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

MEMORY OF MY WIFE’S CONFUSION, of her confused lack of memory: To know that she did not know who I was, even when she awoke in the middle of my story, in the middle of my telling her.

To understand she would not know her own name, no matter how many times I repeated it.

But as I spoke, her skin stopped smoking, lost some of its hottest heat even as it then stayed black and brittle. Encouraged by this cooling I confessed and confessed, and as the words moved out of my body and into the air, then with each story I saw her fever abate, diminished by right-ordered speech as it had not been by the wet cloths I had earlier tried. With each wrong-uttered word, each mistake I made or half-truth I told, the process reversed itself, set her body back toward ruin, and so I grew more careful, talked slower, put my tale on the surest path from our past to our present, smoothed out its digressions, its shifts of attention and time.

Soon I could touch the whole of her hand, then stroke her whitening forearm, and often she did not object to my touches, although if asked who I was she said she knew only whom I had claimed at great length to be. The blackness continued to leave the surface of her skin, revealing a face smooth and unwrinkled, unaged by memory, and while my speech tried to complicate that blankness, too often my words evoked no emotion.

It wasn’t until I spoke of finding the furs in the deep house that I thought I saw some new reaction upon her face, a restrained titter, or else a twitch approximating surprise or recognition or grief, perhaps a new turn of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes. It was so slight I could not identify its exact character, but whatever it was I wanted more, and before I continued I went into the front room and retrieved my satchel, and from that satchel I took one of the cub-sized furs—their previous movements so calm now—and when I gave her that fur she squeezed it tight against her chest.

And again, my questions, my asking, Do you know yet who you are?

Do you know who I am?

Do you know why you’re crying?

Still she shook her head, and still she denied, and her tears did not last long, not with her body still so hot. All the pieces of her I found in the deep house now went back into her, were returned by story, a different manner than they had escaped, sung into the rooms of the deep house: Now they came carried upon my breath, upon the word, these stories of dead child and dead bear and dead child, dying world.

After the story of the moonfall, I helped my wife from the bed, dressed her in some of the clothes hanging in her closet, as I had dressed myself earlier, in a shirt and trousers I had not seen since the youngest days of our marriage. Once she was clothed and shoed, then I had to sit down again, to gather myself before her, this ageless vision of the woman I had known and loved, long before our many complications, whom I was still growing used to in this new and unexpected shape.

And who was I to her, by the same light?

Still only a stranger, old and stooped, limping, long bearded and filthy.

She helped me down the hallway and into the front room, then out of the house, onto the porch, onto that fey-lit dirt. Her chamber’s stale air circulated different than the air above, and at its first taste I began to cough, and then I could not stop coughing. My wife let go of my arm, the arm I’d meant to support her instead, and I doubled over, hacked and wheezed, but for a time no relief came. Afterward I looked up at her blank patience, and then I said, Do you remember yet? How to create shape and sense from a song? How to make a garden out of the dirt or moons out of the sky?

I said, Once, you made a boy out of a bear, and sometimes I look at you and I think you almost remember.

My wife did not respond, but I thought I saw some flicker of emotion move across her face, and then her hair again seemed to blaze behind her, or else it was only the wind and the weird light.

My wife, I said, and because I didn’t know what else to do I stood to take her hand in mine, linked our fingers together. I set our feet upon the path that led from the house to the woods, the new and dark-barked trees, not as tall or broad as those found above but just as evenly spaced, and beneath them the pine straw was just as thick, lit by a similar diffusion of light. But here there were no badgers to be seen, no deer or elk, nor pheasants or quail, no sound but the wind, and there were no buck scrapes along the low trunks of the trees, no owl pellets coughed up and left for some scavenger. And there was likely then no cave, and this I believed I knew even without checking, because when my wife made this place she perhaps did not remember that there was supposed to be a cave, a cave and also a bear.

While we walked, I told my wife of when I first reached the great stairs, but no matter how I described it she did not recognize this landmark, nor my name for it, and so I tried again to explain, tried to find a better way to teach her what she herself had made or else first discovered.

I told her about fighting the bear at the burying ground, and at last she traded silence for curiosity, asking me, But what is a bear?

Next I told her about the bear killing the whale or the squid, and she asked, What is a whale? What shape is a squid’s?

And how to explain to someone who has never seen a bear what bear means, or whale , or squid ?

What is the word child , even, if you have never seen a child?

She said, I wish—

She said, I would have liked to have had a husband, and I would like to have a son.

She said, It has been so lonely here, all by myself, as I have always been.

Maybe this house once belonged to someone else, she said, some other woman.

She said, Perhaps it was her you came looking for, but she is already gone. Perhaps I am someone else, and you are only mistaken in the way you look at me.

I said her name, begged it of her, said, Please, and then I said her name again.

I said, Do you remember any of the songs, the ones that might still save your boy, that could save me too, if there is enough of me left?

Please, I said. Please tell me that you do.

My wife, I let her go, or else she pulled loose, walked away, a step or two steps or three. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, then let them hang at her sides, hands open near her hips. She spread her legs just wide of her shoulders, opened her chest to fill it with air: a singer’s stance, and how my heart moved to see it.

A breath, a deep breath, and then a deeper one: She sucked the strange air until she was filled, and then she looked into the non-sky, into the place where moon or stars would have hung if there had been moon and stars.

She looked up through the trees, and then with a turn of her mouth she released that air, that potentially song-held breath.

What then?

What else. Only something hard sounding, a bleat, a blather. Not just not a song but also not a melody, not a chord, not a single note.

She tried, then tried again, but each try was worse than what had come before, and there was nothing of who she was within her sound.

My wife said, I’m sorry.

She said, I wanted there to be a song, a song for you.

She said, I wanted to make you happy.

I nodded, knew. Again I took up her hand. I said, You must be so very tired.

I said, It’s time for you to sleep.

I said, In the morning, we will bury our son.

I FOUND MY SHOVEL ORone like it in its accustomed spot, the place I once put it, the place some earlier, less-forgetful wife sung it back. Leaned against the rear of the house, it had shared space near the edge of the garden with my traps, but now there were no traps, and also nothing for them to catch, and that too was best.