The Kept

by James Scott

  The main room writhed with life. The inn had a large open foyer, where men played cards like at the hotel, but here women sat on their laps, wearing small outfits. Caleb noted the heat as well, barreling out of two enormous fireplaces—one to his left and one to his right. A bar ran the length of the building, obscured by smoke from the fire, lamps, cooking, cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. Staircases on either side led up to the second story, where a walkway led to rows of closed doors. A woman opened one, a disheveled man after her. He slapped her on her bottom and she rang a bell next to her door.

  “Help you, boy?” In front of Caleb, a man sat squeezed into a chair. He was enormous, the size of a bull, his sides escaping over the arms of his seat. Caleb wondered how big a man could get. On his head he wore a hat that only served to accentuate the massiveness of his skull. At his feet were the ruins of a table. On his lap he held a metal box. “I say, help you?”

  “No,” Caleb said, and moved to walk past him.

  The man sprang up with surprising quickness and put a firm finger to Caleb’s chest. “Kid, you got to pay to even see what the Elm has to offer.” He shook the metal box, and it rattled with coins.

  “Aw, let the boy have a peek, Ethan,” a voice said from behind the mountainous man whose hand—Caleb was certain—could have shoved him right through the pine wall and all the way back to the Brick & Feather Hotel. A disappointed Ethan gave Caleb a poke that knocked him back a yard, confirming his assessment of the man’s power. “Don’t worry me,” he said, and spat toward a metal spittoon beside the door, the ground splattered with his many attempts.

  The voice that had saved Caleb belonged to the same man who’d told him to come to the Elm in the first place. Caleb prepared to reintroduce himself but became confused when he saw the man owned not one but two sturdy legs. Caleb dismissed the notion that perhaps legs could be reattached in the larger world. This man had no stubble: His face was smooth and unwrinkled. Caleb wasn’t able to see his scalp through his hair, and his clothes were certainly not held together by needles. They were, in fact, the nicest clothes Caleb had ever seen. They shimmered in the lamplight, which swayed with the movement of the room. This was an entirely different man. Who happened to look almost exactly like the man his mother had chased him from earlier that day. “Has the glamour of the Elm Inn left you speechless, young one?”

  “What?” Caleb said.

  “My child, you look as though there’s something you’d like to say.”

  “I met someone who looked like you,” Caleb managed.

  “Ah, my lovely brother,” he said. “And yet here you stand.” The man smiled, and Caleb smiled back, realizing he’d made a joke. He liked the way the man talked. All of his words had a kind of magic to them, almost like they were music.

  “He has a wooden leg,” Caleb said, thinking it a very interesting thing to say until he remembered that, of course, the man’s own brother would know this fact.

  Yet the man laughed and the smile never left his face. “He does, indeed.” He raised his pant legs, exposing dark socks supported by black bands and metal clips. Between the two, however, was pink flesh. “I, on the other hand, do not. My young friend, have you never visited us before?”

  Caleb glanced around, surprised in the calm, enveloping presence of this man to find the two of them in a flurry of activity. “No. Never.”

  “Well, my dear boy, there is a lot to be learned here. Do you like to learn?” Caleb nodded, and the man reached out a clean hand tipped with perfect fingernails and patted him on the head three times. “Of course you do—knowledge is the key that unlocks all of life.” He turned on his heel in a manner that Caleb had never seen, a manner that he hoped to practice in his hotel room as soon as he returned. Caleb followed in his scented footsteps.

  EDWARD WALLACE WAS a giant of a man. His office was an old rail car, and he dwarfed the steps leading to it. He rested both hands on his cane as he spoke to Elspeth and Charles. He sat on the top step, his knees poking up like two mountain peaks. His back contained a permanent hunch from leaning down for people to hear him. Had he been standing, Elspeth imagined, she wouldn’t have been able to make out a word over the saws and picks and the squeal of pulleys.

  “Kind of scrawny,” he said as if she wasn’t there. He reached out and squeezed her biceps twice, testing. “Seems strong, though. Sure he can work the lake?”

  “Of course he can,” Charles said. Elspeth was concerned, though. For the most part her injuries had mended, thanks to Margaret’s care, and though she’d done her fair share of removing stumps and rocks from the fields, she wasn’t sure how she would tolerate the continuous exertion. She would avoid midwifery and in exchange, she would have to keep pace. Besides, Charles wasn’t that much bigger than she was, excepting his belly. She studied him quickly and rounded her shoulders and pushed her hips forward to match his.

  “We certainly need the manpower. That icehouse isn’t going to fill itself.” Wallace’s face twisted. “Charles, give us some privacy, would you please?” he said. Charles’s fingers played over his hat with frenetic energy. Elspeth was sweating, tensing, ready to flee, about to be found out, a woman among the men, an impostor and a fake. Charles thanked Wallace, placed his hat back atop his head, and walked several paces. Wallace shooed at him with his cane, and Charles shuffled up the hill, away from the lake.

  Wallace leaned forward on his elbows, close enough she could smell something—pipe smoke, maybe—on his clothes. “He told you about the job, correct? The dangers inherent?”

  “I’m well aware. Charles laid it all out for me,” she said. Wallace was unconvinced. “And I need the money.” He waited some more. “I trust Charles,” she said.

  This satisfied him in some way, and he rapped his knuckles on the railing of the stairs, and the cast iron rang like church bells. “Good, then. Best of luck to you both. Charles has his positives, but he can also be a bit”—he thrust himself up with the power of his cane and towered over her—“odd.”

  The odor of woodfire drifted across them, and Elspeth couldn’t help but think of her own skin to the flames.

  At the top of the hill, Charles leaned on the railing of the icehouse ramp. “What’d he say?”

  “I begin tomorrow,” she said.

  He asked her to get a drink with him. The sounds of the other men had increased in her time with Wallace; they walked up from the lake, a steady mass of them, all chatting and laughing, happy to be done for the day, their collective heat bringing a wave of steam. She agreed, and regretted it as soon as the words had left her mouth.

  As they merged with the crowd, Charles explained to Elspeth—Jorah—how they cut the ice from the lake with long saws and created a channel down which they floated the blocks. He pointed to all the stations on the steely ice. He and Elspeth would probably be on the banks of the water, he said, where they picked the blocks of ice up with a set of tongs and swung them by crane and pulley to a cart that would be taken to the icehouse by horses. The canal was a black stripe against the solid surface of the lake. She answered his questions about her family with a series of masculine grunts. He spoke of his own wife and their children.

  They headed into a dingy tavern and Charles ordered two whiskeys. Elspeth didn’t have the head or stomach for such things, but rather than give herself away, she threw the brown liquid back with a flick of her wrist and covered the blaze in her throat with her deepest cough.

  “We had a boy die in birth,” he said after he’d had another drink. “The cord had been wrapped around his neck and he lived for a few days, almost a week. The whole thing just about broke my wife clean open—me, too—and we set a place at the table for him before our other boys got old enough to object.” Charles bit at his nails, mind stuck at his dinner table, and drank another shot of whiskey.

  Elspeth feared the sound of her own voice as the alcohol invaded her, but a cloud had settled over the two of them, and if she had spoken, she doubted he would have heard her anyway. Her thought
s—those that she kept hidden even from herself—had broken loose and she couldn’t hope to stop them.

  She always pictured train tracks from above, lines and circles across the land like stitches on the earth. On that morning, she’d had to run to catch the train, and a porter had helped her aboard as the cars lurched into motion, the speed pushing her onto her heels. Snow glistened with melting water as they swept past. In the lowlands, the unending sheets of white gave way to patches of yellowed grass.

  As usual, she hadn’t planned on taking the child. Emma had turned two and could speak in complete sentences and move around the yard on her own. Elspeth left at the beginning of winter, and tried to find a different type of work, but everywhere she turned she was deemed unfit, unprepared, or uneducated. To her, the cries of infants sang from every door and window, slowing her steps on the plywood walkways of town, calling for her to help. Unable to ignore them any longer, she went into the doctor’s office she’d been circling for days and offered her services. The next morning, she crouched in her usual position, rags at the ready, pail of hot water at her feet, gleaming tools cleaned and laid out in neat and tidy rows. Everything waited in its correct place.

  On the train home—the grass patches becoming more and more scarce as the train veered north—the baby didn’t move. Elspeth tickled its feet, tried to get the baby to grab onto her thumb, her nipple, anything, but the baby refused. Elspeth wished for Jorah. The children had all fallen ill at one time or another, and he had nursed them back to health with herbs and medicines he stored in jars in a trunk at the foot of their bed. The baby turned blue, the splotches of color joining and deepening, the veins dark and threatening, and Elspeth debated running into the corridor for help, but she couldn’t leave the child or risk the inquiry.

  She waited too long. Before nightfall, the child stopped breathing, the blue fading, leaving the skin pale and rigid. Elspeth wrapped the body in a shawl, pressed it to her shoulder as if it were alive, and walked the corridor. The motionless child that she clutched in her arms had been taken by a God seeking revenge on one who spoke His word but would not follow His direction. He had given her no hints, no signs, direct or implied, that she should take this child. And now He’d shown her what He’d do to her for ignoring His wishes.

  A man passed down the aisle as she did. She rocked back and forth on her hips, and placed a finger to her mouth, asking for quiet while the baby slept. The man gave a small bow of apology and stepped into an empty compartment to allow her to pass. She came to the end of the train. The icy wind tore at her clothes like claws. Elspeth couldn’t look at the swaddled child. The stars maintained a fixed position above the train as it hurtled forward. She dangled the child over the tracks. She let go. The stars did not flinch.

  In the bar, the tears came again. She dipped her head low so Charles couldn’t see her. Surely this would give her away. Her cheeks burned as though she stood on her barstool and shouted her transgressions into the close air of men who’d toiled all day on the lake. Time would expose her. Though when she raised her head, she saw that Charles cried for his own loss.

  “I don’t know why we put them through that,” he said, “seeing that plate every night. Maybe we were trying to let the other boys know how lucky we all are. It’s difficult to be happy with what you have, isn’t it?” Elspeth couldn’t begin to answer that question. Charles didn’t give her a chance, ordering another round of drinks and some chicken pies. Elspeth protested that she didn’t have enough money. “It’s my pleasure, Jorah,” he said. Had she said she needed to get back to Caleb, she assumed Charles would have slid his stool back and excused her without a word. “Hard to feel lucky in this world,” he said. “But today, I am.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You saved me, Jorah.”

  CALEB SAT IN a soft chair in a luxuriant room that had a bath in one corner, surrounded on all sides by mirrors. A woman was in the bathtub, naked, but the man he’d followed inside paid her no attention. Caleb tried to do the same. When the man in the fine clothes saw the boy’s discomfort, he chuckled. “Go ahead,” he said. “You can look.”

  Some part of Caleb wanted to, but he shook his head no.

  “A man of principle,” the man said. “A dying breed.”

  The rest of the room shone with the reflections from the water, the polished wood walls and beams glittering. Even the bed seemed radiant; the bronze had been burnished and the very sheets appeared to exude warmth. The man sat on a lounge opposite Caleb. “My name,” he said as he crossed one leg over the other, “is London White.”

  The unmistakable crack of a gunshot sounded from the other room, followed by shuffling on the hardwood floors. Caleb flinched. White made no move.

  “My brother and I were born in this town. And where are you from—?”

  “Caleb Howell,” he said, embarrassed by his small voice. He knew there was a slight difference between from and born and he took pains not to lie. “From a farm.”

  White laughed. He laughed so hard tears rolled down his face. He wiped them with a handkerchief that he produced from his pocket. When his laughter slowed, he took one look at Caleb and began again. The scuffling in the other room escalated. Solid thuds knocked dust from the walls. Caleb wished he’d brought his Ithaca.

  “I’m sorry. But, yes—a farm. And are you a hard worker, Caleb?” Caleb nodded. “Don’t waste much time talking, I see. That’s good. A great benefit to this establishment, silence.”

  A picture frame slid from one of the walls and shattered on the ground. In a flash, White crossed the room and threw open the door. He was gone only a moment. When he came back, he ran a silver comb through his hair and smiled.

  A few seconds later another gunshot. The noise ceased.

  “Yes, the benefit of silence.” White took the time to seat himself, straighten his clothes all over again, and cross his legs with perfect leisure. He drew a watch from his vest by its chain and wound it, an affectation Caleb immediately admired. “So, what brought you from your farm to my doorstep?”

  Caleb knew he had the right place—the Elm Inn was indeed a home for killers. He recalled Charles Heather talking to his mother. “I think you were going to offer me a job.”

  “I was, was I?”

  “I think so.” Caleb, not sure of himself, tried to affect confidence. “You were going to pay me to work for you.”

  “I wasn’t,” White said, and extended his hand for Caleb to shake, “but I will. We reward the bold here, as you shall find.” White’s grip was intensely strong. “Welcome, Caleb Howell, to the Elm Inn, and all her splendors.”

  CHAPTER 3

  That night—their first in a real bed since leaving William and Margaret—Elspeth and Caleb were both racked by nightmares. Caleb’s involved dark, furtive men sneaking into his house and stealing his gun. Sometimes he would reach for it, but he could never grasp it. Others, he’d aim, only to see nothing in his hand but one of his feathers. He woke and nodded off again, a twisting, sweating sleep stalked by an animal at the edge of his vision. When he finally managed to get off a shot, he tracked its blood through the woods and the trail ended with Jorah, dying on a mound of new earth on the other side of the hill.

  “They wouldn’t let me have my gun back,” Caleb said as soon as his mother’s eyes opened. Upon reaching their room, he’d searched their packs for a weapon. He’d found the hunting knife, which he’d unsheathed and placed under his pillow. “I left my gun at the counter and when I got back, it was someone different and he didn’t know where it was.”

  “They probably put it someplace safe,” Elspeth said. The boy had dark circles under his eyes. He played with the buttons on his shirt, his nerves frayed. For Elspeth, the dreams contained bundles dumped on railroad tracks, the sheets unfurling and leaving a naked baby on the iron rails. Gusta van Tessel floated above her, her hair and thin clothing waving in a starry sky as if underwater, her lips blue. The baby’s feet and arms would stir, its large eyes searching for someone to pick it up, and its
mouth would open wide and let out a piercing shriek.

  She tried to shake the murkiness the dreams left behind and concentrated on Caleb, his boots tapping on the floor. His brown hair uneven from Margaret’s haircut, he looked small in the space of the window, sitting low on the stool. When the children were infants, life had been simple. If they cried or fussed, she fed and rocked them. She became adept at slipping them out of her arms and into their cribs without their even stirring. There were times she woke in the middle of the night to silence, and made her way across the room to linger until the child moved—a sigh, a shift, a kick. Only then could she return to Jorah. In those days, there were simple problems with simple solutions. Caleb not being able to sleep without his gun was more complex. His foot shook in his dead brother’s boots—boots she’d purchased on an abbreviated trip to Betherd that Elspeth had cut short before the child had been born, before indulging again—and the leather hammered out a rhythmless beat on the floorboards. She stood up from the bed, fully dressed, smelling as if she hadn’t bathed in a week, knowing it added authenticity to her disguise, and went to retrieve the boy’s gun.

  Not having his Ithaca had banished all else from Caleb’s mind. At his mother’s receding footsteps, he took the hunting knife from beneath his pillow, replaced it in its sheath, and put it back in his mother’s pack, careful to restore everything to its rightful order.

  She wasn’t gone for more than five minutes. She handed the Ithaca to him having judged its heft automatically, as she would an infant—eight pounds—and he cradled the weapon carefully. He checked the chamber and took the cloth from his back pocket and folded it several times to find a clean square of fabric.