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

CODA The Scorched Singer

AND THEN ONE MORNING SHE found a man upon the shore of her lake, floated in from the shallows, his naked body white and rent, his back dug deep enough to expose muscle beneath skin, bone beneath muscle.

She withdrew, then moved closer again. Turning him over, she revealed a face she did not recognize, not from before her long loneliness: One of the man’s eyes was cloudy, the other shot with blood, and there was no breath in him, none moving his face and lungs. She shuttered the man’s eyes, then closed his mouth, hiding his broken teeth. Everywhere she touched, the man’s skin stretched away, its shape tattered, his chest scarred from some multiple cracking wounds, all his other injuries far older than his drowning, left unset or else healed by an ugly method.

She did not investigate further: The man was dead, and that was enough. She had left enough mysteries unsolved, did not need another.

The coming of the man had fouled her lake: What water was once blue and filled with sparkle was now grayed, even blackened out near the center, where some other filth swirled in the slow current. She watched the second shape froth and decided that soon she should make the lake bigger again, so that whatever contaminant this man had brought might be spread thinner.

But first there was the body of the man. She could not decide where to put him, whether to burn his body or else bury it in the dirt near the shore or perhaps up the slope or even farther still, on the other side of the house or in the woods beyond, and while she deliberated she went to the house and stripped the sheets off her bed.

A selfish thought: If the body had drifted back into the lake by the time she returned, then she would pretend him a dream, like the other men she had dreamed in the past few weeks—and then a smile upon her face, because she had almost thought remembered instead: Men hunting in the woods, setting traps. Men coming down some long and spiraling stairs. Men banging their fists upon a door hidden in the rock at the far edge of the dirt. But the men she had seen had not been this man, only some other progression of shapes: one a young man, dressed in a white suit; one in his middle years, bearded, dressed in furs; and a third, some aged wanderer, coughing blood into his hands, wiping his fingers on his skinny thighs.

When she was very young there had been another woman who had lived in this house with her, who had cared for her, fed her, clothed her, taught her. That other had passed from the dirt long ago, and later she too had gone away, leaving by an almost-vanished road for a more crowded country, for its tall and sprawling capital. Later she had returned to the dirt by another passage, a blacker escape, and now she was again alone, lonely despite some lingering mysteries, the men in her dreams, and also these few recurring sounds: the laughter of a child, the roar of a bear, the angry words of a father, speaking to someone else, some other woman about to be hurt.

And where had these phantoms come from? Were they waiting here for her return, or had she brought them back with her? And why could she not remember?

The man’s body was still beached when she returned to the shore, and now there was another object too, washed up beside him. Something white, flowing in the water.

It was not until she got closer that she saw that floating outline was merely a wrapping come partway undone, a covering for another smaller shape.

It was not until she was almost upon both the new shape and the man’s that she recognized the second for what it was: The white shape was a shroud, made of wet and dirty bedsheets, and those sheets matched those she held in her hands, had been put to the same purpose she intended hers, the impermanent preservation of the dead.

This new shape was so small it could only contain a child, and her fingers trembled as she twisted her hands in the sheets and pulled it ashore. The sheets were closed by locking folds, and she undid them one by one, and though she wanted to look away as she opened the last one, she did not.

Inside the shroud was the body of a boy, six or seven years old, or maybe even older—a runt, stunted. A cry caught in her throat as she lifted him out, and then the smell from within the shroud gagged her, transforming her earlier sound into something new, and still she did not look away: The boy had been dead an even longer time than the man, and now his features were collapsed, his face no longer a face, the skull stove-in, the teeth jutted through the softened skin of his lips.

She picked up his hands, found his long fingernails curled into the fleshy pads of his palms, tearing clawed indents, tiny wounds. This was a body damaged by time, by time and by submersion in water—and how long had they been there in her lake, and where had they floated there from? The boy’s shape demanded something of her, some consolation, and she did not wish to deny what she felt, had determined to deny herself nothing. She lifted him onto her lap, into her arms, felt his weight upon her, and how he was filled with the lake then, and how when she squeezed him closer that water came out, through his mouth and nose, the other wounds decayed across his flesh.

The water that covered her, it was not all from her lake, and when it flooded her mouth she remembered not everything but something more than she had, or else she almost did. What she remembered was already present in her world: Here too there was already house and dirt and woods and lake, sun and moons, and yes, ghosts too, for what else could account for her dreams? Here there was always wife and always mother, for she might have been both even if she was neither now, and here there was always son, for she had made one of those once too, and before that was husband—and even if she could not remember his face she remembered his voice, how tone-deaf he was, how he spoke ceaselessly because like most men he could not sing, and because he could not say anything without too many words.

She was old, in the last of her ages, but she thought she was not stupid, only forgetful.

In the floating blackness she had forgotten all the faces she had known, but now here there were two more, dead in the shallows of the lake she had made for herself and for them, for someone like them—so that when they came for her it would be as if they were already home.

There were many songs inside her, even then.

There was a song for the making of the objects by which a household was furnished and run, the bowls and breadboards and spoons and knives and pots and pans.

There was a song for the waking of a child, and for putting him to bed. There was a song for his birthday, and also for each day in between, each day during which he became different from the day before.

There was a song for making milk, even inside the breast of a barren woman, so that a child might be nursed even though his mother was not his mother.

There was a song for sewing clothing, and another for mending holes in those clothes, because there was exactly one right song for every action, for every desired artifact or outcome, and always it was important to sing the right song at the right time.

There was a song for the making of moons, but it cost so much to sing that it might take years to recover from, because the hole it cut would pool with grief, until nothing else might grow inside that circle.

There was a song for the carving of the earth, but its every note required one piece of herself, something to put where that earth had been, so that the dirt might not collapse. There was no creation from nothing but only from cost, and it was mostly with herself that she might pay.

There was a song for marriage, and another for anniversaries, and another for divorce.

There was a song for sickness, for fever, but it had not saved her when she was sick and fevered.

There was a song for birth, and a song for funerals, and it was the funeral song she sang now as she stacked wood upon the sandy shore, as she stacked the man and the boy upon the wood.

When the pyre was ready, she sang it aflame, then stood watch over the burning bodies. The fire climbed, and as she watched the blaze she fevered and she flamed and she sang the funeral song. And afterward her world grew quiet, and she was quiet in it, sure there was no man or beast left that knew her name, no one that might guess where she had fled or what had happened to her.

She believed herself alone in her world for just that single moment, a moment exactly as long as it was, and then something else splashed from the lake behind.

She turned to look out across the surface of the lake, and then from the water came the loud sound of them, the many where once there was one, and she had forgotten that too, had thought she had left it behind, but then she remembered how it had felt, remembered it now, so many years after it first swam from within her. She listened to the strange speech, and then she put a finger to her lips.

She said, Hush now.

She said, Mother says be quiet, just a little longer.

And then the splashing stopped.

And then the singing began.