Long-ago memories of river wives catching the stories of the world, singing and weaving them into water, threading them together through time so none were lost, and all were waiting to be heard.

I did not know if other river wives took husbands from the people of the earth and gave birth to creatures such as me. My mother was gone before such things could be asked. I remembered that she swam beside me at night in the river. I remembered her dark shape sheltering me from the currents that moved over us. I remembered the line of her body, her fins frilling in the water, her watchful eye, her golden skin glowing as moonlight slipped between the folds of water.

‘Why did Mother leave us, Father?’ As I grew older he would still sit to answer me and sometimes he would take my hand and stroke it gently.

‘Perhaps there was somewhere else she needed to go. She never looked old, but she was. Older than the lake below and the lake above, and still I wonder at that for she was as young and as bright as summer to me. And you were born. Perhaps that was what she needed: a daughter to be here to carry on for her.

‘You will always be young, my little fish,’ my father said, ‘and one day I will be an old, old man.’

‘You will never be old, Father.’

‘I will, little fish, and there is nothing we can do to stop that.’

‘But you will stay with me?’

‘Forever and a day.’

W
ilson James followed me along the path and dipped his head a little as he passed through the door of the house my father had built. He ran his hands along the stone walls and gazed at the ceiling that was the wood of many trees. He moved about the room, trailing a finger along the table rubbed to a glow with beeswax, along the mantelpiece over the stone hearth. He looked out of the windows and rested his knee against the wide ledge where Father had liked to sit and watch the river.

‘Your father built this?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘He is quite a craftsman. Is he about today?’

‘He is beside the river.’

Wilson James observed me. His face had taken the colour of a man who knew the sky. He wore his shirt of blue lines and his feet wore boots that humans wore to walk in the mountains. I saw he had lost some of the softness that had startled me the day I saw him naked and sleeping. I felt a flush of warmth overtake me as he met my gaze. Wilson James turned from the window and his eyes found the bed and stopped. He walked over to it.

‘It’s a polar bear skin,’ he said. ‘It’s real. Unbelievable. Where did you . . . who gave it to you?’

‘My husband.’

‘Your husband?’ he said, and his voice was shallow. ‘Where is he?’

‘He is not coming back.’

Wilson James stood very still and ran his hand through the fur and then he looked at me.

‘What did he do, your husband?’

‘He was . . . a woodcutter,’ I decided.

‘Ah,’ said Wilson James.

I smiled and said, ‘What sort of tea am I to make you?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Oh no,’ I smiled. ‘I will decide for you.’

I stood and looked into his eyes and saw the circle of dark about the pupils. I saw the flecks of gold and cream that pulled out from the strands of deep blue. I saw the ache in his cheeks, the heaviness that lingered on his lips, the words that would not quiet in his ears, the whispers of childhood in the lines about his eyes. I saw his life waiting deep in his bones. I saw the food that had burned him from the inside, the sweats that worried him at night, the twitch at the edge of his face that was there when he awoke. I saw the gentleness in his skin that told me he had not found enough friends. I saw his eyes had not cried sufficient tears nor seen enough of what he truly loved.

‘What does your body need?’ I said aloud.

‘Coffee. Or a shot of Drambuie.’

I made the tea to my mother’s recipe. Her recipes asked for many things and I had everything that was necessary. Bark, moss, leaf and river rock. I made the tea that would help the sadness in Wilson James’s eyes. It had not been made for many years, not since my mother made it for Father when first he came to the river. It had been long before I was born, but I knew every ingredient just as I had always known every song my mother had sung.

Wilson James held the cup and sipped at the tea. He had settled into Father’s chair by the fireplace and the scent of him was the scent of somewhere far from here, where the world grew other trees. Dust spiralled in the open door as sunshine fell onto the floor stones. Steam drifted from the pan that cooled beside the fire. He sat forward and said, ‘You have not told me your name.’

I looked into his face and said, ‘I have found in the naming of things that something happens.

My father had names—the trees, the lakes, the mountains, the river, the small flowers and mosses. The butterflies. The fish. Each of them had a name that was fixed as lichen is fixed to a rock, but even lichen grows old and crumbles. I have lived for a long time now without the names of things, for when I name them they grow smaller. There are times now in the forest when a flower appears, berries grow, a certain fungus blooms, and if I name it I can pass it by as if I have seen it already. I do not want to pass it by. Every change is one of the sounds of the forest. Every fish is marked a different way. The bark of each tree has a pattern that is unique, a constellation of small creatures and plants which grow there and make it home, and it may have a neighbour which stands also in bark of a similar cloth, but it is not the same because its name is the same.’

‘Tree. Lake. Mountain. They are also names,’ said Wilson James.

‘But they are questions too.’

‘Perhaps I will think of a name for you.’

‘You may make a name but I will not be that every day.’

Wilson James finished his tea and I poured more for him.