by James Scott
THEY WALKED, AND muscles they’d forgotten stretched and tugged at their bones. Neither had much to say. After an hour of following Martin’s precise directions the cold, the trees, the snow, and the rhythm of their steps hardened time into one familiar mass. Every couple of hours Elspeth would make them stop and drink and sit for long enough to catch their breath. During these breaks, she would recite Martin’s directions as if predicting their future, and Caleb would fill in a detail here and there that she’d forgotten.
Late in the afternoon, Elspeth listed two more landmarks and then an old cabin. Martin had told them the family that lived inside had been friends with the Shanes for years and would happily welcome them. “It’ll be nice to get a hot meal and spend the night in a bed,” Elspeth said, despite the concerns she tried to mask for the boy’s sake, thrusting her hands into her pockets so they didn’t stray to the pistols—Ethan’s and her own—that she wore at her waist. “Don’t tell them where we’re headed, though. We can’t be too careful.”
The closer they got to the house, however, the path twisting around a small hill and over a frozen creek, the deeper her worries. It struck her that they shouldn’t have to blaze this trail through the drifts, that the family should have come this way to hunt or to resupply their stores for winter.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Do you want me to take the lead?”
She said no and labored on, the ground tilting up, and what bothered her—as it had not long ago—was the lack of life: no noise, no smell of smoke on the air. Her heart beat faster. The cross at her neck bounced against her chest with each plodding step.
“You’re walking too fast,” Caleb said. She stopped and found him twenty yards behind, his bandaged hands holding his shotgun, the tips of his fingers bright red.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I want to get there before dark so we don’t surprise them.”
Caleb glanced at the sky. The sun would not leave them for another hour, maybe an hour and a half, and the house must be close. He rechecked that the Ithaca’s safety was off.
The trail opened into a clearing at the crest of the hillside, and there stood two log walls and the stone chimney of a house. Caleb blinked back tears. His mother’s pace didn’t waver, and she walked right into what remained of the cabin, stumbling over beams and debris beneath the snow.
“We’ll have a nice fire,” she said.
Caleb joined her at the hearth, which she wiped clean with her gloved hands.
THEY’D BUILT A hearty fire, and spread the tarp beneath them. The cabin’s two walls gave them protection from a biting wind that had kicked up once the sun had gone down. They didn’t worry about the smoke—they knew the Millards were a half-day’s walk, and even if the brothers came upon them, the ending would be the same.
“It’s not much, is it?” Caleb said of their meager rations.
“I thought Martin’s friends would welcome us,” she said, though she hadn’t packed for more than the two days’ journey to the Millards’. One of the logs tumbled from atop the others, startling the boy. His collar hung from his neck, and his eyes had taken on the hollowed-out darkness of his uncle’s. Elspeth wondered at the toll her actions had taken. The whole time they’d walked, she’d gone over permutations and possibilities, searching for a way in which her son would survive the next day. She considered leaving once he fell asleep and continuing on by herself, but he would keep going, too, and even if she was killed, he would try to avenge them.
“It was an accident,” he said. “The fire. And shooting you.”
“I know,” she said.
He worried about sleeping, and of the nightmares that awaited him. For the first time, he told his mother of the dreams that had plagued him in the house, and how he’d moved to the barn to avoid them. He talked about his time in the pantry, and how he couldn’t remember much but he could remember everything. “Some nights,” he said, “I would wake up lying next to Jesse, and I wouldn’t know how I’d gotten there. I would think he’d blinked, and I couldn’t remember if it had been a dream or not.” He told her he’d heard Emma giggle from the snow, and watched Mary try to pull herself from the stove. One night Amos had urged him to come out from the pantry, and he’d complied and waited in the stark moonlight, kneeling at his brother’s side, urging him to speak again until the day started to break and he had to crawl back to his hiding place.
Elspeth pulled her scarf up to wipe her tears and breathed into it, the closeness reassuring. She’d laid the two pistols at her sides. “Your father taught me to shoot,” she said.
“He’s not my father,” Caleb said.
“He protected us,” she said. “He made us a family.” Caleb opened his mouth to speak, but instead poked the fire with a stick. She needed him to hear about the quiet, happy times. They didn’t occur to her often. “He used to worry when he left me alone to work or get supplies. So he took me hunting with him to learn to shoot. We would bring a lunch with us, some hard-boiled eggs and bread, sometimes jam if we had it, or—on the best days—smoked ham. He and I would follow the stream down the hill, through the fields, and into the forest, and we’d lie down there and your father would roll his eggs on my stomach, cracking the shells.” He’d kissed her, his hair draping her face.
“Did you kill anything?” Caleb asked.
“Of course. Deer, squirrels, beavers, raccoons, even a turkey.” She inspected Ethan’s pistol with the help of the firelight: the worn curve of the trigger, the smooth grips, and the stained barrel. It was so heavy, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to aim it with one hand. Again she went over the next day, and this time the brothers were saddling their horses in front of the house and they opened fire the moment they saw Elspeth, who couldn’t even lift her gun. Jorah had told her to fire with her exhalation, to remain within herself but without thought. This, like everything else, seemed impossible.
She couldn’t stand to look at Caleb with what awaited them and she excused herself to find firewood. At the first tree, she bent her head to the trunk, prayed to God, and let the rough bark absorb her tears.
As she walked back, Caleb saw his mother as half of what she’d been long ago, that mysterious figure who left for months at a time and then resumed a central role as if nothing had happened and then left again, and half of what she’d become in Watersbridge, with the pants and boots of a man, and the hat, coat, and scarf of a woman. Her stride, weighed down by her armful of wood, contained some of each.
She added a log to the fire and sat close to Caleb. She’d become softer to him in a way that owed nothing to her clothes or her hair. He heard her lick her hand and then pat down one of his many cowlicks.
Around midnight, the sky cleared and the stars began to show themselves, singularly, and then in bunches, like Caleb’s freckles in the summertime. She drew closer, and stroked the back of his cheek with her cold fingers. He held still, not wanting her to know that he was awake and risk her stopping. Neither slept and neither spoke as the wet wood hissed and the fire popped, the stars multiplied and deepened, Caleb kept awake with thoughts of murder and Elspeth of death.
CHAPTER 2
The items on Shane’s list dwindled down to a handful, and Caleb and Elspeth responded by walking closer and closer to each other. Still, Caleb couldn’t help but think of his father and uncle, and the thunderous hooves of their horses as they rode in search of him, his father standing in his stirrups and Martin leaning close to his horse’s neck, the speed enough to yank their hair back. They crisscrossed the land, riding through dust, rain, snow, and leaves; hills, valleys, fields, and forests.
Around midmorning Caleb and Elspeth reached a battered train trestle spanning a frozen river, the ice silver. The supports looked like a series of Xs, as Shane had described them, and the bridge itself consisted of horizontal ties a yard apart, sandwiched between two pairs of massive timber beams that ran the width of the river. No train tracks had been laid leading to or away from
the trestle, though they could make out a path through the trees on either side—whatever plans had been laid for the tracks had been scuttled. Caleb rolled spare shotgun shells in his pocket to distract himself, but as his mother scanned the bank for a way down, all he could envision was his father plunging through the ice and into water so cold it burned.
The wind funneled straight down the canyon cut by the river, and the snow whisked along the ice, creating a low whisper that made Elspeth shiver. She mapped out a plausible way down the banks, but then she saw the expression on Caleb’s face. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “The ice is thick. You can tell by its color.”
“My father, he died looking for me,” Caleb said. Elspeth bowed her head. She didn’t know what else she could learn that would make her understand the trail of misery she’d created any more. “He went through the ice.”
She turned from the bank and climbed the incline to the bridge, which, to her, looked deadly: Some of the supports were broken, some dangled from one side, and the ties had been coated in a thick hump of snow and ice honed by the wind. She hadn’t thought to steal two pairs of cleats from the Great Lakes Ice Company, which would have made her realize the confidence she tried to project for Caleb’s sake. She kicked at the snow on the first board and made a gap big enough for both feet, and stepped onto the bridge, her boots sliding and then stabilizing. The air wrapped around her and she understood how easily it could throw her off, twenty feet into the snow at the ends of the bridge, but from the center sixty or seventy feet to a sure death. If one plank gave in to age and wear, all of their searching would be for naught. She put this out of her mind, and once she moved onto the third tie, she beckoned for Caleb to follow. He hesitated. She managed to turn around and was going to go back to help him, but he ignored her and slid his shotgun down the back of his coat and—both arms out for balance—hopped over the gap and onto the trestle. When Elspeth faced forward again, the bridge seemed to stretch on for miles, but she didn’t want to show fear in front of him and she dug new footholds and continued.
Nearly halfway across, she toed a plank and it let go of its mooring and tumbled to the river below. After a few seconds, they heard it hit the ice with a hollow rattle. The gap between the ties was too wide, and Elspeth edged over to the beam facing the wind and wiped the snow from the wood; if she should be knocked from her perch, she’d rather it pushed her onto the bridge. She crawled on all fours, trying to carve grips for Caleb as she went. The beam was wider than the ties, but the ice was thicker and harder, and she couldn’t get down to the bare timber and prayed for God to let them both cross safely.
Only after his mother had gotten close to the other side of the gap did he inch toward the beam. A slip would kill him, smashing him onto ice the color and strength of steel. Out of the corners of his vision things shifted and moved, but when he turned his head all would be motionless. It dizzied him. He splayed himself out on the timber, his back foot twitching as it left the tie behind. The exposure to the wind was stronger than he’d expected, and he struggled to dig his toes into the thin veneer of ice left by his mother. A gust tore down the canyon—he could hear it coming and see the snow torn from the trees—and they braced themselves, Caleb pressing his cheek to the ice, Elspeth crouching onto a plank. The wind clawed at his clothes and tried to loosen his grip. His chest and arms cramped. One of his fingernails cracked from digging into the wood and the pain raced up his arm and he roared. When the wind died, his mother leaned out to him and held on to his collar the rest of the way. The worst had passed, and they sped up, still cautious but with the other end in sight.
Twenty feet from the bank, Elspeth risked a glance back at Caleb and her right foot slid out from under her, and then her left. She threw out her arms and her chest hit the tie, knocking the wind from her lungs. Caleb yelled. Her legs dangled in the air. Her hands had a tenuous grip. Caleb rushed his steps but could not get to her in time. She threw one boot over the edge of the board as both hands gave out and she somehow rolled her body onto it, ending up on her back. She heard Caleb vomiting. Her breath came in quick, scratchy gasps.
Caleb wiped his mouth with his glove. He scraped loose some snow and used it to rinse. His fear at seeing his mother fall had caught him by surprise and slammed him in the gut. He was ashamed. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Elspeth waved him off. She had not yet caught her wind enough to speak. When she did, she rose, keeping her hands on the tie until she was sure of her footing. She kicked the next board free of snow and ice. “I’m okay,” she said.
As she stepped onto solid ground, the overwhelming stillness of it collapsed her. Her body quivered from the tension. Caleb joined her, his knee touching hers, and he drank from a jar of water. “I’m sorry about your father,” she said. He passed her the jar and her hand shook with the hammering of her heart.
THE BRIDGE CROSSING had sapped much of their energy, and they pressed on as they had to Watersbridge, trudging through snowdrifts as if in a trance. The breaks ceased—if they’d stopped they might not be able to start again until morning. At midday, Caleb passed a sandwich to his mother and they ate as they walked and when they drank, the water sloshed from the jar onto their chins and chests.
Elspeth’s mind had run out of ways to predict their fates, and she concentrated on how much she’d missed having her son at her side. When the snow turned to powder or they walked through a blanketed cluster of trees, she listened to his breathing, measured and soft. She moved in step with him, near enough that when the way narrowed and they had to part and pass one at a time, the cold invaded her deeper, and she wished that her wounds would return so she could rest her arm across his shoulders. The wind intensified and she lifted her scarf over her mouth and motioned for him to do the same, though she had long ago gone numb.
MIDAFTERNOON, WITH THE sun bright enough to warm their skin and peel their cheeks, they passed between two rocks that stood like the horns of some ancient beast. She stopped and hugged the boy. Caleb buried his face in her scarf. His mother rocked back and forth and he swayed with her. Over his shoulder, she looked back the way they’d come, and she followed the flight of a turkey vulture in the distance as it traced the horizon, and toward the end of its path a shock of orange flared in the distance, between a pair of trees. She thought of Charles, alone and broken in his apartment, his mementoes scattered around him.
They’d reached the end of Martin’s list. Around the bend they would see the Millard home. Caleb hoped that the farm would be as broken and empty as everything else they’d encountered, the skeletons of the brothers visible in the middle of the house like those of his siblings. It only seemed fair.
The main house sliced through the snow like an ax blade, the roof heavily pitched and punched through twice on either side by windows. The barn was like any other, though in need of paint. A majestic oak towered over everything, its bare branches seeming to gather the whole homestead in an embrace. Pens for the cattle stood empty, the snow undisturbed. The barn doors remained closed. Smoke drifted from the chimney, and they noted its lazy ascent. Elspeth took one pistol and then the other from her waist, tested their weight, and raised them, craning her head in an effort to aim. Caleb sighted down the barrel of the Ithaca.
They’d both expected something more: vines like snakes wrapped around the fences, black clouds and barking dogs, rusted cages filled with bones. A horrible screeching filled the air, and Caleb swung the shotgun left and right, trying to find the source, his finger beginning to tighten on the trigger. Elspeth stayed him with a tap to his forearm, and pointed to the roof of the barn, where a series of weather vanes lined the peak, pointing in their direction, sounding their alarms on rusted bearings. The wind died. The screeching halted, and a horse, which seemed as unnerved as they did at the disturbance, stood up in the paddock closest to the house.
CHAPTER 3
They stood in a grouping of trees with a clear view of the house, the barn, and the paddock and waited. The horse occupied i
tself rubbing against the fence and protectively trotting around its perimeter. After an hour, nothing more had happened. Elspeth untied the bedroll and tarp from her pack, shrugged out of her coat, removed her gloves, and stuffed them all out of sight at the base of a tree. Caleb followed her example, tossing aside his blankets and extra clothes. She unwound her scarf from her neck, did the same for the boy, and rolled them up and dropped them into the pile. She didn’t think the scarves would weigh them down or get in their way; she’d wanted an excuse to touch him once more.
The sound hit them both at the same time: the crunch of snow, the huff of breath. Instinctively, they looked to the house, but the noise came from somewhere on the path. She signaled for Caleb to position himself on one side of the trail behind a thick tree trunk. With her pistols raised, she inched forward until she reached the broken stump of an evergreen—jagged with splinters the size of her fingers—and took cover, aiming down the bend.
She dropped her pack. She couldn’t tell which gun to aim first but decided on Ethan’s, and tried to keep its bulk steady. All Caleb could think of was his earlier failure, and he gritted his teeth until they ached. The sounds got louder, and he blinked, his vision blurry. His heart beat in his fingertips and he could no longer feel the trigger. A man appeared between the rocks, his head down, his red hair bright in the sun.