by Matt Bell
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 tigh
t 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.
THE 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.
AND 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 a
rms, 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.
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