The Kept (5 page)
T
he morning sun, as if recalling the fire, scalded the sky with bright oranges and reds. His mother lay inert next to him, bundled tightly in the few blankets he’d saved. The chill, however, seemed to have done her good; her face appeared less pallid and translucent, more solid. Caleb dripped some water onto her lips and she drank until she coughed and he turned her head so she didn’t choke.
He threw aside the canvas he’d hoisted to protect them from the elements to find that a few inches of crisp, granulated snow had fallen in his brief sleep. He put on Jorah’s coat, which came to his knees, and he had to roll the sleeves in order to see his hands. The smell of smoke clung to everything and thickened his tongue. He hacked and spat an evil black stain onto the new powder. The house smoldered and popped. Caleb refused to look in the direction of his siblings, not yet ready to see what the flames had left.
The barn door still wouldn’t budge. They didn’t keep any shovels in the house; they were all in the barn as Caleb would be first to wake in the morning and, if the snow was deep enough—he would leap from the opening to the loft, first tossing a shovel out before him, where it would penetrate the unblemished white like an explorer’s flag laying claim to a new land.
He shifted some logs in the woodpile so that he stood high enough to push open a window. His fingers held on long enough to pitch himself up and onto the sill but, his boots and jacket slippery with snow, he lost his grip and crashed onto the hard-packed earth below. Above him the rafters lurked dim but brighter than the coal black of the ceiling. The odd stillness of the space made him uneasy—usually his presence would be met with swallows dropping from the darkness and swooping in wide circles and the animals rousing themselves, even though Caleb, as close to one of their own as existed, seldom made noise. The animals were worse off than he’d feared.
The pump had frozen, and he kicked at it with the heel of his boot—Jesse’s boot—to break the ice that encased it. Caleb filled pails and took them around, dumping them into the bone-dry troughs behind the enclosures that separated the animals from one another. It was as if their bodies had been hollowed out, their stomachs bloated with hunger, their legs stripped bare. He, too, felt as if his necessary parts had wasted away, his empty shell held down by nothing but his brother’s boots. He couldn’t bear to light the lamps. The stench was stunning. He took fistfuls of oats and hopped the fence and tried hand-feeding the horses, who were alive, but barely, their ribs pronounced beneath skin dotted with sores. He poured trickles of water directly into their mouths from the pail. Their parched tongues worked at the water, and even this slight movement cheered him. Two of the pigs had died, and the others had taken nibbles from the carcasses. The sheep were mostly gone—but only the infirm or pregnant were housed in the main barn, the rest were high up on the hill in a small outbuilding. The cows appeared to be the hardiest, but even they were sick, their skin thick and hard, their breathing slow, their reactions muted. Caleb moved between them, absorbing their warmth. The milky edges of the cows’ eyes were exposed as they searched for him, questioned him. He responded by patting their flanks and humming softly. For two years, this place had been his sanctuary. He stood in the middle of the barn, his eyes welled with tears, his chest tightened with anger, and he dropped the bucket with an apocalyptic clatter.
T
HE COLD AIR
seeping in under the canvas reestablished order to Elspeth’s thoughts. They’d become jumbled in the fire, losing their thread and pitching her into hellish dreams of rotting corpses with their long fingernails pointing, and their skinless jaws opening and snapping shut.
The sun reminded her unconscious body not of the teasing fires of hell, but of a happy warmth. She was rocking back and forth, the boards making a pleasing creak with each roll of the runners, baby Amos in her arms, the floors slick with the sawdust Jorah carried in on his clothes and in his hair that would turn their feet pure white by the end of the day. The child slept, warm on her skin, his tiny forehead lined with purple veins like a subtle map of some fantastic land. She would trace those lines, the longitudes and latitudes of their new son—Mary nearly forgotten—as through the window she watched Jorah frame the barn. Soon she would have to rise and put Amos back in his crib, make sure Mary was occupied, and help Jorah and the horses heft the timbers. He would say nothing but she could sense the questions building. Outside, he exchanged his saw for a hammer and she watched him pull a red cloth from his pocket and draw it across his face, and when his eyes emerged, they fixed upon her, dark and hooded.
Amos grew, and as he did, so did the clouds across her thoughts. She would rock the boy furiously, trying in vain to recapture that feeling, the heat of the baby against her chest, the peace of watching out the window. He hated to be idle, would not give her the rest of sleep, did not depend upon her wholly. When she relented and put him down, he pulled himself up by the rungs of the chairs and stayed standing on his own. His gurgles sounded more and more like words with each passing day, and he possessed a soft mat of hair. In the sun it was like gold, and Elspeth hated it. She caught herself wanting to cut it off, to take Jorah’s straight razor and restore the baby to what she thought of as its natural state. Mary played quietly in the corner, stacking blocks Jorah had fashioned from scraps of wood. She knocked them down and Elspeth bit her lip, wishing the child to stop. But whenever these thoughts struck her, Elspeth would cradle Amos and read her Bible to herself, surprised it didn’t ignite in her hands. She clutched him to her, hard, and once she left a series of finger-shaped bruises on his arm as he wriggled to be free, to be placed on the floor to run through the open door and out into the fields where she would never get him back. The bruises went from black to blue to yellow, but sometimes, even when Amos grew tall and muscled, she would see them on his upper arm, black as pitch, and she would look away.
C
ALEB BUILT A
fire in the makeshift stove, a pile of bricks arranged in the shape of a box, topped with a flat stone, with a hammered and bolted chimney capped with chicken wire that carried the smoke through a hole in the side of the barn. Before he’d installed the wire, a family of raccoons had crept down the metal shaft, drawn by the scent of food, and when he lit the fire the next morning, they came screeching and snarling from the bricks. Caleb had been forced to stab one with a pitchfork when it got cornered in the horses’ stall, the horses stamping wildly, the raccoon screeching and clicking and baring its teeth.
In the loft, his bed, his lantern, his bedpan, and his small pile of clothes were exactly as he’d left them. A biscuit—the last thing Mary had cooked—sat fuzzy with mold on the crate where he kept his things: a few books of animal pictures his mother had brought back with baby Emma, a collection of arrowheads, and another of feathers he could not identify. They seemed silly to him now, a child’s playthings, and he was embarrassed by how he would sit in the weak light of his lamp and rub the feathers against his face, thinking of the strange birds that had left behind these clues, species he’d never seen that flew only at night.
The door to the loft looked down on the smoldering rectangle where the house once stood and the rustling canvas under which his mother slept. He threw the shovel as hard as he could, and almost reached the first fence around the barn, which separated the pigpen from the pasture. The snow was not deep, but he jumped anyway, enjoying the brief moment of nothingness, his body no longer his own, the wind screaming past. He landed with a thud and rolled forward, coming to rest on his back. The sky was gentle blue, unaffected by what had happened beneath it.
W
ITH THE HORSES,
the mule, and their greatest efforts, the barn had been built. Jorah leaned the new walls against trees as they did so. He sat in the branches to hammer everything into place, and once he’d finished he cut them down to make room. Her husband went about his work with a clouded countenance, which she first took for concentration, but then understood to be something far deeper. She lifted a protesting Amos into her arms. Mary played with pinecones a few strides away.
“We should baptize that boy soon,” Jorah said. He pressed his hand flat against one of the corner posts of the barn and then aligned his foot with the base, checking its orientation. Satisfied, he slapped his palms together.
“Of course,” she said. “Today?” The afternoon threatened to slip away, and the wind had picked up, signaling a storm or—at the very least—rain.
“Now,” he said. “Mary’s dress is on the top shelf of the closet.”
Elspeth started to say that she knew exactly where the dress was, and there was no way it would fit the heavier, taller Amos, but she remained mute.
By the time she’d cut the back of the dress open and affixed some ties to keep it shut, evening had descended on them. Amos fought her as she tried to put his arms into the sleeves. The door slammed and she heard Jorah’s footsteps coming toward her. Instinctively, she held the child closer.
“Now,” he said. They carried no lamp, and Jorah pulled Mary along by the hand, more than once lifting her by it when she stumbled, unable to keep up with his pace or to know the dips and holes in the earth as he did. Amos cried on Elspeth’s shoulder. As they approached, the creek grew louder, the spring melt lending power that made the water roar.
Elspeth could see little but the white collar of Mary’s dress, and the black shape of her husband stepping down into the creek. She heard the water splash against his thighs and his sharp intake of breath as the icy water enveloped him to the waist.
“Give him to me,” he said. He sang the same song, but not in the lilting, patient way as before, this time more of a chant. “
O Father, bless the children
,” he began. Amos wailed. His white dress glowed in the dark. Jorah sang louder. “
Lift up their fallen nature, Restore their lost estate.
” Mary, too, started to cry, and she grasped at Elspeth’s skirts. The wind grew in strength, and the trees rocked toward them and then away. “
Receive them, cleanse them, own them, And keep them ever thine
.”
Elspeth saw the dress dip and Amos stopped crying for an instant, but then recommenced louder than before, and Elspeth pictured his tiny mouth opened wide, his face turning purple. Jorah did not hand the child out, but stepped onto the shore with the boy in his arms, and Elspeth felt the cold radiating from her husband, and heard the chattering of his teeth.
T
HE RHYTHM OF
the shovel consoled Caleb as he dug out the barn door. The task gave him something to concentrate on and he wrapped his hands in rags that grew wet with perspiration. Soon blisters opened on his palms. When the sun lowered behind their hill and the chill sharpened, he stopped, jammed the shovel into the pile of snow and, setting his feet, pulled on the door. It swung open, scratching a half-moon of dirt, the rich brown earth shocking against the snow.
Inside, he piled straw on the floor as close to the fire as he dared. One funeral pyre had been enough. He covered this in his thin set of sheets, and though the straw poked through the cotton in places, it would have to do. His footsteps crunched as he followed the path of his own prints back to the tent. He removed the canvas from over his mother and laid it on the snow. While the chill had eased her fever, he understood another night might kill her. Bent at the knees, he imagined lifting her like a swaddled child and placing her on the canvas as gently as he could, but all he could do was roll her. She grunted. “Sorry, Mother,” he said, and at the sound of his own voice, he looked to the hills behind them, as if even that brief speech would bring the murderers out from the trees, screaming and waving their guns before they leveled their steel and the shots cracked again. Caleb dragged his mother toward the barn. He contorted his neck to avoid the black mark where it all had originated.
With the back of his hand he felt his mother’s forehead, leaving a small smear of blood at her temple as he did so. Her fever had fallen. The grip of her muscles had loosened, her brow had relaxed, her jaw no longer flexed until small striped shadows developed on her cheeks, and her eyes no longer squeezed tight as if against a bright sun. He gave her some water and spoke to her as he did the animals, nonsense, a collection of soothing tones and syllables, near-words. Caleb thought it did his heart more good than hers. He placed his head by her hip, the straw poking his face, but he didn’t mind. He listened to the crackle of the fire and the small rustle of the animals in their pens.
After a short sleep, he rose. The day didn’t have the bite of the last and yet he wrapped his arms about himself. He focused on a tree so he could avoid an accidental sighting before he was ready. When he sensed he’d drawn close, he looked down upon what he’d done. Their home lay in ashes that the wind had smeared across the snow, as though the house were slowly escaping. The four thick posts that had formed the perimeter of the house remained, charred and shrunken. In what had once been his parents’ bedroom, in a far corner, the bones of his father had been scattered into disarray. Stark white, in a smaller circle of ash no more than a yard from where he stood, rested the skeletons of his brothers and sisters. They had fallen in on one another, arms wrapped in arms, legs hooked around legs, rib cages intertwining like hands in prayer.
I
N THEIR BED
that night, Elspeth had pulled the quilt close to her chin. Jorah knew. He entered the room without a lamp. His weight settled on the edge of the mattress, but he didn’t lie down. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. Elspeth’s body became confused, her heart trembling an uneven beat and her mind racing and then slowing. “I don’t know,” he continued, “whether this is because of some wrong I have committed.” She could feel him undoing the buttons of his shirt and peeling it off. Marring his uncovered back, she knew, were the crisscrossed, ropelike scars from his beating at the hands of her father and Mr. van Tessel. When she doubted how he could love her, she remembered these scars and the torn fists that had held his meager belongings when he had found her in the woods, his knuckles split nearly to the bone, the cuts so deep they hardly bled. He’d read the Bible to her at night as they searched for a land to house their new life together, and had renamed himself for her and for God, to show his new dedication. He’d liked how it had sounded,
Jorah,
so smooth and unlike the ugliness of Lothute. Those memories held small comfort for her in their bedroom, his broad back to her.