In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (24 page)

I was disappointed by this result but I had hardly expected
more, had been foolish to hope: Mine was not the power of voice, had never been that.

My power, always it was something else, and it was a thing more terrible than even the worst awfulness these shades had imagined. And as they would not give me what I wanted, so now my anger would be brought upon them without further warning, a sudden storm from unclouded sky.

L
ONG AGO, I GIRDED MYSELF
against the woods with an armor of fur, with a trap chained to my skin, with one knife upon my belt and another swallowed into my heart. Now there were no such arms available, and so when I returned to the house I had to search again for some other method to clothe myself, some other way to make my intentions known. Most of what was in the house was mere domestics, but in our closets there hung one apparel that might serve, that had served me first, on my best day: My wedding suit, white as it was once white, remade again by my wife’s memories, its original purpose as forgotten by her as anything else.

I stripped naked, scrubbed my body in the boil of the last bucket of water, brought earlier from the lake. Washing myself with that captured gallon, I could feel my capacity for transformation in its wetness, dormant but never gone, and when I was clean I shaved my face bare, and when I was shaved I took my wife’s scissors to my hair, cut it in the ancient fashion of our wedding year. I trimmed my nails with the same blades, then brushed my teeth, scrubbed at their squares with my fingers, with soda and salt.

Then the suit, then the pants and the shirt and the jacket, then the tie that my hands had nearly forgotten how to knot, that took too many efforts to hang right.

I did all the things I did the morning of my wedding, and when I was finished I was as close as I could come to what I once was, and what sad and sallow shadow I made, and in our mirror I saw all my ruin made more obvious by its scrubbing: My cataracted eye, hung low in its socket; the many scars of forgotten origin. How my one shoulder lifted lower than the other, how my one leg dragged so that even standing still I looked to limp. How even with the same haircut I did not have the same hair I’d had, its peak upon my forehead higher and thinner than when I was young.

What I saw in the mirror was my dying, and how at last it was near, so near I could always smell it, could put my fingers to my skin and feel it moving beneath, beneath and also within.

I was failed father, failing husband, failure in every role, and still I went on, up and out of that house and toward the tree line, my dragging steps dredging the dusty dirt, that ground bereft of the rain my wife forgot to add to her last world, our deepest house. As I walked I corrected my gait until my hips ached, then I let my body move again in the manner its turned nature wanted, ankle sideways, arms outward, good eye leading my leaning face, pointing me toward what I knew awaited me beneath the first trees, a roaring column of her worst children, some naked and howling, bear-faced or not, and all united in how they would not let me pass.

To recognize the impossibility of hiding my approach from the foundlings, so not to try.

To keep my gaze pointed past their small faces and their wild expressions, into the long woods beyond.

To maintain that the foundlings were no children, no prize, only horded distraction.

To make believe—to make a belief—that I could prevail against them, and that if I did I might find now some recent-made cave farther into the woods, a cave not there before my wife came to dig it from the earth.

And as I crossed the tree line the foundlings fell upon me, and in their haste one another too, their sound swarming, and together they punished me with their sharp bodies, and then they ripped my wedding suit, and then all the man that lay beneath it.

M
Y FLESH, MARKED WITH A
topography of anger.

My hair, torn from my scalp in clumps, my scalp torn.

My eyes, poked and pried, until both the good eye and the cloudy saw only tears, a lasting sparkling.

My ear twisted, then a finger pulled back and back and broken, then enough of that, enough damaging the surface; then the tearing of my skin, the breaking of what was within, and then my crying out, my begging for mercy, mercy, and how I did not deserve it, and then my saying my wife’s name, saying it almost voiceless for there was so little voice left, begging that from wherever she had gone she might remember me and so call off the children she had made, and then, at last, something new to hear, something come through the growls and screams, the hackled roars of these piled children, a sound heard not in my good ear, but in my bad one: A series of notes, not quite like a song, coming from beneath the floor of the woods, up and out of the earth, a sound high pitched at first, and then a noise so low its tone was felt only in my vibrating organs, my jumping spilling blood.

The foundlings unpiled themselves from atop my bones, stood
to howl some response, stamping their feet against what frustration the sound brought, and while they were occupied elsewhere I tried to look down and around at my twisted shape, my broken structures, then struggled to turn over, to put hands and feet beneath me—and despite my felt efforts, no change in position happened, no muscles responded. All my bones seemed unconnected to any other, and perhaps they were, for when my right hand and then my left hand returned to my control, all they found was blood, and then everywhere I placed my knees and elbows and head was blood too, and the worst pain was across my belly, and when I put one hand there it slipped right through, into the strung-out hurt of my stomach, the long guts surrounding.

At last I was finished, at last this body was going to fail and fail until it stopped failing, and how for a moment this thought ran a smile across my split lips, my broken teeth, my torn tongue, for some ever-larger part of me no longer wanted to be the one who went on but only the one who had stopped, and yet there was some slim hope left, one cowardly path left untaken: If I could turn away from my wife and leave the woods, if I could make it across the dirt upon my knees and my belly, if I could crawl the length of the dock to drop myself in the water, then I would again become the squid, relieved of my injuries, changed for the last time. I pulled my cowardice forward, felt what was loosed within me dragging against the unpacked earth, felt my insides getting dirty in hollows no longer protected by skin and fat, and then vomit spilled upward, filled my mouth and my nose, and some similar stinking liquid leaked out of my stomach, its punctured sac.

Then the sound again, and then after it the noise, and then the sound and the noise, together, and yes, then at last a song, and yes, and yes, and who sang it where, and I did not know, could not see anymore, and what was not pain was numb, and what was not deaf
heard only that song, and then foundlings everywhere, all around, their hands upon me, and me not looking, not able to look and happy for it, for what more did I want of their deadly differences?

A dozen arms lifted me, a dozen more moving under to carry all of me, even the parts escaping the shattered container of my body, all those blood-let organs, and with each step the foundlings took I cried out, and the movement of so many hands made an uneven gurney, but they did not slow nor answer whatever unintelligible queries I tried to make, and anyway I asked only to lose consciousness, to fall toward the buzzing light awaiting, but always I was tasked to witness, to remember, and so I bore it, and from atop their hands I looked through the trees and into that wife-made sky, always before empty, and there I saw some stars appear against the dusky bowl, and I knew those new stars by their old names; for they were the stars my wife had called down from our sky all those longest years before, that had fallen through the lake and into the black below, and in them I saw some letters of that ancient alphabet restored, the old stories, and while they were not complete still I recognized their shapes, sky-bear and tall-tree, gold-crown and lake-whale, first-father and ever-mother—

And then my sight was gone, and then there was no more sky, only some more constrained space, and even through my blindness, some transition from light to darkness, from level to sloped. And then being carried through that darkness, down into it. And then stretches of time not stopping, unmarked by anything but the steady breathing of those many foundlings carrying me onward, and when one tired he was replaced by another, and on the back of this swarming litter I descended without stoppage, all the wreck of me carried as one thing, if a spill could be so carried, rushed onward, down into darker dark, stronger song.

A
FTER THAT LONG PORTAGE, THERE
was again light, but the sights that returned with it were nothing I saw with my eyes, although I opened them too, useless as they were.

What did I see then, with that other gaze? Ceiling at first, and ceiling only, from where I lay suspended, belly up atop the foundlings, now crowded close together, a press of bodies below me, keeping me aloft. We had entered a cave, and the cave was like the one my wife and I had lived in while I built our house.

To the foundlings, I said, Enough.

I said, Please, you have carried me far enough.

They had carried me, and also the tune of the song, and the song was louder here than it was in the woods or the passages we journeyed down to reach wherever here was. Now I heard how they voiced it without inflection, without tone, and yet all the notes were correct, although correct as opposed to what I did not know, sure only of their correctness. I did not think they would hear me speak, not over the volume of the song, and also of the sound, these two separate but similar things now loud together, loud even through my deafness, which like my blindness had not
mitigated, only been made different, so that while it had not been healed still I could hear, and so the foundlings did too, and in one motion they lowered my body to the floor.

By that light I looked upon my body, a glance so brief it could only survey the vast damage, the irreconcilable nature of my wounds, not sickness alone but also the crude angers of these foundlings. There was no saving myself that I saw, and so no reason to withhold any effort. I forced myself to stand, felt the breaks in my body shift around my new stance, and then I gathered my spilled self up into my arms, forced it rudely back through the hole in my belly, which no longer bled. I closed my eyes, breathed in, smelled the copper and cordite of my pains, and when I opened my eyes again, then the song stopped.

Now there was more air in the room, more unbreathed breaths remaining, and soon I saw all there was, gathered in that gloom: All the foundlings, wood-sprung, crowded close in all their wrongness, any slivers of rightness remembered encased in fault and waste and never. On their circled faces were formed all the expressions that together might have combined to make one lost boy’s face, but once separated those features made no sense, nothing any whole person would mistake for the same articulation, and yet I knew my wife had so mistaken, and in their swarmed faces—their hundreds of faces, arrayed in every direction, from wall to wall, point to point in the darkness—I almost missed hers, hung there in front of me, a glowing moon of skin set atop her long neck, her graceful shoulders, her slim body not standing above the foundlings but sitting among them, rested in some rocking chair, so much like the one I had made her that it returned pain to my body, which had been numb to such sensation—or rather, pain returned to me, floating around and through, my body nerveless, barely present.

My wife rocked, but no child sat upon her lap.

My wife, she had tested every child there, but none had fit, no one child matching that weight she missed without admitting her missing, that voice she craved without knowing what it would sound like when next it was heard. These foundlings were her wishes, her griefs manifested in all their glory and blame, and as she stood into the space between me and them I saw in her revealed shape the return of the scorched wife, the burned woman I had found upon reaching the deepest house, and for a moment I startled at the sight, for I realized that in that cave I had expected to find not a wife at all but rather a bear, a bear afire, made from the woman my wife had been.

And what had averted that fate? What had kept her from what change befell the wife before her, the foundling’s mother, my long adversary?

Perhaps only the fire within, which would abide no clothes upon her, and perhaps no fur either.

Away from my stories, she had become herself again, the woman she had arced toward whenever I was not there to tell her whom I wanted her to be; and in her absence I had also moved toward this limited man I was now, this best man I could be.

My wife’s heat blazed immense, and if I’d still had sweat within me it would have burned away, wicked from the flapping of my skin. My armful of myself dried, shrank in my hands, my mouth parched, my nostrils singed with the smell of their hair. I turned my face away, felt the prickle of her heat follow my cheek, and then I righted my gaze, held her eyes steady as she held mine: Here she was, and here I was before her, drawn as always to this woman, these women she had been, pulled through time and memory, through those long bodies of the world.