The Kept (2 page)

Sickened, she cracked the ice that covered the surface of the drinking bowl and sipped some water from the ladle. In the main room, three logs stood on end against the wall, next to the large woodstove, and she opened the grille and saw that Jorah had left the fire ready for the morning. Perhaps that explained his presence in the bedroom—Jorah often went back for a short nap between his morning chores and the first blush in the sky, and she would pretend to be asleep as his weight reshaped the bed beside her and she, too, drifted off, listening to the sounds of his breathing.

She retrieved the matches, stepping over Jesse’s body once again. Seeing her children sprawled in the kitchen affected her more now that the shock had worn off, and her whole body began to quiver. She stood there, shaking, sweating, not certain where to start. Her numb fingers went to work trying to untangle Mary’s dress from the range, and she stopped to breathe into her cupped hands to warm them. Mary shook like a doll with her efforts, but it was no use. Elspeth would have to cut her loose tomorrow. How Mary would have cried at that thought, after the many hours she’d spent in the yard clutching her dress in her arms to keep it from the dust. Even the chickens seemed to understand her concern, and did not nip at her toes or flutter at her feet as they did the rest of the Howells. But everything would have to wait for tomorrow and the light of day. She would place the bodies out in the barn with their brother Caleb. Once the house heated, the smell would be too much to take. Burial was out of the question this time of year. Even Jorah would not have been able to dig deep enough to safely keep the bodies.

As she straightened Mary’s dress, she heard a scratching in the pantry, and it relieved Elspeth to have company, if only a mouse. Her voice almost leapt from her throat to call the boys, who loved to catch the mice and keep them in homes they built from scrap wood. She approached the door gingerly, afraid of frightening the animal. The floor creaked. A bright flash and she was thrown into the air. She landed on the kitchen table, nostrils and throat full of a burning smell, her body rent. It felt as though she had fallen apart.

T
HE PANTRY SMELLED
of gunpowder. The acrid smoke swirled and then disappeared, sucked through the hole in the wall created by the elbow of Caleb Howell and the kick of his gun—his prized possession—a twelve-gauge Ithaca shotgun. The thirty-inch barrel ran most of the width of the pantry, leaving no room for recoil. Six more paper shot shells sat in the mass of blankets between his legs. He cleared the spent rounds, still smoking, and awkwardly loaded two more before pressing his face to the pantry door and looking through the hole created by the shot. It was warm on his cheek. He’d heard the grunt as the pellets hit and the scraping of the table legs as the murderer’s body dragged it across the kitchen floor.

Through the smoldering gap in the wood, he saw one hand draped over the side of the table, blood dripping from the index and middle fingers. The steady tap helped him keep time. He waited for twenty, then another set of twenty. Caleb couldn’t count higher than that.

Moments before, it had been comforting in his delirium to hear sounds again other than the fabrications of his terror and the incessant moan of the wind through the bullet holes and the scratching of the elm against the roof.

He had been asleep when the men had come last. The first shot had sent him scrambling to the edge of the hayloft door. The sun threatened to rise. His sister, who’d been coming to fetch him for breakfast as she did most mornings, lay in the snow. When the men stepped into the doorway and over the threshold, Caleb caught only a few details: the long beard of the first; the gangly, unsteady legs of the second—like a newborn calf; and the way the third moved like water. Each carried a gun. Each wore a red scarf: the bearded one dangled loose about his shoulders, the gangly one wrapped around his neck and the third tied his long hair back with his. Caleb heard another shot and moved into the darkness of the loft. The crack of gunfire kept coming and he willed himself to press his eye to a knot in the rough wood. They emerged from the house, the three of them, and the gangly one glanced toward the barn. Caleb’s pants grew wet and he backed up, wriggling down into the hay, covering himself, his hands clenching at the straw.

Sometime later, maybe minutes, maybe hours, he thought he heard voices, and then nothing.

When he finally rose and picked the hay from his clothing, the house was dark. Emma’s body was only a small shadow. He climbed down from the loft and fetched his gun from the rack at the rear of the barn. Ithaca in hand, he sprinted across the yard, head swiveling, certain he saw red scarves behind every tree. He paused, and—with a careful touch—brushed the snow from Emma’s face. Once inside, he passed through each room as quickly as he could, running past the horror so he could not fully take it in, shoving open his parents’ door, the smell of gunpowder strong, his father’s rifle untouched in the corner. On his way back through the house, searching for any remnant of life—a groan, a twitch—he was met with stillness beyond his imagination. It made so little sense to him that he pressed his hand to his mouth until his jaw hurt, for he feared he would laugh, his throat and stomach dancing with the possibility. When that subsided, he grabbed his wrist with his hand and hugged himself hard. He couldn’t leave the bodies, didn’t want to be so alone, and he hid in the pantry, where he felt safe, confined. The moaning of the wind accompanied his sobbing while he awaited the return of three men. In the depths of night, he emerged to stretch, check for signs of intruders, and wipe Emma’s face and body clean from the snow that never seemed to stop falling, then crept back into the pantry, where he waited with the loaded gun.

He’d been asleep, again. But this time he woke and did not wait, did not let his hand prove unsteady or his legs grow wet. This time he had been brave. This time he had done what his father had been unable to: He’d protected them.

Once he felt certain no one else lurked in the shadows, he emerged from the pantry, his knees cracking, his legs cramping at being bent so long. He shifted his Ithaca to the crook of his shoulder. From the doorway, he saw the boots. He knew them. He let loose a scream from his rusted vocal chords. The lamp glow—diffused by the cracked chimney—lit the face of his mother. Her slate gray eyes were shut. He removed her hat, and her black hair unfurled onto the table. The scarf around her neck staunched some of the bleeding, so he left it. To see her not moving seemed impossible; in his twelve years he’d never so much as seen her sleep.

He prayed—not for himself, because he’d long ago lost the place in his heart for God—but for his mother, who believed. His prayers were half answered by the rise and fall of Elspeth’s chest, infrequent and unsteady as it was. Most of the shot had missed her, peppering the wall and the cupboard containing their dishes and cups. One or two had cracked the chimney of the lamp. The rest, however, had lodged in her chest, her shoulder, and her neck. Caleb opened his father’s whiskey—Jorah wasn’t much of a drinker, only a sip for Christ’s days: Easter and Christmas, the day before Ash Wednesday and Epiphany—and he poured the brown liquid over his mother’s clothes, soaking the wounds like he’d seen his father do when he’d nicked his own leg with the ax or when Amos had stepped on a nail. Unlike Amos, who’d screamed so ferociously that Caleb had felt it move up his feet and into his core, rattling his rib cage, his mother made no noise. He was certain she would die and that he’d killed her. The thought made him numb.

All he could do was busy himself. To keep warm he pulled his nest of blankets from the bottom of the pantry and wrapped two around his shoulders. As he did every night, he traded the wide berth of his Ithaca shotgun for the distance and precision of his father’s rifle. He laid two blankets over his mother’s feet, and one under her head. The rest he draped across the kitchen chairs to air out. He lit the small stove at the foot of his mother and father’s bed, and resolved again to move Jesse. When he stepped over him he tried to concentrate on the reflection of the lamp in his mother’s wet footprint rather than his brother’s tousled hair and the curve of his ear. He would move Amos, too, and Mary and Emma, and bring them all to rest. The fire would soon make the bodies rot—the cold had been their preservation—and Caleb had lit nothing more than twigs since the three men had killed his family. Nothing would make him careful now. He didn’t care who saw the smoke or smelled the burning wood; everyone he knew in this world had moved on to the next. The lengths he’d gone to over the past five days—or was it six?—would no longer be necessary. With his mother’s presence came a strange sense of freedom: They were all home, and he had nothing left to wait for, nothing to fear, but his mother’s last breath.

His feet wrapped in old pillowcases to keep them warm and silent, he shuffled into the living room and stared out into the snow. He saw his mother’s tracks extending out toward the barn. Once more he heard the solid thud of her body hitting the kitchen table and the screeching of the legs gouging jagged lines across the floor. He thought there must be some elemental knowledge stuck deep in his blood that should have prevented him from pulling the trigger. Shouldn’t he have been able to tell, even in the darkness of the pantry, even through the wood and the roar of the wind, that the person on the other side was his mother? He checked on her again—sat beside her, crying—and once he’d seen her chest rise and fall twenty times, he composed himself, wiped his tears until his face turned raw, and dragged a chair to the window in the living room to wait out the night.

The exposure of sitting in plain view unnerved him. To soothe himself, he shouldered Jorah’s rifle and took shaky aim at the landmarks he could pick out in the dark: the dead pine that held their swing in its scraggly grasp; the boulder that marked the start of the stream; the farthest fence post of the sheep pen; and the stump where he, Jesse, and Amos played Chief. If anyone had followed his mother, if anyone waited for them, if anyone smelled the fire or saw the lights, he hoped he would be ready.

It wasn’t difficult to keep from sleeping. Everything was painted in the shades of the killers—a face in profile, an outline of a body, the long legs and the beard and the greasy hair. Before hiding, he’d taken in the weapons slung over their shoulders, their vivid scarves. He remembered their gaits, how they hunched against the cold and walked gingerly over the thin coat of ice that covered the snow, careful not to slip. In the kitchen his mother coughed and he double-checked the rifle to be sure it remained loaded and patted his pockets, where the bullets clicked reassuringly.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Caleb found his mother’s sweat cold, her breathing shallow. He didn’t know what to do. He wished to crawl back into the pantry, where the days had been lost to him, a collection of hours spent listening intently and shivering and sleeping until time bled together. He knew he had to ignore this impulse and left her, set the Ithaca and the rifle against the dresser in his parents’ room, and lay down on the floor in front of the stove, the warmth and give in the boards amending his pantry-bent posture and relaxing his muscles. Perhaps an hour later, he went to the kitchen, taking a path he’d memorized to keep from seeing the faces of his brothers and sisters, first looking at the window, then the mantel, the scratch on the doorframe, the crocheted quote Mary had made—A
ND IF IT SEEM EVIL UNTO YOU TO SERVE THE
LORD,
CHOOSE YOU THIS DAY WHOM YE WILL SERVE; WHETHER THE GODS WHICH YOUR FATHERS SERVED THAT WERE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOD, OR THE GODS OF THE
A
MORITES, IN WHOSE LAND YE DWELL: BUT AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE
LORD. This way he stepped around Amos, Jesse, and Mary. He tried to pretend the bodies were no longer his siblings, but pieces of furniture.

Caleb sat on the chair by the door, the tidy row of boots beside him. He’d been wearing Amos’s old pair, which were worn thin and much too large; his father had stuffed the toes with scoured wool, but this made his feet itch and didn’t stop his heels from chafing on the leather. Jesse’s boots were snug but comforting. He laced them tight and prepared himself to visit the barn. The animals had not been fed in almost a week, and he wondered how many of them would be dead or dying, or missing, or eaten by another. The cold air made him cough. The sun stung his eyes. To block it out he held up hands stained with his mother’s blood, and slowly, through his fingers, he could see more than the blazing white of the landscape. Emma lay at his feet and he stooped to clean the snow from her face for the first time in daylight.

It took great effort to reach the barn. When he did, his body had turned to a confusion of sweat and chill, pain and numbness. He’d grown weak from eating nothing but the preserves and pickled beets left in the pantry. The bread had run out on the first day. Mary would have baked more once breakfast was finished, and he recalled the sound of her pounding the dough. The snow had blown against the grand doors, and, his small store of energy sapped, Caleb could not fight them open. He tried to climb the woodpile to reach the window, but his hands refused to grip the sill. He stood a log on end and tried to pull the doors from the top, but they wouldn’t yield. Beaten, he finally allowed himself to break open, weeping and kicking at the snow.

When he was empty and calm again, he tapped on the wall of the barn and pressed his ear to a small gap in the boards. He heard rustling inside, but not the usual collection of snorts and huffs that met any intrusion. He gave the side of the barn one last pat and steeled himself for the trip to the house.

W
ITHOUT THE FEAR
of killing his mother or injuring her any worse—he was certain she was going to die no matter what he did—he heated his father’s butchering knife over the kerosene lamp. He rolled Elspeth onto one side and spread a blanket underneath her, then rolled her onto her other side and pulled the wool taut. She made no sound. The hand that had been hanging, bleeding onto the floor, had swollen fat and purple when Caleb placed it in her lap. He plucked the necklace from the blood on her chest and wiped it clean with his thumb. A pellet had dented one of the arms of the cross, imprinting a small half-sphere in the silver. Worried about damaging it further, he turned it to lie next to her head. When he slid off her boots, something fell to the heel, and he reached inside and found a wad of damp papers. He thought of the wool scratching his feet and he pressed the papers back into the toe. He slit her dress up the middle and it dropped away, baring her flesh. Caleb averted his gaze, each glance bringing him more of her. His mother kept her body private. She never washed in front of them or swam in the stream in summer, rarely exposing even her arms. Caleb knew that there was no time for modesty. Over each small puncture wound he poured a few drops of whiskey. He pressed the tip of the knife in until he felt scraping or heard the small clink of metal. If the pliers did not fit in the opening, he wiggled the knife around so they would. Blood drained into the new space, spilling over and trickling down her hot skin. Most of the shot concentrated in her right breast, and Caleb took less and less care of where he placed his hands. The thick and unwieldy pliers took two or three tries to fish each ball of lead from her, especially where they’d lodged in her muscles, which were taut and difficult for him to maneuver. He dropped the pellets in a tin coffee cup; each landed with a satisfying clink. As he dug the stray shot out of her neck, she stirred. Caleb yanked the pliers out and stepped back from his makeshift operating table. A trickle of blood seeped out of her neck and then stopped. Her eyes fluttered open. She moaned loudly.