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

Accompanied by her sighs and her songs, my wife spent the dark months of that winter wandering the house, filling the then-few rooms with the detritus of her desires, opening and closing and shaping her mouth to call them forth, shaping new sounds into new words, into shapes that contained those words and sounds, and despite the scraped wound between her legs—that constant ooze of blood that for a time left her skin paled even whiter than before—still she sang into being these inscrutable objects, a table stained with molasses, a basket of hard fruits, a crib stinking with spilt milk, as sour smelling as what leaked from her still-expectant breasts, her body that had not yet admitted its loss.

In the kitchen she hung a wall with spoons as shiny as the star-flashed glass that pocked the dirt, then filled a cupboard with matching sets of bowls, each the size of her two cupped hands. Soon I found her also revisiting the furnishings I had made for the fingerling, and as I trailed her through our rooms she sang a song over their forms, taking the rude shapes I had made and adding to their naked function some flourishes, prettifications: Now the bassinet was filigreed with ornate leaves, now the changing table was guarded on each corner not by a simple post but by a wooden bird as detailed as any ever born from egg.

Everything I made she improved, but it was not improvement I craved, only title, control, mastery. Always I had planned to be the maker of things, a steward of artifice, and yet here she was, able to call from within what I had to cull from without. In my anger I tested her powers, asked her to make some varied objects that I desired for the house, certain tools and utensils harder to craft, and when those requests did not defeat her expanded ability, then I asked for something else, something just for me: some amount of steel, fashioned into traps, a complement to my fishing tackle, the tools of my previous employment, with which I might perhaps venture into the woods, after the fur of small animals I had seen living under those trees.

My wife frowned but did not deny me, for in those days we refused each other nothing. She created and created, and when I could not abide any more of her objects—shapes meant for a once-expected childhood, now only mocking, robbed of any right utility—then I began to take more of my hours outside the house I had built, inhabiting instead the lake and the woods, whose strange failings could not be laid so squarely upon my deeds, nor the body of my wife.

And yet for a long time after their making I delayed putting my traps to work, because it was fishing for which I was best built. The lake was thick with salt and did not freeze, and that first winter I took only such numbers as were necessary for our table, lured the lake’s silver swimmers from the depths with hook and line, with wriggling bait and heavy sinkers. In those days, the fingerling did not often speak—he was still in his infancy, and even as a ghost there was perhaps some semblance of rules, progressions—but upon the lake he stirred, swimming throughout the channels of my body more easily than when my feet were planted upon dry land. Between casts, I placed my palm up under the blousing of my shirt, probed for his presence, and as the fingerling left his hole in my belly to swim against my surface I was more easily able to learn his movements, often swift beneath my skin, and also the peculiar numbness that accompanied his too-long presence in one organ or another, as if my senses had been sundered, as if it was his will my body spoke to then, instead of my own.

It was only this first child that I swallowed, secreted away, and by the time the fingerling had wintered within me for several years, in between had come and passed some other brothers who did not take, some sisters whose cells refused my wife’s bloody chamber. With each of their passings my wife made again the angry words I did not want her to have to speak, and then again there was her bloodied dress dragged into the yard, again my begrudged rowing her out upon the lake, again the calling down of the stars by the strength of her song, its harsh syllables always sung after we let float away the body of some newest child, so unprepared we could hardly call it stillborn.

At last the sky was so dimmed and emptied of its ancient alphabet that we lost the shapes of even the oldest stories, the comforts of our parents’ myths, for now there was no more sky-bear, no tall-tree beside it or gold-crown to rest upon its head, and also no more lake-whale or salt-squid hanging in the sea of stars above the dirt. From then on whatever sky we lived beneath was not the sky of our parents, and whatever stories we might tell our children would not be the stories we had been told.

Now the fingerling came into possession of his full voice, and often he whispered darkly in my ear, revealing the objects my wife sang into being but then hid or else buried: the mismatched booties hidden beneath the bed, long after she had promised to stop their creation; the tiny bonnets hanging behind her own in the closet; the dresses made for the late maternity she had not yet had, their austere fabrics meant to drape over the swollen object of those expectant months.

Out back of the house, the fingerling showed me the first bassinet, the one I had made and that she had improved, now broken and buried beneath the nightshade, the monkshood, the pennyroyal—and then he asked what it was my wife intended to grow, knowing I had no answer for his smirking question. Already I was made to learn to despise him by his words, and also sometimes her, and as each child sputtered inside her, my wife moved away, or else I did, until at last we were rarely in the same part of the house, our voices kept too distant to easily speak to each other.

It was only then that I first saw what else the fingerling had been trying to show me: the newly variable nature of our rooms, of the house that contained them, and how my wife’s rolling apart in the night tore away more than just the blankets. As her side of our bedchamber grew some few inches, I did what little I could to right our arrangement, tugged hard at the blankets that barely covered the widened bed—until again all things were distributed evenly, even as they were somehow also farther apart.

THERE WAS FRESH JOY INmy wife’s voice when she announced the beginning of her last pregnancy, and in the weeks that followed some same feeling of hope came to inhabit my own chest-space, as if after so much disappointment I could so easily be filled with love for this child she claimed was better coming. Buoyed by her words, our best marriage resumed: We began again to eat together, at noon and at dusk, our fish filleted and fried upon our plates, garnished with vegetables from her garden. Each evening we met in our sitting room to read the scattered, unordered pages of our few remaining books, and then at night we lay side by side, bodies close but always not touching—as then I believed her delicate, capable of being disturbed from her pregnancy—and also that our next child was just as fragile, some uneasy swimmer in danger of being jostled from out her body, as all his lake-bound brothers and sisters had been, as the fingerling had before them.

After my wife had remained pregnant for a full season, then she took me by the hand, pulled me up from my chair and out onto the dirt beyond the front porch, into the place where the dirt had become most glassed, most reflective of what sun and moon shone upon it. There my wife again began to sing, and with some new song—one more powerful than any other I had yet heard or imagined—she took something from me, and also a similar portion from herself, and into the sky she lifted what she had taken until it took on some enlarged shape, until it became a heavenly body with its own weight and rotation and orbit: At the request of her melody, our flesh became a new moon, a twin to the one already hung.