THE CHANGE
The river is large and opaque. Even in its calm moments, one can never completely trust it. A lot is going on beneath the surface. A riffle or an eddy might appear, stay for a while, then disappear. Occasionally a hidden piece of wood, or even a full-sized log, will explode unexpectedly to the surface. Sometimes you can see the pale belly of a dead fish or some other dead thing close to the surface. When a person understands the river, visions of prehistoric sturgeon can appear. They lie in the cold blackness, on a mound of muck at the base of a back eddy, raking in and devouring anything presented by the invisible currents. It is an entirely amoral place down there, an alien, atavistic world. Of course, I wasn’t thinking of these things while the men talked to my father in Grampa’s yard.
They were great dark shapes, with deep rumbling voices, standing around my father as I held his leg. I could feel tension scarcely held in check by the sounds. It gripped them all. Young as I was, I could feel remember my father’s leg flexing as they talked. I may not have understood it, but my body responded with flexing of its own. A woman had disappeared from the village. She was my playmate’s mother, but I didn’t know that. The men had their dogs with them, and, from the way things worked out, they probably wanted my father to bring ours. Of course, my father agreed.
Looking back, there seemed little choice for any of them except to bring their dogs. What else could they do?
There is an interlude in which we were running. I often didn’t see the things that hit my face or body. My father, running flat out for much of it, carried me in his arms while trying to protect me. Sometimes he put me down, letting me run for a bit, then picked me back up. I probably held them up too much. I could hear the wind rushing into my father’s chest as he and the men around us put out. . . hard. Looking back, there was a sense of emergency and fear. A cycle of run, stop, then start running again had begun. It continued for a long time. I can remember hearing the gasping and panting when we stopped. The men bent over with their hands on their knees. The dogs were circling us, barking excitedly. Eventually calming down, they sat panting with their tongues hanging out. At one point, we started up, and the dogs began milling around. They quickened, and we changed direction, going faster as the pressure on us increased.
We had been following the flume Grampa had built into the mountains for water, but we were now following closer to the creek as it went down toward the river. I could hear the water moving over the rocks, and I remember seeing the place near the creek where the First Nations women left me fish roe wrapped in leaves after cleaning salmon. Then, everything changed again. The men stopped pushing so hard. They became tentative.
Perhaps they were starting to accept what they feared. I’ll never know, but whatever was going on was still powerful.
Looking back, I feel a sense of inevitability. Perhaps I am manufacturing the feeling, but it is natural to me nevertheless and will remain so. I can remember the shock when we arrived. There was silence.
We must have been going much of the night before we reached the river. How else could I remember the light being the silvery light of dawn?
Before us was a trail of footprints in the sand. The light outlined the edges of those prints and drove opaque shadows into their depths. They had a terrible finality to them as they went to the bank of the river, stopping and not coming back. What had happened was irrevocable, undeniable. Confirming all our fears, they demanded our acceptance. The men stood and smoked, saying nothing while looking at those tracks, and I watched them. The dogs sat and panted, staying with the men, not following the tracks to the bank.
It was the first time I sensed something happened to women those grown men didn’t understand. It scared them, and I felt their fear. Somehow my young boy’s mind knew the words ‘change of life,’ I believed this made her crazy and caused her to drown herself in the river. I can’t tell you how I knew this, but I did. It’s possible I heard the men saying it at the river that morning and filled in the blanks later on. Or maybe I heard other adults talking. I can’t remember. Years later, I asked both my parents about the death, and they confirmed that people believed the change to be the cause. So, my playmate’s mother exists alone in my young boy’s mind, without understanding or help.
Lament
You come back to me from your journey, my friend’s mother, a sister in a primeval place. And sometimes tears spring to my eyes. You come alone during quiet times. I can see your body turning slowly in the currents. You are wrapped in the chill and darkness of the river’s waters. It is like a ballerina’s slow, powerful dance, light but inevitable, even wild at times. Occasionally, you put a pale spot on the surface of the water as your body turns against the terrible darkness below. I grieve how you left and for the interruption of your journey at the bridge many miles downstream.
For two weeks, you had travelled in the dark driven by the currents through the twists in the river’s course. Perhaps your journey continued despite the bridge. But I could not follow you, and vestiges of my fear are still there to be re-awakened.
