by James Scott
“Who were you waving to, then?”
He repeated his act of examining the empty room.
“I’m Ellabelle. You’re Caleb. This is my room.”
He ignored the cot in the corner.
“Do you talk? To real people, I mean.”
“Of course.” His voice made a strange leap and he turned back to his wash.
“Where did you come from?”
Caleb recalled London White’s laughing at his answer to that very question. “My mother and I live down at the hotel.” Something about Ellabelle made lying more difficult. He couldn’t concentrate on what he meant to say—words tumbled out of his mouth without his guidance. Lying, he’d come to understand, took two things: forethought and memory. Both had been disabled in Ellabelle’s presence. “I meant my father.” He needed to figure out a way to end her questions before they began. “My mother’s dead.” He thought of Jorah’s body, riddled with bullets. There was no way Caleb could have moved it to be with the rest of them, but his skeleton off alone in the dark corner of what had once been the house seemed especially cruel now. He tried to steel himself, rid himself of his guilt and anger toward a man he no longer knew as his father. They were strange feelings to have, with Ellabelle tiptoeing nearer on the wet floor. The room smelled of the laundry soap, a jarring cleansing odor, and Caleb took long breaths to combat a dizziness that swirled inside him.
“I said, I’m sorry to hear that,” Ellabelle said.
“Oh, sorry. Thank you.” Caleb leaned back and removed a pillowcase from the water. It steamed in the cold air. It dripped onto the floor between them. He’d opened the window a crack to help the clothes dry faster, and the wind that squeezed through whistled at the two of them. Caleb tried not to think of the horrific holes in the house and his days spent in the pantry.
“What happened?”
Caleb sloshed the water back and forth.
“What happened to your mother? How did she die?”
“I shot her,” he said quietly.
Ellabelle came even closer. She sat on the edge of the tub. Her pale thighs, exposed when she sat down in her dress, pressed together. Every moment they didn’t speak was filled with the sounds of the laundry, echoes upon echoes. Caleb thought she hadn’t heard him. There were a million follow-up questions she could ask, and he prepared himself to lie his way out of it, to pretend it was all a joke. He forced a grin. She frowned. The only question that came from her was “Why?”
“It was an accident.” It felt better than he could have hoped to have the truth loose in the air. The sheets sighed and shifted in the draft. Ellabelle touched her soft hand to his forearm. He refused to look at her, watching the whirlpools he created in the tub. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Caleb couldn’t be in that room with the overwhelming odor of the cleanser and the oppressive humidity any longer. He set the broomstick down on the side of the tub.
“Ellabelle?” someone called. She rolled her eyes, and White strode into the room. “Here you are. Hello, children.” He lifted a pillowcase appreciatively. “Well done, Caleb. Fine job. This one,” he said and pointed to Caleb, “takes true pride in his work. He’ll be something someday soon, so you be nice to him, Ellabelle.”
“She was just talking to me,” Caleb said.
“I know,” White said. “Time to earn your keep, dear.” He extended a hand for Ellabelle.
“What is he now?” Ellabelle said, ignoring his request.
“I’m sorry?” White said.
“You said he would be something soon, and I’d like to know what he is now.”
White’s demeanor changed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Ellabelle relinquished her tiny fingers. A bell rang close by, and Caleb wondered if it called for her. Before she left his side, she gave his arm one last squeeze.
ELSPETH STOOD IN front of a display containing a few dozen pistols. A young boy about Caleb’s age knelt on the floor near the door, sorting nails into two buckets. Outside, a lake snow poured down heavy flakes, five or six inches on the street already, and the residents of Watersbridge were by and large staying indoors. The shop was empty except for Elspeth, the boy, and the shopkeeper, who spread his moustache with his thumb and index finger. “A pistol, eh?” he said. He introduced himself as Jakob. Elspeth shook his hand but held on to her own name. She’d found that not saying much reduced her risks. Besides, most of the men she’d encountered didn’t waste words. “I apologize,” Jakob said, “but do you by chance have a son?”
Elspeth pondered the shopkeeper’s purpose: Maybe he aimed to sell two pistols, father and son, and double his profits. “Yes?”
“A thin boy with brown hair, brown eyes? Perhaps thirteen, fourteen?”
“Twelve,” she said, and thought of her list of the children’s names and their crossed-out ages, lost to the fire. It was strange for her—after all these years—to have one of the children out in the world, meeting people, drawing connections back to her. “How do you know him?”
“He’s come through here,” Jakob said. He invested the statement with a thick sense of meaning, but exactly what he meant by it Elspeth couldn’t guess. “Are you sure you need one?” Elspeth figured the man was accusing her of being a poor parent, and Margaret asking her to abandon her son charged through her heart. “After all,” he said, “Christmas is coming near.”
Elspeth held up a hand to save the man from giving a long sales proposal, trying to contain her impatience. “Sir, if it’s not too much bother, the pistol. Please.”
Jakob—taking her attitude seriously—explained the advantages of the weapons one by one, taking the time to tell her what type of game she could take down with each. She knew that Watersbridge in the middle of winter didn’t sport the best game, and yet he went on about deer, moose, and bears. Elspeth guessed that he needed his own peace of mind—and maybe that of his son, who pitched each nail into its bucket with a satisfying clink. Everyone, she decided, had to convince themselves that they were safer than they were.
CHAPTER 7
The kiss Elspeth and Charles had shared in her dreams made her flush when she recalled it, and she would distance herself from him by refusing to talk for an afternoon. Charles’s behavior, too, grew more erratic, whether because of her occasionally silent days she didn’t know. Some mornings he would wait for her outside, the coffee steaming. Others he would arrive at work out of breath—long after Elspeth had loosened and oiled the chains and the crane—without apology. Or he wouldn’t show up at all, and Elspeth would find herself next to a man who didn’t rest or forgive her weaknesses the same way Charles did, who didn’t take pause to stare out at the lake for minutes at a time, and drove at the iron bar in front of them without ceasing. His absences went unexplained. At times, she wondered if she smelled alcohol on him, and whether it was from the night before or more recent than that. This, she thought, is how accidents happen.
On her days alone, she missed him and the comfortable rhythm they’d developed. The job moved faster when he spoke of his family, and she shared small details with him as well, scenes from her childhood or the early parts of her life with Jorah, when happiness seemed possible. For all of the unpredictability, she appreciated his company.
Exhausted from fighting her dreams at night, by day she had no energy left to ward off her imagination. Sometimes she wondered if one of the men she worked beside could have killed Jorah and the children. Maybe Caleb would recognize him in an instant. Once, a shaft of sunlight struck the men pushing a block down the canal and it rested on one man, a slight figure who attacked the ice with particular vigor. The beam created a flutter in her chest and she wondered if God pointed the man out to her for a reason, but as she formulated the theory the light moved on to another man and another, shimmering against the frozen sweat and condensation slick on their coats. Perhaps they all were guilty. If the wind came from the east and didn’t roar across the lake, she sometimes heard the cries of the baby in the office. To turn her ears from the temptatio
n she would count her footsteps or concentrate on the creaking of the crane until her racing mind went blank again. She tried not to think of her family, or what people would do if she was recognized. Owen Trachte had not reappeared. After work, she would have two drinks to slow her mind, eat dinner—usually a small steak or stew, some days with Charles, others alone—and skate home on the icy streets, woozy with alcohol, her muscles too spent to control.
If the store was open even after she cleaned and turned in her cleats, she brought home dinner for Caleb: a pail with a sandwich wrapped in a cloth napkin, some cured meat, salted potatoes, dried fruit. Though the boy never thanked her or acknowledged the food, the pail would be empty the next morning. He returned from the inn while she slept and she left before he woke. She admired his closed eyes while he slept, how they fluttered behind his eyelids. She studied herself in the mirror and then looked to him, trying to pick out the similarities Jakob, Margaret, and Charles had seen. Once she angled the mirror so they appeared side by side—as if in a portrait—and closed one eye and then the other, trying to gauge the distance between them. She would comb her hair with her fingers down across her eyes, and she’d tuck it back beside her ears, and she’d see it, too. He could be mine, she sometimes thought.
CALEB SWEPT THE Elm Inn inside, and cleared snow from the porch and the stairs outside. He and Ellabelle would sneak in a conversation here and there, before White told her to get back to work with a slap to her rump and a clanging bell. They avoided the subject of Caleb’s family and his mother’s murder and focused instead on the events at the Elm Inn. Ellabelle had a natural talent for mimicry, much like Mary, and she imitated the postures and faces of the frequent customers and would act out entire conversations she’d overheard. She said every word—even those that made Caleb blush—without blinking, then collapsed into laughter. Their laughter was often what alerted White, being such an unusual noise for the Elm, and the two of them became adept at hearing his elegant shoes coming up the stairs, and Caleb would run onto the walkway and start sweeping while Ellabelle would sit at her dressing table and prepare herself for her next client. Caleb hated to see Ellabelle’s door closed, but he hated even more to see it open and a man thrust his hat on top of his mussed hair and amble back into the parlor, a grin on his lips. She’d reach up a thin arm and pull the string attached to the tarnished bell next to her door and if no one came, White would slide through the crowd and tap a man on his shoulder and whisper into his ear. Caleb hated to watch but found himself staring anyway, committing the men to memory so he could see the change in them when they exited her room.
White could hear the bells through the din of the bar—amid the jokes and arguments, the exclamations of dismay and exhortations of luck he could discern a single bell and its source. Caleb memorized London White’s movements—his walk and his nervous habit of plucking his watch from his pocket and winding it—and he tried them out in the empty rooms where he stripped the soiled sheets. He was careful to keep these mannerisms from Ellabelle, though he didn’t know why, and from Frank, who sometimes kept Caleb company during breakfast at the Brick & Feather. Most mornings the hotel was quiet, and Frank sat across from him, telling stories about his boyhood on Nova Scotia. Frank also encouraged Caleb to improve his reading with the newspaper, helping him through articles about President McKinley and the troubles with Spain. Often the size of the world made Caleb dizzy. It all seemed so far off, as distant to him as his barn. Caleb avoided thoughts of home, his family, and his animals. And yet every morning when he put on Jesse’s boots he pictured his brother. A smile seen through the crowd at the inn or the sound of someone’s laugh would remind him of Jesse, too, and he would move closer with his broom, trying to find the perfect instant where he could see or hear his own memory, but not well enough to break the spell. He wished he could pray. On these days, he allowed himself some precious seconds with the horses hitched outside and with one of the regular’s dogs, Misty, who often escaped the house and stayed dutifully outside the front door all day, occasionally lowering her head onto her paws for a nap. Caleb would bury his face in her fur and listen to her belly rumble.
He scrutinized the men at the Elm Inn, and placed himself in the barn, his face flush against the rough wood. The biggest excitement among the patrons had been for Owen Trachte, but he had been the one man Caleb had noticed who did not come back, as many of the customers came to be familiar once he understood that the same men sat at the same tables and visited the same girls. Violence created little stir—even when someone got shot over bad cards, White simply ordered the wounded to be taken to the doctor, and the injured man would be carted off to laughter and things would return to normal. And though Caleb knew there were most likely men in the inn at all times who had probably killed someone—including its owner—he didn’t see any of the men with red scarves. Caleb wondered if—before coming to have their laps caressed by women in small clothing and spend their day’s wages on drink and cards—the customers sat down to a meal the same way his family had. He wondered if all fathers betrayed their prayers.
He reassured himself of his pistol’s presence by shifting his hips and having its heft on his belt so he didn’t pat the small of his back every few minutes. The sight of blood ceased to bother him; after what he’d seen, there wasn’t much that could shake him. The sense of fear he expected to clutch his heart remained at large, nothing but a wild thought that drifted farther and farther away, as far away as the strange-sounding places in the newspaper, France or Spain or Mexico.
Until Martin Shane returned. It was a Friday, often the Elm’s busiest day—but not the bloodiest, which, almost without fail, was Sunday—and Martin Shane slipped through the door, spoke to Ethan for longer than most, paid his entry, and skulked along the edge of the room to the bar.
Caleb swept the stairs, ignoring the rhythmic banging of a bed frame. The previous Sunday, Martin—all crimson with fury, his fair skin burning beneath his shaggy blond hair—had broken three chairs over the back of a man who had one of Martin’s friends by the neck. When Ethan pinned Martin’s arms behind his back, Martin saw Caleb, who stood in front of him, broom in hand. The sight of Caleb stopped Martin’s screaming and struggling. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Ethan’s knee dug into his neck, but Martin paid no mind to the twenty stones bearing down on him, and his bloodshot stare didn’t leave Caleb, who had been on his way to sweep snow from the porch so it didn’t snap clean off the inn, but the strangling and chair-crashing had been in the path to the door.
“Go help wash the glasses, Caleb,” London White had said as he approached the broken chairs and bleeding men. “The porch can wait for us to sort this out.”
Caleb had not seen Martin since, and he’d looked for him to avoid him. The mere thought of the man’s gaze made him squirm. No one paid much attention to the boy who swept, shoveled, and cleared glasses. Less than a week later, though, Martin waited at the end of the bar, thick-necked and wind-peeled. The Elm had yet to fill up, but men finished with work streamed through the doors and dropped their admission into Ethan’s lockbox.
Caleb stole past doors doing their best to contain the grunts coming from inside until he stood on the balcony directly over Martin. He could see the freckles on Martin’s scalp and the way half of his collar had tucked under his shirt. Martin spoke with the bartender, lifting his hands into the air, then pressing them together as if asking forgiveness. He reached into his pocket and produced some money, which he slid across the bar. White had told Caleb that chairs cost the Elm thirty-four cents apiece, but he charged customers fifty. A fine, he’d told Caleb, kept people honest. “Mistakes are meant to be learned from,” he said, “not repeated.”
The bartender took the money and stepped away, and Martin stood on the footrest under the bar and scouted the room. Caleb knew Martin Shane looked for him. He drew back against the wall and a bell rang close to his head and he jumped and turned, smashing into the soft chest of a woman. “That’s going to
cost you,” she said, and adjusted her brassiere. She rang her bell and Caleb gasped. The customer on his way out of her room chuckled. “Jesus, kid,” the woman said, “this ain’t the place for someone who startles easy.”
ON FRIDAY MORNING, Charles hadn’t been waiting for Elspeth. As she walked alone past the dress shop and the barber’s and paused outside the doctor’s office—everything dark and hushed, the day seeming to gather itself, the sky over the lake fat with snow clouds, but nothing falling—she heard a whistle from the church. Framed by the columns and holding two mugs, Charles waved to her. Unsure of his purpose, she hurried across the street. Charles opened the door to the church, and they stepped inside the narrow hall meant to keep the cold from the congregation. He produced a key and unlocked the inner doors. Charles sat in a pew, Elspeth next to him. The church looked all the bigger in shadow.
“You have a key to the church?” Elspeth asked. Somewhere in the vast space water dripped.
“I used to be a deacon,” Charles said. Elspeth was going to ask what had happened, but he plunged ahead. “Jorah, I have some things to confess.”
“You’ve chosen a fine location,” Elspeth said, trying to ease the tension that contorted Charles’s face.
“All my talk of the boys—it’s all been true, in my heart,” he said. “And I don’t know how I did this and I’m so sorry I lied, but—they’re gone.”
“Dead?” Elspeth said. Her own truth pushed up her throat.
“No,” he said. “Their mother took them.”
Everything slowed. Elspeth could count a minute between each drop of water, and if she’d seen one, she would have sworn it drifted slowly as a feather. She waited for him to continue, but he simply shattered. He dropped his head to his hands, which rested on the pew in front of them. His sobs echoed through the sanctuary. One, two, three times he lifted his head and thumped it against his knuckles. The whole pew rocked with the motion. Tears washed down Elspeth’s cheeks, too, and she let them, unconcerned about what damage they would do to her falsely shadowed jaw. She composed herself, exhaling deep breaths and drying her eyes.