The Kept

by James Scott

  “Just trying to help, son. But I understand. My mistake. Here,” William said, and handed Caleb a clean, damp cloth. He knelt at his mother’s side, wiped the last of his tears, and used his body to block their view as he pulled the final bandages aside. The blood had caked onto her skin, small pebbles of clots and scabs, which he dabbed away. William presented him with some clean bandages and Margaret took away the dirty ones.

  “Let’s put her in a bed upstairs,” William said.

  “Oh, no,” Caleb said, his words sounding as if they came from the end of a long tunnel. “We couldn’t take your bed.”

  They laughed. “We wouldn’t want that, either,” William said, “but we have plenty of empty rooms and empty beds.”

  “Nothing but empty rooms and empty beds,” his wife said.

  Caleb stumbled. He was aware of William’s arms behind his neck and at the small of his back, and as the world faded around him, he heard William say, “Perhaps we need to take care of you first.”

  SHE’D STOPPED WALKING. She wanted to call out for water, but her throat could not carry out even this simplest of instructions. The constant chill that had assailed her bones no longer wrapped its cold fingers around her. She could sense nothing but the soreness of fever and the invasive confusion of dreams. She prayed she still clutched her Bible. In her more lucid moments she hoped for a parable that would give her strength, but her knowledge failed her. Jorah would reach onto the vast shelves of his memory and find the exact passage, the exact lines to suit her situation. Her own mind, however, seemed frozen. No words of God, no images struck her to bring light to the dark place in which she lay.

  Out of that darkness came a pair of sullen brown eyes, and a small, pointed nose. Gusta van Tessel had been a year younger than Elspeth, and as Elspeth went about her chores—helping with the cooking, sweeping the floors, and tidying the shelves she could reach—Gusta followed, silent and watchful. As Gusta aged, she hardened and turned mean, her black hair long and shimmering and often curled into an elaborate bun that Elspeth’s mother would worry over for too long, until they’d have to rush the lunch preparation and the van Tessels would raise their eyebrows at the undercooked vegetables and the uneven slices of bread.

  As a teen, Gusta fell ill, and the family fetched the doctor from town. Their usual physician had been an ancient man with a bulbous, broken-vesseled nose, but this doctor was handsome, with thick blond hair, his carriage well appointed, his medicine bag oiled, the leather new and buckles gleaming. Gusta’s sickness ran its course, and the doctor, who even the boys fawned over, departed. No more than a month later, Elspeth came upon Gusta on the south lawn, stretched out on a bench, arms extended, stark naked. Gusta didn’t notice her, and Elspeth retreated back to the house. The sunburn brought fever and the young doctor. Not long after, it was announced at the dinner table that Gusta and the doctor would marry. Elspeth sank into herself, doing her chores day after day, trying not to think, letting time pass. She hated to see the empty place at the table where Gusta had once sat.

  The following spring the well-appointed carriage returned, and the doctor—now with a small beard that aged him somewhat—took Gusta’s hand as she stepped down, pale and painfully thin. Her brown eyes had shrunk since childhood, but in her skeletal state they stood out again, like coffee-soaked saucers. Elspeth’s father unloaded enough luggage for a lengthy stay.

  On the first night, long after dinner, Elspeth lay awake at her parents’ feet, fanciful images of the doctor’s house in her head while the moonlight played through the curtains. She imagined Gusta’s life often—the fabrics of their chairs, the patterns on their carpets, the softness of their sheets. The rapping of harried footsteps upstairs made Elspeth and her parents sit upright, so finely, tightly attuned to the needs of the household that they must have looked like the three prongs of a hinge, opening in unison.

  Upstairs in the hall, the doctor stood with his hands at his sides, shoulders slumped and head down. An overturned candle had sprayed the floor with wax, and Elspeth considered how to remove it without scratching the wood. Her parents, however, did not look at the stain and stood side by side, hands loosely entwined. Expectant, Elspeth stationed herself a foot behind them at the threshold of the bathroom. In the wobbly light of Mr. van Tessel’s lamp, Elspeth saw past Mrs. van Tessel’s crouched form to the body of Gusta. She drifted in the overfilled tub, her hair swaying back and forth, her eyes and mouth open. Her pallor had fallen to what appeared to be no color at all, an absence of shade so profound it took Elspeth’s breath away. Occasional drips of water from the edges of the tub and the doctor’s hands were the only sounds in the large room. Everything shone with wet reflections, casting glimmering shapes on the walls, the ceiling, and their stunned faces. Gusta’s nightgown had been made translucent by the water, and even in the wavering, weak light, Elspeth could see the dark spots of her areolas and the black mound of her pubis.

  Gusta’s husband never left; he sold his marriage house and—in spite of the van Tessels’ offers to the contrary—stayed in the same room he’d been in the night he awoke to an empty bed beside him and grabbed the candle from its holder and sprinted down the hall, too late. Sometimes Elspeth would end up alone in a room with the doctor and not notice him for several minutes, as if he could not muster the force required to be present. When one of the van Tessels became ill, the doctor would get out his medical bag, which year by year grew shabbier, the leather cracked, the clasps broken and then missing. He’d wandered out of the sitting room one summer afternoon, having immobilized Ginny’s turned ankle, and Elspeth waited to let him pass, both of her hands grasping the handle of a bucket that steamed with hot water to scrub the hall floors. Alexis’s voice came muffled from the room, but then Elspeth heard Ginny stating something that had been whispered for years: Gusta had been unable to bear children. The doctor’s halted expression and rushed steps confirmed it. Elspeth looked down at the bucket, her watery reflection staring back at her.

  Outside of those infrequent events, Elspeth seldom thought of Gusta after her death. After all, there were more van Tessels, four girls and five boys, and they all needed as much—if not more—care than Gusta. But years later Gusta would come to her in her dreams, peeking around corners, mouth twitching, hoping to be noticed.

  CALEB AWOKE IN a bed cloaked in white sheets in a white room. He had been stripped to his underwear. Someone had washed him; he could smell the soap. They’d also cut his hair, and he touched the jagged edges. Once his eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw that his room stood at the front of the house, looking out onto the bowl he had dragged his mother across. Though he would have guessed only a few hours had passed, their tracks had been covered over and blown away so thoroughly that he must have slept for at least a day. He surveyed the room: his clothes folded in a tidy pile on a chair next to the bed; a shelf crowded with books, their spines brilliant red leather with gold lettering; and a framed painting showing three children. Caleb pushed the covers aside and stepped onto the cold wood, his toes curling from the shock. He wiped the dust from the frame. The children all possessed the same brown hair.

  “Those are our babies,” William said from behind Caleb. He wobbled across the floor in his surrogate boots. “Sorry to startle you. Wondered if it was you I heard moving around.” He handed Caleb his pants and shirt, stiff and unfamiliar and smelling of flowers, and Caleb dressed while staring at the portrait. “Did you sleep well?”

  “They all look the same,” Caleb said.

  “I’ve apologized to them for that,” William said and laughed. “They have my big nose and flat face, though their mother’s lovely chin and hair. Some of God’s grace in that, I suppose.”

  Caleb shifted his gaze from William to the young faces and back again. He pictured the children as separate parts stitched together and shivered. “They all died?”

  “Certainly not. They’ve all moved away, married, had children of their own.”

  “Children of their own?” Th
e idea was not completely foreign to him; he’d seen the animals give birth, he’d learned of the parents of his parents, he knew of the families from the Bible, but he didn’t understand how one could simply decide to have children. He wondered if he, too, could have children of his own.

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Caleb ignored the question and continued to stare at the picture. William spoke of the farm that they’d helped run before moving on to their own lives. He pointed out the window and told Caleb about the sinkhole that had once been a cornfield, verdant and lush. “Then one day, once they’d all left us,” he said, “the earth started to fall in on itself, as if someone had pulled a plug on a drain.” The wind blew across the field, and by instinct Caleb covered his face. The snow drifted up from the hills like smoke. “You must be hungry,” William said.

  Caleb followed William down a long hallway, something he’d never seen or experienced, and the tight space made him duck his head. “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’s doing much better,” William said. “I think it was more hunger and fever that got her than the pellets—you did a fine job, son.” William opened the door to the next room. It was larger, almost the size of Caleb’s entire house. The walls were painted yellow, the ceiling white. The floors were sparkling wood, but spotted with small rugs. In the center of an enormous bed—the head and foot decorated by intricate, wrought-iron curves, the breadth of it enough, he thought, for two horses—his mother slept in blankets that piled high around her like she was floating on colorful clouds. She appeared better, healthier, than at any time since her hand had dangled over the edge of the kitchen table, her blood counting seconds on the floor. “She’s a strong one,” William said. “A lesser woman—shoot, most men—wouldn’t have made it as far as she did.”

  “She’ll be okay?”

  “I truly think she will.”

  Caleb placed his head next to his mother’s hip. The rattling wheeze had left her lungs.

  “Let’s get you some food,” William said. He placed a light hand on Caleb’s back and brought him down to the kitchen, where Margaret stood at the counter, a mixing bowl in her arms. A hulking stove took up much of the room, a fire crackling and filling the air with the smell of burning wood. Everything, even the sounds of spoons scraping bowls and cupboards being opened and shut reminded him of home. He listened to Mary and Emma bicker over who had to sift the flour and heard Jesse tromp in and plop down onto the seat next to him.

  The old man looked at him with concern. “What have we got for the boy here?” William asked and rubbed his hands together. Caleb ate everything set in front of him: ham, bacon and eggs, toast, apple cider, corn cakes, fried potatoes, and, at the end, a thick slab of blueberry pie. Margaret apologized that the blueberries had come from a jar and said the pie would be better in summer—William said that her worst blueberry pie was still the best in the world—but Caleb hardly heard either of them over the deep, rumbling satisfaction in his stomach. He sat back in the chair, happily bloated, and drank the last of another glass of milk.

  William and Margaret showed him out to the parlor—William had been right about the meal, his steps were sure, his head clear—where he noticed for the first time the fireplace had been covered up with boards, nailed across the hearth, descending from the mantel, in such a thick latticework that no opening could be seen. The cold overwhelmed him.

  “What happened to the fireplace?” he asked. He’d loved his small fires, sometimes sitting in front of them for hours, mesmerized, listening to the pinging of the tin chimney as the metal expanded with the heat.

  “Oh,” William said, his expression changing. Margaret looked away, clicking her fingernails against one another.

  “You’re alive,” he said, “with blood pumping through your veins and a soul stitched onto your body like a well-fitted suit, correct?” Caleb nodded, though he was unsure. “Well, we have some in this house who are not alive, who do not have blood pumping through their veins, but who, more importantly, are nothing but the thin suit of the soul.”

  For Caleb, the world had opened up again like the sinkhole out front, and he was liable to fall into it and never be seen again. The things he caught out of the corners of his vision, the glimpses of movement from his brothers and sisters, had a cause and an explanation.

  “Don’t worry,” William said. “We know how to deal with these souls.” He motioned toward the fireplace. “Most of them were coming in through the chimneys, attracted to the smoke and the embers.” Like the raccoons, Caleb thought. “We never saw them, of course, they wouldn’t allow us to, but we heard them talking to us, calling out.”

  Once it had been said, Caleb heard the voices himself—hollow sounding, alternating high and deep, speaking too slow or too fast to understand.

  “We stay in bed most of the time,” Margaret said. “We push the dresser against the door. Our fireplace is more carefully barricaded than this one.” She reached out and touched the bricks, ran her fingers along the mortar. “Stoves are okay; they’re too small and too hot.”

  “At night, we leave the back door open—no matter the cold—only a touch, a mere inch.”

  “Why?” Caleb asked, even though the idea made more and more sense to him, because in this world, where people slept in the beds of kings and everything had been coated in beautiful colors, where children bore children in a never-ending circle, loose souls wandering the cramped hallways and vast rooms did not seem so far-fetched.

  “If any of them squeeze in through a crack in the night,” he said, “we need to let them out.”

  This sobering concept sank into Caleb’s swimming head. In a place this desolate—and it felt much more so than his own home, which had been full of animals, people, and life—a place where the ground sucked up an entire cornfield for no good reason—perhaps ghosts did wander the forests. Perhaps this was how other people lived, with specters among them, waiting for them to sleep. The food churned in his stomach. He sat in one of the cushioned chairs, trapped by its softness, its enveloping hold. The flowers stitched into its fabric danced woozily, as if in an undecided breeze.

  “Are you all right?” Margaret asked.

  “He’s having a hard time hearing it, Margie, like those men.”

  “He’s not like them.”

  William looked Caleb over, up and down, his filmy stare half hidden underneath his thick eyebrows.

  “What men?” Caleb asked.

  William unraveled one of his scarves, peeling the wool from a series of broad bruises in the shape of two very large hands. The fingers extended around the back of the old man’s neck. “This is what they did to me,” William said, “and they took a lot of our stores. Food, shoes, clothes. That’s why I greeted you as I did.”

  The ringing of the shot sounded far away and long ago, and the echoes traveled all the way back to his barn. “Who were they?” Caleb asked.

  “There were three of them,” William said.

  “Three,” Caleb repeated, his insides convulsing.

  “Never seen them before. They showed up in the same shape as you—dirty, half-starved, thirsty.”

  The three figures exited his house, their damage done. “Red scarves?”

  William twitched. “You after those men, or are you with them?”

  Caleb thought he might vomit; he tried to think of something else, but could only see the bright spray of blood beneath Emma. He tugged at his hair. He looked to Margaret for guidance, but she shivered uncontrollably, her mouth shut so tightly her loose skin became taut on her neck and around her cheeks and forehead. He thought of their bloody hands, touching the things he’d touched, their filthy bodies sitting in his chair. Their matted hair, with all those dangerous thoughts underneath, had lain on the very same pillow he’d placed his head upon. His heartbeat thickened and slowed down. He flexed his hands. “When did they leave?”

  “Not quite four days ago,” William said.

  “Did you see which way they went?” Caleb asked, tho
ugh he himself hadn’t been brave enough to risk watching their departure.

  William said that he hadn’t, that he’d been unconscious and left for dead. Margaret, he said, had been in hiding in their closet, beneath a pile of blankets. Caleb wanted to tell her he knew how it felt to curl up in a closet like a hunted mouse. William stared out the window at the gathering drifts that were pushing against the glass, his face burning red. “I thought,” he said, “that by the time I got to her, she would be gone.” Tears formed in the old man’s eyes, and he turned away.

  “I saw,” Margaret said, her voice so soft it was almost lost in the hum of the wind and the creaking of the house. “I saw which way they went.” William’s jaw stiffened under his patchy beard. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you would go after them. I heard the doors open and I had to see if they had you with them. I’m sorry.” To Caleb, she said, “They were going northeast. Toward Watersbridge.”

  “They could’ve seen you!” William said.

  Caleb’s bag had been placed near the cocoon, which had been rolled up next to a new ball of twine. She had washed the bandages and stacked them in piles. The straps of his bag had been repaired with even stitches and tight knots. He checked the chamber of his Ithaca and put a box of ammunition in his shirt pocket all the while trying to ignore the fact that an old woman had been braver than he. “Thank you,” Caleb said, and shouldered his pack. He opened the front door and the comforting cold and familiar wind beckoned him. He tugged his gloves on with his teeth. The scarf smelled clean when he wrapped it around his mouth and nose.

  “Don’t go, son,” William said.

  “Caleb,” Margaret said. “What about your mother?”

  He leaned the Ithaca back against the wall, and replaced the box of shells in his pack, which he set on the floor. He thanked Margaret for her fine stitching. His gloves and his scarf he hung with some others on a rack of antlers that had been bolted to the wall.