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

I struggled, staggered to what remained of my feet, and then I called out to the foundling, said, We do not have much time.

I said, You should not be here, in these woods.

I said, Get out, and then I said it again and then again, and with each repetition of my warning the foundling recoiled but did not retreat, and also the fingerling raged furious, hardened his grip around my already-pressed organs, and still I tried to speak, croaking each breathless word, each syllable tasting of bile, of rotten teeth and ghosted flesh.

Help me, I said.

I said, Help me, but hurry.

The foundling I’d known was merely a child and might not have had the strength to open the jaws of the trap. This foundling was not so differently shaped, still small despite the decades passed between us, but he had little trouble yanking loose my injured leg, and if he was not careful he was at least quick, and if he hurt me worse at least I was cleared of what steel had caught me.

My ankle looked no better once freed, its bones and muscles and flesh sorely wrecked, but whatever pains the foundling caused were far less than how the fingerling would have seen me hurt, and also shamed and broken, and when the foundling stepped underneath my armpit I flinched so abruptly I nearly fell again—because what would the fingerling do now—and also how long had it been since anyone had touched me, since any other had tried to help?

With the foundling’s body supporting me—he was hard and wiry then, muscled like a man despite his prepubescent shape—we stumbled slow through the brambles, then out the woods, across the tree line, toward the house. As we crossed the dirt, I saw that the foundling’s once-burned face was somehow again unmarked, but also that he remained not quite well, and so he was joined to our family in this other way, how in each of us there dwelled some sickness, some scarred tissue or flustered potential, turned bone, twisted muscle: For the foundling, there was some fever found in the deepest reaches of the house, wet lands I had not seen. Or maybe it was the fire itself, caught in his flesh as it was so recently caught in the rooms of the deep house, the palace my wife had made, the ruins to which I’d had those rooms reduced.

Inside the house, I wrapped my already-swollen, bruised ankle in torn furs, the only bandages I could make. The inner hides filled fast with pooling blood, but I did not change them immediately, as first I thought to deal with the foundling, whose own illness seemed more pressing. There was no proper bed big enough to lay him upon, but there was my nest of blankets beside the broken one my wife and I had shared, and so I took him into the bedchamber, where I stripped off his sodden clothes, then wiped his body dry with the cleanest of our rough cloths. It took me aback to see how little he had changed against how old I had become, how heavy the decades lay upon my bones, and then I was startled again, at how passive his face remained while I toweled him, the foundling standing dispassionate, a child waiting beside the washtub for someone else to dress him.

In the absence of clocks I did not know how long it had been since the day the foundling’s mother took him away, but however many decades it had been his shape had aged only unto the cusp of adolescence: His shoulders and chest were still those of a boy, and there was no hair upon his lips or cheeks, nor under his arms or between his legs. Even the long, uncut hair upon his head was thin, thinner than I remembered, and as I stroked it off his hot face the fingerling made another heat inside my hands, a prickling numbness that took with it some portion of my senses there, so that I could not feel anymore the texture of the boy’s skin—and yet what little I felt I clung to, and did not forget: the foundling, a boy preserved by the devices of my wife, by her voice, her voice’s song.

Despite his fever, I covered the foundling in what other blankets I had, then took my bucket down to the lake, hobbling all the way, and fetched it full of the lake’s freezing water. Back in the bedroom, I found the boy asleep, his face senseless, his tossing body turning the sheets as I tried to quiet his movements with one hand so I could apply cool cloths with the other. Soon the room smelled wetly of sickness and salt, and despite the deep pain in my other joints I thanked the fingerling for my numb fingers, which could not feel the near ice of the lake water dripping from their age-spotted joints, and all the while that other son churned in my gut, overflowed my stomach with his bile, flooded my intestines with barely held diarrhea, filled my eyes with cruddy tears—and how I ached as he pushed his shapes outward, bulged my skin to make more room for his rage, his accusations, his righteous claims of dominion.

How I fought him then as I had not since the burning of the deep house.

How I fought him limb by limb, digit by digit, so that he might not bring harm to the foundling, but to do so not yet for the foundling’s sake, or not his sake alone.

Soon old hurts began to throb, and also there was my shattered ankle, which I unwrapped and studied by the light of the moons. I spent what water remained washing the wound somewhere out back of the house, where thick clots and then new blood puddled the frozen earth. What remained beneath was almost too wrecked to call an ankle, and never again did I walk straight or stand perfectly upright, but when my ankle was as clean as it could be, I wrapped it in fresh fur, making myself a boot as I had once made an armor.

Afterward I returned to the house, to the bedroom inside the house where the foundling slept, where he would sleep for some long period, during which I would keep some close vigil, during which I would leave him only twice: once to remove him something to eat from the woods, and once more to return to where the foundling had found me, so that I might drag some branches behind me, obscuring the smaller footprints he left in the blood-thawed earth nearby, so that if the bear did still live I might believe she would not so easily find his sign.

The foundling was awake again when I returned to the house the second time, sweating and shaking but able to stand and speak, his voice as high and lilting as ever. He complained of his long hunger and of the dirt’s cold air, and when I pressed him to speak of his mother instead or at least first, he only repeated his complaints. In response I dressed him in my old clothes, and where those fit wrong I modified them with my knife, holding the cloth away from his body so I might slice some strips from the bottom of his shirt, from the low hem of his trousers. Afterward I sat him down at the table, and there I opened him a hairless rabbit to eat, warmed it as best I could.

While he ate I watched his face for the fear I had expected to see, but now he seemed unafraid of this room in which his features had been undone, perhaps because his face was no longer exactly that same face, not that of the son my wife had masqueraded before me, no longer a blend of my features and hers. Now I was removed altogether, by the same method by which my wife had smoothed his scars, by the way long before that she had removed the many aspects of the bear.

After he was finished, the foundling got down from his seat, came over to stand before mine, and as he placed his hand into the wiry nest of my beard, all my body quivered toward his touch. I opened my arms with more hesitance than I wished, but he did not hesitate, only climbed into my lap, curled against my chest. He was too big to hold like this, but it was what I wanted, and anyway he was asleep before I could push him away, and as I held him, daring not to move, again and always the fingerling howled, accused, called me traitor. And did I bother to answer?