River Mumma

Faye was thirty-four when her grandmother died, and thirty-four when she found out she had been paid for.

It came out at the wake, the way these things do, in a kitchen, from a woman she had been calling Auntie all her life without being entirely sure of the connection.

“You don’t know?” Auntie Vin said. “You is the one they take out of the river.”

Faye put down the pot she was drying.

“You was little little. Six month, maybe seven. Your mother carry you down to wash and she put you on the stone and she turn her back one time, one time, Faye, and when she turn back around the basket gone.” Auntie Vin made a small flat motion with her hand, a thing going out on the current. “They find you down by the bend. Dry. Not one drop of water on you, and the basket wet through.”

“That is a story.”

“It is what happen.”

“Auntie Vin, babies don’t come out of a river dry.”

“No,” the old woman agreed. “Them don’t.” She picked up a dishcloth and did not look at Faye. “Ask your grandmother what she promise. Oh. You can’t.”

· · ·

Faye lived in Kingston and worked for an insurance company and did not believe in any of it, and she drove back to town on Sunday evening perfectly fine.

On Thursday the kitchen tap started.

Not a drip. A sound in the pipe when the tap was closed, a soft irregular scraping, over and over, that the plumber came twice for and could not find. The second time he stood in her kitchen with his hand flat on the wall and listened for a long while, and then he said the pipes were fine, and he charged her for the visit and left quickly.

She knew what it sounded like. She did not let herself know it for another two weeks. It sounded like something being drawn slowly through hair.

· · ·

River Mumma sits where the water is deepest and combs her hair with a comb of gold.

Everybody in the district knows it. You learn it before you learn to swim: do not go to the head of the river alone, do not fish there on a Friday, and whatever you see on the rock, you do not take it. The comb is the thing people take. That is the whole of the story, in every version Faye had ever heard: a person sees the gold on the stone, and the water is quiet, and the woman is not there, and the person thinks, this once.

And then the river stops giving. The fish go. The spring runs thin. And it does not end with the one who took it, because a debt like that is not personal. It is on the house. It is on the line.

· · ·

She went back down in March and let herself into her grandmother’s house with the key she had not yet been able to give to anybody.

She was not looking for anything. That is what she told herself while she went through the wardrobe, and through the cabinet, and through the tin on the top shelf of the kitchen with the papers in it, and then through the suitcase under the bed, the one with the lock broken off, which is where the old people in that family kept everything that mattered to them and nothing that was worth money.

It was in a sock, inside a shoe, inside a plastic bag, inside the suitcase.

It was about the length of her hand. It was heavier than it had any business being, and the teeth of it were fine and close, and it was not brass, and she knew that immediately and completely in the way you know a thing your body has decided before your mind gets there.

She sat down on her grandmother’s floor with it in her lap.

In the tin with the papers there was a school exercise book, half used, and on the first page, in her grandmother’s hand, a list in two columns that ran for eleven pages. Dates on the left. On the right, items.

1961. Two yard white cloth.

1962. Rice, one quart. Overproof, half.

1963. Blue soap, three.

Every year. Never the same thing twice in a row. The hand got looser as the pages went on and in the last few years it was shaky and large, and the final entry was from two Augusts ago, and it said: Comb. Next year. I am sorry, I am old, my knee.

And then nothing.

· · ·

Her mother, on the phone from Fort Lauderdale, said, “Faye, I am not discussing this.”

“Mummy.”

“I am not discussing it because there is nothing to discuss. Your grandmother was a country woman with country ideas and you are a grown woman with a mortgage.” A pause on the line, long distance, a small hiss under it. “And because I put you on that stone and I turned my back. And she never once, not one time in forty years, said a word to me about it. She just went every year with her rice and her soap and she kept it to herself so that I would not have to carry it. So no. I am not discussing it.”

“So you believe it.”

“I believe my mother carried something for me for forty years,” she said. “Call it what you want.”

· · ·

The scraping was in the bathroom pipe now too, and in the water heater, and once, in June, in the office cooler on the eleventh floor of a building in New Kingston, which was when Faye stopped sleeping properly.

She dreamed of a woman from behind. Never the face. A woman sitting on a wet stone with her back to her, in no hurry at all, working a comb down through hair that went on and on and did not end, and the sound of it was the sound in the pipe, and the sound in the pipe was the sound of somebody waiting who has all the time there is.

In the dream Faye said, I did not take it.

And the woman did not turn around, and did not stop combing, and said, Neither did she.

· · ·

She drove down on a Friday in August and slept badly in the empty house and went up to the head of the river at first light.

The path was worse than she remembered, and she had worn the wrong shoes, and there is something ridiculous about carrying a thing wrapped in a dish towel through bush at six in the morning in a pair of office flats. She held onto that. The ridiculousness was the only handle on it.

The pool at the head is wider than it looks from the road, and dark green, and cold coming off it even in August. There is one flat stone at the far side that the water goes around. She had swum there as a child a hundred times and had never once, not one time, gone near that stone, and no adult had ever had to tell her not to.

Faye unwrapped the comb.

She had thought, on the drive, that she would say something. She had gone so far as to consider what. Standing there, all of it seemed like exactly what it was, which was a woman talking to a river, so what she said in the end was what her grandmother would have said, which was almost nothing.

“It take her a long time,” she said. “She was old. Her knee did bad.”

She held it a moment longer than she meant to. Gold is a strange weight. Then she put it on the stone, the way you put down a thing you are giving back and not a thing you are throwing away, and she took her hand off it, and she stepped back.

The water did nothing. Birds. A dog somewhere down the hill.

She was almost at the top of the path when she heard it behind her, unhurried, patient, perfectly ordinary: the long slow draw of a comb through wet hair.

She did not turn around. She was her grandmother’s grandchild, and her grandmother had raised her properly, and there are things you do not do.

She walked home. The kitchen tap in Kingston has been quiet since. She has not been back up to the head of the river, but every August she goes down to the house, and she takes something with her, and she leaves it on the bank where the path meets the water.

Nothing expensive. Rice. Blue soap. Two yards of white cloth.

She has a book now, with a column for the date and a column for what she brought. She is teaching her daughter the handwriting.

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