by James Scott
“These men shot your mother,” William said.
“They took my family,” Caleb said.
“They didn’t have anyone with them,” Margaret said.
“No,” Caleb said. “I meant something different.”
William and Margaret both fixated on a gilded picture frame. It showed a young man, his hair flat to his scalp, his eyes dark like Margaret’s, his face the same shape as William’s. “You can ask the spirits,” William said, “to bring them back.”
Caleb’s heart leapt, as if from the hayloft door and out across the fields. “Can that work?” he asked. “Does it?”
“Not yet,” William said, “but we keep asking.”
CHAPTER 10
Caleb examined the bullets for imperfections. Even their smallest changes in grain, a slight wave in the metal, he knew by heart. He asked William so many questions about the appearance and whereabouts of the three men that William started asking Caleb questions as well, like what he was planning on doing when he found them. The inquiry stopped.
He dreamed of killers and scarves and untying his brother’s boots and rising up to the dark sky, a ghost himself. He barely slept. In the moonlight leaking through the dusty windows, he crept from room to room, as he had at home, watching for intruders, filled with stories William told of souls unmoored from the stitching of a human body, wondering whether they would look like the white shirt his mother had let go over the rapids, translucent and moving with a spirit of its own. Late one night he heard the creaking bedsprings relieved of William’s weight, and the old man came into the hallway, dressed in a thick sweater and many pairs of socks bundled and tied with bootlaces. The candle he clutched in his hand lit his face from below, turning his brows into evil shadows. He looked like the scarecrow the girls had made and stuck on the broken handle of a pitchfork in the middle of their vegetable garden. Caleb stood in front of him—dressed only in long underwear cleaned and washed by Margaret—the Ithaca loaded in his arms.
William nodded at Caleb sadly. “If you’re going to do it, kill Margaret first,” he said. “I don’t want the shot to wake her, and for her to know what’s coming. Better to sneak in now and do it quick. That’s all I ask.”
Caleb was so hurt he couldn’t respond. He’d studied himself in the mirror—a vanity Jorah had eschewed—and—despite the haircut Margaret had insisted upon—concluded he didn’t look like a killer at all. When he recovered enough to speak, he said, “I don’t want to kill you. I’m watching out.”
William’s shoulders dropped with relief. “You can’t shoot ghosts, son.”
Caleb let the shotgun’s barrel touch the ground. At the small clink of metal, William mussed Caleb’s hair and went back into his room. Caleb’s hands twitched at memories of patting Emma in the same way. The bedsprings confirmed William’s return.
Caleb kept the gun in the bed next to him, rolled up in his pants so the oil didn’t ruin Margaret’s clean sheets. He thought it the kind of thing a killer wouldn’t do.
WHEN SHE CAME to, Elspeth didn’t know where she was or what had happened. At times, she’d imagined herself in one of the homes where she’d served as a midwife, and when the old woman woke her by pressing a cup to her lips or wetting her forehead with a moist towel, she’d try to get to her feet, to fetch the doctor’s tools, to put the water on, to lay out the towels, but the old woman would push her head back to her pillow with a gentle hand. Others she’d remember herself back on the straw pallet at the foot of her parents’ bed in the van Tessel home. In the mornings—a tick before first light—their father would rise to get the plants and flowers in order, to fill the vases and clear the lawn of any branches that had fallen in the night. Elspeth and her mother could sleep a bit more before they’d have to serve breakfast. She would nestle into her hand-me-down sheets and stained pillow and fall into her deepest slumber. The last few days had been her soundest sleep since, and when her eyes opened they weren’t heavy or swollen. She felt right.
Caleb poked his head into her room and, upon seeing her awake, slipped in and eased the door shut behind him. She couldn’t explain his sudden presence off the hillside. Most days she wouldn’t see him until evening supper, and even then, he arrived after the prayer and didn’t linger once the plates had been cleared. He looked strange, too, his skin pinker, his frame stooped slightly, as if the roof was about to cave in, and his hair appeared to have been cut with a dull knife. It came back to her, the white hot pain of the shot, the struggle down the hill away from their home—their home which had disappeared in the night.
Margaret entered without a knock and smiled at the two of them. “You have your mother’s features,” she said. Caleb shied away and played with the mended buttons on his shirt. Elspeth hadn’t considered the shock of Caleb being in the world for the first time. She noted the sharp cheekbones that did not resemble Jorah’s even planes, the dark brown eyes unlike her dusty gray, the peach skin that neither she nor Jorah possessed. The children had never known anyone but their siblings, and if they’d noticed anything strange about the fact they all looked so different from one another, they’d never spoken of it. Elspeth ached to unburden herself, to tell Caleb that he was not her child, that none of them were, but she prayed and realized that the weight lifted off of her shoulders would be dropped squarely on his and he looked too lean and worn for that.
The old woman ran her hands through the boy’s hair. Caleb didn’t flinch, but stood still as a frightened deer. Elspeth, her strength and mind returning, wanted to tell the woman to stop touching her son. She hadn’t experienced such jealousy in a long time, not since the soft spots on the babies’ skulls had grown over. On the wall hung a portrait of three children, clearly belonging to the old woman. Their looks were shared.
Two and a half years after she’d left the van Tessels and her parents behind, with snow falling hard and wet, plastering itself against the windows, gathering on the panes, Elspeth had cleaned metal birthing instruments in hot soapy water. Her red hand removed a shining set of forceps. She’d taken a job with a Dr. Forbes, and hardly considered Jorah, who spent his days with the animals and making furniture so that each time Elspeth came home, the house would be more full, more finished, more alien to her. Their house, as yet, contained only the two of them.
Dr. Forbes scribbled in one of his many black notebooks, a blue ribbon bookmarker dangling from the desk.
“Sir, if I may?” she said.
“Yes?” he said, not turning away from his note taking and, in fact, dipping his pen again.
She waited for him to finish. He removed his glasses and cracked his knuckles. Elspeth scrubbed at a small set of shears. “I wonder,” she said, “if it’s possible for a man and woman who are of different colors to have a child?”
Forbes laughed. “What kind of a question . . .” he began, then cleared his throat. “Of course, God would never approve . . .”
“Yes, sir.” But she couldn’t help herself. “I saw a couple walking—an Indian and a woman like me—and they seemed quite happy in each other’s company, and I wondered. I’m sorry to ask.”
He laughed again. “A woman like you? Hardly.” His fingers toyed with his belt buckle. “It has been known to happen.” He stood and thumbed across the spines of his notebooks, selected one from a high shelf, and flipped through the pages. His neat, cramped handwriting flew past. “Here it is. Yes, once, when I was quite young, I assisted Dr. Vashin as he delivered such a baby.” He cleared his throat, the air dried by the woodstove, and read, “The baby appears to be in normal health. The girl, fourteen years of age, also appears to be in fine condition. The birth did not give much difficulty or pose additional problems.” He smiled at her. “My spelling certainly has improved.”
“So it is possible?”
It took him a moment to recall what she was referring to. She could see the memory alight on his face and he flipped to another page in the notebook. He frowned. “It seems, and I had forgotten this altogether, that the girl
’s father made away with the infant in the night and dashed its head against a rock.” He clapped the notebook shut, causing Elspeth to jump. She wasn’t certain he’d been reading the last part and she worried she’d gone too far. “For the best,” he said.
“But it is possible?”
He touched a hand to her waist. Elspeth allowed such advances without response, but he never moved past them.
“As possible as it would be for you and I to have a child,” he said, his lips wet against her ear. But now she knew it would be futile, no matter the man.
She dropped the shears in the sink, and waved her hands to clear away the soap bubbles, and in the water she saw herself staring back and thought, as she often did then, of Gusta van Tessel, eyes wide and empty, staring up from the bottom of the bathtub.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING when Caleb saw his mother, she looked even healthier, more solid and more herself, though Margaret had taken the liberty of cutting her hair as well. It did her no favors—so short it made her face more severe, her features sharper. He heard Margaret on the stairs and shook his mother awake. “We need to go,” he said, “they’ve been here. The men, the three men, they were here.”
Few things in her life had provided Elspeth such evidence of God. She brought her hand to the cross at her neck, and then to her head. “Did that woman cut my hair?” Caleb nodded. She tried to smile. “Does mine look as awful as yours?”
“Worse,” he said and laughed.
Elspeth noticed the boarded hearth. “What happened to the fireplace?”
“That’s where the ghosts come in,” Caleb said, and didn’t have time to say anything further, because Margaret opened the door, and pretended to be surprised to find them both there.
“We’re leaving,” Elspeth said, and forced herself—through gritting teeth—to sit upright.
Margaret explained to both of them in great detail the dangers of moving Elspeth, saying she needed weeks, if not months, to fully recuperate from her injuries. Caleb began to panic. “So you may be able to leave before long,” she began. He knew that soon wouldn’t be good enough.
“I’ll be fine,” Elspeth said, with finality. She could not have this woman cutting their hair without provocation or invitation and filling Caleb’s head with stories of ghosts and insanity. Then she noticed her clothes on the chair at her side. “Did you wash these?”
Margaret looked confused. “Well, yes, they were filthy.” Elspeth yearned to be in Jorah’s secure presence, if only in the scent of his old shirt. “They were covered in blood and muck, and—”
“We leave now.”
“My dear . . .” Margaret began, but Elspeth closed her eyes.
“Leave me,” she said. If God wished for her to follow these killers and was content to throw them in her path, she wouldn’t wait for His next sign. A shadow passed over her. A hand went to her face, and she wasn’t sure whose, but it was rough and chilled.
Once she heard the door shut, she rewrapped her chest. A quiet knocking at the door revealed the old woman. She didn’t shy away from Elspeth’s bare skin.
“William and I,” she said, “are concerned about the boy.” When Margaret understood that Elspeth wasn’t going to speak before she’d finished, she shut the door. “We are of the opinion it would be best for him to stay here, with us, until you’ve done what you need to do.”
Had the question been put forth a week earlier—as she lay in the dark shadows of the barn and the boy sloshed water into troughs, talking to the animals as he went—she would have said yes. After their journey, however, leaving him was inconceivable. “So Caleb told you what happened?” Margaret said he had. “And you think—after that—my family murdered—I would let my last child out of my sight?”
“No, dear, of course not,” Margaret said and wrung her hands. “We have food and shelter and the boy seems so bent on . . . well, on killing.”
Elspeth jammed items into her pack, not caring whose they were or where they’d come from. “We thank you for your help.”
“I hope you’ll reconsider.”
Elspeth took some money from the toe of her boot, perhaps more than she’d intended, and threw it onto the bed. “For your troubles.”
Margaret scurried away, and when Caleb knocked, Elspeth thought she’d come back to see if she had, indeed, reconsidered.
“I’m ready,” he said. He traced the outline of the keyhole on the doorknob with his fingernail. “I have bad dreams in this house.” Caleb hoped she would say something to let him know everything would be all right.
She yanked her bandage tighter. He heard the fabric strain. “Bad dreams,” she said, “are nothing but.”
ELSPETH LIMPED HER way into the kitchen, where William and Margaret had a full breakfast sizzling. Their backs stiffened at her injured shuffle.
“Surprised to see you up and about,” William said and sipped a cup of coffee.
She didn’t sit down, didn’t eat. “I thank you both for what you’ve done, but Caleb and I are leaving today.”
“Stay and rest up,” William said.
“We must go,” she said.
William’s countenance darkened. “Margaret and I don’t think you should follow after those men. No good can come of it.” He tried to dissuade her with his tale of the killers, of the evil that came out of their pores, and the easy way with which one had held him by the throat while the others went through their drawers and stole anything of value. “And this place they’re headed—this Watersbridge—is no kind of place for a mother and her son.”
The name shoved Elspeth back into the wall. Caleb, pink and new, had wriggled against her chest as she hurried through the dusty streets of that very town. The boy had cried, and she longed to duck into the church to calm him, but had pushed on. Circumstances—if they could be called that—made her return inevitable. And with the boy, a stolen son of Watersbridge. This, surely, had to be her reckoning. If so, she would go headlong.
Caleb—twelve and so different to her it made her shudder—entered the kitchen, sat down, and ate from the abundant plates of food. Elspeth had never seen him so at ease and it pained her. “Caleb, we have to be going.”
He heard the tone of his mother’s voice and shoveled eggs in faster. Margaret took a tin of muffins from the oven.
“Eat,” Margaret said. “Stay. You need your strength, too, dear.”
As if to prove she had plenty, Elspeth lifted Caleb’s chair from the table—the boy’s fork still clutched in his hand—a surprising show of power, even though it sent tendrils of pain to her toes and fingertips to do so. William raised his arms in acquiescence. Margaret retrieved a cotton bag from the pantry. On top of it she placed half a dozen of the steaming muffins.
“There’s enough food in there to last you,” she said.
CHAPTER 11
They could see Watersbridge down in the valley long before they reached it. The streets and clustered buildings were visible, and behind them the gray expanse of the lake. Caleb’s stomach knotted in anticipation. The thought that they were close pushed them, and they tempted darkness when a snow squall rushed upon them, night lowering in an instant, the snow hard and fast as rain. It took both of them to lash their tarp to a maple tree, the wind toying with the material, the snow blinding.
The branches lent some cover and they each cleared a spot down to the earth to sleep on and they ate from the sack William and Margaret had provided—salted pork, pickled beets, bread with hunks of butter. After the comforts of the couple’s house, the cold penetrated them deeper, sensing their weaknesses, until they became sore and tense. Elspeth tried not to think of the woman, how she asked to have her child, and slept a dreamless sleep, rising in the dim dawn to walk again, trailing behind Caleb, the town lost to trees and brush in the lower altitudes.
That afternoon, they came upon a burned-out building. It appeared to have once been larger than the Howell house, square but grand. Most of the frame held. Everything else had been prey to the flames. The scor
ched beams creaked and whistled in the wind. Caleb explored the remnants of the building, testing a step in a stairway that led to nothing. He shook a post. She saw how he changed in the midst of the charred remains—his face paled, his wide brown eyes avoided hers.
He climbed to the top of the staircase. His mother stood below, never setting foot inside the wrecked building. She coughed, a racking, terrible sound. “I burned the house down,” he said. “I burned the bodies, and the house caught fire. All I had time for was you and the rifles and a little bit of food.”
“You couldn’t bury them,” she said.
“No.”
“I understand,” she said, and she meant it, glad he’d set the fire: It gave them nothing to return to, nothing to compel them to turn back. The boy must miss it all, she thought. She wanted to give him something. “Caleb,” she said, “Watersbridge is where you were born.”
Caleb looked down at the buildings, a church steeple visible. He’d been born in a town that housed murderers. Margaret and William had difficulty discussing Watersbridge in front of him, choosing their words carefully, and he attempted to reconstruct and decipher all he could. “Mama,” he said, “if I was born there, does that make me the same as those men?” It all seemed too much to grasp at once, and he wondered how other people understood it without difficulty. He kicked at a burned beam of the house. It twanged and shook, but held.
“No, Caleb,” she said. “It doesn’t.” She wished she could reach out further than that, draw the boy from his trance, but she only had the energy to go forward and soon after he caught up and followed in her tracks.
CALEB FORGOT HIS soreness once they came in view of the trails of smoke rising from the chimneys of the town, and he raced ahead. Elspeth called for him to slow down, but he didn’t listen. Above the tops of the pine trees, the steeple, topped by a golden cross, gleamed in the midday light.