The River Wife Read Free Page B

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,’