And in this room: How my wife made the bear weak. How she lay flat upon the dirt, upon the dirt floor of our cellar, and put her cheek upon the ground. How she whispered songs into the earth, how with those songs’ reverberations she lulled the bear to sleep even as she kept her sleep restless, to delay her rival’s tracking, her waking attempts to move upon the dirt. How the wounds my wife had given the bear worsened, how the bone snapped free of the rib meat, of the fleshy parts of the neck.
AND IN THIS ROOM, THIS new series of rooms that followed: My wife walking out of the house and across the dirt.
My wife lifting the hem of her skirt above the brambles at the tree line, choosing her steps carefully as she navigated the trapped woods.
My wife slowing to look at deer and elk, muskrat and wood-chuck, rabbit and squirrel, all still whole and hearty, sure sign this memory preceded the foundling, our finished family.
My wife stopping to smile from within a pillar of sunlight, such shafts already rare and soon to be rarer still.
My wife not carefree in that dappling, but preparing, gathering strength.
And in this room: the entrance to the cave at the center of the woods, marked only by her footprints in the muck, headed in.
And in this room: my wife traversing the many chambers of the bear’s cave, all descended from the one in which we so briefly lived when first we came to the dirt.
And in this room: my wife gathering the yawning cub below into her arms, then putting some few furs to rest in its place.
And in this room: the bear half lidded, locking its gaze with my wife’s, parent-that-was to parent-to-be. How angry the bear’s yellow eyes were, and how sad my wife’s.
And in this room: the song with which she beat and battered the bear.
Then another room, with the bear’s own song, its curdling attempt to fight in the manner of my wife.
And then another, with the secret of my wife’s ears, stopped up safe with wax and tiny balls of feathers.
And in this room: My wife holding the bear down with her song, then lulling that giant back to sleep. Then leaning in close, putting her lips inside the tickle of the bear’s ear, and there whisper-singing a lie, a vision to replace the truth: to make the bear believe she had awoken already and in her hunger devoured her cub, so that it might live no more, so that it might be back inside her, a jumble of leg and paw, face and fur, all feeding the one who fed it.
And in this room: How my wife was not sure she had succeeded until months later, when the bear awoke from her long hibernation to howl her shamed horror into the earth, to fill her cave with worse sound, to shake the earth and also the trees above, frightening the birds to flight, the beasts to quivering in their burrows and their beds, and afterward the woods seemed emptier, occupied only with what ruined fauna the bear and I would make together.
And in this room: A single moment, captured during the long lonely climb out of the cave, the sleeping cub cradled to her breast. A single note of the song she sung as she climbed, that secret song I knew so well, which she had practiced upon the dirt while I slept locked inside our bedchambers.
A single note, and yet how I knew what it could do, and what other notes would follow, and how I knew that even before she emerged into the air of the woods the cub was no cub at all.
How I knew all this at that first note, knew it even before I found the other rooms containing some other single sound of that transformation from bear cub to foundling, finished even before she arrived at our front door, the entrance to a house at last filled with family.
And in this room: again a ball of furs, same as I carried in my satchel, but memory made, song grown.
How I removed the true fur, bear given, and how I held it in one hand, then this song-made copy in the other.
How when I picked the two furs up again, I could not remember which was which, and so took them both.
And in this room, in these rooms, a vision: mine or my wife’s, of all the stars that had fallen out of the sky and into the lake; of those stars falling still, descending sputtering through the deepest water, then past into some other darkness, where for a time they might light the wide hollows below.
AND IN THIS ROOM: THE love letters we wrote to each other in the months of our courtship, aflame. This then the last seconds of their existence, when we burned them on the eve of our wedding, when my wife said that the words inked by my hand and by hers were the words of lovers but not spouses and that after we were joined we would need new letters with which to profess new promises.
But never again did we write each other, because afterward we always had each other so close.
What I would have given to be able to stand the heat of those old immolations, to have been brave enough to thrust my hand into their flaming shapes so as to read whom it was my wife had loved, so as to again become that person.
And in this room: the moment of our first lovemaking, which did not occur in the house but in that other country where we lived when we were first married, its cities once reachable by the road that led around the lake that, until we lost the head of its trail, could have taken us back home.
And in this room: a moment even earlier, the first time my wife raised her dress to me, exposing her battered shins. And then in another the first time I saw the bruises that blacked her knees and tendered the skin of her thighs.
And then, in another, the first time, long after those first times, when I realized she’d done this to herself.
And in this room: a memory of my parents, a story I had told my wife.
My parents, who should have taught me how to be a parent myself.
Who tried but perhaps could not succeed, for what did they know of families on this side of the lake, the mountains?
In their own country, children lived and lived and lived, and so many of our structures were unnecessary there, would be bright madness if erected in their shining world.
And in this room: the blanched face of the father of my wife in the moment I asked for his daughter. How it was my wife’s permission I needed, and yet I did not seek it until others had promised her hand.
And in this room: my father’s voice, telling me the purpose of a marriage was the improvement of a man and a woman, each meant to make the other better.
It is enough, he said, and also, You cannot expect to make the world better, not by any love.
He said it was only to my wife that I was responsible for my actions, and only to me that she could be held to the same standards. And as he said this I knew he believed it, that he did not know he was wrong, and that in his wrongness it was his duty to me he had not considered.
And in this room: the smile on his face as he said those words, which at the time I mistook for friendship, a bond we had not previously enjoyed.
And in this room: My younger father, years earlier, telling me what it means to be a man. My ungrayed mother, telling me what it means to be a husband. These two talks, which did not take place at the same time, joined here as they never were, so that I would be reminded that their advice was anything but the same thing—and also I wondered how my wife knew, how she knew these parts of me to take, to put into her own deep house as if they were hers—and it was the fingerling who provided the answer, who reminded me of what flesh she took to make her moon.