What was I to make of these rooms, the few I saw before they were shut away, and also of what they were filled with? Some held objects obvious in purposed pairings—the crib and the cradle, the bottle and the blanket—but others less so: In one room, I saw the death of a cougar but not the cougar itself; in another, the moltings of a thousand butterflies; and then a single giant specimen of the same species, bigger than any I’d seen, first flapping slowly about the room, then becoming more and more agitated as it failed to find its escape, thrashing its iridescent body against the walls of its cell until its magnificent wings were broken.
The creation of these new rooms—this deep house—took some toll on my wife, or else the strain of mothering the foundling began to diminish her, or else it was only the years, the first decade of our marriage already ended: Her porcelain skin paled further, shrank tight against her bones, and her long black hair shone less and less, until at last she took a pair of scissors to it, cut its length up and around her ears, and afterward it seemed her face was different than I remembered, as if her hair’s framing was enough to make her one person, its absence another. Some days her voice was so hoarse from her singing that she claimed she could not speak at dinner, and at other meals she did not speak but gave no reason.
THE DAYS WERE THIEVES, AND the happier ones the worst, their distractions allowing the hours to pass unnoticed, allowing the minutes to be snatched away without knowledge of their passing. As my wife contented herself with the foundling, so I tried to make my trapping and fishing count for something, so I tried to convince myself that the fingerling could be a son all my own, son enough, and better for his embedded residency, a station where neither of us might ever lack the other, as the foundling lacked his mother at every moment: For what breast was brought soon enough after the hunger, what calming touch brought comfort in the instant of its need? No, whenever we were satisfied, then we were deluded, and in our delusions the days took from us what was ours, as wood hollowed with termites, as all iron rusted, as our clothes faded and split their machined threads, and as the home-sewn furs that replaced them grew stale and stiff. Seasons went by, each less distinct than the one before, and what world we had grew only sparser, colder: Now there was less to trap in the woods, less to catch in the lake, and what restockings there were made things only worse, as with the blunter animals the bear brought back.
And the bear? It too worsened with the days, so that everywhere I went in the woods I found its fallen fur, the marks where it scraped it free of its itching skin, against boulder and branch and now bark-bare trunk.
My wife and I, we aged, and although I knew it was not correct, still it often appeared our children were the agents of our diminishment: the fingerling, devouring me from within, and the foundling, always at his mother’s side, taking of her body, her energy, her time, her grace. And so the days passed, and as they passed they took: Our hair grayed, our teeth yellowed, our bodies stooped across our bones, and in the mirror there was no one I recognized, only my fatter face, my beard atop that fat, my body bigger, and yet every year there was even less of me to love, to be loved by.
AND ALSO WHAT DID NOT change: Still I was only a fisherman, only a mere trapper of beast and bird, only a husband and perhaps a father—except that despite my wife’s assurances I still did not believe the child I had raised with my wife was any son of mine. By the occasion of the foundling’s sixth birthday, whatever my wife had done to make the child her own had exhausted my patience, and on that day I determined I would avoid its truth no more, and if she persisted in her claims, then she would cease to be even the slim wife she had become.
But how to force the issue, to put my family to the test?
As my wife had invented, so I invented too, for in that absence of rules it was often possible to make my own.
At the fingerling’s suggestion, I extracted from our traps two rabbits, and from the lake I took three fish—the better, he said, to test the loyalties of our bodies against the histories of the same, to show what came from where and where each now stood. I brought my catch to her kitchen, secured it in the icebox for the making of the foundling’s birthday celebration, that last shared meal, wife-cooked later that day: The smell of seared fish. The blood-and-boiling-tomatoes stink of stewed rabbit. A birthday feast made only of flesh, and no cake for baby either.
Six years old, and still the most taste he had for sweets came from the breast of her, his mother, whom he would not quit in full.
Throughout my wife’s kitchenry, the foundling clutched about her aprons, her skirt hems, and likewise I clenched my left hand around my fork, my right around my knife, and also my stomach closed around the fingerling. My wife set the table, set pot and pan upon its wood, and then with our heads bowed we said our rote thanks to woods and lake and dirt and house, for the food we were about to eat, for what bounties the elements had given us. Afterward, my wife smiled or faked a smile in my direction, trying to mollify what hurt feelings I would not hide, and then she gave me the three fish she pretended I was hungry enough to eat, and to her giving I said or heard myself say No, and then, in the same voice, NO. ONE FISH FOR ME. ONE FISH FOR YOU. ONE FISH FOR THE BOY. OR ELSE WE ARE NO FAMILY.
Those were the words that I spoke to her, from behind the thickness of my beard, that newer face my wife said she did not like as much.
Those were the words she ignored as she reached for her ladle, as she scooped two steaming bowls of stew, one for her and one for the foundling, as she set his in front of his hungry fork.
I felt my words thicken the air between us, and when I stood my movements were each heavied with their vicious, viscous weight. Each move was perhaps easy to watch but harder to stop, and so even though my wife recognized my intentions, even though she shouted, rounding the room as I rose, still my hands set to gripping the edge of the table, lifting and lifting and lifting that surface until every once-right thing slid free: My ceramic plate scraped down across the up-angling wood until it hit the edge between two planks, and then the plate flipped past the foundling, who continued to sit in his chair, shock spreading across his face but too slow for safety. His utensils were still in his hands, some chunk of rabbit still skewered on the tines of his fork, and from his face his birthday expression disappeared—its happiness never a gift, only the promise of gifts—his mouth twisting as his bowl toppled into his lap, and when he at last leaped from his seat to cry out and swipe at his trousers, he took his attention off the still-climbing table, away from our last shared pot, the slipping cast-iron container, its metal barrel black and rough and alive with heat, its contents barely cooler than a boil.
I would have said I meant only to make my anger known—but then the table reared up over the foundling, and the pot struck him with a weight unexpected, its contents erupting as he crumpled, the gravy slicking his face and skin, steaming where it stuck.
How the foundling cried then! How he wailed for his mother, how he thrashed upon the floor even after my wife reached him, and how she cursed my name then, as she tore at his clothing, the furs and made cloth trapping stew against skin, as she wiped the burning food from his quick-blistered face, his tangled hair, his red-pocked arm.
As my wife lifted her naked son into her arms she said that she hated me, that I had made her hate me, and as she told me how she hated I realized I still held the table slanted, and as she told me she was leaving I lowered it back to level, let its legs thunk against the floorboards. Of all the many elements we had claimed and named, I had not given a number to family, had not even counted it among them, and this omission had not gone unnoticed by the fingerling, that relentless cataloguer of all my faults: Now it was family that would be missing, that in that moment was already gone, as my wife stood to carry the aggrieved foundling away.