The Kept

by James Scott

  Through the smoldering gap in the wood, he saw one hand draped over the side of the table, blood dripping from the index and middle fingers. The steady tap helped him keep time. He waited for twenty, then another set of twenty. Caleb couldn’t count higher than that.

  Moments before, it had been comforting in his delirium to hear sounds again other than the fabrications of his terror and the incessant moan of the wind through the bullet holes and the scratching of the elm against the roof.

  He had been asleep when the men had come last. The first shot had sent him scrambling to the edge of the hayloft door. The sun threatened to rise. His sister, who’d been coming to fetch him for breakfast as she did most mornings, lay in the snow. When the men stepped into the doorway and over the threshold, Caleb caught only a few details: the long beard of the first; the gangly, unsteady legs of the second—like a newborn calf; and the way the third moved like water. Each carried a gun. Each wore a red scarf: the bearded one dangled loose about his shoulders, the gangly one wrapped around his neck and the third tied his long hair back with his. Caleb heard another shot and moved into the darkness of the loft. The crack of gunfire kept coming and he willed himself to press his eye to a knot in the rough wood. They emerged from the house, the three of them, and the gangly one glanced toward the barn. Caleb’s pants grew wet and he backed up, wriggling down into the hay, covering himself, his hands clenching at the straw.

  Sometime later, maybe minutes, maybe hours, he thought he heard voices, and then nothing.

  When he finally rose and picked the hay from his clothing, the house was dark. Emma’s body was only a small shadow. He climbed down from the loft and fetched his gun from the rack at the rear of the barn. Ithaca in hand, he sprinted across the yard, head swiveling, certain he saw red scarves behind every tree. He paused, and—with a careful touch—brushed the snow from Emma’s face. Once inside, he passed through each room as quickly as he could, running past the horror so he could not fully take it in, shoving open his parents’ door, the smell of gunpowder strong, his father’s rifle untouched in the corner. On his way back through the house, searching for any remnant of life—a groan, a twitch—he was met with stillness beyond his imagination. It made so little sense to him that he pressed his hand to his mouth until his jaw hurt, for he feared he would laugh, his throat and stomach dancing with the possibility. When that subsided, he grabbed his wrist with his hand and hugged himself hard. He couldn’t leave the bodies, didn’t want to be so alone, and he hid in the pantry, where he felt safe, confined. The moaning of the wind accompanied his sobbing while he awaited the return of three men. In the depths of night, he emerged to stretch, check for signs of intruders, and wipe Emma’s face and body clean from the snow that never seemed to stop falling, then crept back into the pantry, where he waited with the loaded gun.

  He’d been asleep, again. But this time he woke and did not wait, did not let his hand prove unsteady or his legs grow wet. This time he had been brave. This time he had done what his father had been unable to: He’d protected them.

  Once he felt certain no one else lurked in the shadows, he emerged from the pantry, his knees cracking, his legs cramping at being bent so long. He shifted his Ithaca to the crook of his shoulder. From the doorway, he saw the boots. He knew them. He let loose a scream from his rusted vocal chords. The lamp glow—diffused by the cracked chimney—lit the face of his mother. Her slate gray eyes were shut. He removed her hat, and her black hair unfurled onto the table. The scarf around her neck staunched some of the bleeding, so he left it. To see her not moving seemed impossible; in his twelve years he’d never so much as seen her sleep.

  He prayed—not for himself, because he’d long ago lost the place in his heart for God—but for his mother, who believed. His prayers were half answered by the rise and fall of Elspeth’s chest, infrequent and unsteady as it was. Most of the shot had missed her, peppering the wall and the cupboard containing their dishes and cups. One or two had cracked the chimney of the lamp. The rest, however, had lodged in her chest, her shoulder, and her neck. Caleb opened his father’s whiskey—Jorah wasn’t much of a drinker, only a sip for Christ’s days: Easter and Christmas, the day before Ash Wednesday and Epiphany—and he poured the brown liquid over his mother’s clothes, soaking the wounds like he’d seen his father do when he’d nicked his own leg with the ax or when Amos had stepped on a nail. Unlike Amos, who’d screamed so ferociously that Caleb had felt it move up his feet and into his core, rattling his rib cage, his mother made no noise. He was certain she would die and that he’d killed her. The thought made him numb.

  All he could do was busy himself. To keep warm he pulled his nest of blankets from the bottom of the pantry and wrapped two around his shoulders. As he did every night, he traded the wide berth of his Ithaca shotgun for the distance and precision of his father’s rifle. He laid two blankets over his mother’s feet, and one under her head. The rest he draped across the kitchen chairs to air out. He lit the small stove at the foot of his mother and father’s bed, and resolved again to move Jesse. When he stepped over him he tried to concentrate on the reflection of the lamp in his mother’s wet footprint rather than his brother’s tousled hair and the curve of his ear. He would move Amos, too, and Mary and Emma, and bring them all to rest. The fire would soon make the bodies rot—the cold had been their preservation—and Caleb had lit nothing more than twigs since the three men had killed his family. Nothing would make him careful now. He didn’t care who saw the smoke or smelled the burning wood; everyone he knew in this world had moved on to the next. The lengths he’d gone to over the past five days—or was it six?—would no longer be necessary. With his mother’s presence came a strange sense of freedom: They were all home, and he had nothing left to wait for, nothing to fear, but his mother’s last breath.

  His feet wrapped in old pillowcases to keep them warm and silent, he shuffled into the living room and stared out into the snow. He saw his mother’s tracks extending out toward the barn. Once more he heard the solid thud of her body hitting the kitchen table and the screeching of the legs gouging jagged lines across the floor. He thought there must be some elemental knowledge stuck deep in his blood that should have prevented him from pulling the trigger. Shouldn’t he have been able to tell, even in the darkness of the pantry, even through the wood and the roar of the wind, that the person on the other side was his mother? He checked on her again—sat beside her, crying—and once he’d seen her chest rise and fall twenty times, he composed himself, wiped his tears until his face turned raw, and dragged a chair to the window in the living room to wait out the night.

  The exposure of sitting in plain view unnerved him. To soothe himself, he shouldered Jorah’s rifle and took shaky aim at the landmarks he could pick out in the dark: the dead pine that held their swing in its scraggly grasp; the boulder that marked the start of the stream; the farthest fence post of the sheep pen; and the stump where he, Jesse, and Amos played Chief. If anyone had followed his mother, if anyone waited for them, if anyone smelled the fire or saw the lights, he hoped he would be ready.

  It wasn’t difficult to keep from sleeping. Everything was painted in the shades of the killers—a face in profile, an outline of a body, the long legs and the beard and the greasy hair. Before hiding, he’d taken in the weapons slung over their shoulders, their vivid scarves. He remembered their gaits, how they hunched against the cold and walked gingerly over the thin coat of ice that covered the snow, careful not to slip. In the kitchen his mother coughed and he double-checked the rifle to be sure it remained loaded and patted his pockets, where the bullets clicked reassuringly.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Caleb found his mother’s sweat cold, her breathing shallow. He didn’t know what to do. He wished to crawl back into the pantry, where the days had been lost to him, a collection of hours spent listening intently and shivering and sleeping until time bled together. He knew he had to ignore this impulse and left her, set the Ithaca and the rifle against the dresser in his parents�
� room, and lay down on the floor in front of the stove, the warmth and give in the boards amending his pantry-bent posture and relaxing his muscles. Perhaps an hour later, he went to the kitchen, taking a path he’d memorized to keep from seeing the faces of his brothers and sisters, first looking at the window, then the mantel, the scratch on the doorframe, the crocheted quote Mary had made—AND IF IT SEEM EVIL UNTO YOU TO SERVE THE LORD, CHOOSE YOU THIS DAY WHOM YE WILL SERVE; WHETHER THE GODS WHICH YOUR FATHERS SERVED THAT WERE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOD, OR THE GODS OF THE AMORITES, IN WHOSE LAND YE DWELL: BUT AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. This way he stepped around Amos, Jesse, and Mary. He tried to pretend the bodies were no longer his siblings, but pieces of furniture.

  Caleb sat on the chair by the door, the tidy row of boots beside him. He’d been wearing Amos’s old pair, which were worn thin and much too large; his father had stuffed the toes with scoured wool, but this made his feet itch and didn’t stop his heels from chafing on the leather. Jesse’s boots were snug but comforting. He laced them tight and prepared himself to visit the barn. The animals had not been fed in almost a week, and he wondered how many of them would be dead or dying, or missing, or eaten by another. The cold air made him cough. The sun stung his eyes. To block it out he held up hands stained with his mother’s blood, and slowly, through his fingers, he could see more than the blazing white of the landscape. Emma lay at his feet and he stooped to clean the snow from her face for the first time in daylight.

  It took great effort to reach the barn. When he did, his body had turned to a confusion of sweat and chill, pain and numbness. He’d grown weak from eating nothing but the preserves and pickled beets left in the pantry. The bread had run out on the first day. Mary would have baked more once breakfast was finished, and he recalled the sound of her pounding the dough. The snow had blown against the grand doors, and, his small store of energy sapped, Caleb could not fight them open. He tried to climb the woodpile to reach the window, but his hands refused to grip the sill. He stood a log on end and tried to pull the doors from the top, but they wouldn’t yield. Beaten, he finally allowed himself to break open, weeping and kicking at the snow.

  When he was empty and calm again, he tapped on the wall of the barn and pressed his ear to a small gap in the boards. He heard rustling inside, but not the usual collection of snorts and huffs that met any intrusion. He gave the side of the barn one last pat and steeled himself for the trip to the house.

  WITHOUT THE FEAR of killing his mother or injuring her any worse—he was certain she was going to die no matter what he did—he heated his father’s butchering knife over the kerosene lamp. He rolled Elspeth onto one side and spread a blanket underneath her, then rolled her onto her other side and pulled the wool taut. She made no sound. The hand that had been hanging, bleeding onto the floor, had swollen fat and purple when Caleb placed it in her lap. He plucked the necklace from the blood on her chest and wiped it clean with his thumb. A pellet had dented one of the arms of the cross, imprinting a small half-sphere in the silver. Worried about damaging it further, he turned it to lie next to her head. When he slid off her boots, something fell to the heel, and he reached inside and found a wad of damp papers. He thought of the wool scratching his feet and he pressed the papers back into the toe. He slit her dress up the middle and it dropped away, baring her flesh. Caleb averted his gaze, each glance bringing him more of her. His mother kept her body private. She never washed in front of them or swam in the stream in summer, rarely exposing even her arms. Caleb knew that there was no time for modesty. Over each small puncture wound he poured a few drops of whiskey. He pressed the tip of the knife in until he felt scraping or heard the small clink of metal. If the pliers did not fit in the opening, he wiggled the knife around so they would. Blood drained into the new space, spilling over and trickling down her hot skin. Most of the shot concentrated in her right breast, and Caleb took less and less care of where he placed his hands. The thick and unwieldy pliers took two or three tries to fish each ball of lead from her, especially where they’d lodged in her muscles, which were taut and difficult for him to maneuver. He dropped the pellets in a tin coffee cup; each landed with a satisfying clink. As he dug the stray shot out of her neck, she stirred. Caleb yanked the pliers out and stepped back from his makeshift operating table. A trickle of blood seeped out of her neck and then stopped. Her eyes fluttered open. She moaned loudly.

  “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.

  CHAPTER 2

  The 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.”
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  “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.