In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods Read Free

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 aonce-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 herbloodied 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,