The Kept

by James Scott

  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.

  WHILE 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.

  “He did the best he knew. He didn’t have a father of his own.”

  “Did you have a father?” Caleb asked.

  “For a while,” Elspeth said after a time.

  “Did you have brothers and sisters?”

  “No,” she said. “Not like you. It was just us.”

  “You and your father and—your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Caleb had never heard about the parents of his parents. It had never crossed his mind, and—as when they’d left the borders of the earth he’d seen from the top of his fence post—the world opened up at their acknowledgment, strange people suddenly born into his imagination. He felt closer to his mother than he ever had and helped her to stand. They left clean footprints in the thin veil of snow that penetrated the canopy, and when they cleared the line of elms, the sun made them squint, the wind caused them to shiver, and in step with his mother, Caleb didn’t notice that the snow was much deeper than when they’d entered the shelter of the trees.

  CHAPTER 8

  Caleb daydreamed of cities, houses like theirs but as tall as the tallest trees, swaying back and forth in the wind. From the topmost room, they would scan the horizon, searching for the killers, their bodies growing used to the steady rocking.

  He waited for his mother to say something, to continue their conversation from earlier, to somehow acknowledge their closeness. Each step took all of her concentration, however, and silence reclaimed her.

  They slept in a hole created by a fallen tree, and rose the next morning with the sun high in the sky, hidden from them by the mass of roots and clods of dirt. The cold had sapped what little strength Elspeth possessed—had stolen into her joints and locked them in place. Every time she stood, it surprised her to be on her feet. As they resumed their task once again, they broke through a line worn clean in the snow; animal tracks paced a clear circle around their camp.

  The straps were giving way on Caleb’s pack, but when he wondered whether his mother would be well enough to make the stitches strong again, he saw that she, too, had weakened. Her face, which had been regaining some of its old complexion, in the sunlight appeared ashen and drawn. He dug through her bag, and found a package fastened by loose string. Rather than chewing gum, the parcel held small, sugared gumdrops. After all the white and brown of the dead of winter, the blazing yellows and oranges brought a smile to Caleb’s face. He gave a red gumdrop to his mother, who tucked it into her cheek and tried to match his happiness.

  ELSPETH’S BODY WORKED on its own while her mind slept in fire. Sometimes she jerked away from the burning and became dimly aware of Caleb’s hand at her elbow, and she would try to thank him, but her voice had left and her lips had become so racked with fever blisters they were more water than skin. Other times she heard the calling of birds or the squawking of crows and she would be certain that Caleb had been forced to leave her and she was facedown in the snow, waiting for her last breath so the birds could take their portion of carrion back to their young. Somehow this last image improved her mood, and when Caleb’s arm wrapped around her waist and she understood they’d never stopped, she felt cheated.

  They had no food. Their clothes were beginning to wear out, beaten by the wind and the snow. Elspeth’s breath came heavily, sporadically, with a strange wheezing like a baby’s rattle. They walked over long, rolling hills. On all sides, trees cracked from the weight of the snow as it melted in the sun. Sometimes a branch would fall with a massive whoosh and a dead thud. Caleb would jump with fear but his mother wouldn’t react at all.

  Together they crested another in the unending line of hills, the land like waves on the oceans and lakes his father read about in his stilted tongue as the children huddled in his bed at night and Caleb sat outside, crouched underneath the windowsill.

  Elspeth identified something that had been dragging along in her mind. “Were you in the barn?”

  He stumbled. She had given all of her weight over to him. Her feet barely made contact with the ground. He knew that to stop was to die. “I hid,” he said. All the reasons, the excuses he’d readied sounded hollow. “I did nothing.”

  A large hill loomed in front of them, and he knew it would be their last. His words seemed to have wrenched the final bit of strength from his mother, and she could no longer lift her feet high enough to clear the snow. He imagined what it would be like to die but it simply sounded like rest. They would rest. And they would not wake again.

  His body climbed. He wished it to stop, and tried to communicate this to his limbs, but his head had drifted away and was no longer connected to the rest of him. Atop the hill, Caleb crashed to the ground, his mother fallin
g with him. She made no noise. He squinted in the harsh white blur. The endless land surrounded them, naked, no trees, nothing but smooth snow. An indentation—as if God had taken a scoop out of the earth as one would a cup of flour—sat half in shadow, half in sunlight. Tall and alone at the edge of the dent stood a building.

  “A house. Mama, there’s a house,” Caleb said to Elspeth, his voice cracking. She didn’t move. He placed her on their tarp, along with his pack, the Ithaca, and her bags, and tied it as well as he could. With the rest of the twine, he attached the cocoon to his pack, though with each tug the straps dug into his shoulders and threatened to tear entirely.

  From the hill, the house had appeared to be less than a mile away, but from the bottom of the bowl it seemed at least twice that. Caleb stopped. He ate some more gumdrops that his stomach immediately rejected in a bright sunburst on the snow. A hawk circled overhead, its call like the earth being torn apart. Caleb stood on unsteady feet and returned his pack to his shoulders, where the skin burned, rubbed raw. Jesse’s boots dug into the snow for traction. “One more.”

  A strap went. “Hold on, Mama.” He kicked his toes into the powdery snow and strained to keep the tarp from sliding backward. “Hold on.” Caleb took the last few steps at a run, and collapsed at the top of the hill. The other strap gave way with a small sigh and a pop and he spun and caught the twine as it tried to slither away. The coarse fibers peeled his skin until he wrapped it around his wrists, stopping the cocoon’s descent and bringing it next to him. He lurched onto his stomach. His dwindling heat melted the snow, and sleep started to hug him. Even in his exhaustion, Caleb knew if he closed his eyes whoever lived in the house would find him lying there next to a small, clean spot of yellowed grass where his breath had left him and—next to him—his dead mother swathed in a tarred canvas tarp. He pushed himself onto one knee, then one foot. He grasped the Ithaca and dragged it out of the cocoon by its barrel. The gun had never felt so heavy. He worried he wouldn’t be able to lift it to fire. The house rose ahead, and as he advanced into its cold shadow he saw how massive it was: at least three stories, with a long porch that extended the entire length of the first floor. Chains for swings rattled from the ceiling. The windows were as tall as a man and had each pane intact, but none glowed with lamps. No smoke billowed from the chimney. Caleb took a look back at his mother. Her parched lips didn’t move; no breath clouded in the crisp air.

  A shot cracked the sky and Caleb dropped to the ground, pointing the Ithaca at the house as he did. Stinging life rushed back into his limbs. Silence as the report echoed down through the valley.

  “Who’s there?” a man’s voice called.

  Caleb didn’t dare move.

  “I think I got him,” the man said.

  Caleb heard the creaking of a door and aimed the Ithaca at the front porch. An old man, cradling a shotgun half as big as his body, let the screen slam behind him. Caleb had never seen someone elderly, nothing more than drawings in books that depicted the ravages of age as soft and giving. This man shuffled at an angle, as if he ducked under a low branch, and most of his scalp shone through thin strands of white hair. Every movement brought a new sound—a sigh or a sniff. On his feet he wore bundles of rags. His clothes were layers of burlap, some torn and filled with holes so that the ones beneath poked through. Caleb didn’t know how the recoil hadn’t knocked him clean off his feet.

  “Are you dead?” the old man called.

  Caleb had him in his sights. “No,” he replied, his voice louder and stronger than he could have hoped.

  “Did I hit you?”

  “No.”

  “You alone?”

  Caleb relaxed and the gun barrel dipped into the snow. “My mother’s with me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Did he say ‘Mother’?” said a woman’s voice from inside the darkness of the house.

  The old man turned slightly. “Hush, Margaret,” he said. “I said, where is she?”

  “She’s here,” Caleb said. He didn’t think the old man had seen him yet but could track him by the sound of his voice. The snow was deep enough to conceal most of him, and the afternoon shadows did the rest. Caleb thought the man was going to step out farther into the snow. Instead, he set his rifle against the railing of the porch and sat down on the top step. He placed his chin in his hands. “I’m an old man,” he said after a while. “I can wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Caleb asked.

  “Yes, wait for what?” the voice from inside said, more clearly this time, as if it had moved closer to the door. He’d called her Margaret. This made Caleb feel safe.

  “For you to show yourself, and show you mean us no harm.” He pointed to the rifle at his side. “I showed you I mean none.”

  “You shot at me,” Caleb said.

  “Ah,” the old man replied, “that was before you had a voice. Now you’ve got one and you sound like a boy. Are you a boy, son?” The old man brushed something from his sleeve. He certainly didn’t seem threatening.

  “Tell that boy,” Margaret said, “that we have pie.”

  Caleb’s stomach throbbed with hunger.

  “I will do no such thing,” the old man said. “I aim to wait for this boy to show himself and then I’ll know what to do.”

  Caleb left the Ithaca in the snow, but memorized its exact location should the man fire again. He got up and the blood drained from his upper extremities. He wanted to sit right back down, so heavy was the wooziness inside his head. He swayed, as if he stood in one of his city buildings.

  “What are you doing here?” the man asked.

  Caleb, his heart brimming with the answer, could only say: “We’ve been walking.”

  “And where’s your mother?” the old man said.

  “She’s behind me. She’s real sick.”

  “Dammit, why didn’t you say so?” the old man said.

  Caleb heard the woman talking quickly inside, but couldn’t make out the words.

  “Son, why don’t you and your mother come on in the house?” the old man said.

  “Okay.”

  The man picked up his gun and as he reached for the door, he paused. “You’ve got to tell me one more thing: Do you mean us any harm?”

  “I mean no one harm.” He raised his hands, as if that’s where malice hid, and realized that he’d told a lie. “I mean you no harm.”

  The fact that they had arrived somewhere brought energy surging back to him. His mother, however, looked even worse than when he’d packed her up, forehead dull with sweat and her mouth pinched shut. It was the color of her skin, however, that nauseated Caleb—a bilious green so thick she looked less like a person and more like the slugs he and Jesse had found under logs, stomping through the woods in search of things with which to scare the girls. Caleb dragged the tarp to the house.

  The door creaked again and the man’s boots thumped toward him. “Your momma, what’s she got?”

  “Shotgun pellets,” Caleb said and put his head between his knees. He thought the man might take his gun up again and force them away.

  “Guess it’s not contagious,” he said and sniffed. “Let’s get you two inside. Soup’s almost ready.”

  “There’s pie,” Margaret said from somewhere inside the house.

  The old man snorted. “Wipe your feet.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Out of the constant howl of the wind, Caleb’s ears were emptied of everything but his own heartbeat. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he saw a house unlike anything he could have dreamed. Lamps sat on every available surface. Walls were covered in decoration. Tables had glass tops. Chairs were adorned with elaborate carvings. Floors were hidden by thick carpets, their strands woven together to form beautiful flowers and branches, all in exploding colors. To Caleb, used to the dull wash of snow, the occasional tree, and the rare gumdrops, it was like staring straight into the sun. His head ached.

  The old man stood at the other end of the room, his arm around his wife, a woma
n of similar stature, her clothes the same worn fabrics, her skin as weathered and rutted as his. “Where’s your mother?” she asked.

  Caleb waved his hand toward the door.

  “Well, don’t stand there like a statue, boy, bring her in,” the man said.

  The air outside felt better to Caleb, and he realized he’d been sweating in the house, streams running down his back and the middle of his chest. He’d forgotten how he overheated indoors. The sweat dried and froze on his skin. He managed to carry Elspeth up the steps to the porch, but then his strength failed him. He had to drag her into the house on the tarp, taking care not to bump her head as he pulled her over the doorsill.

  “My goodness, get her out of that coffin,” the man said, and rushed forward. He fumbled open a folding knife and cut the twine that fastened the cocoon together. Caleb saw his mother as they must have—filthy, sweating, fevered, with a wound bleeding through her shirt, and he believed himself a failure. They tried to calm him with comforting noises while they looked over his mother. “My name is William H. Wood,” the man said, “and this is my wife, Margaret.” Caleb introduced himself.

  “Where are you coming from, Caleb?” Margaret asked, patting his hand.

  “Far away,” Caleb said, knowing that but little else. “Very far.”

  Before Caleb could realize what was happening, he had placed his head on Margaret and began—for the first time in front of anyone but Jesse—to cry. She patted his back vigorously, as he would a sick sheep. This made him cry harder. Through the haze of tears, he noticed that William had unbuttoned his mother’s shirt, and her bandage lay half open on her chest. Caleb rushed forward and wrenched the old man’s arm behind his back. William dropped the knife, but Caleb maintained the pressure. The old man squealed and asked him to stop. Margaret yelled and tried to pull at Caleb, and when that failed, she simply put her arm around him and rubbed his head, as if what he truly needed was reassurance. When Caleb glimpsed William’s pained expression, their words made it through the haze of anger and he released him. Caleb’s world went fuzzy. “Sorry,” he said, and backed against a couch.