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

until at last we were rarely inthe 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.

T HERE 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 moonshone 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.

W E 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