The Kept

by James Scott

  CALEB 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.

  WITH 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.

  THE 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.

  IN 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.

  “I don’t know if perhaps I made you feel some necessity or urge,” he said. Elspeth tensed, fearful that he might strike her, thinking of the flash of his eyes as he demanded she hand him Amos while he fought against the raging creek, the water piling up and around his torso, the white foam spectral in the dark.

  One of the children cried in the other room and they both held their breath. Elspeth pictured herself making the journey down the hillside, her effects secure on her back, her customary letter of reference folded among her things. She only hoped that he would allow her to spend the night before leaving.

  When it seemed enough time had passed and the children had resumed their sleep, Jorah spoke again, his voice even softer. “I also know that I made a promise to you, to keep you safe and protected. Haven’t I done that?” Elspeth’s feet tingled. She’d gripped the quilt tight enough to cut off her circulation and yet her fingers clenched ever harder, the material gathering in her hands, where it quickly grew damp. Jorah sighed, his shoulders rising and falling. A milky stream of moonlight washed over the bedroom. “I’ve protected you. And I will continue to do so.” He reached back and took one of her hands, cupping her fist much as he had Mary’s heels. Elspeth relaxed, and he turned to her—everything about him soft—and tugged on her arm. She heard the tender pat of his feet hitting the floor. The quilt slid from her and she felt levitated, like her own feet never met the ground, and hand in hand they walked into the next room, where Amos slept in his crib, his belly protruding, his tiny hands clenched beside his head, and Mary slept also, her brown hair splashed against her pillow in the bed Jorah had made and inscribed with a letter M on the headboard. They each breathed deep and even.

  “They look nothing like us,” Jorah said, and Elspeth’s body jerked and she made to run away, but he latched his arms around her and held her as tight as she’d ever held Amos, and he said, “Whose children are these?”

  CHAPTER 5

  The clarity of the memory startled Elspeth. She coughed, and tried to sit up, but the pain was too intense. At first, she thought she was in a high-ceilinged hotel room in another strange town but soon realized she was in the barn on her back in tremendous pain, and she couldn’t recall how she’d gotten there or how she’d been injured. A crow called to her from off in the darkness. She remembered walking up the hill and the fever-soaked nightmare of the bodies strewn about the house and then the flaming hot pain and understood she’d been shot and her children were gone. She cried out again, and Caleb appeared before her. It couldn’t be, she thought and tried to move, but she was too weak.

  “Mama, it’s okay,” he said. He truly was alive—the knowledge sent a spasm of happiness through her, and the surge proved enough to roll her eyes back once more.

  The night of Amos’s baptism, when the children had been put to bed, Jorah had told her that he’d seen the bodies of mothers before, and he knew Elspeth had not had a child. He sighed, letting the bookmark from his Bible slide between his middle and index fingers, and said, “For a while I convinced myself that it was possible. That the child could be”—he chuckled, an angry sound—“I thought it could be a child of God.” He ran his hand along the leather binding, but said nothing else and asked her no questions. Implicit in his silence was an understanding, she thought, that Amos and Mary would be enough for them. She left to work and trudged up the hill again with more money stuffed in her shoes and everything flowed well for a while. After two years, though, the urges returned. She spent entire nights cradling her arms and rocking on the balls of her feet in front of the windows.

  When she’d come back with Caleb, Jorah hadn’t spoken to her for days. One evening, however, after she’d fed the baby and held him on her shoulder to burp him, she sensed Jorah in the doorway, watching them, and knew that something in him had thawed.

  CALEB DRAGGED THE dead animals through the woods—the smallest first to create a track that became tamped down and smooth—and to the edge of the cliff where he and Jesse had taught themselves to chew Amos’s tobacco, spitting thick streams of juice onto the rocks below. He threw the dead chickens, rolled the dead sheep, dragged the smallest of the dead pigs. The others he could not manage, though he tried. All this took the better part of the day.

  He looked in on his mother every hour or so, wiped her forehead with a cloth despite the fact that the fever had abated, and fed her from the bowl of eggs he kept warm by the fire. The color had returned to her skin. He thought that she might live, not merely for another sunrise, but to stand and walk again. But with standing and walking came the prospect of speaking, and he would have to explain himself. He didn’t know how he could tell her about his fear, how it had clenched him into a ball and forced him down into the hay. He didn’t know how he could tell her that he’d heard Emma’s short scream, like the bleating of a lamb. How he’d hidden. How he’d seen them—had been within a hundred yards of his Ithaca and another few to the open loft door, from which he could have sighted at least one, aiming for the red scarf. How he’d shot her.

  They would need a plan, and for the first time he began to think of a future. All he could tell his mother was that he planned on killing them. He assumed she would want the same. He sat in the open door to the hayloft with these thoughts. Snow fell, only scattered flakes at first, but then in thick sheets, erasing the stars. His feet hung free. He chewed on an old boot string. His father’s rifle sat across his thighs.

  He imagined himself leaping down from the loft as the birds scattered at the first shot. Perhaps before that. He would have heard them coming, or detected some change in the air, like the mornings when Emma would come to get him for breakfast and he’d be at the edge of the loft even before the creaking of the door. This would be the opposite, a call like the one that had brought his father to the other side of the hill late one night, a low, rumbling thunder like a storm miles off, so faint it might be nothing more than the creaking of the trees, except somehow his bones would know different, and he would have jumped down from the ladder and grabbed his Ithaca. He loaded it as he crept along, the shells clicking into place. Emma saw him and he motioned her inside. Her eyes betrayed no fear, so strong was her faith in her brother. Or maybe he picked her up under one arm and placed her safely in the house, telling her to latch the door. He edged along the periphery of the pen bent over, under the cover of the fence. One hand planted on the post and he vaulted over it. He circled back around them, down a path in the hill between birches and elms and evergreens that only he knew, and as he came up behind them he would say, “Put those weapons down. There’ll be no killing today.”

  But of course he would kill them, because they would not drop their weapons, and he would feel no remorse. Afterward, his father would find the perfect Bible passage to make everyone feel that what he’d done was right with God. Even Caleb would listen. And he would believe it—and the man who was saying it—deep in his core.

  They would bury them in the plot on the other side of the hill, where Caleb had first discovered death, a simple marker their only connection to the living world. He could also penetrate the frozen ground and dig a perfectly rectangular grave. That was what the Caleb who could kill would do.

  The Caleb who could not fire his father’s outsized rifle into the night sky, imagining the bullet losing speed and falling harmlessly into one of the rolling fields below, perhaps sending up a small cloud of snow, probably not. His shoulder throbbed from the kick of the gun and he knew he’d have a bruise for a week. The sound was lost in the descending blanket of snow. It was a call to the killers, a sign from Caleb that he would find them, that he would be different when he did. Or so he hoped.

  Elspeth murmured. When he got to her, everything a
ppeared to be the same; he wondered if he’d imagined the noise. He checked the bandages, cleaned the wounds with whiskey, and dabbed at her forehead with the rag. When he withdrew it, her unsteady pupils tried to follow him. “Caleb,” she said. She forced a smile and small dots of blood burgeoned on her cracked lips.

  Caleb feared she saw his guilt, but hoped she saw how he’d changed: He would defend them, he would find those men, and he would kill them for what they’d done to his family.

  ELSPETH HAD BEEN living in dreams so long the pale dawn confused her. The bandages made no sense, either, and then she remembered the shot, and her last seconds of consciousness. The wraps were clean but loose and tied with poor knots. In spite of the pain, she tried to stand, and surprised herself by getting to her feet. She shuffled to the barn doors and leaned her weakened body against them until they opened. The air struck her and nearly knocked her over, and she searched for her balance, the task made more difficult by the dizzying effect of the snow swirling lazily outside. Nausea rippled within her.

  The house was gone. In its place, a blank hole. The elm that had overhung their home had shriveled into something black, no longer quite a tree. In the clutch of her fever, she’d thought it strange that they slept in the barn and now she realized why—the men who had shot her and her family had razed their home. The closest trees had their branches shortened and twisted by the heat of the fire. The ice clinging to the bark had saved the forest, preserved the rest of the yard so that it appeared as though God himself had plucked the house from this world, as one would a blueberry from its bush. Elspeth noted the four posts that had been the entirety of the house she’d left on her first trip. The fire had made them its grave marker.