Every Voice but His

I. Ama

Before the singer came, I had a daughter.

That is the wrong way to begin. Everyone begins there — with him, with his coming, as though the world started when his foot touched the valley road and his voice opened like something that should have stayed closed. They say it was a Tuesday. They say the sky went the color of a bruise on a peach. They say the river slowed first, before it stopped, the way a heart does.

But I had a daughter before any of that.

Her name was Reo, and she could hold a conversation with a goat. Not the way children talk to animals — babbling, projecting — but a genuine exchange, the goat saying something with the angle of its jaw and Reo answering with her hands and the particular tilt of her head that meant I hear you but I disagree. She arbitrated disputes between the fishing families. Not because anyone appointed her. Because she walked into rooms where people were shouting and the shouting would subside, not into silence but into speech. She had that quality. The quality of making language possible between people who had forgotten how.

She could predict flooding by the behavior of the swallows — three days before, they would fly in low circles over the southern bank, and Reo would walk through the village saying move the grain stores, move the grain stores, and people would move them. Not because she was powerful. Because she was right often enough that people stopped asking how she knew.

She died in the second month of the dry season. A fever. Nothing mythic about it. The healer gave her willowsap tea and said wait, and I waited, and on the third night she went quiet in the way that means gone, not sleeping. I washed her body with river water and wrapped her in the cloth she’d woven that spring — blue thread, badly dyed, the color uneven because she insisted on using indigo berries from the south bank instead of the cultivated ones and they were always unpredictable. The cloth smelled like her. Like indigo and sweat and the oil she used on her hands after mending nets. There were calluses on her palms from the cord. I counted them. Fourteen on the left hand. Eleven on the right. She was left-handed. She had always been left-handed, and I had always known this, and the knowledge was worth nothing and everything.

That was how Reo died. Not taken. Not stolen by a god or a fate or a dark lord from beneath the earth. She died of fever, and I buried her under the holm oak behind the house, and the world went on, and the goats stopped talking, and the swallows still flew their circles before the floods but nobody watched them anymore.

Then he came.

We remember it differently. That is the first thing you must understand. Ask Senne and she will tell you the river stopped at midmorning on the third day of the week. Ask Daulo and he will say it was near dark. Ask old Ama and she will close her eyes and say the river has not stopped, not ever, it merely held its breath and has been holding it since. We do not agree because the event was not one event. It was as many events as there were people standing near water when the water forgot how to move.

Some of us heard him before we saw him. Some of us felt it — a change in the air pressure, a trembling in the stone walls of the houses, a wrongness in the quality of the light. The singing came from the north road. It entered the valley the way water enters a crack in a wall — slowly, then everywhere.

II. Senne

The river stopped on a Tuesday. I know this because I had set twelve nets on Monday evening — six in the eastern channel where the perch run, six in the shallows for crayfish — and when I went to check them Tuesday morning, the nets were lying on bare rock. The water had pulled back like a dog’s lip from its teeth.

I thought drought at first. We get low water in the fourth month. But low water is gradual — you watch the bank marks, you move the nets upstream, you adjust. This was not gradual. This was a river that had been running waist-deep the night before and was now a series of puddles in a bed of dark stone.

Then I heard the singing.

I am not a person who talks about singing. I set nets, I mend nets, I sell fish at the Tuesday and Saturday markets, and on the days between I maintain the drying racks and check the crayfish traps and keep accounts in a book my mother started thirty years ago that records every catch, every season, every variance in the perch run. My mother mended nets and her mother mended nets and the skill is in the fingers, in the particular twist of cord that makes a knot hold against current but release under a pull from the right angle, so you can free a snagged net without cutting it. I know the tensile properties of hemp, of flax, of the cotton-and-horsehair blend we use for crayfish traps because the horsehair resists the acids in the clay-bottom water. These are useful things to know. When people ask me what the singing sounded like, I say: it sounded like a man singing. A very good singer. The kind you’d listen to at a festival and think, “He’s good,” and then go back to your drink.

But the river stopped.

I have described the singing this way — flatly, without ornament — to perhaps thirty people over the years, and every one of them has said, “But what was it really like?” As though the flat description is a shell I’m hiding behind. As though the experience must have been numinous, overwhelming, transcendent, and I am simply too limited or too stubborn to admit it.

It sounded like a man singing. The river stopped. These two facts are related. I do not understand the mechanism, and I am not interested in the mechanism, because understanding the mechanism would not return my twelve nets to their proper positions or reconstitute the three months of smoked char that Preva lost or bring the crayfish back to the southern shallows.

I lost two nets to the mudslide when the water came back three days later. The crayfish traps were destroyed — all six — and three of the perch nets were so silted they couldn’t be cleaned, the fibers clogged with a grey organic paste that smelled of rot and would not come out no matter how long I soaked them. I spent eleven days re-tying, re-setting, re-positioning. The fish took another two weeks to return to the eastern channel, and the crayfish never came back to the shallows at all. I moved the crayfish operation upstream, past the mill, where the banks are steeper and the setting is harder but the bottom is gravel, not mud.

People ask me about the singer and I tell them about my nets.

III. Ama

He came up the valley road carrying nothing — no pack, no instrument, just himself and that voice. I saw him from the garden where I was kneeling among the pepper plants, pulling the weed that grows between the rows in the dry months, the one with the small white flower that looks harmless and has roots that go down half a cubit and strangle whatever is planted beside it. I saw him, and I stood up, and my knees were stiff from the kneeling, and the stiffness was more real to me than he was. A tall man, thin the way hungry dogs are thin, with hunger in his face but not the kind food solves.

I knew immediately. The way you know weather. The way you know when a stranger is carrying grief — it precedes them up the road like a smell, and his grief smelled of something sweet and ruined, like fruit left too long on the branch.

He sang as he walked. Not words, at first. A sound. The sound a river makes when it passes over flat stone, only reversed — the sound of water remembering how to stop. The air changed when he opened his mouth. I could feel it in my teeth, in the joints of my hands, in the old fracture in my left wrist where I broke it falling out of the holm oak when I was eleven and it had never healed right and it ached before storms and it ached now.

I went inside and shut the door.

Reo had been dead four months by then. My grief was the kind that lives in the walls — quiet, structural, the house still shaped by her absence the way a pot holds the shape of the water you pour out. Her mending basket was where she had left it, by the door, with a half-finished net inside and the bone needle tucked into the cord at the point where she had stopped working. I could not bring myself to finish it and I could not bring myself to move it. It sat there. A sentence interrupted mid-word.

I did not want his grief in my house. His grief was not quiet. His grief was a weapon that did not know it was a weapon.

He was looking for her. That was the rumor that followed him up the valley — he was looking for his wife, who had died, who he intended to retrieve from the underlands, the country beneath the river where the dead go to do whatever the dead do. He believed his singing could open the way. He believed his love was exceptional enough to be an exception.

I had buried a daughter with callused palms and badly dyed cloth and no one had tried to open the underlands for her. No one had stopped a river.

We told our children: a man came through the valley and he was so sad the river stopped to listen. We told them this because it was easier than the truth. The truth was that the river did not stop to listen. The river stopped because it was made to stop — because his voice had a power in it that was not asking, was not even commanding, but simply was, the way gravity is, the way winter is, and the river could not be a river in the face of it. We told our children sadness because we did not have a word for what he did to us. Grief, maybe, but grief with the weight of a natural disaster. A flood, except the opposite. An unflood. Three days without water in a valley that is water.

There are things we have agreed not to say aloud. That the singing was, in fact, beautiful. That some of us — we will not name which — stood in the road and wept. That for the duration of one held breath, before the river fully stopped, before we understood what was happening, the sound he made was the most extraordinary thing any of us had ever heard. We do not say this because it changes nothing. Because we are afraid that if we start saying it, we will not be able to say the other things — the nets, the fish, the smell, Pielle — with the same conviction.

IV. Daulo

My daughter Pielle was nine years old and she liked the riverbed. When the water ran, she liked the shallows — turning over stones for the clay-red newts that lived underneath, building small dams with the other children, coming home with her legs muddy to the hip and her pockets full of smooth stones she would line up on the windowsill by color, dark to light. When the water stopped, she went to the exposed bed because it was new country, a place that had always been hidden, and she was the kind of child who believed hidden places were invitations.

I was in the boat shed when it happened. Scraping the hull of the flat-bottom skiff I use for the deep-pool fishing, working the barnacle knife along the keel, thinking about nothing — the satisfying resistance of dried weed against the blade, the smell of old pitch, the particular hollow sound of an empty hull when you tap it with your knuckle to check for soft spots. I heard Aleno shouting. Not my name. Pielle’s.

The mud took her. Not quickly. She was in up to her knees before she called out, and by the time Aleno got to her she was hip-deep and the mud was still pulling. The silt along the eastern bank is different from the rest — it’s a fine grey clay, rich in the mineral the potters use for their glazes, that behaves like solid ground until weight is applied, and then it behaves like something that wants to eat you. The potters know this. The fishers know this. We have always known this. We teach the children: stay off the east bank when the water drops. But the water had never dropped like this, all at once, the entire riverbed exposed in a morning, and the east-bank silt was under a thin crust of dried surface that looked exactly like safe ground.

Aleno pulled. I got there and pulled. We used a plank across the mud to distribute our weight, the way you do when you’re retrieving a stuck boat, and we worked her free by increments — an arm’s length, rest, an arm’s length, rest — while the mud made a sound like breathing, a slow wet exhalation every time we pulled her up an inch. It took most of an hour. She lost a shoe. She was not hurt, not anywhere you could see, except the fear — the kind of fear that settles into a child’s body and rearranges the furniture, so that afterward she would not go near the river at all, not even when the water came back and the shallows were safe and the newts were waiting under their stones.

She would not go, and she has not gone. She is twenty-three now and lives in the hill town above the reach of any water and keeps sheep, which do not require rivers. She is good with the sheep. She has a talent for the lambing season, a calmness that steadies the ewes. I visit her when the road is dry and we sit on her porch and look out at the dry brown hills and do not talk about the river.

The singer did not know about Pielle. The singer did not know about any of us. He passed through our valley and his grief rearranged our geography and he kept walking, and the songs they sing about him in the markets do not contain a single line about a nine-year-old girl hip-deep in mud calling for her father.

Someone told me once that I should forgive him. That his loss was real, his love genuine. I said: my daughter cannot touch water.

We do not say his name. Not out of anger. Not out of fear. Out of a kind of precision. His name is in every song they sing about us in the cities — the valley where the great singer walked, the valley where the river mourned, the valley where love was so powerful it bent the laws of nature. In those songs, we are landscape. Background. The place where the remarkable thing happened. If we say his name, we become characters in his story. We prefer to be characters in our own.

His wife — they call her by name in the songs, a name as smooth as a river stone, a name that sounds like it was invented to be sung. We had a name for her too. Ama called her “the woman he was looking for.” Senne called her “the reason.” Daulo did not call her anything. Lehe, who was not yet born, calls her “the absence at the center.” Lehe calls most things something.

V. Senne

What people don’t talk about: the smell.

When a river stops for three days in the warm season, everything in it dies. The fish, obviously — I found perch belly-up in the puddles, their gills crusted with dried mud, their scales already dull. But also the algae, the water plants, the insect larvae, the colonies of freshwater clams in the deep pool below the mill. A river is not water. A river is a community — thousands of organisms in a system of mutual dependence, each one relying on the movement of water the way a lung relies on the movement of air. When it stops, the community dies, and dead things smell.

For two weeks after the water returned, the valley smelled of rot. Sweet and thick and everywhere, a heaviness in the air that settled into fabric, into grain, into the pores of wood. It got into the walls of houses. It got into stored grain — the entire autumn wheat store in the community granary had to be sifted and re-dried, and even then there was a taste to the bread for months after that people could not name but could not ignore. Preva, who keeps the drying racks for the autumn fish, lost her entire stock — three months of smoked char ruined because the smell permeated the flesh. She sat on her front step and did not cry because she is not a crier but she held very still, the way people hold still when they are calculating a loss too large to be calculated, and then she stood up and began taking the racks apart.

We aired the houses. We scrubbed with lye and sand and the sharp vinegar Ama makes from her windfall pears. We burned juniper in the hearths. The smell diminished. It did not go away. There is a quality to the air in this valley, even now — fourteen years later — that anyone from outside would not notice but that every person who lived through the three days can detect. A faint sweetness beneath everything, like a stain that has been cleaned but not removed. The ghost of dead water.

I keep records. I have always kept records. In my mother’s book, the catch numbers for the season of the singer show a gap — three blank days, then a slow recovery that took the rest of the summer. The autumn run was poor. The following spring was adequate. The year after that was normal. On paper, the river recovered in eighteen months. In practice, certain species never returned to certain stretches. The freshwater clams in the deep pool below the mill are gone. They have not come back. I check every season. I record the absence.

VI. Ama

What he did in the underlands — I have heard the songs. Everyone has heard the songs. They say he sang to the lord of the dead and the lord wept iron tears. They say the dead themselves paused in their slow work of forgetting and remembered, briefly, what it had been like to breathe. They say his wife — his Reo, his whatever-her-name-was, the woman who had been a person and was now a plot device in a song about a man’s feelings — stood up from among the dead and followed him toward the living world.

He looked back. Or he didn’t. Or the passage closed on its own. Or she chose not to follow. The songs disagree, which tells you something about songs.

She did not return.

He came back through our valley three days later, walking the same road, and this time the singing was different. Before, it had been a weapon — purposeful, directed, the sound of a man who believed he could remake the laws of the world by the force of his voice. Now it was a wound. Open. Bleeding into the air. The river did not stop — it had only just started again, still cloudy with silt, still carrying the bodies of dead fish downstream — but the water changed color. Went from brown to a blue so dark it looked like night, and the color held for an hour, and then faded, and the river went back to being a river that was trying to remember how to be a river.

I was in the garden again. Kneeling again. The weeds had not stopped growing during the three waterless days — weeds never stop, that is the one thing you can rely on — and I was pulling them, and my hands were in the dirt, and I looked up and he was on the road and he was passing and he did not see me.

He did not see any of us. His eyes were turned inward, toward the image of the woman he had failed to save, and I thought: you are already writing the song. You are already turning her into music. She is not even cold and you are composing.

My Reo did not become a song. My Reo became a blue cloth with uneven dye, folded and stored in the chest at the foot of my bed, where I can touch it when the nights are long and the goats are silent and the house holds her shape. She became a mending basket with a half-finished net and a bone needle that I still have not moved. She became the swallows that no one watches and the clam species that Senne records the absence of every season and the particular angle of light in the kitchen at midmorning when I half-expect to hear her step on the stone floor and do not hear it and do not hear it and do not hear it.

No one crosses the threshold of the dead for her. No one stops a river. The world continues, which is what the world does, and I continue in it, which is not heroism but is what I have.

VII. Lehe

I was not born yet. Everything I know about the three days, I know from listening.

From Senne, who tells it in numbers — twelve nets, six traps, eleven days of repair, eighteen months until the catch returned to normal. From Daulo, who tells it through Pielle, through the shape of what Pielle lost, and every time he tells it the hour they spent pulling her from the mud gets a little longer, not because he exaggerates but because the memory of it has expanded inside him, the way a tree root cracks stone. From my grandmother Ama, who tells it in circles, beginning with Reo and ending with Reo, as though the singer were a parenthetical in her daughter’s life.

I was born the following spring. The river was running mostly clear by then, and Senne had mended all her nets, and the smell was mostly gone except on hot days when the wind came from the east.

Here is what I am not supposed to say: I wanted to hear the singing.

Not the destruction. Not the river stopping. I know what it cost. I grew up in the shape of that cost — Pielle gone to the hills, the crayfish gone from the shallows, my grandmother’s house still holding the outline of a woman I never met. I know. But I also know the songs, the market songs, and they describe a sound that made the lord of the dead weep, and I have spent my whole life in a valley where nobody sings anymore. Not really. Not the way they used to, before — Ama told me once that people used to sing at the harvest, at the mending circles, at the river when they set the nets. They stopped after the three days. The singing reminded them of something they did not want to be reminded of, and so they stopped, and now the valley is quiet in a way that everyone has agreed to call normal.

I think they lost something they won’t name. I think the singing did something to them besides the damage, and they have sealed that room shut, and I am the only one who notices the sealed door because I never saw what was on the other side.

When I was twelve, a traveling singer came through — a young woman with a reed flute and a good voice — and she sang the song of the great singer’s descent. She sang about love so powerful it unlocked the gates of the world below. She did not sing about the fish or the nets or Pielle.

When she finished, old Senne stood up from the bench where she’d been mending a crayfish trap and said: “That’s not what happened.”

The traveling singer looked at her. “It’s the song.”

“I know it’s the song. I’m telling you it’s not what happened. What happened is that a man’s grief destroyed our water supply for three days and I lost twelve nets and Preva lost a season’s worth of smoked fish and Daulo’s daughter will not touch a river for the rest of her life. That’s what happened.”

The traveling singer left the next morning. I wanted to follow her. I didn’t. I was twelve, and Ama would have come after me, and anyway, where would I go? But I have thought about her sometimes — whether she kept singing the song, whether she changed a verse. Whether she understood something about the valley that the valley cannot understand about itself: that the singer’s grief and our grief are not the same story, but they are not entirely separate stories either, and the insistence on keeping them apart is its own kind of damage.

We are not kind about him. We should say this. There are those among us — Lehe, mostly, and the others who came after — who say we have made him into something he was not. That our version of the singer is as much a construction as the market songs. That we have turned him into a villain because we needed one, the way the songs turned us into scenery because they needed scenery.

We do not know what to do with this argument. It is Lehe’s way to find the crack in the wall and put her finger in it. We check the nets. The crayfish still will not return to the southern shallows, fourteen years on. But Lehe is right that the crayfish do not prove what we want them to prove. The crayfish prove only that ecosystems are fragile, and we knew that before he came.

VIII. Senne

I want to say something about rebuilding, because no one asks about it, and it is the only part of the story that belongs entirely to us.

After the water came back, after the smell cleared enough to think through, after Ama stopped standing in her garden staring at the road and went back inside and started making bread again — after all of this, there was work.

We re-dug the irrigation channels. The mud had filled them, and the mud was heavy with dead organic matter, and it clung to the shovel in a way that ordinary mud does not — a thick, resisting paste that smelled of death and refused to be moved efficiently. It took eight of us three days to clear the main channel from the millpond to the southern fields. Daulo worked despite his back, despite Pielle’s fear, despite everything, because the peppers needed water and the peppers do not care about your sorrow.

We rebuilt the drying racks. Preva designed a new ventilation system — she’d been thinking about it for years, she said, sketching it on scrap paper during the winter months when there’s no fish to dry. The new racks use a cross-draft that pulls air through the fish from two directions simultaneously, with adjustable slats so she can control the flow depending on humidity and wind direction. The smoking is more even. The char has a better texture. People come from three valleys over to buy Preva’s smoked char now. Preva had the design before the singer came. She would have built it eventually. The singer did not give us Preva’s racks. He gave us the need for them.

We planted the east bank with willows to stabilize the clay. It was Daulo’s idea. He dug thirty holes along the east bank in one day, his hands blistered to raw flesh by the end, and we filled them with willow saplings that Ama had started from cuttings in her garden. They are tall now — fourteen years of growth — and their roots hold the silt, and children play beneath them, and no one has been trapped in the mud since.

I have mended four thousand nets in my life. Each one held.

IX. Ama

You want to know about forgiveness. Everyone who hears this story wants to know: did we forgive him?

I’ll tell you about forgiveness. On the morning after Reo died, I got up and fed the goats. I did not want to feed the goats. I wanted to lie in the dark and listen to the house being empty, to press my face into the pillow that still smelled of her hair — she’d slept in my bed the last two nights of the fever, the way she used to sleep there as a child, curled against my side — and I wanted to stay there until the dark took me too. But the goats were hungry, and hunger does not wait for grief to finish, and so I got up and I fed them, and the act of feeding them — the grain in the bucket, the sound of their teeth against the tin, the warm animal smell of them — was not forgiveness but it was something adjacent. It was the decision to continue. To let the ordinary hold me when the extraordinary had broken me.

Forgiveness is too large a word. I don’t forgive him. I don’t not-forgive him. He passed through. That is what he did. He passed through and things broke and he kept walking.

But I will tell you something I have not told Senne or Daulo or even Lehe, who asks everything. On the second night, the night the river was fully stopped and the air was already starting to turn, I went outside. Late. The moon was up and the dry riverbed was silver-grey in the light and I could hear him — far away, already past the valley, heading toward the underlands — and the singing was distant but clear, the way starlight is clear, and I stood in my garden among the pepper plants and the weeds and I listened, and for the span of one breath I understood why he was doing it. Not agreed with it. Not forgave it. Understood it — the way you understand fire, the way you understand a flood, the thing that destroys you and is not wrong, exactly, but is simply too large to be contained by anything as small as a valley or a life or a river.

Then the breath ended and I went back inside and the goats were hungry in the morning and the weeds were still growing and Reo was still dead in the ground under the holm oak and nothing had changed.

Reo’s cloth is in the chest. Blue, badly dyed, the indigo uneven because she was stubborn about the berries. I take it out sometimes. Not often. It smells of less now than it used to. In a few more years it will smell of nothing, and then it will just be cloth, and I will hold it anyway.

Lehe has started writing things down. Not in a book like Senne’s, which counts fish. In a different kind of book. I don’t know what she’s counting. She says she doesn’t either.

We will tell this story until there is no one left to tell it. Not because it is remarkable but because the other story — the pretty one, the one with the singing and the underlands and the backward glance — has been told in every market from here to the coast, painted on walls and carved into lintels and taught to children who are then surprised to learn that there is a real valley with real people and a real river that once stopped flowing for three days.

Lehe says we should tell both stories. Lehe says they need each other. We are not sure she is right. But we are no longer sure she is wrong, which is a different thing, and harder.

The river runs. The crayfish have not come back.