In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (25 page)

My wife, I said, and the heat from her licked at my lips, dried my voice.

I said, I have been no husband to you, and the fire ate my words, so that I had to wet my mouth, reloose my tongue.

My wife, I said, I have been no husband, and no father, but you have been a mother to these children—and that was the whole truth of it. As broken and bad as these foundlings might be, they were hers if she wanted them, and she had gathered them close, had accepted the mothering even of the most awful: Not the memories of me, or of our first lost son—my son, my fingerling—but of this foundling, this one whom she had not birthed but for whom she had done all else, had nursed, had taught, had swaddled and sang to, and it was in him that she was best to be found, in this person made lovely to her even if never to me.

Now in this cave, all the foundling’s aspects were gathered, real and otherwise, and I did not doubt she could see them all, all the possibilities of his past and present, his future.

My wife’s skin, black already, blackened again, and as she moved her head around me I heard the crinkle of her flesh, again like the pages of a book, a story crackling.

I knew I could not smell the smoke that filled the room, no longer had any sense of smell, and then through the smoke my wife said, Time and time again you have told me about our children, about all the children you see, but I do not see what you see.

Her face so and close, yes, a whiff of her old perfume, hidden behind history or else only a scented memory, and no right sense. She was so old now—we were both so old—but still I found her beautiful, and here, in this beauty, I always would be arriving, however long delayed: I did not know how much deeper the world went, how many more caves beneath caves there were, but there was no longer any distance I would not follow her, no unlit
chambers that could hide her fire, and always I would seek her through the darkness, and always I would deliver my body bowed beneath my awe at what and who she was, by what more she had become and was becoming:

Here were the children I wanted to have with her or, if not the ones I dreamed, then the dreams I deserved, right for what world I had made.

Here was the foundling, now one made many, and on each one’s lips was a song or part of a song, the songs she sang of them before they came and also after.

Here was the foundling, her mothering of him: our parenting that I had barely joined, and then my withdrawal from that arrangement, its continuation in my absence.

Here was her deep house, which I had burned in my frustration.

Here were her great stairs, left to lead me through the black, even if I was too much a coward to follow.

Here was my wife, scorched and sad and forgetful, and here was me, her husband, supplicant and penitent, and how far she’d had to go to get me to follow her right, so that I might arrive at the place where I could at any time have come more easily with less pain for her and for all others.

For all my life, I thought that she was the receptacle into which I would put some seed of mine, make the family I wanted, but it was I who was the empty vessel, carved stubborn as stone, as unburnable as the moon, ready at last to be filled with the
fire
and with the
song
, and these last two elements were weaved so deeply into the hidden magic of the world that I had forgotten to count them among my numbers, although all my life they had been there to make us: And then the foundlings sang, Let there be
fire
, and then there was fire beneath the earth.

M
Y WIFE PUT HER HAND
upon my face, said, I remember you now. You have righted yourself, fixed your face from out your beard, cut away the wrong hair.

She said, You changed without me, and I forgot how to recognize you through the changes.

And what was there to do but to agree?

My wife raised her free hand, placed it on my other bare cheek, and then her body burst black inside its flame, those flicking tongues white-blue, then hotter colors, colors hued indescribable, and the stone floor of the cave heated too, and all the foundlings cried out, their ghostly range of voices so narrow, so similar. My pooled and pooling blood sizzled, evaporated, and then I was falling, and still my wife gripped my face, held me from off my knees. She lifted me straight, pulled me to her, and then the flames were through my skin, inside my open body, razing away the last shreds of my wedding suit, and still I could not look at her, ashamed as I was of my old and broken shape, dying grotesque.

My wife, she took my slipping guts from out my hands, pushed them back in through my open belly, and then she said, Husband.

She said, Husband, I remember you.

She said, I remember singing you your vows, and then her hands were inside me too, so horrible and hot, what her fever must have felt like, the halls of memory enflamed, and still the fire spreading, spreading. I opened my eyes to see her, black before me in the dark and the flame, the surface of her shape again the negative of the one I had better known, and when she removed her hands she left me open, and then she moved against and around me in the fire, her long legs making circling steps, and in the fire she began to sing, and as the fire and the song grew it became a furnace, and we were in it together, and the foundlings too, the vastness of them, their child-faces pressed close, and now like us they were even less flesh and bones than before, and in their difference and their disarray they came faster and faster, and from each of their lips my wife took one note, and when the child was soundless he moved into the fire, and then the fire moved into me, into her, into us, and how full I got, how fast moving my thoughts, like a clock ticking full of futures new and unlikely and somehow possible, and how lovely my wife’s song was, and how long before it was over I knew there would be no foundlings left, that it was in them that my wife’s story was stored, the before and after of my leaving her, kept in her true child, the one I had buried in her last woods, and what she had waited for in her house was not me and my story but her
son
, returned to her and by the woods restored, as another woods had restored so many of the other lives I had failed to steward or to groom, and the song my wife sang was the finest I had ever heard, but it was not the song I had searched for.

This song, it did not restore me, but that was no longer why I had come, and no more would my want be to go on and on and on, to live without end, a desire that would not have stopped with the
death of my body or my children’s or their children’s but only with the extinction of every possible world, so that my end would come at the termination of all things, that last threshold of possibility.

No more, I said, begged with my mouth filling with fire, my eyes and my hands and my stomach and lungs filled with the same.

No more was enough, I begged, and more than I deserved.

Only after the last of the foundling had passed between us was my body closed and my wife’s opened, enclosing me, drawing me in. It was not the love we’d had, but it was enough, and there at the bottom of the world I moved my broken body against hers, and in that cave I once more gave half a child into her, where our many wants might meet the half a child she had left, the memory of a song, and yes, throughout our coupling she sang, and it was a new song, made from the song that had made the fingerling and all his failed brothers and sisters, that had made the new moon and made the deep house and the deeper house and this deepest house, its dirt and lake and woods, its foundlings, its cave beneath them all, buttressed by the bones of the world, made a vault or else a safe haven, so that no matter how many levels collapsed above us still our child might somewhere be protected from the mistakes of its parents.

A
FTER OUR RETURN TO THE
house, we resumed for a time our lives together, as husband and wife.

My wife’s body paled again, and this new color lasted, her skin now flush only with her songs, a music employed to sing back the world we had known and also to better it: A sun rose in the sky the week after our return, or at least some convincing illusion of one, and that night, after it set, a moon followed its unrestrained arc. Clouds came later, and then rain falling, and then grass poking through the dirt, although from what seeds, from where? I did not know, did not ask. No longer did I need to know all the seats of power. It was enough that my wife’s songs added to what we had, and anyway I was not restored as she was, and so my old and tired body had not the strength to fight. At night we slept in a bed together—a bed of wood again and not of stone—but in the mornings I often arose coughing and sore to find her already gone, hanging again some photographs upon the wall or else rebuilding the nursery I had turned into my den. During the day she gardened, and as she gardened she sang to our
child, the one growing within, made below the earth but destined to live upon it.

This time, there was no boredom at the slow progress of her pregnancy, the weeks of slimness nor the first small bulge that followed. Together, we touched and listened and sang, my rough and toneless voice doing its best below the beauty of her right one, and while only rarely had I sung with her before, now I did at every chance, whenever my throat was not too ravaged, and for less than a year, this was our life.

That near year, it was not without its sorrow, and its passing did not forgive us or help us to forget what we had done, but it was good enough for me to accept my fate, the fate of this place, the last of all the world I would ever see, and even as it was improved by measures, still I knew it would prove temporary.

It was the last world for me, but not for my wife, made young again, and not for our child, who with my wife I had determined must escape, must inherit what first home we had made, to make of it as she would or else choose to leave it behind, to return to that country from which her parents had embarked, the one on the other side of the lake, across the mountains, that busy land where we were born, all those many worlds ago.

My wife and I first denied the coming of the end, but the signs became manifest, multiplied. Even with her restored song and her many feats that followed, it seemed this last place was doomed to fall, and so it was the woods that failed first, their trees growing leafless with the advance of days, then rotting, toppling to the ground. There was no life there, and no bear to make more, to roar right the shapes it required, and eventually not even any cave, that hollow having collapsed some months
into my wife’s pregnancy, after it became obvious she would not return. The lake was similarly diminished but faded more slowly, drying up with every day I spent on the land instead of swimming beneath its surface as my next nature desired me to do. From the shore, I sometimes watched the fingerling-fish flash through the water, plentiful without my culling but seemingly senseless too, now only animals that I pretended I felt no kinship to, no responsibility for.

With the trees leaf-bare and the water dropping, an ill-tasting wind began to blow across the dirt, eroding its surface into the air, and already that new sun was dimming, that new moon’s orbits growing less straight, more heavy looking upon the sky, and soon there would be no reason to stay here, and perhaps no way. My wife had made the shape we needed for our story, and now our story was ending, and so also its world.

Memory as last conversation: To wait in my chair upon the porch, old and tired, bones aching and eyes heavy, for my now-round wife to return from her gardening behind the house. To allow her to sit down beside me, to take my hand in hers. To smile but to wait for her to speak, then to listen so close to her words, the favorite song of her soft speech, and then to hear her say that it was time for us to leave, to take our child from this place.

My wife then, she was not exactly herself—not the self I had known—but she was some new woman like her and just as easy to love.

My wife, she said: I do not remember the world you spoke of, that you told me was once like this one, but I want to see it, and if I am the reason it was destroyed, then I want to be the method by which it might be rebuilt.

With her hand in my hand, with her eyes on mine, she said, I
want our child to have everything we wanted to give a child, and to give her our world together.

Come with me, she said, and for a moment I thought that she knew my plans, but then she continued, and I saw that my latest secret—last of them all—was yet mine alone.

She stood, lifted me from my chair, and then she said, Come with me and help me get ready, for there is much left to do and so little time to do it.

And how she was right, and also wrong, for time was not what she thought it was, in her new youth, nor what I had thought it was in mine, passed so very long ago.

I did not know what my wife would find when she reached the surface, nor truly how well she might weather the journey upward, climbing the great stairs and pushing through the black only to arrive at the terrible truth of the deep house, the rent and ruined rooms of that palace that had held the treasures of her person.

I did not know if the surface above burned or bloomed or if there were any walls remaining of our first house, any chimney still allowing guesses as to where walls once stood, might go again.

Perhaps she would reach the surface to find the way impassible and would not be able to climb out of the earth without more destruction, without carving her way forward, and what then, and what would that do to what unmarked mother she had become?

Perhaps, perhaps, and no answers anyway.

There were just the two of us now, and also the one coming, and most often we were quiet and simple with each other, and in bed that night I laid behind my wife, put my hand atop her belly, and as our baby kicked within I asked her about the song the foundling had sung over me, in the moment after my heart attack. Did she
remember that song? Had she taught it to him? Did she still have it to sing?

My wife could not see my face, and I did not permit her to turn around, to face my face while she answered. I did not want her to see my expression, to see what ugly thing hope was doing there, to my twisting lips, my twitching cheeks.