In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (13 page)

Inside the house, I wrapped my already-swollen, bruised ankle in torn furs, the only bandages I could make. The inner hides filled fast with pooling blood, but I did not change them immediately, as first I thought to deal with the foundling, whose own illness seemed more pressing. There was no proper bed big enough to lay him upon, but there was my nest of blankets beside the broken one my wife and I had shared, and so I took him into the bedchamber, where I stripped off his sodden clothes, then wiped his body dry with the cleanest of our rough cloths. It took me aback to see how little he had changed against how old I had become, how heavy the decades lay upon my bones, and then I was startled again, at how passive his face remained while I toweled him, the foundling standing dispassionate, a child waiting beside the washtub for someone else to dress him.

In the absence of clocks I did not know how long it had been since the day the foundling’s mother took him away, but however many decades it had been his shape had aged only unto the cusp of adolescence: His shoulders and chest were still those of a boy, and there was no hair upon his lips or cheeks, nor under his arms or between his legs. Even the long, uncut hair upon his head was thin, thinner than I remembered, and as I stroked it off his hot face the fingerling made another heat inside my hands, a prickling numbness that took with it some portion of my senses there, so that I could not feel anymore the texture of the boy’s skin—and yet what little I felt I clung to, and did not forget: the foundling, a boy preserved by the devices of my wife, by her voice, her voice’s song.

Despite his fever, I covered the foundling in what other blankets I had, then took my bucket down to the lake, hobbling all the way,
and fetched it full of the lake’s freezing water. Back in the bedroom, I found the boy asleep, his face senseless, his tossing body turning the sheets as I tried to quiet his movements with one hand so I could apply cool cloths with the other. Soon the room smelled wetly of sickness and salt, and despite the deep pain in my other joints I thanked the fingerling for my numb fingers, which could not feel the near ice of the lake water dripping from their age-spotted joints, and all the while that other son churned in my gut, overflowed my stomach with his bile, flooded my intestines with barely held diarrhea, filled my eyes with cruddy tears—and how I ached as he pushed his shapes outward, bulged my skin to make more room for his rage, his accusations, his righteous claims of dominion.

How I fought him then as I had not since the burning of the deep house.

How I fought him limb by limb, digit by digit, so that he might not bring harm to the foundling, but to do so not yet for the foundling’s sake, or not his sake alone.

Soon old hurts began to throb, and also there was my shattered ankle, which I unwrapped and studied by the light of the moons. I spent what water remained washing the wound somewhere out back of the house, where thick clots and then new blood puddled the frozen earth. What remained beneath was almost too wrecked to call an ankle, and never again did I walk straight or stand perfectly upright, but when my ankle was as clean as it could be, I wrapped it in fresh fur, making myself a boot as I had once made an armor.

Afterward I returned to the house, to the bedroom inside the house where the foundling slept, where he would sleep for some long period, during which I would keep some close vigil, during
which I would leave him only twice: once to remove him something to eat from the woods, and once more to return to where the foundling had found me, so that I might drag some branches behind me, obscuring the smaller footprints he left in the blood-thawed earth nearby, so that if the bear did still live I might believe she would not so easily find his sign.

The foundling was awake again when I returned to the house the second time, sweating and shaking but able to stand and speak, his voice as high and lilting as ever. He complained of his long hunger and of the dirt’s cold air, and when I pressed him to speak of his mother instead or at least first, he only repeated his complaints. In response I dressed him in my old clothes, and where those fit wrong I modified them with my knife, holding the cloth away from his body so I might slice some strips from the bottom of his shirt, from the low hem of his trousers. Afterward I sat him down at the table, and there I opened him a hairless rabbit to eat, warmed it as best I could.

While he ate I watched his face for the fear I had expected to see, but now he seemed unafraid of this room in which his features had been undone, perhaps because his face was no longer exactly that same face, not that of the son my wife had masqueraded before me, no longer a blend of my features and hers. Now I was removed altogether, by the same method by which my wife had smoothed his scars, by the way long before that she had removed the many aspects of the bear.

After he was finished, the foundling got down from his seat, came over to stand before mine, and as he placed his hand into the wiry nest of my beard, all my body quivered toward his touch. I opened my arms with more hesitance than I wished, but he did not hesitate, only climbed into my lap, curled against my chest.
He was too big to hold like this, but it was what I wanted, and anyway he was asleep before I could push him away, and as I held him, daring not to move, again and always the fingerling howled, accused, called me traitor. And did I bother to answer?

No, I did not, for what other answer was there that he would accept?

W
HEN THE FOUNDLING NEXT AWOKE
, I fed him the rest of his rabbit, then worked the warped iron of our stove to heat him some water, found him soap to bathe away the last of his fever smell.

I waited while he scrubbed and dried and dressed, and then I begged him to speak, to tell me of his mother, of my wife.

I said, Tell me it all, and do not stop, no matter what you see upon my face or what I do with my hands.

I said, I am not always in control of who I am, but I do not want you to be afraid of me, not anymore.

The foundling nodded, and then he said he knew, that he had long known.

He said, My mother showed me the man you used to be. She made many rooms to show me, and also to show you, so that when next we were together you would be yourself again, your right self, and we would not have to be afraid.

He said, She made a house for you, put all of herself inside it for you to recognize, but even after you saw what she wanted to say
still you never came to where we were, although often we thought that you would.

He said—and here I heard his adult voice most, a deepness hidden within his child-shape—he said, Do you know how sad it made her to have you refuse her forgiveness? Do you know how sad it made me, to find you out in the woods, playing with your stupid traps?

The foundling and his mother had listened for my footsteps, and then my longer periods of stopping, resting or else slow consideration. He said that sometimes his mother said she heard me running, that I was moving faster now, that at last I was coming and that soon we would all be reunited.

Other times, he said, I would pause so long that they wept for fear of my death, for his mother said only the collapse of my bones could have stopped my advance, could have kept me away.

The foundling said he’d watched his mother waste herself to make the deep house, singing her bones inside out, making of her sweat salty rivers in which to cool my face and of her flesh banquet rooms in which to feast my hunger—but I remembered no such meals, and told the foundling so.

Certainly there were rooms of flies and rooms of maggots and rooms of garbage, I said. Certainly there were poison-rimmed goblets, plates powdered with pressed privet, tetanus-stilled beasts caught in rusty traps.

The foundling shook his too-small head, stopped the advance of his story.

Mother said you’d say that, he said.

He said, She said you were afraid of her, and also of me. That something had put a fear in you, and that now you were wary.
And still she said we should wait for you to arrive, still she said you would arrive transformed.

What if
deep house
was not all there was beneath the earth? What if there was
deep dirt
? What if there was
deep woods
and
deep lake
? What if my wife was then making some new world beneath the dirt, and only my cowardice atop the great stairs had kept me from reaching it, from taking part in its reconfigured elements?

What if I could become
deep father
and she
deep mother
and the foundling or the fingerling our
deep child
, and what if the whole world I had known—all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons—what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?

What if my wife had known how to leave it all behind? What if she had tried to tell me, and what if I had not listened?

E
XHAUSTED OF HIS STORY, THE
foundling slept in my lap, and as he slept I stroked his hair as I had stroked my wife’s, as I had once hoped to stroke the fingerling’s, when I still imagined he might be a boy.

And how the fingerling hated this substitution, the equivalency it suggested, and how he wished me to stop.

How he knew what I was doing, what I planned to do next, and as warning he filled me with his black feelings, attempted to rob me of my enjoyment, my small joy at this first night of new fatherhood, and with his movements he kept me even from sleep, from indulging in my exhaustion to take some simple slumber of father and son. I held the foundling, and the fingerling moved agitated within me, and soon I began to feel some dull pain in my shoulders, then my arms and hands.

A prickling, then a numbness, then the prickling again.

Soon my jaw ached, and I shifted the foundling so that I could free one hand to rub at its joint, then to clear the sweat from my forehead.

I had barely eaten since the arrival of the foundling, but now I
felt like I had eaten too much, and if I could not still my stomach then I thought I would have to wake the foundling, send him to sleep somewhere else.

Last I felt the squeezing in my chest, like a fist wrapped around my heart, its grip bearing down, then letting up, then bearing down, a kind of contraction I had never before known, and at this touch I knew the fingerling’s intent, recognized his goal even if he kept silent as he worked. In the years of our long cohabitation he had found his way into every part of my shape except my head and my heart, but now he moved to enter fully my centermost chamber, and I felt him move to block that pulsing organ, shaping his many bodies into some plug or plugs with which to stop me where I sat, and when his work was complete I seized in my chair, the jerking of my body so violent it bucked the foundling from my embrace.

I grappled dumbly at my chest, pounded the skin and sternum that separated my hands from my heart, and as I floundered the awakened foundling dragged me gasping from my seat and onto the rough-boarded floor of our house. I spasmed upon the boards, and soon I could not feel my pulse or my breathing, but still I sensed the fingerling everywhere now, every part of him on the move, and against him I sensed the foundling working from without, setting his hands upon my chest, his lips on my lips. And when that failed he began to speak, and then his speech turned to song, made a new music that even in my dying I knew I had never heard before.

The song the foundling sang was not just sound but also smell and sight, also touch and taste, and also light, also
not-black—
and with it the foundling drove his brother out of my center, back to my stomach, to my thigh, those first hiding places now again made far
from what remained of me—and when the fingerling was secured, my body jerked upon the floor, all of me weakened and sweat soaked and in terrible pain.

But even in my pain I found a reveling, this returned life worth celebrating: For a moment all I felt was the glorious pounding of my heart, the busy way my lungs bellowed, that first breath so filling my chest with air that I thought I might never have to breathe again.

F
ROM UNDER THE WOODS THE
bear had brought back all I had killed and buried, roaring them from the burying ground into new and uncut threads, perhaps diminished shades of their former shapes but at least not dead. That too was how I returned, lessened of some portion of my manhood, of what awful man I had been, but also of what protections the bear had given me: Soon my adrenaline faded, and then I began to wheeze, and then also to hack, until I expelled some number of dark clots onto the floor. Afterward the foundling helped me back into my chair, then sat down, crossed his legs before me. Even that short climb winded me, and in my chair I gasped for air, clutched at my chest. The pain radiated everywhere except the places the fingerling had been driven, and in those holdings numbness prevailed.

Despite some lingering nausea, I felt the fullness of my appetite return, a ravening long ago put aside, now returned to announce my restored need, and then suddenly I realized the foundling was speaking and that I had not been listening. I pulled myself straighter, then slumped again, placed my elbows unsteady upon my knees, let my head tilt to one side or the other. From that
stance I could not see the foundling’s face well, and as he talked I struggled to understand the words he made, his stuttered syllables high pitched and softly spoken. I asked him to start again, to speak slowly until this story was told, the only story that had ever happened to him alone: not the story of his time with my wife in the deep and deepest houses, but of his journey away from her side.

As we had burned the deep house empty so the foundling had watched his mother catch a fever she could not cool, and as she burned she diminished: her breasts flattened, her skin loosened, until she was all bones and jaundice. But still the foundling stayed at her side, and still he sometimes drank from her, for eventually there was no other food, and after what little milk my wife had left soured soon he too was sick, the fever that filled her filling him. And with each meal he took from her he had to know his mother was dying.