The River Wife

by Heather Rose

  My father’s face softened into the kindness of moss that grows in the furrows of trees and asks for nothing but dappled light and the touch of rain. He carried with him a carved stick when he walked, to steady himself. He was happy with the simplest things. He smiled and his eyes carried the brightness of sunshine caught in a ripple of water.

  As if he glimpsed the years ahead, he asked again and again of me that I make no contact with any human who came to the river. To never speak with the humans who visited the lake.

  ‘I wonder sometimes what the world is like beyond here,’ my father said. ‘I wonder how the cities have changed. We may need to go further upstream. Go further into the mountains.’

  ‘What worries you, Father?’

  ‘The world I came from and this one here may yet meet. I do not want you thinking it would be kind if that happened. It would not. Whatever I can do to keep you safe from that, I will.’

  ‘Somewhere there are humans that I belong to.’

  ‘Nowhere more than here, little fish.’

  ‘But if there are people, if they do come, they are not so different from me, surely,’ I said. ‘I am your daughter.’

  ‘They are as different from you as rock is to water. You must promise me that you will never be tempted to speak to them, to choose one for friendship, for I fear it would be the end of all that is here, and the river itself and every story within it would be lost.’ And then he said, ‘But there are other people you belong to.’

  ‘River wives?’

  ‘Yes. And other keepers of things. Like your mother.’

  ‘Where are they, Father?’

  ‘They will come.’

  And as my father had imagined, my own people did come for me, and my father was happy. It was as if he had been casting a thread for many years and had finally caught what he needed. The Winter King arrived on the first day of deep snow with his companions and musicians. He had travelled far from the land of blue ice to find the river wife who was spoken of in stories. My father walked deep into the forest with him and many days did they talk and many songs were sung before the Winter King asked me to be his wife. Asked me if he might be my husband through all the days of winter and depart each year at snowmelt to return to his land where spring and summer never visited. When he returned the following winter I agreed.

  On the day of my wedding, my father spoke to me of a journey he wished to make to the lands beyond the mountains.

  ‘I will be back, I hope, by summer,’ he said.

  But it was many seasons before my father returned. The Winter King had travelled nine winters to be with his wife when my father at last came back to the river. It was late spring. I stepped from the river on a bright sky day to find my father waiting on the stone he liked to sit upon. His hair had grown quite white and his face had the light of the moon in it. His back was no longer bent and he did not need the staff he had once used to help him walk. He was straight and tall and he had no words. Only the light that shone from his eyes spoke to me.

  It was that summer my father began standing still. At first he did it for a day and later more days. Not coming into the cottage at night. Not eating his soup. Not coming to sit by the fire. Just standing right there beyond the house with his feet in the river.

  Within a season he was no different to the forest. Moss and lichen grew upon him. Golden toadstools sprang up in the earth around him and others grew fawn and pale in his bark. Many birds have been born in his branches and many creatures have sheltered in the quiet of his leaves. Still he stands there on the riverbank. Still love is possible. Some love never ends.

  Time swelled and withered, the river flooded and thinned. Night and day watched over the forest. Seasons passed and returned, and returned again. As I tended the river through all its cycles, the rhythm of the river shifted. Snow settled upon the mountains but not in the forest. The trees awakened to whiteness but soon the snow gave way to patches of dark earth and wet fallen leaves. Again it snowed, and in silence ferns bowed their heads to winter. But by evening the whiteness had seeped into the land, water trickled and ran along every pathway, and the colours of the forest returned. I thought the coming of snow was like the coming of flood and the arrival of spring. It would return. But it did not. Deep cold abandoned the forest.

  No snow lay heavy upon the house. The lakes no longer froze. And the Winter King came no more to the forest. No cloaks hung beside the door. No voices spoke who knew my name. The table was without guests. The fire went unlit.

  I tended the river and wove the stories of the world but I was alone. I glimpsed my mother’s life before my father came to the forest. A life of time sweeping away behind and laid like a valley ahead without any person beside her to share the pathway, note the shape of clouds, the ending of rain, the coming of night. So solitary my days became that I imagined the skin that bound me might unravel, and the scales upon my skin that shimmered at night in the moonlight might wash away, until I was bone and only bone, pale and unearthly, neither woman nor fish, and none would ever remark my passing.

  Humans came as Father had said they would. I watched houses being built. One after another as the years worked upon the forest, as trees grew and fell, humans took root upon the lake’s edge. A house was built just at the bend in the river and I was sure Father had never thought they would come so close.

  I listened for their voices. I sat upon the platforms they had made out over the water and watched the stars emerge, imagining for a moment that beyond was my family, there where the yellow light pooled on the grass, where the house hummed with noise, there was my husband, my children.

  I listened to their talk and their laughter, which broke sudden and unexpected as a strange birdcall. I heard harsh words that travelled far in the night. I listened to the voices of children playing in the trees, a child in a darkened house crying softly, and then I listened no more but slipped under the water and returned to the river.

  And that was how love found me, long after the pattern of faces that had been dear to me had slipped away and I was a wife only to the river.

  Spring had settled herself in the forest when I found Wilson James. The blue of his shirt caught my eye as I arranged the flow of water over the tumble of rocks, threading fragments of stories together before they disappeared downstream.

  There was something about the way his eyelashes lay upon his cheeks as he slept that should have warned me there was mischief afoot. He slept so deeply in the unrolling fronds of ferns. Blossoms smaller than new mayflies had blown down upon his hair and settled upon his face. Mosquitoes had been at the side of his neck. I reached out and touched him. I had no fear that he would feel my touch and wake. We didn’t live in worlds that touched at all. At most he might feel a passing breeze, but not my hand running along the line of his cheek down to his mouth. His skin was warm and rough, soft and fine, like the bark of a tree softened by rain.

  His eyes opened suddenly and in the surprise of it we gazed at one another. Who would have thought such blue eyes would spring awake from those lids? I took my hand away and leapt back, for he spoke, and it was clear he could see me as well as I could see him and that was not as it should be.

  ‘Well the dreams do run wild here,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Didn’t know I’d fallen asleep. It was quite a trek up here.’

  I had made no shoe. I had woven no basket. I had tied no red cloth in the branches of a tree. I had spoken not to any bird or snake who might have acted as a messenger. What was at work that I had not noticed as winter slipped from the earth and the sun no longer hid like a moon behind grey clouds? No human had ever come through except my father, and that had taken my mother’s knowledge. Wilson James crossed the line as if he did not even know a line existed.

  The next thing he was at the river’s edge washing his face, and his hair was going light and dark where the water took and didn’t. His mouth was slurping the river from his hand, the water was falling from it and catching
the light. He said, ‘I guess you see a few in here. Trout mostly?’

  He turned and looked at me. He had stepped into my world. All that Father had warned me of, all that he had prepared me for, was standing in front of me. I thought to run, run, take the river two leaps and away and be gone from him faster than a dragonfly.

  ‘It’s okay, I don’t bite,’ he laughed, and his laughter ran across to me over the sound of the river. I watched him. And then Wilson James did what my father had done when he too had laughed—he rubbed his hand through his hair as if to finish the laughter and sweep it away behind him.

  I said, ‘There are brown, golden and rainbow fish. Of course in the lakes there are the dark old fish and the small silver fish who are born and gone before the season has passed. It’s impossible to know how many there are.’

  He laughed and slapped his pockets and said, ‘Now where did I put it?’ and swooped back into the fernery to grab a pouch then rolled a long white hairy-ended paper and lit it. He sat upon a rock and fog came out of his mouth which smelled like dank pools caught at the lake’s edge after spring melt has flowed away. I had seen men on the platforms doing this and smelled the dank smell they breathed but never had I been so close.

  He said, ‘It’s so noisy, the river.’

  He was a man talking to me, seeing me as if I was simply a woman. It was a wonderful cold curious thing. He was as talkative as a frog. ‘God, there’s nothing up here. It’s unbelievably remote. Forest as far as the eye can see. Crazy you can’t fly in. It’s a terrible road. Mary was right when she told me to stock up. I’m staying at Mary Kitchener’s house. She’s let me have it for the summer. You know, back . . .’ He indicated with his head where the house was.

  I knew the house. It was at the bend of the river. I had seen it built. And then a fire took it and it was built again. It was the one that had come closest. Perhaps because she was a woman I had been less concerned by her. I had not seen her for many summers.

  ‘It’s the only one they’ve allowed this side of the river, by the look of it. I wonder how much she paid for that,’ he said.

  ‘The woman has not come here with you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s too far. She’s over eighty now. By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m Wilson James.’

  Wilson James. It had a music about it like a birdcall mid-morning. Wilson-James-Wilson-James. He reached out a hand and I leaned forward and held it. His hand had the dry paper feel of sunshine on bark. It was warm and the water within him was soft in his skin. My fingers lingered against his and then his hand slipped back and away from me. I had not imagined a hand could do that, spread its warmth through me the way his hand did.

  ‘You are easy to touch,’ I said.

  He smiled but did not offer it back to me. And then he sat again on a rock by the river and breathed slower, his head moving like a hunting bird.

  No creature of the forest has this custom of humans, to touch and then not touch at all. Father would have liked that I had remembered my manners. ‘Manners are what separate us from beasts,’ he had said. ‘Or at least that was what I used to think. Trout have no manners though, I learned that here. Which is why we do not mind that people come to the great lake to catch them and eat them. As long as they do not eat my daughter, I am happy.’ And my father had rubbed my feet as I sat upon his legs, my feet with their green-gold scales. ‘You know how to be safe in the water, don’t you?’ he murmured. ‘You have your mother’s pool, yes. None will ever find you there.’

  ‘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.

  Fragments 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.