How I fought him then as I had not since the burning of the deep house.
How I fought him limb by limb, digit by digit, so that he might not bring harm to the foundling, but to do so not yet for the foundling’s sake, or not his sake alone.
Soon old hurts began to throb, and also there was my shattered ankle, which I unwrapped and studied by the light of the moons. I spent what water remained washing the wound somewhere out back of the house, where thick clots and then new blood puddled the frozen earth. What remained beneath was almost too wrecked to call an ankle, and never again did I walk straight or stand perfectly upright, but when my ankle was as clean as it could be, I wrapped it in fresh fur, making myself a boot as I had once made an armor.
Afterward I returned to the house, to the bedroom inside the house where the foundling slept, where he would sleep for some long period, during which I would keep some close vigil, during which I would leave him only twice: once to remove him something to eat from the woods, and once more to return to where the foundling had found me, so that I might drag some branches behind me, obscuring the smaller footprints he left in the blood-thawed earth nearby, so that if the bear did still live I might believe she would not so easily find his sign.
The foundling was awake again when I returned to the house the second time, sweating and shaking but able to stand and speak, his voice as high and lilting as ever. He complained of his long hunger and of the dirt’s cold air, and when I pressed him to speak of his mother instead or at least first, he only repeated his complaints. In response I dressed him in my old clothes, and where those fit wrong I modified them with my knife, holding the cloth away from his body so I might slice some strips from the bottom of his shirt, from the low hem of his trousers. Afterward I sat him down at the table, and there I opened him a hairless rabbit to eat, warmed it as best I could.
While he ate I watched his face for the fear I had expected to see, but now he seemed unafraid of this room in which his features had been undone, perhaps because his face was no longer exactly that same face, not that of the son my wife had masqueraded before me, no longer a blend of my features and hers. Now I was removed altogether, by the same method by which my wife had smoothed his scars, by the way long before that she had removed the many aspects of the bear.
After he was finished, the foundling got down from his seat, came over to stand before mine, and as he placed his hand into the wiry nest of my beard, all my body quivered toward his touch. I opened my arms with more hesitance than I wished, but he did not hesitate, only climbed into my lap, curled against my chest. He was too big to hold like this, but it was what I wanted, and anyway he was asleep before I could push him away, and as I held him, daring not to move, again and always the fingerling howled, accused, called me traitor. And did I bother to answer?
No, I did not, for what other answer was there that he would accept?
WHEN THE FOUNDLING NEXT AWOKE, I fed him the rest of his rabbit, then worked the warped iron of our stove to heat him some water, found him soap to bathe away the last of his fever smell.
I waited while he scrubbed and dried and dressed, and then I begged him to speak, to tell me of his mother, of my wife.
I said, Tell me it all, and do not stop, no matter what you see upon my face or what I do with my hands.
I said, I am not always in control of who I am, but I do not want you to be afraid of me, not anymore.
The foundling nodded, and then he said he knew, that he had long known.
He said, My mother showed me the man you used to be. She made many rooms to show me, and also to show you, so that when next we were together you would be yourself again, your right self, and we would not have to be afraid.
He said, She made a house for you, put all of herself inside it for you to recognize, but even after you saw what she wanted to say still you never came to where we were, although often we thought that you would.
He said—and here I heard his adult voice most, a deepness hidden within his child-shape—he said, Do you know how sad it made her to have you refuse her forgiveness? Do you know how sad it made me, to find you out in the woods, playing with your stupid traps?
The foundling and his mother had listened for my footsteps, and then my longer periods of stopping, resting or else slow consideration. He said that sometimes his mother said she heard me running, that I was moving faster now, that at last I was coming and that soon we would all be reunited.
Other times, he said, I would pause so long that they wept for fear of my death, for his mother said only the collapse of my bones could have stopped my advance, could have kept me away.
The foundling said he’d watched his mother waste herself to make the deep house, singing her bones inside out, making of her sweat salty rivers in which to cool my face and of her flesh banquet rooms in which to feast my hunger—but I remembered no such meals, and told the foundling so.
Certainly there were rooms of flies and rooms of maggots and rooms of garbage, I said. Certainly there were poison-rimmed goblets, plates powdered with pressed privet, tetanus-stilled beasts caught in rusty traps.
The foundling shook his too-small head, stopped the advance of his story.
Mother said you’d say that, he said.
He said, She said you were afraid of her, and also of me. That something had put a fear in you, and that now you were wary. And still she said we should wait for you to arrive, still she said you would arrive transformed.
What if deep house was not all there was beneath the earth? What if there was deep dirt? What if there was deep woods and deep lake? What if my wife was then making some new world beneath the dirt, and only my cowardice atop the great stairs had kept me from reaching it, from taking part in its reconfigured elements?
What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known—all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons—what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?
What if my wife had known how to leave it all behind? What if she had tried to tell me, and what if I had not listened?
EXHAUSTED OF HIS STORY, THE foundling slept in my lap, and as he slept I stroked his hair as I had stroked my wife’s, as I had once hoped to stroke the fingerling’s, when I still imagined he might be a boy.
And how the fingerling hated this substitution, the equivalency it suggested, and how he wished me to stop.
How he knew what I was doing, what I planned to do next, and as warning he filled me with his black feelings, attempted to rob me of my enjoyment, my small joy at this first night of new fatherhood, and with his movements he kept me even from sleep, from indulging in my exhaustion to take some simple slumber of father and son. I held the foundling, and the fingerling moved agitated within me, and soon I began to feel some dull pain in my shoulders, then my arms and hands.