In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (21 page)

To understand she would not know her own name, no matter how many times I repeated it.

But as I spoke, her skin stopped smoking, lost some of its hottest heat even as it then stayed black and brittle. Encouraged by this cooling I confessed and confessed, and as the words moved out of my body and into the air, then with each story I saw her fever abate, diminished by right-ordered speech as it had not been by the wet cloths I had earlier tried. With each wrong-uttered word, each mistake I made or half-truth I told, the process reversed itself, set her body back toward ruin, and so I grew more careful, talked slower, put my tale on the surest path from our past to our present, smoothed out its digressions, its shifts of attention and time.

Soon I could touch the whole of her hand, then stroke her whitening forearm, and often she did not object to my touches,
although if asked who I was she said she knew only whom I had claimed at great length to be. The blackness continued to leave the surface of her skin, revealing a face smooth and unwrinkled, unaged by memory, and while my speech tried to complicate that blankness, too often my words evoked no emotion.

It wasn’t until I spoke of finding the furs in the deep house that I thought I saw some new reaction upon her face, a restrained titter, or else a twitch approximating surprise or recognition or grief, perhaps a new turn of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes. It was so slight I could not identify its exact character, but whatever it was I wanted more, and before I continued I went into the front room and retrieved my satchel, and from that satchel I took one of the cub-sized furs—their previous movements so calm now—and when I gave her that fur she squeezed it tight against her chest.

And again, my questions, my asking, Do you know yet who you are?

Do you know who I am?

Do you know why you’re crying?

Still she shook her head, and still she denied, and her tears did not last long, not with her body still so hot. All the pieces of her I found in the deep house now went back into her, were returned by story, a different manner than they had escaped, sung into the rooms of the deep house: Now they came carried upon my breath, upon the word, these stories of dead child and dead bear and dead child, dying world.

After the story of the moonfall, I helped my wife from the bed, dressed her in some of the clothes hanging in her closet, as I had dressed myself earlier, in a shirt and trousers I had not seen since the youngest days of our marriage. Once she was clothed and shoed, then I had to sit down again, to gather myself before her,
this ageless vision of the woman I had known and loved, long before our many complications, whom I was still growing used to in this new and unexpected shape.

And who was I to her, by the same light?

Still only a stranger, old and stooped, limping, long bearded and filthy.

She helped me down the hallway and into the front room, then out of the house, onto the porch, onto that fey-lit dirt. Her chamber’s stale air circulated different than the air above, and at its first taste I began to cough, and then I could not stop coughing. My wife let go of my arm, the arm I’d meant to support her instead, and I doubled over, hacked and wheezed, but for a time no relief came. Afterward I looked up at her blank patience, and then I said, Do you remember yet? How to create shape and sense from a song? How to make a garden out of the dirt or moons out of the sky?

I said, Once, you made a boy out of a bear, and sometimes I look at you and I think you almost remember.

My wife did not respond, but I thought I saw some flicker of emotion move across her face, and then her hair again seemed to blaze behind her, or else it was only the wind and the weird light.

My wife, I said, and because I didn’t know what else to do I stood to take her hand in mine, linked our fingers together. I set our feet upon the path that led from the house to the woods, the new and dark-barked trees, not as tall or broad as those found above but just as evenly spaced, and beneath them the pine straw was just as thick, lit by a similar diffusion of light. But here there were no badgers to be seen, no deer or elk, nor pheasants or quail, no sound but the wind, and there were no buck scrapes along the low trunks of the trees, no owl pellets coughed up and left for some scavenger. And there was likely then no cave, and this I believed
I knew even without checking, because when my wife made this place she perhaps did not remember that there was supposed to be a cave, a cave and also a bear.

While we walked, I told my wife of when I first reached the great stairs, but no matter how I described it she did not recognize this landmark, nor my name for it, and so I tried again to explain, tried to find a better way to teach her what she herself had made or else first discovered.

I told her about fighting the bear at the burying ground, and at last she traded silence for curiosity, asking me, But what is a bear?

Next I told her about the bear killing the whale or the squid, and she asked, What is a whale? What shape is a squid’s?

And how to explain to someone who has never seen a bear what
bear
means, or
whale
, or
squid
?

What is the word
child
, even, if you have never seen a child?

She said, I wish—

She said, I would have liked to have had a husband, and I would like to have a son.

She said, It has been so lonely here, all by myself, as I have always been.

Maybe this house once belonged to someone else, she said, some other woman.

She said, Perhaps it was her you came looking for, but she is already gone. Perhaps I am someone else, and you are only mistaken in the way you look at me.

I said her name, begged it of her, said, Please, and then I said her name again.

I said, Do you remember any of the songs, the ones that might still save your boy, that could save me too, if there is enough of me left?

Please, I said. Please tell me that you do.

My wife, I let her go, or else she pulled loose, walked away, a step or two steps or three. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, then let them hang at her sides, hands open near her hips. She spread her legs just wide of her shoulders, opened her chest to fill it with air: a singer’s stance, and how my heart moved to see it.

A breath, a deep breath, and then a deeper one: She sucked the strange air until she was filled, and then she looked into the non-sky, into the place where moon or stars would have hung if there had been moon and stars.

She looked up through the trees, and then with a turn of her mouth she released that air, that potentially song-held breath.

What then?

What else. Only something hard sounding, a bleat, a blather. Not just not a song but also not a melody, not a chord, not a single note.

She tried, then tried again, but each try was worse than what had come before, and there was nothing of who she was within her sound.

My wife said, I’m sorry.

She said, I wanted there to be a song, a song for you.

She said, I wanted to make you happy.

I nodded, knew. Again I took up her hand. I said, You must be so very tired.

I said, It’s time for you to sleep.

I said, In the morning, we will bury our son.

I
FOUND MY SHOVEL OR
one like it in its accustomed spot, the place I once put it, the place some earlier, less-forgetful wife sung it back. Leaned against the rear of the house, it had shared space near the edge of the garden with my traps, but now there were no traps, and also nothing for them to catch, and that too was best.

And then back around the yard and onto the porch and inside the house, where my wife waited, where the shrouded foundling waited dumb in her arms.

And then outside again to hold the front door open so that my wife might carry her unremembered son out of our house, to lift him once more over the threshold and onto the dirt, and because I did not know where else to put him I buried him in the woods, in the same part of these new woods that I had claimed in the old, where I took the logs for our house, where I interred every beast I could. But all those days were gone, and I had promised this new woman whom I couldn’t not call my wife that I would stop speaking of them, and the digging took all morning, as my wife could not work the shovel, and I was too sick for fast work. And so
another element of our world was ended, and I believed for a time that no more would come.

I avoided my wife’s blank gaze as I received the foundling’s body from her, and then I lowered her son into his grave, and then I took the two furs from my satchel to blanket them across his shape—and when that first shovel weight of dirt hit heavy upon the shroud, it was only I who cried.

I
N THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
I made my living again within the house, although I did not broach the borders of the marriage bed. Instead I took the crib and bassinet and rocking chair out onto the dirt, and in the yard I broke them, and then I made the nursery mine. Into it I gathered all the remaining artifacts of who we were, those same reminders that failed to stir my wife: the photographs of our wedding, the clothes we wore on our wedding day, still preserved, and also the gifts we had been given then, meant to start our life together. Emptied of those objects, the proper house became appropriately blank, and now those shapes that I could not discard would hurt me only in private, in the length of my sleepless, darkless nights.

There were no fish in the lake nor beasts in the woods, and so we ate from the small garden behind the house, where my wife’s garden had always been, where perhaps some garden had always been meant to go. There were no pests to eat her crops—but also no bees to fertilize them, no worms to upturn the dirt, and no proper sun to light them—and so what grew there was also
odd, plentiful but misshapen, underripe, without much flavor but nutritious enough. It was an unworkable garden, one whose half-sung mechanism would eventually fail from incompleteness, and when I asked her where she found her first seeds, she said that she did not know, that the garden had always grown exactly this well.

I said, Did you forget, or did you never know?

I said, How long ago did you start to forget? Do you at least know that?

She knew so little, despite my long storytelling, and when despite my promises I again reminded her that once she was able to make this whole world we now lived in, had somehow carved it free from the black, then she shook her head, said it was I who was mistaken.

She said, Why would I make a world so unfinished, if I were making it for me? Do you think I adore emptiness, or else a creation incomplete? When you speak of a bird, its wings, its feathers, I think to myself, That is something I would like to see. When you tell me of the bear, I wonder what its fur felt like under your hands and how its spoor smelled and how terribly frightening its roar must have been, even before it was the broken thing I saw from my window. And these fish you speak of, sparkling silver, why would I not want to feel their swimming around my ankles, the smallest minnows nipping at my toes, as if it were they who were meant to eat me, instead of the other way around?

I said, Once you did know.

I said, It was you who made this place.

My wife shook her head again, touched my face with her now-cool fingers. She said, How do you know these things about me? How do you pretend to know?

I said, Once you brought your son here to escape me, but there couldn’t have been this world, waiting. This is a remaking of the world we shared, the only world your son had ever known.

I said, You tried to make him a home, and for some time you succeeded.

My wife again wanted to speak, but first she stared off into the twilit sky, the dark-that-was-not-dark of our morning. She was again so beautiful, her grace terrible in equal proportion to her sadness, and after she gathered herself she said, No, this world has always been here. I did not make it. Always it was here, waiting for me to find my way.

She said, I have listened to your story and I have been moved by your words, but I do not believe you are my husband, that the boy we buried was my son.

And then I knew I should have shown her the foundling’s face, what was left of his face, how her song had made his into hers, had claimed even his nose and mouth and eyes, made them as hers were made, adopting him not just in claim but also in shape, and had I proved the foundling I would have proved it all.

My wife listened to my words, considered my trembling insistence, then said, It would not have mattered.

She said, While you slept, I opened his shroud myself and saw nothing like what you say I should have seen. Just a dead boy, whose death meant nothing to me.

Every day after I woke up to the same old touches, mindless now but still hot and cold, thick and thin, beneath and atop my skin. I coughed, spit up into the bucket I had left there for just this purpose, and when I was finished I took the bucket outside and limped it down the path to the lake, where I dumped its runny contents into the waters. There tiny black fish swam into the shallows to eat
this bloody vomit, and I did not tell my wife I recognized them but rather kept their existence to myself.

A new secret then, but even if I had told her, would she have understood? Could she have looked into the water to see that the slim length her body aborted was become a school of fish or something like fish, as hungry for their father’s flesh now as when they were younger and meant to be a boy?

And so I said nothing. And so I continued to say nothing, even as other signs began to reappear, recur: Because I was sick I could rarely stand more than a few bites of what we gathered from the garden, and after each such meal, my wife asked me why I did not eat, and when I did not answer, she asked what she had done wrong in the kitchen. I hurt her anew as she asked again every evening, my mere presence enough to reintroduce doubt, my voice and my actions or lack of action enough to allow the reentry of guilt, that emotion I had carried from the top of the world to its very bottom, where now it pooled and stained all that I touched, all those I longed to touch, and it was after the frustrations of one of these late meals that we first heard the voices, the high laughter from within the woods, cut through the stillness of the dimming light, the unbroken content of our evening.