The River Wife Read Free Page A

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