In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

by Matt Bell

  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.

  NOW 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.

  Despite this gathering evidence, I did not call my wife’s bluff, only counted the days and weeks and months as they passed. Each night, after I was locked into our bedchamber, there I scratched a new mark into the floor beneath the bed, some reminder of the length of her deception, a predictor of its likely end, a calendar made more necessary as the season stalled, so that often it was the cloudless distress of winter, the harsh light of sun and moons cold despite the sometimes-bright blue of the sky.

  Whenever we snuck into the house during her nap to lift her shirt, to spy again her deception, always her body appeared pregnant everywhere but her belly, where there were always only the bundled furs between her shirt and her flat skin, and no baby besides, and no matter the strength of her songs I did not then believe those furs would ever become a baby, even as she otherwise remained seemingly with child, heavy-breasted, thick-thighed. And so in the ninth month I emerged unsuspecting from the woods, still merely a husband, made no proper father despite the insistent promises of my wife, the hungry claims of the fingerling upon my flesh.

  That day, I felt myself only a fisherman, only a trapper with rabbits in hand, but already I had been remade again, my station changed upon an event unattended and now revealed: In our sitting room, in the rocking chair I had hewn for the fingerling’s birth, there my wife waited holding a baby boy, his wide face howling, his wrinkled body swaddled into some blanket I had never seen, perhaps also only lately sung into being.

  Memory as new fatherhood’s first failing: To have my wife stand and pass the baby’s warm weight into my arms, then with a whisper press the child’s name against my ears. To hold the happy shape of this son and for a moment not care where he came from, not care how he was made, not care that in my joy I was believing what did not deserve belief—and then to have this feeling taken as the fingerling reacted, attacked, punched out from within the cage of my ribs until my heart thumped wrong, until I stumbled and reeled, until my horrified wife reclaimed the baby from my embrace before I could drop him to the floor.

  YOU WILL NEVER LOVE HIM, said the fingerling. I WILL NEVER ALLOW IT. THIS BROTHER, YOU WILL NEVER KEEP HIM CLOSE AS YOU HAVE KEPT ME, AND ALWAYS I WILL CLAIM YOU FOR MYSELF—

  Is this not what you wanted? asked my wife. Have I not given you what you asked of me, all you have ever asked?

  No matter which way I opened my mouth, I did not know what to say, how to say anything without saying it all. Against my unexplained distance my wife clutched tighter this foundling, the baby boy whom she called our son, whom she called a name meant for another, for one of our previous failed children. With the boy held to her breasts, now suckling oblivious, then my wife insisted again that this was my child, that I should not doubt, that she did not understand why I doubted.

  She smiled and said, We made this child together, with one body weaved against the other, as we had tried to make so many others.

  At my silence she tried again to smile, and I tried too, and when I failed I left behind that joy and confusion to step out onto the porch, then onto the dirt, where in private I might let my body shake. I circled round behind the house, and there I discovered the garden already unmade, its dank sod overturned, the many buried objects of baby raising now ripped anew from its earth so that they might be reinstalled in the house, each useful at last.

  And then to have to look back at the house I had built, filled now with what I had not.

  To have to listen to the fingerling say, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU SO.

  To have to have him be right, and to not yet know what that meant.

  MY WIFE, HOLDING HER NEWBORN, her body taking full part in her false motherhood, so that her breasts were ample in the months after the finding, and at her tit seemingly always the foundling nursed, drinking deep: I rarely held him myself, but from across our rooms I measured his quality, surveyed his coarse black hair, his wide face and heavy-lidded eyes, the warm bulge of his plumped belly and limbs, his mouth that could then make only the dumbest sounds, cries announcing hunger, exhaustion, a soiling. It was a son I had wanted and a son I had been given, but what son was this? Even in his infancy I recoiled at how possessive his crinkled fingers were, holding her to his lips with more urgency than those of any baby I’d known, more than any of the right-born sons I’d seen on the other side of the lake, the first objects of my bachelor’s jealousy. Still I was not satisfied, and I was not alone in the anger I felt, my strange rejection of the baby’s health, the baby: Ghosted within my belly, the fingerling swam faster to make his own feelings known, stung his renewed need throughout his home of bile and half-digested fish, where in the absence of his mother’s milk he had found some fair substitute, so that by then he had surely devoured some permanent part of me; not what I made with my body, but what my body was made of.

  FOR THAT FOUNDLING, OUR FALSE son, my wife and I played at parenting together, and in those early years we learned him in the ways of our family and also the first four of the elements, dirt and house and lake and woods: Cross-legged upon the fur-covered floor, we told him what we had been taught, that those four aspects were all we were—but then my wife said there was another, a fifth, and that this element was called mother, that it was her mothering that made the foundling, more so than any other. I thought this to be a lie but said nothing, kept silent my concern at her greedy deception—and then as I withdrew I came as well to discern elements previously unknown. Soon I wished I had spoken of these others first, to position them before her claim, or that I’d had the courage to speak of them after, to displace it: For if mother was an element, then so was father, then so was ghost, then so there were at least seven, a number much increased from what we had earlier believed, from what we had been told to expect, long before our arrival upon the dirt.

  Over some number of months, a year, two years, we taught the foundling to crawl and then to walk, to speak in words and then in phrases. We tried to teach him how to play but failed, or else I did: At first I believed the foundling to be possessed by some strange seriousness, some unchildness, but soon I heard through a window his squeals at the tickling of his mother, at her fingers teaching him to feel tickl
ish.

  I had never heard this laugh before, had never caused it no matter how I had thrown the boy into the air, no matter how I caught him just before he crashed, no matter what other roughhouses I taught him, as I myself had been taught.

  By the time the foundling began to sing my wife’s simplest songs I had learned to restrain the fingerling, but always he watched for his chances, and soon all my angers were ulcered inside me, and one by one the fingerling sought their increased company, in whatever pits they burned their slow language. My wife and I were quieter then too, gently estranged, and so from us the foundling learned to speak only slowly, a lack set against all the years the fingerling had whispered in my ear: By the time the foundling said his first word, the two matched syllables of mother, by then I had been convinced of my ill feelings against him.

  In the months that passed he refused to learn any other word—any other but mother, mother, mother, mother—and at night my newly named wife held him between us in the bed, her touch always on him and never me, and at meals the fingerling conspired from my gut as my wife fussed over the foundling’s every want, as their voices filled the small house, until again and again I fled the clamor of their table to go out into the moony woods, where in those days I would often find myself digging some unneeded plot, like a dog who has not yet found his bone but still wants the place to bury it.

  Despite the mystery of his origins, in most ways the foundling was a boy as I had always imagined a boy would be: His learning to walk was followed by a destructive curiosity where he knocked over the carefully arranged objects of our house, cracking worse our already-bear-chipped bowls and also the wife-sung ones, or else endlessly clacking his mother’s spoons against one another. Once he could better speak, he began to question every action my wife or I made, his halting sentences querying the origins of fish, the depth of the lake, the sequence of the seasons, and also crying at what he did not understand, what we could not explain into kindness, like the first time he watched me strip the hide off a deer or scrape free a fish’s scales. Soon the foundling bawled every dusk when I approached the house, even when I came empty-handed: For while it was his mother who cooked for him, he saw only that it was I who fished and trapped, skinned and slaughtered and butchered, and even though he had no trouble sharing in the meals we made, it became my wife he thanked and me he feared.

  I dug more holes, and because I could not dig a hole without wanting for something to put in it, for the first time I began to kill what I did not intend to use: In one hole I buried a muskrat and in another a rabbit and in another a wrench-necked goose, caught by my own hands after it squawked me away from its clutch of goslings, themselves doomed beneath my frustrated heels. My wife still maintained her garden, but in those days I also kept one of my own: For every rabbit I took from the woods, I buried two more in the clearing made when I’d cut trees for our house, so that others might grow from whence they came, and so they did grow—except that with each passing season they returned leaner and lamer, limping where they might before have hopped. It was not just the rabbits who failed, diminished by my poaching: Remember now a mink without its fur or else this beaver without the squared hatchet of its teeth, gnawing useless at a trunk it had no chance of opening. Remember this duck born with dulled beak, this peacock ill feathered to attract its mate. Remember all those other animals, blunted and endangered by my hand, and yet how could I stop, and yet what could I do except to mitigate through their bodies my most recent darkest thoughts, which always required some burial somewhere, with some thing, in some hole of my own digging.

  As the foundling grew I too changed, hardened into who I would be, and soon I was burying whole deer in too-shallow holes, stepping down into their graves to snap the lengths of their antlers or else letting their branches point through the dirt, made accusing knuckles of bone. In this way all the beasts and birds of the woods gave themselves over to my traps, so that never was there a morning when I found nothing, where no fur or feather filled my gathering fists.

  All the beasts and the birds, all except for one: The only animal I dared not trap was the giant bear, who I correctly feared would not suffer me to try.

  Some mornings, I arrived at the burying ground to find that the bear had uncovered my plantings, had torn the flesh from off their bones so that it might eat of what I had killed but not for food—and also to bring back what it did not require. This is how I thought the bear showed me what it claimed, even unto and after death, and also what it thought of my poaching, as if I did not already know the bounds of its domain, and of all others: That the woods belonged to the bear. That the house belonged to me, or else had before, but was owned now by her, my wife. That if I wished to reduce my trespass, then the lake would perhaps be a better place in which to store my dead—if only my wife could have stomached the sight of my dragging their bodies across the dirt, of the scraped clay wounded red.

  During the day, the foundling roamed often upon the dirt, sometimes in the company of his mother and sometimes alone. As he grew in size he grew braver too, but still he remained unwilling to step under even the thinnest outer trees, those still shot through with sunlight. Even with his mother at his side, holding his diminutive hands, his fingers too small for his age, even then he was afraid of everything he might have guessed lurked within those living woods, his imagination making up for his lack of experience—but could what he might have imagined be worse than the truth? Much of what happened in the woods was then my secret, and the fingerling’s: the trapped and the dying beasts; the dug and filled graves; the bones thrust through the dirt, uncovered and freed to new life by the bear, then trapped and buried again.

  The foundling was most afraid of the bear, that beast I had spoken of often at the table, despite the hushings of my wife, and also he was afraid of me, of the fingerling inside, that brother the foundling did not know but that I believed he sometimes heard in my voice. His fear of me disappeared only fleetingly, now and then in some lucky forgetfulness of childhood, and eventually my wife stopped bringing him near the woods, so that he would not wail at the sight of the trees, my traps, bloody me; and as they withdrew into the safety of our house I too retreated, spent more and more of my daytime on the wooded side of the tree line, that threshold’s divide.

  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 th
e 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.

  MEMORY 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.