by James Scott
“I have to go to work,” Elspeth said. “How do I look? Dirty enough to be a man?” Caleb tore his eyes from the Ithaca and glanced at his mother. She’d turned into someone else. Caleb said she did. Elspeth hesitated, not sure if she’d made a joke, decided she hadn’t, and left the boy wiping down the barrel of his gun, as if he couldn’t bear to have someone else’s hands sully the steel.
CHARLES MET HER outside the hotel, holding two steaming cups. He gave one to her and she took a careful sip of thick, black coffee.
“How’s your boy?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, but she worried.
The morning was late in coming, under cover of dark, roiling clouds. The air smelled like snow, and Elspeth pulled her jacket close. “You’ll get used to the cold, Jorah,” he said, “but we need to get you some thicker gloves. Those won’t last the day.” He drew a pair from his denims and slapped them into her outstretched palm. “I always bring a spare. After work I’ll show you to the mercantile.”
Elspeth thanked him, the cold providing the rough edge to her voice so she didn’t have to. The harshness of their breath and the snow packing under their feet constituted their conversation for the rest of their walk. There wasn’t a soul on the streets except the occasional man headed in the same direction.
Lanterns drew a line from the icehouse to the canal upon which the frozen blocks would soon float up to the shore. The sight of the giant cubes of ice, almost as big as a man, made the nerves in Elspeth’s stomach leap into her chest. She wasn’t sure she could do the job. Maybe it would expose her for the fraud she was. Maybe the company would simply fire her. Or maybe Charles would fail to lock the pincers, and the ice would tumble onto her spine, and all she would know was a faint crack.
The lights reflected off the snow and hung a series of golden domes over the beginning of the workday. Horses whinnied and stamped their hooves into the frozen ground, their tack jingling. Elspeth and Charles joined a long line of men—none of whom spoke to Charles or greeted him as they did the others, with grunts or quick words. Elspeth retied her laces and pulled at her gloves. Somehow these small gestures took the edge off her apprehension. At the end of the line stood Edward Wallace, who leaned on a cane fatter than Elspeth’s arm, and, despite his crooked posture, towered over them all. He held a ledger, which he glanced at when Elspeth and Charles stepped forward. He handed them each a pair of ice cleats, a series of metal teeth with adjustable straps at the toes and heels to fasten them to their boots. “Van Tessel and Heather—the cranes,” he said.
Down the embankment to the edge of the water, they stood under a large post, jammed into the earth like a false tree trunk. Fifteen feet in the air, the post formed a T with another, this one parallel to the ground, the two held together by a swiveling metal bracket. On one end of the arm was a pair of metal pincers. On the other, nearly blending into the steely clouds, was an iron bar in the shape of a cross.
FRANK HADN’T EVEN finished shaking the cold from his arms when Caleb asked him, “How did you expect me to get my gun back?”
Frank hung his coat. “Morning, Caleb. How’s the room?”
Caleb ignored him and repeated his question.
“Sorry, son, I must have forgotten to tell Wilkes whose weapon it was,” he said as he moved behind the counter and rearranged the items that Wilkes had shifted over the course of the night. “But—God’s honest truth—I didn’t figure you’d find much at the Elm Inn worth your time. I expected you back rather quickly.”
Caleb accepted this explanation, and gave Frank his empty breakfast plate. “I enjoyed the eggs.” Caleb searched his pockets for the rest of the money. He’d laid the coins on the bed and arranged them by size, then memorized the numbers on their faces. He’d wanted to know which was best, what he could buy for each one, and he clinked them together in his pockets as he stood in front of Frank. “Do you know where I can buy a pistol?”
Frank dripped some oil onto a rag and began to wipe down the counter. “A pistol? Caleb, I don’t know you from Adam but I have to say, I’m a Christian man, and I don’t know if I should associate myself—or this hotel—with someone who carries a pistol and finds himself at the Elm Inn at all hours of the night.”
Caleb knew what one would buy a pistol for, but he’d studied himself in the mirror from the time his mother left for work until breakfast, and he didn’t look like one of the three men in red scarves or the men at the Elm Inn—not like a killer. He looked like a boy. Even for a boy, he thought, he didn’t look dangerous.
“The type of man I’m talking about is a man looking for trouble and trouble has an easy enough time finding folks on its own.” Frank scrubbed at a spot on the counter, his forearms flexing where they emerged from his rolled sleeves. “So, Caleb, sorry to say, I think you and I might be done being friendly.” With that, he balled up his rag, tossed it under the counter, and walked through the door to the kitchen.
ELSPETH AND CHARLES snapped the tongs onto a block of ice, the water sloshing under their cleated boots like liquid steel. Once they had secured the teeth, they walked over to the cross and each set their grip. Leather had been wound around the bar, but it had worn out in places and torn free in others. The apparatus groaned, the ice lifted, and the water dripping from its heights froze before it hit the hard-packed snow, pinging like shot.
“Jorah,” Charles began as they pushed, swinging the ice to the sled, “is your wife home waiting on you?”
Elspeth strained at the weight. The bar required both a forward and a downward force to move. She pushed harder. Her wounds yanked at her skin; the bandages constrained movement. A groan escaped from deep within her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry. Maybe another time.”
The thought of divulging anything made Elspeth queasy. Her secrets threatened to burst her at the seams every day. The constant pressure had become such an accustomed part of her that to live without it, she thought, would likely deflate her and she’d collapse to the ground like an empty burlap sack.
They dropped the ice onto the sled and the memory of the strain in her muscles tried to make her arms rise. She led the way back down the incline. The apparatus whined when they pulled it along with them, empty. “I had to ask,” Charles said, “because I have a soul that needs some unburdening. My own wife—my own dear wife—has been trouble for me lately.” He proceeded to list his complaints with his wife—her misunderstandings of him, her distaste for his work, her desire for a more comfortable life—in such detail that Elspeth gave up on listening and his voice became another sound in the rhythm of the work—the crisp squeal of the tongs as they snapped shut, the creak of the swivel as they pushed at the bar, the panting of their breath, and the small, measured steps of their feet on the packed snow, the teeth on their soles biting into the ice.
WITH HIS CONCENTRATION divided by every new man coming in the door, Caleb was not an attentive sweeper. Several times London White whisked past and pointed to a section of floor blemished by a small nest of hair or a clump of dirt. Eventually he took Caleb by the hips and moved him over to a splatter of cigar ashes. “How’s your eyesight, Caleb?” he asked, and waved a hand in front of his face.
For much of the early morning, Caleb had debated whether or not to come to the Elm and begin work, but he always drew the same conclusion: There was nowhere else he would be able to observe the killing kind in such obscurity. Frank had said nothing from the counter as he’d slipped past, and London White had only pulled a pocket watch from his vest to comment on Caleb’s tardiness.
Caleb toiled upstairs, supposedly sweeping the walkway that was lined with rooms identified by swirling, golden numbers affixed to the doors. The bells chimed irregularly in the morning, far from the symphonic clamor of ringing at night. From inside the rooms came muffled moans and rhythmic thumping that Caleb pretended not to hear. He had a notion of what happened between the ringing of the bells, but thinking about it made his eyes go blurry, so he pictured the
killers. When the customers exited the rooms, some flushed and hurried, others languorous—as if they’d eaten a large and satisfying meal—Caleb would bend over his broom, pretending to inspect the floor, sneaking only a glance at their walk or their hair, trying to fit them with red scarves.
The panorama of the Elm Inn was best viewed from the walkway, and Caleb swept it again and again. There were half a dozen tables for cards, and the tinkling of coins being tossed on them could be heard under the constant roar of conversation and the occasional disagreement. It was still early—the weak winter sun trickled through the filmy windows—and White had told Caleb not to worry about gunfire until the liquor had more time to work. Caleb acted as if he knew what this meant. Women circulated among the tables, and Caleb avoided looking at their ill-fitting attire and the bodies they barely restrained. These women were shaped differently than his mother or his sisters, rounder, more fleshy. They brought drinks to the men, played with their hair, sat on their laps, and whispered into their ears. Caleb’s embarrassment made it easy to give his attention to the men, who watched one another with wary glances. Many looked like the raccoon Caleb had impaled in the horses’ stall, their expressions wild, their bodies plagued by nervous tics. Each carried the kind of weight in his shoulders that bowed his back and hid his face from the world. Caleb thought he would know one of the killers if he saw them, that he would feel it as clearly as if he’d leapt into icy water. No one in the Elm Inn gave him that shudder. Some, however, struck a deep fear in his heart. One customer, frustrated by something unknown that happened behind one of the closed doors, caught sight of him on the upper walkway, the first time someone besides White or Ethan had taken any notice of him, and Caleb scurried in the other direction, lamely passing the broom behind him. The man’s longer strides caught up with him, and he rammed his elbow into Caleb’s back hard enough to knock the broom from his hand and send it clattering over the railing and onto a handful of patrons waiting at the bar. “Watch yourself, boy,” he said and tromped down the stairs.
Caleb heard a yell of annoyance and pressed his back to the wall, out of sight from the floor below. London White came up the stairs, broom in hand. He considered it, passing it from one palm to the other. Caleb knelt and swept the last of the dirt into his hand. He didn’t know what to do with it—he had been sweeping it up against the walls between the doors, rather than onto the card players and women below—so he dumped it into his pocket.
“When I was your age,” London White began, making it clear he’d paid no attention to Caleb’s work habits, “I was like my brother, living in the woods, making moonshine to sell to thirsty travelers, eating whatever we could catch—possums, rabbit, squirrel.” He winced. “Then I sold a jar full of our best to a man in a nice suit. He rode the finest horse I’d ever seen. He wore the finest clothes. We feared men like that. Sometimes we’d give them our product for free.” He wrung the broom handle with his fists. “Imagine that—the ones who could truly afford our wares and we’d give it to them for nothing because we were scared. I didn’t like that feeling. Not at all.” His knuckles went white. “I followed him home. He lived in a gorgeous house—windows and ceilings like a church, walls and floors as resplendent as the most magnificent of palaces. He had a beautiful wife—red hair to her shoulders, skin white as snow. Do you know what I did?”
Caleb shook his head. He could feel the dirt sifting through a hole in his pocket and trailing down his leg, tickling him. A smile began to creep across his face.
“I snuck into their bedroom at night and cut both their throats,” White said.
Caleb repressed a burning urge to run. He had to stay. The knowledge that he was standing with and working for a murderer didn’t shock him; it only confirmed his suspicion that he was in the right place. What did surprise him was his appearance. Caleb squinted at White, the outline of his jaw, the proud way he held his head, his upright bearing, and knew he’d never seen him flit across the frozen landscape from the hole in the barn. White was one of them, but a different breed.
“Was it the right thing to do?” He leaned on the railing. “Most would say no. But as I lived in their house and ate their food, my fear was gone. We do what we have to do so we can be unafraid.” Caleb observed London White further: the precisely folded kerchief, the watch chain that dangled in an exacting crescent, the brightly, exhaustively polished shoes, the neatly combed hair. “And you, Caleb, I think you know that.” He chuckled to himself. “One step ahead already. I knew it when you asked me—no, told me—that I was going to give you a job.” He glanced at Caleb out of the corner of his eye and a glint of a smile flirted across his lips. “You’re not afraid, are you?”
Caleb knew he needed to grow accustomed to lying. “No. I’m not.” He saw an opportunity present itself. “I need to know something.”
White patted Caleb on the shoulder. “Good boy.”
“I need to buy a pistol.”
White straightened Caleb’s collar, buttoned an additional button on his shirt. “What you need is some new clothes. I shall bring you some.” He licked his palm and smoothed Caleb’s hair. “Shirt, pants, a new jacket.”
“I don’t need a new jacket,” Caleb said forcefully.
White seemed to weigh his response. “Okay, Caleb.” He picked a stray hair from his shirt and blew it from between his fingers. “A pistol? Whatever for?”
White turned to the front door, where there stood a stocky man with a wide smile and a nose that even from the upper floor could be seen as crooked, broken many times over. White licked his hand again, but this time patted down his own hair and adjusted his suit.
“Owen Trachte, in flesh and blood,” White said, loud enough for the man to hear. “Polish the railings next,” he said to Caleb, before descending the stairs. Owen looked to Caleb like a new kind of man—something he’d never seen before, different, even from London White. He didn’t have White’s smooth confidence, or the silent strength Caleb saw in his father, or the friendly openness of Frank at the Brick & Feather Hotel. Owen bore with him something different, a naked anger that Caleb thought, at unguarded moments, might be found on his own face.
CHAPTER 4
Her hands raw and screaming with coin-size blisters, Elspeth sat next to Charles and sipped from a stein of beer. She didn’t wish to go back to the hotel to that sad boy sitting on the stool with his rifle in his lap, waiting for a group of killers to pass beneath his window. So she occupied the same chair in the same bar from the previous evening, listening to Charles talk more about his life. He told her he’d come to this part of New York from the coast of Massachusetts, where his family had lived for generations, a long line of fishermen and whalers. He told her of the ocean, of going out in a ship as a boy until he could see nothing but the enormity of the world; how the calm seas exposed the curve of the earth, which dizzied him and made him afraid he could slide off at any moment. The Heather blood—his father had told him—did not run strong in his veins. Land, he said, was where Charles would need to make his way. And so he left Massachusetts to escape the constant lapping pull of the sea.
Like Elspeth, he’d traveled all over New York, seen much of the state—the mountains, the mighty river to the north, the vast stretches of green land between. But the shore of the lake, he said, had felt like home. The wind-powered waves were more than large enough for him. He’d been to Erie’s center and jumped into the gray water and had been unafraid. The town’s almost constant cloud cover suited him, as did the way the snows could move in without warning and alter the earth in minutes. “It struck me,” he said, “as a good place to hide.” He stroked his red beard. His moustache was frosted with ale. He smiled at Elspeth. “It’s good to talk,” he said.
“You didn’t talk before?” Elspeth said. “To the man who was injured?”
Charles stared into his beer for a long time. Elspeth almost asked the question again before he said, “I guess Ben and I were never all that close.” Elspeth thought maybe she’d spoken o
ut of turn, that perhaps the accident had been worse than she’d imagined. The drink had worn them both down; their edges had softened and their usual care had eroded. “I have to apologize,” he said. “I lied to you.” He looked up at the ceiling. “About the Bible pages. My mother didn’t put them on the windows of my bedroom.” He traced his finger around the rim of his glass. “She put them in the outhouse. It got so stiflingly hot in there in the summer.”
The admission made her laugh. It took effort for her to suppress her real laughter and move it down a register. Charles joined her. “Did you tell Ben that?” she said, thinking she continued the joke, but Charles stopped laughing abruptly. He drank for a long time, his Adam’s apple rising and falling with each swig. “What about your wife? How did the two of you meet one another?”
It was Elspeth’s turn to gulp down some more of her ale. “That’s a long story,” she said. The truth fluttered around inside her throat like a butterfly and she needed to leave before it flew out on its own. She gathered her coat. “For another time.”
Charles begged for her to stay. “What about the gloves? We were going to buy you more gloves.”
“The mercantile is open at this hour?” she said. The windows reflected the two of them, hunched over the bar. Beyond that, pitch-dark.
Charles’s glance outside made him appear offended by the passage of time. “You’re welcome to use mine long as you need them,” he said. “After all, I owe you.” Charles drained the rest of his drink, leaving nothing but froth dancing at the bottom of his mug. He signaled for the barkeep, who stepped out from the shadows and slid another beer in front of him, foam climbing over the sides and down his fingers as he grasped it. “Fatherhood,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” Charles’s voice had taken on a new shape, something harder and sharper. “You have a nice boy. He’s handsome and polite—much like you. A good boy.” He spun a coin on the bar and snatched it up in his fist. “You’ve done well for yourself, van Tessel, you and your wife.”