The Kept (25 page)
“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.
E
LLABELLE’S CLUMSY FOOTSTEPS
entered the room. Caleb lay on the floor. He couldn’t control his breathing: It came 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.
E
LSPETH 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.
C
aleb 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 holes 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.
T
HE DRESS SHOP
in Watersbridge didn’t open often. A sign in the window proclaimed in flowery script,
FOR BOUTIQUE APPOINTMENTS, PLEASE SEE MR. JAKOB ROTH, MERCANTILE.
When Elspeth peered in, however, a woman bent close to a dress on an armless torso, pins in her mouth. This woman, the same woman who had waved to her—one of the only small kindnesses she’d met in Watersbridge—was also captured in dozens of photographs in the back of the store. A tiny light appeared in the dark, almost forgotten place Elspeth had reserved for God. Bells signaled her arrival.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman asked. Elspeth said no, and the dressmaker remained focused on her work. “That’s okay. How can I help you?”
“Something simple,” Elspeth answered. “For my wife.” The store wasn’t much bigger than the room she’d shared with Jorah, one side lined with bolts of fabric on long spindles, another contained shelves loaded with folded dresses, some labeled with a name in the same fluid script as the sign. The occasional glinting pin and a few small scraps of fabric, too small even for a pocket, dotted the floor.
“Would you like to come back with her?” the woman asked. She fixed the hem of the dress an inch higher, stepped back, tilted her head this way and that, and undid the pins to let the hem fall back to its original length.
“She’s not here,” Elspeth said. “But she’s about my size.”
The woman glanced back at her—the first time she’d done so—removed a piece of lace from an embroidered box, and spun it around the neck of the dress. “Have many people noticed?”
Elspeth stopped protesting before she could even start. Her broken nose pulsed. Her vision went black, then white, then a hazy confusion of both. “Not many, I hope.”
“People don’t pay attention to anything but themselves these days.” She emitted a grunt of exasperation at the dress and wrapped the lace around her hand to tidy it. “You stopped binding your bosom.”
Elspeth noticed her shirt dipped in the center, a subtle shadow, nothing more.
The dressmaker chewed on the end of the tape measure she had around her neck. She removed a dress from one of the shelves. The fabric was heavy but beautiful, a deep blue, shiny but not ostentatious, with careful buttons and clasps. It looked expensive, but between the flood of emotion and fears that overpowered her, Elspeth couldn’t object. The woman tapped the nameplate affixed to the now-empty shelf.
ROBERTSON,
it said. “Dead,” the dressmaker said. “Don’t worry about the cost—I’ll be glad it can go to someone.” She got out a sheet of paper and wrote a note in her long, looping scrawl and once finished, she folded it twice and handed it to Elspeth. “Take this to my husband at the mercantile. Only him. Only Jakob.”
Luck had proved so hard to come by that she didn’t dare spoil the miracle by asking questions. Instead, she offered her thanks and started to lift the dress by its shoulders to let it fall to the floor, but the woman pressed Elspeth’s hands together. Hers were small and chilled. “It will fit.”
C
ALEB HAD EXPECTED
Elspeth hours ago. He couldn’t stand Frank’s pained expression any longer and he’d moved to their room. For close to an hour he soaked himself in the bath, his fingernails never ready to give up their thin crescents of dirt. He used them to comb his hair, flattening it down, though pieces shot up in places, like weeds poking through a stone walkway. From the shelf above his bed he selected the nicest shirt White had given him and his cleanest trousers. With some spit and a sock he tried to clean his shoes. After he tucked his shirt in, he figured out how to button his suspenders to his pants and drew them up over his shoulders, where they fell slack. Once he finished, he sat on the stool, afraid he would muss his pants and wrinkle his shirt. So he paced, following the paths of the warped floorboards.
A low boom echoed through the hotel. A crack extended down one of the windowpanes as the explosion reverberated through the building. It felt like the detonation had come from within himself—as if his heart or his stomach had finally given way to the constant pressure. He passed a hand up and down his torso to see if he was still whole. Out the window, he could see down the thoroughfare to the church at the tip of the green, and next to it, a crowd.
“W
ELCOME BACK,” JAKOB
said when he saw Elspeth. “I trust the Colt pistol is to your liking?”
Rather than responding, Elspeth handed Jakob his wife’s folded note. His smile faded. She worried that she’d been turned in by the dressmaker, and that any one of the pistols in the case between them could be turned on her.
“Okay,” he said. He ran his thumb and his index finger along his moustache, and then wiped his hand on his shirt. “Let’s find what you need.”
The thunderous boom shook the store, and Jakob caught a glass that fell from a shelf behind him, but elsewhere came the sound of items crashing to the ground. Elspeth’s knees buckled and she latched onto the counter. She saw her own wild expression reflected in the glass.
“They’re dynamiting graves,” Jakob said, “for the icehouse workers.” He stepped out from behind the counter, and called, “Seth, take inventory of what’s been broken. Isaac, listen for the bell.”
From the depths of the store came matching shouts, “Yes, Papa.”
The note had been left on the counter, Jakob’s moustache wax marking his fingerprints. All she could make out before following after him down the overcrowded, labyrinthine aisles was the word
husband
.
C
ALEB LEFT THE
Brick & Feather, his patience gone, and marveled at the great number of people outside; more, it seemed, than ever before. In the graveyard behind the church, the crowd would back up as one and the dynamite would sound. When the mass of onlookers moved, Caleb prepared himself for the shaking of the earth.
A large man unhitched his nervous horse outside the barbershop, and Caleb stopped to run his hand along the beast’s muzzle. The horse’s muscles relaxed, the tension dissolving into leftover anxious quivers. “You like horses?” the man said and dabbed sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, his hair pasted to his scalp by the moisture. “You have a way with them.” Caleb thanked him and the man said, “This is Art. I don’t think I’ll be able to calm him ’til they’re done making those graves. Best to bring him home and let him worry there.”
Caleb watched the crowd back up again and he laid his hand along the horse’s brow, standing on his tiptoes even though the horse had lowered its head to him. The explosion came and went and the horse snorted, nothing more. The man patted it along its flank. He fished something out of his pocket and handed it to Caleb.
HANK WALSH, BREEDER OF FINE STALLIONS
, it read. “If you ever need a job, son.”
Caleb played at the edge of the card with his thumb, holding it between two fingers, and a frost settled over him—he couldn’t imagine going to work for someone like Hank Walsh or even owning a fine horse. Caleb couldn’t picture anything at all outside of the feverish crack and flash of gunfire. He knew as he wandered down the crowded road that he would never pass a day without seeing killers exiting his house, Emma’s limp body, or Jesse’s dull eyes. He threw the card into the muck so he didn’t waste any more time on it, and watched the water seep into the paper and the letters run.
The bells on the door to the mercantile rang. The boy his age came sprinting from the aisles, and another who looked like an even smaller version of their father trailed behind him, then caught up. They wrestled and jostled to be first behind the counter, the larger one winning out and shoving the other to the floor.
“Can I help you?” the boy asked, out of breath.
Caleb took the Colt from his pocket. The boy stuck up his hands and he and his brother laughed. Caleb didn’t understand what struck them as funny. “You know,” the boy said, “I’m making like you’re robbing the store.” The brothers laughed some more. Caleb tried a chuckle, but it came out like a cough.
“I’d like to trade in this pistol.”
The boy whistled. “No one’s ever turned in a Colt Army model before, have they, Isaac?”
“No, sir, Seth,” Isaac answered.
“Are you thinking about money or trade?”
Caleb said that he wanted the money to spend in their store, and the boy explained to him how much he could give him, considering Caleb had payments left, and they shook hands on it. Seth, the older of the two boys, brought Caleb to an aisle not far from the counter with Isaac following close behind. The first vase Caleb saw he loved. A yellow daisy had been painted on a blue jug, and Caleb thought it to be the exact type of thing the Shanes were sure to have in their home. He also picked out some cloth napkins—“A big seller,” Seth assured him, with Isaac nodding for emphasis—some salt and pepper shakers in the shape of horses, and a needlepoint that said
MOTHER
in scripted letters that he would hold in reserve, just in case.
He clutched the final item in his arms, even as Seth wrote them up, and presented Caleb with a sheet to sign. Caleb scribbled something on the page—too excited to re-create the fine circles and lines Frank had taught him—and grabbed his packages. A note drifted to the floor from the counter, and Caleb bent to pick it up. He couldn’t help but read it. “
This man is in danger of losing his wife. My dear husband, we are to reconnect them. Love.
” He almost told the boys how sad the note sounded when he handed it to them, but decided against it, figuring he’d rather they didn’t know.
J
AKOB AND
E
LSPETH
shared the load of parcels they’d settled on—an overcoat, two hats—one for winter and one for spring—gloves, perfumes and powders, undergarments, boots, and a couple of dresses, not as beautiful as the one she carried under her arm, but fine enough for everyday wear. They unburdened themselves on the front counter, and Elspeth sorted through everything, unable to believe this sudden rush of good fortune. The older of the two boys stood next to his father, a smile on his face.
“What’s happened, Seth?” Jakob asked. “You look awfully pleased.”
“That boy was here and he traded in his Colt pistol,” Seth said. “No one trades in a Colt. Isn’t that right, Father?” Jakob inspected the gun and the paperwork. “Did I do something wrong?”