The Kept (4 page)
Once he grabbed her hand but it was so feverish and wet that it felt like no hand at all. She hadn’t improved, nor had she gotten worse. Caleb opened the house to the outdoors and let the cold and the light flood the kitchen. The wind dried his tears. He hoped the fresh air would dispel the odor of his brothers’ and sisters’ deterioration, but by dusk he had to tie a handkerchief around his face to fight the smell. Yet the snow gave way to ice and the ice to frozen ground and the frozen ground to a land strewn with slate and limestone, and in an hour with the pick he hadn’t made a grave fit for a chicken.
E
LSPETH HAD BORNE
Mary up the hill, the path at that time unfamiliar and unworn. Several times she had to turn around to try to find an easier route. Small trickles of water made footholds treacherous, and she would brace herself to stay on her feet. Her clothes became soaked in mud and torn by small branches. The baby, strapped to her chest, gurgled with each bounce.
In the yard, freshly shorn sheep chased one another around their makeshift enclosure. Jorah stood on the porch, as if he expected her, his black hair blown across his face, while Elspeth forged through the mud, the smell of animals and urine thick in her nostrils. He squinted at the bundle in her arms. As she drew closer, his expression broke into one of pure joy, something she’d never before witnessed, and he leapt from the porch and ran to her, his unshod feet sliding in the mud and the turned earth of the field. She said, “It’s a girl. Our girl.”
“Our girl,” Jorah repeated and lifted Elspeth into the air and spun them around until they tumbled to the damp soil, dizzy, clutching at each other, and when they were through laughing, Elspeth’s cheek touched the vulnerable spot on top of the child’s skull where—in their excitement—the hat had fallen from it. She ran her fingers across the crease where Mary’s impossibly tiny head met her even more unlikely neck, where the tufts of infant hair grew long and softer than anything in her imagination.
C
ALEB WENT BACK
outside and placed Jesse on top of Emma and Mary and Amos, who lay in a pile atop the chairs from the living room, which he’d broken with Jesse’s boots and the butt of his Ithaca. Splinters of wood and useless nails surrounded them, all of it startling against the previously uninterrupted snow and ice. Amos’s bulk had been enough to force Caleb to reconsider where he’d lain Emma, and he brought her to her older brother and placed her on top of him, twenty steps from the house—he counted them as he brought the others. His father he could not budge from the bed. Caleb would wait for his mother to pass, and then let them lie together.
As a child, Caleb hadn’t known of death. He saw cows, sheep, and pigs butchered, but he and his family—people—were different. When his father read the stories of the Bible, Caleb assumed those men and women were still walking the earth somewhere. But two years prior—his tenth birthday less than a month past—he had gone late at night to check on the sheep, guided by the moonlight and his perfect memory of each stone and root in the path. He’d watched as a man crossed the fields below, the grass waist high. The man stepped with great deliberation, and Caleb knew enough not to move. He carried a gun; Caleb saw the moon reflect off the steel. A shot rang out, and Caleb ducked and waited for the sting of the bullet. It was the man, however, who jerked backward and disappeared from view. Caleb’s father—he recognized his upright walk—emerged from a stand of trees at the foot of the hill, waded through the grass to where the man had dropped, stood over the depression in the grass, and leveled his gun. A second report chased the man’s small cry out into the world. At that time, Caleb had lived in the house and slept in the same bed as his brother, and for months after that, when they were both woken by his nightmares, Jesse would cover Caleb’s mouth with his hand and hug him, muffling his screams, squeezing Caleb back into himself.
Water plinked all around him, falling from the branches and the roof. He stopped and listened. He stood beneath the elm tree that hung over their house, and found himself in the path of one of the steady drips, each as cold and finite as a bullet. This would be the last time he would ever see them; he’d been careful to hide their injuries. Mary—her dress in tatters, cut away to untangle her from the stove—stared out from beneath Emma. Mary looked whole, and he thought of her standing in the barn, waiting for him to show himself. She would fold her arms and stand there sternly, until his giggling would turn to laughing and the chaff would sift down through the gaps in the floorboards, falling like dun snow, and he would lean his face over the edge of the loft. “Father needs you,” she’d say. “Father needs you for something.” He heard these words with such clarity that he became angry with her for not speaking or getting up, for lying there like an old cow on a rainy day.
The easiest to move, weighing no more than a lamb, had been Emma, the one who understood him least, who asked him questions the others didn’t.
Why did he live in the barn? Why didn’t he like to talk or sing? Why did he sit at dinner only after their father had already said the prayer?
Caleb would lean down, look her in the eye, and muss her hair. Somehow that placated her.
Underneath her, facedown, was Amos, the eldest boy, who could silence them all with the same look their father gave, who one morning after milking had gotten his hair caught in the latch to the barn door and no amount of tugging or twisting could free him. Caleb had been forced to cut him loose, leaving thick, sandy locks of hair waving at them. Their father had made Amos wait two weeks before he’d let Mary even it out, a large gap in the bangs that he flicked and pushed from his eyes. “
Oh, ye sons of men
,” their father quoted, “
how long shall my glory be turned into dishonor? How long will ye love vanity, and seek after falsehood?
” Caleb thought they were praying, and paused on the steps, hat in hand, the scent of stew readying his stomach. No one dared smile at Amos’s crooked haircut. Even in death, he held sway with that expression, and Caleb had cut the brass buttons from a pair of overalls his father would never wear again and had placed them over Amos’s eyes.
And Jesse. Jesse had been the only one to know him at all. They would sit on hot summer days in the tall grass, far enough away not to be able to see each other through the shifting stalks, close enough to hear the occasional sigh or hiccup, together but apart, waiting for the fog to roll over them and the moisture to collect on the blades before they’d lie down, their bare arms and shoulders cooled by the dew. He had used the remnants of Mary’s dress to cover Jesse fully, but somehow when his brothers and sisters settled into one another, things had shifted and now his dirty fingernails pointed at Caleb. He took his brother’s hand, pretended it felt capable and human, and tucked it beneath Mary’s back.
He avoided his mother when he took the lamp from the hook above the stove; he couldn’t stand for her to know what was happening. He no longer bothered to close the door to the house. When he ventured back outside, a rabbit scampered across his path, leaving its prints in those of Jesse’s boots, the sight of which gave a brief leap to Caleb’s heart, but then he realized the boots held his own feet. He removed the chimney, the collar, the burner, and the heavy wick from the kerosene lamp and dumped the contents across the four bodies. On top of that, he emptied what was left of the oil in the small barrel they kept in the kitchen. He clutched the tinder in his hands. The kerosene soaked down to the snow and began to melt it in small rivulets, like the view from the hillside when the streams swelled in spring. The rivers radiated out from the mass of bodies, and as he contemplated them, his brothers and sisters came alive. He heard their voices; he saw them move.
He couldn’t do it. It would have to wait for nightfall, when he could no longer see their faces or their familiar features, and remember them speaking and playing and singing and praying and crying and laughing. Sometimes, on the quietest of nights, when the moon hung heavy in the sky and the light could guide him as well as the sun, he would tiptoe to the front door of the house, sit on the step, remove his boots, lift the latch, and in stocking feet walk silently from room to room, watching his siblings sleep.
The house offered no solace. His mother’s irregular rasp chased him from the kitchen. He avoided the stained shapes on the floor as if his brothers and sisters were still there, and entered his parents’ room. The book Jorah had been reading to the children lay on his bedside table, a red ribbon marking their place. Beneath that sat his frayed Bible. The only thought in Caleb’s head when he’d heard the shooting was that his father would stop it. He’d done it before. With each shot, Caleb had wondered whether it had come from his father’s gun and he’d hoped his father would wave to him from the front step, telling him all was well, but then the three men had slunk out into the yard. He shuddered, and caught himself with a hand to the frame of his parents’ bed. His father looked shrunken, his clothes tattered by the shot and bullets. In life, he’d been in constant motion, only sitting to eat or read the Bible. When he put his shoes on, in fact, he did not sit on the chair next to the coatrack as everyone else did—he remained standing. Jorah’s manners and movement had given him size and weight, but in death it seemed as though he’d been wearing a coat much too large and had shrugged it off.
The wind had ceased, and with it, the whistling and moaning of the house. Sometimes he caught himself humming along with it at the base of his throat, and he’d wonder how long he’d been keeping himself company.
Caleb turned his back on his father’s body, his horrible grimace, and almost tripped over a pile of sheets on the floor. Not sure in their bloodied state what they contained, he nudged them with his foot, then noticed the clean linens on the bed. Even though he thought it had shattered altogether, his heart broke once more, for his mother, for his father, for his brothers and sisters.
He gathered the sheets and added them to the pile of bodies and broken furniture, and sat on the fence that he and Jesse had constructed to pen the pigs. It had been crooked the first time and they’d rebuilt it until they got it right, their father never saying anything but, “
And he built fenced cities in Judah: for the land had rest.
” On his knee Caleb rolled a cigarette from the tobacco he’d uncovered beneath Amos’s pillow. Jesse had showed him how to pinch the leaves and wind the papers tight and occasionally allowed him a puff here and there for his services.
The valley unfolded before him, undulating lands with small patches of forest, everything covered in cottony snowfall. When the wind came, the whole world would quake with movement—every tree, leaf, and blade of grass—moving in waves like liquid. But the snow and wind had subsided and everything was at rest. The world, too, waited.
The short day grew dim. Caleb vowed to wait until sunset, but the clouds rolled in again, thick and gray like the mounds of sheared lamb’s wool that cluttered the barn at first thaw, and the sun disappeared. Once he’d finished smoking, he would say good-bye. Caleb lit another cigarette. He didn’t like the taste but enjoyed the warm sensation in his throat and his lungs. Before long, the papers burned his fingers and he spat on them, rubbing them back and forth to ease the pain.
T
heir first night together, baby Mary slept between them, and Elspeth worried that Jorah kept the child awake with his constant touching: cupping the heel of her foot in his palm and looking over the miniature toes with delight, placing a finger in the dimples of her elbows, giving her his pinkie and laughing when she suckled on it. Over her husband’s protests, Elspeth took the infant into the main room to feed. She could hear Jorah shifting on the bed to see through the open door, but she held her back to him, silently urging the child to drink. She had been practicing, but the baby at times refused her, or latched on painfully, or, most often, the milk refused to come and Elspeth would look away so Mary could not see her crying.
Jorah built a crib, and some nights Elspeth would find him sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching Mary sleep. When he returned to bed, he would recite his observations, speculate on the baby’s dreams, remark on her beauty. He would drop into slumber, his brow clean and smooth, his lips bent into a slight smile while Elspeth examined the shifting shadows on the ceiling until the dawn chased them away.
On a clear July day, the heat filtering through the trees, Elspeth stood on the bank of the creek, holding Mary in her arms. She’d made a tiny dress from her nicest white scarf and the pillowcase in which she’d carried her belongings away from the van Tessels’.
Jorah positioned himself on two steady rocks, his legs staggered for balance. He wore a white shirt and his finest trousers, which he’d rolled up past his knees, but the rushing water soaked the fabric anyway. He sang in a register lower than his speaking voice, “
O Father, bless the children, Brought hither to thy gate
.” He gestured for the child. Elspeth edged closer to the water and reached out and Jorah took Mary in his sure arms and continued the hymn. When he finished, he handed the child’s bonnet to Elspeth. Mary’s large eyes worked against the sunlight. Jorah said something quiet that Elspeth couldn’t hear, and dipped the baby’s head in the rushing creek.
Elspeth watched the sky. Cottony clouds lazed on the horizon. She didn’t know what she’d expected. Certainly she didn’t think the child would burst into flame or the earth would crack open and swallow her whole, but she didn’t expect Jorah to hand Mary back to her and for the child to act perfectly happy and for Jorah to smile as well, unrolling his pants and saying the Lord’s Prayer. With Mary’s breath on her cheek, she heard herself reciting the passage she’d memorized the night before, “
And Mary said, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in his God my Savior.’ ”
Jorah looked upon her as if she’d come straight from heaven. This only made her face flush and her legs waver as she retreated back to the house.
C
ALEB MONITORED HIS
mother through the glass. Nothing made this an interesting pursuit—at such a distance, her breathing was imperceptible—but he could attend her and at the same time measure the strength of the sun as it tumbled down the sky in the gleaming of the window. He focused on his mother and then the sun and back and forth so many times his eyes were adjusting slower and slower and his head throbbed.
From this spot, he could imagine the path of the killers as they walked around Emma’s body, her life already leaking away, into the kitchen where Amos froze midstride and Mary didn’t have time to turn from the stove, and then through the great room, where they shot Jesse as he ran to Jorah. Even if he hadn’t witnessed the man falling in the waving grass and didn’t know of his father’s capabilities, Caleb would have fled to him, too, and he pressed into the wall of the house, thinking of his brother’s shoulder against his as they scrambled toward safety. There they would lie forever, side by side. Jorah had failed them, hadn’t even gotten up, and Caleb burned every time he thought of his father’s body in bed, and the unused gun in the corner.
When he was nine and exploring their land for the first time on his own, Caleb had discovered a magic, silent place on the other side of the hill: four humped mounds in a small clearing covered by curving moosewood, the striped trunks gnarled and growing over rocks as if pinning them to the earth. The trees and the grass were well maintained, and Caleb felt at home there, safe. Two days after seeing the man die, Caleb ventured to his private spot to try to arrest the hammering in his chest and stop the nightmares that had plagued him once he finally managed to sleep. The peace had been shattered, though, by a new mound where the turf sat in clumps amid freshly exposed earth.
E
LSPETH HAD GIVEN
Jorah the money she’d earned in town, and he’d wrapped it in a kerchief and left for a period. During those quiet nights, she held the baby in the rocking chair, sometimes not getting into bed before a pink flush crept over the sky. She stared out the windows, walking from one to the other, awaiting his return, restless. He came back with a cow and two wicker baskets full of chickens. In his hat, he ferried half a dozen chicks. By then, Mary had begun to walk and burbled the beginnings of words. He placed the hat in the grass—the chicks chirped and squawked and tried in vain to mount the edge of the hat and escape—and he knelt down, holding his arms wide for his daughter, whose lurching steps filled him with laughter.
Her brown hair grew long and fine and curled at the tips. More and more Elspeth left the care of the child to Jorah, who relished it all, every soiled diaper, every burping. Mary tottered on her feet and chased the chickens around the yard, but they’d turn on her, and—with useless wings flapping—knock her to the dirt. Jorah would drop his shovel or his pitchfork and scoop his tearful Mary up in his arms and place her on his shoulders. She would press her cheek against the top of his head until she cried no more. Elspeth observed this with worry and envy. When the days grew shorter, she left again.
P
AST NIGHTFALL,
C
ALEB
sparked the tinder and lit a handful of hay. It reflected off the ice and made everything sparkle. He let it burn. Then, as it illuminated Emma’s face looking up at him, he dropped it onto his brothers and sisters. He shut his eyes and ran.
The sound came first, a whooshing like a bat flying close to his ears, but all around him. Next came the sudden rush of heat, and he fell. Before he could pull himself from the snow and ice, the smell hit him, the noxious odor of burning hair and flesh. He scrambled to his feet and—vomiting on his way—fled from the pyre. He followed the path he’d made to the barn, back to safety, and from two hundred yards away, in its shadow, the fire looked like any other. With a ball of snow, he wiped the bile from his chin. He picked up another tight fistful and sucked the water from it.
With no warning, the wind tugged his hair so hard it hurt his scalp and brought with it particles of ice that stung his face and neck. It drove the flames along the ground, following the tributaries of oil and kerosene, low and slinking like fog. The fire covered his twenty paces in an instant as if following his trail. The house withstood only a couple teasing licks before the roof ignited, the wooden shingles and gutters clogged with pine needles. The attic window, shuttered for the winter, popped behind the wood. He was already running toward his mother. The roof had proved to be little but tinder, and—weakened—it dropped down onto the rafters in less than a minute. The gap between the barn and the house had never seemed so vast. The ice cut his ankles above his boots. He held his scarf to his face against the smell.
Once through the door, the house roared around him. The heat was astonishing. A section of ceiling closest to the pyre caved in on the living room, and he saw the rocking horse they kept in the corner—though they were all too old for it—crushed by a beam. His mother did not move, despite the stifling smoke and the thunderous noise of the house falling down around her. Caleb screamed, urging her up, his mouth an inch from her ear. He slapped her cheeks. Sweat beaded and rolled down her forehead. He took her under the arms, and dragged her from the kitchen table. She yelped as her feet slammed on the floor. His vision blurred, and when he coughed it felt like he spit flames. He clutched his mother, fighting to pull her along with him, the heat so intense, so close, that he thought they wouldn’t make it.
The air from outside slipped in the open front door, bracing and new, and it brought life to his lungs. He leaned back and dug his heels into the floorboards, and soon enough he lay gasping in the snow, his mother half on top of him. When the tears cleared from his eyes, he was surprised to find the fire more docile. It was sure to swallow the house, but now seemed like the milk snake he’d seen eat a mouse in the barn: content to finish its job, but in no great hurry.
Caleb thought of the Ithaca and his father’s rifle sitting in the kitchen next to the door, and his mother’s bag beside the coatrack. They would need them. He allowed himself a prayer—he thought of his mother, said her name, so that maybe God would listen—asking that the wind wouldn’t pick up in the short time he would be inside. He pulled his scarf back over his mouth and nose. The doorframe held. The heat leeched all the moisture from his skin and lungs, leaving behind an aching dryness. He wrapped his hands in his sleeves so he could touch the hot metal and threw the weapons out into the snow, along with an old coat of Jorah’s, his mother’s bag and jacket, a pot, a pan, a bag of oats and one of cornmeal, and a few blankets.
The wind resumed and the fire screamed with approval. His prayer hadn’t been answered. He threw himself out the door. As he turned over, shimmying away from the inferno, he heard a frenzied hooting. An owl emerged from the small triangular gap above the door, and swooped through the smoke. Then another. The windows cracked like gunshots.
His mother lay where he’d left her. He wadded his shirt and tucked it beneath her head, and sat in the snow, shivering. He placed the back of his hand on her forehead. The snow seemed to have brought her fever down, but he knew he couldn’t leave her exposed for long.
Half of the house collapsed. The living room bent outward, then flattened altogether, sparks exploding into the sky like fireflies. Sheets of ash, borne by the wind, their edges glowing orange, floated away like demonic leaves. The flames found the kitchen, and he watched the table withstand the onslaught through the darkening windows and the open door. His head filled with the impossible wish for the table to survive. At that moment, another owl burst forth. As it took flight, its wings beat frantically against the flames blooming from its feathers. He stood and watched it careen through the smoke-filled air, flying erratically in uneven spurts, the light consuming its body, until it dropped and landed in the snow with a hiss.