That day, I felt myself only a fisherman, only a trapper with rabbits in hand, but already I had been remade again, my station changed upon an event unattended and now revealed: In our sitting room, in the rocking chair I had hewn for the fingerling’s birth, there my wife waited holding a baby boy, his wide face howling, his wrinkled body swaddled into some blanket I had never seen, perhaps also only lately sung into being.
Memory as new fatherhood’s first failing: To have my wife stand and pass the baby’s warm weight into my arms, then with a whisper press the child’s name against my ears. To hold the happy shape of this son and for a moment not care where he came from, not care how he was made, not care that in my joy I was believing what did not deserve belief—and then to have this feeling taken as the fingerling reacted, attacked, punched out from within the cage of my ribs until my heart thumped wrong, until I stumbled and reeled, until my horrified wife reclaimed the baby from my embrace before I could drop him to the floor.
YOU WILL NEVER LOVE HIM, said the fingerling. I WILL NEVER ALLOW IT. THIS BROTHER, YOU WILL NEVER KEEP HIM CLOSE AS YOU HAVE KEPT ME, AND ALWAYS I WILL CLAIM YOU FOR MYSELF—
Is this not what you wanted? asked my wife. Have I not given you what you asked of me, all you have ever asked?
No matter which way I opened my mouth, I did not know what to say, how to say anything without saying it all. Against my unexplained distance my wife clutched tighter this foundling, the baby boy whom she called our son, whom she called a name meant for another, for one of our previous failed children. With the boy held to her breasts, now suckling oblivious, then my wife insisted again that this was my child, that I should not doubt, that she did not understand why I doubted.
She smiled and said, We made this child together, with one body weaved against the other, as we had tried to make so many others.
At my silence she tried again to smile, and I tried too, and when I failed I left behind that joy and confusion to step out onto the porch, then onto the dirt, where in private I might let my body shake. I circled round behind the house, and there I discovered the garden already unmade, its dank sod overturned, the many buried objects of baby raising now ripped anew from its earth so that they might be reinstalled in the house, each useful at last.
And then to have to look back at the house I had built, filled now with what I had not.
To have to listen to the fingerling say, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU SO.
To have to have him be right, and to not yet know what that meant.
MY WIFE, HOLDING HER NEWBORN, her body taking full part in her false motherhood, so that her breasts were ample in the months after the finding, and at her tit seemingly always the foundling nursed, drinking deep: I rarely held him myself, but from across our rooms I measured his quality, surveyed his coarse black hair, his wide face and heavy-lidded eyes, the warm bulge of his plumped belly and limbs, his mouth that could then make only the dumbest sounds, cries announcing hunger, exhaustion, a soiling. It was a son I had wanted and a son I had been given, but what son was this? Even in his infancy I recoiled at how possessive his crinkled fingers were, holding her to his lips with more urgency than those of any baby I’d known, more than any of the right-born sons I’d seen on the other side of the lake, the first objects of my bachelor’s jealousy. Still I was not satisfied, and I was not alone in the anger I felt, my strange rejection of the baby’s health, the baby: Ghosted within my belly, the fingerling swam faster to make his own feelings known, stung his renewed need throughout his home of bile and half-digested fish, where in the absence of his mother’s milk he had found some fair substitute, so that by then he had surely devoured some permanent part of me; not what I made with my body, but what my body was made of.
FOR THAT FOUNDLING, OUR FALSE son, my wife and I played at parenting together, and in those early years we learned him in the ways of our family and also the first four of the elements, dirt and house and lake and woods: Cross-legged upon the fur-covered floor, we told him what we had been taught, that those four aspects were all we were—but then my wife said there was another, a fifth, and that this element was called mother, that it was her mothering that made the foundling, more so than any other. I thought this to be a lie but said nothing, kept silent my concern at her greedy deception—and then as I withdrew I came as well to discern elements previously unknown. Soon I wished I had spoken of these others first, to position them before her claim, or that I’d had the courage to speak of them after, to displace it: For if mother was an element, then so was father, then so was ghost, then so there were at least seven, a number much increased from what we had earlier believed, from what we had been told to expect, long before our arrival upon the dirt.
Over some number of months, a year, two years, we taught the foundling to crawl and then to walk, to speak in words and then in phrases. We tried to teach him how to play but failed, or else I did: At first I believed the foundling to be possessed by some strange seriousness, some unchildness, but soon I heard through a window his squeals at the tickling of his mother, at her fingers teaching him to feel ticklish.
I had never heard this laugh before, had never caused it no matter how I had thrown the boy into the air, no matter how I caught him just before he crashed, no matter what other roughhouses I taught him, as I myself had been taught.
By the time the foundling began to sing my wife’s simplest songs I had learned to restrain the fingerling, but always he watched for his chances, and soon all my angers were ulcered inside me, and one by one the fingerling sought their increased company, in whatever pits they burned their slow language. My wife and I were quieter then too, gently estranged, and so from us the foundling learned to speak only slowly, a lack set against all the years the fingerling had whispered in my ear: By the time the foundling said his first word, the two matched syllables of mother, by then I had been convinced of my ill feelings against him.
In the months that passed he refused to learn any other word—any other but mother, mother, mother, mother—and at night my newly named wife held him between us in the bed, her touch always on him and never me, and at meals the fingerling conspired from my gut as my wife fussed over the foundling’s every want, as their voices filled the small house, until again and again I fled the clamor of their table to go out into the moony woods, where in those days I would often find myself digging some unneeded plot, like a dog who has not yet found his bone but still wants the place to bury it.
Despite the mystery of his origins, in most ways the foundling was a boy as I had always imagined a boy would be: His learning to walk was followed by a destructive curiosity where he knocked over the carefully arranged objects of our house, cracking worse our already-bear-chipped bowls and also the wife-sung ones, or else endlessly clacking his mother’s spoons against one another. Once he could better speak, he began to question every action my wife or I made, his halting sentences querying the origins of fish, the depth of the lake, the sequence of the seasons, and also crying at what he did not understand, what we could not explain into kindness, like the first time he watched me strip the hide off a deer or scrape free a fish’s scales. Soon the foundling bawled every dusk when I approached the house, even when I came empty-handed: For while it was his mother who cooked for him, he saw only that it was I who fished and trapped, skinned and slaughtered and butchered, and even though he had no trouble sharing in the meals we made, it became my wife he thanked and me he feared.