In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (3 page)

In my father’s house, she said, we ate only fish, but I am no longer in my father’s house, and the old ways no longer bind me.

She slid her pooled plate toward me, said that in this small
world there were pleasures and powers I had not yet imagined and that through them we might find some strength to share.

She said, Together we will remake this dirt, the sky above it and the ground below, and all the animals and birds and fish that crawl and fly and swim upon and around it, and by our own new laws we will be better married, made anew.

A family, she said. What you have always wanted, at last arrived; for one way or another, I have found the will to give it.

I did not know then of what she spoke, was afraid of this new manner in her speech, its sound so like my own worst thoughts, like those of the fingerling. And so I shook my head, asked her not to speak this way again, and after she withdrew her plate I returned to the woods, where afterward I spent more and more of my time.

In my absence, my wife filled our rooms with more new-sung objects, baby-things for her baby, made this time from no template of mine but rather out of her own imagining. Meanwhile I turned my anger to task as I worked to empty the woods of all the animals favored by the bear, who I came to believe was lord over that shaded domain.

When I say
belief
, I do not mean I knew what I believed, not in the way I had believed before coming to the dirt, in steepled buildings made to organize such feelings. Things were odder here than they were elsewhere, and most stories were not written as clearly: On the other side of the lake, across the mountains, the truth had been inscribed in the stars and could not be changed. Here, upon the dirt, my wife had wiped clean that sky-flung slate, and so I was not sure what to believe or where to look to rediscover what once I had simply known.

Throughout this pregnancy’s middle months, the fingerling and I continued to trap the woods, to bring home what meat and furs we earned. Our nights stretched troubled, some feeling in the gut appearing in my dreams as in the fingerling’s, its shadow disrupting our sometimes-blended nightscapes with unsure worries. From within those sleepless hours I would emerge blearily from the house, returning to the woods to check my traps for ferret or fox, for the rabbits or wild hounds stuck in the steel jaws of my mechanisms, and because I did not know what else to do with those whose meat she refused, I took up the taxidermist’s craft, the tanner’s: To skin, to scrape, to preserve the furs. To make my wife shut them with needle and thread, for when our first clothes had turned to rags. To reclaim them as memory, their bodies arranged with glue and wire, their skins stretched over wood forms meant to decorate the walls of our house, to displace the long-empty picture frames.

Above the traps, where shafts of moonlight descended through the boughs, often a space existed wherein some segment of the shifted sky could be seen, where the last stars remaining did not retain their original seats but rather slid along new curves, their paths distorting as the second moon’s weight tugged the sky. Each night the fingerling catalogued this movement, and together my eager watcher and I searched for other signs, like how the once-white glow of my wife’s moon was perhaps even then tinged some shade of pink, and the sky was not all we watched, nor all we wondered about. More and more, we pondered what my wife learned in the cave, that house of the bear, when we lived there without knowing to whom the cave belonged: How long did she know about the bear before it awoke from its long sleep?

How long did my wife know, and what did she find between the time of her first knowing and that awakening, the bear rising to chase her from its home?

Whatever she found, was this the source of her stronger songs, of the voice that made her words more powerful than mine, even though it was I who had claimed this dirt to rule? Or was it something else, something she and I had done together?

That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.

L
ATER MY WIFE LEFT FOR
the woods too, perhaps for the first time since our fleeing the cave of the bear in our earliest, more innocently childless days: I knew only that first she was beside me in our bed, and then she was gone, into a night lengthened beyond reason; and though I did not sleep, I pretended to, so that when her absence ended she would not have to explain. I trusted her then as I would not trust her later, not even early that next morning, when upon her return and her resumption of sleep—and also time, I thought then, oddly—the fingerling seized the dawn-light’s warm chance to show how it was not just mud that caked brown my wife’s heels and ankles. And still I refused to see what I was shown, even as the fingerling urged me toward right thinking.

I did not want to do what he claimed was necessary, to lift my wife’s nightclothes and confirm the new stains streaking dark her white thighs, and while the fingerling begged me to show him, to show us, I told him I would not push my wife farther into this misery, would not compound her sadness with the forced and early addition of my own.

I watched my sleeping wife, hovered my hand over the scroll of her hair. And to the fingerling, I said, Wait.

Wait, I said.

Wait until she awakens.

Wait until she washes and eats.

Wait until she has readied herself with freshest clothing, until her hair is returned to its bindings, until her face is rouged and powdered. Then she will tell us all we need to know: what has happened, what will happen next, and when at last it will all be over.

M
Y WIFE EMERGED FROM OUR
bedchambers late, as was her custom throughout those childless years.

Dressed only in her nightclothes, ankles stained, she walked through the kitchen and out the front door to the dirt beyond, while I sat at our slab of table with my fork and my fish, while in my half-filled stomach the fingerling looped anxious orbits. He begged me to follow her onto the porch or at least to spy upon her through some opened window, yet I maintained what slim calm lingered—for if my wife’s pregnancy had truly ended—if our last good chance had indeed passed unborn between her legs—then she had promised to end our world, then surely that end was come.

But then morning passed into day into evening into night.

I listened, but the song did not come, the calling-down sung after each of her other pregnancies, and when at last I opened the door, there was no wife out upon the dirt, or near the lake, or in the woods, no matter how or where I searched: Again she had disappeared from the surface of all things, just as she had
the day the bear destroyed our wedding gifts at the mouth of its cave.

When at last she returned, her pregnancy seemed not ended, despite the grief bloodshot through her eyes, the stagger pained into her step. I asked her where she had gone and what she had done, but she said only that she was tired, that she did not wish to speak. Her body betrayed none of the quick deflation it had before, and so I did not know what to say or do, and afterward I kept some distance during the day and also in the night, and I gave her more than her share of what I trapped and fished, so that she might feed this baby better, so that if it were somehow still within her it might find the strength to live.

From that night on, my wife avoided our bed, sleeping instead alone upon the dirt, beneath the moon and also her moon, bidding me not to follow but to promise to remain inside the house—and even though I promised, my promise was not enough.

Each evening I again agreed to retire to the bedchamber, agreed as if I had never been asked, my wife’s voice betraying no recognition of our patterns, of my nightly exile to our lonely bed, where only the fingerling’s terrors would keep me company.

Then my wife saying good night, muffled through the closing and closed door.

Then the key moving in the lock.

Then the latch making it easy not to break my promise.

Then the waiting until dark, until the darker dark inside, and then moving to the window, where I believed I would not be seen.

From that vantage, I could not spy where she lay, but I could hear her voice, and as I listened she filled the nights with a song she had not sung before, the purpose of which I could not divine.
Each morning, she returned at dawn in her draped and dirtied nightgown to unlock the bedchamber door, and no matter what she said I did not question her, only chose to believe the best of the many possibilities, that her acned skin and ruddied cheeks and heavied body were some good sign, some assurance that this pregnancy continued, that there was still some child coming. This was the story I wanted most, and so it was easiest to believe, no matter what the fingerling claimed—and also there was the matter of her moon, neither ascending nor descending. If her pregnancy had ended, then I thought there would be no need for these locked doors, these separate nights, not against the language of her eyes, the promised danger of her sung moon.

In my hopeful naïveté I made believe that the moon’s place in the sky assumed or assured a child’s place in her, but while I slept the fingerling begged my eyes open, watching and waiting and never allowing me to forget what we had seen, that night my wife had returned bloodied to the bed.

YOU KNOW THERE IS NO CHILD
, the fingerling said, his shape curled in upon my ear, circling its ugly organ with each word, each soft-slung syllable.
THERE IS ONLY A LIE
,
WHICH IN YOUR WEAKNESS YOU ALLOW HER TO KEEP
,
TO HOLD AGAINST YOU
.

EXPOSE HER
, he said, and then he slipped his shape across my face, around the curve of my jawline, down into the spiral canals of my other ear, crowding that too-small space so that he might command my attention, so that he might speak longer than he had spoken before:
EXPOSE HER AND MAKE HER PAY. FOR HER DECEPTION
,
FOR WHAT SHE DID TO YOU
,
FOR WHAT SHE DID TO ME
,
TO MY OTHER BROTHERS AND SISTERS
.

He said,
I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF HER SHAPE
,
AS I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF YOURS
,
AND I TELL YOU IT IS NOT OUR LACK BUT HERS
.

Despite the tickle of the fingerling in and around my face, still I dissented. Long had I saddened at the failure of my children, at the ghost I had set to seed, but never had I blamed my wife, not in full, not as we expanded the distance between our bodies, not after we had ceased to smile at each other in doorways or through windows. Some part of that distancing had been reversed by this pregnancy, and in this last-found closeness I wanted to believe all the fingerling claimed I should not; and even if her pregnancy was over, then perhaps I was willing to blame her actions on the twisting unreasonableness of heartbreak, and so I did not agree that my wife had done me wrong.

Against these arguments the fingerling insisted, and in my refusal of that insistence the fingerling showed me some others of his tricks, demonstrated how he too was a tracker. He had learned his mother’s movements, and also her motives, knew both better than I ever had, and so one hot afternoon he urged me back to the house, hurried me until I abandoned my shouldered burden to walk faster: For weeks, my wife had sung upon the dirt throughout the darkest hours while in the locked bedchamber I slept or tried to sleep. Now she was too exhausted to resist napping some portion of the day, and so the fingerling commanded me to tread lightly, to open the front door without creaks, to cross the floorboards without boots, to enter the bedroom, to see there what might be seen.

LIFT HER SHIRT
, bid the fingerling, hysterical, foamed and frothed, a nausea of need, and I did as he begged, and beneath my wife’s blouse I found what he wanted me to find: a fur, balled into the shape and size of a baby’s bulge; this hide with which my wife had hoped to deceive me, as if our son was to be a wolf, as if she had last rucked with an animal.

WAKE HER
, the fingerling commanded, but I did not wake her.

WAKE HER
, the fingerling said again, but it was only the fingerling who was angry then, only he who wanted her so quickly exposed and punished. For my part, there was almost only more sadness, that she could not admit what had happened, this expulsion from her body of our most recent child, which unlike all the others she had delivered dead alone.

N
OW CAME THE MONTHS OF
crossed deceptions, where we each hid beneath our clothes some child or not-child, grown inside our bodies or else never grown: For me there was the fingerling, five years swallowed, willful, angered at what world he knew only through me, his father-shaped host; and for my wife there was her own false child, her lie made artifact, a fakery of fur clutched always under her blouses and dresses.