Four Rivers
by H. S. RoisonThere are four rivers near my house. They’re gentle things, smooth silk in perpetual motion. There’s one for each of my babies – Andrew and Mary, Stephen and Connie – and while I know I can never have them back, it pleases me to think that now they’re immortal.
I’ve been here for a quarter of a century. Twenty-five years, just me and my memories, and when I’ve gone they’ll go, too. That’s why I’m going to live forever here. I’ve put so much into this place I can never leave it. I’ll become its earth and air and water, and I’ll protect us all for eternity.
I’ve tended crops here, kept hens and pigs, I’ve shaped the land and made it mine. I’ve planted twenty-eight trees in twenty-two years: beech and oak and elm and birch. Some of them are giants now, others still saplings, and I love to spend my afternoons in the grove, among the fruits of my life. I planted faster in the beginning – three in the first year, three in the second, two in the third. Now I plant one every couple of years. I may do another tomorrow, and maybe it’ll be my last.
But then, I always think that.
I took a walk yesterday afternoon. It was almost warm, but not quite, my favorite sort of day. I strolled, in turn, to each of my rivers – to Connie and Stephen and Andrew and Mary. I always leave Mary till last. She’s hardly a river, not much more than a burn, barely formed, groping for a future – just like my Mary. The wind seemed to caress me as I bent and ruffled my fingers through the water. It bubbled around some heavy stones, seeming to dance towards my hand. "I love you, I miss you," I whispered, and walked away before she saw my tears. She was always sensitive, little Mary.
I saw John last night. I can’t believe it’s a year since we last met, but we always get together on our anniversary – this is our ninth – and I like to see how he’s getting on. I can recall every detail of our first meeting. I’ve still got the photos, of course, and that helps. I laid them out yesterday and let their memories wash through me. How attractive I was, back then. So was he – a nice man, tall and thin, skinny in fact, though he’s even skinnier now. I met him in a bar in Peterborough. He was playing a guitar and singing a song about a man whose wife had died. He was intense, his eyes screwed shut as he sang, and he seemed to be feeling the pain of the song. I like a man to feel pain, rather than repress it in that retentive, masculine way. They’re very hard to find. And so I bought him a drink and we chatted at the bar while I decided whether I wanted him.
I certainly did – he turned out to be a perfect specimen. All “new man” consideration on the surface, pure neanderthal beneath. I wanted him –and I got him. So easy.
I was nervous before meeting him again. I dressed quickly, my mind racing, struggling to capture all the ideas filling it, and I felt a kind of slow dizziness. I’ve always cherished this moment: it’s when the change comes. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw someone else’s eyes. I smiled and nodded.
A hammering in my heart and ears told me it was time to go. I put on my boots and gathered my things and headed through the grove to meet John. His tree was number twenty, a silver birch near the pond, ten years old and already five metres high. I love birch – the texture of its bark, the way it crumbles and breaks and peels from the tree, like a scab ready for picking. I wondered how he would look. He had been a bit weathered the last time, a bit detached, as though he wasn’t looking after himself properly.
They all get like that, eventually.
It was a lovely evening, fresh, a slight breeze making my work easier. The ground was soft after all the rain last week, even under the protection of the tree, and it only took me half an hour to reach him.
I dropped my spade. Stood at his door, just a few inches from the surface, and patted my hair and adjusted my blouse, readying myself to greet him. I tugged off my hiking boots and slipped into red sling-backs, then took a deep breath. This was always my favorite part. I knocked on his door. "John, are you in?" An old joke now, but it still made me laugh. The door was beginning to rot quite badly, its sickly aroma filling the air. Even a strong pine doesn't respond well underground, and I'd need to replace it next year. I began to ease it open.
There's an instant, just before the door fully opens, when you see inside into a world of unimaginable darkness. It's the darkness of eternity, and it terrifies me every time. It’s monstrous in its energy, as though life has been compressed for the past year, feeding on itself, becoming denser, ever denser. You truly understand mortality when you see that darkness.
It’s why I'm staying immortal.
I pulled the door open and lifted it from the casket. "Hello John," I said, smiling. "How are you? I do believe you've lost weight again." John grinned sightlessly at me, a rictus smile claiming his face. Despite the embalming I gave all my gentlemen, it grew wider every year as the leathery flesh round his cheeks shrunk back and disintegrated.
His eyes betrayed the same helplessness they had that night, ten years before, when he began to lose consciousness. People look so vulnerable when they're about to die. I remember the way he kept shaking his head as I explained about the poison in his whisky.
"You haven't," he kept saying. In the end, I had to be quite insistent – even showed him the bottle. Some of my dates understand and put up a good struggle, but others never really fathom it. I don't like them. They just slip into hell without a murmur. What kind of a send-off is that?
John struggled. He was good. He tried to stand, reach out for me, throat straining to utter words his paralyzed vocal chords wouldn't permit. But his eyes told me everything he wanted to say, and I laughed while he wept in frustration and terror and anger, shaking his head erratically as poison flowed through his veins. It was a painful death, long and protracted, and I held his sweaty hand and mopped his brow as his spirit lurched into oblivion. Finally, he subsided into a death huddle, crouched like he was back in the womb, and I used my knife to finish the job.
Even now, ten years later, I could still see defiance in his body. His left hand, almost fleshless now, just a few rotting sinews holding the bones together, was upturned and curled, as though he were readying to hit me. I poured a glass of wine and sat beside him, and we began to chat. I offered him a canapé, but he said he wasn't hungry.
"Such violence, John, even after all these years. You know I don’t like violence. You know how much it upsets me. Reminds me..." I nibbled my canapé distractedly. "You never met my children, did you, John? Pity, you would have liked them. Everybody liked them. Little angels."
John watched me, and I fancied his grimace changed to one of sympathy. Maybe, after ten years, he was finally learning. It’s not something men are good at. That's why they have to pay.
"So what do you do with your time now, John? Apart from rot?" He smiled at my joke and I stroked his cheek. His skin was hard and fragile, eyes dark with regret. I truly thought we were coming to love one another, John and I. He was my favourite, because he was the most like my husband.
I got up and danced, danced round my grove, round his grave, dancing to memory and loss and redemption. I weaved round my trees, the oldest a beech, the youngest an oak, and under each one was a body, a token of love, a bauble in memory of my babies. John was here, under his silver birch, and Louis had an elm next door. David had been a hard man, he deserved an oak, but Nigel was wet, my worst gentleman ever – he made do with a weeping willow beside the river. And the others, twenty-eight in total, filled my grove, stretching over three hundred yards and twenty-two years of labor, quietly nourishing their trees, helping my land to live.
And on their anniversaries the best of them – like John – were dug up and given their day in the sun.
Some of them have been underground longer than they lived. My first date – Harry – was only twenty-one when I gave him his new home. He had long, thick hair, curling round his neck and on his chest and back and legs. You'd never know that now. I dug him up last month, and he's quite bald. In fact, he's only bone.
Bone and guilt, that's what men are made of.
And me? I’m made of memory. Memories of twenty-two years ago, of a daddy and his children and a sealed car and a hose-pipe. Memories that don’t evaporate.
And some memories require compensation.
©H.S. Roison
HS Roison lives in England and works in local government. To atone for this sin he writes creative fiction in his free time. He has been published in The Big Jewel, Mad Hatter's Review, Opium and Saucy Vox.