The Kept (12 page)
“I’ll manage to find it,” Elspeth said.
“Well, it’d be tough to pick the wrong lake,” Charles said and laughed again. He placed his hat atop his head, and Elspeth noted his scars and misshapen knuckles.
Caleb cut into his steak. He heard the wood creak as his mother sat back down, but could only watch the blood draining from the meat and gathering in the curve of his plate, unwilling to look at his mother until she glanced down at her food. Only then could he study this new person across from him.
A
t three forty-five in the afternoon—according to the grand hotel clock—Elspeth left the Brick & Feather having told Caleb to stay in the room with the door locked, and headed west, downhill toward the lake. The Great Lakes Ice Company occupied the curve of land on the water, the unfamiliar machinery for the extraction of the ice—tall, dangerous-looking metal structures and beaten sleds with sharpened blades—close to the lakeside. Snow clouds gathered into a mighty wall over the water. The icehouse loomed to her left, in a direct line from the shore, and she heard the calls and replies of workers inside. As she went, she studied the postures and affects of the men she passed and reminded herself to widen her stance, to move her arms less, and to crouch down a bit with each stride. Every man’s face possessed some kind of threat, some shade of darkness. Even Charles Heather, whom she found waiting for her outside the offices, an old train car, one of two set a bit apart from the bustle of the company. “Jorah,” he cried in greeting. He shook Elspeth’s hand warmly, then further enveloped it with his other hand. He rapped upon the door to the office three quick times. He’d tried to comb his hair, and the effect sent his red curls spiraling off the side of his head like the petals of a flower.
Inside, a fire blazed in a stone hearth. The building contained one rectangular room, with evenly spaced windows. The only door was behind them. Three old men sat at a long desk, two bent over ledgers, the third clacking on the black and white keys of an adding machine but similarly stooped. A plaid flannel blanket hung on the wall, its reds and blues eaten away in places by moths. In the corner, a crib appeared to Elspeth like an apparition.
“I’ve brought a new man,” Charles said. “A replacement.” He cleared his throat. “A replacement for Mr. Acker. This is Jorah . . .”
Elspeth tried not to stare at the crib and waited for someone to acknowledge it. Surely it could not be real, in this of all places. Impossibly, the sun bored through the clouds to find its lacy adornments and made them glimmer. “Jorah van Tessel,” she said, lost in the desire to peek over the edge of the crib.
One of the men—the eldest, judging by his lack of teeth and the white hairs coming from everywhere but his scalp—ceased his scribbling and put down his pencil. “Van Tessel, did you say?” Elspeth said yes, her mind fully enraptured by the illusion in front of her. The sure sound of fussing came from inside. The baby began to cry, tightening Elspeth’s body like a string on a fiddle. Maybe, she thought, the Devil played a trick on her. No one seemed bothered by the child’s plaintive call. “Are you of relation to Dedrick van Tessel?” he asked. The baby wailed.
Elspeth reeled. Torn from the crying, she saw the second oldest van Tessel boy, the smallest in size. Dedrick had been a scrappy child, always bruised or cut, whose clothes needed mending at least five times more often than the rest of the children. Dedrick spent hours in his room, serving punishment for hitting one of his brothers or sisters, but he also found ways to escape his confinement. Once he’d grabbed hold of his windowsill on the second floor, and from the kitchen below Elspeth watched his stubby legs kicking at the empty air before he let himself drop into the bushes. Her mother told her to keep silent unless Dedrick had hurt someone.
“No relation,” Elspeth told the old man.
“Dead,” the man at the adding machine said, and sniffed. “Fell off his horse, didn’t he, Horace?”
“Cracked his neck in two,” Horace replied, without pausing in his work.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She couldn’t imagine Dedrick grown. She tried to place a small beard on his jaw to make him appear older, but she ended up seeing him as he’d been. Elspeth thought of her father, too, tending the van Tessel gardens. But the years had gone so swiftly. Her mother and father had likely passed away. She envisioned two simple stones to mark their graves tucked in the corner of the van Tessel’s property. “A cousin perhaps. Distant cousin.”
“It’s an uncommon name. Dedrick was an uncommon fellow,” the eldest said. “Like Charlie here.” The other men in the office chuckled. “But, alas.” He snatched his pencil back up, picked some stray lint or hair from the point with his dirty fingernails, and resumed his work.
The baby’s cries clawed at her.
“Horace, should I tend to the baby?” Charles asked. Elspeth grabbed hold of the table. Her relief at the baby’s existence threatened to topple her. Her concern shifted to that of being discovered. Perhaps, she thought, something about her sympathy for the child colored her appearance: her skin flushed too brightly or her hands joined together the wrong way. Before she’d left the hotel, she’d inspected herself in the mirror and confirmed that without washing, and in Jorah’s sagging clothes, she bore more of a resemblance to a man, and she’d been careful to maintain this appearance. She looked to Charles and affected his belly-forward posture and tucked one thumb into her belt loop, as she’d seen a fair number of men do.
“Things cannot possibly be so dire,” Horace said, “that I would entrust a baby to you, Charlie.” All three old men laughed, and Horace pushed his way upright, joints cracking loud enough to be heard over the adding machine and the crying of the infant. He put a hand to his back and pressed himself up straighter. “I’ll see to her, I’ll see to her.”
“Should hope so—she ain’t my granddaughter,” the man at the adding machine said, and they laughed yet again.
Elspeth shifted so she could see into the crib, where the baby’s face had gone crimson, her toothless mouth open wide, fists clenched in incommunicable fury. Horace picked her up and clasped her tight to his chest. Elspeth was surprised at the ease of his movements and the sureness of his grip. The baby saw Elspeth and the crying slowed and then stopped. She blinked her wide eyes. “She likes you,” Horace said. “She doesn’t usually take to strange men. Do you?” he asked the child.
The room lurched. Elspeth gripped the table more firmly, gave more of her weight to it, afraid she would pass out.
He brought the baby closer. Elspeth could smell it, the sweetness of its skin, and she reached out a quivering finger and ran the back of it along the child’s cheek and a thrill spiraled through her. The rush of that soft skin. Everything inside of her moved faster, her heart larger, her bones stronger, her hearing clearer, her vision brighter. The memories she kept chained inside her broke free, including those she banished beyond all others.
She and Jorah had been on their own less than a year, and between the beatings Jorah took and the hard jobs that paid little, she’d convinced him to let her head out on her own to find work. She’d promised to use a fake name, for fear the van Tessels hunted their runaway workers, and to come home at the first twinge of trouble. He’d given her directions to the nearest town, where it took her less than a day of asking for work before someone pointed her to the doctor’s office. Dr. Watt hired her before she understood the position. “Are you queasy around blood, Clara?” he asked. She shook her head no. “Do you have a steady hand?” She did. “A strong overall constitution?” She thought so.
The next day, she held a man’s arm together while Dr. Watt sewed it up, whistling to himself, drawing the black string tight. Later than afternoon, after she’d washed the blood from her hands and Dr. Watt had commended her on her resolve, they’d gone to see an expectant mother. Throughout the examination the husband and wife argued over every aspect of their future child—whether it would be a boy or girl, what name they would give him or her, where he or she would sleep—and every disagreement circled back to a previous one and it started all over again. Elspeth had never before seen a woman yell at a man. Watt cleaned his pipe on his shirttail, untucked for this purpose. Once a week when the doctor checked to see how the baby lay in the uterus, the husband and wife would scream at each other until they were red-faced and sweating. Sometimes the doctor and Elspeth could hear them yell as they approached the boxy white farmhouse, the screams escaping through the open windows.
“Is this common?” Elspeth asked.
“On occasion,” Dr. Watt said. “It’s a difficult process for some. Most husbands aren’t quite so tolerant.”
Two months later, Elspeth was summoned from her hotel room in the middle of the night and ushered into the house by the husband, great concern on his face. The kitchen had been turned into a birthing room, a pot of boiled water perched on a Windsor chair, instruments laid out on a clean towel, the wife on the table with quilts and blankets piled under her, the room bright with light and warmed by the woodstove, and Dr. Watt smoking a pipe and massaging the wife’s stomach like bread dough, his head cocked toward the ceiling as if maybe someone had called his name. The baby was breech, he explained, speaking calmly to both the mother and Elspeth about what he was going to do. He pressed hard on the lower part of the stomach and tried to shift the baby, but it would not budge. The process was too far along, he said, the baby had already begun its journey and sat too low in her pelvis to be moved. He plunged his hand into the woman, and she howled. Her husband called from the porch, where they could hear his heavy boots pacing. “What’s happening?” he said
“Everything’s fine,” Dr. Watt said, but Elspeth could tell he was concerned. He bit hard on the stem of his pipe and then tossed it aside, the tobacco and ash scattering on the floorboards. “Not long now,” he said, and sure enough, a small foot slipped from the woman and the doctor didn’t hesitate to marvel at its size or vulnerability, and instead wrapped his fingers around the baby’s ankle and began to pull. Elspeth could see the child beneath the woman’s skin, the surreal lumps moving and squirming. She sensed the three of them—doctor, mother, baby—fighting each other, their wills pulling in opposite directions. Elspeth squeezed the woman’s shoulder and gently probed her stomach and then her lower abdomen before she located the head and pressed down with the heels of both hands, and the tension between mother and child eased, and nature once again took hold. Another leg emerged, and then the girl’s midsection, like a miracle. Dr. Watt yanked, impatient. Elspeth followed the head along its way with her fingers, applying pressure here and there when things stalled. The woman was small, but the doctor wasted no more time—sweat cascaded down his forehead, soaking a vee down his shirt—and with a great tearing he pulled, and the woman screamed and Elspeth wanted to hit him, balled her fist to strike. The head slid out and the doctor held the child—a girl—by the ankles he’d been yanking on for what felt like days and cleared her nostrils and her mouth and she wriggled in his hands. He gave her to Elspeth. She wiped the vernix and the blood from her body and face. She’d never seen something so pure, so untouched, and she marveled at the fragility and the stunning, electric life evident in every miniature movement.
Dr. Watt held out his hands to her and she pretended to find another speck of blood on the child’s cheek and clung to it an extra precious minute. After she surrendered the baby, Dr. Watt swaddled her tightly and handed her to the new mother, whose groans of pain and rocking back and forth halted in the presence of her child. The father came in and the expressions on both of their faces made Elspeth understand that no mistake existed that this joy could not undo.
For weeks Elspeth possessed a new vitality; something vibrant had opened up to her. She longed to experience what she’d seen; she yearned to hold her own child. But the more she and Jorah tried to conceive and the more failure stacked up, the less she could recall the thrill and the harder it became for her to even move, her bones aching as everything ebbed away. Gusta van Tessel haunted her, and she once dunked herself under water, but broke the surface and clanged her fist against the side of the tub. She’d left Jorah the next morning to find another job as a midwife.
In the icehouse office, the man at the adding machine waved a piece of paper in the air. “Enough with the baby. I got two babies in here already,” he said and slid the piece of paper across the desk to Elspeth. “Take this to Wallace. Charlie, show the man.”
Elspeth wished to stay and let the baby stare at her for the remainder of the afternoon, but Charles grabbed the paper and gave her a light push. The other two men had resumed their scribbling, the scratching of their pens loud in the room like the gnawing of mice in the night.
T
HE INTERTWINED BONES
of Caleb’s brothers and sisters reached out to him, their mouths suspended in grimaces of pain. The terror when he’d sneaked out of the pantry at night haunted him. They would sometimes appear to move, or he would hear a breath or a sigh, but when he composed himself, nothing had changed. Emma’s outline in the snow reassured him that she didn’t shift in the night or twitch in the periphery of his vision. He’d sit in the yard next to her body, like he had in the long grass with Jesse, and he would will things to be as they had been, the deathly silence merely the comfort of family. This calm never settled upon him fully, and when he stood up, the nightmare continued as reality. He would get to his knees, remove his gloves, and brush the snow from his baby sister’s face.
Not sure if he’d slept at all, he threw the covers aside and removed the scratchy nightshirt William and Margaret had given him, noting the bruises that ran up and down his legs and how his ribs protruded from his torso. He had a new hollow in his chest where he assumed his heart had been and he dressed as fast as possible. His Ithaca he once again fixed to his side before putting his jacket on, and he wound his scarf carefully around his neck to cover the section of the barrel that poked out from behind his shoulder.
In the lobby of the hotel, a fire crackled in the hearth. Men played cards at a table. Another sat in a chair, reading a book. Caleb tried to shake the ghosts that clung to him like spiderwebs. Frank stood behind the counter, the newspaper spread in front of him, and Caleb asked him where he could find the Elm Inn. Frank didn’t look up and spoke to Caleb in a secret language of streets and directions. When Caleb didn’t move, Frank creased the paper in the center and folded it over again, all with deliberation. “What’s your name?” Caleb told him. “Okay, Caleb.” Frank repeated what he’d said, only this time slower and using his hands. Caleb moved only a few steps, and Frank sighed, opened the gate that led out from behind the counter, and guided Caleb by his shoulders into the street. From there, he pointed at the hitch outside the post office, the light that illuminated the window of the barber’s, the darkened doors of the hardware, and explained to Caleb where he needed to turn past the church in order to get to the inn. “It’s on the side of the hill.”