In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (6 page)

A
ND ALSO WHAT DID NOT
change: Still I was only a fisherman, only a mere trapper of beast and bird, only a husband and perhaps a father—except that despite my wife’s assurances I still did not believe the child I had raised with my wife was any son of mine. By the occasion of the foundling’s sixth birthday, whatever my wife had done to make the child her own had exhausted my patience, and on that day I determined I would avoid its truth no more, and if she persisted in her claims, then she would cease to be even the slim wife she had become.

But how to force the issue, to put my family to the test?

As my wife had invented, so I invented too, for in that absence of rules it was often possible to make my own.

At the fingerling’s suggestion, I extracted from our traps two rabbits, and from the lake I took three fish—the better, he said, to test the loyalties of our bodies against the histories of the same, to show what came from where and where each now stood. I brought my catch to her kitchen, secured it in the icebox for the making of the foundling’s birthday celebration, that last shared meal, wife-cooked later that day: The smell of seared fish. The
blood-and-boiling-tomatoes stink of stewed rabbit. A birthday feast made only of flesh, and no cake for baby either.

Six years old, and still the most taste he had for sweets came from the breast of her, his mother, whom he would not quit in full.

Throughout my wife’s kitchenry, the foundling clutched about her aprons, her skirt hems, and likewise I clenched my left hand around my fork, my right around my knife, and also my stomach closed around the fingerling. My wife set the table, set pot and pan upon its wood, and then with our heads bowed we said our rote thanks to
woods
and
lake
and
dirt
and
house
, for the food we were about to eat, for what bounties the elements had given us. Afterward, my wife smiled or faked a smile in my direction, trying to mollify what hurt feelings I would not hide, and then she gave me the three fish she pretended I was hungry enough to eat, and to her giving I said or heard myself say No, and then, in the same voice,
NO. ONE FISH FOR ME. ONE FISH FOR YOU. ONE FISH FOR THE BOY. OR ELSE WE ARE NO FAMILY
.

Those were the words that I spoke to her, from behind the thickness of my beard, that newer face my wife said she did not like as much.

Those were the words she ignored as she reached for her ladle, as she scooped two steaming bowls of stew, one for her and one for the foundling, as she set his in front of his hungry fork.

I felt my words thicken the air between us, and when I stood my movements were each heavied with their vicious, viscous weight. Each move was perhaps easy to watch but harder to stop, and so even though my wife recognized my intentions, even though she shouted, rounding the room as I rose, still my hands set to gripping the edge of the table, lifting and lifting and lifting that surface until every once-right thing slid free: My ceramic plate scraped
down across the up-angling wood until it hit the edge between two planks, and then the plate flipped past the foundling, who continued to sit in his chair, shock spreading across his face but too slow for safety. His utensils were still in his hands, some chunk of rabbit still skewered on the tines of his fork, and from his face his birthday expression disappeared—its happiness never a gift, only the promise of gifts—his mouth twisting as his bowl toppled into his lap, and when he at last leaped from his seat to cry out and swipe at his trousers, he took his attention off the still-climbing table, away from our last shared pot, the slipping cast-iron container, its metal barrel black and rough and alive with heat, its contents barely cooler than a boil.

I would have said I meant only to make my anger known—but then the table reared up over the foundling, and the pot struck him with a weight unexpected, its contents erupting as he crumpled, the gravy slicking his face and skin, steaming where it stuck.

How the foundling cried then! How he wailed for his mother, how he thrashed upon the floor even after my wife reached him, and how she cursed my name then, as she tore at his clothing, the furs and made cloth trapping stew against skin, as she wiped the burning food from his quick-blistered face, his tangled hair, his red-pocked arm.

As my wife lifted her naked son into her arms she said that she hated me, that I had made her hate me, and as she told me how she hated I realized I still held the table slanted, and as she told me she was leaving I lowered it back to level, let its legs thunk against the floorboards. Of all the many elements we had claimed and named, I had not given a number to
family
, had not even counted it among them, and this omission had not gone unnoticed by the fingerling, that relentless cataloguer of all my faults: Now it was
family
that would be missing, that in that moment was
already gone, as my wife stood to carry the aggrieved foundling away.

I sat down on the floor of that room, the foundling’s wet clothes flung everywhere, my own now drowned in a lake of stew, filthy with the smatter of vegetables ground beneath my wife’s shoes, my muddy boots. Outside the windows, the sun set, but the light did not diminish: On the night of the foundling’s birthday there was moon in every window, wide streamers of moonlight illuminating every surface, filling every puddle with glow. I could not stand that steaming silence so brightly illuminated, so I instead wandered down the hall to our bedchamber, tracking foul footprints to where the foundling sat on the edge of our first bed, crying from out his scorched features. I stood in the doorway and watched as my wife bandaged him shut with strips of fabric torn from the hem of her dress, swaddling his face and hands and chest to protect his open-fleshed wounds, and throughout her ministrations he would not cease his crying. She put cold compresses upon the uninjured parts of his body to cool the worse-hurt rest, but when his body could not shed the heat of his burns she did not hesitate, as always I would have hesitated. As I watched, she lifted her boy into her arms, his body limp against hers, arms and legs dangling from her grip, and then she pushed past me, out of the bedchambers and down the hallway, past the first kitchen and the first sitting room and the first nursery, that room he had so rarely slept inside, and then farther on, into the hallways beyond the one I had built, where there were more hallways still, all carved out of the dirt and into the coolness of the earth.

And what then? What words did my wife say in those last moments before their departure?

Only some song of silence: As the foundling screamed his
goodbyes, my wife relied instead on the angry quiet of her body, and as she walked away, I listened to the slimness of her shoulders, the topography of her spine, the sight of her thudding blood flushed from beneath her skinny bones, those sharp ribs pressed against her thread-worn and hem-ripped dress. What she said was nothing she could not say without her mouth closed and her eyes long-darked, already turned away—words without sound, without song—and then without further glance or gaze she was gone from my sight, and afterward the flashed shape of her absence burned hot in my eyes, and around it her silence continued speaking for years and years, remained always the sound of her saying nothing, and then the sound of the nothing said.

M
EMORY AS MONTHS ALONE: TO
live in a world changed by my wife but that did not contain her. In those days I began to miss her differently than I had missed her in the years we shared these rooms with the foundling, and also I came to resent the attitudes of the fingerling, who swam sharp circles around my heart and lungs, rejoicing at my wife’s abandonment, her escape, that easy proof of what unsteady structure our family had been. Sometimes he choked himself into my throat, and it was in those minutes that he held court, that he showed how well he could speak in my voice, if I did not try too hard to resist.

With my mouth, the fingerling said,
NOW YOU MUST GO INTO THE DEEP HOUSE
.

ROUT YOUR WIFE
, he said.
LAY WASTE TO MY BROTHER
.

CLEAR THIS DIRT OF ALL OTHER CHILDREN
, he said,
SO THAT I MIGHT BE REVEALED IN THEIR PLACE
,
SO THAT MY MOTHER MIGHT LOVE ME IN THEIR STEAD
.

The fingerling, he said nothing of this to me until it was too late, and then when he did speak he said too much, on and on until I silenced him too, until I stopped his speech with an application of
my fists to my stomach or throat, where I sometimes caught his shape beneath my blows, but most often I bruised only myself, marked yellow and blue guesses of where he might have been. It would be some hours before he regained his voice, but then he again spoke clear and calm and sure, uninjured behind my battered skin, and I believed what he said to me was true: My wife would not be coming back from the new house she had sung, that deep house dug below, and as long as she remained away the foundling was not coming back either.

My wife’s moon loomed lower than it had before, its wider hue continuing its shift from yellow-white to pinkish-red, and as it bent the sky it also bent our seasons, so that our short fall preceded an endless dry winter, all gray skies and no snow, no rain. The woods were evergreen and so mostly kept their boughs, but even there some stands of trees lost their needles, then their cover of bark, then some thickness of their trunks, until, hollowed out, they crashed down beneath heavier winds.

In the cold those trees rotted slowly if at all, and one day I realized that the sun no longer rose as regularly as it had but rather kept its course just beneath the edge of the earth, as if it were ever almost-night or barely-morning, and only rarely after did we see its shape arcing overhead, although some measure of its gleam still curved near the horizon, glowed us long dawns, stretched days of dusk.

I continued to trap from the woods, but because I did not eat the meat my trapping created only more digging in the burying ground. I fished until the sunless air grew too cold to venture onto the water as often as I had, and on the coldest days I rested upon the dock and wondered what would happen to my fish, to whatever creature lived below the fish, the bear that was
not a bear—but then the salted water did not freeze. The rest of my hours I spent in the house itself, walking not just the ground floor but also warily venturing into the first story of the deep house below, where sometimes I called my wife’s name, or else the foundling’s, and sometimes I did not. As I walked, gas-lamp in hand, the fingerling chattered away, often tinny in my ears, or else he spoke from lower in my body, and from both stations he urged me again to follow my wife downward, to find which of the many rooms and chambers she had entered.

I listened to his urgings, but I was not yet ready, hesitated even after we discovered the secret to my wife’s doors, a banality unsuspected: All were locked with the same lock, the same set of tumblers as the house’s first door, the one that led out onto the porch and the dirt, whose key I wore slung around my neck, as I had always worn it. And so none would refuse my passage, should I choose to enter.

And then one morning I found outside our front door the footprint of the bear, and more of its signs beside: its fallen fur, its spoor. Like all the other animals of the woods, the bear had never before left its shaded domain to walk exposed upon the dirt, and so beside those footprints there shivered around me my own goosed flesh, my prickled hair—for now something had lured it from its woods, and what else was there, what else had changed but the absence of my family, and then I knew that whatever pact the bear and I had enjoyed through the long years of my poaching, that unspoken truce was at last broken.

T
HE NEXT MORNING I SEWED
for myself an armor of furs, a grotesquerie of layers upon layers, of thick skin and rough-nubbled hide, each swath stitched with a crudeness borne of my own fat fingers. I threaded together what we had meant for covering our floors and our walls and our bed, and when I was finished I draped myself tip to toe, then sewed my shape inside, made myself horrible, a beast meant to match the bear. My movements stiffened, thickened, I knelt before our hearth, wetted my fingers, dragged their tips through the cold ashes stilled there, then painted my face with what char stuck to those narrow bones, so that all that showed from within the fur was dark, cheeks and nostrils and ears and lips. Heaving beneath my burden, I tucked my skinning blade into its sheath, its sheath into the belt strained around my waist, and then I walked out the door, off the porch, around the house and into the garden, where sat my waiting traps, each wanting again for the woods.

I put my hands into that pile, and when I saw my hands next they held the only weapon I had ever understood, the only one I had ever wielded against another: not spear or axe, not machete,
not bow or sling. Instead, my hands had sought what they knew, and remembered into their grip the largest of my traps, like the others in everything but size, and never before used: on this end a steel jaw, ready to be pried open, set to collapse, and on the other a chain waiting to be wrapped around my wrist and forearm, then sewn deep into the fur of my armor—and then, at the fingerling’s suggestion, stitched deeper, into the arm below, so that no blow might rip it free.