In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (26 page)

I said, Answer me where you are, or else don’t.

My wife, she pressed back into me, patting my hand on her belly with her hand, and then she said, What if it was the other that restored you? That saved you when you needed him most?

No, I said. It was not him.

And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.

E
ARLY STILL, ON THE MORNING
of our scheduled departure: I left our bed in the chilled hour before the dawn, careful not to wake my wife. I took one last look at her, at the swelled curves of her body, at her face more precious to me than ever before, except maybe at the very first. When I had seen all I could hope to see, then I slipped out of the house and down to the lake.

At the edge of the dock, I removed my clothes, folded them onto the slats, the sung boards made to resemble the other dock above, the one I had made with my own hands. I felt the dew upon those planks, wiggled my toes against that damp, then shivered at the breeze goosebumping the scarred and folded leather of my skin.

Those scars were my palace as the deep house was my wife’s, as the woods and the cave were the bear’s, as much as any other part of my flesh, another version of my story lashed from my ankle to my back to my shoulder, to my chest and my face and my hands, and now I was leaving all of them behind.

I had told my wife what I had done and what it had made me, and still she took me back.

I believed she loved me again, and because she loved me, I had kept one more secret plan, this tucked-away mercy.

Memory as stretched moment, as elastic time, as always for me the moments have been: To know that I had made all the journeys I could, or would. To believe that my wounds had left me mostly unfit for marriage, for fatherhood, for any world less simple than this one, and my wife and our coming child deserved better, because despite my softening I believed it was better to have no husband than one like me.

To imagine my wife might have said this was not for me to decide.

To agree in principle, while still rejecting her claim, while choosing not to give her the chance to voice it.

When I dared delay no longer, I flexed my body beneath my old skin, felt its sure response despite its many creaks and popping cracks: This man was going to die, but the squid the man could choose to be might live some time longer, at least until the lake was dry, just dust dispersing, blown upon the last wind. In that water awaited the only other I had not forgiven, and before this deep-sunk world was ended I wanted whatever there could be between us, between my last shape and his, even if this thing I would be wanted nothing so grand, needed nothing but what could be provided by instinct, by hunger and rutting. I hoped that within that simplicity was left some space, a slimness where the last of a man might control what a squid would be, what it became—and then I felt the first heat of the morning’s sun—and then I was running for the end of the dock, the last running I would ever do, and as I reached the edge I leaped—and in the air I felt some catch in my throat, a black thread long swallowed, a black hair tugged taut
and then snapping—and what an awful relief it was—and after I hit the water, how horrible it was to still be
me
, how I had hoped that I would not be, and yet still there I was, always me me me, man as trapper and hunter, as bear-bane, as ghost-killer, as husband failed, father-failure, squid and—

—memory as mid-shift, mid-sentence, mid-sound: To be beneath the light-dappled surface but not yet deep. To turn back and see a shape standing on the edge of the platform, tall and heart-proud against the sky, then tumbling forward into the water, a falling pile of bones and skin and regret, what that shape was always going to become, no matter how well it tried to love, no matter how badly it had most often failed to do so, and as it fell it broke the surface of the lake—

—and in the lake there was water and salt and black fish, blacker eels, and more of each every day. How the fish sustained the eels, and the eels the squid. Getting full and staying full. Sated, satisfied. Then the fish moving inside even as they moved without. Then the squid’s body suddenly heavy, until swimming was torture. Then the surface unreachable by any effort, then descending in wide circles, sinking through soundless depths. Then more and more of the black fishes, still each a finger’s length, and then more of the eels, longer and wider and heavier toothed.

Then darkness, then blackness—then what was below the blackness, the second layer of blacker black.

Then realizing the blackness moved, was moving, that the blackness had scales, had fins and tails, had voices, saying
FATHER
, saying
FATHER
. Voices hungry, unfooled by new shapes, each speaking memories and prophecies.

Voices, many voices, but also only one, and in the deepest of
the depths, something else, a mass of flesh and bone sunk earlier to the bottom, now split and torn, now more food for these angrier shapes, and now the squid trapped beside it, held down by their weight, wounded by their biting through the mantle, their scrabbling at armor and shell—

—and still I remembered, although I did not want to, and still I went on, because I was not without my power, not without danger, protected by hook and tentacle and hard beak, and even then the fingerlings were not worried. There were more of them than there were of me, and they were patient, and they were thorough. One day they would consume me, make their new life from mine, from what mine had become, as always they had promised me they would: When they were done with the bear, they would come for the squid, and from me they would take their last strength, and if it happened before the lake dried, still I would be satisfied, because they would be ended too, trapped as I wanted them trapped, given no more entry to the better worlds above, and their future was so short, and the real future was elsewhere, and when I was not only the squid I could see it coming, a prophecy so sure it seemed a final memory, a history already past:

My wife, pregnant upon the great stairs, climbing tall steps in the dark.

My wife, pregnant upon a landing over a chasm, pregnant in the empty halls of the deep house, crying for what had been lost.

My wife, pregnant and expectant, climbing out of the earth and back onto the dirt, where a shattered house stood or did not stand.

My wife, doubled with contractions, singing through the pain to close the sundered dirt, to flatten the land.

My wife, clutching her swelling, delaying the baby so close now; my wife delaying to sing foundations back down into the
dirt, singing up walls atop those foundations, singing up roof and windows and doors—and then when the house was ready my wife walking through the front door, clutching at every new rail and corner, pulling herself into a bedroom much like a bedroom she had known, and then lying down upon the same-shaped bed.

My wife, screaming the birth-song she had waited a life to sing entire, her sound beautiful as a bird’s, angry as a bear’s, and her hands now raising her skirts, now delivering alone this new and howling child, some whole daughter come at last, whom together we had cracked dirt and time in want of, her tiny shape now filling my wife’s messy arms, and still the birth-song continuing, creating everything else a child’s world might need, beasts and fowl and fish, stars and story and songs, more songs, one song to contain all others, and all of them together still only one, all elements combining to make a world, to give that world a name, to give that name to a child, who might carry it forward, onward into whatever awaited her, whatever other landscape she would make to call her own, and then the past was ending, and then the present began, and then I saw the future just beyond it, everything that happened next, but not to me.

A
ND THEN ONE MORNING SHE
found a man upon the shore of her lake, floated in from the shallows, his naked body white and rent, his back dug deep enough to expose muscle beneath skin, bone beneath muscle.

She withdrew, then moved closer again. Turning him over, she revealed a face she did not recognize, not from before her long loneliness: One of the man’s eyes was cloudy, the other shot with blood, and there was no breath in him, none moving his face and lungs. She shuttered the man’s eyes, then closed his mouth, hiding his broken teeth. Everywhere she touched, the man’s skin stretched away, its shape tattered, his chest scarred from some multiple cracking wounds, all his other injuries far older than his drowning, left unset or else healed by an ugly method.

She did not investigate further: The man was dead, and that was enough. She had left enough mysteries unsolved, did not need another.

The coming of the man had fouled her lake: What water was once blue and filled with sparkle was now grayed, even blackened out
near the center, where some other filth swirled in the slow current. She watched the second shape froth and decided that soon she should make the lake bigger again, so that whatever contaminant this man had brought might be spread thinner.

But first there was the body of the man. She could not decide where to put him, whether to burn his body or else bury it in the dirt near the shore or perhaps up the slope or even farther still, on the other side of the house or in the woods beyond, and while she deliberated she went to the house and stripped the sheets off her bed.

A selfish thought: If the body had drifted back into the lake by the time she returned, then she would pretend him a dream, like the other men she had dreamed in the past few weeks—and then a smile upon her face, because she had almost thought
remembered
instead: Men hunting in the woods, setting traps. Men coming down some long and spiraling stairs. Men banging their fists upon a door hidden in the rock at the far edge of the dirt. But the men she had seen had not been this man, only some other progression of shapes: one a young man, dressed in a white suit; one in his middle years, bearded, dressed in furs; and a third, some aged wanderer, coughing blood into his hands, wiping his fingers on his skinny thighs.

When she was very young there had been another woman who had lived in this house with her, who had cared for her, fed her, clothed her, taught her. That other had passed from the dirt long ago, and later she too had gone away, leaving by an almost-vanished road for a more crowded country, for its tall and sprawling capital. Later she had returned to the dirt by another passage, a blacker escape, and now she was again alone, lonely despite some lingering mysteries, the men in her dreams, and also these few recurring sounds: the laughter of a child, the roar of a bear, the
angry words of a father, speaking to someone else, some other woman about to be hurt.

And where had these phantoms come from? Were they waiting here for her return, or had she brought them back with her? And why could she not remember?

The man’s body was still beached when she returned to the shore, and now there was another object too, washed up beside him. Something white, flowing in the water.

It was not until she got closer that she saw that floating outline was merely a wrapping come partway undone, a covering for another smaller shape.

It was not until she was almost upon both the new shape and the man’s that she recognized the second for what it was: The white shape was a shroud, made of wet and dirty bedsheets, and those sheets matched those she held in her hands, had been put to the same purpose she intended hers, the impermanent preservation of the dead.

This new shape was so small it could only contain a child, and her fingers trembled as she twisted her hands in the sheets and pulled it ashore. The sheets were closed by locking folds, and she undid them one by one, and though she wanted to look away as she opened the last one, she did not.

Inside the shroud was the body of a boy, six or seven years old, or maybe even older—a runt, stunted. A cry caught in her throat as she lifted him out, and then the smell from within the shroud gagged her, transforming her earlier sound into something new, and still she did not look away: The boy had been dead an even longer time than the man, and now his features were collapsed, his
face no longer a face, the skull stove-in, the teeth jutted through the softened skin of his lips.

She picked up his hands, found his long fingernails curled into the fleshy pads of his palms, tearing clawed indents, tiny wounds. This was a body damaged by time, by time and by submersion in water—and how long had they been there in her lake, and where had they floated there from? The boy’s shape demanded something of her, some consolation, and she did not wish to deny what she felt, had determined to deny herself nothing. She lifted him onto her lap, into her arms, felt his weight upon her, and how he was filled with the lake then, and how when she squeezed him closer that water came out, through his mouth and nose, the other wounds decayed across his flesh.

The water that covered her, it was not all from her lake, and when it flooded her mouth she remembered not everything but something more than she had, or else she almost did. What she remembered was already present in her world: Here too there was already
house
and
dirt
and
woods
and
lake, sun
and
moons
, and yes,
ghosts
too, for what else could account for her dreams? Here there was always
wife
and always
mother
, for she might have been both even if she was neither now, and here there was always
son
, for she had made one of those once too, and before that was
husband
—and even if she could not remember his face she remembered his voice, how tone-deaf he was, how he spoke ceaselessly because like most men he could not sing, and because he could not say anything without too many words.