by James Scott
Elspeth surged forward and tried again to pull the men from Charles, but they were too far gone, and she couldn’t get within a foot of him without being knocked back by an arm or a hip. “You’re killing him,” she shouted. The men wouldn’t let up. She tried to push through again and an elbow caught her square on the nose. The crack reverberated in her skull and she tumbled back onto the ice. Tears came. The stars in her vision became fireworks. Elspeth could feel the thrum in her skin—her nose, the swelling of her eye, the blood sliding around her mouth and down her neck.
A gunshot sounded out. It had no effect. The second stopped them, and they released their grips, straightened their shirts, wiped the blood from their fists onto their pants. Their breath sent fast-dissolving clouds into the air, and they came and disappeared like the blinking of fireflies. Owen Trachte held a pistol loosely at the end of his thick fingers, the barrel smoking. He jerked his head at the men, and they grumbled to each other before tromping back into the restaurant, their skin red with exertion and cold.
“Guess you found him,” Owen said when the door had shut.
Elspeth mopped the blood from her face and spit more onto the snow. It pooled in her throat. The two of them appraised Charles. She could smell the alcohol on Owen’s breath, and she saw his father, years ago, drinking in his office, reclining in his chair, his feet upon the windowsill. Charles’s face had lumped and distended. When he breathed his nose whistled. The cold had either numbed Elspeth to the point where she could no longer feel it or the night had already started to leave them. She looked to the sky between the trees, but could not find any sign of light in the east.
Owen checked Charles’s body, first one arm, then the other, then his shoulders and his collarbone, his torso, and his legs. “He’s got a broken jaw, maybe some ribs,” Owen said. He turned his attention to Elspeth. “They got you both pretty good.” Owen squinted at her, and then placed his thumbs on either side of her nose. He pressed down. A burst of electric pain coursed through her and settled into relief from the pressure. Owen patted her on the shoulder and pointed to his own lumpy nose. “I’ve had my share.” Elspeth heard the thunderous stampeding of Owen and his friends, the wails and squeals they’d emitted as they’d chased and attacked each other, the closet full of rolled white bandages that would need to be restocked every few months in winter, every few weeks in summer.
“Thanks,” she said. He bent down and gathered up a ball of snow, which he packed in a handkerchief and gave to her. She pressed it to her nose.
“The bleeding should stop soon enough,” he said. “You’ll probably have a headache for a few days.” He picked Charles up and tossed him over his wide shoulder. Charles grunted at being bent in half.
“Should you be carrying him if he has broken ribs?”
“Nobody else is going to,” Owen said and set off in the direction of their home. Though she wasn’t sure he intended her to, Elspeth matched Owen’s short and heavy steps. She couldn’t help herself. The guilt she felt for Caleb seeped into her thoughts, and she wondered if perhaps Phillip Trachte had drunk himself to death on account of her stealing one of his charges. “You learned to set a nose on your own?”
“Nah,” Owen said. He fished a cigarette from his pocket and lit it before Elspeth could offer to help, the whole action taking less effort than she would need to tie her shoes. “My father was a doctor.” Somehow he held the cigarette in his lips and managed to drag on it with one corner of his mouth and exhale with the other.
“He’s gone?”
“Yeah. He taught me more than I wanted to know. He was my only friend growing up,” he said, and Elspeth almost asked about the boy who’d knocked out his tooth but thought better of it. “I must have been six—seven—and I was too afraid to ride a horse. So he would get down on all fours and we would practice, the two of us. He’d rear up and everything. Prepare me. He was like that with a lot of things.” Charles moaned on his shoulder. “So what did you boys do to get those men so upset?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Looks like Heather got the worst of it.” He readjusted Charles, who whimpered. “But he usually does.”
Elspeth let the comment fade on the wind.
“I’ll wake the doctor,” Owen said as their house came into view.
“Can’t you do it?” she said. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude. I just meant—you set my nose and I saw you at the icehouse today.”
“I don’t think I was much help there. I can do some stitching in a pinch, but that’s about all.” Owen spit some stray tobacco from his tongue. “A doctor lives downstairs. He usually works on animals, but he was my father’s apprentice.” He flicked his cigarette into the night. “I trust him.”
“I guess I’ll head back then,” she said. Owen waved her away with a meaty hand. As she peeled off and walked in the direction of the Brick & Feather, she tripped again and again over clumps of ice and the hardened footprints of others. The cold returned, but Elspeth was certain it had never left.
CHAPTER 12
Elspeth’s hand stung, and she pulled it from her pocket like it was a rock, or a gun: cold, heavy, and inhuman. Her skin had torn along the knuckles and swollen on either side, so the gash looked like a series of mountain ranges cut by a river of blood. Somewhere in the fight she’d lost her hat, and she paused outside the butcher shop, and in-between the silhouettes of hanging pigs and geese she searched the ground like it had only fallen once she’d noticed it was gone. While her lungs and muscles coursed with the fight, her broken nose ached in the wind, and her ears rang from Owen’s gun, she continued on, and in front of the hotel she almost crashed headfirst into Caleb, coming from the opposite direction. No sound but their footsteps interrupted the night. No one else ventured out in hours that were tipping from late to early. It was as if they were the last live souls on earth. Elspeth enveloped the boy in a hug and squeezed him until her arms ached.
After he’d ignored the one rule his mother had ever given him, he couldn’t understand why she’d chosen this moment to show such affection. It was as though she knew where he’d been and what he’d seen. The courage he’d built up to ask her all of his questions drained away once again as she held him.
The boy refused to look at her. “Did you find something out?” she asked. She glanced over his shoulder as if the trio of murderers were right behind him. She noted the pistol in his hand, and tapped his wrist, as if encouraging him to put it away. He did not.
“What happened to your nose?” he asked, making out the swelling through the shadows. She looked old. Their time together had worn on her, and he saw the wrinkles that stress had dug into her skin. Her forehead bore three deep lines that colored her stern and worried. He held the door open for her.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Only once the door shut out the wind did they hear their hearts thudding vainly in their ears to combat the cold. The grand clock tocked in the empty space. They stared at each other for a while, waiting. Neither spoke, and to each it was apparent how much had changed for the small boy who went to live in the barn and the woman who tromped up the hill every few months, stayed a few restless months more, and then was gone.
AT TEN O’CLOCK in the morning, something heavy crashed in the hallway, and they jumped awake and winced in unison. Caleb pushed back the filmy curtains above his bed. The morning appeared thick with skies like smoke, the snow not yet falling. Wind buffeted the building. They studied each other. Elspeth had slept sitting up, and her limbs crackled with inactivity. She stretched one leg and then the other and loosened the laces on her boots. Her lips were caked with gore. Both her eyes had gone black. But it was her nose, and the thick vee of blood it had left on her shirt, that held his gaze. It had grown purple in the night, and though it looked relatively straight, a small lump protruded from its center. Caleb, for his part, looked much worse. His jaw carried a nasty bruise, the deep color of blackberries. On his temple, a thick knot pulled his eyeb
row into a surprised arc and half closed his eye. Combined, they gave his face the appearance of leaning to one side, like a snowman that had begun to melt.
“Aren’t we a pair?” Elspeth said.
Caleb’s voice came out garbled from his swollen mouth. He repeated something he’d heard often at the Elm Inn. “The cards aren’t falling for us.”
“I got a raise at work,” Elspeth said. “So it’s not all bad.” She attempted a laugh. From the edge of the bed, she leaned over to retie her boots and every heartbeat brought agony pulsating into her nose.
“We can’t go yet,” Caleb said. He picked up the toy horse his mother had gotten him only the day before; it looked ridiculous in the morning light. Leaving had only occurred to Caleb in rare stretches of quiet—coming home from the inn in the early morning, the hardiest birds trying out their songs, or among the drying sheets, the air pregnant with steam and the smell of soap—but he had always thought of Watersbridge as a transitional point: Either the murderers were there and they would kill them, or they weren’t and Caleb and Elspeth would try another town and another until they ran out of world. As the days had passed, however, and the piles of their clothes had begun to accumulate, and their scents and belongings had filled the room, Watersbridge had become something like a home without either of them realizing it. Caleb returned the horse to its shelf. He took the pistol from the stool and tucked it back into his belt. Like he hadn’t seen it in a very long time, he set the Ithaca on his lap and went to work cleaning it, the kind of chore his father had shown them but hadn’t allowed them to perform on their own before they’d watched him enough times to walk his hands through it first, telling him what to do, step by step. The first time Caleb had cleaned Jorah’s rifle he’d placed the gun upon a bright white towel so as not to mar his work, and when his father had seen the towel smudged with oil, he’d made Caleb wash it and sit on the creek bank to watch it dry. “There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men,” his father had said when Caleb finally came in, the towel folded as neatly as he could manage and dry as a bone. The memory made him think of the Shanes’ house, and though the Ithaca had been buffed to a bright sheen, he shook out his cloth and started all over from the end of the muzzle.
Elspeth wiped the dust from the mirror and adjusted her hair. Her black eyes and the thick bruise of her nose lent a certain manliness to her face. The throbbing worsened as she stood. “What are you going to do today?”
Caleb tilted his head as he answered. “Ask some questions.”
She buttoned her coat and tied a scarf around her neck. “You be careful, Caleb. If you need me, I’ll be down at the icehouse, in the offices there.”
Caleb stared at himself in the shine on the shotgun barrel, where his lumps and bruises distorted his face beyond recognition.
THE ICE COMPANY had come to a standstill. At the shore, where the breath of horse and man usually created a constant cloud of exertion, only two men worked in silence, shrouded in scarves, repairing the bent and battered sled. Closer to the icehouse, a solitary figure reset a lamppost. The hulking doors were closed, yet Elspeth could hear the men chipping away at the ice inside. Next to the building, an oilcloth tarp wasn’t wide enough to obscure the bodies beneath it—those that hadn’t been moved to the church, or couldn’t be identified, the worn soles of boots and the muddied tangles of hair protruding on either side. She didn’t see the darned socks, or the small feet they held.
In the office, only Horace sat behind the long desk. The hearth was cold. He wore fingerless gloves and thick glasses, and his hair stuck up in a white horn, as if he’d been yanking on it all night. He had wrapped himself in the plaid blanket that had been hanging on the wall, and where it had once been, a large scorch mark marred the wood. The baby slept in the crib, her arms crossed and her tiny fists snug under her chin. Elspeth wished her sleep was as sound. Her desire to run flashed only briefly, like the tip of a memory.
“I see you, I see you,” Horace said, “I must finish this one . . .” He went silent and scratched some numbers into a ledger. The figures piled up on the page. After an uncomfortable length of time, he set his pencil on his desk and pushed his chair back with a loud scrape. “What is it?”
Elspeth explained the promotion.
“You’re smaller than the rest. I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”
“Rest of who?”
“You worked with Heather?” he asked. She hadn’t mentioned Charles’s name. “Did he do that to you?” She reached a hand up to her damaged face. Horace laughed, exposing his pink gums. He slapped the desk. “Today’s shot, but tomorrow, who knows? Who knows after something like this. You’ll have to work in here, with us. Not much room to speak of.” The old man pulled the blanket tighter across his shoulders. “He’s a funny man, Charlie Heather,” the old man said. “Always has been. He was a funny boy.”
“You’ve known him since he was a boy?”
“Of course. He’s Wallace’s son. He practically grew up in this room—that’s his crib.” Charles’s stories of the sea, of growing up in Massachusetts, had all been lies. Horace read her look and continued. “They don’t share a name, I know. He’s Edward’s sister’s boy.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “She abandoned him.” Elspeth stared at the scar burned on the wall. It was roughly the shape of a bird. “She came into town one night, child in tow, and knocked on Edward’s door like a stranger. The next morning he woke up and she was gone. She only stayed long enough to say that the father’s name was Heather.” The old man blew his nose into a handkerchief that appeared out of the blanket. “Maybe it was all that time growing up without a mother that turned the boy so . . . peculiar.” She saw Charles in the snow, clutching the dropped glove, inhaling its perfume. “But you know all about that, don’t you?” The man flipped open a different ledger, sending dust spinning in all directions. “If you didn’t, we wouldn’t have to find another promotion.”
Elspeth ignored the slight, and turned her attention to the child. “I bet this little one knows nothing of what’s happened,” she said, and held out a finger to the infant, who clasped it in her tiny hand on instinct, but didn’t stir.
“Oh, no, no,” the man said, “she’s been up all night—she just went down in fact. No, the kids know. They know better than we do. It’s like when you see the forest creatures fleeing, you better run, because something’s coming—flood, fire, pestilence.” Elspeth moved her finger back and forth and the baby held on even in sleep. The man finally located whatever he’d been looking for and licked his lips twice in quick succession. “They understand it all a lot better than we think.”
CALEB, TUCKED BENEATH his hat and collar, hurried down the stairs and toward the door.
Frank called out to him. “Breakfast?” Then, glancing at the clock. “Lunch?” He excused himself from a man fixing the door to the kitchen. Frank carried a newspaper under his arm, and plopped it on the table.
“What happened?” he said, lifting Caleb’s hat, and then folding back his collar. Caleb let him: A part of him had hoped that he would. “My lord, Caleb.” Frank pulled him into the kitchen and sat him on a stool. He said he’d only be a minute, yelled Caleb’s customary order to the cook, and snatched his coat from the rack, which wobbled back and forth in his haste.
In the hours between breakfast and lunch the kitchen calmed down, and the staff sat in the corner, playing cards on a butcher’s block. One dozed in a chair next to the door leading outside, his head propped against the hutch containing stacks of plates and rows of glasses. A cook, a kind, round fellow who winked at Caleb every time he’d bring his dishes in and place them in the sink, dropped off a plate of hash and eggs with two pieces of toast with extra pats of butter. It hurt to eat. His teeth were loose. The eggs and hash were easy enough to soften with his tongue and then swallow, but the toast he left untouched.
Frank, flushed and exuding cold, came into the kitchen with a brown bag in his hand. He w
ithdrew a small tub, dipped his fingers into it, and said, “It’s petroleum jelly. It doesn’t hurt, but it’ll guard your face against the cold. You’re not going out today, are you?”
Caleb dreamed of a day spent in bed or at Frank’s side, reading the news and watching the people come into the hotel, but he said, “I have to.”
“I expected you’d say that.” Frank slathered the jelly onto Caleb’s face, heavy and soothing. He tapped the newspaper. “Care to read some before you go?”
Caleb wished it to be so easy, but he needed the kind of information only the Elm Inn could provide. He thanked Frank for his help and dropped his plate at the sink. Frank put Caleb’s hat on with care to avoid the cuts and bruises and refastened the collar of Jorah’s old coat, and helped Caleb roll the sleeves. Frank’s hands smelled of the paper—of ink and pulp. Caleb ignored this last plea to stay in the safety of the hotel, and left out the back, where he gingerly opened the door and the cold gust that blew in woke the napping man, his sudden spasm rattling the glasses and the plates, ringing them like chimes.
ELSPETH SAW THE would-be preacher standing in the upper doors of the icehouse, his hands folded across his belly, hair falling out of place and into his eyes in the face of the wind. He radiated such peace that Elspeth changed course. Inside, a handful of men stacked broken chunks of ice onto sleds, struggling in dirt thick with blood. She climbed the stairs, and as she reached the catwalk, the preacher darted in the other direction. Elspeth picked up her pace, and the men below stopped their work to see who would dare raise such a ruckus while the ghosts lingered. She hoped she apologized with her eyes. “Sir,” Elspeth whispered, but the preacher did not stop. “Preacher.” He sped up and crawled under the thick ropes that lashed the remaining stacks of ice to giant eyebolts they’d fastened to the walls. “Wait,” she said.