The River Wife (18 page)

Wilson James held me to him. ‘Can you not stay?’ he asked. ‘Please stay with me. I will buy a home by the ocean for us and you can walk with me by day and sleep here in the sea at night. Perhaps we might have a daughter of our own, or a son. Please, do not leave me. Tell me you will stay.’

So startling was this notion of life with him here by the sea, of another child, that for a moment I was enchanted. Here was the man I had chosen to love. We would grow old together. I would come and go from the water and our children might play upon the beach. But how could I resist this urge to speak with him, to tell him all that overflowed in me? To never speak with my children? It would be only a matter of time before my voice slipped from me and Wilson James would slip away. And I did not belong here so far from the river. In the many moons that I had been gone from the river my longing to return to it had grown louder than any song.

Slowly I shook my head and motioned to the sun falling and the wind dropping. The day was drawing to an end. When he kissed me it was with all the tenderness that any man can find in his heart and I took it into the place in my heart that was breaking and hid it away where sadness could not find it.

I walked away across the beach to the ocean that would eventually take me home to the mountains. I turned only once, there at the shore, to see the silhouette of him against the sky, and he raised his arm in farewell before I slipped into the sea.

T
he moon lit all the upturned places he had been and did not find his shadow. The raindrops leapt as they hit the river rocks and washed his footsteps away. The river retrieved her quiet places on the moss banks where he had slept with his notebook on his lap, the house forgot the scent of him.

Long has been the quiet now without his voice. No overhanging tree makes his silhouette. No clouds remind the water of his face. No birdsong replaces his laughter. No passing blue of wing matches the colour of his eyes. He filled the morning sky, he was the sound of autumn rain, he was the scent of nightfall coming, the taste of words unsaid. He was my earth, my kind, a life known and unknown, he was old and new, a journey only partly glimpsed. He was my story, and while he was here, his story was mine.

The quiet of the days went on. I traced his words, his days with me, into the river. I worked slowly, making stories that were soft but deep, and all the while I sang for him and called the world to watch over him.

He would never come back. He would not walk to the river and scoop me from it though I swam where he knew to find me. He would not come and if he did they would claim him back and so I could not long for him but longed instead to know that he was well in life, that his stories had returned to him, that his words had found him again, that love walked with him and that the hundred pieces of my heart which I had sewn inside him were with him still.

W
hen Wilson James died years later, some said he had lived far longer than a man ought to. He went swimming in the ocean, as he had done almost every morning since he had settled there. He took his swim at dawn and the sea had been kind and the day warm, but he did not return. His body was washed up further along the coast. It was said that he had a pale line of green scales on his right foot, though some said they had fixed themselves there on his journey through the currents.

I might never have known about it at all if I had not heard the whisper of a story come on a fine mist one morning. It was the story of a man who had swum in the sea and been lost, and when his body was found his legs had become a fish tail. It was told that as a young man he had once been saved from drowning by a mermaid and had borne scales upon his feet ever since. Some said she had claimed him back, and others that he had gone to find her again. Other stories came of a man who had been a great writer and each morning he caught the stories he wrote from the sea, as a fisherman might catch his breakfast. And there was one story of a woman who waited by the shores of a river for her fish husband to return, and by day she sang songs to him and by night she slept in the river and awaited his return.

At night I swim as an old fish swims, gently in the moonpool. I have begun to feel the cold. My hair reflected in the water is the colour of snow. Death awaits me and accompanies me and death is my awakening. How beautiful the brush of clouds above the trees. How bright the catch of water as it breaks over rocks in the river. How the leaves move the whole forest in a single note of breeze. Death wheels above me like a great bird, whispers to me as quiet as the wings of a moth, and holds my hand like a needy lover. What might I have done differently? What the same?

I no longer wonder if I am more fish than woman or woman than fish. My life is governed by the span of a human life and I have found in this a simple truth that had never come when all of time stretched out before me. I am a creature of this world. Soon I will return to the earth and so I will never leave here. How fleeting has been all that I held dear. All those I have loved, each one, has been lost to me. How long love goes on for, long after voice and touch and eyes and smile are forgotten. Once I am gone from here, what I have known will continue to change and all it has been for me will not.

The river has grown quieter and the days warmer. Frost has not kissed the earth for many seasons and the mountains bear no snow. Rain bursts from the sky in wild storms and then does not visit at all. One day the forest will be grassland and the river will be gone. The tallest trees have fallen and the forest is dry in the bare sunlit patches. Perhaps my daughter will return and summon the rain to wrap itself about the mountains and fill the lakes until the land is running with water once more. Perhaps the moonpool will be deep again and other fish will come to swim in its depths. Perhaps the forest will again grow quiet and green, alive with leaf and moss and tree and creatures of every colour and pattern of movement.

There is a wonder in this world that has no words. It is the wonder of things visible and invisible, human and other. I am not one or the other, the world is not one or the other, we are both.

I have cast the stories I have heard upon the river, not woven deep, but floating within bubbles of air, helical and rainbow-infused. So light that sunshine will snap them open. See how the light catches on them? So many I have launched in their fragile air carriages. Still I may not finish with them all before it is my time to flow on. Each story that leaves me makes me lighter. Each story unfolds like a flower cast upon the water and each one has its own purpose. Each story has its place and time.

I will never see the people who will pause and listen at the side of a river, who will take the time to sit on a patch of earth in a forest, those who will watch the sky or listen as the rain comes down, those who will turn their face to hear the sea or pause before they drink. But we will all be part of each story that unfolds upon the earth.

A story is always in the listening.