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

by Matt Bell

  MEMORY 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.

  THE 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.

  Memory as reminder that I was no hunter, no good tracker: Like a fool, I first marched to the cave, but the bear did not so easily give itself up, and once inside I could not even find the tricky entrance to the lower passages where I assumed it slept.

  There was only one method I had employed to cause the bear to appear, and so wearing my thick-layered suit I set my traps again, manipulated their intricate devices to capture what best beasts the woods had left, the widest-antlered bucks, never before caught and as yet undiminished, but soon broken-boned, velvet-robbed; and then another such prize, a well-plumed peacock, whose blooded coverts I twisted free from their roots, weaving their long-quilled eyes through the seams of my armor. For weeks I wore my armor and I stalked the woods and I killed every mink and otter and polecat, bashing their heads where they were caught, lifting the sewn-in trap above my shoulders, crashing it down upon their hissing, their mewing mouths. All these and more I interred beneath the burying ground, my aggression escalated so that I might fill the boneyard dirt with the best dead, so that the bear might be compelled to call them free, their shapes necessary to restock its domain. And all this time I remained stuck within my armor and then stuck to it, its threaded seams and hems leaving no place for me to slip free. For some stretch I ate and slept and pissed and shat within, filled those furs with sweat and filth, staying in the woods until my ash-streaked cheeks were smeared with my frustration and with my disgust at my stink, and surely in this state there could have been no sneaking up on the bear, who even from within the deepest depths of its cave might have smelled my stiff-legged approach, the bloodied, muddied layers of my furs.

  The woods, never loud, hushed now at my actions, until at last I woke to a morning where all my traps waited empty and quiet, there being nothing to catch or else nothing so dumb as to approach the bloody steel, the sure paths of stench and sign I left everywhere. Satisfied, I returned to the house once more, to cover myself again in hearth ash, and to wait for nightfall, the better dark within which I hoped to hunt the bear.

  FIRST THE WHITE MOON RISING, then the newly red one, both wrongly full night after night and that night too, when beneath their rays I lifted my stiff-stitched and stinking self from off our porch, felt the pull of the trap’s chain upon my skin, and with my loudest voice I called the fingerling to duty.


  Soon I arrived at the burying ground to find the floor of that clearing flipped at last, some buried bodies of beavers and badgers and wolverines dug free of their shallow plots, their gore dried or else drying. Everywhere there was the fresh mark of the bear, its footprints wide as my face, urine like acid prickling my nostrils, fallen fur crawling with fistfuls of lice—and at that sight the fingerling squirmed nervous at the back of my mouth. I pressed him back down, and also myself forward, toward the median of that boneyard, toward what meeting awaited me there: the bear rising, unfolding its limbs from their rest, all its massive size matted in the butchery of my trappings.

  The fearsome beast of our first meeting was long gone, and instead there was only this new creature, lowed, submissive in posture if not in fact, its previous wound expanded, expounded upon: The bear that stood before me now stomped unsteadily on its meat-thin limbs, its fur-torn, bone-sprung body led wobblingly forward by its squared head, that skull burst through the tearing skin of face and snout. Orbital bone gleamed bright around the jaundiced eyes it was meant to protect, those spheres drooped upon distressed tendon, sleepy on frayed muscle, and my eyes roved mad too, took in all its shape, its stomping stance, its claws flexing free of its threatening paw. Its voice tore from its lungs, the sound of that roar so fierce it stumbled me even before the bear tensed its body forward, ready to lean into the angry first step of its charge—and as it roared again I heard its true voice for the first time, a speech like no other.

  Despite this show of confidence, I reckoned well the seeming diminishment of the approaching bear, for hidden inside my own hackle of found fur was the same wearied lack, the same bones carved only brave enough—and then all that remained of me arrived at its test, the bear falling upon me, all hot breath and battle, and now memory again, of conflict reached:

  To plan to close the distance between us by striking the first blow.

  To drop the trap from my right hand, to catch its falling chain and swing it back overhead with my left.

  To watch the heavy trap orbit once, then again, the only revolutions I had the strength for, all the bear’s charge allowed.

  To throw my hand forward, the trap escaping my grip to slam its open sharpness into the side of the bear’s opening face, catching its growl between those quick-closing jaws of my own.

  To set my feet, to dig the hard heels of my boots into the dirt—the dirt beneath the woods’ thin floor—and then, as the caught bear tried to wheel away, to begin to pull its face down to my level, to the dirt, turning the chain hand over hand, tightening it in my grip, wrapping its length around my forearm.

  To hear the fingerling cry out as I dragged the bear, to feel his cheer loosen him from his hard small place, celebrating a victory yet unearned; and in that move he unbound what part of my resolve he had made, even as the bear turned back, as it charged again, as even with my trap undoing its face it closed our slim distance, intending to undo much more of me.

  The bear roared, its voice constrained but never caught, and then it stood into that sound, lifting the enormous dark of its body upon its hind legs, and me with it, up from off my own thinner limbs. Its head was now three lengths above the forest floor, my trap still embedded in the crushed flesh and scraped bone of its cheek, and from the other end of the trap’s chain I was left to dangle and kick and also to support my sewn-in arm with the other, trying to reduce the pull of that deadly weight, its tearing free.

  My armor came apart beneath every swipe of the bear’s claws, its uselessness made more obvious with each tugging of the bear’s trapped head, each new blow ribboning my flesh beneath. Before long my caught shoulder separated from its socket, muscle and bone pop-popping beneath my skin, and now both the bear and I were howling, our shared frustration loud enough to empty the woods, to drive every still-living thing from that burying ground.

  The bear continued to stand, swung and batted and pulled against my caught chain until it damaged not just my body but its own. Inch by inch I fell, my weight dragging the trap down the bear’s muzzle, that sliding steel unbinding some rare part of its still-skinned skull, squeaking metal on bone, scratching a swath of hair from off its face as it worked itself free. My feet kicked for the relief of the ground, but despite my slow falling, the last few inches remained a gap I couldn’t yet close, and as I swung within the bear’s anger, I continued to be caught by its blows, my tattered shirts filling with more and more of my dumb blood. In my shoulder I watched some strained bone at last break through the skin, and when I nearly fainted at the sight and the spilling, then the fingerling inserted himself into the action, keeping me awake, urging my eyes again, commanding me to hang on, to somehow climb the chain with my good hand even as he moved out of my chest and into my trapped shoulder. As he stretched his length up that side of my body, I felt how he worked his own secret skill, making some new connections to bridge muscle to tendon, tendon to bone, and above it all he spun skin to contain what he had repaired, and as I realized what he had done I cried out again, all at once so sore afraid.

  MY REBUILT SHOULDER HELD, AND upon its strength I pulled myself up the chain toward the bear’s throat, where I thought to put my skinning blade to right use, but then came some cruder event, the fingerling snapping, or else something snapping in the fingerling, his cries echoing inside mine, their loudest sound escaping my mouth to be mistaken as some fiercer threat. The bear howled at my howls, tossing its head and its shoulders and me too, my body swinging in time with its movements until at last I fell free, the momentum of my bloody weight screeching bone, pulling the trap’s jaw clear of the bear’s snout, the bear’s freedom and mine bought at the cost of most of its nostril, and also a ropy skein of maggoted, loused fur torn from nose to ear.

  I faced the untrammeled bear, its open roaring, and what latest bear met my looking, enormous upon its hind legs: I saw for the first time its rows of sore-pocked nipples, four across its chest exposed from thinning fur, nearly choked shut by the bone sprung through the bear’s winter coat, then the lower set, the pair almost hidden behind a furred thickness still untouched by the surrounding decay. The bear waited until it saw I had seen, and then it laid its length upon the forest floor, rolled its body back and forth across the madness of mud our tangle had made, as if the cool earth might soothe the damage I had done its face.

  Or rather, not its face, but hers: She whined and whimpered in the agony of her ruined mouth, pressed it hard against the forest floor, biting and tearing at the earth, yellow teeth staining with dark dirt. How little I still knew of the bear then, despite all the other mammals I had trapped and gutted, despite all the others and parts of others I had buried, and all the dusks and dawns I had stood on the dirt side of the tree line, watching her move about the clearing of the burying ground, waiting for her to leave before I made my own approach, some leftover rabbit in my hand, and how wrong I was to believe the bear a he instead of a she—

  For now I was sure the foundling was no boy but rather a cub, stolen from this once-sleeping mother, this wooded power who slept no more.

  And no wonder the sun could not rise. No wonder winter could not fully come. No wonder in those days it was always the far end of fall, always almost-night, when such a thing could come true, such a thing as the theft of a cub, as a song to make a boy.

  All this, because my wife took what was the bear’s to love and loved it herself, because she entreated me to love it as she did.

  All this, and still there was also with me my own secret child, the one we made but did not finish, whom I had not revealed, only buried away inside my breast and belly.

  I stood up into that fear, into the pain that surrounded it, and on unsteady feet I spoke to the bear.

  I said, I know what my wife took from you.

  I said, I know you have come to my house looking for what is yours.

  I said, The child you seek, I promise it has never been mine. I have not claimed what remains yours to claim, or if I have, it has only been these small beasts
buried here, these trifles, of no importance to me.

  But never your child, I said. Never that.

  To the bear, whining, writhing beneath my words, I said, It was my wife who made your cub her own, who made him no bear at all.

  As I spoke—as I waited for the bear to respond—I found I could not lift my right arm, its length still swaddled in deep-sewn chain. The impulses of my brain failed again and again to reach the nerves of that limb, and I saw how that length of my armor was swollen with what I had spilled. I began to fear I would lose the arm, until what else was there to do but make any mistake that might first save me, and still I swear I did it almost without thinking—or else it was only what thoughts floated behind my speech, the speech I spoke to the bear even as my remainder asked the fingerling for his help, asked without knowing if he could—and then the fingerling agreed, too eager, and only once my body thrummed with his process did I keen the cost of our agreement: He knitted my flesh, remade complete what he had begun while I hung from the bear’s grip, but also he took some other part of me with which to do so, as his mother had done to make her moon, forming it not only from song but from some fraction dug from each of us, and for some short time after I would be less whole than before, even past what fractures I already possessed, and with each stitch that pushed the trap-chain from out my skin or reknit my flesh, so some other bound the fingerling tighter to me than ever before.

  With my arm again wholed, I set my knife to quickest work, cutting through layers until I had shed my shredded armor, and then I pulled tight the remainder of my undershirt to cover the still-flapping skin of my chest and belly. The bear’s lungs sucked air and breathed blood, so that her teeth specked with the evidence of her deep wounds, but what was there to do for her within my few powers? I was not the healer my wife was, not the shaper of flesh she had somehow become. Softly I stroked the bear’s coat, paining myself not to pull even more fur from her already-unthreaded skin, and then the bear roared, and with her roar she told me what mistake I had made: Until my confession, she had not known where her child went, had thought him dead, his now-furless smell so alien she had not guessed my wife’s son had been that cub so long gone missing, so furiously missed.