The Kept (7 page)
T
hey went on like that—Elspeth and Caleb—for nearly a week. Each day Elspeth could sit up for longer and stomach a bit more food. Each morning, noon, and evening, Caleb changed her bandages, and the wounds no longer seeped liquid, and the scabs started to meet in the center like ice over a puddle. The snow continued, too, and the black shadow that used to be their home became lost in the sweeping, slow-moving drifts. The four broken posts turned half-white with driving flakes that stuck to the sides like moss.
Inside the barn, the revived animals heated the air enough for Caleb to walk around without two shirts and two pairs of socks. His mother’s growing strength made him look upon the meager provisions he’d collected with new eyes. He packed and repacked, preparing for the journey ahead. Into an old rucksack that must have belonged to his father, Caleb placed what dried meats they’d stored in the barn for the winter. He rolled a thick wool blanket around clean shirts, extra rags for bandages, empty jars for water, a length of twine to hang their shelter, some matches, and—buried deep at the bottom—one of his favorite feathers, curled and so deeply black that when the sun shone against it, the edges appeared purple. He cleaned and oiled the guns. He took boxes of ammunition and stacked them in his arms, impressed by their heft.
For lunch he made cornmeal cakes, picking out the grubworms with quick hands, trying not to burn his fingers on the stone. The animals perked up at the scent, and Caleb knew their interest signaled the restoration of their health. He sometimes thought of staying but pushed the wish aside by shutting his eyes tight and thinking of the gunshots and the emptiness in the faces of his brothers and sisters. For the first time he lit the lamps that lined the middle of the barn, and he saw the animals, thin but alive, their bones cast in sharp relief beneath their taut skin, their shining eyes watching him. At the last stall, he discovered the horses had died in the night. He slammed the bucket to the ground and the water sloshed out and puddled at his feet. The horses—hardly recognizable as such, they’d grown so thin and frail—had fallen together, curling into each other. Caleb got down in the muck and folded himself into their embrace as well. The mud was cold and stiff. The horses had materialized one day, grazing in the valley below. Jorah had owned some workhorses once, but they’d died before Caleb knew them. Sometimes Amos pretended to remember them, but Mary would dismiss this as nothing but dreams, pictures culled from the words of their father. Caleb and Jesse had spotted these horses at the same time, but it had been Jesse who went to tell Jorah. Their father’s look had not been one of delight, as theirs had been; he shielded his eyes from the sun with a flattened hand and scanned the horizon. The horses—he would explain later—had been broken and wore the marks of being saddled. He ushered everyone inside and sat on the rock at the edge of the cornfields and watched the animals for most of the afternoon before he whistled for Amos and the two of them disappeared down the hill. When they’d returned, Caleb had been awed by the horses’ size, their knotted muscles, their veins thick as one of his fingers.
As he curled against the belly of the horse, he thought of his move to the barn, which had begun after he’d watched the man in the valley spasm and fall, the sound reaching Caleb’s hiding place long after the flash of the powder. Day by day, he spent more time with the animals—who were simpler and easier to understand—waking earlier and staying later, Emma or Mary bringing him his lunch. After one fitful night in which gunshots sprung him awake again and again, and Jesse clamped his hand to his mouth each time, the two boys paced the inky darkness of the yard, then spent a while on the fence—not talking, Jesse keeping Caleb company—before Caleb wandered into the barn. He’d slept in the loft with no nightmares. The next night in the house, he woke screaming. In the barn, tranquil slumber. He grew used to the outdoors, but inside he would flush and burn with heat. Part of him thought perhaps Jorah radiated evil, and at night it seeped into his head and poisoned his dreams, and he yearned to ask Jesse about it, but he could never manage to find the words.
E
LSPETH PRACTICED WALKING.
She creaked her way to her feet and took tentative, choppy strides, reminded of the children’s first steps—their first betrayals—how when Amos had begun to walk, she’d rushed to the lip of the hill and stood atop a stump, contemplating whether to throw herself off.
Down the aisle of the barn she limped, and considered how it must affect Caleb to see the animals in such a state. She didn’t know the boy well—she barely knew any of the children—but she understood, of course, that he loved the barn and the animals it contained. The walk quickly drew the breath from her, and she rested against the railing of the final stall, where the two horses’ bodies shrank each day, their teeth baring themselves and their rib cages poking through their tightened skin.
On the second day, she made it to the end of the barn and back. She felt more herself, and though her body wasn’t ready, she couldn’t bear being locked up with death any longer. Every time she glimpsed the wreckage of the house, her skin itched with her damnation. This limbo could hold her no longer. “Tomorrow,” she said, walking back to her bed, knowing he listened from the hayloft, “we leave at first light.”
T
hough from the state of her injuries and the fact that she’d woken in Jorah’s clothes she presumed that Caleb had seen her body, Elspeth retreated into the back of the barn out of modesty and wrapped bandages around her chest, drawing them tight with her teeth until it hurt to breathe, the fabric groaning each time she did.
Caleb paused at the top of the ladder, wiping sleep from his eyes. His mother fastened her bandages with a series of pins that made her look as though she’d been stitched together with metal. “It’s time,” she said.
“What about the animals?”
Elspeth put one arm and then the other into the sleeves of Jorah’s shirt, trying to ignore the pain, knowing that worse—much worse—would come. To leave the animals must be hard for the boy, she thought, and their eyes followed her with rapt attention, awaiting their fate. Their snorts and shuffling steps amplified in her head. “Perhaps we set them free?”
“They’ll die,” Caleb said. While he stood within a yard of his bed and his feeble belongings, his heart begged for a few more moments of childhood. He forgave himself his whining. He pictured his animals roaming the hillside sickly and weak. He hoped he’d meant much to them. “They won’t know what to do.”
“You could stay,” she said. He came down the ladder, his twelve-year-old form so small in that giant space. The animals didn’t care, she thought, that he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung crookedly over his tiny frame, or that his hair stood on end in the morning and then flopped into his face by midday. He’d found his place. Her head and stomach eased at the thought of walking off by herself like she had a dozen times since she and Jorah had settled in their small nook on the shaded side of the hill.
Staying had of course occurred to Caleb. His mother had said it aloud and so it pushed its way to the front of his thoughts and hung in the air in front of him, easy enough to grab. He could live like this forever, among the animals. But his mind had been made up and his family depended on him, and he walked down the rows of pens, unlatching them as he went, unable to look at the expectant faces. While the chickens milled about under his feet, he slid the pack over his shoulders and took the Ithaca and Jorah’s rifle in hand.
They swung the doors open. The cold air gripped their skin and turned their lips dry, and they tugged their scarves up to cover their mouths. The snow crunched underfoot. Caleb fought the urge to look back. The faint sounds of the animals called to him, begged him to reconsider. But then he passed the small lump of snow where his brothers and sisters lay entangled in each other’s arms and his resolve hardened. He hitched his bags higher onto his shoulders.
Legs heavy and head dull, Elspeth stared at the empty space where her home had once stood. She saw the four stone markers, and the line Caleb’s footprints had drawn to them. She prayed silently, asking for a safe journey for both herself and Caleb on their mission and also for her children and her husband as they sought their way to heaven. Abraham had been willing to kill his son for God, and so He spared them both. On the altar of sacrifice that receded with each step, she had given not one, but four children and a husband. She wondered whether God had become so much crueler with the passage of time. Instead of giving thanks for what she’d been spared, she grew angrier at what had been taken from her, and a hunger grew deep in the pit of her—in the imaginary womb where she carried and bore the children she’d taken as her own—to find the men responsible and snatch everything from them with equal cruelty.
Elspeth, usually as sure-footed as a mountain goat, stumbled and slipped along the icy rocks and steep descents. Caleb didn’t offer his help before she slid down an embankment and crashed onto the thick ice atop the stream. Her scream penetrated the thick air of the morning. Caleb tucked the Ithaca—safety on—down the back of his shirt, where it formed a second spine and helped him feel upright. The cold metal stuck to his skin. The rifle he used as a walking stick. He took Elspeth by the crook of her arm, and they made their way awkwardly, the path not wide enough to accompany the two of them side by side. Elspeth lost herself in pain—let herself be buried by it—her only focus to keep her feet moving.
Caleb remained quiet, concerned that any conversation would lead to the logical questions. They’d never spoken much; Caleb didn’t speak unless spoken to—sometimes not even then. He had one strong memory of his mother, and he’d stored it away, much the same as his books or his feathers.
One autumn morning, he’d risen early to fish in the eddies of the stream. He stepped out of the woods on a long, flat rock that jutted out over the water. The surface looked placid, but he and Jesse swam in it in the summertime, and the current spun them around like tops. The cool radiated up from the water onto his face and hands as he sat down to fish. His cork swayed in the stream, his feet kicked at the air, and a cigarette dangled from his lips when he heard his mother coming up from the lower path, a basket of laundry in her arms. She hummed to herself, a hymn he could hear them singing to Emma as he tended to the animals, “
There’s a home for little children, Above the bright blue sky
.” Elspeth, preoccupied and harried—having recently returned from months away—set the basket down and removed one of her husband’s shirts, which she held up to the sun to look upon with a bewildered expression, as if she’d never seen such a thing before. Caleb stared at the shirt as well, at the way the sun shone through the thin fabric.
Elspeth saw Caleb and flinched, skidding on the muddy embankment, and would have tumbled into the water if the shirt hadn’t caught on a rock. When she lifted it to the sun again, it had been clouded by mud and torn down the middle. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and tilted her head at him. It was his turn to start, and he tossed the cigarette into the water, where it made a small hiss—enough for both of them to hear—and looped around in a spiral before it disappeared over the edge of the rocks. Elspeth smiled, dangled the shirt over the stream, and let it drop from her hands. It waved underwater, pushed and pulled by the indecisive current, and then it, too, went over the falls, like the ghost of a drowned man. Neither made a sound, though when Caleb caught a trout and brought it wriggling from the water, she smiled at him again. He strung the fish and tied the twine around a root that protruded from the ground in a wooden loop. He’d only needed one fish, but he liked sitting there in the weakening autumn sun with his mother so close by, doing her work. When she finished, she nodded to him once and walked off, the laundry basket in front of her like a belly full with child. Only then did Caleb gather his things.
That golden fall day had been the longest the two of them had ever been in one place by themselves. It was their only shared secret. The gap between them had widened again after their brief connection and he felt it yawning even as he clutched her arm and helped her down the jagged path that split the hillside like a bolt of lightning. He worried that if he told her what he’d done she would leave him, and he would spend the rest of his days alone.
Elspeth was distracted by the map she had stored away in her mind. As her trips had become more and more frequent, she prayed constantly that the next child would bring her peace. The town of Caleb’s birth, Watersbridge, had wide, dusty streets and when the wind howled down their corridors the air filled with sand so thick one had to close the windows even in the height of summer. The church’s imposing steeple punctured the sky. Caleb had looked like a lumpy, disheveled angel, and Elspeth had tried to help herself, had sworn she would be happy with what she had, but this promise did not last his first day on earth. The train ride home had been short, and Elspeth marveled at her forked tongue, which could lie with no effort to other passengers about her reasons for forcing a newborn to endure such a journey. When she was met with Jorah’s wordless anger, her breasts would not produce for the child, and so she dipped her finger in milk and sugar and the infant Caleb would hang on with tenacity. She’d been gone for eleven months. Once Jorah had connected with Caleb—when the child peered over her shoulder at him—the boy had been like the rest. But not quite. Caleb and Jorah had never settled into a comfortable rhythm, not like the others. She’d waited another two years before Jesse, whose mother had turned to alcohol and laudanum, and she’d presented this as evidence to Jorah, and he’d accepted another child without question.
She tried to stop. For four years she swaddled, nursed, and delivered, not immune to temptation, but not succumbing to it, either. Emma had proved too difficult. She brought the baby home with no explanation, and Jorah had been sullen and taciturn. She heard him praying morning and night by their bedside for her salvation. Nothing could have made him break his word to her. Though she often tried its strength, she knew it to be true.
“W
HICH DIRECTION WERE
they headed?” Elspeth asked. She leaned down until their foreheads almost touched. They’d come a fair distance, and Caleb risked a glance back toward home but couldn’t see the barn or the tops of the trees he knew by heart. This section of the hill wouldn’t be visible from his fence post and the realization chilled him. Caleb had seen the footprints, their trail in the snow like a long snake of guilt, winding its evil way into and out of their house. He raised a snow-covered arm and pointed.
Elspeth pulled at her bandages, and thrust a finger into one of the wounds. The pain cleared her mind and brought her breath rattling back to her, gave life to her legs. The boy had pointed her back the way she’d come. She flipped through images of the towns and cities she’d visited, as if turning the pages of a book, examining them, looking for sidearms on the men, listening for the pop of shots as the taverns spilled their contents out onto the streets. “Hapsburg,” she said, remembering stepping around a broad puddle of dried blood outside her hotel one morning, and hearing the constant hammering of the overworked coffin maker. “It’s a good place to start.” The journey would be slow, she thought, and they would not come back this way again.
T
HEY COULDN’T FIND
the energy to talk, nor did they have much to speak about. Elspeth recalled the long miles to Hapsburg and understood her crawling pace meant days of travel, days spent inside her own head, attempting to piece together where the men had come from and how they’d discovered the Howell farm in the middle of so much nothing. Rocks rose up out of the ice to snag her boots or appeared under her heels, sending shock waves of pain through her. Caleb’s thoughts zipped from his siblings to the fire to the great expanse of the world he found himself walking across.
As morning turned to afternoon, a low fog rolled in, thick as smoke, creeping its way up the mountain like a living thing. It wrapped around their ankles and then their waists and within minutes it became difficult for them to see their hands in front of their faces. Caleb held on to his mother, as she knew the way by heart.
She shook violently. He leaned in and saw her face wet with tears, her mouth contorted in a grimace of sorrow. “Would you like your Bible?” he asked, attempting to console her.
“They’re all gone,” she said.
“Yes, Mother.”
“The house, too. The house your father built.”
“Yes, Mother.”
The wind picked up for an instant and the fog unwound itself from their bodies, and the snow began again, landing with wet thuds on their hats. “He spared us,” Elspeth said. This was the cruelest punishment. “Why would He do that?”
T
HE MIST PRESSED
in on them again, heavy and smelling of rot. Rain fell. Elspeth’s calves cramped, but her thoughts moved in an endless circle. And then, the bottom dropped out from under her. She stepped forward, and expected the pain of her stiff leg, but no ground met her foot. She slid through Caleb’s arms. She let herself go limp, moving with shocking speed. The sound of the ice rushing past produced a steady growl. One of the scarves around her neck caught on a broken limb, and she thought it would hang her. She hoped that the earth would disappear beneath her again and she would feel nothing.
But the scarf unraveled with a brief heat on her neck and the hill leveled off. The roar in her ears subsided. She remained on her back, listening to the ticking of the rain. She’d gone under the fog, the land covered in a low ceiling, all white and flat and impossible to tell one direction from another.
The fog hung so close that Caleb had to kneel to see that rain had washed out the edge of the path, and two slick lines in the snow marked where Elspeth’s boots had gone over the edge. He called to her. The air looked like dirty dishwater. He stood at the lip of the washout, and told himself to jump several times, but his body wouldn’t allow it. He thought of his brothers, how even Jesse would laugh at him, and he wished for Amos’s hands to come out of the mist and shove him. He longed for their taunts and their goading. Below him, somewhere in the murk, he saw something move. He slid. His pants rose on his ankles, and the ice started to burn his skin, so he lifted his feet, moving even faster. The object that had caught his eye became visible again as he crested a bump. He leaned left as he slid, stretching, trying to steer himself. The damp fog had made the surface of the snow so slick and he moved so fast he didn’t think he could get there. He reached. His fingers closed on the wet wool of his mother’s scarf, and he freed it, though the brief resistance sent him spinning and he continued down the hill backward. At any moment he expected to hit a rock or a tree and he braced himself for impact.
When he’d come to a stop, Caleb rolled over onto his stomach and checked the back of his pants. The ice had nearly rubbed right through the material. His ankles were hot and raw, and as he watched, dots of blood sprouted and pooled on his skin.
About twenty yards away, his mother made a strange noise from her stomach. His bleeding ankles forgotten, Caleb rushed to her. As he approached, he could hear with clarity the sound he’d confused for coughing or choking: Elspeth was laughing. Gales of it rolled from her broken body, throaty and gruff. Caleb laughed just hearing her.