In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (9 page)

The fingerling commanded me out of the house and down the slippery glass of the path to the lake, following the scrape to the salted shores of our beach, where we came upon some enormous mass the likes of which I had never imagined, all of its blubbered weight rent unrecognizable by claws and teeth some time before, then left to float, to bob up and down upon the waves until at last it had stranded there in the night, brought high onto the beach by the strange tides our two moons had wrought. What was it that so deeply hurt the bear, what was it that she had killed? For long minutes I stared, unable to make sense of what I saw. It shared no shape I already knew, was instead all shapelessness all over, made punished flesh or cracked mantle or torn appendages, and before its bloated stench all my guesses seemed wrong.

And I wondered: What were the bounds of its shapelessness?

Was it shapeless like a squid, or shapeless like a whale?

T
HE NEXT TIME I STEPPED
across the threshold of my house I shut the door behind me, locked it tight against the dirt. The door’s key swung chained from my neck, then went tucked inside my clothes, over my heart, cold among the hair and the gooseflesh. In haste, so that I might not lose my slight courage, I gathered the few provisions I thought I would need, a single satchel’s worth: only some salted and smoked fish, my gas-lamp and torches and flint, a soon-useless ball of string; the skinning blade; and also what the fight with the bear had won me, the writhing cub-fur with which I was to confront my wife, which I was to guilt her into again clothing the foundling inside.

M
EMORY AS FIRST EXPLORATION OF
the deep house, as this progression of rooms: To follow the many staircases down to the many landings, the many hallways branching out from behind progressively heavier doors.

To open the first rooms and find the deep house made now a palace of memory, a series of rooms in which what I had forgotten had been curated, collected together with what I had tried to forget, and also with other moments that had occurred only in dreams, or else not at all, not for me.

To find in each room some unadorned spectacle, my wife or me or us together, with or without those children we had failed to have, plus the one she had stolen, that she had passed off as our own. Or not passed off, but made true: It was in those passages that I saw how even if I had not accepted the foundling into my family, still my wife had accepted him into hers, put him at its center, a space I believed I had once occupied, and so our house was divided, and then divided again and again, because what house might stand against a child loved by only one parent, when the jealous other held that same child in suspicion and contempt?

And how for me the fingerling remembered everything.

How the fingerling saw even what I would have left undiscovered, what I did not want to share with him or any other child.

How even then he rode most often in my belly, in my thigh, in my throat, so that he might always be close to the skin, soaking in the new airs I moved my body through. And so he was there too in each of those many rooms, where otherwise there would have been only me, always me, me lonely and me alone among the tiny domains of my wife, sung into being as she passed, echoed throughout the deepening dirt.

In the first room I found piled the cargo we lost to the bear: Here again were the broken vases and cracked crystal, the shattered punch bowls, the punched-out platters.

Here were the shredded rags of my wife’s dress, and beside them my boutonniere, meant to be preserved inside a translucent bubble, now freed from where it had been glassed.

Here was the intricate mechanism of a handmade clock, gifted and then broken, stopped as all other clocks were eventually stopped.

All these objects, seemingly each its own but merely parts of a whole, what in the cave we had lost.

And in this room: her wedding ring, discarded. She had improved everything I had given her but not this, and so its simple band remained only what it had ever been. I held the ring in my hand, and then I took off my own ring, and I laid both upon the stones, touching. Rings had been insufficient to fasten us together, and it would take more than rings to rebind what had been broken.

AND LESS TO END IT
, reminded the fingerling.
AS YOU HAVE PROMISED. AS I PROMISE YOU WILL
.

And in this room: the sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amid all the other business of our wedding day.

And in this room: the footprints she made on the beach where we were wed, where we had stood atop that platform, separated by the priest and then joined by the same, and all this upon that other sunnier shore, where it was not always summer but where often it was summer enough.

And in this room: where my footprints that evening were, not always at her side, only sometimes so. And how I wished it had been different, that I had not walked away at the beginning of our marriage, when I thought it would always be so easy to return.

And in this room: the words I used nearly every summer after, to beg from her one more child, even after she was determined only to stop the trying and also before she found she wanted her motherhood again, wanted it this time for herself, wanted it more than even I had ever wanted or realized.

And in this room: the scent of my wife’s perfume as she passed, a smell once lovely, now stale as glue. And how I missed its original, how I had missed it.

And in this room: every graying hair she pulled from her head or her body in the failed years between the fingerling and the foundling. Every piece of skin she rubbed raw in the bath, when between miscarriages she could not scrub away the hormone-stink of motherhood, falsely begun. All that hair and skin, stuck wet to the floor.

And in this room: A white suit that no longer fit. A shirt that wouldn’t button, a tie that drew its knot too quick around the neck. The relics of a body betrayed against itself, and against my wife, who had not agreed to love what fat and hair it acquired, nor the blank spaces replacing what it had lost, those first few teeth, those other small kindnesses.

And in this room: My wife’s garden, if she had not abandoned its offerings to eat the meat of the woods. What she might have grown with the labors of her hands instead of the song of her voice. What this dirt would have yielded to us, if only she had again given the sun leave to shine.

And in this room: a silver bowl full of her tomatoes, one taste of which revealed the tang of their song-stuff, their lack of right reality, despite skin, despite juice and seeds.

And in this room: all the faces of the fish I had taken from the lake, piled into a single mash of eyes and gills, teeth and scales. How surprised I was to see them, and how easy it was to forget how many lives I took just to keep myself alive, to feed my wife and the foundling. All these bodies, knifed open so we might continue another day.

And in this room: The death of a badger, cradled in steel, rehashed. The static of an action worn down by repetition, this series of moments brought to completion only to begin again, reduced, semi-badgers torn and tortured into some novel shape.

And in this room: an empty space in which, if I had watched long enough, the badger might eventually have been made
separate from the trap, freed from its circumstance, if not the damage done.

And in this room: a floor of hides, stitched from the skins of what I had trapped, where I could not stop myself from kneeling upon the floor, from digging the hooks of my fingers into its stitching. I pulled and pulled and undid some of its ties, and from beneath I revealed only more flooring, more skins sewn to skins, and soon there was around me a pit of flesh, a hollow stinking of its taxidermy, and below that only more skin, only more fur.

And in this room: the buzzing of bees and then, elsewhere, another room, full of bees. Two separate rooms, one with the bees themselves, silent, and the other filled only with their sound. How many more rooms I knew there must be if that continued. How much more house it took to keep things separate, to break them down.

And in this room: the smell of decomposing onion and beet, potato and rutabaga—all that vegetal rot.

And in this room: The last sunflowers of my wife’s garden, the first that stretched their petals toward her red moon instead of the sun that barely again rose over the dirt; and if the light of the moon was mere reflection, and the light of two moons doubly so, why then their different hues, against the vast black of the sky?

And in this room: a fistful of black seeds.

In the next room, the shell of the bear: her proud bones stuck through her skin, her bristled fur fallen like pine needles. Her
claws pulled from their moorings, her teeth loose in her jaws, her breath rotten as fallen bark, worm-struck as the earth beneath her woods, stinking of meat eaten long past its date, dug up.

And in this room: my wife’s favorite dress, worn the first time she danced with me. How when I held the fabric to my face I smelled nothing, because the smell of her sweat was in another room.

And in this room: a well-scrubbed floor, and on it a well-scoured pot, scratched by the removal of meals we shared, of meals we ate apart.

And in this room: a bowl made of mirrors, so that as I drank of it, it drank of me.

And in this room: the song of the stars, never heard after it was silenced above the dirt, and before that never this clearly. How I had forgotten even what I had forgotten, this series of notes that made a song that made a story, all so hard to retell without their sharp light present, hard to hear or hum even when the stars yet hung from the sky, and impossible now that their shapes had been extinguished. And again my wife had remembered, as I had not.

And in this room: lightning. And in this room: thunder. And in this room: how long it had been since it rained.

And in this room: the smell of a mother’s sadness, but not my wife’s. Hers I would have recognized easily, but this one took some longer effort, for what man could know the tears of a bear, the way her sorrow-sweat stinks, soaked through fur and hide?

How now I could, because the bear had filled my skin with her breath, and if some part of me was the fingerling, so perhaps some other portion was the bear.

And in this room: How my wife made the bear weak. How she lay flat upon the dirt, upon the dirt floor of our cellar, and put her cheek upon the ground. How she whispered songs into the earth, how with those songs’ reverberations she lulled the bear to sleep even as she kept her sleep restless, to delay her rival’s tracking, her waking attempts to move upon the dirt. How the wounds my wife had given the bear worsened, how the bone snapped free of the rib meat, of the fleshy parts of the neck.

A
ND IN THIS ROOM, THIS
new series of rooms that followed: My wife walking out of the house and across the dirt.

My wife lifting the hem of her skirt above the brambles at the tree line, choosing her steps carefully as she navigated the trapped woods.

My wife slowing to look at deer and elk, muskrat and wood-chuck, rabbit and squirrel, all still whole and hearty, sure sign this memory preceded the foundling, our finished family.

My wife stopping to smile from within a pillar of sunlight, such shafts already rare and soon to be rarer still.

My wife not carefree in that dappling, but preparing, gathering strength.

And in this room: the entrance to the cave at the center of the woods, marked only by her footprints in the muck, headed in.

And in this room: my wife traversing the many chambers of the bear’s cave, all descended from the one in which we so briefly lived when first we came to the dirt.

And in this room: my wife gathering the yawning cub below into her arms, then putting some few furs to rest in its place.

And in this room: the bear half lidded, locking its gaze with my wife’s, parent-that-was to parent-to-be. How angry the bear’s yellow eyes were, and how sad my wife’s.