In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (14 page)

The hot house above burned, and as it did her skin reddened, then blistered and flaked off, and the foundling had the scars to prove it, bands of once-blistered flesh on his hands and wrists, earned smoothing back the smoking snakes of his mother’s hair. When his mother could not lift her head to cry or her hands to feel, the foundling had crawled into their bed for the last time, curved his stalled bones inside the skinny ess of her own.

Cradled in that last cradle, the foundling wept, and as she burned away his tears his mother spoke.

I know your face, she said, but you are not the only one. Still there is a memory of your father, the first time I met him, which always I have held back, and if I remember nothing else I remember that.

A sweating silence followed, and some new hours of forgetting,
and then she said, And I remember a bear, and also a cub crying for its mother.

I took that cub, she said, and as I carried it from a cave I used my mouth to peel off its softest fur, clump by clump.

What the foundling told me last: That when he left, my wife still remembered my name.

That she remembered at least that, if she remembered nothing else.

That she said my true name to the foundling. That she whispered its two syllables into his ear against the curve of his collarbone. That she breathed me onto his skin, gave him all the sympathetic memories she had left, so he would not be afraid as he had been, as I had made him to be.

With a final kiss, she said, I wish I would remember you after you are gone, and then she sent him away, sent him as an orphan into the world she had made—as the orphan he would become, if I would not take him in, or if I was no longer alive—and then for a while he was alone in the world, a best-loved son unremembered, climbing upward through those many miles of smoldered spires, their crumbling structures sloping in. And as he’d climbed he took into himself the miles of scorched stairs and hollowed halls, that mimicry of his mother’s own interior landscape, that palace of her I had wrecked and ruined, and now with this telling he meant to give me what he had carried, so that I might be forced to carry it too.

F
ROM THE PILE OF CAST-OFF
furs beside the house, I chose the cleanest strips to replace the dirty dressing around my ruined ankle, my trap-clubbed foot, and then I washed my face in a bucket of salt water, my hair in the same. As I moved around the outside of the house I kept my eyes on the tree line, nervous that the bear might appear there. I had not seen her since the day we fought in the woods, that same day she gave me the fur her son had once been buried inside, kept still in the satchel slung often around my body, which contained also the near-identical fur I had taken from the deep house, the only object pulled from my fire. Now I again removed the two furs from that satchel, tried to remember which was real and which only sung, and when I could not I told myself that it could not matter, this slim difference between the memory and the thing remembered.

At the most crimson hour of the dusk, I led the foundling down to the cold shores of the lake, where I put him into the rowboat and then rowed us out upon the water. As I fished for our dinner I wondered aloud if the foundling had the same strength of
voice his mother had, if he could tear down the last stars, invisible behind the light of his mother’s moon—or else could he buoy that red shape back up into the sagging sky, almost broken then? Since the foundling’s return more cracks had appeared across the bowl of the sky, and now all the visible sky was fractured, streaked with more stuck lightning, those sights emitting their accompanying hummings and buzzings and long low thunders, and I asked him if he knew what would happen next, if his mother had told him what we should do.

But no matter what I said, the foundling said nothing in return, only sometimes shook his head or shrugged, stared off across the water. Now it seemed impossible to recall the face he had worn before, when last he was meant to be my son: Whatever song his mother had used to take him from cub to boy had perhaps blocked his progress from boy to adult, and I wondered if this could be set right, if there was some other song his mother could sing that would unbind him.

When next he lifted his eyes to mine, I pointed to the sky, and I said, Do you know what the red moon means? Or what happens next?

I said, Are you scared?

I said, In the morning we will go back. We will find your mother, and if we can help her, then we will.

The foundling still did not speak, only stared at me with his changeless face, the constellation of his eyes only two points, a single line, and yet what story I saw there, answering even without his speech to guide me: That he missed her. That if we could not find her again it might be a kindness, as he would be able to hope forever that she was not dead.

And then again I was jealous of what he had that I did not, and because I could not stop myself, I said, Everything you will lose when she dies, I have already lost.

It was the fingerling who broke the silence that followed, speaking for the first time since the night of his last attack, saying
NO
, saying
NO
again, saying
THE BEAR IS COMING
,
THE BEAR IS COME
,
THE BEAR HAS COME AND SHE WAITS FOR YOU ON THE DIRT AND SHE WAITS FOR YOU IN THE HOUSE AND SHE WILL TAKE WHAT YOU HAVE KEPT FROM HER
,
AND THIS TIME I WILL NOT LET YOU DEFEAT HER
, and what I heard also was not
DEFEAT
but
DECEIVE
, a choice perhaps, spoken in two voices.

I stopped my rowing, pulled the paddles up from the water, let the surface still around us. The air filled with our gray breath, and the shimmer of my wife’s moon seemed to waver from above, and though I could not see her I heard the bear roar from the dirt, and with that roar I saw more lightning crack across the sky, and also that the lightning already frozen there had begun to move, first slowly and then quickening, sparking red and green and blue-white across the inner sphere. The bear barked, then roared again—and in that roar I heard a new sound, a naming, and where had the bear learned such a thing—and then as the bear called the red moon’s name that moon began its fall, and as it burst the last skin of the sky it fractured, bursting into some innumerable flock of missiles, and each irregular shape ignited as it dropped through the atmosphere, and this time there was no wife-song, no other power waiting to save us.

T
HE FRACTURING MOON FELL THROUGH
a cloud of sound, the racket of the sky’s awful cracking, and every part of the moon’s broken body arrived aflame, the first rough clumps to impact jolting the dirt into the air, and then the next wave concussed the already-broken ground, sending shock waves across the lake and also debris back toward the sky, great eruptions digging deeper craters. Above us the other moon snapped back upon the dazed ellipse of its orbit, suddenly brighter without competition, and as I watched it dance back into place I also saw how the sundered sky refused the dirt’s offering, so that soon gravity returned earth to earth, ten thousand handfuls of rock and sod falling upon the dirt and the lake, and for some time both the foundling and I had to crouch and cover our heads, to protect ourselves from the last moon rocks piling up in the bottom of the boat or else splashing loudly into the water around us.

When at last it was safe I stood and found my balance and looked toward the shore, through the swirling debris and dirt clouds, and there I was sure I spied some portion of the house still standing, set upon a promontory shoved up through the cracking
of the earth. Behind it I saw the woods aflame, and from those woods came again the bear, her brutish shape emerging grotesque from the fire. I could not possibly have heard her above the loud discord of the dirt’s destruction, but when I saw her bared teeth and angry stance upon the shore I imagined her hoarsened sound calling across the lake, and then I lost sight of her in the confusion. A moment later I again thought I saw her fur-bare armor silhouetted against the fire, imagined the sizzle of exposed bone, that terrible pain issuing from her lungs. I watched for her where I could, but more than I wanted to know where she was, I wanted only for her to be gone, and then I saw her leaving, a blank shadow turning slowly in a sea of red flames, returning the way she had come, back into the blazing trees.

Lightning cracked above, true lightning not stuck but fresh and flashing, and the rain turned to downpour turned to storm, and upon the lake the salt water chopped, the surface rough where it had been the stillest. The foundling and I were tossed in our rowboat as I put the oars to the waves, pulled hard for shore, but we were too far out, and the water was too churned, and any begging for help I directed at the fingerling fell unanswered on his dumb lumps. Soon our route went wide of the right line to shore, and then I pounded my fists against my choked thighs, pleaded with that one son to help me save the other, regardless of their bad blood, the no blood between them, and then I roared too, until my tears and my noise frightened the foundling, frightened him as bad as the falling sky, the dark clots of flung-up dirt still crashing into the water all around, the shore collapsing into the lake even as we tried to reach it. The foundling screamed for me to stop as I screamed at the fingerling to do the same, until our voices were interrupted by the next disruption of the dirt, the second such shaking, and
then some angry waves shook out across the surface of the lake, raising the rowboat high upon their crests, then dropping it down into unsteady furrows, where from its flat bottom we watched the water climb in high battlements above us, and when those battlements collapsed their cold contents filled the trough between with more water, caved wet walls crashing in.

T
HE EDGE OF THE OVERTURNING
rowboat struck the foundling first and then me, knocking me somewhere in the back of the head or between the head and the neck, in some awkward place where I could not reach the injury, not while I kicked for the surface, and not afterward, while I struggled against the waves and searched the surface for the foundling. At last I saw him already heading toward the burning dirt, the house or house-hole remaining, and while I wanted to hurry after him I was not sure I could make it to the shore. I treaded water as best I could, but I tired fast with the drag of my new wound, and so I struggled only until his stroking form was small in the distance, close enough to shore that I could imagine his safe arrival, and then I did not try to follow.

Instead I made myself believe it was not just
whale
that inhabited our lake but another as well, the two connected by
ghost
, and for once the fingerling did not fight me but instead encouraged the story I was telling. At his suggestion I sank like a stone, like the stone of my heart, like the stone knife of the fingerling scraping at the walls of my heart, slashing toward escape, and in that passage into darkness something else shifted, for as I swam
and sank and broke my chest to breathe I did not die, and around me the water seemed to be salt water no longer, not exactly, but instead both salt and water, and as I fell also again something thicker, more slippery, blacker even than the dark water, a sea of ink where once there was a lake of salt.

I threw myself ever lower, tunneled into the water at the fingerling’s command, this swimming motion almost all he knew from his short life, his too-quick float in his mother’s belly. All of me ached now, and still there was farther to go. I begged off, begged to rest, to quit, but then the fingerling spoke again, his heavy words dragging me down, forcing me under.

He said,
IN THE WOMB
,
IF YOU STOPPED SWIMMING
,
THEN YOU DIED
.

He said,
ONCE
,
I THOUGHT THE WOMB WAS THE WORLD
,
AND THEN WHEN THAT WORLD REJECTED ME WHAT OTHER CHOICE EXISTED EXCEPT DROWNING
,
EXCEPT HOLDING MY BREATH UNTIL I BURST
?

NOW DIVE
, he said, and so I dove, swimming until I reached the bottom of the lake, but not the bottom of its center I had expected, only its center’s edge, its near shelf, the drop-off where the safe part of the water ended, the coolness below the burning surface above, where that band of cool fell down into colder darkness. On that shelf I leveraged myself lower, and also I felt the first floating strands of gunked eggs, unfertilized and untended and half gnawed, a thousand wasted babies, food for the silver faces of the lake’s fish, those blank expressions surrounding our dive, our pursuit into the thick black of the cloud below. I kicked deeper, drove our bodies down with the movement of my good leg and then my bad leg and then my good leg again, but despite my effort I did not make it to the center of the lake alone or even alone with the fingerling.

I could not have, not even before my crushed ankle or my other newest injury.

Now I knew that what still lived in the lake had many names and shapes but was then best titled
squid
, and although the bear thought it dead it was not exactly, and after its long-lashing reach hooked my skin I thought I would drown, but no, I did not die, not then.

HE COMES
, said the fingerling,
HE COMES AND HE IS YOU AND YOU ARE HIM AND NOW AT LAST YOU ARE BOTH HERE TOGETHER
, and the fingerling’s voice was a hissing threat but also quieter than any other time of late, a hush that made me more afraid, and I felt him withdraw into his stomach-pit, and then the lake’s giant squid struck, reached out from the black beneath the lake to wrap me in its rough-puckered tentacles, to slash my skin with their barbed hooks.

I exhaled a scream of bubbled air, struggled to free myself even as the squid bid me to be still, fixing me with one huge eye and then the other. After some time the squid began to speak as the bear spoke, in an old language translated by the fingerling, its tentacle-shrouded beak snapping close to my face, saying that there was more to the making of a child—of a family—than just two bodies, than two bodies and an empty set of rooms.