The Kept

by James Scott

  The men below leaned against the sleds, watching the preacher race toward the opposite staircase. One of the men said something to the others in a whisper harsh enough to ascend to the walkway, and the preacher, in the echoes of this unheard comment, stopped. He faced her and forced a smile. “Hello.”

  She’d been wrong. Rather than the ease of peace on his face, it had been the emptiness of utter despair. He looked down at the men. “Would you mind if we went someplace more private, my—my son?” They both knew this term had no place between them; Elspeth must have been at least five years older than he.

  He led her to a storage room where chains hung from the ceiling and bolts the size of her thigh were stacked against the walls. Buckets of harness oil and axle grease filled the room with dizzying odors. Yet the preacher insisted on shutting the door. The lamp had been turned low. “Now,” he said, “what is it that you need help with?” His voice threatened to crack with each syllable.

  Elspeth longed to explain to someone, to receive some sober advice and perhaps leave turning over a Bible quote in her head as she would if she’d been speaking to Jorah, though she’d witnessed how poorly equipped the preacher was to handle such chores. Seeing him, however, she recognized she’d break him if she asked for much. “Would you be so kind as to say a prayer with me?”

  Relief poured over the preacher’s face, and he looked even younger with the lines of concern lightened. They bowed their heads, and he sank to his knees and Elspeth followed. They said the Lord’s Prayer together. By the time they finished, his cheeks were wet and he blinked away tears.

  “What is it?” Elspeth—who felt no better—asked.

  “I’m sorry, I should be providing you with counsel, not the other way around.” He got up and brushed the dirt from his knees. He offered Elspeth his hand and helped her to her feet.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “Well,” he began. “This whole thing”—he waved his arm around him, to encompass the icehouse—“has been too much for me.” His voice split into multiple registers, alternating high and low. “I know it’s silly to complain when men have lost their lives and children their fathers and wives their husbands, but I don’t know how to bring these people peace.”

  People rarely asked Elspeth for advice. A doctor she’d worked for—the doctor who had left her with Emma—once had asked her, “What is that head so full of that I feel like I can never ask you a question, for fear of it spilling over?”

  “All you can supply is an ear,” Elspeth said to the preacher. “If you can’t give solace with the Bible, don’t try to.”

  “I don’t know my way around the Book as I should.” He fingered the thick links of a chain. “You’re going to tell someone, aren’t you?” She swore she wouldn’t. “I craved something of my own,” he said. She knew this impulse well. “I used to walk past this perfect house next to the church on my way to work in the furniture factory, and some days on the way home I’d stop and sit in the grass and just look at it. I thought about it all the time, everything behind those windows being mine. When the factory moved to Rochester, I was fired, but the man who lived in the house had been promoted. The preacher—the real preacher—convinced me these were signs from God. It wasn’t difficult. The Lord had made me stay and now I could get what I wanted. I’d been put so very close.”

  “Can we be blamed for wanting?” she asked him.

  “We can,” he said.

  A small breeze rocked the chains, and they clunked together.

  “‘Do you hear the call, my son?’ he asked me.”

  Elspeth didn’t have to ask, didn’t have to look at him to know his answer and that he hadn’t meant it at all.

  ONLY A FEW scattered men lounged around the Elm Inn. As with most mornings, the sun coming in through the windows without the curtains pulled or without curtains at all cooked the previous nights’ sins: the smell of alcohol more pungent and insidious, the odors of moving bodies more bracing, urine and stale smoke and cooked meat all congealed into one mass. Caleb grabbed a broom someone had rested on the doorframe—probably Ethan sweeping up broken glass or someone’s teeth—and brandished it like a weapon, unable to conceive of working. A door banged open upstairs, and Ethan’s hulking frame backed out of it. At first it looked like he carried a pair of boots under his arms, but after a few more steps, Caleb saw a thin stripe of skin and then trousers. Ethan maneuvered himself around the bend toward the staircase, his back scraping along the railing, the balusters sounding off-key notes. It was plain from the way the man’s head swept along the wooden floors that he was dead.

  “Boy,” Ethan called, spotting Caleb, “come and help me with this one.”

  One insinuated many to Caleb, but he wouldn’t dare ignore Ethan’s request. He scampered up the other staircase and hurried along the walkway. Ethan lifted the man’s torso with a hand in each armpit, and Caleb took up his ankles. His socks had fallen down into his boots, and the skin felt hot. But Caleb soon realized it wasn’t heat that shocked his hands, but the intensity of the cold; the man was like ice. Ethan smiled, one eyebrow cocked under the bowler White always asked him to remove indoors. “Whose fist you hit with your face?”

  Caleb grunted and found a new grip on the rolled cuffs of the man’s pants. “No one,” he said. The man’s eyes had lolled deep into his skull, the color there like the set of pearls White lent from girl to girl, whoever happened to be his favorite at the time, whoever—he’d told Caleb—could fetch the best price. Caleb had seen eyes like those before and he’d covered them with a set of buttons from a pair of overalls. The scent of early morning on the hillside came to him, something fresh and earthen, and it turned to rot.

  “Ethan,” Caleb said, once they’d gotten to the bottom of the stairs and the big man had dropped his load with no ceremony whatsoever, the dead man’s skull bouncing on the floor. Caleb set the feet down with all the care he could muster. “What are you going to do with the body?”

  “What we do with the rest,” Ethan said. When gunshots rang out in the inn, the first thing Caleb did was to find and identify the gunman, see if he struck a chord in his guts, and once everything calmed, someone would call out, “Somebody go and fetch the doctor.” The next morning there would be a deep pocket in the snow on the side of the building, smeared with the dingy brown of old blood. He’d come to learn the joke, to understand their cruel humor. Ethan wiped his hands on his pants. “Don’t you worry about stuff like that. You stick to sweeping and doing the laundry for now. Someday maybe you’ll be able to quit the ladies’ chores and move on to the men’s.”

  “How would I find someone,” Caleb said, edging the dead man’s legs parallel to one another with his toe, “who would be willing to kill a man?”

  “Now that, kid, is a man’s chore.” Ethan stretched his back until it cracked mightily. “You mean to kill the one who done that to you?” Ethan hoisted the corpse again and motioned with a nod for Caleb to follow suit. “I suppose I could do it. Depends on the job.” They shuffled across the gaming floor, Ethan kicking chairs and tables out of the way as they went. “Killing’s like anything else—there’s a right man for it.”

  Caleb couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked Ethan these questions sooner; everyone else took such great pains to protect him that he’d stopped asking lest he hear the same careful, uninformative answers. “What if I needed someone to go kill someone someplace else?”

  Ethan paused while he fiddled with the latch on the door, holding the man’s entire upper body with one large paw. “Ol’ Jackson Ramus, that’s who you’d call.” Jackson Ramus. The name didn’t seem real to Caleb. He checked it against his images of the men. “Of course Ramus died three, four years ago.” Ethan pitched the door open and the cold wind knocked Caleb backward. Ethan didn’t notice. “He was supposed to be tracking a woman whose husband said she’d been kidnapped. And he found her all right, found her in the lying-down game with another man.” Ethan didn’t slow moving across the icy landing to
the railing. “Ramus was a smart man—maybe too smart, maybe not smart enough—and he figured if he came all the way back to ask the husband what to do, he was sure the husband would send him right back the way he came to kill this new man and the cheating wife.”

  Ethan stopped when they got to the edge of the deck. Caleb spun around, thinking they were going down the stairs when the legs were yanked out of his hands and the body flew through the air. Ethan slapped his palms together. “Of course, Ramus was also what you might call a lazy man. Lazy man with a gun is not the kind of man you want to find yourself next to.” The body landed facedown, the snow leaping into the air with a massive, rushing noise, and settling over the man’s clothes. “So he shot them, both of them. And came back home.”

  Caleb looked at the body splayed out in the snow, everything at unliving angles. He could barely listen to the words that followed.

  “But Ol’ Ramus got it wrong. When he came back, the husband was so upset, he shot Ramus between the eyes, stuffed his killing fee inside his mouth, and then shot himself right in his goddamned broken heart.”

  THE PREACHER’S STORY hummed in Elspeth. She stepped over the repaired tear in the earth. Wallace stood outside the icehouse, looking up at the great doors. She hurried toward him, but Wallace appeared to be in no rush himself. He turned and saw her expression. “So you’ve heard.” He sighed, and the sudden condensation gathered around his head with the heaviness of the thought. “Charles has always . . . Charles has been a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you trying to keep me away from him?”

  He patted her reassuringly. “Quite the opposite.” His hand angled her face into better light. She feared he’d wipe the shoe polish from her jaw and crack his cane over her skull. “Did he do that?”

  “How can you keep standing up for him? Cleaning up his messes?” She heard her voice climbing into the feminine territory she’d been so careful to keep hidden.

  If Wallace noticed, he didn’t betray it. “Oh, what we do for our sons.” He knocked on the door like he wished it luck, and headed toward his office. “You’re welcome to the job, all the same,” Wallace said, not bothering to turn around.

  CHAPTER 13

  That night, Elspeth fought off sleep for Caleb. When he arrived home, she ate with him, despite the intense weight in her eyes and the soreness in her body. Her hands hurt when she moved them, and every time she blinked, her vision bloomed into oranges and reds. She asked Caleb about the inn, and his responsibilities there. As his mother, she thought, she should inquire more about how he spent his days and nights. His responses were minimal: grunts and nods. Words, it appeared, had left him.

  Caleb was wary but happy that Elspeth took an interest in his search in some tangential way, that she hadn’t forgotten the scattered bodies in their home. Over and over he watched Ethan ejecting the corpse from the deck of the inn, and its horrible flight, and the empty whush as it landed. When he took out his pistol to clean it, all she did was ask him to wait until they’d finished eating, and so for the time being he tucked it back into its familiar spot behind his belt. He cut his food without scraping his plate and chewed quietly, because the meal seemed to be a solemn occasion, a preparation for something that he didn’t understand.

  Past the barn down a small worn runnel that had dried up long ago, a stump had overhung the edge of the hill, half of its roots dangling, hanging on to the air itself, and Caleb would stand on the dead wood and sense everything in front of him, and nothing below. One spring morning he’d followed the dried channel and at the end found nothing but a drop-off. He’d thought he’d never be able to recapture that feeling, but since the murders, he experienced it all the time.

  “Do you remember how Amos would sit on that old crate by the pigpen for hours?” he asked, the memories, as always, grounding him. “Watching his shadow move across the grass? At first he’d been punished with it, but then he liked it?”

  Elspeth didn’t remember, and couldn’t know if she’d been gone, had forgotten, or had simply not paid attention. “He was punished a lot, wasn’t he?” she finally said, and Caleb rolled a piece of apple with his fork. The church bells rattled the glass in the windows, shook the water in their cups. On more than one occasion, Elspeth glimpsed the toy horse she’d purchased for him and she cringed, knowing how badly she’d misread the situation. The gun waited on the bed with the boy’s cleaning supplies. She couldn’t turn the clock back on him, no more than she could cut a child’s hair and call it a baby again.

  THE NEXT DAY, Caleb arrived at the inn to a pile of dirty bedding. He separated the items by order of their drying times, washing the few blankets first, followed by the sheets and the pillowcases. In the white mass immersed in the tub, he saw the dead man, watched him sail through the air and break upon the snow, felt the sharp chill of his ankles in the water. His empty eyes stared out from the bubbles. Caleb wondered if he had a family, if they missed him, and if they thought of him. Some days Caleb forgot to think of Mary, and he tried to picture her as he pushed the broom handle back and forth, the sheets gurgling in its wake, and finally saw her laughing and kicking the chickens aside as she rushed to the kitchen, her apron full of eggs. A violent thump from the other room dislodged his memory the way the sun moving behind a cloud will evaporate a shadow. When he tried to conjure her up again, she was gone. He hoped his mother remembered her sometimes. He missed his brothers and sisters with a soreness in his arms and his chest that had nothing to do with the work in front of him. Despite the steam in the air, he felt parched, dried out.

  After he’d hung the last sheet, he walked upstairs, his mind made up. He had to look. He wondered where the souls went, and saw the translucent suits described by William and smelled the dry fire of home, the choking stench of the bodies. He heard the roar of flames and the frantic hooting of owls. At first, he stood far from the window, afraid to see the dead man again. He sat on the bed. The one piece of artwork on the wall commemorated the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Caleb admired the peaceful look on Hamilton’s face, and the angelic radiance that emanated in a golden halo around his head. Burr’s pistol exploded in a cloud of gunpowder, and Hamilton’s chest bore a mortal wound, all at the same time. Caleb thought the painting captured the speed with which things happened. On the dresser, someone had left a newspaper, exclaiming that a grave full of nine hundred bodies had been uncovered in a place called Boston, where workmen had dug holes to stick a train underground. He struggled over the words, and wasn’t pleased that he’d taken the time to do so. Frank had steered him away from such stories, preferring the heroism of the president or the tales of everyday people who did brave things like rescue a child from drowning or save a dog from a burning building. Caleb wondered if other people found things as confusing as he did.

  Assured that the world outside contained as much dread and violence as the world he’d encountered, Caleb went to the window and peered over the sill. A body, indeed, lay in the snow. Something moved as well, and he pushed open the sash. Snow cascaded down from the eaves at the disturbance and once it had cleared, he leaned his head outside. The wind fluttered his hair. The ground appeared to be littered with bodies, dark shapes that he strained to see more clearly. One of these inert forms possessed the brown curls of Ellabelle. Caleb’s heart dropped. A second passed, though, and her arms began to move, then her legs. He exhaled and rested his head against the side of the window frame. Ellabelle shifted her limbs again, producing a swooshing sound. She’d made snow angels, a whole host of them. She peered up at him. “Caleb?”

  There was another body, though, one that didn’t move. This man had fallen face up. His legs did not twist at unnatural angles. It wasn’t the same man Ethan had thrown from the porch. This body belonged to Gerry. His eyes were open, and his stable boots muddied the snow at his feet.

  Ellabelle called Caleb’s name again. The gash in his head pressurized, as though it would tear open and spew bl
ood until he, too, lay in the snow, an expanding puddle beneath him. London White had killed Gerry. Or had Ethan do so. Maybe Ethan had misunderstood their conversation. Caleb assumed it had been on his behalf—he may as well have pulled the trigger himself. He heard Ellabelle calling from outside, the voice seeming to come from another land altogether. He backed away from the window, his head pulsing, thinking he might vomit, retching and crumpling to one knee. The Colt fell from its station and slid across the floor. In the inn a bell rang, an early customer finished, another welcomed.

  THE AIR WAS warmer for the first time in weeks, the clouds not charging in with violent purpose, but lolling across the sky. The ice gave way rather than snapped under Elspeth’s feet on her way to Charles’s apartment. A few squirrels emerged from their homes and scampered around the thoroughfares. Owen Trachte held the door open for Elspeth and they’d passed each other before he recognized her. She wondered how deep the recognition went. “Nose looks okay,” he said. She thanked him for his help.

  She’d been waiting in the hotel, drinking coffee and drumming her fingers on her knees, not sure what to do next. A piece of her said to leave Charles alone, to go to work at her new job, where she could collect some more money before she and Caleb moved on to another town. But every time she thought of their departure she saw the golden steeple of the church, the cross that emanated light, and deep inside was reminded of the weight of her sins. She no longer had the strength to carry them around, nor would busyness or movement sate her. She prayed on the tattered couch in the lobby of the Brick & Feather. Her thoughts were unfamiliar as they sprinted past, a jumble of dead bodies and Jorah’s voice intoning Bible verses, cut up and stitched together until they made no sense. At the thought of Caleb, however, they slowed, and in her head she prayed for him, for Charles, and her own soul, though she knew it was beyond saving.