The Kept (20 page)
The light from a lantern drifted down the aisle, and Caleb retreated to the rear of the stall. From his new vantage point, he could see the back of the man who’d started the fight Martin had waded into, swinging chairs. Martin’s friend took off his hat and rubbed at his scalp. “He’s taken a shine to the boy?”
“Don’t you worry, Dax,” Gerry said. “Marty proves that’s the boy and White’ll have to let him have him.”
Caleb wondered if he’d underestimated Gerry; it sounded like he was trying to calm Dax down.
“Proof?” Dax said. “Where in hell’s he going to find proof? The kid’s been gone for fifteen goddamn years.”
Gerry scoffed. “That boy ain’t no more than thirteen. Probably hasn’t got a hair on his prick yet.”
“You know what I mean.” He lowered his voice. “Martin said he’d pay me to take him. We could split it.”
“Dax, don’t be an idiot. I don’t like White any more than you, but if you make off with that boy, there’s only one place for him to come looking, and he’s going to come looking with Ethan and a whole armory of guns.”
A latch lifted, and Caleb heard the rattling of reins. “He likes the boy that much?”
“Does it matter how much?” A horse whinnied, and Gerry nickered at it. “London White,” Gerry said, “don’t like being thieved.”
The hooves moved off, and so did the men.
Caleb exhaled. A noise rustled close, and he didn’t have time to react before an arm reached through from the next stall and grabbed his neck. He smelled liquor and tobacco. The arm clenched tight enough that he couldn’t scream.
“Looks like I caught myself a barn rat,” Gerry said, his breath hot on Caleb’s ear. “You been into the feed, rat?”
Caleb’s feet kicked at the hay. The horses whinnied nervously. He reached into his waistband and wrapped his fingers around the Colt. Gerry yanked Caleb back hard, smacking his head into the wooden rail. The force of it must have surprised Gerry, and Caleb shrugged his arm off, scurried deeper into the pen, lifted the gun and cocked the hammer. Shadows cast by the lantern, which Gerry had hung down the aisle, prevented Caleb from seeing into the next stall. “Don’t touch me,” he said, his throat raw.
Gerry spit onto the dirt. “You heard us, didn’t you, boy? You heard me tell that idiot Dax Hanson not to kidnap you? You heard me warn him about Mr. White?”
“Step out into the light,” Caleb said.
“So you can line me up? I don’t think so, son. Why don’t you put that weapon down and we’ll finish this chat?” Caleb caught a glint of thin hair and he pointed the pistol right below it. “Okay, now,” Gerry said.
“Stay still.” Caleb listened for the man’s feet shifting in the hay. For the first time, he’d done what he’d hoped he would have the strength and courage to do and he had the advantage on someone. This didn’t give him the elation he’d expected, instead he clutched his stomach to hold everything inside. “Who is the Shane boy?” he asked. Wind shifted something in the beams and the whole barn squealed at them.
“Martin Shane’s nephew disappeared a while back—he’d have been about your age now, and so he gets it in him that every boy that comes around is his old lost nephew.” His feet moved.
“Stay still,” Caleb commanded. From this distance, he figured he could get maybe two shots off before Gerry could hop into the pen.
“I have to admit, though, Caleb Howell, you’re the first one that’s ever given me pause. Or,” he said, “Mr. White.”
“Mr. White thinks it’s me?”
“Hell if I know what goes on inside that head of his. But this is the first time he’s let Shane walk out without a scratch after pulling something like that.”
Caleb squeezed his legs together. His stomach was warm. “Where does Martin live?”
Gerry laughed. “Martin Shane’s been a friend of mine since you were nothing more than a star in the sky, son.” He stepped out into the light and turned his back to Caleb to lift the lantern from the nail where he’d left it. He’d lost the fear that Caleb was going to shoot him, and Caleb didn’t have any need or desire to kill the stable attendant, although he’d told himself he would if it had come down to it. He let his arm drop. Gerry whirled and punched Caleb in the jaw. Then the temple. Caleb crumpled, the gun in his hand, a full complement of bullets in the cylinder.
“You’re lucky you got angels watching over you,” Gerry said and kicked some hay on Caleb. “You ever put a gun on me again, boy, better make sure you shoot me dead.” On his way out of the stables, he slammed a fist on one of the enclosures. The horses whinnied and reared at the outburst. The swelling didn’t wait. If angels watched over him, Caleb thought, they didn’t mind seeing him suffer.
E
LSPETH HAD TO
work to keep up with Edward Wallace’s strides. Even with the cane and on unsteady footing, his long legs swallowed up a yard at a pace. He stopped to shake the hand of the would-be preacher, who beamed as if he’d been touched by God Himself. Inside, Wallace’s office had been decorated like a well-appointed sitting room, with a rack full of periodicals between two overstuffed chairs. A fire popped and sang, the room dry and pleasant. Thick rugs deadened her footfalls, and Wallace shut the door to the cold and hung his cane on the coatrack. In the corner lay a crib, a yellow blanket folded over its rail. Elspeth clenched her fists. “Terrible tragedy,” she said, her throat frail from the choking, her voice somewhere on a train with the baby.
“Yes, of course,” Wallace answered. He wedged himself into one of the chairs and motioned for Elspeth to take the other. Though aware of the crib behind her, crouched in wait, she tried to ignore its call. She removed her hat and pushed her hair behind her ears, reminding herself to cut it even shorter when she was within the safety of the hotel. Through the windows, she could see the icehouse and the land falling off toward the water where workers had already begun to rebuild the line of lights in the ruts made by the horses and the sled. The small, round fires still burned.
“Charles tells me you can work numbers,” Wallace said. He set his pipe onto a dish and took a ledger from under his chair with a groan and flipped it open to a page marked with a ribbon.
Elspeth had initially learned mathematics from helping her mother with the cooking, and the books the van Tessel girls had left behind, and had further improved her skills as a midwife—mixing tinctures, tracking changes in weights of mothers and children—though she didn’t recall telling Charles. The attention, however, had already grown too much for her. She reminded herself of the cost of discovery. “No, sir.”
“The bookmen need help,” Wallace said, ignoring her. “Especially now, with new men coming on and families needing their final pay.” He took two fountain pens from his breast pocket, uncapped them, and laid them side by side. “Jorah, let me be frank.” He consulted his ledger. “You’re not cut out for the line. The crew you and Charlie work on has been the slowest, day in and day out, since you arrived.”
She thought of Charles’s absences and of their many breaks, where she bent over and waited to catch her breath. Beads of sweat began to form at her hairline and at the small of her back. She’d been too confident about her ability to fool them. Wallace began making lines on the ledger, loud, final lines that must have signaled the deaths of the icehouse workers. Charles’s feral expression came to her and the veins in her neck pulsed.
“But Charlie spoke highly of your intellect, and so . . . The position comes with a raise.” Another mark struck out another life.
“I’m not that concerned with the money, sir.”
“You have a son, don’t you, Jorah?” His pen hovered over the paper. She wondered if anyone knew about the errand boy yet—whether his parents had been informed or not. “Wouldn’t your son enjoy one day moving out of the Brick & Feather and into a home? Wouldn’t he like to have a room of his own, perhaps? A growing boy needs a room of his own.”
Elspeth ignored the surprising knowledge Wallace had of her and instead indulged in the daydream of her and Caleb living in a small house on the edge of Watersbridge. It was summer. Elspeth crossed the yard after work, and when Caleb threw his arms around her, she didn’t care that her hands had been stained with ink and ran them through his hair anyway. Then, from the gaping maw of the open door, a baby cried. Wailed. And Elspeth longed to run to the child but Caleb clung to her tightly, as she had Amos, as Jorah had when he’d asked her about the children. She gasped.
“Horace, one of our accountants, has been forced to pay rent here while he takes care of his grandchild.”
Elspeth needed to touch the blanket, to clasp it to her face and smell it, breathe in the scent of the child. The familiar itch came to her, a scratching at her core. “So the infant sleeps here at night?”
“Often, yes,” Wallace said. He tapped his pen on the edge of his ledger. “It’s no way to raise a child—in someone else’s home.” He slashed out another life.
Tears began to form and she heard the baby crying again. She wondered where they could go, how much money it would take to set her and the child up in a new town. She blinked the tears away. “I’m sorry—It must be the smoke from the fire.”
Wallace seemed to consider this, then joined her in the lie. “I’ll have the chimney checked,” he said. “So—a promotion?” Wallace rolled something across the desk with the cap of his pen, and when it stopped in front of her, Elspeth saw it was a tight roll of bills tied with a piece of string.
The infant kept calling to her, needing her, and she knew she had to remove herself from that very small, very hot office if she were to breathe. She took the money. “Thank you,” she said.
I
n the alley next to the barbershop, Elspeth checked to be sure she was alone and pulled her boot from her foot. She banged the heel against the ice and a small, dark clump slid from the leather. With the back of her hand, she pressed the money flat, counted it, unrolled the bills from Wallace, added those to the stack, folded it in half, and placed it in her pocket. She’d played this game many times, the promises to herself not to purchase a train ticket, not to gather supplies for the journey, not to think of the child asleep and waiting for her, needing her. Yet with the money in hand she could think of nothing else. Wallace had given her the funds and told her where to find the baby, she told herself. He’d made a point to mention how little Horace could provide for it, how much it needed its own space, and she could already feel the child’s weight in her arms, how it grounded her.
When she passed the dress shop, the woman inside paused in her work, her tight lips holding a series of pins between them, and gave a hesitant wave. A boy stood outside the mercantile, shoveling snow from the walkway. “Are you all right?” he asked her. She mumbled something about being fine, but she caught her reflection in the shop window and understood why the dressmaker had reacted as she had: She was coated with blood. “Would you like to come in and wash up?” he said. “You could have some water.”
Once inside the store, the heavy air, laden with food and coffee, stifled her. She hunched and dropped her head between her knees. “Are you sure you’re okay?” the boy asked. “My father’s there now, helping out, I guess.” He took her by the elbow, and she allowed him. “At the icehouse,” he added. The image of the boy with the broken skull and the smell of the icehouse—the crisp, fresh odor of the ice; the sweat of the men; the sharp stench of the dying—would not leave her, and she fingered the money in her pocket for encouragement. They pushed through a set of saloon doors at the rear of the store, and he placed her in a dark room the size of a closet. The boy lit a lamp, illuminating shelves full of family portraits, most of them small, no larger than a tea saucer. She picked the boy out in many of them. Father, mother, two sons. A family without greed, she thought. They stood erect and proud, though in one image they dissolved in laughter. The boy fetched a washbasin, a cloth, and a mirror. Her face and neck had been painted with gore and it had dried and fractured on her skin. She thanked him, her voice cracking into her own, not the deeper version she’d been forcing from her belly.
“Father likes cameras,” he said, as if apologizing for the photos. “We carry them in the store. I don’t know if we’ve ever sold one.” Elspeth draped the cloth over her face and let the moisture loosen the blood. “We’re not even allowed to touch them, me and my brother. Last week, my brother,” he started, then must have thought better of it when she rung out the bloody rag. “Father says rules are made to keep us safe.”
Elspeth turned this over in her head.
The boy erased a smudge from one of the picture frames with his shirtsleeve. “No one needs reminders of Watersbridge, my mother says.”
“I suppose not,” Elspeth said from behind the cloth. She pulled it down her cheeks, the material rough. She scrubbed at her neck and imagined she peeled away parts of her she had no use of anymore. She saw Caleb lying in the gruesome muck with his head staved in, the ice that killed him inert around his lifeless form, melting from the heat left in his blood. “I have a son,” she said, “about your age.”
“I know,” the boy said. “I’ve seen him. There aren’t many children here.”
The money made a slight bulge in her pocket. “I came for a gift for him.”
The boy scratched his chin thoughtfully, probably something he’d seen his father do. “How old is he?”
“Twelve.” She no longer needed her sheet of paper with all of their names and ages. All she had left to remember was Caleb.
“What kind of things does he like?” She shrugged. She couldn’t conceive of Caleb running around, playing games with this small, dark boy. Caleb had grown up in the span of one morning. She knew she’d failed him. The boy wiped his nose with the back of his hand, staring at her. “Well, what does he like to do for fun?”
The question made Elspeth bury her head in the cloth once more, and she thought of him, so small and scared, cleaning her wounds, waiting to see if she would survive, the entire rest of his world erased.
C
ALEB HURRIED TO
the Brick & Feather. The streets had emptied. He noted this, but he didn’t consider why. He had wrapped his scarf around his face so that his bruises didn’t show. Inside the hotel, he gave Frank a brief wave and bolted up the stairs. He burst into the room, thinking only of asking his mother about Jorah and the Shanes. He found her, however, bathed and dressed in her church clothes, a tie knotted tightly under the darkened jaw she’d worn since their arrival. In her hands she held a small package. He unraveled his scarf, and her look changed to one of horror. “What’s happened?”
“It’s not important.”
“Of course it is.” As the shopkeeper’s son had for her, she took Caleb by the elbow and led him into the washroom. She filled the bath with hot water and began to take his clothes off.
“Mama,” he said in reproach when she started to unbuckle his pants, even more nervous around her with the possibility of being the Shane boy clogging his thoughts. He turned from her to undress, and stepped into the water, covering himself. He had never seen this side of his mother, and he buried his questions and fought his embarrassment so that she would continue. He forced a smile and his face ached. She used a cloth to carefully dab at his cuts and bruises. He hadn’t known her to be so gentle. Her touch, certainly, seemed that of a mother.
After she’d washed him, Elspeth rested her cheek on the edge of the tub. “I used to bathe you, all of you, as babies.” She splashed some water onto his back with a cupped hand. The light played on her eyelashes. “I loved you so. Your skin was the softest thing I’d ever touched, and afterward, I would wrap us both in a towel to keep you close.”
Caleb recalled Emma being bathed in the kitchen sink, her body red. The girls would be allowed to help, and Caleb peered at them from beneath the kitchen table, the same table upon which his mother had lain, close to death. “Mother,” he said, aware he risked ruining this moment, “I was the one who shot you.”
Elspeth went rigid. Her hand clutched the porcelain. “Why?”
Caleb made trails with his hands through the water, and tried to bring himself back to his raft, floating downstream. “The men had come. They’d shot everyone. I’d been in the barn, but I couldn’t . . .” Every tear in his body had been wrung out of him. The emptiness moved down his limbs. “When you came in, I thought you were them, and I had to do something.”
Elspeth combed the boy’s hair from his forehead. “It’s okay,” she said. “It is.” She sang to him in a soft, shy voice, “
O thou hearest when sinners cry, Though all my sins before Thee lie, Behold them not with angry look, but blot their memory from Thy book
.” Her voice echoed in the small room, and because she held her cheek on the tub, it vibrated through the water. “Do you understand what it means?” she asked. He nodded. “I have many apologies to give you, Caleb,” Elspeth said, “and I hope you can be as forgiving.”
The beating and the admission, coupled with the bath made him spent and sleepy, and he leaned his head against the porcelain.
For a moment
, he told himself, and shut his eyes.
Elspeth heard his breath even out, and his hand slipped from his lap and she saw that he was no more than a boy and replaced the washcloth. After a few minutes, she shook him gently, dried him off, and helped him into bed. While he slept, she went downstairs and ordered them dinner: steak, fried potatoes, and beets.
C
LEAN, DRIED, AND
rested, Caleb sat up in bed. His mother lifted the lid from his dinner. She’d waited for him, and she used the stool for a small table. They ate in happy silence, afraid to make a loud noise or a false move, unused to this fragile new contentment.
Sated and with empty plates, they both relaxed. Elspeth presented the boy with a gift. He undid the twine, pulling it so quickly it sent a smoke of fibers into the air. The butcher paper held a toy horse, its mane and tail lustrous and soft. It was brown with a white mark in the shape of an arrow on its forehead. Its teeth were exposed, painted brilliant white, and it raised its front left hoof, as if in greeting. “Thank you, Mama, it’s nice.”
“I know you must miss the animals of the barn.”
He stroked the hair with his thumb. Of course he did, but he missed his brothers and sisters more. The quarrelsome noise of the Inn was much different from the noise of the Howell household, and Ellabelle couldn’t measure up to Jesse.
While Elspeth cleared their plates and placed a hand on the door to bring them back to the kitchen, she said, “I don’t want you going to the Elm Inn anymore. It’s too dangerous. Don’t get crossed up in something in which you have no business.” Caleb opened his mouth to reply. “I’m your mother, Caleb. Rules are made to keep you safe.” At that, she shut the door behind her.
The affection that had spread through Caleb over the course of the last few hours evaporated, and when he threw the sheets aside, his skin rippled with goose bumps. He already was crossed up in something, and he appeared to be the only one capable of remembering what they’d lost. No gift or toy pony could undo that. He could not be changed into a boy again for the convenience of his mother. He threw his hat and gloves on, not caring about the dried blood that mottled each, and left the Brick & Feather before his mother could return.