In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (5 page)

How every day I watched the foundling always choose his mother, how he preferred her lap, her end of the table, her body to curl
against when dreams of the dark woods and the darker cave trembled him awake.

How his lisping voice was still better for singing than my rough and rude timbre, and how this too was a realm they shared, to which my talents granted me no entry.

How when he wanted a story, he wanted it only from her lips, and so it was her stories that formed him, never mine.

How whenever he was not with her, the foundling seemed listless, exhausted, and while she did her chores he fell asleep in odd places, tucked into a corner of the sitting room, hidden in the shaded hollows between the furniture; or upon a pile of dirty furs, ready for the washing; or in the dark slimness of the space under the bed, where I would find him snoring so slowly, balled up, legs tucked below his belly, hands folded beneath his face; and if I tried to shake him awake he would not stir, not until my wife returned to lull him from his sleep with a song or a soft word.

How the eighth element she taught the foundling was called
moon
, but when the time came my wife pronounced it
moons
, as if hers was no copy but rather some proper and equal addition to what had come before, that original to whose workings we were not then or ever privy.

How, like his mother, the foundling preferred the meat of the woods to the fish of the lake, so that always I ate alone, even when we ate together.

How even if we had not been so slowly separating, even then the fingerling would have kept us sometimes apart, his threats against the foundling enough to double my own reluctance, my own inability to father.

How I told myself I held back for the boy’s safety, but how that was not the whole of the truth or even the most of it.

How by the time the foundling was with us several years—by
the time the fingerling had floated within me nearly double that span—how by then I could admit the root of the fracture on our family, of the distance between my wife and I, between me and her son: Despite all my long wants, I had never thought rightly of how to be a parent or a husband, only of possessing a child, of owning a wife.

M
EMORY AS NEW APPETITE, AS
hunger and harriment: To wish to try to join my family in its diet, but, because I would not take back my public objections, to do so always in secret, eating only the parts of animals never eaten before, parts my wife and the foundling would not miss.

To trim the sinew from around the vertebrae of a raccoon, to gnaw a woodchuck’s knuckle, to save the ears of a hare in the back pocket of my trousers.

To crack open heavy nuts taken from the cheek of a squirrel, trapped while storing its winter stock.

To throw away the stringy flesh of groundbird after groundbird, keeping only loused mouthfuls of feathers to swallow later.

To do everything differently because what was already accomplished had failed to provide what life I wished, and only some new way seemed likely to save our family from this long fall, this world beneath the slow-sinking moon, this home where there was only husband and wife and fingerling and foundling in the house, only the bear in the woods and whatever-was-not-a-bear in the lake, of which I have barely yet spoke: We knew by then the
ninth element was called
bear
, and for a time nine was enough. The tenth element was in those years only intuited, and what it was best named I did not know, whether
whale
or else
squid
, else
kraken
, else
hafgufa
or
lyngbakr
; a monster to match a monster, to oppose the other merely by its existence opposite the woods, in the lake on the other side of this border of dirt, the thin territory upon which we had staked our tiny claim.

Only rarely did I have some chance to speak with my wife alone, in the language of adults, that diction now kept reserved for special occasions, rarer privacies. Always the foundling was with us, or rather with her, caught up in her skirts or tasting from her cooking spoon or toppling over in the dirt of the yard, nearby where she hung up her laundry or beat the dried mud from off our rugs, and anyway everywhere within those first rooms was within earshot of everywhere else. Now there was nowhere we could go to be together, a couple only, and now every room seemed too small, the walls close by design but made closer by the dark furs that decorated every surface.

In hopes of catching my wife alone I began to take opportunities to exhaust the foundling, to chase him around the house and the yard behind, each time inventing some game for us to share—and I remember once I made my body as big as I could, hunching my shoulders like the bear, grunting and growling my worst feelings, and the boy ran before me, stumbling and mock terrified and calling for his mother, who did not laugh at our play but at least did nothing to stop it, only folded her laundry and kept her silence. And when the foundling at last collapsed napping in the grass, then his mother carried him into the house before returning to the yard, where her wash waited unfinished, and where I waited for her.

The play had tired me too, but it had not weakened my anger, and as always when I was in my worst moods I pressed my wife to explain our son’s origins, said to her, Tell me again of his conception, of the trials of your pregnancy, of threatening me with your moon that still hangs overhead.

My wife loosened one of my shirts from our line, folded its sleeves against its seams, folded it in half again, and placed it within her basket, a basket she had made. The shirt was cotton and not fur, but we raised no such crops, and so this too was sung into its shape, not trapped and skinned and sewn. All the most useful objects in our house were of her making, and what I asked her was whether the boy wasn’t the same, another construct, all hers.

She was still beautiful then, her skin glossed with sun and too much moon, her eyes tired but happier than they had been in the years of our failures, and as I complained she reassured me again, said, I have given you what you wanted, or close enough.

She said, I know how many children you wanted and I know this is just one child, but you could choose to decide he was enough, to believe that one child with me was still a miracle.

She said, You are unhappy but why, when this life is almost exactly the life you wanted, that you wanted and that I agreed to give you.

But still I was unsatisfied, still I claimed that the son she had given me was not the son we had made and that somehow she had replaced him with this other, this foundling. Against these claims my wife offered no new defense, would only reassure me again, telling me not to worry, that of course he was my son, that despite the wonders of her voice her songs could not make a life. She said this again and again, against my many multiplying queries, each voiced as I trailed her around the house, following her from chore to chore, until after so many denials she changed
her tack, asked quietly, What is a life lived but an array of objects, gathered or else made into being, tumored inside the wall-skin of our still-growing house? What else to make a biography of, if not the contents of these rooms?

As much as I had tried to ignore its progress, still it was obvious that the house was growing, that it grew most when I was not looking, when I was not there to catch it, and that my wife had begun to fill its new rooms with objects of her own devising, made for her own needs, those of her foundling. And then one day I returned home to find my wife not in the rocking chair where I left her, nursing her stunted son, but rather in some new room dozens of yards farther down the hallway, the hall that before went only to our bedroom but now extended past that first door, past several others I did not know. There I found them, together in a space bare of furnishings except for some bed, and there mother and son slumbered, his head laid to her collarbone, perhaps naked beneath white sheets, bodies as close as hers and mine once were.

Everything remained unsaid, our lives a stasis of secrets, and when the foundling came to me on his own then too I reached out with my hands to maintain our safest distance, pushed his outstretched arms back down to his sides, corrected his advances: When he tried to kiss me goodnight like he did my wife, I turned my stubbled cheek against his milk-stunk lips, and he was not yet strong enough to turn it back, not even with his fingers twisted tight into the scrub of my then-new beard.

The fingerling rejoiced with turns and twists through the short circuit of my guts, where he continued to make his most frequent habitation, exiting the long throw of my stomach and intestines only occasionally for the passages and pouches of lungs or liver or bladder. As yet I had not felt him within the confines of my
skull-space, but often he crawled along the surface of my face, stretching my skin so that I was sure my wife might see him sliding across my features, as I thought her foundling sometimes saw. If she did, she said nothing, and eventually I came to believe that she must not. But whether her not seeing was a failure to understand or a failure to look, I did not yet want to know.

Memory as flicker, as fury: To be able to be jealous of a child was to imagine thoughts for the child that he was not yet old enough to have.

To be suspicious of our house was to be sure that in the morning there was no second floor below our cellar, and no stairs leading farther down and in, and yet in the afternoon to find both those constructions.

To have built this house without understanding or imagining that when I stopped building it would grow still—and when I was not looking, then again my wife remade what I had made, sang her own house within my house—for how else to account for all those rooms, all those hallways? How else to account for these stairs, these doors, and behind them chambers furnished with new shapes?

My wife withdrew the foundling farther from my gaze, and afterward I saw them only rarely outside the house and never far from it. I had rowed them out onto the lake, had tried to teach the foundling my habits, but those days too were ended, and again I would be the only one of my kind, denied my lineage. Now my wife and the foundling emerged from the new chambers of the house only at specific times, only at meals or else not even then, and afterward my wife retreated not by heading out of the house but by heading in, by climbing back or else down. Soon all our closets gave access
to such stairs, and at the bottom of these staircases were only more doors, more halls, more rooms that for a long time stayed empty, until my wife began to fill them with the song of her voice, and after they were filled she sometimes locked their contents away, which in those days were not yet meant for me.

On the first floor, the doors were not locked as the deep ones were, and so I wandered past them in the early mornings, the late nights, the hours when my wife and the foundling slept in our shared bed or else their other bed to which I was never invited, set in a chamber I could not enter, its door suddenly barred by a mechanism I could not discover. I searched every open room, and in each one I found some newly aggressive mundanity, some object or set of wife-sung objects, their shapes familiar but their purpose inscrutable to my reckoning.

What was I to make of these rooms, the few I saw before they were shut away, and also of what they were filled with? Some held objects obvious in purposed pairings—the crib and the cradle, the bottle and the blanket—but others less so: In one room, I saw the death of a cougar but not the cougar itself; in another, the moltings of a thousand butterflies; and then a single giant specimen of the same species, bigger than any I’d seen, first flapping slowly about the room, then becoming more and more agitated as it failed to find its escape, thrashing its iridescent body against the walls of its cell until its magnificent wings were broken.

The creation of these new rooms—this
deep house
—took some toll on my wife, or else the strain of mothering the foundling began to diminish her, or else it was only the years, the first decade of our marriage already ended: Her porcelain skin paled further, shrank tight against her bones, and her long black hair shone less and less, until at last she took a pair of scissors to it, cut its length up and
around her ears, and afterward it seemed her face was different than I remembered, as if her hair’s framing was enough to make her one person, its absence another. Some days her voice was so hoarse from her singing that she claimed she could not speak at dinner, and at other meals she did not speak but gave no reason.

T
HE DAYS WERE THIEVES, AND
the happier ones the worst, their distractions allowing the hours to pass unnoticed, allowing the minutes to be snatched away without knowledge of their passing. As my wife contented herself with the foundling, so I tried to make my trapping and fishing count for something, so I tried to convince myself that the fingerling could be a son all my own, son enough, and better for his embedded residency, a station where neither of us might ever lack the other, as the foundling lacked his mother at every moment: For what breast was brought soon enough after the hunger, what calming touch brought comfort in the instant of its need? No, whenever we were satisfied, then we were deluded, and in our delusions the days took from us what was ours, as wood hollowed with termites, as all iron rusted, as our clothes faded and split their machined threads, and as the home-sewn furs that replaced them grew stale and stiff. Seasons went by, each less distinct than the one before, and what world we had grew only sparser, colder: Now there was less to trap in the woods, less to catch in the lake, and what restockings there were made things only worse, as with the blunter animals the bear brought back.

And the bear? It too worsened with the days, so that everywhere I went in the woods I found its fallen fur, the marks where it scraped it free of its itching skin, against boulder and branch and now bark-bare trunk.

My wife and I, we
aged
, and although I knew it was not correct, still it often appeared our children were the agents of our diminishment: the fingerling, devouring me from within, and the foundling, always at his mother’s side, taking of her body, her energy, her time, her grace. And so the days passed, and as they passed they took: Our hair grayed, our teeth yellowed, our bodies stooped across our bones, and in the mirror there was no one I recognized, only my fatter face, my beard atop that fat, my body bigger, and yet every year there was even less of me to love, to be loved by.