The River Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

fields.”
    ‘The boy did as the young woman asked. He carried her on his back to her home in the river, and when he returned to his family he found the table laden. For a whole turn of the seasons the crops grew plentiful, the trees were heavy with fruit and the boy was greatly celebrated for catching the river goddess. But after a year life returned to normal. The bounty faded, the crops and trees gave only their usual yield. So the boy’s older brother thought to also win the regard of his people.
    ‘He went to the river and he caught many fish and each one he carried in his basket back along the path to the village. None was the young woman his brother had spoken of and each of the fish he flung down on the path. All day he fished until at last, as the sun was sinking to rest among the mountains, he caught a black fish with scales of gold. When he carried the basket on his back it grew heavy so he laid the basket down and from it stepped the young woman. She looked about her and saw the dead bodies of all the fish the young man had thrown away and she was dismayed.
    ‘ “What is it you seek from the river?” the girl demanded.
    ‘ “You can bring bounty to our table and plenty to our crops.”
    ‘ “You have taken food from the river and you have wasted it. You must return me to the river and no food will sit upon your table and your crops will fail,” she said.
    ‘But the brother bound the young woman with a rope, saying, “I will bring you to our home and you will make sure the table never runs low and the crops are plentiful, and because you are more beautiful than any girl in the village I shall consider making you my wife and I will rule over the village.”
    ‘He carried her on his back but when he arrived home, instead of a woman on his back, he bore the skeleton of a great fish.
    ‘The younger brother was so distraught at what his older brother had done, he carried the bones of the fish back to the river. He laid the fish upon the water and the bones turned to mist and rose into the sky. When he returned to the village his brother and all the people who had lived there were gone. Water came no more to the land and it has been that way to this day.’
    My father nodded.
    ‘Father, when I die will I be a fish or a woman?’
    ‘I am not sure you will ever die.’
    ‘Only if I leave the river?’
    ‘You belong to the river. We both know that.’
    ‘Mother left the river.’
    ‘Yes, little fish.’
    ‘Do you think she went to the sea? Is that where river wives go?’
    ‘Perhaps, little fish.’
    ‘Do I look like her?’
    ‘You do, so much like her. But of course she was not human at all. So when I held her it was like holding time itself.’
    My mother had gone when I was so young I had few memories of her. I longed for her but she was not here with us, and I hovered between wanting to know everything about her and wanting to know nothing.
    ‘Will I really live forever, Father?’
    ‘My not-so-little fish,’ and here he held me gently against him with his arm about me and looked into my face with his smiling eyes, ‘you are life in some form I could never have anticipated. You are my own flesh and blood, yet you are so much more than that. How late it has come, this understanding that I have been entirely shaped by my human brain and all the limitations it has. How far we might go if we could reach beyond our form, and yet I suspect the very notion of reaching beyond is part of the human condition as well. Ah, it is a riddle, life. I cannot see the future but I know I will never leave you. Even if you are here forever.’
    I saw life. I saw it in flies swarming, in butterflies, in bubbles floating on the river, in fog lifting, in the breeze with its gentle invitation to move. The river changed and change was its pattern, the tumble of cycles one upon the other like a stone thrown into the lake at dawn when the surface was pulled tight with silence. Only the sun was constant, and the sun