The Kept (19 page)
Caleb sat on the edge of the naked mattress.
Sometime later, Ellabelle tiptoed in, her stocking feet soundless on the wood. She sat so close their legs touched and asked what was happening. “That doesn’t sound right,” she said after he’d repeated what White had told him. “Shane’s not the type. Trust me.” She elbowed Caleb in the ribs playfully. “I can always tell.”
Under the vacant stare of the deer, Caleb suddenly longed to understand what transpired behind the closed doors. His mouth opened and he knew Ellabelle would answer, but he couldn’t figure out how to ask.
“Do you think,” she said, “that this has something to do with your mother?”
His mouth clapped shut on his question. “No,” he said. He thought of the earthen mounds and the men they contained. He couldn’t figure out how the murderers could have stumbled upon their farm by accident. They were looking for them, and they’d found them. Perhaps they’d found him as well. The thought didn’t frighten him, but filled him with stillness.
E
LSPETH RETREATED TO
the edge of the water, where the first block of ice made its way to them, pushed along by the polemen, all in shadow. Charles readied the crane and the pincers and rubbed an oil-covered rag at the hinges. His cheeks had swollen from rubbing away the traces of his tears. They worked in silence.
With two blocks on the sled, the horses pawing at the ground, shuffling, ready to work, a crack like a gunshot echoed across the lake. Elspeth stopped. Charles looked stricken. For an instant she thought he’d been shot.
“The icehouse,” he said.
A low rumble followed by a tremendous crashing shook the ground beneath them. Elspeth almost toppled over. The noise continued, never ending. The horses reared and one took off running, forcing the other with it. The blocks of ice had not been secured, and one slipped from the sled and the whole apparatus lurched onto its side, the other block toppling over and charging across the packed snow. Elspeth heard the tightening of the leather as the animals strained against the upended sled. Another unearthly crack sounded out from the icehouse. The horses galloped hard, the sled tearing the earth behind them and knocking over one of the light posts, then another, and the lanterns spilled their kerosene onto the snow, creating tiny suns, perfect orbs of flame.
Charles had already made it halfway up the hill before the rumbling stopped and the screams started, his cleats kicking up snow behind him, stumbling in the great gashes left by the horses. Elspeth followed far behind, passed by some of the men who worked on the lake, their jackets covered in a silvery glaze like sleet. The icehouse loomed above her, three stories of rough-hewn wood, looking weather-beaten but permanent. From the open door, cries of pain and alarm exploded and carried out over their abandoned posts.
Once inside, all was chaos. Blocks of ice the size of sheep had crashed to the ground and lay in pieces in the loose array of a herd, and between and among them lay the dozens of men who had been unfortunate enough to work in their shadow. The giant towers that had pitched forward left a gaping hole in the middle of the icehouse like a missing tooth, and an unholy light shone through the gap onto the floor, setting the horror in sharp relief. Arms and legs sprouted between shards of ice, as if mountains had sprung up without warning and trapped men in their rocky surface. Some worked to lash the remaining pillars to the railings of the upstairs catwalk, which Elspeth immediately understood to be not only pointless, but also potentially lethal to everyone in the building: If those blocks should fall, they could bring the entire building down with them. Others milled about, gathering in groups to pull, to lift, trying to free those who’d been ensnared by the avalanche. The agonized shrieks were unbearable.
Elspeth got caught up in the stream of men, whose current carried her down the wide ramp—scarred from the constant sliding of the sleds—to the floor, stepping over and across smaller pieces of ice that had slid the twenty feet or so to the door. There, a ruddy-faced man with blood spilling from a thin cut on his forehead yelled for her to take a side of a block of ice, through which she could make out the distorted image of a body. Elspeth took hold. She’d left her gloves at the crane and the cold burned her fingers. Her cleats, too, were at the edge of the water and the worn treads of her boots struggled to gain traction. The man counted to three and groaned loudly. Elspeth pushed as long as she could, until her arms caught fire and the breath burst from her mouth, and she fell to the ground as if all that had been holding her together was the air she kept in her lungs. They rested. They counted to three and tried again. It didn’t move. Charles elbowed Elspeth to the side to get his hands on the block as well, and the bloodied man counted. This time the ice slid away, and exposed a man driven into the dirt floor. They didn’t wait long—he was dead.
Charles put a hand to her shoulder and propelled her on to the next group, who were trying to move four nearly whole blocks from two men. They seemed to be on top of one another, three arms intertwining and jutting out from the ice. Elspeth looked around at the faces of the men gathered, grim and covered in muck and blood. She knew, as they all did, that their efforts were futile. But they needed to do something, to loose their fear on some task. They moved one chunk, and then another. The men had been crushed together, their cheeks touching, almost embracing. Blood mingled in the dirt floor.
Loud pops issued forth from the ice as it settled. Men shouted for help. A few others with broken limbs or superficial wounds screamed in pain, while others squeezed their heads with their hands, uninjured but stricken by the dreadful sight of a relative or friend taken from the world by nothing more than water.
Charles took a fistful of her coat and urged her along again. One foot, covered in a hole-filled sock, darned many times over, extended out from beneath a jagged hunk of ice. A boot lay untied a few inches away. The two of them managed to push the ice aside and beneath it was a boy. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. The ice had dashed in the right side of his skull, and his face there had been flattened and split at the line of his scalp, revealing stark white bone and wet blood, purple from the cold. His mouth gaped open in surprise. In his hand he held a sheet of paper. Before she could tell him to leave it, Charles wrenched the message from the boy’s grip. He held it out to her and when she didn’t take it right away he dropped it to the bloody earth.
Her numb fingers searched it out in the muck. The note read: “
Stephen—Lunch at Noon? Meet me in Front of the Church.—Lucy.
” Elspeth placed it upon the boy’s chest and draped one of his arms across it to hold it in place. With shaking fingers, she pressed his eyelids shut.
A look crossed Charles’s face, one he tried to erase immediately but an impression remained like a faded scar. He stepped nimbly across the ice-strewn terrain and out the open door, where the sun had risen and turned the sky a dull gray. He darted off in the direction of town as if yanked on a string and Elspeth followed. She tripped in the ditch left by the horses when they’d stampeded away and regained her balance without so much as a glance backward from him. He disappeared down a path made by the workers in the mornings; the trail through the evergreens took them out of the wind and to and from the apartment buildings on the edge of town. It sloped downward, but the men had kicked footholds wide and even like glass steps.
At first she thought the same impulse that had driven Charles to the accident repelled him with equal speed, but she caught sight—between the slender trunks of the pines—of a man in a waistcoat and a corduroy cap twenty paces ahead of him. She heard Charles cry out but the man didn’t break stride. Charles ran, even his cleated boots skidding, each time righting himself with a hand to the icy path, and when he got close enough, he lunged and threw both arms around the harried man. A hundred yards away, Elspeth rushed down the slick steps, thinking she would break up the fight before Charles killed him. Instead, Charles wheeled the man around and kissed him.
Like she’d heard a bullet whistling past, Elspeth ducked. The man didn’t fight Charles at first, but after a long embrace he clutched Charles’s shoulders and shoved him down a small embankment. Torn, the man hesitated and then hurried away. Elspeth stayed hidden and took stock of the quiet forest: No one else had seen.
Charles dragged himself onto the path and sat with his feet tucked under his thighs, his chin sunk to his chest, and his arms wrapped about himself. As she approached, he stood and she half expected him to kiss her, too, especially as his hand came to her neck tenderly. Then he started to squeeze. “Charles,” she said, before his thumb closed off her windpipe. She didn’t fight him; her final penance had come.
He gripped her throat tighter, and pointed a finger at her, a voiceless threat, and spots of light filled her vision and her legs began to go limp. She wondered what he saw in her eyes as she died. His attention shifted to something on the ground and he released her, and she collapsed, forgotten. She let her body relax and gathered air into her lungs. Charles pounced at a dark leather glove, finer than the unevenly stitched pairs they wore out day by day. He placed the opening over his mouth and breathed in hard enough to wilt the fingers. He eased the glove onto his hand and flexed it. Lost in himself, he left her on her back, gasping and retching. The lights in her eyes flashed across the gray sky like shooting stars, and then faded away.
A
SOFT KNOCK
sounded at the door. Caleb tapped the Colt at the small of his back. Ellabelle took his other hand in hers.
Martin Shane entered. The light from the lamp cast shadows onto his face. Caleb inched the pistol from his waist and cocked the hammer. Martin removed his hat and placed it on the dresser. His hands shook, Caleb guessed from drink, but as Martin moved closer and leaned down, Caleb saw that he was crying. He’d never seen such a large man cry before. Martin’s unsteady fist wiped his nose and he dropped onto his knees, shuffling forward on them, his wet eyes fixed on Caleb. A dreamlike peace had come over him and he reached out to touch Caleb, though he was a yard away. Caleb started to sweat and his fingers went numb where he clutched the pistol.
Ellabelle hugged Caleb tight. “What are you doing?” she asked Martin.
Thunderous footsteps sounded on the walkway before London White stormed into the room, followed closely by Ethan. “Martin Shane,” White said. Ethan pulled a sawed-off shotgun from somewhere in his massive bulk and aimed it at Shane’s head, but Shane didn’t flinch, didn’t stop his movement toward Caleb. When he got close enough, Shane lifted Caleb’s chin with one finger. The light flooded his face. He was terrified.
“Hell, maybe I was wrong,” Ellabelle said. “Maybe he does want to fuck you.”
Caleb didn’t think he could move to raise the pistol.
“Martin Shane,” White said again. “Step back from that boy or Ethan will take your head clean off.”
The small click of Ethan’s gun being cocked froze everyone in the room and seemed to bring some sense back to Martin. The big man stepped forward and pressed the gun into the base of Martin’s skull. He pushed hard enough to bend Martin’s head forward, but his eyes never left Caleb.
“It’s okay,” Shane said. “I’m this boy’s uncle.”
T
he smell of urine made Caleb wince. Ethan had dragged Martin away, and White had said to Caleb, “We’re going to settle all this out,” then followed Ethan out of the room. A gunshot rang out downstairs, and Caleb flinched. Ellabelle put her hand on his shoulder to steady him. Caleb worried that they’d shot Martin rather than hear his story, and that in letting it happen, he’d killed a man the same as his father or London White.
“Wasn’t him,” Ellabelle said, as if hearing his thoughts. “That came from a card table.” She got him to his feet and giggled. “You work here long enough, you know where the bullets are headed.” The exchange with Martin had left Caleb with nothing. His body could do little but tremble. He didn’t blanch when Ellabelle peeled his wet pants from his body, the fabric producing a sucking sound when it pulled away from his flesh, the pistol falling from his waist and onto the floor. This time they both jumped. If Ellabelle had been offended by the presence of the weapon, nothing she said or did betrayed it; she simply put the pistol on the side table.
“I’ve never had an uncle,” Caleb said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not true. This happens every so often.” She eased him back to the bed. Caleb’s body went slack and he rested his head on the stained pillow.
Ellabelle went over him with a warm washcloth, wiping clean every crease of his body. He didn’t possess the energy to refuse. After she finished bathing him, she patted him dry with a soft cloth, and soon the scent of rose powder reached his nose. Its scent lingered in the hallways, and at times he would see one of the women slap a handful into each of her armpits before she rang her bell for another client.
Ellabelle helped him crawl under the sheets. She pulled the curtains on the glaring winter day and snuffed out a candle that burned on the table beside his pistol. “Sweet dreams,” she said.
E
LSPETH QUIVERED WITH
draining adrenaline. She tried to piece things together, but they wouldn’t fit. She walked back to the icehouse and looped her scarf around her neck twice, afraid that Charles’s hands had left a bruise, not that anyone would notice with all of the broken and wounded walking dazed through the snow. She heard the cry of a child, the baby in the train car, and her heart leapt, and she turned her head this way and that, trying to pick out where it came from, before an unattended sheep wandered by her, its bleating something her mind had twisted into something it wasn’t. One man—whom she didn’t recognize—dropped to his knees not far from her, a mangled mess at the end of his arm. He gripped his wrist with one hand and watched as the blood drained from the tips of his fingers, drawing dots and then lines in the tamped snow between his legs. Elspeth knelt beside him. He looked at her with glazed eyes. She reached for his wrist and lifted his arm higher, above his head. The bleeding slowed. He leaned against her. The blood dripped warm onto her shoulder and then her cheek. She drew his belt from his pants, which elicited a grunt of irritation or query from him, circled it around his arm and pulled tight. With the knife from his sheath she dug out a new notch in the leather and cinched the belt. A frantic man with a black bag in his blood-soaked hands knocked Elspeth out of the way and took over. He helped the injured man up and ushered him elsewhere without a word. Once he’d left, Elspeth realized it had been Owen, the bag in his hands very much like his father’s.
The horses were gone, the screaming had for the most part stopped, and the milling workers had either taken up in small groups or disappeared—to where she had no idea. No one had made an announcement of any kind. No one had taken charge. She sat down on the edge of a trough, the water iced over, the horses’ saliva dried in swirls and eddies. Fresh-looking men wandered from person to person, asking what could be done—their questions joining her own in a vast babble—and Elspeth knew they’d come running from town, alerted by the shaking of the ground and the screams that carried across the ice. Others created their own tasks: Some pulled the bodies from the icehouse and covered them in canvas; some had gone to work repairing the gouges in the earth from the horses’ wayward journey; and four men worked to move the blocks of ice that had fallen from the sled, but they didn’t seem to have any destination in mind but toward their origin, toward the lake.
L
ONDON WHITE ROUSED
Caleb none too gently. He saw a pile of new clothes on the chair in the corner and White holding the Colt. He yearned to be back in his bed at the Brick & Feather, with its raucous springs and thin blankets, but the distance to the hotel had grown by miles since Martin Shane had arrived. As Caleb opened his mouth to ask why White had woken him, White pointed the pistol at him, and took aim. He made a light popping sound with his mouth—the sound of a tiny gunshot—then let the weapon dangle from his finger. He twirled the Colt, caught it in his fist, and replaced it on the table. His unoccupied hands pulled his watch from his pocket and he began to wind. “Is it true?” he asked.
Long ago on the unfinished road, his mother had told him she had no brothers or sisters. Jorah was not his father, but even if he was, he and Martin shared no visible similarities. He couldn’t be his uncle, but somehow he felt familiar, as if they’d spoken before in a dream.
“Because if it
is
true, well, then, we have a whole set of problems.” The winding of the watch became ferocious. White sighed in irritation at what his hands had been up to while he had been distracted, and he threw the watch next to Caleb’s pistol.
“Then it’s not true,” Caleb said.
“That’s no kind of an answer,” White said. “What trouble are you in?”
“I’m not,” Caleb said.
“We don’t have many twelve-year-olds wander in here, Caleb. Much less twelve-year-olds with pistols tucked into their waistbands.” Caleb wondered whether White had a gift for spotting sin. He witnessed enough of it; perhaps it revealed itself to him. Caleb fidgeted in the bed, even more aware of his nakedness beneath the sheets. “If you’re in trouble and you’re honest with me about it, I will take care of it.”
Caleb pondered this opportunity for long enough that White took it as an answer, and patted Caleb’s cheek with reassurance. He checked himself in the mirror, washed his hands, and slapped his face with water. As he watched his own reflection he said to himself or to Caleb, “Of course not. Martin has been prone to outbursts like this. If you were indeed the Shane boy, you would be much . . .” White inspected Caleb in the glass, his head tilting this way and that, squinting. In answer, White pulled the sheets up tight around Caleb’s neck. “No,” he said finally, after much study. “No.”
“Mr. White,” Caleb said, “what’s happening?”
White pressed his hair into place, removed his jacket, slapped it with an open palm—the dust glittering silver in the light from between the curtains—and then slid it back across his shoulders, where it fit like a second skin. “The proper question is,” he said, “how do we keep this from happening again?” He fetched his watch from the bedside table, held it up to his ear, secured the chain, and situated it in his vest pocket. He buttoned his jacket. His hand moved over Caleb’s Colt. “Turns out you might need this.” White rotated the gun on the table so that the grip faced Caleb. The unsteady sensation Martin had set upon him flooded back stronger, because there were so many things he didn’t know. He wondered if he was the Shane boy. The image of Shane’s neck bulging beneath Ethan’s arm came back to him and he said, “Mr. White, please don’t kill him. Don’t kill Mr. Shane.”
White laughed. “Son,” he said, “what good would that do me?”
A
MAN STOOD
over a cart full of the dead with the Bible in a tremulous hand. His legs swayed on the cart bench, and he periodically bent down to steady himself. He wore denim overalls and a hole-filled shirt: not the uniform of a holy man. He commenced a passage, then stammered and wiped something from the pages with his forearm, flipped through them, the wind rustling the fine paper, the sound like wings flapping. He struggled to keep his place. “Damn it,” he said as he lost his balance, regained it momentarily, then slipped from the cart, the Bible falling from his hands. He scurried after the book, and when he picked it up again he thumped it against his thigh to rid it of snow. Perhaps realizing what he’d done, he cradled the Bible in his outstretched palms, as if to ask His forgiveness for the rough treatment.
Elspeth watched this from the edge of the trough where she’d sat—covered in gore—for almost two hours. On occasion, a doctor—or someone acting as one—would lean down and ask if she’d been hurt and she would shake her head without speaking. One of them had handed her a cigarette before he ran off, in the direction of what she didn’t know. She rolled the cigarette between her fingertips, crushing it, only dimly observing the tobacco drift to the ground, and the paper being taken by the wind when it had emptied.
The children came in an endless loop: stealing them, watching them grow older, listening as their sounds crystallized into words, Dr. Watt taking the baby from her outstretched arms and the elation ebbing from her body, the child she’d dropped on the train tracks crying out to her. Once, after a long absence, she’d sat down to a dinner that Mary had cooked, something that had apparently become customary with her gone, and the children all looked to Elspeth, expectant. How their shrill voices had angered her, how she’d wished they would stare at something else. They seemed hardly to blink. The angrier she became, the less they watched, and this stoked her fury. Caleb had been one of the last to look away, eating the center of his bread, pressing it against his mouth, licking off the butter.
The would-be preacher read aloud, “
But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; and there a wall fell upon twenty and seven thousand of the men that were left
.” He frowned and glanced around the bustling scene, but when no one took any notice of him—he did not spy Elspeth watching him—he pressed on. “
And Benhadad fled, and came into the city, into an inner chamber
.”
Elspeth missed Jorah. It came to her like waking from a nightmare. Jorah would be able to find the perfect passage for this man, to give him the strength he needed to deal with the crushed bodies gathered in a heap at his feet. On her voyages into the city, she rarely thought of her husband—even when a man took a shine to her she declined out of her own disinterest, not out of loyalty to the husband who’d stayed on as her protector through all of her sins. Another man, after all, served her no purpose. But in the dimming sun, with all the horrors of the day receding, she wanted to see her husband, to touch the bony bumps on his shoulders, chalked with dry sweat, and have him kiss the top of her head where her hair parted.
The preacher’s brow furrowed and the corners of his mouth tipped again, and he rifled through the pages. Apparently dissatisfied, he returned to where his finger had marked the page he’d begun and he continued, “
And his servants said unto him, Behold now, we have heard that the kings of the house of Israel are merciful kings: let us, I pray thee, put sackcloth on our loins, and ropes upon our heads, and go out to the king of Israel: peradventure he will save thy life
.” Even the casual listener could tell that the man hadn’t picked a suitable passage, but Elspeth forgave him—as he apparently did himself—for he left the cart and walked away in the middle of another verse.
“That did not go well,” a voice from behind Elspeth said. Edward Wallace blotted out the sky. He leaned on his cane and smoked from a pipe. In general, he appeared unbothered by the events that surrounded him.
“I suppose not,” Elspeth said. Two men dragged a dead horse up from the lake.
“I hear you acquitted yourself well today, Jorah van Tessel,” Wallace said. Bile rose in her throat. “Perhaps in pairing you with Charles we’ve underestimated you.”
The mention of Charles made her blush. All of the jokes the men in the office told and the strange, oblique allusions coalesced in her head. “I don’t believe so, sir.”
“So are we in agreement?”
“No—I meant, sir, that I don’t think that’s the case. I enjoy the work.”
Wallace grunted, and with a crackling of bones and joints, sat down next to her. He coughed a few times and they waited until his wheezing subsided. “In truth, Jorah, most of these men are meant for nothing more than this.” He gestured with his cane to the panorama around them. The sun had escaped the tree line and drifted out over the lake and turned gold in its descent, Erie with it. In this new glow, the men moving the dead from the icehouse and the rest making repairs and consoling one another turned to shining statues.
“Come with me,” Wallace said, and rose with the help of his cane.
E
LLABELLE HAD WARNED
Caleb not to spend time in the stables. “Not one good thing happens there,” she said. Between the stalls, however, the heat from the animals chased the chill from his bones and a long-lost security welcomed him. A man named Gerry logged the comings and goings of horses, carts, and carriages. Caleb didn’t like his leer when the night wore on and he’d snuck too many drinks from the bar, or how he lingered in the Elm as often as he could, loitering by the women’s rooms, wearing an evil grin and pinching their rear ends, which always made them squeal and slap his shoulder. If Gerry had even slightly resembled one of the killers with his wiry strands of hair and yellowed teeth, Caleb would’ve shot him on the spot. Or so he told himself.
Night had fallen. The noise from the Elm reached into the stables, and so Caleb walked farther into its darkness, to the end of the stalls. The quiet eased the tension between his eyes. One stall held no horses; the latch had been broken from the wood. Caleb hooked his leg up and over the rails with a practiced agility and soon he’d fallen asleep in the hay.
He hadn’t been there long when he heard loud voices. Caleb knew Gerry’s slur, but the other voice didn’t conjure a face as easily. “Aw, hell. White don’t know what he’s doing from one day to the next,” Gerry said. “From one minute to the next, even.”