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

ACROSS THE TREE LINE FORthe first time in years or decades, in perhaps some other longer length unreckonable as all time then was, I arrived there unprepared for the changes visited upon the woods, how its low spaces choked with rough-edged hedges, with brambles and thickets, so that all my old passages were no more. With some effort I reached the burying ground, and found within it the last fallow patch beneath the boughs and thorns, last remnant of my small incursion upon the land of the bear, where still nothing fresh would grow.

My traps had been set according to the dictates of experience and long routine, but with this new arrangement of scrub and thorn I could not easily find where I’d placed them. Warily at first, then bolder as over some days the bear failed to appear, I began to hack through the denseness of the brush until I thought I had found each trap, including some still containing the bones or part of the bones of some animal caught long ago, in the first days after I armed the steel jaws that undid them: Here a muskrat, crumbled into tiny ribs, tiny skull, here a wolf undone the same, here a trampled otter and there some fox.

I reset my traps, and each day after I visited that dark-soiled burying ground, carrying with me some new-caught wastrel nearly bare of fur and fight, and as I interred it into the cold, hard dirt, I checked again the newer graves I had earlier dug. None had been disturbed, and still there was no bear nor even any sign of her, and as I cut new paths through the trees I found I could not even find my way back to her cave, that entrance with which I was once so familiar. For a time I began to imagine that the bear had passed away in my long absence from the dirt and the woods and the lake, but the fingerling did not believe it, did not let me believe.

Long before, I had professed a belief that what a man did for his wife was to build her a house, and so in the absence of the bear and my unwillingness to leave I made some move to rebuild what had been broken, what worn-out house remained. The smoke from below had grown less strong, and the dirt even colder, and so I wrapped myself in new furs uncured and still smelling of the woods, then crossed the tree line to knock down some fresh trees from which to cut logs for our walls. It took some manner of days to drag each across the dirt, and by the time I had some sizable number beside the crooked house I realized I no longer remembered how I’d built it, or else what I did remember did not apply to rebuilding. With nothing else to do I moved from dirt to lake to woods to house to cellar, where often when I could not sleep I sat above the trapdoor to the world below, breathing in the fading smoke-smell and expelling it back out, calling my wife’s name down into the dark, a repetition of my cowardice atop the great stairs, repeated until my breath came slower and harder, until my voice was choked silent, my lungs packed with the fingerling’s thick shapes, their oily jelly.

Even with the house’s slivered walls punched full of holes it was still warmer inside than out, and so I lay on the floor beside our bed, that better shape broken by the bear’s frustrated blows or else some collapsing portion of our house’s roof, and there I made myself a nest of old furs, all stale smelling but no worse off than I had left them, with no moths or rats living upon the barrenness of the dirt to chew their hides. Through the gaping roof I watched the two moons, and the rooms of the house flickered with the weird days and the long nights and their heavy glow, their differing shafts of damp light filtered by the splinters of our struts and beams.

The sky was so close then, and without stars or clouds I could see how far it had bent, at how sharp an angle it now rested, encumbered by the extra bulk of my wife’s barely aloft construction. The dirt and the house were silent, except for the wind bearing the creaking sounds of the strained curvature above, and I wondered how long we would be safe there and also if, when her moon fell, my wife and the foundling would be saved beneath the dirt, or the bear within her cave.

And then one night there came another creak.

And then on another night, another.

And then some other night when the fingerling said, IT IS TIME TO FLEE THE DIRT, TO RETURN TO WHERE YOU ONCE CAME FROM.

IT IS TIME TO TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE, AND OVER THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND, WHERE YOU WILL CEASE, WHERE YOU WILL RELEASE ME, WHERE I WILL LIVE AND LIVE AND LIVE IN YOUR STEAD. AND SO AT LEAST SOME PART OF YOU WILL GO ON.

And that night I sat heavy with his words, and sometime later the buzzing sky begin to crack from its burden, forked everywhere with lightning that flashed across its surface but then did not disappear, instead remaining through the accompanying thunder and then beyond, and as I wondered at the lightning’s indelible persistence the fingerling spoke again.

WIFE AND FOUNDLING AND BEAR, he said, AND YOU UNABLE TO SAVE EVEN A SINGLE ONE.

And still I held my stubborn position, as always I had meant to hold it.

THE SMOKE FROM THE DEEPhouse stopped, and afterward everything turned to ice, all the world except the lake, its salted surface, and how long my life might have persisted like that, with me waiting white bearded and bent of body, if not for an injury worse than any other I had suffered: Cutting my way through the new and thicker brush of the woods, I stupidly put my foot into one of my own traps, its mechanism concealed beneath the undergrowth, and then I was caught by that forgotten device, some snare that the fingerling had failed to warn me away from, as he had warned me from so many others.

The snapping clasp of the trap’s mechanical jaws caught me by the ankle, breaking the skin and cutting muscle and tendon, and as the pain burned through my stuck leg I howled as so many other beasts had howled, screamed my accusations, screamed out my anger at the fingerling. At last he hoped to be proved stronger than me, and how I feared he was, all his smirking shapes together perhaps at last a better ghost than I was a man.

To plan the sawing of knife through bone, but again to fail to commit. To wail and drag at my broken, bloody leg, hauling the chained trap behind me in some limited circle, but to hear no response except the same silence that had already filled that frozen wood.

To despair, but to keep my feet, because to sit down upon the ice-strewn ground would be the first step toward giving up, toward accepting the death the fingerling had led me into, or else the begging for my life he hoped would win him his desires.

To sit down anyway, because eventually there was no strength left for the standing.

To feel my breathing shallow, my pulse slow. To close my eyes, and see nothing except the fingerling’s clumping movements inside my head, behind my eyes, his dark sparks and darker flashes.

To hear nothing, and then after the nothing at last something new, and then the fingerling’s agitated voice, saying NO, saying NO, saying NOT HIM.

To open my eyes to spy the approaching foundling, that boy who had never before been brave enough to cross the tree line, who had so rarely wandered even that far without my wife making soft tracks behind him, now trudging toward me through the bracken and the bramble, at last unafraid of the woods or else made the master of his fear.