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Authors: James Scott

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BOOK: The Kept
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“God,” she said.

“It’s me, Mama, it’s just me,” he said. “Caleb. Your boy.”

With that, she turned and coughed up a small gob of blood, her body racked with the effort, and she went limp with a loud sigh. Caleb waited, hugging himself in defense, until she took one long breath, and then another—shorter—and another.

C
HAPTER 2

T
he fever boiled away the excess, burned off the fuzzy edges of her memory. Elspeth felt she’d risen from great depths to bring her head above water, and everything that had been obscured by guilt and sin was once again made clear.

She remembered her father’s moustache, how he would wax and comb it last thing before heading out the door to work for the van Tessels, tending their gardens. Mr. van Tessel would give the last of his tin to her father, who would dutifully scrape out the remnants. She remembered the stomp of his wooden leg and the small sigh that escaped him whenever he bent down. She remembered the scar on her mother’s cheek where she’d been bitten by a sheepdog as a child, and how in summertime it turned silver when the sun tanned her skin. She remembered running in bare feet, the heat of the dirt on her toes, and the grass sharp on her soles in August when God starved the land.

The burning in her chest—for certain the first flames of her eternal damnation—brought about thoughts of Mary. She saw her face as it had been in infancy, the cherubic cheeks, her mouth without teeth but always smiling, and the hairless head that bounced and bobbed with each of her uncoordinated movements.

Mary had been her first. It was September, but an Indian summer had flared across the Northeast, bringing death by heat and humidity. Aboard the train in Rochester, as the compartments filled with harried men and women, everyone sweating in the oppressiveness of the motionless cars, she panicked at the thought of the child perishing before ever reaching its new home, before she and Jorah could even present it with a name and baptize it in the creek that seemed so perfect when they’d stumbled upon the clearing that would hold their house. When she’d left, the building was new enough that the walls smelled strongly of cedar, the pine furniture sweated sap, and the floorboards creaked in the afternoons from the drop in temperature.

Elspeth hurried down the train’s thin corridor, people not even giving way to a woman carrying a child, everyone rushing, the temperature unbearable. The passageway emptied; people had settled in their compartments and at each Elspeth was met with the snap of a shade drawn in her face or the angry cries of a full car. Toward the back of the train, she saw through the dusty window one empty, plush red bench. She opened the door slowly, afraid of what it might reveal. A woman lay on her stomach, her face hanging off the edge of the embroidered cushions. Elspeth thought the old woman might be dead but was too exhausted to care. She dropped her bags on the floor as quietly as possible, and crumpled into the seat opposite her. Elspeth exhaled and looked out the window. Rochester had been her home for eight months, yet she knew she could never return. As if powered by this thought, the train began to move.

“Hello,” the woman said and sat up with tremendous difficulty, her eyes shining with tears as she propped both of the pillows high up on her back. The face had been lost to Elspeth over time, but in her fever it appeared before her with clarity: The stitching of the cushions left red impressions on the woman’s sallow cheeks, and her green eyes sank into her skull until it seemed they peered out from caves. Her gaunt face stood in sharp contrast to the thickness of her ankles, so swollen they dwarfed her calves.

“The compartment wasn’t full,” Elspeth said, “but we can move.”

“No, please,” she said, and smiled through a wince of pain. “I’ll enjoy the company.” Elspeth nodded, unsure of what to say. “My brother lives in Syracuse,” the old woman continued, “and I’ve been sent to stay with him there. Sent.” She sniffed and ran her hand along the latch of the window. “Like a parcel, shipped off.”

The baby was hot on Elspeth’s shoulder and she moved her to the other. Thinking of the word of the Lord, but unable to contain herself, she asked, “What’s the matter? It’s best to know, for my child.” The mere phrase “my child” made Elspeth tingle.

“Oh, no need to worry,” the woman said. “But you’re right to, of course, for the child’s sake. Bright’s disease.” She explained to Elspeth the swelling of her kidneys, and how the blood that used to course safely through her veins was escaping, leaking into her flesh and threatening to kill her. Would kill her. Each heartbeat, in fact, brought her closer to death. The train’s wheels clacked with exacting rhythm, and the woman cocked her head to the side. “Listen,” she said, “that’s the sound of my heart.”

The woman smiled at the baby. She reached out a shaking hand and slid her fingers over its near-bald head. Elspeth, too, had come to know the delight of the warm skin and the hints of downy hair. The woman withdrew quickly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.” Elspeth told her she understood.

A vague whiteness at the corners of her lips showed when she opened her mouth to speak. She swallowed. Then she began again. “If I may,” she said, and then—despite the great pain that made her teeth gnash together and her breath hiss between them—she stood on her bulbous ankles and adjusted the infant, placing it across Elspeth’s arm, with its head at her left biceps and its torso supported by her right. The tension that Elspeth hadn’t realized she’d carried in her shoulders disappeared. The baby stirred, then eased back into sleep, the pink skin of her eyelids adorned with purple veins.

The woman stroked the child’s tiny ear with the back of her finger, and Elspeth would have sworn to her Savior that the old woman’s cheeks filled and flushed, and the crevices and shadows on her forehead dissolved, everything about her beaming. After a time, she collapsed back onto her seat. The cushions were thrown into disarray behind her. “She’s young to travel,” she said, and glanced out the window, her skin sagging.

Elspeth rocked back and forth in time with the swaying of the train as it barreled down the tracks, the trees and hillsides merely a blur. “We’ve no choice.”

 

I
N THE KITCHEN,
Caleb crouched beneath the coatrack. The sleeves of his father’s jacket tickled his head, and he shoved them aside. From his vantage point, all he could see of his mother was a few strands of black hair that spilled into space, and—when she took one of her rare breaths—her chest. But he could hear the noise, an unholy groan that she produced deep within her, and he plugged his ears against it, the sound deadening into a bass hum. He waited for her chest to rise, and held his breath until he saw it again. Soon he felt light-headed.

As he drew close to her, he removed one finger from his ear but replaced it immediately. She sounded like death: as if her life was being pulled from her body forcibly. He imagined her spirit like a wisp of smoke, but one with talons and teeth that it dug into her insides and the groan was those nails and teeth being dragged across her ribs, her throat, and her lungs as it fought to keep its place. He cried and cursed himself and uncovered his ears and let the noise tunnel through.

She frightened him, always had, even before he’d moved to the barn, but never as much as she did with her blood seeping from her body and that noise clawing its way out. Soon, he thought, she would be empty. His surgery seemed to be speeding the process: His sloppy digging and cutting had made the wounds worse. Her hair, flecked with rogue strands of gray, had become matted and tangled. He patted her bare arm. The heat had been replaced by a cold clamminess. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched her before he’d shot her. During her long absences he remembered her immense strength—greater than that of any of the boys. Her shoulders were sloped with muscle, and her knotted arms were thicker than Amos’s. He pushed up one of her eyelids and saw nothing but white streaked with blood. She would not survive, he thought again. He picked the pillow up off the floor, where he’d dropped it the last time, before he went scooting like a mouse beneath the coatrack. Some of the goose feathers scattered on the floor and stuck in the wide puddle of blood that had accumulated beneath the table. He raised the pillow over her head, and plumped it between his hands. He clutched the fabric. Every time the courage built within him to crush the material down on her face, stopping forever the spasms and the terrible sound, she would cough or murmur and turn back into his mother. He held his position until his arms shook. A droplet of sweat formed at her widow’s peak. As it traced the curve above her eyebrow, she squeezed her eyes tightly, and he recalled her making the same expression when he and Jesse had come tromping into the kitchen one night. She’d held her eyes shut for long enough that the boys knew to retreat back the way they’d come. This had stayed with him, because the next morning, she’d left and they wouldn’t see her again for six months. He threw the pillow across the kitchen, where it collided with an empty jug that used to hold their sugar. The pillow landed on the floor, while the sugar container spun on the shelf, rattling around on its base before it got too close to the edge and tumbled. It landed, however, directly in the center of the goose down. This small piece of fortune made Caleb smile, and he brushed his mother’s hair from her face and the sound ceased. The calm was worse to him, and when she recommenced, he pulled a chair to the table and laid his head on it, next to his mother’s hip, where he felt every raw breath reverberate through the wood.

 

W
ITH DARKNESS, THE
fits ceased. The fever dulled. But her memories continued to unfurl before her, and uncovered events she had worked hard to forget—arguments, trespasses, lies—and she relived the aftermath of the first time she’d spoken to Jorah, who was known then as Lothute.

“A savage,” her father said in a whisper—all of their conversations whispered so as not to disturb the van Tessels. Their nook of the building had always been the servants’ quarters, and as such, did not hold noise as well as the house proper, the boards not as tight, the corners not as square, the walls and floors unadorned. Worried even about his steps, her father removed his shoes, placed the tired leather next to her mother’s boots, and straightened the two thick, woolen socks that muffled the thump of his wooden leg. “You’ve embarrassed the family over a savage. We must assume Mr. van Tessel has been told.”

“All I did was say hello,” Elspeth said and her father’s hand snapped her head back. Her lip throbbed but did not split. She’d only heard Lothute speak that morning, never before, and his voice had surprised her, light and airy where she expected gravel crunched underfoot. She’d pretended to shake a rock from her shoe in the cool of the barn while he mended a horse’s saddle. Elspeth had been warned to keep away from him, but she saw them as paired in their silence—neither was spoken to, neither was expected to speak. Besides his darker complexion, he looked the same as they did, wore the same clothes, ate the same food. He did not run around with a tomahawk and a belt full of scalps like the Indians in her books. His eyes were kind.

“The van Tessels deserve to see better of us,” her father said with crimson cheeks and straining neck muscles, his anger loosed but his volume contained. As if summoned by the mention of his name, or by the harshness of their whispers, the shadows of Mr. van Tessel’s fine shoes appeared at the crack beneath their door.

Her mother wept, and Elspeth knew better than to look to her for support and instead glanced around the room, her home—the bed her parents shared, the straw mattress at their feet where she slept, her small trove of books that the van Tessel girls had grown out of, her mirror, another van Tessel castoff because it had been warped somehow and stretched one’s appearance at the edges of the gilded frame—and she knew, even before she heard the slither of her father’s belt being drawn from his pants, that she would not see any of it again.

She squirmed to get away, but her father grasped both of her wrists in one strong hand and brought the leather down upon her back and her head. He struck her again and again, and she cried out. Her blood dotted the floor as it flew from the buckle. She screamed for him to stop, and the two shadows shifted beneath the door and then disappeared. The beating ended. Her father wrapped the belt around his hand like a bandage. He even seemed to whisper his ragged breathing. When Elspeth pushed herself onto her feet, he leaned against the dresser on his fists.

“It’s time you go, child,” her mother said. “Here.” She opened a drawer and presented Elspeth with a neatly folded pillowcase, pressed between her two palms. “For your things.” When Elspeth reached for the linen, her mother retracted her hands, as if she’d be scalded by her touch.

Less than a mile from the van Tessel estate, Lothute caught up to her and matched the rhythm of her careless steps. He handed her a cloth, and she held it to her head. “Is this my fault?” he asked her.

She stood there, shocked and crying, her few possessions in the pillowcase—yet another van Tessel hand-me-down, already torn—wondering what this man would do to her mother and father if she told him the truth.

“I don’t know where I’ll go,” she said, the echoes of the lashes racking her body.

“I’ll protect you,” he said. She looked out at him from between eyelashes caked with blood. He took the cloth from her and dabbed at her injuries, swabbed the clots from her face, then examined the wounds, his face inches from hers. “All shall heal in time. I promise.” He smiled. She smelled his sweat. He nodded to her belongings. “I’ll return with my things.”

He walked through the woods, and she followed his white shirt flitting among the trees until she could find no trace of him. Only after he’d left did she consider the beating—or worse—that awaited him at the van Tessels, and she prayed for his survival and tried to reassemble the day through the miasma of her shock. She’d only wanted to say hello. But after this, they had no choice. After this, he was hers, and she was his. And so she sat down to wait.

 

C
ALEB SPENT TWO
days listening at his mother’s hip, thinking each wretched breath might not be followed by another. From the shelf in the living area he’d fetched one of their Bibles, and though he could not read it, not well, he set it next to her limp hand, thinking it might comfort her, wherever she was. The pillow he’d tucked beneath her head. He couldn’t bring himself to end her pain and leave himself alone in the world.

BOOK: The Kept
8.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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