The River Wife

by Heather Rose

  ‘ “If you bring me the shoe to match this one,” she said to the man, showing him the shoe that was the pair of the one she had placed in the river, “you shall marry the spirit of the river and you and your children will have eternal life.”

  ‘The man said, “And where might I find this shoe?”

  ‘ “It is in the last place you will look.’

  ‘The man looked up and saw the moon, who was late going to bed that day.

  ‘ “I could ask the moon, but as that is the first place I have looked I am bound to be unsuccessful, so instead I shall ask the sun,” he said.

  ‘The sun was not happy to be troubled by a man but said she had seen a shoe just like that on the banks of a great river which flowed from this very river and was no more than a few days’ walk. The man was well pleased and set off downstream. But the way was hard and the pathway treacherous beside the wild river. As the man walked his skin grew fur and soon he had transformed into a wolf. The sun passed him by and laughed at his travels.

  ‘ “You will never find eternal life as a wolf,” she said.

  ‘The man now spoke to the moon, who was that night full on the horizon and so close enough to talk with.

  ‘ “The sun has tricked me. Where might I find the shoe I am seeking?”

  ‘ “I have seen one just like it in the depths of this river, but you must swim deep to find it.”

  ‘In the light of the moon the wolf swam in the river but no shoe could he find. He was washed downstream in the water’s flood and as he journeyed his fur was washed away and he was clothed instead in the shimmering scales of a fish. At last he was swept into the ocean and washed to the shore and his fish form slipped from him as he lay on the cold sand. There on the beach a white bird spoke to him. “If you climb that tree over there you will find the shoe you seek,” she said. “But remember it is in the last place you will look.”

  ‘And so the man began climbing the tree. When he was only a small way up his hands grew sharp, and soon his arms and legs were black and shiny, and he was transformed into a small beetle. The wind blew at him and rain fell and many times did he cling to the tree for life. At last, at the top of the tree, he found the bird who had laughed at him. She fluttered her wings in the breeze.

  ‘ “Fly to that mountain over there and look into the waters of the blue lake and you will see the shoe, and there you may choose the gift of eternal life, if you so wish it.”

  ‘The man was transformed into the shape of a great raven and flew high into the sky and far across the land to the last peak, where the bright light of ice glowed white in the sky. Though it took all his endurance to fly so far, at last he gazed into the lake. But, instead of his own reflection, he saw only the sky.

  ‘ “I am nothing,” he said, dismayed. “The lake does not even note my presence. I began as a man and I have journeyed the pathways of beast and fish, insect and bird, but now I am nothing.”

  ‘ “What form would you seek?” said the woman from the river, appearing beside him at the water’s edge.

  ‘ “My own true form,” said the man.

  ‘And so the man became the shoe he had grown from in the river.

  ‘ “You see,” said the woman, “you are what you were seeking.”

  ‘And the man stood up out of the shoe and took her hand, and it is said that indeed they married and many were their children and each had the gift to change shape into wolf or fish or insect or bird. And so the man, as he had wanted, went on forever.’

  ‘So when women look for shoes they are really searching for the ideal man?’

  ‘I do not know. I have never had to look for shoes.’

  ‘I have noticed your shoes. Did your father make them?’

  ‘Some he did. And others were gifts.’

  I wanted to tell Wilson James that there were other stories which might be told—stories of battles, of the growing of food, the making of peace, the taking of husbands and wives, the raising of children, the making of relatives, the bringing of rain, the care of the dead—and all these stories are in the river, if he had ears for listening.

  ‘So if I found a shoe in the river and put it on would eternal life be my prize?’

  ‘Would you choose it?’

  ‘I am sure there would be a great price to pay.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There always is.’

  I do not know quite the moment when I befriended love again. Was it the day he brought me green orchids from his walk across the high reaches? Was it the day he caught his first fish, a brown trout that he cooked and brought to share with me for lunch, and I cried and he said he was sorry, he didn’t know but he was trying to know. Or was it right back there on the day we sat at the lake’s edge and watched the rainbow-coloured vessels float across the water? Was it already there when I traced my hand along his cheek as he slept under the ferns? Or had it been there, this hope for love, since I dreamed as a young woman that a man would come for me, a human, as my father had come to my mother, and though I did not know his face or his voice, or the eyes he would watch me with, still I anticipated his arrival.

  What did I know of love? I knew the words of sunrise and the language of full moon, waning moon and dark. I knew the sound of a leaf settling on the forest floor after a long descent. I knew the calls of birds and beasts. I knew the caress of water. I knew the first fronds of spring, the last gold of autumn. I knew the tenderness of blossom and the fragrant damp of earth. I knew the silver of river rock, the chatter of rapids, the winged music of small creatures. I knew the fabric of mist, the invisible hour before dusk and how the sun looks from deep within the river. I knew the gift of a daughter swimming beside me, the call of her voice, the stretch of her hand, the curl of her body on a rock in the sunshine.

  Love, I came to see, was not simply a river; it was an ocean few crossed with ease. Perhaps it was not the crossing that mattered but the boat that was built to travel in.

  The rain of the world had returned again to the forest. The land pooled and bubbled. Rain came early and talked late into the day. The land grew soft and every path shimmered. Then at last, though it had not come for years, snow fell deep in the valley. One morning I stepped from the river into a pale sky and the banks and boughs and every blade of grass and branch of fern were hidden with the sudden brightness of snow. All day it fell, as silent as love itself, and the upright forest curved and leaned and arched forward, heavy and white, every surface defined, each twig, stick, leaf upon the ground textured by the pattern the snow had made upon it. My footsteps were soft upon the world’s new surface.

  Wilson James came down to the river and stood on a patch of green moss while all about it was white or black and he said, ‘I am not prepared for winter. I don’t have enough warm clothes.’

  I took him to the house and said, ‘There, in that trunk, my father once kept his books and journals. But now, if you look, you will find clothes suited to this weather and I think they will fit you, though they are not perhaps what you are used to.’

  Wilson James put on the coat which had kept the weather from my father and he said, ‘He really was a man, wasn’t he? A long time ago. But he was here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And he would be glad to see his clothes worn again.’

  And so it was that Wilson James came to wear the skins of my father, the hooded cape he had sewn, the gloves, the long coat that made him near invisible as he passed between the trunks of trees.

  Not long after that first snow had melted I returned from upstream and found Wilson James sitting outside my door wearing my father’s coat. He had a notebook on his lap and he was writing.

  ‘You have found my home,’ I said.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘It was suddenly right in front of me. I shouldn’t have come here without you.’

  My world was slipping from me or I was slipping from it and this man was part of it. I had no-one to help me. I wanted to understand.

  ‘I can go again if you like. I
brought you bread. And this,’ he said. ‘Our jam. I would have brought it before but I wasn’t sure you’d eat it. That you should eat it.’

  ‘I will try.’

  He cut the bread and spread the jam on top of it, as Father did with honey. The jam tasted like a memory of sunshine. My veins ran with the sweetness of it. I was laughing and then my head ached and I did not feel myself. Wilson James made tea for us and only after I had drunk it did I realise he had used the tea for sadness and I began to cry.

  ‘It’s the sugar. I’m sorry. You probably shouldn’t eat it. Don’t cry. It’s not good to cry when the sun is shining.’

  ‘Yes, the sun is a friend of mine,’ I said through my tears.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Wilson James.

  ‘No day goes by that it is not by my side, upon my cheek, at my back, lighting my way. Though there are clouds and rain and storms, always the sun is hiding there. In all my life it has been my most constant companion.’

  He took my hand then and said, ‘My, you have been alone a long time.’

  There had been so much time when there had been no-one to walk the riverbanks with me. When I forgot the sound of my own voice talking. There had been a time when I wanted only to be a fish, for as a fish I could not miss my people nor lament their passing. There had been a time when I railed against the river and my duty to the songs and stories of people I would never know or see. There had been years when I grieved at every story that told of a mother and daughter, every story that told of winter, every song that spoke of eternity, for eternity is no friend to those who are abandoned. My cycle was so long and undulating I could barely glimpse it. But Wilson James’s cycle was written in the lines of his hands, the fragments of darkness in his eyes, the smooth rocks in his voice. I felt the net of my humanity catch me. I wanted to love him. I wanted to feel my human heart.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he said. ‘Turn me into a frog if you must but kiss me.’

  The earth does not care for humans. The wind, the rain, the moon, the birds, the sunshine, the fall of light and dark, these things are not bound to humans. They are and they go on and that is the only duty they have, to be the cycles of growing and replenishing and falling away.

  Wilson James was a whole landscape even in his face. I saw the two parts that I had first observed; the half that was gentle and the half that was hard were no longer distinct. His eyes had settled. His skin upon his cheeks, his whole face had become something clearer. The small hairs that grew from his skin were grasslands my fingers rippled through. His warmth came from deep within him. His eyes were bright and watchful and I looked into his face and his mouth flickered with words he might say.

  Wilson James slipped his hand along the fabric of my dress and peeled it back to bare my skin below my neck and this he kissed.

  ‘Let me make love to you,’ he said.

  ‘You ask to know me and you think it the most intimate thing you could know, but it is not.’

  ‘Tell me what it is I need to know.’

  I drew breath and said, ‘If you will sit by the river at sunset and watch me swim. If you will return to the river and meet me at dawn, and if at dawn you still wish to lie with me, then I will make love with you. But if you choose at any time to walk away, then I will not try to hold you to me.’

  He kissed my mouth. ‘What are you?’ he said.

  ‘Are you brave, Wilson James?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Soon you will.’

  I wondered how my mother had faced this moment. In all the stories she had left me, there was none for the journey of love between a river wife and a man. The only story of such a bond was that of my mother and my father, and I could only guess at the price each had paid. Would they still have loved each other if they had known the price? Would I still have loved Wilson James? Love seemed a world where the sun did not rise twice in the same place, nor the seasons travel one after another. Love had colours and textures all its own.

  Wilson James stood upon the riverbank and the rain caressed his face, curling his hair, polishing his skin, softening his eyes.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ I said. I did not kiss him and he moved to reach out his hand once before I went but we did not touch.

  And then I stepped into the water. I swam as a fish and came back to the shore and Wilson James was still standing there, though I could not make out his face. I fed near the waterfall, as was my habit, and I slept in the moonpool. I did not think of him for that is not the way of fish. In the morning, when I stepped onto the riverbank, he was there, and I could see he had spent all night beside the river. The long coat he wore was entirely wet, his hands were bitterly cold and snow was falling on him. He looked more aged than Father had ever looked.

  ‘Come inside,’ I said. ‘You will become ill. We must warm you.’

  I made a fire and slowly I took from him the coat, his shirt, his shoes, his socks. He pulled me against his skin and a ripple went through his body strong and sharp and then another, as if someone had sent a stone into the depths of him and the waves of it were washing ashore.

  ‘The world is not as I thought,’ he murmured.

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘You are a fish,’ he said.

  ‘I am of the earth and of the river.’

  He held me to him and his skin stole warmth from the closeness of our blood. The days of longing for him, the coldness of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the stretch of his legs, the colour of his eyes, the texture of his breath on my skin, the weight of him above me and in me and with me, so sharp and sweet was the relief of it, so deep and urgent and shuddering. And then he held me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  We drifted in wetness. My hair laced his cheek and his arms held me to him. He slept and I slipped from him and clothed myself for the day. The snow had stopped and a sky blue and cloudless was high above the forest and so I cast a dress in a colour to match. I returned to stroke his cheek before leaving to tend the river. His skin was running with water and as hot as fire.

  ‘Wilson James, I think you are unwell,’ I said, but he did not wake. ‘Wilson James, you must rouse yourself.’

  I brought him water to drink but his head rolled on his shoulders and his eyes did not stir beneath their lids. I wrapped him in a blanket of skins and when it was too wet I dried it by the fire and wrapped another about him. All day I dried the blankets and wiped his body until I was sure there was no more water inside him. Grey grew his skin. And then white, until I was sure he would die, so cold and silent was he.

  Night fell and I did not wish to leave him. Though I kept the fire and it burned high and bright, his body was seized with shivers that came and went like cold wind through him. Then the trembling began and his breath came harsh and rattling. Several times he cried out with a desperate anguish.

  I could not wake him. I could not get him to drink.

  ‘Wilson James, I must leave for the river,’ I said, but I did not.

  Again I changed the blanket soaked by his skin. Water no longer seeped from him but beaded on his skin as leaves are beaded at sunrise with dew.

  A wind blew up outside and sticks and leaves clattered at the windows. The fire shivered and I fed it more wood until it roared as loudly as the wind about the cottage. I tended Wilson James and, as the darkness of night descended, my mouth grew dry, scales emerged and shone on every part of me and each breath of air became more painful than the last. Still I stayed. His face was translucent, so pale had it become. His breath quiet and infrequent.

  ‘I have killed him,’ I said. ‘I have taken him from life.’ I had thought only to love him, not to hurt him. Where was it told that a river wife would kill a man if she lay with him? My father had not died. Where was it told that I might not know what it was to be a human and love as humans do? Why was I made human if I could not be, could never feel what others felt? Why bring him here at all to the river, why have him slip through only to have this, his death?

  Death comes
every day to the forest and the river. Death has its own stories and its own keepers. I had not needed such a conversation in all my years, but I pleaded with death that night to turn its gaze from Wilson James. And I pleaded with something more eternal than me, something fierce and hopeful, that would hurry death away.

  My own life was leaving me the longer I stayed from the river. Every breath of air was a punishment, as if I breathed hot coals. My legs grew in agony as my fish body tried to return. At last I left him, for death or life, I knew not.

  The few steps to the riverbank were a shock of pain like none I had ever known. I fell into the shallows, flipping and gasping for water deep enough to catch my breath, tearing my underbelly. At last the final belated transition of legs into tail, and I was swimming slowly, swept against the river’s flow, until I reached the darkness of the deep pool beneath my father and, floating there on that moonless night, I was not able to cry.

  A day and a night passed for Wilson James and it passed for me. I did not step from the river, too battered was my body, too weary and, in truth, I forgot him for a day and another night so far into my fish self did I go, as if in trying to deny the ancient spell that called me each night to the water I had strengthened it even more. I fed and swam and I was not human at all. When I stepped from the river on the second day at dawn the wind had subsided. A mist of rain had closed in the forest and I could see no further than a few steps ahead. I looked down to find my human skin was red and torn, my flesh coloured green and purple with the beating of rocks. I had no strength to clothe myself that morning with the light of the day. I wished only to tend my wounds and sleep.

  I crossed the dark earth patterned with snow-melt and went inside the cottage. Wilson James was turning logs in the fireplace.

  ‘You are alive,’ I breathed. I felt my nakedness but had no strength for anything but to rest.

  ‘What has happened to you?’ he asked.

  ‘I stayed too long from the river.’