by James Scott
“He’s up there,” Owen said. He flicked his thumb toward Charles’s room. Elspeth thanked him again and hurried up the narrow staircase. Charles yelled for her to go away when she knocked, but she ignored him. The door was unlocked. Everywhere there were papers: books, ledgers, newspapers, letters, envelopes—some torn open, others untouched. Stamps littered the floor like pebbles in a stream. A dining table and two chairs would have taken days to unearth they were so covered in materials: maps, tintypes, drawings, plans, notes, photographs, reference books opened and stacked on top of one another. Bookshelves of all sizes gave little order to the clutter, their shelves so overladen they bent into nervous smiles. The grimy windows on either side of the room failed to illuminate much, the papers making everything dusty, the air itself almost smoky, and Elspeth coughed and licked her desiccated lips. On a folding cot lay Charles, braced by several pillows, his face encased in bandages, his arms and one leg likewise.
“What is all of this?” Elspeth asked, picking up a newspaper dated three years prior.
“I’m in pain enough without you wasting time getting to the point,” he said through a small slit in the bandages, his jaw barely moving. He shifted in the cot, the material groaning beneath him.
“Why did you have them move me off your shift?”
“I’m sure you know. You’ve seen enough.”
“Did you even have a wife?” she asked. He said he did. “Why should I believe you? You lied about your whole life.”
“I didn’t.”
“What about Massachusetts? What about growing up a fisherman’s son?”
“I thought they made me more interesting to you. You, who’d come out of nowhere like an angel.” He snickered. “But what do I gain by lying now?”
“And this wife left and took your boys?”
A small fleck of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth and it spread on the bandage, soaking the stark white. “My wife suspected me, the way I am.”
“But you had children.” In all the mess, she glanced around for a photo.
“The mind is powerful,” he said. “And for a while, I could make it do what I wished.” He tugged at his bandages. “But this was lying in wait.” With each of his breaths, the stitching on the cot sighed and the joints clicked. “And now, we do what we can.”
“You loved your sons.”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I do.”
“I know you’re a good man.” She thought again of Caleb tending to her and the horror he must have experienced at opening the door to find the results of his bravery. “Mistakes,” she said, “are correctable.”
“These aren’t mistakes,” he said. “These are facts. But I am sorry I lied to you, Jorah.”
“I’m sorry, too.” His pointed look as the boot had lifted over his face sent a chill through her. “My name isn’t Jorah,” she said. She was more surprised to say it than Charles appeared to hear it.
“Whoever the hell you are,” he said, his back going rigid and lifting off the cot. He writhed in agony. “You’re here to kill me? Say yes. It’s okay. I want you to. Let’s all keep our secrets.”
Elspeth drew herself up and picked her way across the dusty library to his side. She touched him lightly and he jumped. Despite her broken and bruised nails, she couldn’t guess how her hands hadn’t given her away. With her small, battered fingers, she flipped the lock on the door.
“No one’s here,” Charles said at the sound. “Go ahead and shoot. Send me out of this world.” He sobbed. The bandages on his face contorted. “Please. I can’t take any more.”
The purple fingers protruding from his cast were within a hair’s breadth of her hip. The pistol tugged at the back of her trousers. Holding up one hand in defense of her action, she took the gun from its hiding place and dropped it on the cot next to Charles’s leg, within easy reach of his hand.
“You don’t think I’ve tried?” he said. “I can’t. I’m a coward.”
“I’m not going to kill you. You’re the only one who knows me.” First she removed her hat and scarf. Then she unlaced her boots, struggling with the mud-caked knots. She pulled off her socks, and her bare feet stuck to a rainbow of stamps. She unbuckled her belt and let her trousers fall to the floor. Charles shook on the cot, the canvas screeching. Her sweater required some force to pull over her head. It sizzled with static. Her hair stood on end. She unbuttoned each button of Jorah’s flannel shirt and shrugged out of it.
“Jorah, stop,” Charles said. She glanced at the gun but it hadn’t moved. “Whatever your name is, just stop.”
Her Jorah had waited in their bed. It was early summer. He hadn’t yet built the closet or the dresser. Their room had no walls, but the beams that would soon support them reflected the lamplight, clean and white, and everything beyond in their new house was darkness. The air smelled of fresh pine and cedar. She undressed in front of him, but as she reached her undergarments he looked away, and she sat at the foot of the bed and removed them alone. He lifted the chimney and blew out the lamp, and let the darkness settle onto the sounds of their breathing and the small clink of the glass sliding back into place. When she slipped under the covers, his hand pressed onto her belly, his skin warm and rough. Her body changed, grew more capable, tightened into something stronger. Her belly, however, remained the same, and no amount of effort could fill it. “My name is actually Elspeth.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Charles said.
Elspeth stood in her undershirt and a sagging pair of wool drawers. She shifted her weight and paper crunched underfoot. Even in her state of undress, sweat rolled down her legs. The shirt caught on the pins she’d used to fasten her bandages, and she pulled each from its housing, lining them up on a stack of newspapers that covered the bedside table. As she did so, she pressed her right arm across her so the bandage did not fall. Once she’d removed the pins, a ritual she’d repeated enough to perform without looking, she unwrapped the bandage, the layers peeling away with a soft sighing. Her breasts fell loose. The shot continued to heal, some mere white pocks, others scabbed over in a dull crimson. Her cross remained around her neck. She tucked her thumbs into the waistline of her drawers and worked them over her hips until the fabric whisked down her legs. She stepped out of them.
“Okay,” he said. “What now, Elspeth?” The bandages around his lips grew slowly darker. Her hands felt empty, her arms yearned to cover her nakedness, but she forced herself to stand there. “Do you want me to say I’m surprised?” he said. “Do you want me to say I didn’t know?”
“What?” An unknown draft crept up her shins and her thighs and shrouded her. The sweat prickled on her skin.
“I didn’t know at first, not right away.” He coughed and sank deeper into the mattress. “But soon enough. Why do you think I took so many breaks if not to cover for you? Why do you think I said all of that to you in the church about our understanding one another?”
“When then?”
“I spoke to you once at the tavern, maybe the second night of our working together, and I talked about my boys, and I saw it—something, I don’t know, motherly, feminine. I confirmed it over time.”
Elspeth wrapped her arms around herself and sat down in the pile of clothing. She let her head rest against the side of the cot. “Who else knows?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It took me a while to figure out how many knew my secret. They found out, though.” A bottle of salve rolled across the floor where she upset it. “They will find out, Elspeth.”
She crossed her feet, revealing the bright stamps stuck to her soles. One in particular stood out to her, a violet eight-cent, the man staring off into the distance, a sad, bewildered expression mapped out in the lines of ink. Elspeth plucked the stamp from her skin, licked the back, and affixed it to the foot of Charles’s cot, where he readjusted and began snoring softly above her.
ELLABELLE’S CLUMSY FOOTSTEPS entered the room. Caleb lay on the floor. He couldn’t control his breathing: It ca
me out rapid and shallow but drew in with enormous gasps, his whole mouth opening wide. In his pain he hoped he would die, felt sure he would, that something inside of him had rotted.
Ellabelle knelt close and brought his head upon her knees. Her skin—cold and wet from the snow—soothed his feverish forehead. She smoothed his hair, calming him and said he’d be okay, he only needed to breathe. Before he could pacify his lungs, he forced out the words. “He killed him.”
“Who?” Her curls tumbled from behind her ears as she looked at him. Something sweet hung on her breath. Her cheeks weren’t red from the snow; they stayed pale. She looked frozen.
“Mr. White. He killed Gerry.”
“Of course he did,” she said. “It’s okay. He’s coming.”
“What do you mean?” Caleb asked.
“I thought something was wrong—I told him to come.”
“He killed him,” Caleb repeated.
The crisp, measured steps they’d learned to listen for when joking or telling stories rang in the hallway and then in the room. Ellabelle didn’t move. White first readjusted the blankets where Caleb had mussed them and then sat in the same spot, looking down on the two of them.
“Caleb, does Mr. Wilcox’s end not meet your approval?” he asked. He dragged his watch by its chain from his pocket and turned the wheel. Caleb’s head swam and his lungs had not fully recovered. He panted like a dog. “Gerry Wilcox, the stableman?”
“No,” Caleb said. “I didn’t want him to die.”
“So those injuries on your face, those did not come at the hand of Mr. Wilcox?”
“That doesn’t mean he has to die,” Caleb said.
“I see.” White rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “Not that I need to elucidate my reasons for you, Caleb, but I simply cannot have my employees beating upon one another. Mr. Wilcox had been warned against this type of behavior. Ms. Ellabelle, has Mr. Wilcox ever wronged you?”
Ellabelle pursed her lips, hard in thought. “Probably,” she said. “I’ve gotten good at forgetting the nasty ones. It’s the kind ones that stick.”
“Of course, my dear. Very poetic,” White said. “So, Caleb, you may rise with a clean conscience. Mr. Wilcox’s fate did not rest with you.” He crouched down and put his hand over Ellabelle’s, the pressure increasing gently on Caleb’s forehead. White smelled of talc and soap. “You don’t have to worry.”
He got up and appraised himself in the mirror. “Now, Caleb, have you any ideas as to the whereabouts of his compatriot Dax Hanson? That would also be appreciated.”
“Why? So he can end up at the doctor?”
“That’s up to Mr. Hanson. These men, Caleb, do not have our best interests in mind. I may tell you that much.” White checked his watch and snapped it shut. “Ellabelle, customers.”
Ellabelle kissed Caleb on the forehead. “You relax now, Caleb. It’s good that Mr. White is here to take care of you.”
“Thank you, Ellabelle,” Caleb said, and he meant it, though relaxing was clearly not possible. He understood she didn’t possess some part of her that other people did. White didn’t have it, either. Caleb didn’t know what to call it, or even how to describe it, because it wasn’t simple right and wrong. Sometimes, he wondered if his mother was missing it as well.
Ellabelle left the room, but before she did, she placed a pillow under his head, and he lay there on the floor, staring at the holy Alexander Hamilton, his chest blooming with blood, listening to the growing bustle of the inn, wondering which bell meant Ellabelle had seen another client, not certain if he cared as much as he once had, until his breathing returned to normal.
ELSPETH STIRRED a pot of soup for Charles, the ladle scraping along the edges of the tin. The air smelled of wet newspapers, a sour, musty odor. She’d dressed herself in Jorah’s flannel shirt, forgoing the underclothes and the bandages. Without them, the constant vise around her lungs had loosened. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” Elspeth said. Her real voice sounded unnatural and she was aware of it traveling up her throat and onto her tongue. “I came home, less than a month ago, and my family had been murdered. Caleb was in the barn, hiding.”
“Everyone?” Charles shifted on the cot. “They killed your children, and—your husband?”
“We think they might be here,” she said. “The murderers.” She suddenly worried about Caleb asking questions at the inn, her frail child among killers. She flushed with embarrassment.
“This is the place to hide, I suppose,” Charles said, and pressed no further. “I’m sorry, too.”
The soup hissed on the stove, as she had ignored it for too long, and she pulled the pot from the heat. “What would you do if I wasn’t here?” Elspeth asked.
“My father would come, after some time.”
“But he’s not your real father?”
“He’s been my father as long as I can remember.” She poured the soup into the cleanest bowl she could find, wiped a spoon on her sleeve, and cleared one of the chairs by the kitchen table. Charles groaned when the stack of papers she’d moved from the chair to the floor toppled over but she ignored him and held out a spoonful of broth. “Owen checks on me from time to time,” he said. The slight gap in the bandages parted as he opened his mouth.
“He’s a—friend?”
Charles scoffed. “Not in the way that you mean, but yes, he is a friend.”
They heard a whisper of music coming from somewhere, so nonsensical to each of them that they didn’t move, drinking in the subtle sound. Neither mentioned it once it had passed.
“Who was the man I saw you with after the accident?”
“Someone important to me,” he said. “As you witnessed, the feeling doesn’t seem to be shared.”
“Did he work the lake before me?” she asked. “As your partner?”
Charles shut his eyes. He talked to himself, saying something over and over and she wanted to lean in to hear, but what she could see of his expression told her it was private and not to be shared.
“What is all this?” Elspeth asked, letting him know the inquiry had ended, motioning to the reading materials stacked on every surface.
“Again, some things that are important to me aren’t to others.”
She ladled the soup into his open mouth. She’d been fed like this, not long ago. She couldn’t recall if she’d ever thanked Caleb or made him understand how brave he’d been or that she’d be dead without him. She supposed he knew. Once the cup had been emptied and she’d wiped off Charles’s mouth, he asked her to leave, not angrily, but with a simple request. She obliged, and as she did so, his body slackened and he deflated on the cot, his body making hardly a ripple beneath the thin blanket she pressed over him. She dressed in her old clothes. The bandages she left behind, the pins still in a neat row.
CHAPTER 14
Caleb waited for Elspeth in one of the plush chairs in the lobby of the Brick & Feather. Despite his nervous excitement or perhaps because of it, he periodically had to shake himself awake, not sure if he’d fallen asleep, and if he had, for how long. Outside, it continued to warm, and some of the snow melted, the drops from the rooftops making discordant music with the ticking of the clock. He allowed himself to daydream of his visit to the Shanes’, how the woman who looked so much like him would embrace him, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around before they both collapsed, dazed and laughing. As the daydream wore on, however, they tired of him, like the girls’ favorite dresses, made from ribbons and lace his mother brought, which would fray and dull until they grew to hate wearing them. He worried the woman would hold him and feel within him the lies and the failures that stacked up on his chest at night and made it hard for him to breathe, as if maybe he’d be heavier to her, and she’d hold him at arm’s length and wonder how he’d gotten so full of rot and poison, not knowing what he’d seen or what he’d had to do. And maybe she wouldn’t ask. Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to say. When he saw Elspeth he would ask her the questions that had been burning hol
es in him. Engrossed in his thoughts, he didn’t notice Frank standing above him, holding a plate of cookies. “Where’s your father?”
“He got a new job.”
“Caleb, this morning someone told me they’d seen you leave the Elm Inn,” Frank said. “Are you still working there?”
Caleb mumbled that he was. His lips tight, Frank asked Caleb how things fared there, and Caleb said they were fine—he didn’t fancy a lecture. “I know it’s not your fault,” Frank said. He took a deep breath. “When I was a boy,” Frank said, “and we lived in Nova Scotia—do you remember where that is?” Caleb said he did, and recalled the map Frank had shown him of a peninsula shaped kind of like a duck’s foot. “I worked with my father. He was a blacksmith and a farrier and everyone assumed I would follow in his footsteps—especially my father. But I never liked the heat, and I hated the noise.” He laughed. “That fire scared me, Caleb. It sure did.” A trio of men talking by the hearth all began singing. “One day, after I’d made a horseshoe, a perfectly nice horseshoe, one of dozens, I told my father that I didn’t care to be a blacksmith anymore. Do you know what he said to me?”
Caleb didn’t. In all of Frank’s stories Nova Scotia and his childhood had sounded so wonderful: the skies full of the calls of loons and the songs of flycatchers and kingbirds, the days spent jumping into piles of hay and fishing from the rocky coast. Caleb had seen it all so clearly and this unhappiness made no sense.
“He told me we each make our own way in this world, and if the forge wasn’t mine, then so be it.” Frank rolled up the newspaper in his fist. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
Caleb watched the people on the walkways, everything busier with the sun out and the cursed cold lifting. “I don’t think my father minds what I’m doing.”
“I wasn’t speaking about your father.”
“London White certainly doesn’t mind what I’m doing.”
“Mr. White is a difficult man to walk away from,” Frank said. “But you can, you know.” Caleb had seen too much to believe him. “You’re a boy. He wouldn’t dare do anything.” Caleb couldn’t help himself. He laughed. It sounded awful, even to him, a bilious, nasty thing. He covered his mouth and a cold shame settled over him. While Caleb knew he meant well, Frank couldn’t possibly guess at even a fraction of what went on at the Elm Inn. He was aware he might end up empty-eyed and broken in the snow, Ellabelle’s angels all around him. As he turned to walk away, Frank bit into a cookie and offered the plate to Caleb, and when he declined, Frank handed him the newspaper, smudged and crumpled from being twisted in his sweating hands.