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Thomas Gough

River Stories

For how many years has the secret, our one secret, sustained us? Our secret is this: prevailing sadness, sadness without cause, is a lake, a blinding presence that gnaws at the children and pours into the silence of morning. It is a faith we take like wine, but more like coffee, I think, this belief in the deep hole at the centre of living, and it fortifies us, or at least it has, lifts up a shield of brass inside us and keeps us ever seeking, like any religion. But when I drove into town the other day I crested the last rise and I saw that the cow paddocks were filled with yellow stalks, and in the middle ran a path to the dry stones of the river. The mountains, too, had gone yellow. Wind turbines turned in the haze, the sky blue but threadbare, and when I came back home with bread and grapefruit in my arms, I saw Cassie was sitting at the kitchen table, a circle of toys around her feet. In the backyard, the children were screaming. I heard the cicadas.

When the children had surrendered and were asleep, Cassie and I walked in the remains of the garden. Peppers, Hungarian and green, a few jewels, hung at our knees. We stepped over the splintered plastic handles of a toy spade, a toy rake, the instinct for the preservation of objects operating all on its own. The clouds overhead were thin. The Southern Cross disappeared, appeared again.

After twenty years of sleeping in the same bed with me, Cassie knew. I had told her nothing about my trip to town, about leaves like little bits of paper rising from the surface of the road, about the hills, yellowing. But she knew.

She said, It'll pass. It always passes.

I said I knew it would, but then I put up a little fight, thought it would be for the best. I said, You didn't see these hills.

She took my hand, and the touch, her skin, returned me to our old confidence, a path of nerves awakening along my shoulders. And, for a few hours, emptiness subsided, became a possession of ours, another page 70 possession. In the darkness of our house, we went to bed and were returned to one another's bodies, and afterwards the pleasing weight of a leg, a heaving ribcage, and then what was ennui but a word like any other, hum of a motor it's best to ignore. In this way, I slept.

But the next day I was in town with the children, in the presence of their impatient, heavy joy, their bare feet, their hysteria regarding ice cream, and I was not immune to sadness, as, in their company, I almost always am. In the park, I held them to me, and the older one was obliging. When at last she slid from my lap, I felt lost, not because she was gone from me for the moment and would, in a matter of a decade or so be outside the small circle of my intimacy forever, but because, in allowing me to hold her for so long and in such heat and in the full view of the public, my daughter had revealed to me that she, too, was an initiate into the awful secret, that she might turn to me one day and tell me she didn't know, she couldn't understand, what all this living was about, that she had thought of it and decided she loved it, and loved me, her mother, even her brother Gregory, but that everything, that love, that happiness, that family were like little spots of shadow, like so many refuges of shade in the face of the great blaze of sadness that rose each day with every one of us and shown in our minds like a dark and unbearable star. Then I pushed Gregory for a long time on the swings and watched Luce climbing the macrocarpa trees, the red of her shirt guiding my eye higher and still higher.

Everybody knows, I said to Cassie that night. I went to town, and I swear everyone is only pretending. They all know.

We had eaten dinner in the backyard, and the children were no longer at the table. Gregory, naked, engrossed, sat in the sandpit, Luce was whispering to herself on the tyre swing.

Charles, Cassie said, please.

She still had half a glass of wine on the table before her, a bite of her pasta salad. If everybody was on to our secret about life's enduring sadness, she didn't want to hear about it, not now, not yet. Her chin was in the sun, and her necklace, a string of leather, a silver bead, seemed a part of her neck, something old and anatomical. I was not gloomy, I thought. Life burnt with its brevity, it seemed to whistle page 71 with it, but I was not especially glum. Irritated was closer to how I felt.

I said, In a moment, all of us will be gone.

Cassie put down her glass. She nodded, glanced at Gregory.

I sat there in that café, I said, the one on Broad Street, the one you can see the mountains from? A little view of the mountains between the software place and the old schoolhouse? You know that place? And everyone there seemed to know. Even the children looked at me, looked at the sun moving down the walls, at the little glimpse of the mountain, and they all knew it would soon be over.

She said, Our secret's out.

I tried to laugh at this, as I knew Cassie had intended, as usually I could. What else can we do, I know. But today . . . yesterday—

Luce called for us. She was sitting in the dirt at the base of the tyre swing. Gregory stood beside her, shrieking, in delight, apparently. But Luce was visibly shaken. I rushed to her, I knelt.

From her seat at the table, Cassie said, What is it?

Luce said, It's an insect.

A cicada, I said. A shell.

Luce turned it over in her fingers. A translucent brown case split along one side. She said, Why do they live in plastic?

The casing had been sitting in Luce's open palm when she said this, and Gregory reached out and scooped it off. Luce screamed, he ran. When she caught him and pried open his hand, brown flakes of cicada casing fluttered down. Everything was happening so fast. Luce hit him, he hit her back. A crescendo had been reached, and, as I crossed to the two of them crying side by side on the brittle lawn, it occurred to me that they were only tired, only signalling that, for them, the day was past.

As I was tucking Luce in that night, she grabbed my hand and kissed it, her hair hiding my wrist. She smelled of sunscreen, faintly of barbecue.

She said, I wish we didn't live here.

She meant here at this place so far from grandparents and a country she still remembered more than I thought she would have been able to. I told her I understood, that I knew, that everything was, I promised this, okay.

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That night Cassie and I sat in our separate chairs and we read. In the corners of the room, clinging to the undersides of the potted fig like shadow or vapour, there was a kind of absence, as if a film had begun to peel away from the world. How could I read? How could anyone? Later I went onto the porch and heard young men hollering in the valley behind our house. It was Friday night, it came to me. Friday night, not quite eleven.

In bed Cassie reminded me of the children. How they were something, how they were meaning you could not deny. I said I knew they were. And what was more, I had her, I said. I had this job that had brought us so far from home. The sun would set, I said, the sea would roar. Life would go on offering itself shamelessly.

And tomorrow Lisa and Harris are coming, Cassie said.

I had forgotten that.

We've known about it for weeks, she said.

I know that, I said. And then I promised I wouldn't bring them down or subject them to my self-pity.

Then Cassie turned over, and in a moment she was sleeping, and I was left there on my back with Lisa and Harris Lamont in my head. They were a generation older than us, and would be coming up from Wellington. Leaving at 4 am. Harris wanted to camp, and he had emailed through an itinerary. Now that he was in his sixties, he never walked under eight hours, though he insisted he had nothing to prove. But they were old friends, the oldest we had in the country, companions left over from our first months here when Luce was a toddler, friends who had found us during our novitiate, fresh mid-westerners abroad. But they had loved us anyway, took us into their home and summer cottage and taught us to drive on the wrong side of the road, and now they were coming for a visit, the first in three years, the first since Gregory had been born, and I was going to go walk up into the mountains of this country at the side of Harris, in the unspoken presence of his life experience, his knack with children, his quiet stamina, his genteel tolerance, his benevolent head of unthinning hair.

In allowing my mind to drift first to Wellington and then over into the mountains, I had set it loose somehow, and in a moment it went sailing over the whole of the South Island, over Stewart Island, and page 73 into the blackness of the fierce south sea. I saw, then, the specks of ice, the blue shelves of Antarctica, its white mountains rising before the shimmering screen of the Aurora Borealis. The world spun for me in my bed, I swear it did, it turned and broke into the sun of some morning, broke over the great spine of the Andes, over the crystalline shallows of the Caribbean, over the endless squared tracts of my homeland. And after that I saw the tundra vast and blinding white, the gray steeples of Europe, high-rises, chains of sea-mountains: over everything, one unbroken film, one pane of glass, delicate as a microscopic slide, and this, I thought, was all that held us in, kept all of us from simply admitting that we didn't know why we lived, and that in not knowing we had been forsaken and were incomplete, and would die wanting would we could not have. I saw it then, a kind of second coming, all the world's voices in their separate tongues giving up the one truth: the zealots, smirking, revealed they were actors, the true believers stepped out of the circle of their faiths like children at the fire's edge, and all faces were held upright, aimed at space, where the glass had at last been splintered so that there was simply the transparent vacuum, a void which no longer gave back reflection.

And, at that moment, with inexplicable oracular correspondence, the earth shook. Or rather, rolled. A tremor that washed through the house and out in the yard and valley beyond. I knew it was an earthquake first, but in the moment afterward, it seemed, it had to be, I thought, the shock of the world's protective sphere shattering, the shudder of absence as it collided with the mountains and the sea.

I sat up. Turned to Cassie. She was still sleeping. My hands, I realised, were trembling. Cassie, I said. Was I trying to wake her? I was whispering. I ran into the hallway, turned first to Gregory's room than to Luce's, but I did not enter, did not even turn on their lights to confirm whatever it was I had needed to know. Instead, I stood there, moonlight on the floorboards, moonlight over my bare feet, the Lamonts in my head, Harris laughing, my heart racing while a wave went drifting through the earth, out toward the ranges, making the bedrock supple before it.

In the morning, Harris and Lisa brought us breakfast. They held Gregory and, half-asleep, paralysed by their audacity, he allowed it.

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Luce was given a gift, a ballerina of paua shell and topaz that could be wound to play a grim, tin-sounding lullaby. And afterwards Harris unfolded his maps. We gathered round, all of us, how could we not? He traced a path into the wilds, mumbling, daubing the paper as if to remove bits of dust, but I saw no dust.

And why not take Luce? he said.

Some part of me had known there would be an ambush involved in my plans with Harris, but I had had not foreseen this.

She doesn't have a pack, Cassie said.

I looked at Luce. She was jumping in place.

Girl her age can't carry a pack, Harris said. He had pity in his eyes. Anyone could see the argument was already won.

Would you like that? Lisa said. She was bending down beside my daughter, her hand fell on the girl's shoulder.

I'll behave, Luce said. I promise I will.

Of course, Lisa said. She stood upright, but kept the hand on Luce's shoulder.

No one doubts you will, Harris said.

By noon we were two hours out of town, climbing the last bit of road, gravel spitting out from under Harris's tires. Then we ran up a slope of sheep paddock and parked in the shadow of a mountain.

You feel that, Harris said. He walked into the knee-high grass, his eyes closed.

Feel what? Luce said.

Harris opened his eyes, touched my daughter's hair, but just for a moment. You'll know, he said. By the time we're back out, you'll know.

Our plan was to tramp to a site Harris had last stayed at in the early sixties. A bend in the Oroua River where the rimu grew thirty metres high and the water collected in a deep basin. The way there ran through five, maybe six kilometres of forest, a level walk amid the song of the tui and cicadas. That's how Harris remembered it. But when we rounded the wall of shimmering green we had seen from the car, we looked on desolation. Two spurs of the mountains met in a valley of mud and stone and gray stumps. Mounds of pine debris had been piled up, as if to be burnt. Instead, they sat under the sun and sent off a fume of pine that stung our noses.

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Was there a fire? Luce said.

Logged, I said.

Clear-cut, Harris said. He was squinting, searching the limits of the wasteland before us.

Luce said, What will we do?

Harris said, It's only this one valley.

The sun moved into the centre of the sky as we crossed the clear-cut valley. Sheets of air smouldered before us, and landslides of mud and black boulders lined the hills. The boulders seemed to burn with their blackness, and I felt that if we touched them they would scald our skin. In the soil behind us, our prints stood out as if they had been made in sand. From the last rise of the logged terrain, I could see them, a wandering, meagre line.

It took us an hour to cross the clear cut, and as soon as we had turned into the cover of the untouched forest the logged area seemed tawdry, beneath our contempt, and we didn't discuss it. It was cool there in the shade. We walked at a good clip, met no one, and in another hour we were descending the steep path to the river. Long before we had seen it, I heard it. The sound was a roar, but there was something shrill to it, something brittle, like ice, and when at last we climbed out of the roots of the rimu and stood in the clearing above it, the river glistened in the middle of its rock bed, silver and mottled white, some animal that seemed both snake and bird, and when it broke on the pillars of black stone, its surface was not torn, but merely stretched and turned so that it spiralled each shaft, then dropped gently down.

Cassie and I had camped with Lisa and Harris before. This was back in our early days in the country. Harris and Luce had brought their two children, a daughter of nineteen, Julie, and their son, Roy. He was maybe sixteen. Julie had brought a girlfriend with her, someone from her university, I can't remember the name. There was another couple as well, a couple Cassie's and my age. Brandy and Grant. They had two girls near the same age as Luce. It was a crew of us, and we were staying in a park cabin, some newly-refurbished place on another river, I don't remember where.

We were camping for two nights. The first went well enough. I remember Luce stayed up late playing with Brandy and Grant's girls.

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Luce wasn't old enough to stay up so late, not really, and Cassie and I were sitting there on the cabin's porch calling for her to come in to bed. At last she fell, scraping open both knees, and I carried her off. We had waited too long to act, and she had gotten hurt because of it. I had a clear memory of the two of us sitting on the porch after Luce was asleep. But when I returned to that memory, I did not do so in embarrassment, but in tenderness. Time, I understood, had stripped the night of its original emotion and left it polished

Now Harris and I were camped by another river and Luce was asleep, and we sat around the fire we had made and talked about that last time camping. Not the first night but the second when Luce was, for a short while, lost. She was found at last, safe and in the company of Harris and Lisa's son, Roy, but for a half hour or so I believed she was lost in the bush. For Cassie, it was worse. She had run off in the night after her and had not learned she was found until after two full hours had passed. For two hours of her life she had felt that.

Harris said, I haven't had a fright like it since.

He meant it, I knew that. I knew, too, that I had to appreciate his concern for Luce. But we had been taking sips from a small bottle of whisky as we spoke, and maybe it was the influence of the alcohol that was affecting my mood, making me petulant, tight-lipped, possessive enough of my daughter to ask myself who this man was to get such a fright out of what would have been Cassie's and my loss, and not his.

It was only a misunderstanding, Harris said. He was holding the bottle in his hands, and it glimmered in the light so that it looked, for a moment, like he was cupping a small fire.

I said, Luce was fine in the end.

Of course she was, Harris said. He was looking at his own hands.

It's like this when you have children around, he said. In the mornings, as I was getting ready to go work, as Lisa and I would be trying to get—Christ, how I would raise my voice! At the children. I didn't mean it. What I meant was, My God, you children are full of life—are life itself: life contained, but just barely. Shit, I'm maudlin.

You're not, I said. I was still holding onto my absurd resentment of Harris, but I could feel it tipping, about to spill out in the form of some other more humiliating emotion. Something I would regret the next page 77 day—something Harris would regret hearing. And I had promised Cassie I wouldn't subject him to any self-pity. But Harris was older, it could be he would know what I was trying to say, that he would have shared a similar secret with his own wife, and that my petty sadness would cheer him, return him to an age when you could let an abstract feeling unhinge you.

So I spoke. I said, The other day I saw the yellow paddocks outside of town and the ranges: everything was so dry, so yellow. Cassie and I we have this thing, this secret, I guess. We don't mention it, you know. But don't you think the world is without a point? Don't you feel that way, really?

Harris didn't say anything.

You look around, I said, and you know that everyone knows it. There's something we use, some belief or hope like a wedge, like a lever, and it gets us through the next moment. Something else gets us past that one, but why and what for?

Harris turned the whisky in his hands. It looked as if he didn't want to embarrass me, as if he were hedging. What I wanted was for him to come clean, to join the throng I had seen in my mind as they drank in the new light of a dark star of truth. But I could see I was getting drunk, and so I said goodnight and turned in.

Luce was snoring, and the tent smelled like sleep and plastic and faintly of hay. I saw the glow of the fire on the tent wall, a crawling haze. The sound of the cicadas seemed to intensify, to swell and merge and grow metallic, as if a wall of ringing steel had been shut down over all of us. And still the sound grew louder, more desperate, a frenzy that I could not block out. It was maddening, this sound, a chorus sung by an army. Then all at once it gave out. Simply stopped. A few insects went on, but mostly, there was silence. And into this silence poured the slow, almost acidic, scouring sound of the river, a whisper, subterranean or internal, and now and again broken by the slow roll of a log, the drop of a stone, or maybe only the suck and fall of water into water, the river digging a hole in its own surface and filling it again.

When I woke in the morning, Luce was not in the tent. I unzipped the flap and stumbled outside in my underwear. I found her almost page 78 immediately. She was standing by the edge of the Oroua. She was serene, though a little bewildered by my obvious distress. I had been awake less than a minute, but during that time my body had been flooded with adrenaline, and I had to sit now to calm myself. My stomach ached, it felt carved out. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was Cassie's face in the firelight on that night when I reported that Luce was not in the cabin, as we had thought she was.

What are you talking about? Cassie had said.

Her sleeping bag's empty, I said.

I saw then the darkness of the bush we rushed at, running blindly into branches, clawing our way into the trees without a flashlight or any conscious idea of what it was we were doing. Pure and useless instinct pulsing through us until Harris told us Luce was probably with his daughter Julie. The thought of that night, even for a moment, returned me to that panic. As an afterthought, I pulled Luce onto my lap. She yelled for me to let her go, but, feeling my hands tighten on her spine, she stopped struggling. As she had in the park the day before, she seemed to understand that I was holding her against some force, shielding her from something that she sensed she might someday come to understand.

On the way out of the bush that morning, Harris and I fell behind Luce. When we turned the corner onto the clear-cut valley, she was already a fair way across it. Amid the stumps and the sloughs of mud, she was a small, spry figure, and we stood there awhile and watched. We couldn't keep ourselves from admiring her. I bragged a bit in the ordinary, indulgent way, and Harris said she was growing up fast. For another moment, we stood there, encircled by a soundness of mind that seemed to fall on us like light.

That afternoon, Harris and Luce and I returned to Cassie and Lisa in the back yard. They were sitting side by side, wearing skirts, looking down at the farm in the valley behind our house. A tractor was making its way back and forth across a swath of field. Gregory was inside asleep, and all five of us sat there together. There was talk about the clear cut, the mighty Oroua, my morning scare, but first there was this silence, this long minute of watching during which the hum of the tractor's engine slowly made its way to our ears, rhythmic but faint, the whine of a fly, and it seemed to me then to be something page 79 we should not have been able to make out from such a distance, a trick of sound we would not hear again.

That night, Lisa and Harris went to bed right after dinner. Luce, too, was tired, and she only put up a little fight out of habit. But there was no spunk in it, and in the minute after her light was off, she was asleep. Cassie and I went out to the garden and picked the last of the vegetables by flashlight. We hadn't discussed it first. She went for the flashlight, I for the basket. When we were done, we sat on the back step and watched the half moon. At the edges of the sky, the stars shone, but there in the center the moon seemed to be mired in a swatch of cloud. Now and again it burnt through the blue haze, but then it would fade again.

You must have had a fright this morning, Cassie said.

In a moment, we would go inside and turn off the lights and fall into bed. Then we would wake at dawn to Harris and Lisa packing. Gregory would be in an uproar. The Sunday would draw out as it does. It could be we would make sauce with the last of the tomatos. After that there was the work week, then the winter.

I said yes, I was terrified. I was returned to the night Luce was lost.

I traced my way back to the beginning of that night and I found there, in my memory, the sound of children. Grant and Brandy's girls and Luce running up and down the cabin steps. I found, too, the sound of chopping wood, how it rang out over the green valley below us, travelling through space, going forth like the call of a bird of prey.

We ate corn Lisa and Harris had grown, Cassie said, and it was as if she had heard the same sound of the axe that I had heard. For the wood was being chopped to start the stove for our dinner. And afterwards there was apple pie. Cassie had made the crust, I had hacked up the filling. After dinner that night we had sat on the porch of that cabin and looked at the sky, all of us, even the children, in that way that it is only possible when your house and your bed with its cardboard boxes of mementos are miles away. I'm sure that night the sun set in the ordinary fashion, the earth rolling in its usual direction, the clouds pulling thin and pink as they often do over the Tasman, but page 80 it seemed to us a gift, something set aside, and down in the valley we heard the water of the river falling out of the mountains.

This, too, Cassie told me she remembered. And later, when I had come out of the cabin, not running, not yet, and told Cassie that our daughter was not there, I recalled that there was something theatrical to my voice, as if, in my new helplessness, I was taking a kind of refuge in pretending. I remembered, too, how we did not start directly to look for Luce. I had had that wrong when I remembered it the night before. First, we simply called her name, not strident, not desperate. Into the darkness, we called her name

I didn't get up, Cassie said. I yelled for her without getting up.

What had happened—and now it was coming back to me with a new sharpness, my chest tightening as I sat there beside Cassie—what had happened was that Harris had stood up and gone back to the cabin. We saw the lights come on in there, which I had not bothered to turn on. It was only after this that Cassie and I began thrashing about in the bush, and who had made us come to our senses was not Harris, as I had thought the previous night, but Lisa.

She's with the older girls, Lisa said. Julie, Lisa and Harris's daughter, and her university friend had gone for a night tramp down the river. They had flashlights, and Julie was familiar with the area.

How do you know that? Cassie had said. Her chest was heaving. How do you know? Did they say that?

Just a feeling, Lisa said. She must be with them.

You ran then, I said. After so many years of rehearsal, we had come to remember together, as if we were returning to a single mind. I think something like this sense of mental harmony between us was what made you look at me with that look we both knew was pride thinly disguised as scorn.

I had to call after you, I said. Cassie, what are you doing?

I called back that I was going to the river.

They've left an hour ago, Harris yelled after her on that night. He meant that Cassie wouldn't catch up to his daughter Julie and her friend, but she was determined that she would. She had told me the story so many times, I could call it up like a memory. She ran down the path to the river without thought, ran as an animal runs, and it wasn't until she was standing knee deep in the river bed itself that she page 81 let herself think that Luce might not be found. The water must have been icy, but she didn't notice. She ran through it, ran while looking at the white rocks of the banks, at the plain of blue that stretched like a day sky from the bottom of the starline to the trees. It was not yet night, she thought. Not yet night, and Luce was already gone. In the trees on both sides of the river, on both sides of her, there was the thrumming darkness of the bush. She must have cried out as she ran, must have moaned and shouted our daughter's name, but she doesn't remember this. She remembers only the incessant sound of the water, not even her footfalls through it, but the simple roar of it, the motion of it breaking on the rocks and groaning down its bed. Thirty metres above her, she saw the roots of trees in the cliff walls, sinews, glossy from the moon.

I said, She was fine.

Cassie said, She was with Roy.

We were no longer talking. These phrases marked the end of the story and they were spoken without meaning, given off by rote like the responses spoken in a liturgy. Luce had been lost, but she was found. Not by Cassie. When she finally caught up the girls they were sitting on a stone before the corridor of a gorge where the white water churned. They knew nothing about Luce being missing, and they were frantic with worry on her behalf. The three of them ran back up that river and then climbed the mud ruts of the path to the cabin. There they found Lisa and me sitting on the porch, waiting. I told Cassie that Luce had been found. Harris and Lisa's son Roy had only taken her to look at the stars, and he came back with her about fifteen minutes after Cassie left for the river. He hadn't thought anyone would notice she was gone.

But by now it was late. Gregory would be up at six, and so Cassie and I went to bed. In the darkness of our room, we could hear the locusts and the wind that swept up the valley. In the morning, there would be a great effusion at Harris and Lisa's leave taking. There would be that sauce to make. I had a full week of work lined up. The secret of our sadness had been resurrected for a few days, but tomorrow it would again recede. Cassie and I would scorn it. We would do dishes when the children were asleep and after that make love.

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I had felt joined to Cassie as we sat together on the deck and recalled the night Luce was lost. In her mind I imagined the same images that I saw in my own. Everything I felt, she also knew, as she had known about the sadness. But now as we lay in our bed with the half moon outside the curtains, I felt Cassie receding, her presence diminishing as if we were parting over the surface of open water, our two minds pulling further and further away. I felt foolish then, foolish for believing that I had ever thought I could know what she was thinking, and I saw now that her mind was as closed to me as stone.

I saw, too, that Harris would never admit he felt the underlying sadness I knew everyone shared. That Luce, my own daughter, would not know, no matter how hard I tried to explain it, why I had held her so tight. I was alone with my thoughts, and they turned like a current against me, forced my mind into the darkness of that night, and there I was in the river as Cassie had been, in the nameless streaming of water. There I stood, my daughter lost again, the darkness of the forest in a foreign land joined now to the closing darkness of the sky, to the shadow of the earth in which I was bound and in which I would find myself every night of my life. There I stood, my throat a cold and useless channel, the stones lustrous under my feet. There I was standing, the river pressing, gently pressing at the backs of my knees, until at last what could I do but go on, continue searching, running downstream, running with the pressure of water pushing me along?