The Kept

by James Scott

  Wallace seemed to consider this, then joined her in the lie. “I’ll have the chimney checked,” he said. “So—a promotion?” Wallace rolled something across the desk with the cap of his pen, and when it stopped in front of her, Elspeth saw it was a tight roll of bills tied with a piece of string.

  The infant kept calling to her, needing her, and she knew she had to remove herself from that very small, very hot office if she were to breathe. She took the money. “Thank you,” she said.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the alley next to the barbershop, Elspeth checked to be sure she was alone and pulled her boot from her foot. She banged the heel against the ice and a small, dark clump slid from the leather. With the back of her hand, she pressed the money flat, counted it, unrolled the bills from Wallace, added those to the stack, folded it in half, and placed it in her pocket. She’d played this game many times, the promises to herself not to purchase a train ticket, not to gather supplies for the journey, not to think of the child asleep and waiting for her, needing her. Yet with the money in hand she could think of nothing else. Wallace had given her the funds and told her where to find the baby, she told herself. He’d made a point to mention how little Horace could provide for it, how much it needed its own space, and she could already feel the child’s weight in her arms, how it grounded her.

  When she passed the dress shop, the woman inside paused in her work, her tight lips holding a series of pins between them, and gave a hesitant wave. A boy stood outside the mercantile, shoveling snow from the walkway. “Are you all right?” he asked her. She mumbled something about being fine, but she caught her reflection in the shop window and understood why the dressmaker had reacted as she had: She was coated with blood. “Would you like to come in and wash up?” he said. “You could have some water.”

  Once inside the store, the heavy air, laden with food and coffee, stifled her. She hunched and dropped her head between her knees. “Are you sure you’re okay?” the boy asked. “My father’s there now, helping out, I guess.” He took her by the elbow, and she allowed him. “At the icehouse,” he added. The image of the boy with the broken skull and the smell of the icehouse—the crisp, fresh odor of the ice; the sweat of the men; the sharp stench of the dying—would not leave her, and she fingered the money in her pocket for encouragement. They pushed through a set of saloon doors at the rear of the store, and he placed her in a dark room the size of a closet. The boy lit a lamp, illuminating shelves full of family portraits, most of them small, no larger than a tea saucer. She picked the boy out in many of them. Father, mother, two sons. A family without greed, she thought. They stood erect and proud, though in one image they dissolved in laughter. The boy fetched a washbasin, a cloth, and a mirror. Her face and neck had been painted with gore and it had dried and fractured on her skin. She thanked him, her voice cracking into her own, not the deeper version she’d been forcing from her belly.

  “Father likes cameras,” he said, as if apologizing for the photos. “We carry them in the store. I don’t know if we’ve ever sold one.” Elspeth draped the cloth over her face and let the moisture loosen the blood. “We’re not even allowed to touch them, me and my brother. Last week, my brother,” he started, then must have thought better of it when she rung out the bloody rag. “Father says rules are made to keep us safe.”

  Elspeth turned this over in her head.

  The boy erased a smudge from one of the picture frames with his shirtsleeve. “No one needs reminders of Watersbridge, my mother says.”

  “I suppose not,” Elspeth said from behind the cloth. She pulled it down her cheeks, the material rough. She scrubbed at her neck and imagined she peeled away parts of her she had no use of anymore. She saw Caleb lying in the gruesome muck with his head staved in, the ice that killed him inert around his lifeless form, melting from the heat left in his blood. “I have a son,” she said, “about your age.”

  “I know,” the boy said. “I’ve seen him. There aren’t many children here.”

  The money made a slight bulge in her pocket. “I came for a gift for him.”

  The boy scratched his chin thoughtfully, probably something he’d seen his father do. “How old is he?”

  “Twelve.” She no longer needed her sheet of paper with all of their names and ages. All she had left to remember was Caleb.

  “What kind of things does he like?” She shrugged. She couldn’t conceive of Caleb running around, playing games with this small, dark boy. Caleb had grown up in the span of one morning. She knew she’d failed him. The boy wiped his nose with the back of his hand, staring at her. “Well, what does he like to do for fun?”

  The question made Elspeth bury her head in the cloth once more, and she thought of him, so small and scared, cleaning her wounds, waiting to see if she would survive, the entire rest of his world erased.

  CALEB HURRIED TO the Brick & Feather. The streets had emptied. He noted this, but he didn’t consider why. He had wrapped his scarf around his face so that his bruises didn’t show. Inside the hotel, he gave Frank a brief wave and bolted up the stairs. He burst into the room, thinking only of asking his mother about Jorah and the Shanes. He found her, however, bathed and dressed in her church clothes, a tie knotted tightly under the darkened jaw she’d worn since their arrival. In her hands she held a small package. He unraveled his scarf, and her look changed to one of horror. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Of course it is.” As the shopkeeper’s son had for her, she took Caleb by the elbow and led him into the washroom. She filled the bath with hot water and began to take his clothes off.

  “Mama,” he said in reproach when she started to unbuckle his pants, even more nervous around her with the possibility of being the Shane boy clogging his thoughts. He turned from her to undress, and stepped into the water, covering himself. He had never seen this side of his mother, and he buried his questions and fought his embarrassment so that she would continue. He forced a smile and his face ached. She used a cloth to carefully dab at his cuts and bruises. He hadn’t known her to be so gentle. Her touch, certainly, seemed that of a mother.

  After she’d washed him, Elspeth rested her cheek on the edge of the tub. “I used to bathe you, all of you, as babies.” She splashed some water onto his back with a cupped hand. The light played on her eyelashes. “I loved you so. Your skin was the softest thing I’d ever touched, and afterward, I would wrap us both in a towel to keep you close.”

  Caleb recalled Emma being bathed in the kitchen sink, her body red. The girls would be allowed to help, and Caleb peered at them from beneath the kitchen table, the same table upon which his mother had lain, close to death. “Mother,” he said, aware he risked ruining this moment, “I was the one who shot you.”

  Elspeth went rigid. Her hand clutched the porcelain. “Why?”

  Caleb made trails with his hands through the water, and tried to bring himself back to his raft, floating downstream. “The men had come. They’d shot everyone. I’d been in the barn, but I couldn’t . . .” Every tear in his body had been wrung out of him. The emptiness moved down his limbs. “When you came in, I thought you were them, and I had to do something.”

  Elspeth combed the boy’s hair from his forehead. “It’s okay,” she said. “It is.” She sang to him in a soft, shy voice, “O thou hearest when sinners cry, Though all my sins before Thee lie, Behold them not with angry look, but blot their memory from Thy book.” Her voice echoed in the small room, and because she held her cheek on the tub, it vibrated through the water. “Do you understand what it means?” she asked. He nodded. “I have many apologies to give you, Caleb,” Elspeth said, “and I hope you can be as forgiving.”

  The beating and the admission, coupled with the bath made him spent and sleepy, and he leaned his head against the porcelain. For a moment, he told himself, and shut his eyes.

  Elspeth heard his breath even out, and his hand slipped from his lap and she saw that he was no more than a boy and replaced t
he washcloth. After a few minutes, she shook him gently, dried him off, and helped him into bed. While he slept, she went downstairs and ordered them dinner: steak, fried potatoes, and beets.

  CLEAN, DRIED, AND rested, Caleb sat up in bed. His mother lifted the lid from his dinner. She’d waited for him, and she used the stool for a small table. They ate in happy silence, afraid to make a loud noise or a false move, unused to this fragile new contentment.

  Sated and with empty plates, they both relaxed. Elspeth presented the boy with a gift. He undid the twine, pulling it so quickly it sent a smoke of fibers into the air. The butcher paper held a toy horse, its mane and tail lustrous and soft. It was brown with a white mark in the shape of an arrow on its forehead. Its teeth were exposed, painted brilliant white, and it raised its front left hoof, as if in greeting. “Thank you, Mama, it’s nice.”

  “I know you must miss the animals of the barn.”

  He stroked the hair with his thumb. Of course he did, but he missed his brothers and sisters more. The quarrelsome noise of the Inn was much different from the noise of the Howell household, and Ellabelle couldn’t measure up to Jesse.

  While Elspeth cleared their plates and placed a hand on the door to bring them back to the kitchen, she said, “I don’t want you going to the Elm Inn anymore. It’s too dangerous. Don’t get crossed up in something in which you have no business.” Caleb opened his mouth to reply. “I’m your mother, Caleb. Rules are made to keep you safe.” At that, she shut the door behind her.

  The affection that had spread through Caleb over the course of the last few hours evaporated, and when he threw the sheets aside, his skin rippled with goose bumps. He already was crossed up in something, and he appeared to be the only one capable of remembering what they’d lost. No gift or toy pony could undo that. He could not be changed into a boy again for the convenience of his mother. He threw his hat and gloves on, not caring about the dried blood that mottled each, and left the Brick & Feather before his mother could return.

  CHAPTER 10

  Caleb crept along a ridge, the forest, black and endless, on his left and the town of Watersbridge behind him. The snow had melted and then frozen over in an icy sheen. The wind tightened his skin, made his cuts sing and his bruises throb. Ahead, the ridge curled toward the Shane household like the tail of a sleeping dog.

  He’d asked Ethan about Martin—ignoring the twinge of betrayal at disobeying his mother—and Ethan had said the Shanes didn’t venture off their land much, a trait Caleb appreciated. Ethan’s gaze wandered over Caleb’s beaten face, but Ethan didn’t like to ask questions any more than he liked to answer them. Caleb said that he thought he’d walked past their house once, and—as he’d hoped—Ethan replied, “I doubt it; they live all the way on the edge of town.” Ethan had given him directions with little prodding, and he’d finished by saying with great disdain, for he thought the Shanes too isolated, “They named the trail leading to their property ‘Shane Road,’ because no one else uses it.” While he walked on it, Caleb wondered if the road didn’t bear his name as well.

  When he finally got a full view of the house, rather than the slivered glimpses he’d seen through the trees, he saw the eaves decorated with elaborate carvings, the doors similarly marked, and the yard littered with stone statues of animals, buried to their torsos in frozen snow. He waited for the barking of a dog, the bellowing of a calf to herald his presence, but no alarm sounded.

  Someone crossed a window and Caleb lost his breath. Once, he’d fallen from the top of the hayloft ladder, carrying a bucket and rushing to finish his chores before Jesse. He’d thought he was going to die, that his lungs had broken. Yet that injury had a source. This had been nothing but a shadow flitting across the yellow light emanating from the glass, a movement as rapid and fleeting as a bat, and his windpipe constricted as surely as if Gerry had his arm around his neck once more. He pushed his hat up off his brow, chilling the gash at his hairline, the tingling sparks bringing him back to the world, to the dry smell of pine and the flapping of an owl’s wings. High above, the tallest trees creaked in a breeze only they could reach. To Caleb it seemed as though the very air trembled with nerves.

  He inched closer. On his hands and knees, he moved like a spider, and he imagined what they would think when they woke in the morning to such strange tracks. At the far side of the house, the brightest lights reached farther out into the darkness. He searched for a better view, pushing his way through the tips of small bushes poking through the snow. He scraped between the trees, under and over the boughs, the sap frozen but adhering to his coat, hat, and gloves, attempting to strip them from his body. In a small thicket of pitch pine, he found both cover and a gap in the branches, a hollow with only a dusting of snow, the needles and cones gathered into a soft rug, close enough to smell the woodfire. From his knees he could see three people. At first, they all had their backs to him, but then a large figure moved and exposed Martin sitting at the table. He slammed his fist on the seat of his chair and threw something with disgust—what Caleb could not guess. Another man took the seat next to him. Unlike Martin, he had dark, curly hair and reedy limbs. Caleb eased back on his haunches, cold attacking his body as soon as he did. The third figure was seated across from Martin, but he could see it was a woman from the bun in her hair and the shining implements that held it in place. The woman and the dark-haired man held hands and bowed their heads. They prayed. Martin, however, picked up his utensils. The similarity that Martin, too, avoided the family prayers compelled Caleb to say it out loud, testing its nature: “Caleb Shane.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. The three of them ate, and he tried to calculate the hour, but time had warped when Martin had walked into the Elm, and Caleb could hardly figure if night was coming or going.

  Soft, thick snow tumbled down. Unlike most in Watersbridge, which came from the lake and fell fast as rain, these flakes took their time in meandering down out of the sky, gliding back and forth. Between the languid flakes, he saw nothing else that made him want to believe Martin Shane’s story anymore. No one had batted an eye when he’d hurled something across the kitchen, and Caleb could tell that the other people maintained a safe distance from him. Over the course of the meal, Caleb guessed the only noise came from the screeching of knives on plates and the clanging of spoons in bowls. The room contained no more congeniality or familiarity than the restaurant. He felt Elspeth’s touch again, the care with which she daubed the blood from his wounds. A lifetime of memories told him he had been a fool to entertain the ramblings of this insane man. The city had spun him around and loosed him, dizzy and disoriented, on its wonders. Of course Elspeth was his mother. By telling him not to go to the Elm, he understood, she’d only begun to act as one. It had never been required of her before.

  The meal finished, the woman inside turned to the basin beneath the window: She had his hair, his eyes, his lips; part of him had been taken and layered onto her like a veil. He passed his gloved fingers across his own features like he needed to be certain they hadn’t been stolen entirely. He gripped the branches in front of him and pulled, as if the bushes were a quilt he could swaddle himself in. The woman leaned closer to the window and pressed a hand to the glass to shade the light. Caleb let go of the branches and slid backward, not able to turn from the house but desperate to get away. The woman spoke to the men and Martin joined her at the glass. The window clouded with the fog from their breath. Caleb thought perhaps he’d screamed. The branches snatched at his face, his hands. He finally emerged from the thicket. Snow whisked past as he scrambled up the hill.

  The front door to the Shane house banged open to reveal Martin and the other man. Caleb stopped. In the crook of his elbow Martin had a shotgun broken open, and he cupped a hand near his mouth to light a cigarette. The other man reached back inside the door and produced a rifle. Caleb drew his Colt. The glow from the house only made it so far, and then the night might help to obscure the trail that would lead straight to him. Or so he hoped. The snow, for once,
didn’t fall fast enough to cover his tracks. The moon that had remained hidden behind the snow clouds broke free, and weakly illuminated the path at the top of the ridge. He tried to will himself up, to crest the hill and sprint back to town. But his muscles refused. He stayed crouched in a ball. He shivered. Sweat dripped from his scalp, off his earlobes and the tip of his nose. It stung his cuts. When he was very young—before the boys and girls separated into their own chores and their own groups—they’d played hide-and-seek and he’d always hidden in the same places, and he would watch the shoes of Amos, Jesse, and Mary between the boards of the sheep pen or from the corner of the woodpile, and they would approach without hesitation, knowing he was there. As soon as they came close, he could stand it no longer and simply ran, and Amos, especially, would be angry with him for ruining their game.

  Martin kicked at the snow. The two men talked, occasional laughter poking its way through their conversation and piercing Caleb’s hiding spot. Martin locked the shotgun into place while the other loaded his rifle. They cocked the weapons, but their pace was leisurely as they walked toward the thicket. They approached the tracks he’d left. He’d broken clear through the icy surface of the snow and into the powder beneath, and he understood that once the men’s footsteps went from the cacophonous shattering of the icy crust to the soft shuffle of powder, their demeanor would change, and they’d put their guns to their shoulders and not stop until they’d killed him. His knees locked, and he again felt like the small and helpless creature that had watched through the knot in the wall while his sister bled into the snow and his family followed her, one after the other, into darkness.

  The pair was less than a yard from his tracks, and Caleb could smell the tobacco on the air, knew it would soon mix with the metallic stench of gunpowder. Martin shifted his shotgun to his hands. The other man stepped into the middle of Caleb’s tracks and Caleb popped onto his feet and raced for the top of the hill. Without looking, he fired his gun once. The trigger yielded with no resistance. Blinded by the darkness and the terror, he grasped the base of a small oak and pulled himself up the steep incline, digging his boots into the snow, trying to reach the solid earth beneath. His foot struck a rock and he shot forward. Whatever stood in front of him he grabbed, scrabbling toward the ridge. A glance back revealed his scarf hanging from a tree like an empty noose, exposed in lantern light. He clawed at the ice itself. He found purchase on the broken stump of an elm and leapt for the clearing as a bullet pierced the wood. The splinters scratched at him.