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

Confronted with this dying child, my wife did not scream, did not even glance in my direction, while some short distance away this staved foundling fell, his voice no longer capable of words, and the other children seemed as undisturbed as my wife. They did not speak well—the true foundling had never fully outgrown the stutter and stammer of his childhood—but that did not stop them from leaving my wife to come to me, to put their cold hands upon my face, and with their different lisps they said SHHH, they said DON’T WORRY, they said MOTHER WILL BRING HIM BACK, and then there were more of them coming, walking out of the woods, and when they came they came dressed as these first were dressed, all in white, each garment featureless from a distance, but close up embroidered with pale stitching on pale cloth, the markings of our wedding sheets.

My wife stood among the growing crowd of children, all of them coming to her, and from their midst she said to me, What are we supposed to do?

She said, Are we supposed to take care of these children, and what does that mean?

As if I knew. As if there were any laws that had proved constant, reliable. And so I said nothing, because I did not know, because part of me did not want to find out, did not want to commit to another fruitless course of action, whether that was caring for these foundlings, these children found by both of us, whether it was refusing to do so. I was not as convinced as my wife that these foundlings were anything we should lead out of the woods and onto the dirt, and I did not hide my gladness when we found we could not: My wife gathered the children into a single-file column, and in this formation they followed her eagerly until the tree line—but there they would follow her no more, their fear of that threshold seemingly the exact opposite of the first foundling’s, who had for many years refused to return to the woods.

My wife abandoned her garden after the coming of the foundlings, let its plants grow wild again, as perhaps they had before. I followed her lead, went with her into the woods each morning and afternoon to watch the foundlings, and every day there were more among the trees, and always my wife tried to gather some to her, as many as she could. None came with names, and she remembered no such sounds to grant them, to mark this one from that one further than their shifted features already had, and while there were many such names within me, saved for the children we never had, I decided I would not give them to her, no matter how she pleaded.

Despite the evidence of their play, I said these were not real children, that I preferred them nameless, as even if they were real I did not believe they would prove permanent. So few things had, and I wished to never again love what would not last, and while my wife delighted in the company of these children, I did not.

In the deep house there had been a room for every aspect of my wife’s person, and here there was a foundling for every aspect of her son’s, and among them were those that reminded me most of that child we raised together: One foundling, five or six years old, gathered some of the younger ones into a circle, then thrilled them with stories previously captured in our stars, stories about the elements my wife had taught to our own foundling, all that old trap of house and dirt and moon and ghost . I listened long to his explanations, but he did not say mother , did not say father , and so either we were now unnecessary or else he was only some anomaly too, some slightly false son, and somewhere there would be a foundling who knew all the elements, and also their order. Elsewhere, another son knew none of our elements, and so named rock and stream, dust and dream , and also there were others who subscribed to just one at a time, lake or woods, dirt or bear —as if any of them knew what terror a bear was—and if they claimed to, then I made them take back their claim, and if one would not, then I swore he better, or else in my rage I would take that boy out to the lake, let the deep-swallowed shapes teach him better truth.

The only common trait shared among all the foundlings was their veneration of my wife, who walked every day among their number. The children most like our foundling followed behind her, pleading for her attention. Each wanted to show her some trick of memory, some learned thing, or else a physical feat meant to impress her, and she only rarely was, as she did not remember how to be impressed. She did not know enough of what there was in the world to feel one way or another about what she saw, to know what was better than what, and without memory there could be no right emotions, and of course she had refused what memories she had been given. The foundlings tugged at the hems of her skirts, dirtied them with their fat fingers, then their faces, pressed in close, cheeks against cloth, begging for her touch, for her kiss, for her milkless breasts, and still she did not know what it meant to be a mother, what it had meant to her to be a mother to this child, this one made many brothers.

Mother : Once it was the title of her highest ambitions, and now it became only more mystery. Despite her interest, she did not know who to be, what person these children wanted when they called her by this name, and when their frustration turned to hungry anger, always I was there to intercede, dragging them from off her body, untwisting their fingers from her pulled hair, handling them all more roughly than I wished, and so again, so again.

Back in the house, combing her long white hair—hair that never changed back, even after her fever receded—she asked me what they wanted from her, and I could not tell her, could not explain what I believed, a story I had made for myself: that each wanted to be chosen, to be made the one to be mothered.

I said, Give them nothing yet.

There are too many, I said, and you already once gave so much.

She nodded, smiled, patted my hand, but did not do what I wanted most, did not remember : not the first foundling, nor the ache that preceded him, the destruction of the first house that followed.

I said, If you were to fall in love with this many children, what worse thing might you do in their wake?

What wrong thing might we?

As I put her into her bed that night, tucking her slenderness beneath her blankets—my movements tender at last in my oldest age—she said, I want the boys to come live with us.

She said, Boys do not belong in the woods. Boys belong here, in the house.

I shook my head, stroked her hair. Where will they all fit? I asked.

The woods are big enough to hold them, I said. Let them stay in the woods.

She yawned, and then she said, We can always make more house.

She said, We will find a way to take them from the woods, and we will make them each a room in which to live, and in each room a bed for every boy, until the house is exactly the size our family needs the house to be.

Her eyes glimmered, captured the same sad light they did when the fingerling died, when all the other pregnancies that followed ended upon our sheets, ended there until there was the stain that would not come out of those threads.

We can always make more house, she said, until the house is big enough.

THE RANKS OF THE FOUNDLINGSswelled, their unparented variety now often violent without check: Here was a son that took my side instead of his mother’s, dragging some smaller, fairer version of himself across the forest, both boys bloody and beaten.

Here came another, carrying a stick sharpened into a spear, a smile carved into a smirk.