The Kept (15 page)

Caleb shook his head. He could feel the dirt sifting through a hole in his pocket and trailing down his leg, tickling him. A smile began to creep across his face.

“I snuck into their bedroom at night and cut both their throats,” White said.

Caleb repressed a burning urge to run. He had to stay. The knowledge that he was standing with and working for a murderer didn’t shock him; it only confirmed his suspicion that he was in the right place. What did surprise him was his appearance. Caleb squinted at White, the outline of his jaw, the proud way he held his head, his upright bearing, and knew he’d never seen him flit across the frozen landscape from the hole in the barn. White was one of them, but a different breed.

“Was it the right thing to do?” He leaned on the railing. “Most would say no. But as I lived in their house and ate their food, my fear was gone. We do what we have to do so we can be unafraid.” Caleb observed London White further: the precisely folded kerchief, the watch chain that dangled in an exacting crescent, the brightly, exhaustively polished shoes, the neatly combed hair. “And you, Caleb, I think you know that.” He chuckled to himself. “One step ahead already. I knew it when you asked me—no, told me—that I was going to give you a job.” He glanced at Caleb out of the corner of his eye and a glint of a smile flirted across his lips. “You’re not afraid, are you?”

Caleb knew he needed to grow accustomed to lying. “No. I’m not.” He saw an opportunity present itself. “I need to know something.”

White patted Caleb on the shoulder. “Good boy.”

“I need to buy a pistol.”

White straightened Caleb’s collar, buttoned an additional button on his shirt. “What you need is some new clothes. I shall bring you some.” He licked his palm and smoothed Caleb’s hair. “Shirt, pants, a new jacket.”

“I don’t need a new jacket,” Caleb said forcefully.

White seemed to weigh his response. “Okay, Caleb.” He picked a stray hair from his shirt and blew it from between his fingers. “A pistol? Whatever for?”

White turned to the front door, where there stood a stocky man with a wide smile and a nose that even from the upper floor could be seen as crooked, broken many times over. White licked his hand again, but this time patted down his own hair and adjusted his suit.

“Owen Trachte, in flesh and blood,” White said, loud enough for the man to hear. “Polish the railings next,” he said to Caleb, before descending the stairs. Owen looked to Caleb like a new kind of man—something he’d never seen before, different, even from London White. He didn’t have White’s smooth confidence, or the silent strength Caleb saw in his father, or the friendly openness of Frank at the Brick & Feather Hotel. Owen bore with him something different, a naked anger that Caleb thought, at unguarded moments, might be found on his own face.

C
HAPTER 4

H
er hands raw and screaming with coin-size blisters, Elspeth sat next to Charles and sipped from a stein of beer. She didn’t wish to go back to the hotel to that sad boy sitting on the stool with his rifle in his lap, waiting for a group of killers to pass beneath his window. So she occupied the same chair in the same bar from the previous evening, listening to Charles talk more about his life. He told her he’d come to this part of New York from the coast of Massachusetts, where his family had lived for generations, a long line of fishermen and whalers. He told her of the ocean, of going out in a ship as a boy until he could see nothing but the enormity of the world; how the calm seas exposed the curve of the earth, which dizzied him and made him afraid he could slide off at any moment. The Heather blood—his father had told him—did not run strong in his veins. Land, he said, was where Charles would need to make his way. And so he left Massachusetts to escape the constant lapping pull of the sea.

Like Elspeth, he’d traveled all over New York, seen much of the state—the mountains, the mighty river to the north, the vast stretches of green land between. But the shore of the lake, he said, had felt like home. The wind-powered waves were more than large enough for him. He’d been to Erie’s center and jumped into the gray water and had been unafraid. The town’s almost constant cloud cover suited him, as did the way the snows could move in without warning and alter the earth in minutes. “It struck me,” he said, “as a good place to hide.” He stroked his red beard. His moustache was frosted with ale. He smiled at Elspeth. “It’s good to talk,” he said.

“You didn’t talk before?” Elspeth said. “To the man who was injured?”

Charles stared into his beer for a long time. Elspeth almost asked the question again before he said, “I guess Ben and I were never all that close.” Elspeth thought maybe she’d spoken out of turn, that perhaps the accident had been worse than she’d imagined. The drink had worn them both down; their edges had softened and their usual care had eroded. “I have to apologize,” he said. “I lied to you.” He looked up at the ceiling. “About the Bible pages. My mother didn’t put them on the windows of my bedroom.” He traced his finger around the rim of his glass. “She put them in the outhouse. It got so stiflingly hot in there in the summer.”

The admission made her laugh. It took effort for her to suppress her real laughter and move it down a register. Charles joined her. “Did you tell Ben that?” she said, thinking she continued the joke, but Charles stopped laughing abruptly. He drank for a long time, his Adam’s apple rising and falling with each swig. “What about your wife? How did the two of you meet one another?”

It was Elspeth’s turn to gulp down some more of her ale. “That’s a long story,” she said. The truth fluttered around inside her throat like a butterfly and she needed to leave before it flew out on its own. She gathered her coat. “For another time.”

Charles begged for her to stay. “What about the gloves? We were going to buy you more gloves.”

“The mercantile is open at this hour?” she said. The windows reflected the two of them, hunched over the bar. Beyond that, pitch-dark.

Charles’s glance outside made him appear offended by the passage of time. “You’re welcome to use mine long as you need them,” he said. “After all, I owe you.” Charles drained the rest of his drink, leaving nothing but froth dancing at the bottom of his mug. He signaled for the barkeep, who stepped out from the shadows and slid another beer in front of him, foam climbing over the sides and down his fingers as he grasped it. “Fatherhood,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” Charles’s voice had taken on a new shape, something harder and sharper. “You have a nice boy. He’s handsome and polite—much like you. A good boy.” He spun a coin on the bar and snatched it up in his fist. “You’ve done well for yourself, van Tessel, you and your wife.”

Elspeth thought of Jorah’s countless hours reading to the children, schooling them, teaching them the ways of the world as best he could. He practiced long into the night in the living room—she could hear him parsing out the passages of the Bible, the thin pages crackling as he turned them. Caleb didn’t figure into those memories; he’d been in the barn, where his small bed took up a tiny fraction of the huge building, alone in the loft, the hay heaped around him, thick and thin by season.

“You should get back to your wife and children, and I should get back to my son,” Elspeth said, and rose unsteadily from her stool. As she left the tavern, she heard Charles slam down his mug and call for another drink.

C
ALEB HURRIED TOWARD
the Brick & Feather—hoping to reach their room before his mother—but his head spun with lack of sleep. Breathless, he sat on a windowsill to rest when he saw Frank on the other side of the thoroughfare. Caleb shook at the prospect of crossing the street, loaded as it was with horses and men and all their implements. He collected his courage and ran across the road, passing between two carriages, one holding a young couple, and the other loaded with firewood.

“Hello, Frank,” Caleb said as he caught up to the man’s long strides.

Frank, grim, tipped his hat but said nothing. He stopped in front of the barbershop. A horse whinnied from the post, and Caleb stroked its mane. The horse nuzzled against him in the crook between his neck and shoulder. He wondered how his animals had fared with the doors to the barn open, the weather invading, and the food scarce. “I’m sorry,” Caleb said.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

The horse nipped playfully at Caleb’s ear, and he ducked his head away. “I mean, I think you’ve got things wrong.”

“Do I now?”

“I was raised on a farm, just me and my family. Some man in the woods told me to go to the Elm Inn, so I thought I should go.” Frank glanced into the street in a manner that Caleb took for caution at being seen with him. “It’s terrible,” Caleb said, and he meant it. “Frightening.” He next used a phrase his father had reserved for the worst the boys could do—like when Jesse broke the girls’ dollhouse fighting with Amos, or when Amos had persuaded Caleb to jump from the loft door using only Elspeth and Jorah’s pillows to cushion his fall. Caleb’s deepest memory of the words, however, occurred when one night Jorah had told the story of the tower of Babel to the girls, who had said it reminded them of Caleb. Usually this sort of application pleased Jorah, who would praise the girls for finding the Bible in their lives. But this time he went quiet. They asked why they couldn’t understand Caleb and he couldn’t seem to understand them. Then their father said that if they didn’t act, Caleb might be one of them. Outside the window, Caleb cringed at his words. “God help the heathens.”

Frank slipped the hat from Caleb’s head and laughed. “You cannot keep walking around looking like this.” He steered Caleb inside.

A bell sounded as they entered. In the center of the barbershop, a thin man slept in a worn leather chair next to the woodstove, a book in his lap. His sleeves were rolled to his biceps, and he wore black suspenders and red striped pants. He snored lightly. Caleb didn’t wonder why: The heat and the soothing smells in the room made his eyelids heavy as well.

Frank gave the man a small shake. “Teddy,” he said. The barber opened his eyes. He licked his finger and placed the mark in his book. “Have time for two?” Frank asked, and Teddy noticed Caleb for the first time.

“Who’ve we got here?” Teddy asked and stretched. With a yawn, he brushed the chair clean as Frank introduced Caleb. Teddy took the blade to the strop, sliding it back and forth, and asked after Frank’s wife.

“She’s as big as a house,” Frank replied. “But she’s well. She sends her love.”

“It’s going to be a boy, Frankie, I know it,” Teddy said, “and I’ve never been wrong. Have I?” He pointed a pair of scissors at Caleb, and Caleb shook his head no. “See, even the boy knows.”

“My wife is expecting,” Frank explained to Caleb, and answered his question before he could ask. “We’re having a baby. Cut the boy’s hair first, if you could.”

“Of course. It’s my policy to only nick the last shave of the day.”

“I must always be last then.” They laughed. Caleb liked how they talked and smiled at their jokes. Frank looked at ease as he held his palms out to warm at the fire.

Caleb hopped up into the chair. The barber put a sheet around him, and—as he got a closer look—asked, “Who did this to your head?”

“A nice old woman,” Caleb said, “that my father and I met on our way here.”

“She may have been nice,” Teddy said, “but she didn’t see too well.”

He splashed a liberal amount of oil onto Caleb’s scalp, passed his comb through it twice, very slowly, then began cutting. The hair fell in clumps onto Caleb’s lap. He used to stand in line with his brothers and sisters when his father—always on a rainy day—cut their hair. Sometimes he told them the story of Samson, others he would recite Psalms, “
For innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me
,” or “
They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away
,” and tell the children with a smile that by cutting their hair he was ridding them of enemies and iniquities at the same time. It was one of the only jokes his father ever told.

The night his father had killed a man, he’d paused in the tall grass when he’d heard Caleb’s footsteps, and Caleb could see the clouds of his father’s breath slow and then stop as he listened, everything made silver by the moonlight. The rain washed the blood from the grass, but it didn’t erase what Caleb had witnessed. Two days later, the man dead and hidden away, Caleb walked about in a fever, and when he went into the house for lunch, his father was there, sharpening a knife. Caleb froze. He assumed his father knew he’d been the one in the woods with him.

“Shall I cut your hair today, Caleb?” his father asked, drawing the blade down the whetstone. Jorah did not ask questions in a manner that required an answer, but when Caleb said no, afraid of sitting under his father’s eye, beneath the knife he wielded so effortlessly, Jorah went back to sharpening the blade. That evening, frightened of his reaction when his father performed his nightly sermon, he pretended to be late and waited for the prayer to end before he entered the kitchen. His father had glared at him with fire. A moment later, however, his look changed, softened, as if Jorah understood him in some small way, yet Caleb’s fear never left.

“You okay, son?” Teddy asked. “You’re shaking.” Their voices faded. “Has he eaten today?”

He hadn’t since breakfast—Elspeth’s money had not lasted long—and being in the warmth of the barbershop with its pleasing scents and the rhythm of the scissors in his ears and the reassuring pressure on his scalp had made him groggy. The memories of his father were the last thing he thought of before he slid off the seat, dropping into a soft mat of hair.

E
LSPETH CARRIED A
small bag of licorice as an offering to the boy. The beds were made, and the room was cold; he hadn’t been there in hours. The man at the front desk, Wilkes—the very same who’d held Caleb’s shotgun—said he hadn’t seen Caleb all day. Then he said, almost under his breath, “Suppose he could be at the Elm Inn.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” he said, and smirked, but when he saw Elspeth’s face, he no longer found it funny. “Frank told me your son asked for directions to the Elm Inn. That’s when Frank took his gun. I figured you knew.” Wilkes coughed. “The Elm Inn, sir, is a house . . . A place where men meet women.”

He offered directions without her having to ask.

Obviously Caleb had listened to the man in the woods, with his rank breath and wooden leg. She ran despite the soreness from working the crane, the pain in her side growing and throbbing like a living thing. Though it slowed her, she didn’t stop. She took the steep steps two at a time, rushed past the scorched wood confirming she had the right place, and opened the door.

The doorman—his mass dwarfing the chair upon which he sat—merely tapped the money box on his lap. The dim room and smoky haze took a minute to get used to and the first thing she saw when her eyes adjusted was Owen Trachte. She knew him instantly; he possessed the stubbed features and square shoulders of his father. The thought of Phillip Trachte, Watersbridge’s only doctor twelve years prior, took Elspeth’s breath away as swiftly as the kick of a mule. Elspeth hadn’t had time to worry herself with being recognized, but her past had stepped out of the murk to remind her of her sins. The room grew hot and blurred, the details melting away.

“Help you, fella?” Ethan said, perhaps seeing the pallor on Elspeth’s face.

“No.” She collapsed into one of the upholstered chairs around the entryway. She loosened the scarf at her neck and tore the hat from her head.

The doorman looked at her sideways. “Ain’t no resting place.”

Elspeth’s breath raced away from her, faster and faster until her lungs squeezed shut and her eyes searched the room for relief.

“Hey, hey, hey,” the doorman said. He disappeared out of the clear center of Elspeth’s vision and into the smudged periphery. He came back with two glasses, one filled with whiskey, the other cloudy water. She drank them between gasps, the liquid escaping out the corners of her mouth. He told her how much she owed him for the whiskey and then asked, “You seen a ghost or something?”

Elspeth didn’t admit to him he might as well be right. Though she relived her sins daily, the memories had a gauzy quality to them, like a story she’d read a long time ago. Phillip Trachte had placed Caleb in her hands, but she’d lost many of the particulars to time. Owen hadn’t been there, though he’d been a constant presence at Phillip’s side. Owen’s mother had died when he was small, but his faint memories of her and their false promise gave the boy an unsettling edge. His rigid posture always carried threat. On the seldom occasions when he was not allowed into the room with his father, he would lash out, breaking a glass or plate or stealing something from the jacket of an expectant parent. Elspeth couldn’t recall how she knew this; she certainly had not witnessed it herself, but she figured that Phillip had told her of it. This adult Owen laughed, and she saw the gap in his smile where one of his friends had knocked his front tooth out with a fire poker. They’d been dueling—something picked up from a story Phillip had read to them. Elspeth had been in the office putting away an armful of supplies when she heard the roar of Owen’s temper, the clash of weapons, and then his small, surprised yelp.