In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (20 page)

W
HAT ACCOMPANIED US THEN BUT
a child’s cacophony, the fingerling’s voice not one speech but a thousand, a thousand thousands, all together the sound of a break, and of a fracture. I had given him an innumerable number of pains, and he had returned to me the same, and now all of those hurts would own the depths of this lake, would feed on the bear for as long as it took to take her inside their many mouths, and so at least he would possess the mother he had wished to possess, as much as I had possessed him.

As I swam, I wanted to call out to the fingerlings, all the many schools fluttering around. I wanted to speak to them, but not to give them commands, not fatherly warnings or threats or pleas or admonishments. At last I wished to offer only names, all the names we had meant to give our many children. I wanted to give the fingerling what he had long ago asked me for, but I had no human mouth and so could offer nothing more, and anyway it was nothing he gave me back, neither satisfaction nor forgiveness nor a surface on which to attach my sadness, my relief. Whatever forms the fingerling next took on, none would be my son, and not
my wife’s either. The fingerling had gone too far already, even though it had been only minutes since our separation, the annulment of our sharing the space within my shape. Now he had taken his leave of me and I of him, and whoever next heard his many voices would not be me.

The squid gathered the foundling in our two largest tentacles, our strongest arms, then in powerful spurts jetted us back to the shallows, where I could again stand, become the husband, and in my arms the foundling became the son, the only son. As I came out of the water I came out of the squid too, and as a man I smelled the foundling’s death differently, took in the decay that had rushed forward from the restarting of the clock. Upon the shore was my satchel, its strap cut from my back by the bear’s last blow, and as I gathered it up I smelled it too, the two bearskins within it. All felt foul and also fouled, and I could feel the wrongness of their long carryings, my keeping them from the grave or the pyre or the lake. I had brought these as offerings for my wife, but what good thing was I bringing?

A corpse and the coverings of corpses.

To the very end, I had always been the weakest one, and yet it was only I who had gone on and on. Among all the unfair worlds in which we lived, all the other elements had fallen and failed, and still there was me, still there was
husband
. Now here I was, arrived, alone—and always it was in my loneliness that I had best survived—and in the next moment the front door of the house opened, and from that portal out stepped my wife, but not the wife I had known.

I
EMERGED FROM THE LAKE
to see her standing in the doorway of her house, the house that was only hers, so much like the one that had been ours. My wife lingered half in and half out, her hands clenched against the doorframe, that bordered threshold between the dirt and the house, and as I jerked my body up the path I saw even at that distance how the muscles of her face made her mouth to move, but also how no words escaped. With the foundling in my arms, I hurried as best my ruin would allow, and as I walked I rang out her name, voiced it forth into the air, made the shape of its three letters, vowel and consonant and vowel again.

I called her as she was called, but she gave no sign that she heard, or that if she heard she recognized the name, and when I called again her only response was alarm, perhaps fear: at my presence, at the sight of the foundling and me together, pathed from the lake to the house. As I got closer, I saw she had been changed as I had been changed, not just by age but by some other circumstances too: Where once she had looked the part of a woman I had known, now she was fevered into some new person, a scorched wife. As the foundling had described, there had been a fire lit
within her, and while it had not consumed her flesh it had filled her with its heat, so that she could wear no clothes, so that her pale skin was darkened like burned and crackled paper, and her hair was become white, robbed of its pigment. And no matter what I said, still my wife did not speak, still she did not say a single word.

This last memory of my long search, memory as failure, as failure, a faltering: To scream her name again. To kneel before her, and then to lay prostrate at her smoking feet. To thrust wildly at the air with her single syllable, that balanced word, that unanswered name savaged with disuse. To kneel, holding the foundling, rocking his shrouded shape, unable to make my wife accept what had been brought.

To want already for that moment to be over but to fear that afterward there would be only worse moments to come. And so to still be the husband and to be the father but to have neither role acknowledged and in this absence of expected station to want for time to stop again, but to know that clockless hours were gone for good.

U
PON THE PORCH, ALL OF
me dripped, gushed, my naked wounds made known before my transformed wife: The trap-crushed ankle throbbed again with the wrongness of its healing, and without the fingerling’s support the bear-wrenched shoulder hung crooked from its socket, and while those old wounds cried first it was the most recent that spoke loudest. The blood from that wound streaked, streamed around the almost-aligned knuckles of my spine, over my gooseflesh and old scars. Damaged breath wheezed from between the small remnants of my teeth, and as I sucked more air to say her name again I dizzied, my vision all sparks.

I did not know what other words to say, and so I said her name, said it until I was emptied of its sound, and then when I was hoarse and breathless I breathed it back in, and all I wanted in return was for her to speak some part of what I had come so far to hear: my own name returned, perhaps, or else an accusation, best followed by the terms of my eventual forgiveness.

Only after I quieted myself did she crouch down beside me, sinking her knees into the pool of my leaking.

She took my face between her hot hands, and then holding my cheeks—and then the smell of singed beard, of steamed tears—and then holding me, she said, Who are you?

She said, Where have you come from?

She pointed to the foundling, shrouded in dirty white, and as her accusing gaze lingered she said, Who is this, and why have you brought him?

And then, as if she had not already broken me, she turned and stepped back across the threshold, shutting the door.

I waited upon the porch, listened at the wood of the house, strained for the clatter and clack of objects within. After some moments had passed the door reopened, and this woman who had been my wife stepped back out onto the porch, reached out a hand. I took her fingers, took too much of them, and weaved them into mine, and though her heat hurt me I did not recoil, had waited too long to pull away in pain. At her request, I left the foundling momentarily upon the slats of the porch, then followed her out onto the dirt, where each step of hers burned away even what few patches of grass there were, and then in a circle of dirt she stopped and turned back, surveyed my wounds, the many leaks and lacerations upon my body.

With her index finger, she counted each, and as she touched them her heat sizzled and then cauterized the wounds shut, until eventually all that was left would stay there, heavy within me.

Amid the pain and stink, again her voice, again saying, Who are you?

Saying, Where have you come from?

Saying, Whose shroud is that upon my porch?

I am your husband, I said.

You left me, I said. Because you had a son, and after you left I looked for you, and later you sent him to look for me—

I said, I am your husband, and you were my wife, and together we had a son.

I said, I promise you, you are my wife still.

She listened to me speak, and then she shook her head.

No, she said. Always I have been here, and always I have been alone. Almost always it has only been me, and no other.

We were naked together upon the dirt, but still we were not as one. When I tried to argue my case, she stopped me, put a finger to my mouth, burned a streak across my already-chapped lips.

Later, she said. I am so tired.

It is time for me to rest, she said, and then she dropped my hand and turned back for the house.

Where will I go? I asked. Where will I go next?

Then come, she said, and it was as easy as that, and then she said, It does not matter to me.

Without waiting she passed through the door and into the house, and then I lifted the foundling and carried him across that threshold, and also the satchel containing the two furs, the one real and one made. While my wife disappeared farther into the house, I returned to the entranceway to shut the door against the day-like light, the almost lack of wind outside. At last husband and wife and child were again gathered under one roof, and that alone was better than what other states had for so long persisted, on all the other floors of this world.

T
HE LAYOUT OF THE LAST
house was the same as the one we’d shared, and in the front room, I saw a wood-framed sofa like one I had built and that she had upholstered with song, set again before a fireplace clean and piled beside with kindling. On the walls hung framed photographs of our wedding day, pictures that in our first house had been destroyed by the bear, and while my wife had forgotten everything, here everything was. With the spotted tips of my fingers I touched the image of my wife’s face, and also mine, and that couple was long gone now, and it was no wonder she did not recognize us, and yet still there was something there, in or around the eyes, perhaps, or in the set of a mouth, the shape of a nose or neckline: a man and a woman just married, terrible in the potencies of their youth, their early love.

And in the kitchen: All our bowls as they had been when first stacked in their crates, before they were chipped and scratched by the bear’s expulsion of our lives from her cave. All our spoons, shiny upon the wall. All our pots and pans, suspended from their hooks, hung above the hewn-wood counters, and in the pantry
only shelves, surfaces bare because I was not there to hunt or to gather, because my wife hadn’t the strength to harvest her garden—and so she had fed the foundling herself, herself nothing.

And in the dining room: A table set for two but with chairs enough for four. A candelabra with no candles. A layer of dust thick enough to hide the desire for family that once inhabited the room.

And in the nursery: The baby blankets my wife had sewn to show me she was trying. The bassinets I built to encourage her to produce what they might hold. The rocking chair I carved, the mobiles I strung. And because I did not know where else to lay the foundling, I brought him to lay upon that floor, in that room with no bed big enough to hold this slow-grown child. His shroud, ripped and dirty as it was, was still our wedding sheets, the once-white linens we were given, on which we tried our best to make our children, on which our losses slowly stained the white brown, no matter what soaps we scrubbed against its threads.

I walked down the house’s single hallway, to the door at the end where our bedchamber once was. My wife had not yet emerged, and so I knocked, and when there was no answer I knocked again, and when there was still no answer I pushed the door open.

There I saw my wife collapsed on the floor, smoking the hardwood and gasping aloud, her skin dark and also alight, the opposite of my long-cold paleness, that mark of my late life spent below the earth. I did not have far to carry her, but as I lifted her she burned me wide, scorched the arms that held her, the chest that clutched her close. Then came the stench of more crisping hair, and afterward I wore some shirt of blisters, raised and swollen where
they were not burst by the boiling. The pain was extraordinary and did not diminish as I swept aside the burned blankets to reveal a bed made of stone, a copy of the one we had shared but that had required no wood. I laid my wife down upon that slab—upon her side of the bed, the side on which she had always slept—and then I slumped upon the floor beside her, listened to the long syllables of nonsense accompanying the slow smoke that escaped her mouth.

After I could not wake her I carried buckets of water from the shallowest parts of the lake, whatever inlets I could reach without risking falling in, then returned to the house to soak some towels, found where our towels had always been. I laid each one across some surface of my wife’s body, her forehead, her face and neck, her breasts and collarbones and belly and hips, her thighs and calves and feet—and each steamed, then smoked, then flamed—so that I had to snatch it back, burning my fingers. I was afraid to touch her, but when next she moaned I could not resist, and as I put my hand to her forehead to smooth back her hair, then that skin crinkled like ripping paper, and as always there was no good deed that did not worsen my crimes.

I could not sing as my wife could, and she would not wake no matter how I tried to cool her body with lake water or chilled air, let in through the now-open windows of the bedchamber, and because I did not know what else to do I again took her hand in mine, held on even as her heat opened my calluses, and as we burned together I began to speak, to tell her who she was, who she was to me.

I said, Remember I had finished building the house, or nearly so.

I said, Remember how terrible we must have seemed that day, when together we thought our marriage would then and always be celebrated.

I said, Remember: When we first arrived upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, then there was still sun and moon, only one moon, and stars too, all the intricacies of their intersections circumscribing the sky, their paths a tale to last every night, a waking dream to fill the hours of every day.

M
EMORY OF MY WIFE’S CONFUSION
, of her confused lack of memory: To know that she did not know who I was, even when she awoke in the middle of my story, in the middle of my telling her.