And then one night there came another creak.
And then on another night, another.
And then some other night when the fingerling said, IT IS TIME TO FLEE THE DIRT, TO RETURN TO WHERE YOU ONCE CAME FROM.
IT IS TIME TO TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE, AND OVER THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND, WHERE YOU WILL CEASE, WHERE YOU WILL RELEASE ME, WHERE I WILL LIVE AND LIVE AND LIVE IN YOUR STEAD. AND SO AT LEAST SOME PART OF YOU WILL GO ON.
And that night I sat heavy with his words, and sometime later the buzzing sky begin to crack from its burden, forked everywhere with lightning that flashed across its surface but then did not disappear, instead remaining through the accompanying thunder and then beyond, and as I wondered at the lightning’s indelible persistence the fingerling spoke again.
WIFE AND FOUNDLING AND BEAR, he said, AND YOU UNABLE TO SAVE EVEN A SINGLE ONE.
And still I held my stubborn position, as always I had meant to hold it.
THE SMOKE FROM THE DEEP house stopped, and afterward everything turned to ice, all the world except the lake, its salted surface, and how long my life might have persisted like that, with me waiting white bearded and bent of body, if not for an injury worse than any other I had suffered: Cutting my way through the new and thicker brush of the woods, I stupidly put my foot into one of my own traps, its mechanism concealed beneath the undergrowth, and then I was caught by that forgotten device, some snare that the fingerling had failed to warn me away from, as he had warned me from so many others.
The snapping clasp of the trap’s mechanical jaws caught me by the ankle, breaking the skin and cutting muscle and tendon, and as the pain burned through my stuck leg I howled as so many other beasts had howled, screamed my accusations, screamed out my anger at the fingerling. At last he hoped to be proved stronger than me, and how I feared he was, all his smirking shapes together perhaps at last a better ghost than I was a man.
To plan the sawing of knife through bone, but again to fail to commit. To wail and drag at my broken, bloody leg, hauling the chained trap behind me in some limited circle, but to hear no response except the same silence that had already filled that frozen wood.
To despair, but to keep my feet, because to sit down upon the ice-strewn ground would be the first step toward giving up, toward accepting the death the fingerling had led me into, or else the begging for my life he hoped would win him his desires.
To sit down anyway, because eventually there was no strength left for the standing.
To feel my breathing shallow, my pulse slow. To close my eyes, and see nothing except the fingerling’s clumping movements inside my head, behind my eyes, his dark sparks and darker flashes.
To hear nothing, and then after the nothing at last something new, and then the fingerling’s agitated voice, saying NO, saying NO, saying NOT HIM.
To open my eyes to spy the approaching foundling, that boy who had never before been brave enough to cross the tree line, who had so rarely wandered even that far without my wife making soft tracks behind him, now trudging toward me through the bracken and the bramble, at last unafraid of the woods or else made the master of his fear.
I struggled, staggered to what remained of my feet, and then I called out to the foundling, said, We do not have much time.
I said, You should not be here, in these woods.
I said, Get out, and then I said it again and then again, and with each repetition of my warning the foundling recoiled but did not retreat, and also the fingerling raged furious, hardened his grip around my already-pressed organs, and still I tried to speak, croaking each breathless word, each syllable tasting of bile, of rotten teeth and ghosted flesh.
Help me, I said.
I said, Help me, but hurry.
The foundling I’d known was merely a child and might not have had the strength to open the jaws of the trap. This foundling was not so differently shaped, still small despite the decades passed between us, but he had little trouble yanking loose my injured leg, and if he was not careful he was at least quick, and if he hurt me worse at least I was cleared of what steel had caught me.
My ankle looked no better once freed, its bones and muscles and flesh sorely wrecked, but whatever pains the foundling caused were far less than how the fingerling would have seen me hurt, and also shamed and broken, and when the foundling stepped underneath my armpit I flinched so abruptly I nearly fell again—because what would the fingerling do now—and also how long had it been since anyone had touched me, since any other had tried to help?
With the foundling’s body supporting me—he was hard and wiry then, muscled like a man despite his prepubescent shape—we stumbled slow through the brambles, then out the woods, across the tree line, toward the house. As we crossed the dirt, I saw that the foundling’s once-burned face was somehow again unmarked, but also that he remained not quite well, and so he was joined to our family in this other way, how in each of us there dwelled some sickness, some scarred tissue or flustered potential, turned bone, twisted muscle: For the foundling, there was some fever found in the deepest reaches of the house, wet lands I had not seen. Or maybe it was the fire itself, caught in his flesh as it was so recently caught in the rooms of the deep house, the palace my wife had made, the ruins to which I’d had those rooms reduced.
Inside the house, I wrapped my already-swollen, bruised ankle in torn furs, the only bandages I could make. The inner hides filled fast with pooling blood, but I did not change them immediately, as first I thought to deal with the foundling, whose own illness seemed more pressing. There was no proper bed big enough to lay him upon, but there was my nest of blankets beside the broken one my wife and I had shared, and so I took him into the bedchamber, where I stripped off his sodden clothes, then wiped his body dry with the cleanest of our rough cloths. It took me aback to see how little he had changed against how old I had become, how heavy the decades lay upon my bones, and then I was startled again, at how passive his face remained while I toweled him, the foundling standing dispassionate, a child waiting beside the washtub for someone else to dress him.
In the absence of clocks I did not know how long it had been since the day the foundling’s mother took him away, but however many decades it had been his shape had aged only unto the cusp of adolescence: His shoulders and chest were still those of a boy, and there was no hair upon his lips or cheeks, nor under his arms or between his legs. Even the long, uncut hair upon his head was thin, thinner than I remembered, and as I stroked it off his hot face the fingerling made another heat inside my hands, a prickling numbness that took with it some portion of my senses there, so that I could not feel anymore the texture of the boy’s skin—and yet what little I felt I clung to, and did not forget: the foundling, a boy preserved by the devices of my wife, by her voice, her voice’s song.
Despite his fever, I covered the foundling in what other blankets I had, then took my bucket down to the lake, hobbling all the way, and fetched it full of the lake’s freezing water. Back in the bedroom, I found the boy asleep, his face senseless, his tossing body turning the sheets as I tried to quiet his movements with one hand so I could apply cool cloths with the other. Soon the room smelled wetly of sickness and salt, and despite the deep pain in my other joints I thanked the fingerling for my numb fingers, which could not feel the near ice of the lake water dripping from their age-spotted joints, and all the while that other son churned in my gut, overflowed my stomach with his bile, flooded my intestines with barely held diarrhea, filled my eyes with cruddy tears—and how I ached as he pushed his shapes outward, bulged my skin to make more room for his rage, his accusations, his righteous claims of dominion.