by James Scott
A vague whiteness at the corners of her lips showed when she opened her mouth to speak. She swallowed. Then she began again. “If I may,” she said, and then—despite the great pain that made her teeth gnash together and her breath hiss between them—she stood on her bulbous ankles and adjusted the infant, placing it across Elspeth’s arm, with its head at her left biceps and its torso supported by her right. The tension that Elspeth hadn’t realized she’d carried in her shoulders disappeared. The baby stirred, then eased back into sleep, the pink skin of her eyelids adorned with purple veins.
The woman stroked the child’s tiny ear with the back of her finger, and Elspeth would have sworn to her Savior that the old woman’s cheeks filled and flushed, and the crevices and shadows on her forehead dissolved, everything about her beaming. After a time, she collapsed back onto her seat. The cushions were thrown into disarray behind her. “She’s young to travel,” she said, and glanced out the window, her skin sagging.
Elspeth rocked back and forth in time with the swaying of the train as it barreled down the tracks, the trees and hillsides merely a blur. “We’ve no choice.”
IN THE KITCHEN, Caleb crouched beneath the coatrack. The sleeves of his father’s jacket tickled his head, and he shoved them aside. From his vantage point, all he could see of his mother was a few strands of black hair that spilled into space, and—when she took one of her rare breaths—her chest. But he could hear the noise, an unholy groan that she produced deep within her, and he plugged his ears against it, the sound deadening into a bass hum. He waited for her chest to rise, and held his breath until he saw it again. Soon he felt light-headed.
As he drew close to her, he removed one finger from his ear but replaced it immediately. She sounded like death: as if her life was being pulled from her body forcibly. He imagined her spirit like a wisp of smoke, but one with talons and teeth that it dug into her insides and the groan was those nails and teeth being dragged across her ribs, her throat, and her lungs as it fought to keep its place. He cried and cursed himself and uncovered his ears and let the noise tunnel through.
She frightened him, always had, even before he’d moved to the barn, but never as much as she did with her blood seeping from her body and that noise clawing its way out. Soon, he thought, she would be empty. His surgery seemed to be speeding the process: His sloppy digging and cutting had made the wounds worse. Her hair, flecked with rogue strands of gray, had become matted and tangled. He patted her bare arm. The heat had been replaced by a cold clamminess. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched her before he’d shot her. During her long absences he remembered her immense strength—greater than that of any of the boys. Her shoulders were sloped with muscle, and her knotted arms were thicker than Amos’s. He pushed up one of her eyelids and saw nothing but white streaked with blood. She would not survive, he thought again. He picked the pillow up off the floor, where he’d dropped it the last time, before he went scooting like a mouse beneath the coatrack. Some of the goose feathers scattered on the floor and stuck in the wide puddle of blood that had accumulated beneath the table. He raised the pillow over her head, and plumped it between his hands. He clutched the fabric. Every time the courage built within him to crush the material down on her face, stopping forever the spasms and the terrible sound, she would cough or murmur and turn back into his mother. He held his position until his arms shook. A droplet of sweat formed at her widow’s peak. As it traced the curve above her eyebrow, she squeezed her eyes tightly, and he recalled her making the same expression when he and Jesse had come tromping into the kitchen one night. She’d held her eyes shut for long enough that the boys knew to retreat back the way they’d come. This had stayed with him, because the next morning, she’d left and they wouldn’t see her again for six months. He threw the pillow across the kitchen, where it collided with an empty jug that used to hold their sugar. The pillow landed on the floor, while the sugar container spun on the shelf, rattling around on its base before it got too close to the edge and tumbled. It landed, however, directly in the center of the goose down. This small piece of fortune made Caleb smile, and he brushed his mother’s hair from her face and the sound ceased. The calm was worse to him, and when she recommenced, he pulled a chair to the table and laid his head on it, next to his mother’s hip, where he felt every raw breath reverberate through the wood.
WITH DARKNESS, THE fits ceased. The fever dulled. But her memories continued to unfurl before her, and uncovered events she had worked hard to forget—arguments, trespasses, lies—and she relived the aftermath of the first time she’d spoken to Jorah, who was known then as Lothute.
“A savage,” her father said in a whisper—all of their conversations whispered so as not to disturb the van Tessels. Their nook of the building had always been the servants’ quarters, and as such, did not hold noise as well as the house proper, the boards not as tight, the corners not as square, the walls and floors unadorned. Worried even about his steps, her father removed his shoes, placed the tired leather next to her mother’s boots, and straightened the two thick, woolen socks that muffled the thump of his wooden leg. “You’ve embarrassed the family over a savage. We must assume Mr. van Tessel has been told.”
“All I did was say hello,” Elspeth said and her father’s hand snapped her head back. Her lip throbbed but did not split. She’d only heard Lothute speak that morning, never before, and his voice had surprised her, light and airy where she expected gravel crunched underfoot. She’d pretended to shake a rock from her shoe in the cool of the barn while he mended a horse’s saddle. Elspeth had been warned to keep away from him, but she saw them as paired in their silence—neither was spoken to, neither was expected to speak. Besides his darker complexion, he looked the same as they did, wore the same clothes, ate the same food. He did not run around with a tomahawk and a belt full of scalps like the Indians in her books. His eyes were kind.
“The van Tessels deserve to see better of us,” her father said with crimson cheeks and straining neck muscles, his anger loosed but his volume contained. As if summoned by the mention of his name, or by the harshness of their whispers, the shadows of Mr. van Tessel’s fine shoes appeared at the crack beneath their door.
Her mother wept, and Elspeth knew better than to look to her for support and instead glanced around the room, her home—the bed her parents shared, the straw mattress at their feet where she slept, her small trove of books that the van Tessel girls had grown out of, her mirror, another van Tessel castoff because it had been warped somehow and stretched one’s appearance at the edges of the gilded frame—and she knew, even before she heard the slither of her father’s belt being drawn from his pants, that she would not see any of it again.
She squirmed to get away, but her father grasped both of her wrists in one strong hand and brought the leather down upon her back and her head. He struck her again and again, and she cried out. Her blood dotted the floor as it flew from the buckle. She screamed for him to stop, and the two shadows shifted beneath the door and then disappeared. The beating ended. Her father wrapped the belt around his hand like a bandage. He even seemed to whisper his ragged breathing. When Elspeth pushed herself onto her feet, he leaned against the dresser on his fists.
“It’s time you go, child,” her mother said. “Here.” She opened a drawer and presented Elspeth with a neatly folded pillowcase, pressed between her two palms. “For your things.” When Elspeth reached for the linen, her mother retracted her hands, as if she’d be scalded by her touch.
Less than a mile from the van Tessel estate, Lothute caught up to her and matched the rhythm of her careless steps. He handed her a cloth, and she held it to her head. “Is this my fault?” he asked her.
She stood there, shocked and crying, her few possessions in the pillowcase—yet another van Tessel hand-me-down, already torn—wondering what this man would do to her mother and father if she told him the truth.
“I don’t know where I’ll go,” she said, the echoes of the lashes racking her body.
“I’ll protect you,” he said. She looked out at him from between eyelashes caked with blood. He took the cloth from her and dabbed at her injuries, swabbed the clots from her face, then examined the wounds, his face inches from hers. “All shall heal in time. I promise.” He smiled. She smelled his sweat. He nodded to her belongings. “I’ll return with my things.”
He walked through the woods, and she followed his white shirt flitting among the trees until she could find no trace of him. Only after he’d left did she consider the beating—or worse—that awaited him at the van Tessels, and she prayed for his survival and tried to reassemble the day through the miasma of her shock. She’d only wanted to say hello. But after this, they had no choice. After this, he was hers, and she was his. And so she sat down to wait.
CALEB SPENT TWO days listening at his mother’s hip, thinking each wretched breath might not be followed by another. From the shelf in the living area he’d fetched one of their Bibles, and though he could not read it, not well, he set it next to her limp hand, thinking it might comfort her, wherever she was. The pillow he’d tucked beneath her head. He couldn’t bring himself to end her pain and leave himself alone in the world.
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.
ELSPETH 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.
CALEB 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.