The Kept (11 page)
“There’s enough food in there to last you,” she said.
T
hey could see Watersbridge down in the valley long before they reached it. The streets and clustered buildings were visible, and behind them the gray expanse of the lake. Caleb’s stomach knotted in anticipation. The thought that they were close pushed them, and they tempted darkness when a snow squall rushed upon them, night lowering in an instant, the snow hard and fast as rain. It took both of them to lash their tarp to a maple tree, the wind toying with the material, the snow blinding.
The branches lent some cover and they each cleared a spot down to the earth to sleep on and they ate from the sack William and Margaret had provided—salted pork, pickled beets, bread with hunks of butter. After the comforts of the couple’s house, the cold penetrated them deeper, sensing their weaknesses, until they became sore and tense. Elspeth tried not to think of the woman, how she asked to have her child, and slept a dreamless sleep, rising in the dim dawn to walk again, trailing behind Caleb, the town lost to trees and brush in the lower altitudes.
That afternoon, they came upon a burned-out building. It appeared to have once been larger than the Howell house, square but grand. Most of the frame held. Everything else had been prey to the flames. The scorched beams creaked and whistled in the wind. Caleb explored the remnants of the building, testing a step in a stairway that led to nothing. He shook a post. She saw how he changed in the midst of the charred remains—his face paled, his wide brown eyes avoided hers.
He climbed to the top of the staircase. His mother stood below, never setting foot inside the wrecked building. She coughed, a racking, terrible sound. “I burned the house down,” he said. “I burned the bodies, and the house caught fire. All I had time for was you and the rifles and a little bit of food.”
“You couldn’t bury them,” she said.
“No.”
“I understand,” she said, and she meant it, glad he’d set the fire: It gave them nothing to return to, nothing to compel them to turn back. The boy must miss it all, she thought. She wanted to give him something. “Caleb,” she said, “Watersbridge is where you were born.”
Caleb looked down at the buildings, a church steeple visible. He’d been born in a town that housed murderers. Margaret and William had difficulty discussing Watersbridge in front of him, choosing their words carefully, and he attempted to reconstruct and decipher all he could. “Mama,” he said, “if I was born there, does that make me the same as those men?” It all seemed too much to grasp at once, and he wondered how other people understood it without difficulty. He kicked at a burned beam of the house. It twanged and shook, but held.
“No, Caleb,” she said. “It doesn’t.” She wished she could reach out further than that, draw the boy from his trance, but she only had the energy to go forward and soon after he caught up and followed in her tracks.
C
ALEB FORGOT HIS
soreness once they came in view of the trails of smoke rising from the chimneys of the town, and he raced ahead. Elspeth called for him to slow down, but he didn’t listen. Above the tops of the pine trees, the steeple, topped by a golden cross, gleamed in the midday light.
When Caleb passed through a stand of oaks, a voice called out to him. The sound shocked him after such silence. By instinct, he crouched close to the snow, so close the chill stung the clean, bare skin where his hair had been cut. He put a hand to the butt of the Ithaca, tucked into the back of Jorah’s bulky jacket.
A man clambered out of a ditch. He had long, stringy hair and one of his legs was made of wood. On the end was a boot, different than his other. “Hey, there, young master.”
“Keep walking,” Caleb’s mother said.
Caleb couldn’t help it—he wanted to see what the man had to say, and didn’t wish to be rude to the very first person he met from the town of his birth, who hurried toward them, hopping out of the snowdrifts, one finger extended into the air, his white stubble shining in the reflection from the snow. “One moment, just one moment.” From his shoulders hung a pair of coveralls, so beaten and worn that the straps now comprised more thread than denim. Under them, a stained red shirt was as vivid as a cardinal against the snowy backdrop. As the man moved closer, a small clinking sound, like that of tiny chains, accompanied his steps. Caleb saw that many of the dangling threads on his coveralls held needles—dozens of them. It was as if the man needed to repair his clothes so often that removing the needles meant nothing but lost time. They twinkled when he stepped into the path. “Could you spare some food?” he asked.
“We have none,” Elspeth said, arresting Caleb’s hand at the mouth of his pack.
The man scratched his chin; a welt bloomed beneath his fingers, as vibrant as his shirt. “Some coin, then? A tad of copper for the coffers?”
Elspeth moved in front of Caleb. “We have none,” she repeated.
“Well, then, good day to you, sir,” the man said, and stepped out of the path. In the darkness beneath the trees he ran his tongue over his teeth. Elspeth placed her body between the man and the boy, thinking that if they could put him behind them without incident, they were luckier than she imagined. “If you should happen to find some,” the man said, “my brother, London, owns the finest inn in town, the Elm.”
Elspeth took the boy’s shoulder and kept him moving, not daring to look back and find the man upon them, a blade bright in his hand. With each step, however, her grip slackened.
Caleb’s excitement for Watersbridge turned into something dark. His lack of knowledge already frightened him, like he’d only just come out of hibernation into a new world.
The smells of the town—bacon frying, horse excrement, fires burning—reached them before Elspeth let go of the boy. Once she did, Caleb asked, “Why did that man call you sir?”
“Some people don’t know what they’re saying,” Elspeth answered. “Remember when your father had the fever?” The days then had been longer than ever for Elspeth, who dreaded nothing more than being stuck in that house for a whole winter as she watched out the window and in tumbled the first snow clouds. The children would ask her questions, and she would dream of their hands on her, their small, clamoring hands, all craving, needing, demanding something she could not provide. “For some people, the fever never breaks, and they wander through the world of God with a piece of the Devil burning a hole through their brain, whispering into their ears.”
“Father had the Devil in his brain?” Caleb asked, thinking this explained a great deal, that the small graveyard might have been the answer to that call.
“No, no, the Devil burrows down deep in some people, but not in your father, and not in you.”
Caleb thought of the acrid smoke filling the pantry, the ticking of his mother’s blood on the kitchen floor. He recalled his pride, the blossom of heat in his heart at having avenged his family. Elspeth relived the train trips, the babies, the families, and she again felt the grief of their loss. And as they neared the city, the wind erasing their journey, each of their heads rang with the belief that the Devil did indeed nestle in their skulls, and their foreheads burned with the sweat of his wicked imagination.
C
aleb trailed after his mother through the muddy streets, the snow compressed by boots, wheels, and hooves, and held his head down. He’d never seen so many men, or heard such thunderous noise. Every time he looked up, he worried that his chest would cave in and that the Devil picking at his brain would catch fire. Everything, it seemed, moved. “Are we going to the Elm Inn now?” he asked, twice, repeating himself to be heard above the din.
She grabbed hold of the boy’s jacket and stopped him from colliding with a finely dressed man, who tipped his hat to Elspeth and hurried past. At her insistence, Caleb had jammed his shotgun into his pack, and had wrapped the protruding barrel with a blanket. She adjusted it roughly before they entered the main street, where carts passed freely down the center, and men clomped down the pine walkways and mucked through the foul streets shoulder to shoulder.
“But that man told us,” he started.
“We can’t believe him, Caleb,” she said. “Some people tell you what you want to hear, others tell you what they want to say, and they can’t all be the truth. Here, disbelief is as important as belief. Maybe more.” With that, she took his sleeve in hand, and the two of them entered the thoroughfare. He struggled to keep up. There could be no leisure in this town, she knew, and the boy would have to understand that. He could no longer be a child. But she couldn’t bear watching it dawn on him.
The street opened into a small town green, the snow untouched and glassy. At the head stood an imposing church, whiter than the snow, its details lost in the glare of the sun. Behind it, a massive graveyard as big as the town itself stretched up a slow-rising hill. On either side of the green, as if lining up for communion, sat the various shops and stores, post office and barbershop, necessary to keep a small town alive. To the west, through the trees, the great Lake Erie, whose slate gray dormancy joined a sky that mirrored its color. Down the slope, two slivers of land jutted out into the water like a pair of hands straining for each other but never quite getting there, the almost-bridge that gave the town its name. In the embrace of those arms of land, men worked hauling ice from the lake to a boxy icehouse covered in workers like so many ants.
Elspeth forgot about the boy and released her grip on his coat. She almost expected the church bells to ring at her arrival, a sinner come to be burned. She had been in this church, prayed among these people, and buried her nose and mouth in her sleeve to block out the dust as she raced down these streets, Caleb nothing but a stolen babe swaddled in her arms.
T
HE BRICK &
Feather Hotel offered rooms to let closest to the church—near enough that as they mounted the front steps, the bells intoning two o’clock rattled the panes of glass, shaking the posted notes. Elspeth remembered the hotel as a peaceable place. She gave Caleb the money to rent the room and quickly explained what to do, knowing that sooner or later her face would be recognized. It was a lesson, she said to the child, a test. She put her back to the wall and rested in a shadowed alcove next to a clock that ticked slowly and steadily. The rhythm of the pendulum echoed in her injuries as it reverberated through the wall.
The man at the counter introduced himself as Frank and met Caleb with a smile and Caleb responded in kind. Frank wore a crisp white shirt and a brown checked vest, upon which he wiped his glasses. His thick black hair had been combed away from his face and neatly parted on the left side. Caleb did as he was asked, and requested a room. He returned to his mother with the change cupped in his hands like eggs in a nest. They took the stairs, Elspeth obscured by the boy. In their arms they clutched their filthy and threadbare belongings.
“Sir,” Frank said, and stepped out from behind his desk.
Elspeth didn’t stop.
“Oh, sir.”
Frank handed Caleb a tarnished bronze key.
“It’d be difficult to get into your room without this,” he said. “Maybe you should give it to your father for safekeeping.”
Elspeth’s cheeks flushed hot. It was the second time she’d been mistaken for a man. She didn’t dare turn around. She recognized the man’s tone and stilted speech; he thought Caleb was daft. He’d gotten them both wrong.
“Thank you,” Caleb said. “Sorry.”
The words sounded up the stairwell.
The room was cramped, the two beds set in the shape of an L against the walls, an uneven-legged dresser against another. The wallpaper peeled from the wood, and it rustled in the wind that sought out the gaps in the beaten building. In the crook between the two beds sat a wooden stool, and atop that, a chamber pot. Elspeth set her pack down at the foot of one of the beds. Caleb stayed in the doorway, his eyes squeezed with worry. “It’s okay,” she said.
His feet didn’t respond. Several times he had to tell himself to walk before he could take even one step into the room and slide the pack from his shoulders. It slumped to the floorboards. Snow melted and dripped from their clothes.
“Do you prefer one of the beds to the other?” Elspeth tried to sound pleased.
He looked from the bed closest to the door, its heavy blanket faded to a dull pink, to the other, under the window, its honeycomb bedspread worn to holes in places. He heard a horse clop by in the street below and thought of his barn, the vast, open space, the clean air, his animals. “By the window.” He shuffled over and sat on the bed. The springs shrieked. He flinched.
The enormity of the whole enterprise struck Elspeth with the child in front of her, the shotgun he pulled from his pack large in his hands, and she clasped the cross at her neck for something to hold on to. He cracked the breech, checked the shells, and snapped it back into place, and his face loosened and he relaxed against the wall. She joined him at the window and pushed the curtain aside. The streets teemed with people, each one a possible murderer, each one a possible threat to her. To him. She forced a grin and asked if he was hungry and he said yes. She was going to say they needed a bath first, a proper washing, but he looked so doleful and nervous that she changed her mind.
T
HEY ENTERED THE
first restaurant they saw and sat down at the table closest to the door. Caleb scrutinized the men who occupied the other tables, and Elspeth—in turn—studied his expression for some recognition, a flicker of fear or a jolt of surprise. She wished she’d brought a gun with her, and told herself that their next stop would be the mercantile to purchase a pistol, something to tuck into her belt or the calf of her boot. Then she saw the familiar lump at Caleb’s side—the barrel he covered with the scarf at his neck and the stock was hidden in the folds of Jorah’s coat. The gun was long but not cumbersome, and one could dismiss it if they didn’t know to look for it. She was unsure if its presence made her feel better or worse.
She read the menu posted on a slate above the counter to Caleb, and he sounded out the words and repeated them under his breath. “So we ask for it and someone brings it to us?” Elspeth continued without explaining—ham, sausage, steak, bacon and eggs. “So we use some of the money we have left from the hotel?” She said they did and thought the more she answered his questions the more dependent he would become and the less he would attempt to understand on his own.
Caleb went to the counter and ordered steak and eggs for himself and sausage and potatoes for his mother. Rather than carrying the remaining money in his cupped hands, he slid it into his front pocket like he’d seen the other customers do. It occurred to him that they wouldn’t find the men they were searching for in such a place: bright light streaming through the white curtains, carefully painted walls and counters, tidy writing on the slate. He had imagined the killers so many times, and in none of his nightmares or daydreams did they occupy seats in sunshine, eating ham, their napkins tucked into their collars, reading the newspaper. These people were not quite wrong enough to have murdered his family.
Alone at the table, trying to sit as straight as possible with the pain in her side flaring at her every breath, Elspeth monitored Caleb at the counter, waiting for their food. She heard footsteps approach and a loud throat-clearing before she turned to see a man with curly, dazzlingly red hair and a moustache—both of which were patchy. He worried his fingers along the brim of the hat he carried in his hands.
“Sir, if I may,” he said, and waved at the empty seat. Again she’d been confused for a man, and on this occasion, she realized how the mistake had been made—her hat slung low, her face dirty, her hair shorn, her shape covered by Jorah’s old clothes, and her chest bandaged so tightly that it constricted not only her breathing, but her breasts. God had seen fit to hide her, but His purpose eluded her. The man placed himself at the very edge of the chair before she could answer. “My name is Charles Heather. I work for the Great Lakes Ice Company,” he said, “and my partner broke his leg earlier this month. It was my fault.” Charles Heather was on the verge of tears. “The company told me to find a stout man to replace him before the month was up, or I’d be let go. Are you, by chance, looking for work?”
Elspeth considered her options. They needed time to find the three men, and she’d never seen the killers. The descriptions that Caleb and William gave merely served to confuse her; they only spoke of the evil the killers exuded and the red scarves they wore. Elspeth had little money, as she’d left most of it with William and Margaret, a gesture she recognized as pointless. Most important, she understood her weakness, and the job would keep her from a birthing room. “I’m in need of something, yes.” She lowered her voice an octave. “What’s the work?”
Charles shifted back on his seat. He let out a hot breath. “Chopping ice from the lake and hauling it. You look like a strong enough fellow, but the work is hard, I won’t lie.”
Elspeth didn’t doubt his honesty despite the nerves betrayed by his mannerisms. “But this accident—you caused it? What’s to say you don’t break my arm? Or kill me? Is the work so dangerous?”
Charles’s fingers moved even more swiftly around the brim of his hat. He tapped his foot. “Yes, yes, I did cause the accident. I thought I had secured the pincers, but the ice fell onto my partner’s shoulder. I need to make amends to him, to his wife and family.”
Amends. Elspeth liked how it sounded. Charles asked her name.
“Jorah,” she said, unable to conjure anything else. She had never used her real name in town, as she’d promised her husband she wouldn’t from her very first trips away. “Jorah van Tessel.”
Charles indicated Caleb with nod. “You’re about a hundred and eleven short.”
“I’m sorry?” Elspeth said. The question had already slipped out when she wished she could retrieve it; something about it had sounded too feminine, and she decided to limit herself to the fewest syllables possible.
“The children of Jorah, an hundred and twelve
,” Charles recited. “Your name. From the Bible. Ezra. Surely you knew that.”
“You know your Book well.” She glanced at the men seated around the room and—despite the pain it caused her—pushed her knees outward and hunched her shoulders, trying to copy their poses.
“My mother used to cover the windows in the summer to keep the heat out, and one summer—a particularly penniless summer—my mother had to use the pages of our Bible. She said no one reads Ezra. I guess she was wrong.”
“I guess so.” She wondered what Jorah meant by choosing his name—she had yet to come home with one child—much less all of them—when he took it. Maybe the appeal truly had been the way the word sounded, and its softness next to the harsh Lothute.
“So when I went to bed at night, and woke up in the morning, there it would be, Ezra, staring right at me.” She expected Charles to start talking about Faith and Fate and she prepared herself. “I guess somehow I memorized it. Probably the only part of the Bible I could quote you, to be honest.” He smiled.
Elspeth said, “All right.”
Charles Heather stood and clapped his hands together. “You’ll do it?”
She said she would.
Caleb, meanwhile, had been fascinated by the bustle of the kitchen through the open door. He could barely fathom food in such quantities—great bowls the size of washbasins laden with eggs, buckets dripping with batter for hotcakes and corn bread, links of sausage spooled like twine, piles of sugar as big as his head, row after row of glass jars of cider—it was like a fantasy. But the sound of Charles Heather clapping his hands startled him from his trance, and he turned with surprise to see the red-haired man standing over his mother, his bald spot shining in the afternoon light.
Caleb touched the Ithaca at his side, wondering how quickly he could untangle it from his scarf and yank it from the depths of the coat. He could not hear their conversation over the racket of the dining room. The man appeared gentle enough and his mother looked unconcerned. However, by the manner in which she cocked her neck upward, leaned out over the table, her arms crossed, her hands at her elbows, and adjusted herself every few seconds, he worried for her wounds.
Two heavy plates banged onto the counter behind him, and he took one in each hand, his elbow pressing his Ithaca into his side reassuringly. When he reached their table, the red-haired man readjusted the knife and fork where he’d unsettled them. “This must be your son—you can tell,” he said and introduced himself to Caleb, who allowed the man to pump his hand up and down with vigor. “I won’t interrupt your meal any further,” Charles said, tugging his gloves onto his hands. “Mister—I’m sorry, did you tell me your last name?” His rusty brows knitted together.
“Van Tessel,” she said. “Jorah van Tessel.”
Caleb whimpered and Elspeth halted him with a glance. He knew better than to question the tone and tenor her voice had taken on.
“I shall remember it always,” Charles said, with heavy import, and laughed. Elspeth didn’t respond, and he pressed his hat onto his head. He elbowed Caleb and said, “Your father is a good man.” Caleb picked up his fork and knife. “Right,” Charles said, “I’ll expect you at four o’clock to meet with Mr. Wallace at the Great Lakes Ice Company. Do you know where it is?”