In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

1

BEFORE OUR FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.

In the hasty days that followed, I feared we moved in too fast and too early, the house’s furnishings still incomplete, the doors not all right-hinged—and in response to my worries my wife said that was no trouble, that she could quickly finish what I had mostly made.

Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, she began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house, and between the lake and the woods I heard her songs become something stronger than ever before. I returned to the woods to cut more lumber, so that I too might add to our household, might craft for her a crib and a bassinet, a table for changing diapers, all the other furnishings she desired. We labored together, and soon our task seemed complete, our house readied for what dreams we shared—the dream I had given her, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child—and when the earliest signs of my wife’s first pregnancy came they were attended with joy and celebration.

THE DIRT’S WETTEST SEASON SWELLED, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and through those tumid months my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell—and afterward came no more growth, only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed our already-fuel-poor gas-lamps, or cracked cups and bowls behind cupboard doors.

I angered that we would have to start again, and if my wife was not to birth some son then I wished only for that pregnancy’s speedy end, so that she might not suffer overlong, so that another child might be put in this one’s place. But still her body delayed, pretending that the bundle inside her might grow into some child, and my wife pretended too, and when I could not stand her insistence I again went out back of the house to where my wife had planted a garden, some few tubers and herbs to supplement what fish I took daily from the lake.

Now in my frustration I returned that place to the dirt it had been, and later my wife confronted me with what I had done. Her anger flushed her face, and her yelling contained none of the music I loved in her singing voice, and as she exhausted her still-round shape of its rage then at last I saw her labor was upon us.

What sad and sorry shape was born from her after those next days, that labor made long despite the lack of life within:

Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.

Not a heart but a heart bulge.

Not an eye but an eye spot, half covered by a translucent lid, uselessly clear.

Not a baby, instead only this miscarriage, this finger’s length of intended and aborted future.

And what was not born: No proper umbilical cord snaked from mother to baby, from placenta to belly, and so the starved child passed from my wife’s body into a clot of blood and bedsheet, and then into my waiting hand, where I lifted it before my eyes to look upon its wronged shape, that first terminus of my want.

Then to my lips, as if for a single kiss, hello and goodbye.

Then no kiss at all, but something else, some compulsion that even then I knew was wrong but could not help, so strong was my sadness, so sudden my desire: Into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole—its ghost and its flesh small enough to have in my fist like an extra finger, to fit into my mouth like an extra tongue, to slide farther in without the use of teeth—and I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow.

What was there to say afterward, when my wife returned to her senses, when she asked to hold our dead child? What else to tell but that our child was gone: that while she screamed out her frustration I had taken the body to the lake, that I had set it to float away on waters safer than those red waves at drift within her body.

When her howls subsided, her voice was made different than ever before: There was still some baby inside her, she said, some better other that she might bring forth, and so she worried at the entrance to her womb, first with her fingers and then, later, with tools made for other tasks, until all the bedding was mucked with her. I tried to take these implements from her hands, but with increasing ferocity she shoved me back, with the balls of her freed fists, and with a song that staggered me from the bedside, her new voice climbing, hurling strange my name and the name we had meant for our child. In rising verses, she demanded I disappear, leave her, throw myself into the depths of the salt-soaked lake, cast my now-unwanted bones after the supposed casting of our stillbirth, that failure-son.

Drown yourself away, my wife sang, and then despite my want to stay I found myself again outside the house, for against the fury of her song my horror held neither strength nor will nor strategy.

Across the dirt, upon a dock I had built with my own hands, the wind and the rain fell upon my face and the face of the lake, and there I felt the first stirrings of the fingerling, as that swallowed son would come to be called, by me and me alone:

A child or else the ghost of a child, clenched inside my chest, swam inside my stomach, nestled inside my ear.

A minnow or a tadpole, a tapeworm or a leech.

A listener. A whisperer.

A voice, louder without vocal cords.

A voice: FATHER, FATHER, FATHER.

FATHER and FATHER and FATHER.

FATHER, FATHER, a title repeated over and over, until I began to believe: no longer merely a husband, but something more.

And yet I hid this new self, did not confess what I had done when later my wife limped outside, her slender fingers pressing a rag bloody between her impatient legs as she walked down the hill to where I stood sullen upon the dock, to where she opened her mouth to speak, then shut it in silence, then opened it again: a show of teeth, her hesitant tongue, the animal of her grief.

At last she made those shapes to move about the wording of her demand, asking that I take her out onto the lake, where she had never before wanted to go.

Take me where you took him, she said. And what else was there but to agree, to show her the place where my lie had drawn her thoughts, her sorrow’s desire.

The gray lake was motioned only momentarily by our presence upon its sluggish waters, its surface rippled with wind and dashed by my oars but headed always for another flatness, another deeper kind of floating quiet, stiller still, and there was our boat atop it as night fell, as the sky filled with moon and stars and the absence of nearer light. Only then did my wife stand in the rowboat, her movements sudden, unannounced. I worked to steady the boat and so did not grasp her intent when she began to sing, for the first time using her voice not to create or cast up shapes but to take them down—and how could I have even hoped to stop such a power?

With song after song, with a song for each of their names, my wife lured some number of the stars one by one from out the sky, and those so named could not resist her call. Their lights dropped and crashed all around us, nearly upon us, and though they dimmed as they fell, still they landed too bright for our smaller world, and I shielded my face against the flash of their collisions, then covered my ears against the booming that followed. Those that slipped into the water splashed and steamed, and over the rocking edge of the boat I watched queasily as their hot lights dropped, until I lost them into the depths. Where they struck the dirt they did more damage, their fire scorching soil to sand to glass, and then in the growing darkness and the fading light the rain continued until the last fallen stars were extinguished.

Back onshore, I lifted my wife out of the boat’s flooding bottom and onto the dock, and how easy a burden she was then. I cradled her exhausted limpness, held her to my chest as I had hoped that night to hold a child, and in this way we climbed up the path from the lake, across the burned and muddy and darkened dirt, then into the false refuge of the house, where in those unlit rooms our new future awaited to tempt us into trying again: for the family we still hoped to make, the family for which my wife was again scraped ready, made to possess some hungry space, some hollow as full of want as my own hard gut had always been.

ON THE DAY OF OUR wedding, on some now-distant beach, my wife had sworn herself to me with ease and in faith, and I did likewise for her: Together we made the longest promises, vowed them tight, and it was so easy to do this then, to speak the provided words, when we did not know what other harder choices would necessarily follow as we made our first life together in a new city, and then again after we left that country and journeyed to the dirt, this plot stationed so far from the other side of the lake, from the mountains beyond the lake, on whose distant slopes we had once dwelled in the land of our parents, where perhaps there still perches that platform where we stood to speak our vows.

How terrible we must have seemed that day, when together we were made to believe our marriage would then and always be celebrated, by ceremony and by feasting, by the right applause of a hundred kith and kin. And then later how we were terrible again, upon this far lonelier shore, where when we came we came alone.

When we first arrived upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, then there was still sun and moon, only one moon, and stars too, all the intricacies of their intersections circumscribing the sky, their paths a tale to last every night, a waking dream to fill the hours of every day, and despite that bounty my wife was often flush with tears, because what world we had found was not enough for her, not enough for me, not without the children we desired, that I desired and that she desired for me, and despite her doubts she said that she would try, if that was what I assured her I wished.

In those days, there was no house, and until there was we required some place to sleep, to store the many objects we had been gifted at our wedding, the others we had carried forward from other years, those lived beneath the auspices of our mothers and fathers. And so we went into the woods to seek a cave, and in a cave we laid out our blankets and stacked our luggage, and there my wife waited amid that piled potential while each day I went out onto the dirt, while I raised a house with just my shovel and axe, my hammer and saw, my hands hardened by the same.

In that cave I did not leave her alone, though I had meant to do so—and all this happened long ago, when I still thought meaning to do something was the same as doing it—and I too was lonely as I built the house, and then the first rough shapes inside. I built the table and chairs, fashioned the stove and the sink, crafted the bed where I would lay my wife the first night I brought her across the threshold: where as I watched, the ink of her hair wrote one future after another across the pillows and sheets, and in that splay of black on white I smiled to see all the many possibilities of our family, formed out of her body, drawn into my arms.

But first another memory, the day before I carried my wife into our house, the other reason she was in my arms, the first time I spied the bear watching me from within its woods: And when I saw it I stilled my work upon the dirt, moved slowly to set down the tools with which I had not quite completed the house. At the tree line that marked the edge of the woods the giant bear’s back hackled, increased its size again, and the wedge of its head swayed huge and square from its massive shoulders, its mouth spilling yellowed teeth and lolling tongue, exhalations steaming the morning chill. In the face of its stare, I stared back, and the bear slavered in response, shook its thick fur as welcome or warning, and when it saw it had my attention it stood on its huge hind legs, its stamping body a dark tower opening, opening to push a roar up toward the heavens, toward the sun that in those days still ran full circle.

I froze, afraid the bear would charge, and in my fear I for a breath forgot my wife; and in the next breath I remembered, flushed with the shame of that forgetting.

The bear growled and raked the ground and paced the tree line. From my remove I noted the strangeness of its rankled movement and also how it was not exactly whole: where brown fur should have covered the expanse of its back, that fur was in places ripped, and the skin below was torn so that an armor of bone poked through the wound, yellowed and slickly wet. Still the bear seemed hardly to know its hurt, its movements easy, unslowed, perhaps untinged with pain. It roared, roared again, then abruptly it returned to the pathless woods, its bounding passage wide but somehow also impossible to track, the bear tearing no new way, breaking no brambles despite the bulk of its body.

And then I too was running into and through the woods by my own path, across the avenues of pine straw, back to where I had left her, the cave where all our possessions were stored.

I arrived to find our crates and cargo shattered upon the cave’s floor, our clothes shredded, our clock broken, our wedding albums ripped from their bindings. With the passing of those photos went some memories of the old world across the lake, a place perhaps already doomed to fade soon after our arrival in this new one, but now lost before I had erected the structures necessary to withstand that loss, and still some more terrible fear welled large within me, because despite my many cries my wife did not make herself known, and so for some time I did not know if she was alive or dead.

When I finally found her, sequestered in the entranceway of some lower passage of the cave I had never before seen, then as I shook her awake I saw there was no recognition in her dazed eyes, not of who I was to her or who she was to me. She did not know even the single syllable of her name, nor the two of mine, not until I repeated those sounds for her—and then I made her to say them back, to name me her husband, herself again my wife.

THE FINGERLING DID NOT VACATE my body as all other meat had. Instead he founded new residencies, new homes different from the womb he had previously inhabited, when his trajectory was pathed toward a more ordinary existence, that series of hatchings and moltings, egg to fetus to baby, boy to man. Now he was only this dead thing, ghosted into my belly-hole, into my lungs and my thigh, and in his first years he remained the pointer, so that he might one day notice my failings, and also the indexer, so that even from his earliest moments he might catalogue their occurrence. In both shapes he often revealed what he said my wife was doing wrong, and so began the long road of my turn against her, a difference from our recent past, where in my more temporary angers I had only turned away.

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 IN my 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.

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 EATEN meat, 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 FOR the 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.

MY WIFE EMERGED FROM OUR bedchambers late, as was her custom throughout those childless years.

Dressed only in her nightclothes, ankles stained, she walked through the kitchen and out the front door to the dirt beyond, while I sat at our slab of table with my fork and my fish, while in my half-filled stomach the fingerling looped anxious orbits. He begged me to follow her onto the porch or at least to spy upon her through some opened window, yet I maintained what slim calm lingered—for if my wife’s pregnancy had truly ended—if our last good chance had indeed passed unborn between her legs—then she had promised to end our world, then surely that end was come.

But then morning passed into day into evening into night.

I listened, but the song did not come, the calling-down sung after each of her other pregnancies, and when at last I opened the door, there was no wife out upon the dirt, or near the lake, or in the woods, no matter how or where I searched: Again she had disappeared from the surface of all things, just as she had the day the bear destroyed our wedding gifts at the mouth of its cave.

When at last she returned, her pregnancy seemed not ended, despite the grief bloodshot through her eyes, the stagger pained into her step. I asked her where she had gone and what she had done, but she said only that she was tired, that she did not wish to speak. Her body betrayed none of the quick deflation it had before, and so I did not know what to say or do, and afterward I kept some distance during the day and also in the night, and I gave her more than her share of what I trapped and fished, so that she might feed this baby better, so that if it were somehow still within her it might find the strength to live.

From that night on, my wife avoided our bed, sleeping instead alone upon the dirt, beneath the moon and also her moon, bidding me not to follow but to promise to remain inside the house—and even though I promised, my promise was not enough.

Each evening I again agreed to retire to the bedchamber, agreed as if I had never been asked, my wife’s voice betraying no recognition of our patterns, of my nightly exile to our lonely bed, where only the fingerling’s terrors would keep me company.

Then my wife saying good night, muffled through the closing and closed door.

Then the key moving in the lock.

Then the latch making it easy not to break my promise.

Then the waiting until dark, until the darker dark inside, and then moving to the window, where I believed I would not be seen.

From that vantage, I could not spy where she lay, but I could hear her voice, and as I listened she filled the nights with a song she had not sung before, the purpose of which I could not divine. Each morning, she returned at dawn in her draped and dirtied nightgown to unlock the bedchamber door, and no matter what she said I did not question her, only chose to believe the best of the many possibilities, that her acned skin and ruddied cheeks and heavied body were some good sign, some assurance that this pregnancy continued, that there was still some child coming. This was the story I wanted most, and so it was easiest to believe, no matter what the fingerling claimed—and also there was the matter of her moon, neither ascending nor descending. If her pregnancy had ended, then I thought there would be no need for these locked doors, these separate nights, not against the language of her eyes, the promised danger of her sung moon.

In my hopeful naïveté I made believe that the moon’s place in the sky assumed or assured a child’s place in her, but while I slept the fingerling begged my eyes open, watching and waiting and never allowing me to forget what we had seen, that night my wife had returned bloodied to the bed.

YOU KNOW THERE IS NO CHILD, the fingerling said, his shape curled in upon my ear, circling its ugly organ with each word, each soft-slung syllable. THERE IS ONLY A LIE, WHICH IN YOUR WEAKNESS YOU ALLOW HER TO KEEP, TO HOLD AGAINST YOU.

EXPOSE HER, he said, and then he slipped his shape across my face, around the curve of my jawline, down into the spiral canals of my other ear, crowding that too-small space so that he might command my attention, so that he might speak longer than he had spoken before: EXPOSE HER AND MAKE HER PAY. FOR HER DECEPTION, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO YOU, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO ME, TO MY OTHER BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

He said, I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF HER SHAPE, AS I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF YOURS, AND I TELL YOU IT IS NOT OUR LACK BUT HERS.

Despite the tickle of the fingerling in and around my face, still I dissented. Long had I saddened at the failure of my children, at the ghost I had set to seed, but never had I blamed my wife, not in full, not as we expanded the distance between our bodies, not after we had ceased to smile at each other in doorways or through windows. Some part of that distancing had been reversed by this pregnancy, and in this last-found closeness I wanted to believe all the fingerling claimed I should not; and even if her pregnancy was over, then perhaps I was willing to blame her actions on the twisting unreasonableness of heartbreak, and so I did not agree that my wife had done me wrong.

Against these arguments the fingerling insisted, and in my refusal of that insistence the fingerling showed me some others of his tricks, demonstrated how he too was a tracker. He had learned his mother’s movements, and also her motives, knew both better than I ever had, and so one hot afternoon he urged me back to the house, hurried me until I abandoned my shouldered burden to walk faster: For weeks, my wife had sung upon the dirt throughout the darkest hours while in the locked bedchamber I slept or tried to sleep. Now she was too exhausted to resist napping some portion of the day, and so the fingerling commanded me to tread lightly, to open the front door without creaks, to cross the floorboards without boots, to enter the bedroom, to see there what might be seen.

LIFT HER SHIRT, bid the fingerling, hysterical, foamed and frothed, a nausea of need, and I did as he begged, and beneath my wife’s blouse I found what he wanted me to find: a fur, balled into the shape and size of a baby’s bulge; this hide with which my wife had hoped to deceive me, as if our son was to be a wolf, as if she had last rucked with an animal.

WAKE HER, the fingerling commanded, but I did not wake her.

WAKE HER, the fingerling said again, but it was only the fingerling who was angry then, only he who wanted her so quickly exposed and punished. For my part, there was almost only more sadness, that she could not admit what had happened, this expulsion from her body of our most recent child, which unlike all the others she had delivered dead alone.

NOW CAME THE MONTHS OF crossed deceptions, where we each hid beneath our clothes some child or not-child, grown inside our bodies or else never grown: For me there was the fingerling, five years swallowed, willful, angered at what world he knew only through me, his father-shaped host; and for my wife there was her own false child, her lie made artifact, a fakery of fur clutched always under her blouses and dresses.

Despite this gathering evidence, I did not call my wife’s bluff, only counted the days and weeks and months as they passed. Each night, after I was locked into our bedchamber, there I scratched a new mark into the floor beneath the bed, some reminder of the length of her deception, a predictor of its likely end, a calendar made more necessary as the season stalled, so that often it was the cloudless distress of winter, the harsh light of sun and moons cold despite the sometimes-bright blue of the sky.

Whenever we snuck into the house during her nap to lift her shirt, to spy again her deception, always her body appeared pregnant everywhere but her belly, where there were always only the bundled furs between her shirt and her flat skin, and no baby besides, and no matter the strength of her songs I did not then believe those furs would ever become a baby, even as she otherwise remained seemingly with child, heavy-breasted, thick-thighed. And so in the ninth month I emerged unsuspecting from the woods, still merely a husband, made no proper father despite the insistent promises of my wife, the hungry claims of the fingerling upon my flesh.

That day, I felt myself only a fisherman, only a trapper with rabbits in hand, but already I had been remade again, my station changed upon an event unattended and now revealed: In our sitting room, in the rocking chair I had hewn for the fingerling’s birth, there my wife waited holding a baby boy, his wide face howling, his wrinkled body swaddled into some blanket I had never seen, perhaps also only lately sung into being.

Memory as new fatherhood’s first failing: To have my wife stand and pass the baby’s warm weight into my arms, then with a whisper press the child’s name against my ears. To hold the happy shape of this son and for a moment not care where he came from, not care how he was made, not care that in my joy I was believing what did not deserve belief—and then to have this feeling taken as the fingerling reacted, attacked, punched out from within the cage of my ribs until my heart thumped wrong, until I stumbled and reeled, until my horrified wife reclaimed the baby from my embrace before I could drop him to the floor.

YOU WILL NEVER LOVE HIM, said the fingerling. I WILL NEVER ALLOW IT. THIS BROTHER, YOU WILL NEVER KEEP HIM CLOSE AS YOU HAVE KEPT ME, AND ALWAYS I WILL CLAIM YOU FOR MYSELF—

Is this not what you wanted? asked my wife. Have I not given you what you asked of me, all you have ever asked?

No matter which way I opened my mouth, I did not know what to say, how to say anything without saying it all. Against my unexplained distance my wife clutched tighter this foundling, the baby boy whom she called our son, whom she called a name meant for another, for one of our previous failed children. With the boy held to her breasts, now suckling oblivious, then my wife insisted again that this was my child, that I should not doubt, that she did not understand why I doubted.

She smiled and said, We made this child together, with one body weaved against the other, as we had tried to make so many others.

At my silence she tried again to smile, and I tried too, and when I failed I left behind that joy and confusion to step out onto the porch, then onto the dirt, where in private I might let my body shake. I circled round behind the house, and there I discovered the garden already unmade, its dank sod overturned, the many buried objects of baby raising now ripped anew from its earth so that they might be reinstalled in the house, each useful at last.

And then to have to look back at the house I had built, filled now with what I had not.

To have to listen to the fingerling say, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU SO.

To have to have him be right, and to not yet know what that meant.

MY WIFE, HOLDING HER NEWBORN, her body taking full part in her false motherhood, so that her breasts were ample in the months after the finding, and at her tit seemingly always the foundling nursed, drinking deep: I rarely held him myself, but from across our rooms I measured his quality, surveyed his coarse black hair, his wide face and heavy-lidded eyes, the warm bulge of his plumped belly and limbs, his mouth that could then make only the dumbest sounds, cries announcing hunger, exhaustion, a soiling. It was a son I had wanted and a son I had been given, but what son was this? Even in his infancy I recoiled at how possessive his crinkled fingers were, holding her to his lips with more urgency than those of any baby I’d known, more than any of the right-born sons I’d seen on the other side of the lake, the first objects of my bachelor’s jealousy. Still I was not satisfied, and I was not alone in the anger I felt, my strange rejection of the baby’s health, the baby: Ghosted within my belly, the fingerling swam faster to make his own feelings known, stung his renewed need throughout his home of bile and half-digested fish, where in the absence of his mother’s milk he had found some fair substitute, so that by then he had surely devoured some permanent part of me; not what I made with my body, but what my body was made of.

FOR THAT FOUNDLING, OUR FALSE son, my wife and I played at parenting together, and in those early years we learned him in the ways of our family and also the first four of the elements, dirt and house and lake and woods: Cross-legged upon the fur-covered floor, we told him what we had been taught, that those four aspects were all we were—but then my wife said there was another, a fifth, and that this element was called mother, that it was her mothering that made the foundling, more so than any other. I thought this to be a lie but said nothing, kept silent my concern at her greedy deception—and then as I withdrew I came as well to discern elements previously unknown. Soon I wished I had spoken of these others first, to position them before her claim, or that I’d had the courage to speak of them after, to displace it: For if mother was an element, then so was father, then so was ghost, then so there were at least seven, a number much increased from what we had earlier believed, from what we had been told to expect, long before our arrival upon the dirt.

Over some number of months, a year, two years, we taught the foundling to crawl and then to walk, to speak in words and then in phrases. We tried to teach him how to play but failed, or else I did: At first I believed the foundling to be possessed by some strange seriousness, some unchildness, but soon I heard through a window his squeals at the tickling of his mother, at her fingers teaching him to feel ticklish.

I had never heard this laugh before, had never caused it no matter how I had thrown the boy into the air, no matter how I caught him just before he crashed, no matter what other roughhouses I taught him, as I myself had been taught.

By the time the foundling began to sing my wife’s simplest songs I had learned to restrain the fingerling, but always he watched for his chances, and soon all my angers were ulcered inside me, and one by one the fingerling sought their increased company, in whatever pits they burned their slow language. My wife and I were quieter then too, gently estranged, and so from us the foundling learned to speak only slowly, a lack set against all the years the fingerling had whispered in my ear: By the time the foundling said his first word, the two matched syllables of mother, by then I had been convinced of my ill feelings against him.

In the months that passed he refused to learn any other word—any other but mother, mother, mother, mother—and at night my newly named wife held him between us in the bed, her touch always on him and never me, and at meals the fingerling conspired from my gut as my wife fussed over the foundling’s every want, as their voices filled the small house, until again and again I fled the clamor of their table to go out into the moony woods, where in those days I would often find myself digging some unneeded plot, like a dog who has not yet found his bone but still wants the place to bury it.

Despite the mystery of his origins, in most ways the foundling was a boy as I had always imagined a boy would be: His learning to walk was followed by a destructive curiosity where he knocked over the carefully arranged objects of our house, cracking worse our already-bear-chipped bowls and also the wife-sung ones, or else endlessly clacking his mother’s spoons against one another. Once he could better speak, he began to question every action my wife or I made, his halting sentences querying the origins of fish, the depth of the lake, the sequence of the seasons, and also crying at what he did not understand, what we could not explain into kindness, like the first time he watched me strip the hide off a deer or scrape free a fish’s scales. Soon the foundling bawled every dusk when I approached the house, even when I came empty-handed: For while it was his mother who cooked for him, he saw only that it was I who fished and trapped, skinned and slaughtered and butchered, and even though he had no trouble sharing in the meals we made, it became my wife he thanked and me he feared.

I dug more holes, and because I could not dig a hole without wanting for something to put in it, for the first time I began to kill what I did not intend to use: In one hole I buried a muskrat and in another a rabbit and in another a wrench-necked goose, caught by my own hands after it squawked me away from its clutch of goslings, themselves doomed beneath my frustrated heels. My wife still maintained her garden, but in those days I also kept one of my own: For every rabbit I took from the woods, I buried two more in the clearing made when I’d cut trees for our house, so that others might grow from whence they came, and so they did grow—except that with each passing season they returned leaner and lamer, limping where they might before have hopped. It was not just the rabbits who failed, diminished by my poaching: Remember now a mink without its fur or else this beaver without the squared hatchet of its teeth, gnawing useless at a trunk it had no chance of opening. Remember this duck born with dulled beak, this peacock ill feathered to attract its mate. Remember all those other animals, blunted and endangered by my hand, and yet how could I stop, and yet what could I do except to mitigate through their bodies my most recent darkest thoughts, which always required some burial somewhere, with some thing, in some hole of my own digging.

As the foundling grew I too changed, hardened into who I would be, and soon I was burying whole deer in too-shallow holes, stepping down into their graves to snap the lengths of their antlers or else letting their branches point through the dirt, made accusing knuckles of bone. In this way all the beasts and birds of the woods gave themselves over to my traps, so that never was there a morning when I found nothing, where no fur or feather filled my gathering fists.

All the beasts and the birds, all except for one: The only animal I dared not trap was the giant bear, who I correctly feared would not suffer me to try.

Some mornings, I arrived at the burying ground to find that the bear had uncovered my plantings, had torn the flesh from off their bones so that it might eat of what I had killed but not for food—and also to bring back what it did not require. This is how I thought the bear showed me what it claimed, even unto and after death, and also what it thought of my poaching, as if I did not already know the bounds of its domain, and of all others: That the woods belonged to the bear. That the house belonged to me, or else had before, but was owned now by her, my wife. That if I wished to reduce my trespass, then the lake would perhaps be a better place in which to store my dead—if only my wife could have stomached the sight of my dragging their bodies across the dirt, of the scraped clay wounded red.

During the day, the foundling roamed often upon the dirt, sometimes in the company of his mother and sometimes alone. As he grew in size he grew braver too, but still he remained unwilling to step under even the thinnest outer trees, those still shot through with sunlight. Even with his mother at his side, holding his diminutive hands, his fingers too small for his age, even then he was afraid of everything he might have guessed lurked within those living woods, his imagination making up for his lack of experience—but could what he might have imagined be worse than the truth? Much of what happened in the woods was then my secret, and the fingerling’s: the trapped and the dying beasts; the dug and filled graves; the bones thrust through the dirt, uncovered and freed to new life by the bear, then trapped and buried again.

The foundling was most afraid of the bear, that beast I had spoken of often at the table, despite the hushings of my wife, and also he was afraid of me, of the fingerling inside, that brother the foundling did not know but that I believed he sometimes heard in my voice. His fear of me disappeared only fleetingly, now and then in some lucky forgetfulness of childhood, and eventually my wife stopped bringing him near the woods, so that he would not wail at the sight of the trees, my traps, bloody me; and as they withdrew into the safety of our house I too retreated, spent more and more of my daytime on the wooded side of the tree line, that threshold’s divide.

How every day I watched the foundling always choose his mother, how he preferred her lap, her end of the table, her body to curl against when dreams of the dark woods and the darker cave trembled him awake.

How his lisping voice was still better for singing than my rough and rude timbre, and how this too was a realm they shared, to which my talents granted me no entry.

How when he wanted a story, he wanted it only from her lips, and so it was her stories that formed him, never mine.

How whenever he was not with her, the foundling seemed listless, exhausted, and while she did her chores he fell asleep in odd places, tucked into a corner of the sitting room, hidden in the shaded hollows between the furniture; or upon a pile of dirty furs, ready for the washing; or in the dark slimness of the space under the bed, where I would find him snoring so slowly, balled up, legs tucked below his belly, hands folded beneath his face; and if I tried to shake him awake he would not stir, not until my wife returned to lull him from his sleep with a song or a soft word.

How the eighth element she taught the foundling was called moon, but when the time came my wife pronounced it moons, as if hers was no copy but rather some proper and equal addition to what had come before, that original to whose workings we were not then or ever privy.

How, like his mother, the foundling preferred the meat of the woods to the fish of the lake, so that always I ate alone, even when we ate together.

How even if we had not been so slowly separating, even then the fingerling would have kept us sometimes apart, his threats against the foundling enough to double my own reluctance, my own inability to father.

How I told myself I held back for the boy’s safety, but how that was not the whole of the truth or even the most of it.

How by the time the foundling was with us several years—by the time the fingerling had floated within me nearly double that span—how by then I could admit the root of the fracture on our family, of the distance between my wife and I, between me and her son: Despite all my long wants, I had never thought rightly of how to be a parent or a husband, only of possessing a child, of owning a wife.

MEMORY AS NEW APPETITE, AS hunger and harriment: To wish to try to join my family in its diet, but, because I would not take back my public objections, to do so always in secret, eating only the parts of animals never eaten before, parts my wife and the foundling would not miss.

To trim the sinew from around the vertebrae of a raccoon, to gnaw a woodchuck’s knuckle, to save the ears of a hare in the back pocket of my trousers.

To crack open heavy nuts taken from the cheek of a squirrel, trapped while storing its winter stock.

To throw away the stringy flesh of groundbird after groundbird, keeping only loused mouthfuls of feathers to swallow later.

To do everything differently because what was already accomplished had failed to provide what life I wished, and only some new way seemed likely to save our family from this long fall, this world beneath the slow-sinking moon, this home where there was only husband and wife and fingerling and foundling in the house, only the bear in the woods and whatever-was-not-a-bear in the lake, of which I have barely yet spoke: We knew by then the ninth element was called bear, and for a time nine was enough. The tenth element was in those years only intuited, and what it was best named I did not know, whether whale or else squid, else kraken, else hafgufa or lyngbakr; a monster to match a monster, to oppose the other merely by its existence opposite the woods, in the lake on the other side of this border of dirt, the thin territory upon which we had staked our tiny claim.

Only rarely did I have some chance to speak with my wife alone, in the language of adults, that diction now kept reserved for special occasions, rarer privacies. Always the foundling was with us, or rather with her, caught up in her skirts or tasting from her cooking spoon or toppling over in the dirt of the yard, nearby where she hung up her laundry or beat the dried mud from off our rugs, and anyway everywhere within those first rooms was within earshot of everywhere else. Now there was nowhere we could go to be together, a couple only, and now every room seemed too small, the walls close by design but made closer by the dark furs that decorated every surface.

In hopes of catching my wife alone I began to take opportunities to exhaust the foundling, to chase him around the house and the yard behind, each time inventing some game for us to share—and I remember once I made my body as big as I could, hunching my shoulders like the bear, grunting and growling my worst feelings, and the boy ran before me, stumbling and mock terrified and calling for his mother, who did not laugh at our play but at least did nothing to stop it, only folded her laundry and kept her silence. And when the foundling at last collapsed napping in the grass, then his mother carried him into the house before returning to the yard, where her wash waited unfinished, and where I waited for her.

The play had tired me too, but it had not weakened my anger, and as always when I was in my worst moods I pressed my wife to explain our son’s origins, said to her, Tell me again of his conception, of the trials of your pregnancy, of threatening me with your moon that still hangs overhead.

My wife loosened one of my shirts from our line, folded its sleeves against its seams, folded it in half again, and placed it within her basket, a basket she had made. The shirt was cotton and not fur, but we raised no such crops, and so this too was sung into its shape, not trapped and skinned and sewn. All the most useful objects in our house were of her making, and what I asked her was whether the boy wasn’t the same, another construct, all hers.

She was still beautiful then, her skin glossed with sun and too much moon, her eyes tired but happier than they had been in the years of our failures, and as I complained she reassured me again, said, I have given you what you wanted, or close enough.

She said, I know how many children you wanted and I know this is just one child, but you could choose to decide he was enough, to believe that one child with me was still a miracle.

She said, You are unhappy but why, when this life is almost exactly the life you wanted, that you wanted and that I agreed to give you.

But still I was unsatisfied, still I claimed that the son she had given me was not the son we had made and that somehow she had replaced him with this other, this foundling. Against these claims my wife offered no new defense, would only reassure me again, telling me not to worry, that of course he was my son, that despite the wonders of her voice her songs could not make a life. She said this again and again, against my many multiplying queries, each voiced as I trailed her around the house, following her from chore to chore, until after so many denials she changed her tack, asked quietly, What is a life lived but an array of objects, gathered or else made into being, tumored inside the wall-skin of our still-growing house? What else to make a biography of, if not the contents of these rooms?

As much as I had tried to ignore its progress, still it was obvious that the house was growing, that it grew most when I was not looking, when I was not there to catch it, and that my wife had begun to fill its new rooms with objects of her own devising, made for her own needs, those of her foundling. And then one day I returned home to find my wife not in the rocking chair where I left her, nursing her stunted son, but rather in some new room dozens of yards farther down the hallway, the hall that before went only to our bedroom but now extended past that first door, past several others I did not know. There I found them, together in a space bare of furnishings except for some bed, and there mother and son slumbered, his head laid to her collarbone, perhaps naked beneath white sheets, bodies as close as hers and mine once were.

Everything remained unsaid, our lives a stasis of secrets, and when the foundling came to me on his own then too I reached out with my hands to maintain our safest distance, pushed his outstretched arms back down to his sides, corrected his advances: When he tried to kiss me goodnight like he did my wife, I turned my stubbled cheek against his milk-stunk lips, and he was not yet strong enough to turn it back, not even with his fingers twisted tight into the scrub of my then-new beard.

The fingerling rejoiced with turns and twists through the short circuit of my guts, where he continued to make his most frequent habitation, exiting the long throw of my stomach and intestines only occasionally for the passages and pouches of lungs or liver or bladder. As yet I had not felt him within the confines of my skull-space, but often he crawled along the surface of my face, stretching my skin so that I was sure my wife might see him sliding across my features, as I thought her foundling sometimes saw. If she did, she said nothing, and eventually I came to believe that she must not. But whether her not seeing was a failure to understand or a failure to look, I did not yet want to know.

Memory as flicker, as fury: To be able to be jealous of a child was to imagine thoughts for the child that he was not yet old enough to have.

To be suspicious of our house was to be sure that in the morning there was no second floor below our cellar, and no stairs leading farther down and in, and yet in the afternoon to find both those constructions.

To have built this house without understanding or imagining that when I stopped building it would grow still—and when I was not looking, then again my wife remade what I had made, sang her own house within my house—for how else to account for all those rooms, all those hallways? How else to account for these stairs, these doors, and behind them chambers furnished with new shapes?

My wife withdrew the foundling farther from my gaze, and afterward I saw them only rarely outside the house and never far from it. I had rowed them out onto the lake, had tried to teach the foundling my habits, but those days too were ended, and again I would be the only one of my kind, denied my lineage. Now my wife and the foundling emerged from the new chambers of the house only at specific times, only at meals or else not even then, and afterward my wife retreated not by heading out of the house but by heading in, by climbing back or else down. Soon all our closets gave access to such stairs, and at the bottom of these staircases were only more doors, more halls, more rooms that for a long time stayed empty, until my wife began to fill them with the song of her voice, and after they were filled she sometimes locked their contents away, which in those days were not yet meant for me.

On the first floor, the doors were not locked as the deep ones were, and so I wandered past them in the early mornings, the late nights, the hours when my wife and the foundling slept in our shared bed or else their other bed to which I was never invited, set in a chamber I could not enter, its door suddenly barred by a mechanism I could not discover. I searched every open room, and in each one I found some newly aggressive mundanity, some object or set of wife-sung objects, their shapes familiar but their purpose inscrutable to my reckoning.

What was I to make of these rooms, the few I saw before they were shut away, and also of what they were filled with? Some held objects obvious in purposed pairings—the crib and the cradle, the bottle and the blanket—but others less so: In one room, I saw the death of a cougar but not the cougar itself; in another, the moltings of a thousand butterflies; and then a single giant specimen of the same species, bigger than any I’d seen, first flapping slowly about the room, then becoming more and more agitated as it failed to find its escape, thrashing its iridescent body against the walls of its cell until its magnificent wings were broken.

The creation of these new rooms—this deep house—took some toll on my wife, or else the strain of mothering the foundling began to diminish her, or else it was only the years, the first decade of our marriage already ended: Her porcelain skin paled further, shrank tight against her bones, and her long black hair shone less and less, until at last she took a pair of scissors to it, cut its length up and around her ears, and afterward it seemed her face was different than I remembered, as if her hair’s framing was enough to make her one person, its absence another. Some days her voice was so hoarse from her singing that she claimed she could not speak at dinner, and at other meals she did not speak but gave no reason.

THE DAYS WERE THIEVES, AND the happier ones the worst, their distractions allowing the hours to pass unnoticed, allowing the minutes to be snatched away without knowledge of their passing. As my wife contented herself with the foundling, so I tried to make my trapping and fishing count for something, so I tried to convince myself that the fingerling could be a son all my own, son enough, and better for his embedded residency, a station where neither of us might ever lack the other, as the foundling lacked his mother at every moment: For what breast was brought soon enough after the hunger, what calming touch brought comfort in the instant of its need? No, whenever we were satisfied, then we were deluded, and in our delusions the days took from us what was ours, as wood hollowed with termites, as all iron rusted, as our clothes faded and split their machined threads, and as the home-sewn furs that replaced them grew stale and stiff. Seasons went by, each less distinct than the one before, and what world we had grew only sparser, colder: Now there was less to trap in the woods, less to catch in the lake, and what restockings there were made things only worse, as with the blunter animals the bear brought back.

And the bear? It too worsened with the days, so that everywhere I went in the woods I found its fallen fur, the marks where it scraped it free of its itching skin, against boulder and branch and now bark-bare trunk.

My wife and I, we aged, and although I knew it was not correct, still it often appeared our children were the agents of our diminishment: the fingerling, devouring me from within, and the foundling, always at his mother’s side, taking of her body, her energy, her time, her grace. And so the days passed, and as they passed they took: Our hair grayed, our teeth yellowed, our bodies stooped across our bones, and in the mirror there was no one I recognized, only my fatter face, my beard atop that fat, my body bigger, and yet every year there was even less of me to love, to be loved by.

AND ALSO WHAT DID NOT change: Still I was only a fisherman, only a mere trapper of beast and bird, only a husband and perhaps a father—except that despite my wife’s assurances I still did not believe the child I had raised with my wife was any son of mine. By the occasion of the foundling’s sixth birthday, whatever my wife had done to make the child her own had exhausted my patience, and on that day I determined I would avoid its truth no more, and if she persisted in her claims, then she would cease to be even the slim wife she had become.

But how to force the issue, to put my family to the test?

As my wife had invented, so I invented too, for in that absence of rules it was often possible to make my own.

At the fingerling’s suggestion, I extracted from our traps two rabbits, and from the lake I took three fish—the better, he said, to test the loyalties of our bodies against the histories of the same, to show what came from where and where each now stood. I brought my catch to her kitchen, secured it in the icebox for the making of the foundling’s birthday celebration, that last shared meal, wife-cooked later that day: The smell of seared fish. The blood-and-boiling-tomatoes stink of stewed rabbit. A birthday feast made only of flesh, and no cake for baby either.

Six years old, and still the most taste he had for sweets came from the breast of her, his mother, whom he would not quit in full.

Throughout my wife’s kitchenry, the foundling clutched about her aprons, her skirt hems, and likewise I clenched my left hand around my fork, my right around my knife, and also my stomach closed around the fingerling. My wife set the table, set pot and pan upon its wood, and then with our heads bowed we said our rote thanks to woods and lake and dirt and house, for the food we were about to eat, for what bounties the elements had given us. Afterward, my wife smiled or faked a smile in my direction, trying to mollify what hurt feelings I would not hide, and then she gave me the three fish she pretended I was hungry enough to eat, and to her giving I said or heard myself say No, and then, in the same voice, NO. ONE FISH FOR ME. ONE FISH FOR YOU. ONE FISH FOR THE BOY. OR ELSE WE ARE NO FAMILY.

Those were the words that I spoke to her, from behind the thickness of my beard, that newer face my wife said she did not like as much.

Those were the words she ignored as she reached for her ladle, as she scooped two steaming bowls of stew, one for her and one for the foundling, as she set his in front of his hungry fork.

I felt my words thicken the air between us, and when I stood my movements were each heavied with their vicious, viscous weight. Each move was perhaps easy to watch but harder to stop, and so even though my wife recognized my intentions, even though she shouted, rounding the room as I rose, still my hands set to gripping the edge of the table, lifting and lifting and lifting that surface until every once-right thing slid free: My ceramic plate scraped down across the up-angling wood until it hit the edge between two planks, and then the plate flipped past the foundling, who continued to sit in his chair, shock spreading across his face but too slow for safety. His utensils were still in his hands, some chunk of rabbit still skewered on the tines of his fork, and from his face his birthday expression disappeared—its happiness never a gift, only the promise of gifts—his mouth twisting as his bowl toppled into his lap, and when he at last leaped from his seat to cry out and swipe at his trousers, he took his attention off the still-climbing table, away from our last shared pot, the slipping cast-iron container, its metal barrel black and rough and alive with heat, its contents barely cooler than a boil.

I would have said I meant only to make my anger known—but then the table reared up over the foundling, and the pot struck him with a weight unexpected, its contents erupting as he crumpled, the gravy slicking his face and skin, steaming where it stuck.

How the foundling cried then! How he wailed for his mother, how he thrashed upon the floor even after my wife reached him, and how she cursed my name then, as she tore at his clothing, the furs and made cloth trapping stew against skin, as she wiped the burning food from his quick-blistered face, his tangled hair, his red-pocked arm.

As my wife lifted her naked son into her arms she said that she hated me, that I had made her hate me, and as she told me how she hated I realized I still held the table slanted, and as she told me she was leaving I lowered it back to level, let its legs thunk against the floorboards. Of all the many elements we had claimed and named, I had not given a number to family, had not even counted it among them, and this omission had not gone unnoticed by the fingerling, that relentless cataloguer of all my faults: Now it was family that would be missing, that in that moment was already gone, as my wife stood to carry the aggrieved foundling away.

I sat down on the floor of that room, the foundling’s wet clothes flung everywhere, my own now drowned in a lake of stew, filthy with the smatter of vegetables ground beneath my wife’s shoes, my muddy boots. Outside the windows, the sun set, but the light did not diminish: On the night of the foundling’s birthday there was moon in every window, wide streamers of moonlight illuminating every surface, filling every puddle with glow. I could not stand that steaming silence so brightly illuminated, so I instead wandered down the hall to our bedchamber, tracking foul footprints to where the foundling sat on the edge of our first bed, crying from out his scorched features. I stood in the doorway and watched as my wife bandaged him shut with strips of fabric torn from the hem of her dress, swaddling his face and hands and chest to protect his open-fleshed wounds, and throughout her ministrations he would not cease his crying. She put cold compresses upon the uninjured parts of his body to cool the worse-hurt rest, but when his body could not shed the heat of his burns she did not hesitate, as always I would have hesitated. As I watched, she lifted her boy into her arms, his body limp against hers, arms and legs dangling from her grip, and then she pushed past me, out of the bedchambers and down the hallway, past the first kitchen and the first sitting room and the first nursery, that room he had so rarely slept inside, and then farther on, into the hallways beyond the one I had built, where there were more hallways still, all carved out of the dirt and into the coolness of the earth.

And what then? What words did my wife say in those last moments before their departure?

Only some song of silence: As the foundling screamed his goodbyes, my wife relied instead on the angry quiet of her body, and as she walked away, I listened to the slimness of her shoulders, the topography of her spine, the sight of her thudding blood flushed from beneath her skinny bones, those sharp ribs pressed against her thread-worn and hem-ripped dress. What she said was nothing she could not say without her mouth closed and her eyes long-darked, already turned away—words without sound, without song—and then without further glance or gaze she was gone from my sight, and afterward the flashed shape of her absence burned hot in my eyes, and around it her silence continued speaking for years and years, remained always the sound of her saying nothing, and then the sound of the nothing said.