The Kept (17 page)
Elspeth surprised him by pulling a chair up next to his. They each sat in their own preoccupations. Elspeth felt like she was cooking a huge meal and every pot and pan, every kettle and dish, boiled over and she couldn’t get to any of them in time. She didn’t have enough arms, and couldn’t make anything quiet down long enough to gather her thoughts. She saw the paper in front of him and pulled it toward her. She found an article about the gold rush in Klondike Creek and read it aloud. Neither listened much to the descriptions of the hordes of men driven by the promise of an easier life to the dangerous wilds of Canada, but the steady flow of words made them each retreat farther into the cushions.
Caleb examined his mother. Their hair was similar—hers a bit darker, but it fell in the same waves, contained similar cowlicks. His nose could be hers, but they were common, sloping and unobtrusive features. His eyes were brown and farther apart; hers were gray as the winter sky. She had his high, pronounced cheekbones, though her face was less angular. Still, he thought, he belonged to her.
T
hat night Elspeth dreamt of Charles. She sat in her rocking chair, watching out the window of the farmhouse. The day had just started and she could see the brightness expand on the landscape in front of her. Charles materialized at the trailhead, his back bent by a heavy, black bag. As he approached, his steps burdened, he passed a depression that burst with red ribbons unfurling across the snow, rolling endlessly, and the whole hill became covered in crimson silk. She met him at the door. They kissed.
When she woke, she still felt his lips on hers. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and washed her face, but it could not rid her of the echo.
Caleb slouched against the wall, checking the street, his pillow propped up behind him. In the darkness, his eyes were gaunt and sunken, as if the effort of watching had hollowed them out. “Where did you get those clothes?” she asked, noting the new shirt and pants, neither of which had been patched and repatched.
“The man at the Elm Inn gave them to me for work.”
“Work?” she said. Despite the outfit, he looked poor and frayed at the edges.
“I’m only sweeping and cleaning up,” he said. He couldn’t believe how much his mother resembled a man, with her hair cut short, Jorah’s old clothes, and the rinsed shoe polish shadowing her jaw. Something about her, however, a leftover twinge of pain or some unfound piece of shotgun pellet, worried him. He longed to tell her he’d been the one to shoot her, but in their rushed bursts of time together he couldn’t work up the courage. “It’s the best place to find them.”
Her head fuzzy from sleep, she didn’t know at first what he meant.
“The killers,” he said.
Elspeth straightened the sheets and then the faded pink quilt on her thin mattress. The clock downstairs rang the hour. “I’m late,” she said, and bound her breasts and dressed in a hurry, her back to the boy.
O
UTSIDE,
C
HARLES WAITED
with a cup of coffee. They stood for a minute, both facing the empty street, covered over once again with a thick coating of snow. The images of the dream roiled in her head.
“I can’t wait for my family to return,” Charles said before the door had even shut behind her. “My boys. I miss my boys. Graham’s laugh—have I told you about Graham’s laugh?” He had, but Elspeth had come to like hearing his stories, the way his whole body became involved, swaying, hands gesturing, feet stomping. “When they were small, his brother Stephen pulled his arm from the socket—it hung there loose as an empty sleeve—and I had a hard time popping it back in, because every time I did, he would scream and I would try to lessen the pain and end up not going quite far enough. My wife got the idea of distracting him, and she tickled under his chin, and soon we were all laughing—Graham’s like a bird tweeting, high and fast—and I popped the arm back in.” His smile vanished. “Graham got upset. ‘You tricked me,’ he said. And we had. But he only blamed me. It was always my fault.” He coughed, expelling a thick cloud. “I’d forgotten that.”
“You’re a good father,” Elspeth said. “Blame is difficult to maneuver.”
He walked the rest of the way sullen and detached.
Jorah had never blamed Elspeth. Not fully. Perhaps he thought it their cross to bear together, but Elspeth knew they could not have children because of her. Dr. Forbes had told her so. He hadn’t seen her in nearly a year, though his manner betrayed no surprise at her sudden visit. “I expected you might ask,” he said. “I remember our conversations well.” All of her hinting around had not gone unnoticed, apparently, and yet that was not the worst of his news: He had no remedies, no prescriptions, and no cures.
The men swung poles at the ice, undoing the night’s slow, steady stitching over the wound they’d carved in the lake. The cracks echoed up the hill. The lamps hissed, hanging in a line from the icehouse down to the shore. The men on the lake worked in darkness, and with each passing day, Elspeth thanked God that she and Charles worked on the crane, near a bright light. They waited, drinking their coffee, hoping to time their last hot sip with the call to work. Until the men had cleared the canal and began sawing the blocks of ice out from the expanding hole in the lake, they had little to do. When the first block had been cut, they’d go to the water’s edge, where the temperature plunged, to free the crane’s joints and hinges from the coat of ice that had sealed them fast. They would strap on their cleats and jump up and down to get their blood circulating. In the same way, a man named Daniel patted the horses, shifted the blankets on their flanks, rolled and rubbed their leg muscles between his palms, trying to keep them warm until the first sled had been filled. The Friday before, one of the horses had pulled up lame on the first haul, and Daniel had screamed at Charles and Elspeth for overloading the sled. Daniel whispered close to one of the horse’s ears, and Elspeth thought of how Caleb would excel at such a job. Much more fitting, certainly, than the Elm Inn.
“Jorah van Tessel,” a voice said behind them. It was Edward Wallace. “I didn’t realize you were paid to stand and do nothing. Charles Heather, on the other hand”—he rapped Charles’s knuckles with his cane—“has earned a great deal of money for doing nothing.”
“They’re not finished clearing the canal,” Charles said.
Wallace glared toward the shore. “Go help out in the icehouse until the flow starts. Be useful, Heather.” He walked to his office, covering the ground in a few strides, cane knocking on the ice, bowing to squeeze through the door.
The icehouse was lined with stone and coal. Small gaps in the wood allowed air to circulate, keeping the room from retaining any heat. From the doorway, a sloping path descended into the body of the building. Blocks of ice rose into the air as tall as the tallest buildings Elspeth had seen, taller even than the roof of the church, though the steeple brought it closer to God. Pulleys and ropes hung everywhere from the great beams of the ceiling to hook and raise ice to the gaps at the top of the giant rectangular stacks. Men atop these stacks guided the blocks into place.
Charles hopped up onto a barrel.
“Aren’t we supposed to work?” Elspeth asked him. No sooner had the words come from her mouth than she saw Owen Trachte standing in a small circle of men, talking and gesticulating. She flinched.
“Owen Trachte,” Charles said. Owen was stuffed into the fabric of his three-piece suit, his massive neck and arms threatening to burst the seams, like an overstuffed sausage.
“He looks familiar,” Elspeth said. The sight of Owen didn’t concern her as much in the icehouse—she was well-concealed in her hat and scarf—but his presence rattled her.
“He’s around sometimes. I think he sells parts for a machine company. Or hardware. Or ropes, maybe.” When she didn’t react, he continued. “His father was a doctor who drank himself to death.”
“Maybe I knew his father,” she said. She’d known of Phillip’s habit, surely, and saw him sometimes at night in his office drinking and rereading letters from his wife, and she would find him in the morning, rumpled and reeking. He would leave the letters on his desk, and sometimes as he readied himself for work, she would pretend to search for something so she could read a few lines in his absence. “Do they look alike, Owen and his father?”
“A bit,” Charles said. He drummed his hands on the barrel. “I don’t know, actually. I didn’t know his father well.” Her discomfort twisted and turned within her. “I’m sure Wallace is safely in his office now,” he said mercifully, “and we can sit down by the shore.”
Elspeth’s head spun with images of Owen after thrashing his friend—cheeks flushed, hole in his smile dark as pitch—and she wondered what he would do if he were to recognize her.
E
VERY COUPLE OF
days, London White asked Caleb to wash the sheets and towels, washcloths and underclothes. He wore an apron borrowed from one of the bartenders to protect his new shirt. When Caleb placed the dirty items into the old bathtub they used, he avoided colors and stains that he didn’t want explained. White squeezed every penny out of the Elm Inn, and a cot had been set up in the corner of the laundry for days when it was not in use. After the first hour, the windows clouded with condensation, and the drying lines Caleb hooked from a sconce at one end of the room to the other would be heavy with sheets. Water puddled on the floor.
Caleb stirred the linens in the bathtub with the broken end of a broom. He liked to pretend he was steering down a river, as he’d seen in a book his mother had brought home. The book had only lasted a day. When Jorah had read a page and deemed it unacceptable, he’d burned it in the woodstove. The etching of a boy standing, the legs of his overalls rolled high on his calves, steering a raft down seething rapids had stayed with Caleb. He became quite involved in this daydream, waving and talking to people along the river, before the current took hold of the ship and he needed to bravely pilot his craft.
A girl, his age perhaps, with curled brown hair walked into the room. “What are you doing?” she asked. Caleb had never seen her before. She wore a small dress, the kind a girl half her age and half her size would wear, and it struggled to cover where her legs met her hips. If Mary had worn one of Emma’s dresses, this was how she would appear. The look in her eyes, however, one of pain and weariness, made Caleb speak to her as if she were much older than he. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I was stirring the wash.”
“Who were you talking to?”
Caleb shrugged and looked around the room, to insinuate he clearly hadn’t been talking at all.
“Who were you waving to, then?”
He repeated his act of examining the empty room.
“I’m Ellabelle. You’re Caleb. This is my room.”
He ignored the cot in the corner.
“Do you talk? To real people, I mean.”
“Of course.” His voice made a strange leap and he turned back to his wash.
“Where did you come from?”
Caleb recalled London White’s laughing at his answer to that very question. “My mother and I live down at the hotel.” Something about Ellabelle made lying more difficult. He couldn’t concentrate on what he meant to say—words tumbled out of his mouth without his guidance. Lying, he’d come to understand, took two things: forethought and memory. Both had been disabled in Ellabelle’s presence. “I meant my father.” He needed to figure out a way to end her questions before they began. “My mother’s dead.” He thought of Jorah’s body, riddled with bullets. There was no way Caleb could have moved it to be with the rest of them, but his skeleton off alone in the dark corner of what had once been the house seemed especially cruel now. He tried to steel himself, rid himself of his guilt and anger toward a man he no longer knew as his father. They were strange feelings to have, with Ellabelle tiptoeing nearer on the wet floor. The room smelled of the laundry soap, a jarring cleansing odor, and Caleb took long breaths to combat a dizziness that swirled inside him.
“I said, I’m sorry to hear that,” Ellabelle said.
“Oh, sorry. Thank you.” Caleb leaned back and removed a pillowcase from the water. It steamed in the cold air. It dripped onto the floor between them. He’d opened the window a crack to help the clothes dry faster, and the wind that squeezed through whistled at the two of them. Caleb tried not to think of the horrific holes in the house and his days spent in the pantry.
“What happened?”
Caleb sloshed the water back and forth.
“What happened to your mother? How did she die?”
“I shot her,” he said quietly.
Ellabelle came even closer. She sat on the edge of the tub. Her pale thighs, exposed when she sat down in her dress, pressed together. Every moment they didn’t speak was filled with the sounds of the laundry, echoes upon echoes. Caleb thought she hadn’t heard him. There were a million follow-up questions she could ask, and he prepared himself to lie his way out of it, to pretend it was all a joke. He forced a grin. She frowned. The only question that came from her was “Why?”
“It was an accident.” It felt better than he could have hoped to have the truth loose in the air. The sheets sighed and shifted in the draft. Ellabelle touched her soft hand to his forearm. He refused to look at her, watching the whirlpools he created in the tub. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Caleb couldn’t be in that room with the overwhelming odor of the cleanser and the oppressive humidity any longer. He set the broomstick down on the side of the tub.
“Ellabelle?” someone called. She rolled her eyes, and White strode into the room. “Here you are. Hello, children.” He lifted a pillowcase appreciatively. “Well done, Caleb. Fine job. This one,” he said and pointed to Caleb, “takes true pride in his work. He’ll be something someday soon, so you be nice to him, Ellabelle.”
“She was just talking to me,” Caleb said.
“I know,” White said. “Time to earn your keep, dear.” He extended a hand for Ellabelle.
“What is he now?” Ellabelle said, ignoring his request.
“I’m sorry?” White said.
“You said he would be something soon, and I’d like to know what he is now.”
White’s demeanor changed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Ellabelle relinquished her tiny fingers. A bell rang close by, and Caleb wondered if it called for her. Before she left his side, she gave his arm one last squeeze.
E
LSPETH STOOD IN
front of a display containing a few dozen pistols. A young boy about Caleb’s age knelt on the floor near the door, sorting nails into two buckets. Outside, a lake snow poured down heavy flakes, five or six inches on the street already, and the residents of Watersbridge were by and large staying indoors. The shop was empty except for Elspeth, the boy, and the shopkeeper, who spread his moustache with his thumb and index finger. “A pistol, eh?” he said. He introduced himself as Jakob. Elspeth shook his hand but held on to her own name. She’d found that not saying much reduced her risks. Besides, most of the men she’d encountered didn’t waste words. “I apologize,” Jakob said, “but do you by chance have a son?”