She Lived by the River

by Debbie Robertson

I.

All her life she lived by the river.  On the same farm, in the same house, for ninety-four years.

On the night she was born, rain and lightning sliced the sky, but her mother, her dark brown hair tendriling down her white lace gown, held Hilda close to her heart and whispered, “Be brave.” 

Across the room, her father pulled the curtain closed and swore at the wind that shook the house, but then turned to gaze at the bundle suckling at his wife’s breast, and with a calloused finger loosened the swaddling blankets around Hilda’s legs. “See there!  She’s got square knees.” He chuckled softly. “She’ll be a fighter, that one. The knees have told it all.”

I never saw my Great-Aunt Hilda’s square knees. But she was a fighter. Every cousin and grand-child knew how eight-year-old Hilda tackled Luke Kemner, a good four years her senior, and gave him a black eye for pestering one of her pet kittens with a slingshot. And we all knew by heart the story of how ten-year-old Hilda, after winning the Washington County Spelling Bee, by spelling innovatory, quite fittingly, challenged the principal who dared ask her to step aside so the school could send a boy to Jefferson City for the county meet, which, of course, she won, too, spelling phenomenon without even blinking an eye. 

Being brave, we all thought, was to her as easy as breathing. I saw with my own eyes one morning when she had asked me to help feed the chickens, her grabbing a hoe and whacking a slithering rattlesnake who had just inched under the henhouse door. That same summer, while I was watching Uncle Henry trying to break in a new horse for his plow, who was the one who ran from the kitchen and jumped over the fence to grab the bridle of that horse who one second later would have crushed Uncle Henry’s leg with a powerful blow from his angry hooves? It was Great-Aunt Hilda, of course. 

She was the one who gave me my first taste of “home brew,” the beer that everyone started making in their cellars during Prohibition, but then kept on making because it tasted better than anything they could get at the store.    

She loved to take me down to the river and watch the riverboats making their way to St. Louis, filled with men and women in Sunday clothes, out for a weekend cruise along to see the cliffs near Augusta. “That’s one thing I’ve never learned how to do,” she said once, pointing to a woman in high heels. “I tried and tried to walk in them, but they just weren’t for me.”

But, luckily, making chocolate cakes was for her, with a batter so light and fluffy, and me always ready to lick the pan. And too, there were home-made pickles. I know I’ve never tasted pickles like them since. 
 
And how she could dance! On hot afternoons, we would go into the parlor, where the curtains were drawn tight against the sun, and she would slip a Benny Goodman record onto the phonograph, and we would jitterbug around the brown velvet sofa to sounds of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” After we were too tired to dance another step, she would sit at the piano and I would stretch out on the cool wooden floor, the sounds of a Brahms sonata serenading my dreams. 

The only time I ever saw her without her apron was at the Fourth of July picnic. I could hardly recognize her, for all I’d ever known was her in a pink or yellow gingham dress and a blue-checkered apron, her over-the-knee stockings rolled down under her knees, and white tennis shoes. But on that day, she wore a creamy linen dress and a blue hat with a rose picked from her garden, and, to mark the special occasion, red patent leather shoes. 
           
She lived through sixteen floods on that river, several times leveling the cornfields just before harvest. Four times the water came into the first floor of her house, twice almost all the way to the ceiling. She never thought of leaving. “Why? This is my home,” she would say.    

She loved the river. It held the stories of families traveling West to seek new lives, of men seeking fortunes in the Gold Rush. It told of places she would never go. It had taught her how to just keep going, to just keep rolling along. 

And she loved her farm. Even after Uncle Henry died, she climbed up on the tractor and planted the corn and brought in the harvest. “Daniel Boone walked on this land,” she once told me.    “That tree,” she said, pointing to a gnarled oak in the distance, “is where he held court, making many a wise decision. He died not far from here, his last words being ‘I'm going now. My time has come.’ I hope I know, when my time comes, to do the same.”

For ninety-four years she lived by the river. Then one morning she didn’t answer the phone when my Aunt Mary called. The ambulance came and took her to the hospital. And that night it began to rain. For six days it rained, and for six days, Great-Aunt Hilda lay in a coma in the hospital.    

The river rose and overflowed its banks, trampling the corn in Great-Aunt Hilda’s fields, flooding the henhouse, and flattening the roses in her garden. Then, on the seventh day, as the waters from all around poured into the Missouri, the river became a force destroying everything in its path. On that day, with a great splintering and a roar, it took Great-Aunt Hilda’s house away. 

She never knew. Her time had come.            
           
The barn still stands, as does the “Judgment Tree.”  

As do my memories of my Great-Aunt Hilda. 

II.

She lived by the river.  Really between two rivers, or pieces of river, for the Bachelard split in front of the bridge and then merged again, just behind her back balcony. 

I saw her every night, and, if I ventured into the bracing freshness of the morning before the sun had risen, I would see her again, always in her garden, always in a blue print dress, always with a smile. 

“Bonjour, Madame,” her eyes would sparkle.    

“Et bonne journée,” I would respond. 

Morning or evening, year after year, I would marvel that, sometimes, at the exact moment I would approach her house on my bicycle, she would open the door that led to the road, make her way down the steps to the fountain, and then turn to greet me. 

She lived by the river. By choice, not by chance. 

She’d grown up in Paris, amidst bustle of honking cars and scooters zig-zagging their way through the endless traffic. Her parents’ apartment overlooked the Luxembourg gardens, which was nice, she would say in retrospect, but what she really wanted would have been a place on the Seine. 

She’d discovered that river, quite by accident, when she was four years old. Before then, her life had been bounded by her walks with her nanny, her strolls with her father on Sunday afternoon, and a hurried here to there with her mother each morning as she deposited her at the crèche.    

She’d heard the seagulls, and she’d watched in rapture as they soared over the steeple of Saint-Sulpice, which, too, she could see from another of her bedroom’s windows. 

So, late one afternoon in early November, while her nanny was busy chatting with other nannies in the side garden of the Saint-Germain des Prés, a gust of wind—perhaps—made her yellow ball roll through the gate of the garden. Looking right and left at the portal, for she had been taught to do so each time she entered a busy area, she concluded all was safe, and, with one furtive glance at her nanny, who was gesturing demonstratively to make a point in a story, most likely, Eliane was out of the gate, following the ball, which seemed to gather speed as it made its way down the sidewalk. 

Down the passage de la Petite Boucherie, the wind carried it along, and carried Eliane along, too, street after street, the rue Jacob, the rue de Seine, until, at last, the ball crossed over the Quai des Conti, and landed, with a graceless splash, in the river.    

Immediately, the wash of a bateau mouche sent it scurrying to the other bank, but, by the time it bounced against the stone abutment, Eliane had forgotten it completely. Her eyes were on the river, the barges powering their way along, the movement of the water ever-always, the glint of ripples bobbling in the sun. 

And so a dream began. 

“One day I will live by a river,” she said aloud, her voice strong with conviction. A pigeon at her feet nodded its head in agreement. And with that, she turned and went home. 

The dream lingered within her, but languish it did not.    

There was the university, then marriage, and then three children, one who died from a scooter accident at the age of fourteen. 

Eliane did not forget the river. 

At the age of sixty-seven, her husband also gone, Eliane found her river and found her home.   

The small village of Uvernet is at the base of the Route des Grandes Alpes. A mayor’s office covered in red roses, a war monument of a mother weeping, a green-painted bridge decked in boxes of pink and white geraniums, and the house of Eliane. Surrounded by gardens, rows of upright beans, sprays of hydrangeas, splashes of roses and altheas, it backdrops a gurgling fountain and is backdropped by mountains on all sides.    

There, Eliane, every day, listens to the river and works in her garden. Every day, she learns from the river and learns from her garden. 

And, every day, I try to listen. I try to learn, too. 

III.

And so, I, too, live by a river.    

Each day, I take my bicycle and ride alongside it. I watch as the tide and the rain make it eddy and flow.    

Egrets and herons have made it their home. Turtles and alligators, too. 

It is my rhythm. It talks to me. 

I know to keep going, ever flowing, to slow down sometimes, and to rage when the time calls for it. 

I know to nourish others, to let them drink from me, but to also laugh, just as the willows on the river’s banks tickle me as I go by. 

I drift in the moonlight; I dance in the morning; and, at noon, when the sun is hot and high, I follow her lead, as she let her waters lap gently into waiting streams and rest. 

I live by the river. I grow my garden. I live simple, and well. 

I try to be brave, and I try to listen. 

It’s a good life for me. 


* * * * *

Author's Note: Eliane in the story is Eliane Arnaud, who lived, with her two gardens, in the village of Uvernet in the shadow of the legendary Pain de Sucre mountain. I met her exactly as I told it, but I invented her backstory for this telling. When, one morning, she invited me to come back for tea in the afternoon, I, of course, did, and I found out her real life story. It is more fantastical than I could ever make up, but that is a story for another day.

Debbie Robertson divides her year between the United States and France, loving the summer and winter skyline sunrises of Houston, Texas, and reveling in the mountain sunsets in the Alpes de Haute Provence. Her works have appeared most recently in Heimat Review, Academy for the Heart and Mind, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Ekphrastic Review, and Toute la Vallée, a French journal. She has written plays and “operas” for children’s theatre, and parallel text (English-French) short stories.