The River Wife (3 page)

M
y 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.

T
ime 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.

S
pring 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.’