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

We would be saved, the bear promised—but if my wife would not give up the foundling, then I was to take him by deception or blood, and then when I returned there would be other rewards, if I chose to remain to receive them.

For this and less I betrayed our marriage, as slim threaded as it then was, and for this I am ashamed, and yet in my defense what can I say but this: Without that betrayal, how else would I have gained the strength to descend into the deep house, to seek the reunion that could only happen within those long halls, those strange chambers slung toward the bottom of those steepest stairs, spiraling down.

BUT FIRST WINTER CONTINUED UPONthe dirt, and sunless days too, and as I watched, my wife’s moon dug hollow the night sky, so that what few stars existed must have lived only in the short margins of our steep-sloped horizons, starved of their long circuits, the vacuum they’d before been free to roam. All our atmosphere filled with clouds heavy with rain and snow and sleet and hail, their darkness above us, and yet it never rained or snowed or sleeted or hailed, the strained sky making nothing more than a terrible buzzing, heard whenever I looked up at its unturned arc, and for some time I did not see the bear again, but sometimes I saw her footprints, marked all over the rough dirt—and then, after she sickened further, not footprints but some new dragging, a scrape instead.

The footprints led often past the house and toward the lake, but the scrape appeared motioned in the opposite direction, wet from the water, then from the blood leaking out of the bear from the shore to the dirt to the woods. I wondered if all I had to do to save my wife was to wait for the bear to die, but the fingerling denied even this hope: NO, he said, THE BEAR’S DEATH CHANGES NOTHING, AND STILL THERE WOULD BE THE FALLING MOON.

The fingerling commanded me out of the house and down the slippery glass of the path to the lake, following the scrape to the salted shores of our beach, where we came upon some enormous mass the likes of which I had never imagined, all of its blubbered weight rent unrecognizable by claws and teeth some time before, then left to float, to bob up and down upon the waves until at last it had stranded there in the night, brought high onto the beach by the strange tides our two moons had wrought. What was it that so deeply hurt the bear, what was it that she had killed? For long minutes I stared, unable to make sense of what I saw. It shared no shape I already knew, was instead all shapelessness all over, made punished flesh or cracked mantle or torn appendages, and before its bloated stench all my guesses seemed wrong.

And I wondered: What were the bounds of its shapelessness?

Was it shapeless like a squid, or shapeless like a whale?

THE NEXT TIME I STEPPEDacross the threshold of my house I shut the door behind me, locked it tight against the dirt. The door’s key swung chained from my neck, then went tucked inside my clothes, over my heart, cold among the hair and the gooseflesh. In haste, so that I might not lose my slight courage, I gathered the few provisions I thought I would need, a single satchel’s worth: only some salted and smoked fish, my gas-lamp and torches and flint, a soon-useless ball of string; the skinning blade; and also what the fight with the bear had won me, the writhing cub-fur with which I was to confront my wife, which I was to guilt her into again clothing the foundling inside.

MEMORY AS FIRST EXPLORATION OFthe deep house, as this progression of rooms: To follow the many staircases down to the many landings, the many hallways branching out from behind progressively heavier doors.

To open the first rooms and find the deep house made now a palace of memory, a series of rooms in which what I had forgotten had been curated, collected together with what I had tried to forget, and also with other moments that had occurred only in dreams, or else not at all, not for me.

To find in each room some unadorned spectacle, my wife or me or us together, with or without those children we had failed to have, plus the one she had stolen, that she had passed off as our own. Or not passed off, but made true: It was in those passages that I saw how even if I had not accepted the foundling into my family, still my wife had accepted him into hers, put him at its center, a space I believed I had once occupied, and so our house was divided, and then divided again and again, because what house might stand against a child loved by only one parent, when the jealous other held that same child in suspicion and contempt?

And how for me the fingerling remembered everything.

How the fingerling saw even what I would have left undiscovered, what I did not want to share with him or any other child.

How even then he rode most often in my belly, in my thigh, in my throat, so that he might always be close to the skin, soaking in the new airs I moved my body through. And so he was there too in each of those many rooms, where otherwise there would have been only me, always me, me lonely and me alone among the tiny domains of my wife, sung into being as she passed, echoed throughout the deepening dirt.

In the first room I found piled the cargo we lost to the bear: Here again were the broken vases and cracked crystal, the shattered punch bowls, the punched-out platters.

Here were the shredded rags of my wife’s dress, and beside them my boutonniere, meant to be preserved inside a translucent bubble, now freed from where it had been glassed.

Here was the intricate mechanism of a handmade clock, gifted and then broken, stopped as all other clocks were eventually stopped.

All these objects, seemingly each its own but merely parts of a whole, what in the cave we had lost.

And in this room: her wedding ring, discarded. She had improved everything I had given her but not this, and so its simple band remained only what it had ever been. I held the ring in my hand, and then I took off my own ring, and I laid both upon the stones, touching. Rings had been insufficient to fasten us together, and it would take more than rings to rebind what had been broken.

AND LESS TO END IT, reminded the fingerling. AS YOU HAVE PROMISED. AS I PROMISE YOU WILL.

And in this room: the sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amid all the other business of our wedding day.

And in this room: the footprints she made on the beach where we were wed, where we had stood atop that platform, separated by the priest and then joined by the same, and all this upon that other sunnier shore, where it was not always summer but where often it was summer enough.

And in this room: where my footprints that evening were, not always at her side, only sometimes so. And how I wished it had been different, that I had not walked away at the beginning of our marriage, when I thought it would always be so easy to return.

And in this room: the words I used nearly every summer after, to beg from her one more child, even after she was determined only to stop the trying and also before she found she wanted her motherhood again, wanted it this time for herself, wanted it more than even I had ever wanted or realized.

And in this room: the scent of my wife’s perfume as she passed, a smell once lovely, now stale as glue. And how I missed its original, how I had missed it.

And in this room: every graying hair she pulled from her head or her body in the failed years between the fingerling and the foundling. Every piece of skin she rubbed raw in the bath, when between miscarriages she could not scrub away the hormone-stink of motherhood, falsely begun. All that hair and skin, stuck wet to the floor.

And in this room: A white suit that no longer fit. A shirt that wouldn’t button, a tie that drew its knot too quick around the neck. The relics of a body betrayed against itself, and against my wife, who had not agreed to love what fat and hair it acquired, nor the blank spaces replacing what it had lost, those first few teeth, those other small kindnesses.