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

Beneath its new light, my wife explained that her moon was a shape meant not to reveal the sky but perhaps to split the dirt, to destroy what house I had built, its shifting walls. Not a memorial to her sorrow, but at last a way to end it: With the crashing shatter of the moon, the lake would empty its waters, and the woods would burst into flame, and even the cities across the far mountains might shake with the horror of our divorce. The moon would someday fall—this she promised, regardless of her pregnancy’s outcome, for the sky was not made to hold its weight—but with song she could delay its plummet into the far future, for the sake of this new joy in her belly.

And if there was no child coming, only another in our line of small disasters?

My wife’s smile broadened, so wide that for the first time in many years I spied a certain number of her backmost teeth, her pinkest gums, and then she said, I have grown so weary of these many beginnings, and it is only endings that I still crave, only middles I might agree to bear.

WE HAD NEVER BEFORE EATENmeat, only fish, but the woods in those years brimmed with life, and at my wife’s request I began to trap that bounty, so I might bring home new sustenance for her table, so that she might make the furs into blankets meant to keep her warm while she grew this best last chance of a child. But the smell of seared rabbit or boiled squirrel turned my stomach, and I could not be made to try it, preferring instead the catch from the gray waters of the lake. My wife had no such hesitation, and so took apart whatever I found with fork and knife, with savage fingers tearing seared muscle into smaller bites fit for her greased lips. I faced into her new gluttony, its sight offending from across the table, and at the fingerling’s suggestion I asked her why she needed these new foods, this meat that came to displace fish and fruit and vegetable until all her diet was red and bloodied, as never it had been before.

In my father’s house, she said, we ate only fish, but I am no longer in my father’s house, and the old ways no longer bind me.

She slid her pooled plate toward me, said that in this small world there were pleasures and powers I had not yet imagined and that through them we might find some strength to share.

She said, Together we will remake this dirt, the sky above it and the ground below, and all the animals and birds and fish that crawl and fly and swim upon and around it, and by our own new laws we will be better married, made anew.

A family, she said. What you have always wanted, at last arrived; for one way or another, I have found the will to give it.

I did not know then of what she spoke, was afraid of this new manner in her speech, its sound so like my own worst thoughts, like those of the fingerling. And so I shook my head, asked her not to speak this way again, and after she withdrew her plate I returned to the woods, where afterward I spent more and more of my time.

In my absence, my wife filled our rooms with more new-sung objects, baby-things for her baby, made this time from no template of mine but rather out of her own imagining. Meanwhile I turned my anger to task as I worked to empty the woods of all the animals favored by the bear, who I came to believe was lord over that shaded domain.

When I say belief , I do not mean I knew what I believed, not in the way I had believed before coming to the dirt, in steepled buildings made to organize such feelings. Things were odder here than they were elsewhere, and most stories were not written as clearly: On the other side of the lake, across the mountains, the truth had been inscribed in the stars and could not be changed. Here, upon the dirt, my wife had wiped clean that sky-flung slate, and so I was not sure what to believe or where to look to rediscover what once I had simply known.

Throughout this pregnancy’s middle months, the fingerling and I continued to trap the woods, to bring home what meat and furs we earned. Our nights stretched troubled, some feeling in the gut appearing in my dreams as in the fingerling’s, its shadow disrupting our sometimes-blended nightscapes with unsure worries. From within those sleepless hours I would emerge blearily from the house, returning to the woods to check my traps for ferret or fox, for the rabbits or wild hounds stuck in the steel jaws of my mechanisms, and because I did not know what else to do with those whose meat she refused, I took up the taxidermist’s craft, the tanner’s: To skin, to scrape, to preserve the furs. To make my wife shut them with needle and thread, for when our first clothes had turned to rags. To reclaim them as memory, their bodies arranged with glue and wire, their skins stretched over wood forms meant to decorate the walls of our house, to displace the long-empty picture frames.

Above the traps, where shafts of moonlight descended through the boughs, often a space existed wherein some segment of the shifted sky could be seen, where the last stars remaining did not retain their original seats but rather slid along new curves, their paths distorting as the second moon’s weight tugged the sky. Each night the fingerling catalogued this movement, and together my eager watcher and I searched for other signs, like how the once-white glow of my wife’s moon was perhaps even then tinged some shade of pink, and the sky was not all we watched, nor all we wondered about. More and more, we pondered what my wife learned in the cave, that house of the bear, when we lived there without knowing to whom the cave belonged: How long did she know about the bear before it awoke from its long sleep?

How long did my wife know, and what did she find between the time of her first knowing and that awakening, the bear rising to chase her from its home?

Whatever she found, was this the source of her stronger songs, of the voice that made her words more powerful than mine, even though it was I who had claimed this dirt to rule? Or was it something else, something she and I had done together?

That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.

LATER MY WIFE LEFT FORthe woods too, perhaps for the first time since our fleeing the cave of the bear in our earliest, more innocently childless days: I knew only that first she was beside me in our bed, and then she was gone, into a night lengthened beyond reason; and though I did not sleep, I pretended to, so that when her absence ended she would not have to explain. I trusted her then as I would not trust her later, not even early that next morning, when upon her return and her resumption of sleep—and also time, I thought then, oddly—the fingerling seized the dawn-light’s warm chance to show how it was not just mud that caked brown my wife’s heels and ankles. And still I refused to see what I was shown, even as the fingerling urged me toward right thinking.

I did not want to do what he claimed was necessary, to lift my wife’s nightclothes and confirm the new stains streaking dark her white thighs, and while the fingerling begged me to show him, to show us, I told him I would not push my wife farther into this misery, would not compound her sadness with the forced and early addition of my own.

I watched my sleeping wife, hovered my hand over the scroll of her hair. And to the fingerling, I said, Wait.

Wait, I said.

Wait until she awakens.

Wait until she washes and eats.

Wait until she has readied herself with freshest clothing, until her hair is returned to its bindings, until her face is rouged and powdered. Then she will tell us all we need to know: what has happened, what will happen next, and when at last it will all be over.