Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

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.

THE BEAR DID NOT SPEAKprecisely, could not form the mouth-shapes necessary to make the words of our language. I moved to make some response to her roarings—this speech so unlike my own yet somehow translated by the fingerling—but that ghosted son moved first, marshaled his new shapes to possess some smaller set of tools, my tongue numbed as he muscled behind it his own wet weight. As he spoke he swam from my head to my heart to my many other hurts, and then to all of them at once, something he had not before been able to do, and even as I struggled to understand the bear I also feared to know the powers this new ability portended: The fingerling’s securing of my shoulder—and the snapping that had followed—had done him some damage, and now he was not just one shape but many. In each of the wrong and wounded spaces within me, some fingerling came up to call a chorus, to give voice to WHAT NOW, to WHAT NEXT, to WHAT COWARD, WHAT COWARD—and how I tried to ignore him, the many of him there were, and how he expanded everywhere against my shattered nerves, so that I might not.

I followed the bear into the mouth of her cave, where my wife and I had made our temporary home, then we descended after her into the deeper tunnels, where I had searched for my wife after I first saw the bear, when my wife disappeared into the earth for some hours or days. Together we went deeper still, but always along the main path, ignoring the branching side halls and rubbled chambers I saw spiraling away into the dark. In that structure there were no doors, only loose pilings of stones, and through their impermanent barriers I did spy some snatch of what lay there, stolen away: Here one of my traps, there a ripped and discarded skirt my wife had thought well lost.

Soon we arrived in the chamber where I assumed the bear had hibernated, where presumably she had been asleep when we first came to the dirt to build our house—or at least that theory accounted for the long habitation evident in that chamber, with its layers of bedding, of bent and torn bones, near fossils. Here too there were some scraps of fabric, ripped shreds of paper that might have belonged to us, or anyone else like us, and everything in that chamber smelled of the bear—urine and rot and feces, dank and fetid, damp fur and dug dirt and stalest milk—and while I continued to be curious about what I had found, I did not have much longer to look.

The bear placed before me some small bundle of furs, and I needed no imagination to recognize their origins. She unfolded them with her paws, opened them below my slumped body, and then after she retreated I knelt in the space she allowed and gathered the furs into my arms: Here was snout and claws attached to more fur, thick fur lined underneath with fat, all somehow still fresh, ready again to be the makings of a better-made bear than the one before me. The linger of my wife’s perfume remained, proof enough that it was indeed my wife who had song-skinned the bear’s cub, and while the bear watched, I rubbed my fingers down the seams of her cub’s separation, feeling for the places where he had ceased to be a bear, a connection severed as he became a boy, birthed out of this child already alive, already once made flesh from flesh.

The bear roared and then roared again, and in this roar I saw her cave before we came to it: How deep beneath the woods the bear slumbered then, and within her the cub, some drifting egg, some fertilized idea, unplanted.

And in this roar, more worries, that if she was disturbed before her cub was born, then he might not be born at all, or might be born in the wrong place, where he would not survive; that if the coming of her cub did not cause her to stir, then there would be a time when the cub was awake and alone in the cave, vulnerable.

And in this roar, why she put her den so low, why the entrance of her cave was so complicated, the tunnels deeper so distracting, dazing enough that some simpler thief might have lost her way, might have sought instead some easier prize to steal—but not my stubborn wife, not this mother capable only of ghosts, who would one day want more than anything a baby of her own, a baby she might give to me.

And in this roar, how after we came my wife crept downward through the bear’s tunnels, filling her boredom and loneliness with exploration, while on the dirt I toiled with my hands to raise us our house.