The Kept (8 page)

For the first time in a long time, God had handed her a gift. She’d been lying there, trying to figure out how to locate Caleb in the murk, and as she’d decided to stand, she’d heard a noise, growing louder and louder, and then Caleb, his legs stuck up in the air, had blasted through the fog, spinning like a top. When she thought she’d controlled herself she heard Caleb’s helpless giggling—something she’d heard only a handful of times in her life, few enough to count on one hand—and she started all over again.

“The rifle,” the boy said, his laughter stopping abruptly. “Father’s rifle. I dropped it.” He flexed his hand like it might reappear.

“It probably got hung up on a root,” Elspeth said. He held back tears and she could see that losing the rifle had further damaged his mangled heart. She would do her best to fix what she could, and traced the outline of the items lumped in the bottom of her bag. Inside it smelled of cedar and smoke from the fireplace of the hotel where she’d stayed while working as a nursemaid due to a thankful overabundance of midwives. After going unwashed for so long, her packed clothes had solidified into a filthy, mildewed ball that she left in the snow; they could not be saved. Besides, she enjoyed being surrounded by the scent of Jorah’s hard-earned sweat. Underneath her clothes were the gifts, and they made her breathe harder, each gasp causing more pain. Elspeth pulled the stopper from the small vial of perfume she’d purchased for the girls, and the tart scent stung her eyes. She placed it on the ground at her side, and the angular glass refracted the dim light, casting slight rainbows on the clean snow. She unspooled the ribbon meant for Emma. The three yards of purple fabric spilled across the snow, and when the wind tugged at it, Elspeth gave it up, letting it slide away like a colorful snake. From the very bottom of the bag, she brought forth the smallest packages, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She undid one to reveal several chunks of pink gum. “Don’t swallow it,” Elspeth said, handing a piece to Caleb. “It’s gum. Just chew.”

The pinkish blobs looked to him like newborn squirrels. Once he got over the association, however, and the gum softened, he smiled.

“Let’s forget the rifle,” she said. “It was too heavy, anyway.”

Clouds rolled and undulated, moving fast across the sky. She put her arm in his, and led the way toward Hapsburg. The rain resumed. Caleb learned to trust the lean of her body when she steered him in an unexpected direction, but it was always sound and level. In minutes their backs and heads shone with the same glaze that had settled over the landscape. She forgot the bottle of perfume in the snow, but it would soon be buried.

W
HEN THEY CAME
to a group of evergreens that provided some cover from the weather, they made camp in the remaining light. The pines stood close enough to one another that Caleb could string up the canvas, and shortly they were beneath it, rain and fits of hail loud overhead. There wasn’t much to eat: a few nuts, three strips of salted pork. Caleb checked his tobacco rations and saw that he only had enough for one small cigarette. He rerolled the bag and replaced it in the breast pocket of his shirt. It smelled like Amos. He managed to start a fire, though the pine made for poor, smoky fuel. He located a dead birch at the edge of the firelight, and stomped on it with Jesse’s boot to break it into pieces. Rotted, it burned too quickly. They shared a jar of water and then Caleb filled it with snow and placed it close to the fire to melt.

“Did you see the house burn?” Elspeth asked, her hold on the events slippery. He said he had. “Where were they?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He took a pine branch—the sap hissing as it boiled and dripped from the makeshift torch—and wandered away looking for more wood, hoping his mother hadn’t seen the expression on his face. He hadn’t lied, he thought, but before long he’d have to tell the story, and he still worried she’d wander off and leave him there and he’d spend endless days trying to find their home again.

Elspeth watched Caleb’s torch rise and fall with his steps in the middle of the darkness, her feet throbbing and her body alive with pain. She got her Bible from her bag, shifted it closer to her chest, and fell asleep.

Not far from where he’d found the first, Caleb fetched another dead birch branch and dragged it back to their camp, the papery bark sliding off and shredding in his hands. As he approached, he made out a black form creeping along the ground, near the edge of the halo of firelight. At first he thought he’d imagined it, but then it moved again, sideways, close to the ice. Caleb moved to the side as well, in an attempt to keep the fire between himself and the animal. Its eyes glittered orange. The fire popped. The rain intensified.

Caleb drew near the canvas. The animal flirted with the light, allowing a paw—claws sparkling like jewels—to enter here, a muscled shoulder there. As Caleb leapt the last few feet to his pack, the animal growled, a low, guttural noise that stirred his bowels. But in the seconds he ducked under cover to pull the Ithaca from his pack, the animal disappeared. Emboldened with the gun, he walked out of the light, toward where the beast had stalked them. He made out a few footprints, claws digging into the ice, before he backed his way to the canvas, and sat under it, his head out of the rain, his Ithaca across his knees. Here he was, his mother shivering with fever, farther than he’d ever been from home, and he couldn’t help but feel that the world had turned against them.

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning, Caleb caught a snowshoe hare by following it back to its den. He checked for leverets; he wouldn’t take a mother. As he lifted it by its ears, the animal’s huge back feet kicked at the air and it produced a hoarse bark. Caleb let its weight stretch out its body then grabbed the feet and pulled. The spine snapped. It convulsed twice. He cleaned the animal, the meat purple and quivering in the cold, steam rising from the blood, the insides warm on his bare hands. He inspected the organs for spots, and threw them into the creek bed along with the feet and head, where a scavenger wouldn’t let them sit long.

As a boy, he’d once sliced right into the lower intestines, ruining the rabbit, the fetid stench staying on his hands all day, even as he crawled into bed with Jesse, who had made him sleep on the floor. Caleb woke early, the light blue. Jesse must have told their father, because Jorah grabbed Caleb by the hand and led him to the small pen the girls had made, where he grasped a rabbit by its hind legs, and it glanced around, confused but not panicked; the girls did all sorts of strange things with the animals, and they’d become inured to such rough treatment. Caleb’s eyes stung with tears that he didn’t allow to fall.

“Go ahead,” Jorah said. He held the animal out to him. This was before Caleb knew what Jorah was capable of, one of those brief days when he thought the square plot of grass on the other side of the hill was his secret, a magic land left for him alone.

Caleb put his hands behind his back. “It’s Emma’s.”

“It’s our Father’s,” Jorah said and grabbed the rabbit by the head and flicked his wrist. Caleb heard the crack and looked back at the house, sure the girls were watching from inside, sobbing. “This is a lesson you will learn.”

Caleb tried to run away, afraid he would make a mistake in front of his father, who—at that time—he loved so much that he watched him in secret, trying to copy his walk, his mannerisms, even his voice. Jorah caught him with a strong hand. “
He is in the way of life that keepeth instruction
,” Jorah said, “
but he that refuseth reproof erreth
.” Caleb dropped the knife with a clanging and buried his face in his hands, then tried to lean into Jorah, but Jorah kept him upright and wouldn’t permit his son to find solace in him. “The girls will forgive you,” Jorah said. “
Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven.
” Caleb didn’t know what his sin had been.

“Mama,” Caleb said, “did you always understand what Father was saying when he quoted the Bible?”

It was the first time either of them had mentioned home, and Elspeth had to gather herself before answering. “Your father understood things I never will.” She left it at that and leaned on her elbows and let her head relax back against her shoulders. The fact that Jorah had seemingly memorized the entire Bible and could call up passages at will for any problem or occasion had frustrated Elspeth, but it was impossible to criticize. She’d only wished he would use his own words. She rested while Caleb built the fire up and speared the rabbit with a sharpened stick. Smoke rose into the murky sky, and the sizzling could be heard above the pops and cracks of the forest.

During their early years together, Jorah would tell her tales of his time away—small jobs on farms, minor carpentry—and the cruelty of the larger world. Often his skin color would cause him trouble in the form of thieves or employers who refused to pay his wages. He told her of how he fought, and how he held back, and sometimes he ran, knowing his young wife slept alone in an unfinished house without enough food or money. Despite their violence, the stories made Elspeth itch: her feet, her legs, her hips spasming with the desire to move. As time passed, and he became more immersed in the Bible, he sometimes didn’t even come to bed, the faint rustle from the next room of the thin pages turning the only sign of his presence. The pages spoke through his mouth, whole chapters, psalms and hymns in their entirety. It was as if he had turned piety into a contest and Elspeth lagged far behind. Of course, he knew her secrets. Her feet twitched in bed at night, and Jorah told her it was as if she ran from him in her dreams.

E
LSPETH HAD NEVER
needed a compass and she led them with confidence even blinded by pain and fever. They walked on what had once been a grand thoroughfare. Great elms stood in lines on each side of the road, and their branches met overhead, so that beneath them the snow was only a pale dusting on the frozen dirt.

Caleb had never experienced such silence. The snow on all sides muffled everything. He stopped to let it wash over him.

“What is it?” she said.

“It’s so quiet.”

“It’s a road,” she replied. “But they never built the house to go at the end of it.” The last time she’d passed this way, the elms had been smaller, and others had been cleared and chopped to produce the tidy lines. She placed her hand on one. Her fingers were dwarfed by the size of the trunk. “Do you mind if we rest? Only for a bit.”

Caleb hesitated. They’d only walked a few miles—four perhaps—since they’d set out that morning. Then his mother stripped off her jacket, and he saw the blood had soaked through again. “We’ll rest until you’re ready,” he said.

When Elspeth had traveled down the new road alone, the horses that had planed and leveled the way whinnied and clomped their hooves. A man in tweed suit pants and a matching vest emerged from a large tent, wiping a pair of glasses on a handkerchief. When he placed his glasses upon his nose he smiled, his cheeks rising into small apples, his teeth pure white.

“Hello,” he called out. Elspeth returned the greeting and kept moving. “Would you like some water?” Elspeth agreed—the summer heat leeched her strength, even in the shade—and the man winked, as if she’d confirmed a previous order. “My men have gone scouting for a higher location from which to survey the property.” He ladled a cup full of water and Elspeth accepted it with both hands like a child. “Our employer plans on building a farm on this land.” He took the empty cup from her and refilled it. “Good soil here.” He kicked at the new road with the toe of his boot, as if to expose the dirt’s quality. She watched him over the brim of the cup and wondered how different her life might have been if she hadn’t been cast out with Jorah. If only she’d met a man like the van Tessel girls had surely married, she told herself, a man like this, things would be simpler.

“Looking for work, by chance?” he asked. “We have plenty.”

She wanted to say yes. She stuttered some guttural consonants. Before she could block the images, she envisioned Jorah waiting for her, the children gathered around him in the doorway, the children she’d brought home against his wishes, that he had taken on as his own. She handed the cup back to the man, said she had to be on her way, and practically ran down the new street that arrived at nothing.

W
HILE ELSPETH SLEPT,
the quiet began to exert a kind of force on Caleb, the trees seemed to bow closer, and he imagined himself stuffed inside the pantry again, his legs folded over one another, the smell of his blankets, the oil from the guns, the stench of his own body overwhelming the usual pine. “Did you ever know about the rabbits? How I learned to clean them?” Caleb said. He asked his question again; this time his mother heard him.

She said she hadn’t, and he told her the story, uncomfortable at first, his voice wavering. His mouth went dry and he took a sip of cold water from one of the jars. It hurt his teeth. He continued. It helped him not to look at her. Instead he gazed up at the white canopy above them, the branches like veins, and it seemed that the pictures he described drew themselves on the snow like etchings in a book, with straight lines and dark shadows. He said that the girls had not said a word to him about it, though surely they noticed the missing rabbit, and had eaten the stew that evening; they must have known. As his story drew to a close, Caleb knew he was ignoring the center of it: that his father wasn’t the man he said he was.

She knew that he awaited her response. He’d maintained a far-off look while he talked, but now that he was finished she suspected he hoped for an answer to some question he’d posed in the telling. “It sounds like your father,” she said, trying not to make the word sound strange. “Though I suppose he easily could have waited for you boys to trap another rabbit. I can’t say I understand his lesson, either.”

Caleb smiled at this unexpected union; he’d guessed his mother would admonish him for disagreeing with his father, perhaps even tell a parable of her own. Instead, they were paired in their confusion. The branches above seemed to him to exhale, relaxing.