by Matt Bell
I did not hear before my wife heard, did not hear until after she asked me and asked me again if I did, but then afterward what withered flesh that sound made, my skin pebbled along every nerve line, the shivers of recognition jerking me from my chair. Together my wife and I rushed toward the woods, but she arrived there faster, possessed of a new youth, her body restored as fully as her mind was not. From farther ahead her voice called out for me to hurry, and although I wanted to respond, all that breath was already engaged in moving my bones toward her and the voices beyond, and any speech I would have made would not delay the process, and then anyway I was soon enough arriving, looking up from watching my feet to spy my wife, tall and pale and stunned, some short distance across the tree line, and there to see how she was surrounded: by the foundling, by a new crowd of foundlings.
AT THE EDGE OF THE woods stood some small number of sons, all so similar at first but marked apart the more I looked. The foundlings were all their own ages, for one thing, and each carried a slightly shifted face upon its head, a different expression of lips and mouth and teeth. Their appearance put my heart to pounding but did not disturb my wife, who already knelt before their approach, bidding them to come to her, inviting their hands upon her face and body. She gathered these boys close, took some into her arms, and there I saw a mockery of the family I had wanted, some clutch of children encircling this one woman, this woman I had always wanted above all others, and my face twisted as I saw a seventh son wandering out of the thicker brambles, stumbling with his face struck wide across the forehead—as if bleeding from the blow of a boat, as if struck hull across head—impossibly saying MOTHER, saying MOTHER wetly, with lungs soaked and sodden from a lake, and again he said MOTHER, MOTHER, and then all that water inside followed his voice out, spilling onto the forest floor, soaking his words into its soil.
Confronted with this dying child, my wife did not scream, did not even glance in my direction, while some short distance away this staved foundling fell, his voice no longer capable of words, and the other children seemed as undisturbed as my wife. They did not speak well—the true foundling had never fully outgrown the stutter and stammer of his childhood—but that did not stop them from leaving my wife to come to me, to put their cold hands upon my face, and with their different lisps they said SHHH, they said DON’T WORRY, they said MOTHER WILL BRING HIM BACK, and then there were more of them coming, walking out of the woods, and when they came they came dressed as these first were dressed, all in white, each garment featureless from a distance, but close up embroidered with pale stitching on pale cloth, the markings of our wedding sheets.
My wife stood among the growing crowd of children, all of them coming to her, and from their midst she said to me, What are we supposed to do?
She said, Are we supposed to take care of these children, and what does that mean?
As if I knew. As if there were any laws that had proved constant, reliable. And so I said nothing, because I did not know, because part of me did not want to find out, did not want to commit to another fruitless course of action, whether that was caring for these foundlings, these children found by both of us, whether it was refusing to do so. I was not as convinced as my wife that these foundlings were anything we should lead out of the woods and onto the dirt, and I did not hide my gladness when we found we could not: My wife gathered the children into a single-file column, and in this formation they followed her eagerly until the tree line—but there they would follow her no more, their fear of that threshold seemingly the exact opposite of the first foundling’s, who had for many years refused to return to the woods.
My wife abandoned her garden after the coming of the foundlings, let its plants grow wild again, as perhaps they had before. I followed her lead, went with her into the woods each morning and afternoon to watch the foundlings, and every day there were more among the trees, and always my wife tried to gather some to her, as many as she could. None came with names, and she remembered no such sounds to grant them, to mark this one from that one further than their shifted features already had, and while there were many such names within me, saved for the children we never had, I decided I would not give them to her, no matter how she pleaded.
Despite the evidence of their play, I said these were not real children, that I preferred them nameless, as even if they were real I did not believe they would prove permanent. So few things had, and I wished to never again love what would not last, and while my wife delighted in the company of these children, I did not.
In the deep house there had been a room for every aspect of my wife’s person, and here there was a foundling for every aspect of her son’s, and among them were those that reminded me most of that child we raised together: One foundling, five or six years old, gathered some of the younger ones into a circle, then thrilled them with stories previously captured in our stars, stories about the elements my wife had taught to our own foundling, all that old trap of house and dirt and moon and ghost. I listened long to his explanations, but he did not say mother, did not say father, and so either we were now unnecessary or else he was only some anomaly too, some slightly false son, and somewhere there would be a foundling who knew all the elements, and also their order. Elsewhere, another son knew none of our elements, and so named rock and stream, dust and dream, and also there were others who subscribed to just one at a time, lake or woods, dirt or bear—as if any of them knew what terror a bear was—and if they claimed to, then I made them take back their claim, and if one would not, then I swore he better, or else in my rage I would take that boy out to the lake, let the deep-swallowed shapes teach him better truth.
The only common trait shared among all the foundlings was their veneration of my wife, who walked every day among their number. The children most like our foundling followed behind her, pleading for her attention. Each wanted to show her some trick of memory, some learned thing, or else a physical feat meant to impress her, and she only rarely was, as she did not remember how to be impressed. She did not know enough of what there was in the world to feel one way or another about what she saw, to know what was better than what, and without memory there could be no right emotions, and of course she had refused what memories she had been given. The foundlings tugged at the hems of her skirts, dirtied them with their fat fingers, then their faces, pressed in close, cheeks against cloth, begging for her touch, for her kiss, for her milkless breasts, and still she did not know what it meant to be a mother, what it had meant to her to be a mother to this child, this one made many brothers.
Mother: Once it was the title of her highest ambitions, and now it became only more mystery. Despite her interest, she did not know who to be, what person these children wanted when they called her by this name, and when their frustration turned to hungry anger, always I was there to intercede, dragging them from off her body, untwisting their fingers from her pulled hair, handling them all more roughly than I wished, and so again, so again.
Back in the house, combing her long white hair—hair that never changed back, even after her fever receded—she asked me what they wanted from her, and I could not tell her, could not explain what I believed, a story I had made for myself: that each wanted to be chosen, to be made the one to be mothered.
I said, Give them nothing yet.
There are too many, I said, and you already once gave so much.
She nodded, smiled, patted my hand, but did not do what I wanted most, did not remember: not the first foundling, nor the ache that preceded him, the destruction of the first house that followed.
I said, If you were to fall in love with this many children, what worse thing might you do in their wake?
What wrong thing might we?
As I put her into her bed that night, tucking her slenderness beneath her blankets—my movements tender at last in my oldest age—she said, I want the boys to come live with us.
She said, Boys do not belong in the woods. Boys belong here, in the house.
I shook my head, stroked her ha
ir. Where will they all fit? I asked.
The woods are big enough to hold them, I said. Let them stay in the woods.
She yawned, and then she said, We can always make more house.
She said, We will find a way to take them from the woods, and we will make them each a room in which to live, and in each room a bed for every boy, until the house is exactly the size our family needs the house to be.
Her eyes glimmered, captured the same sad light they did when the fingerling died, when all the other pregnancies that followed ended upon our sheets, ended there until there was the stain that would not come out of those threads.
We can always make more house, she said, until the house is big enough.
THE RANKS OF THE FOUNDLINGS swelled, their unparented variety now often violent without check: Here was a son that took my side instead of his mother’s, dragging some smaller, fairer version of himself across the forest, both boys bloody and beaten.
Here came another, carrying a stick sharpened into a spear, a smile carved into a smirk.
Here a third, one fist full of a rock chipped sharp, marked with the makings of the scalps worn ragged around his waist.
All these children, worse than I’d imagined, and then, fleeing from their brothers, those others more gentle, less prone to violence or at least less capable of carrying it out, and as I hid in the brush and the bramble I saw that there were perhaps three tribes forming loosely, banding together to parent themselves in the absence of better versions of ourselves. Each grouping had only the barest of identities, shifted and still mutable, and while it took my wife longer to see them I had no such difficulties. I observed our memories made flesh again, and as they returned some of them were killed again, and afterward more came to take their place, to become new killers or else again the victims, and while they were greater in number they were lesser in shape, just as the animals I’d trapped and skinned had returned, poorer for having crossed my path just once, and if this time it was not a bear that provided that mechanism then I did not know what else.
The foundlings were not all of one kind: The first were almost as the foundling I knew, their features taken from that face that held no relation to our own, to those of their supposed mother and father. That face was the foundling’s from his theft and transformation until his sixth birthday and the scarring of his face, and now it was easier for me to recognize its origins: Under his boyish skin, there was the face of the bear, high and sloped, with a squat nose, a mouth filled with too-early teeth.
Soon after these came other foundlings, more like the one I had known but lacking the wide range of the first: These all shared the same face, or closer to it, their variations of a smaller order, all just different ages of the remade foundling’s face, so much like my wife’s, remade as such after his scarring, his injury at my hands. These mother-faced children were bigger, but they were not big: Just as the foundling who came to me in the last days of our dirt was not as grown as his age should have rendered him, so these multitudes were hindered, shaped too small for their older voices, their developing adulthoods.
The last foundlings to appear at the tree line were something other, more raw potential than memory: It was only among their number that I counted some teenagers, and also some near-men as old as I was when I met my wife, before I moved farther past, into the endless years I now inhabited. No matter their age, these were the worst to behold, scarred and half shaped, for what they were made of was too slim to be a person. Some missed fingers, others limbs, even the parts of a face that made it a face instead of some other, dumber appendage.
It was these children that were the most dangerous, violent in their wrongness, and often I found one of their number dead upon the fresh-stomped paths or else one of the other children ended by their hands. Soon I walked the woods always with my shovel so that I might bury these children before my wife saw them—although perhaps she never would have, since she did not venture as far as I did, did not go past the more-adoring children at the woods’ edge. It was only I who went deep, who interred again the dead, and who slunk all day through the thickets, searching for what my wife, now ignorant in her innocence, could not search for: the child with the right song, with the full knowledge of the elements, with the combination of the two that might save us.
Often I was sneaky in my observations, but other times fits of coughing gave away my presence, or else my cramps left me immobile upon the forest floor, easy prey for the taking, and while the worst of the foundlings had not yet cornered me in such a state, still I watched them grow braver, approaching, and in their eyes I saw some memory of my own, of the way I felt the first time I stalked toward a still-living deer, trapped in my traps.
My fear then? That one day the foundlings would pass the threshold of their hesitance, as I myself had when confronted with that thrashing buck, all those years ago.
THE RULE THAT PROTECTED US inside the house, upon the dirt around it: Despite their growing numbers, the foundlings still could not leave the woods. At dusk I observed how they withdrew deeper into the woods, hiding far from the tree line, but still I often lay awake, wrapped in my blankets beside my wife’s bed, listening for the day the foundlings found some way to overcome their reluctance, as the bear eventually had.
But then one night I heard a new sound instead, a humming made by many voices, far off in the dark: not a song but rather a single note, thrummed out of their many throats, one I recognized, remembered.
This single note, possessed by all? I thought perhaps it was the last note of the song the foundling had used to raise me, a tone able to restart my heart upon the floor of the first house: What they hummed, it was not nearly that song entire, but if they had one note now, then perhaps they would produce more later, and although I knew better I went out of the house and back onto the dirt, back down the path to the woods, and what I saw there was only the empty darkness between the trees, filled not with bodies but with this sound, a child fragmented into noise, and upon my knees I closed my eyes before the buzzing hum, and from the dirt side of the tree line I let it stain me with its promise.
What day was it when my wife and I returned to the tree line together, still hand in hand, as we had taken to walking? What hour was it when we found the woods choked full with children, with all the possibilities of her child, made here into an army of flesh roiling at the tree line, no longer clothed in the white garments they had made from what we had buried, instead pressed naked at the edge of the trees?
What memories we had buried were exhausted now, consumed by what had come after, and still my wife wanted to go to them, cried out as I held her back, because my wife did not see what I saw.
Wanting again to mother, she saw only their nakedness, heard only their cries for her, for any other mother that might appear. I saw and heard that too, but I keened also what waited behind those fronted foundlings, the bear-children, the child-bears, the stained-mouth children who had fashioned their own clothes from a material that could only be their brothers, dead somewhere in the wood and now skinned, and how I gagged to spy it, and this was no way for a mother to see her children, no way for children to act in front of their mother.
It took all the strength left upon my old bones to drag my wife from that tree line, thrashing against my sick grip when the foundlings began to wail, when they cried to her, calling out not the single syllable of her true name, which only I still used, but the joined sounds of her maternal title, the one she once wished to be called instead.
My easily exhausted wife went limp in my arms, and I lifted her off the dirt, carried her away from the woods. Inside the house she fought me again, and I fought her too, dragged her through our rooms, her wrists in my wrists and her legs kicking out, kicking away at every table, at every other furniture, until all surfaces along our path toppled, spilled their contents, filled the house with the shatter of their breakage. When I reached the bedroom, I pushed her inside, and before she could turn back I shut the door and set my weight agai
nst it, and when I had it steady I turned my key in the lock, locked her in that room as she had once locked me.
I set my mouth against the door’s thick plank, and through the wood I said, You say you are their mother, but you do not even remember their first face.
You do not remember where their faces come from, and they are not yours.
I said, They were never your children. Not these.
I said, Your son is dead.
We buried him, I said, and despite these ghosts he has not come back.
She cried at the door, her voice so close I could feel its vibration in the wood beneath my cheek. She said that she did remember, that she was trying to remember them all.
She said, You told the story wrong, deceived me, hid me from what was mine.
She said, We had so many children, more than you said, and now I want to love them all.
No, I said. No. We had one, and you had one, and both are gone.
Her long motherhood was again upon her, half recalled, and want overwhelmed her, made her some senseless animal, banging and banging against the inside of the door, this trap with which I meant to hold her.
And then the banging stopped.
And then it did not resume.
And then when I opened the door, the bedroom was empty of everything except some tiny wind, blowing through the open window, rustling the curtains across the frame.
And then I had lost her again, because by the time my slower gait returned me to the tree line already I was too distant to do anything but watch as the foundlings parted ranks for her to pass, as they closed that same breach against me: Before me my wife was consumed by the churning crowding of her new foundlings, taken away within a deadly scrum from which she did not return.