The River Wife

by Heather Rose

  ‘It’s a long time since he was here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wilson James drank from the cup he had carried down from the house.

  ‘Have you found your story, Wilson James?’

  ‘I think I have it then it slips away. But I’ve been listening. Listening takes a long time, but strangely I am okay with it. The world leaves me alone. Once it might have troubled me to be without anything to claim me. Is this what you do to all the men who come here? Bewitch them with this place?’ His eyes watched me and his smile lingered on his lips. ‘Your husband?’

  I considered that perhaps it had been the Winter King who bewitched me, the young river wife he had come so far to find. He had walked as a bear, and he walked sometimes in the form of a man, and sometimes his form was falling snow. He was my husband and my daughter’s father, but above all he was winter’s guardian, one of the four keepers of nature’s cycles who walked the earth.

  At dusk each evening the Winter King’s companions appeared with their instruments, and long into the night did they play. But they were gone when I returned to the shore at sunrise. If I glimpsed them as they truly were, it was only in the tracks they made in the snow. The house grew bigger in their company. The table was laden with food. The fire roared, the music swelled, their laughter echoed across the roof beams, and as I shut the door and walked towards the river, the sound of their songs died in the darkness.

  In the mornings my husband would sometimes be a bear and other days he would be a man waiting on the riverbank at dawn. He would slip his hands into the river and lift me as a fish and hold me as I changed before he carried me back to the bed in the cottage. I think it amused him to be a bear with a fish he could love and not eat. He would laugh as he plucked trout from the river and ate them whole, though this unsettled me.

  The last winter he came through the mountain path, he had been as tender with me as if I was a bird in need of healing. He carried our daughter about on his shoulders though she had grown tall and strong. She was excited to have him home, as she was each winter. His companions were quieter. The singing was all of journeys that were to be made, of caverns made of ice and of winter without spring or autumn. I did not know. I did not guess that this was his way of telling me he must leave.

  ‘My people are retreating,’ he said. ‘They will not return. I cannot hold against the time that is coming. The old cycles are changing.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

  ‘The singing that has been on this earth is ending. It is a vessel leaving the shore. There is no end I know or understand.’

  He heard it earlier than I. The music of the world had changed.

  So very gently did the Winter King lay me in the river that final night. He knew I would never leave the river, and that to try to persuade me was as if to ask a bird to stop flying. I slipped away to the moonpool with no thought that I would not see him again. In the morning, when I stepped from the river, there was no sound of him, no chop of wood or smoke from the fire. No footprints in the melting snow. It was as if he had never been, but for the skin, the pure white bearskin, that lay upon the bed.

  When I sat beside Wilson James there was no haunting music, no shifting from one form to another, no knowing of each other as creatures who were not human. It was as simple as the small-leaved heath that grows everywhere it can in the forest. It was framed here in the forest by the distance between his home and mine and the course of the river. It had the smooth texture of bark from a slender tree, the smell of forest. It was a thing so simple it would have been easy to overlook it, like clouds so common they went unremarked.

  ‘I have nothing to offer you,’ said Wilson James. ‘I would like to find a gift for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think you are some sort of guardian, a spirit of this place, and that it would be appropriate to bring you something.’

  ‘You have brought me bread.’

  ‘I will bring you jam to go with it,’ he said.

  ‘I will pick the fruit tomorrow morning. There are berries ripening all along the riverbank. I am sure they are edible.’

  ‘Yes, Father dried them but I . . .’

  Sometimes in passing I plucked the fruit and let it rest upon my tongue. But I had let it all go, Father’s garden. The fruit vines he had planted had seeded through the forest, but the vegetables he had tended each day had long been overtaken by fern and scrub. The house too had sunk into the earth, as if one day it would relent and give itself back entirely. I had come from the river to find puddles on the floor. I could not fix it. I could not carve the pieces to fit as Father had.

  I knew that one day the house would no longer offer the shelter Father intended.

  ‘Come to my house after midday. I’ll be ready,’ said Wilson James.

  ‘Will you, Wilson James?’ I smiled. ‘Then I shall be there.’

  He turned to walk away, calling gently after him, ‘If the spirit of the forest is flirting with me, that must be a good sign.’

  Inside the house there was much that was unfamiliar, but not Wilson James or the fruit in bowls upon the table. The house was bigger than I had imagined it would be. My shoes made no noise across the floor, which was softened by something like fabric. But it was the smell that struck me as the strangest thing inside the house. The forest was gone from it. Although it was just beyond, the house was still and empty of the bright scent of trees.

  ‘Do you know the story of this place?’ Wilson James asked.

  ‘The child was killed.’

  ‘Yes, the gas tank. Apparently it took out the whole side of the house. You can’t tell.’

  ‘The trees have never grown here again after the fire.’

  ‘Mary’s daughter.’ He picked up a picture in a case above the fireplace and there was a child spinning in the sunshine, her face smiling as she whirled, her hand just beside her face. ‘It’s why Mary could never sell the place. She always felt that a part of her daughter was still here. Even now. It’s more than fifty years ago.’

  Wilson James replaced the picture above the fireplace.

  ‘She was ten, Mary’s daughter, when she died. The same age as my son.’

  ‘You have a son?’

  ‘He died seven months ago. He would have been eleven today. Mary offered me this place so I could get away. A long way away.’ His voice strained but ran on. ‘Eustace was the happiest person I have ever known. He had a genetic condition that slowly paralysed him. He lived as if he knew his time was short. He played the most beautiful music. Piano. Since he was two. For the last part he couldn’t play or walk. He loved to sit on the beach. Other than music it was the thing he most liked to listen to, the sound of waves. We’d sit on the beach together and he’d make me tell him stories of mermaids and fish and all the creatures of the sea. When he died the last thing he said to me was, “Dad, I will see you on the beach one day.” Once I counted him as a limb of my body. Every day I wake and for a moment the limb is with me and then it is gone, snatched before I can grasp it. I am an amputee. I have ghost pain.’

  So there it was. A child lost to a place he could never follow. I wanted to tell him that I understood. That I knew what it was like to feel the ghost limb of my child. But if I began to talk of my daughter how would I explain her? How could I explain myself?

  ‘I am saddened that you have lost your son, Wilson James. And I am glad you came to the river.’

  He lifted his head and looked at me. I wanted to take his hand and put it to my cheek and say, ‘I will hold you.’ Our eyes did not leave one another and then I said, ‘I would like to hear one of your stories, the ones you told him on the beach.’

  ‘I do not know if I can remember them.’

  ‘Will you try? Are you really a storyteller, Wilson James?’

  ‘Well, as it is his birthday,’ said Wilson James, and though his eyes were bright with water, a smile attempted to rest on his mouth. We sat and picked out the stalks while fruit heated i
n a large pan. Our fingers grew red with juice and this is the story he told and later I added it to the river for others to hear.

  ‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Eustace was only four or five, we walked along the beach and found a fish. A silver fish, only this long.’ He indicated the distance from head to tail with his hands. ‘It was still breathing and we put it back in the water. It swam about in the shallows but seemed reluctant to swim away. We watched it for a while and then we continued on. There on the beach just a short distance away we found another fish, almost identical, but this fish was no longer alive.

  ‘Eustace asked me why they threw themselves on the beach. So this is my story for him. The Story of Two Fish.

  ‘Once, deep within the green ocean,’ he began, ‘there were two fish. Both were silver-backed with mother-of-pearl eyes. These fish were friends as seaweed is friend to a rock and shell is friend to a snail. They belonged to each other. They did not remember a time when the world had been without the other, as if the tide of their friendship had been the rhythm of their lives.

  ‘And so it was one day that one fish said to the other, “When we leap above the sea and the golden world flashes bright in our eyes, do you not think it would be wonderful to have more than a moment? To have more than a glimpse of the golden sky?”

  ‘ “I think in those moments I am smaller than I ever realised,” said the other fish. “And if I stayed in that bright light I should become so small I might never know myself again.”

  ‘ “It is golden and the air stings me and I am frightened, but still I long for more,” said the friend.

  ‘ “It is not for us to step beyond our world. It is not the way. We are bound to the sea for a reason,” said the other.

  ‘ “I do not always want to live by the way,” said the friend, “but by what inspires me. What touches my heart and chills my skin, what lifts me up.”

  ‘ “The golden world does not lift you up,” said the other. “You lift yourself to it. It is all your own doing.”

  ‘ “Still I think it is my destiny,” said the friend. “I will spend my swimming thinking on how I can live in the golden world for longer than a moment.”

  ‘The friend travelled far and asked many questions and the other stayed close beside the friend and did not leave, and so it was that they both learned of the shore. The shore was the place that bordered the sea. Each day waves painted the white sand. Each wave that tumbled to the shore returned dizzy with stories of the surrender and rush of sea as it leapt against the land.

  ‘And so it was the friend said to the other, “We must throw ourselves out from a tumbling wave, throw ourselves into the golden air and bathe in the glory of that world, and then the next wave will come and carry us back to the sea again.”

  ‘ “But none return upon the next wave,” said the other. “It is not possible.”

  ‘ “We will,” said the friend. “I know it. The trick is not to leap too far.”

  ‘ “I am afraid,” said the other.

  ‘ “I am also afraid, but the shore will be kind. Nothing so beautiful could be unkind.”

  ‘Day after day as they swam the blue reaches the friend could talk of little else. They began practising their leaping, going closer and closer to the tumbling waves, sharpening their eyes on the golden light as they leapt.

  ‘ “Let us go this very day, for I feel it is my destiny,” said the friend at last. And because they were two, and had been so all their lives, it seemed the destiny of both.

  ‘And so they went together, for truly they had no thought to go alone or ever to leave the other, though their hearts sang different songs.

  ‘ “If we do not return . . . ” said the other.

  ‘ “We will. We will always be together.”

  ‘Closer and closer they were carried and the sea was dark and then lighter until they were between sand and golden sky, carried in a fold of green. Faster and faster they were carried as the sea pulled up and back and began to fall towards the silver sand.

  ‘ “Leap!” said the friend. “Leap to the light!”

  ‘And so they both leapt, higher than they had ever leapt before, and the swirl and tumble of water crashed beneath and they arced their silver bodies up, up, up. Each was transfixed by the shining brightness, the searing pain of beauty that captivated each until their bodies fell and hit the hard crust of wet sand, and there they stopped. Each of them was too far from the other to know that they were not, in fact, far at all. In vain they sucked at the golden light that, now there was time to really look, had about it a distant vivid blueness that might have been the sea after all. And there they lay stilled by the light and shivered alone.

  ‘And then, as one fish watched with its mother-of-pearl eye blind with the golden glare, it felt a soft warmth and the sensation of being gently held and lifted. It glimpsed the fleeting shadow of an enormous creature before the water enveloped it and the breath of life returned.

  ‘But though the fish waited beyond the tumbling waves for the friend to be returned to the sea also, the friend did not come. The tide changed and changed again. Darkness came and the golden light returned and still the other waited and knew it was too long, and in time the fish returned to the deeper sea.

  ‘ “I have seen the golden world. I have lain upon the shore. And upon the shore it is not possible to breathe and so it was as if I had died. But there are creatures on the shore who watch over us. And some of us they return to life, and some they keep with them,” said the fish when it was asked.

  ‘ “How do they choose?” a fish asked.

  ‘ “I do not know,” said the other.

  ‘And the fish was glad in the time that remained to live in the green ocean and be not dazzled by things unknown. When another asked to swim beside the fish and hear the story again, the fish said, though it caused more pain than to breathe upon the shore, that it preferred to swim alone.

  ‘And so it is,’ said Wilson James, smiling now at me, and himself again, ‘that fish leap still to the shore to bathe in the golden light, and fall and wait on the silver sand. And rarely, though not unknown, a hand reaches down and carries the fish to the water and watches as it takes flight back into the sea.’

  I said to Wilson James, ‘Was it the one who wanted to leap who was saved, or the one who did not?’

  ‘Perhaps it is the one who led, perhaps the one who followed. It depends on how you listen,’ he said.

  ‘That is the secret,’ I said, ‘to every story. It is always in the listening.’

  ‘I never told Eustace,’ said Wilson James, ‘that when I was a boy I found a man washed up on the beach. I was always happy whenever I walked on a beach not to find such a thing again. In the last few months of Eustace’s life his mother and I took a house right on the coast where he could hear the waves at night. It had been years since we had lived together, but having to be with one another and be kind because of him, somehow we managed it. It changed the perspective on everything. When he died it all fell apart, but while he was alive, we were somehow better than ourselves.’

  After a while he said, ‘I should have had more children. I thought when I married again . . . It is a strange thing to choose a mother for your children.’

  Wilson James washed jars and lined them up on the table. He stirred the jam and tested it on a plate to see if when it cooled it ran this way or that or stayed quite still. ‘Jam is tricky because you never know how your mood will affect it. If you are sad it always goes runny and will not set.’

  I said, ‘Are you often sad?’

  ‘Do you have no simple questions?’ he asked, but he was not unhappy. ‘I do what men do. Instead of being sad I grow angry and arrogant. But lately, since Eustace . . . It’s helped being here.

  I don’t know what you are—a muse, a ghost, a spirit. If it’s madness that I can see you and even touch you then I feel perhaps at last I am understanding what it is to be a writer. In the back of my mind I wonder when I will know that the madness has go
ne far enough. That it’s time to return.’

  ‘On some days you do not feel the sun on your face at all but stay here in the house. You smell sometimes as if something harsh has possessed you. What is that?’

  He looked out the window. ‘That is caused by a bottle. But I think I’m coming out of that.’

  Wilson James took a clean plate and poured jam onto it and breathed on it. He reached out and lifted my hand towards him. Dipping his finger into the red sauce he drew on my skin first one long straight line and then another shorter line crossing through it. He said, ‘I believed in the idea of heaven when I was a boy. I thought this was the sign that meant that I was safe. By the time I became a man I knew it wasn’t true. I turned away from believing in anything. I thought there was more assurance in no reassurance. But here, in the forest, I want a symbol. I want something that makes me feel safe again.’

  I took the plate and dipped my finger and turned his arm over. I drew first one flowing red line and then beside it another flowing from the skin inside his elbow to his wrist, two lines that were not hard but soft and moved as the river moves into the palm of his hand. The mark of a river wife. I felt the warmth of him beneath his shirt and I wanted to rest my hand against his chest and feel the beat of his heart. I wanted to tell Wilson James that when a new bird flew down into the forest, sat upon a branch and watched me, that my heart leapt to think it was my daughter returned. That the knock I thought I heard at the door, the sound of the silence bringing snow, the white flash of a creature in the forest, that all these moments I imagined her come home again, though always as the child she had been.

  I had no picture of her grown and I imagined her in countless ways.

  I said, ‘They are never far from us, the ones we lose.’

  ‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, drawing me to him. ‘They are so far and I am still walking and he does not get any closer.’

  ‘I have no life beyond the river,’ I said suddenly, and wondered at my courage.

  ‘You mean you are afraid?’

  ‘No, I can never leave here.’