The Kept (6 page)

“I don’t know if perhaps I made you feel some necessity or urge,” he said. Elspeth tensed, fearful that he might strike her, thinking of the flash of his eyes as he demanded she hand him Amos while he fought against the raging creek, the water piling up and around his torso, the white foam spectral in the dark.

One of the children cried in the other room and they both held their breath. Elspeth pictured herself making the journey down the hillside, her effects secure on her back, her customary letter of reference folded among her things. She only hoped that he would allow her to spend the night before leaving.

When it seemed enough time had passed and the children had resumed their sleep, Jorah spoke again, his voice even softer. “I also know that I made a promise to you, to keep you safe and protected. Haven’t I done that?” Elspeth’s feet tingled. She’d gripped the quilt tight enough to cut off her circulation and yet her fingers clenched ever harder, the material gathering in her hands, where it quickly grew damp. Jorah sighed, his shoulders rising and falling. A milky stream of moonlight washed over the bedroom. “I’ve protected you. And I will continue to do so.” He reached back and took one of her hands, cupping her fist much as he had Mary’s heels. Elspeth relaxed, and he turned to her—everything about him soft—and tugged on her arm. She heard the tender pat of his feet hitting the floor. The quilt slid from her and she felt levitated, like her own feet never met the ground, and hand in hand they walked into the next room, where Amos slept in his crib, his belly protruding, his tiny hands clenched beside his head, and Mary slept also, her brown hair splashed against her pillow in the bed Jorah had made and inscribed with a letter
M
on the headboard. They each breathed deep and even.

“They look nothing like us,” Jorah said, and Elspeth’s body jerked and she made to run away, but he latched his arms around her and held her as tight as she’d ever held Amos, and he said, “Whose children are these?”

C
HAPTER 5

T
he clarity of the memory startled Elspeth. She coughed, and tried to sit up, but the pain was too intense. At first, she thought she was in a high-ceilinged hotel room in another strange town but soon realized she was in the barn on her back in tremendous pain, and she couldn’t recall how she’d gotten there or how she’d been injured. A crow called to her from off in the darkness. She remembered walking up the hill and the fever-soaked nightmare of the bodies strewn about the house and then the flaming hot pain and understood she’d been shot and her children were gone. She cried out again, and Caleb appeared before her.
It couldn’t be
, she thought and tried to move, but she was too weak.

“Mama, it’s okay,” he said. He truly was alive—the knowledge sent a spasm of happiness through her, and the surge proved enough to roll her eyes back once more.

The night of Amos’s baptism, when the children had been put to bed, Jorah had told her that he’d seen the bodies of mothers before, and he knew Elspeth had not had a child. He sighed, letting the bookmark from his Bible slide between his middle and index fingers, and said, “For a while I convinced myself that it was possible. That the child could be”—he chuckled, an angry sound—“I thought it could be a child of God.” He ran his hand along the leather binding, but said nothing else and asked her no questions. Implicit in his silence was an understanding, she thought, that Amos and Mary would be enough for them. She left to work and trudged up the hill again with more money stuffed in her shoes and everything flowed well for a while. After two years, though, the urges returned. She spent entire nights cradling her arms and rocking on the balls of her feet in front of the windows.

When she’d come back with Caleb, Jorah hadn’t spoken to her for days. One evening, however, after she’d fed the baby and held him on her shoulder to burp him, she sensed Jorah in the doorway, watching them, and knew that something in him had thawed.

C
ALEB DRAGGED THE
dead animals through the woods—the smallest first to create a track that became tamped down and smooth—and to the edge of the cliff where he and Jesse had taught themselves to chew Amos’s tobacco, spitting thick streams of juice onto the rocks below. He threw the dead chickens, rolled the dead sheep, dragged the smallest of the dead pigs. The others he could not manage, though he tried. All this took the better part of the day.

He looked in on his mother every hour or so, wiped her forehead with a cloth despite the fact that the fever had abated, and fed her from the bowl of eggs he kept warm by the fire. The color had returned to her skin. He thought that she might live, not merely for another sunrise, but to stand and walk again. But with standing and walking came the prospect of speaking, and he would have to explain himself. He didn’t know how he could tell her about his fear, how it had clenched him into a ball and forced him down into the hay. He didn’t know how he could tell her that he’d heard Emma’s short scream, like the bleating of a lamb. How he’d hidden. How he’d seen them—had been within a hundred yards of his Ithaca and another few to the open loft door, from which he could have sighted at least one, aiming for the red scarf. How he’d shot her.

They would need a plan, and for the first time he began to think of a future. All he could tell his mother was that he planned on killing them. He assumed she would want the same. He sat in the open door to the hayloft with these thoughts. Snow fell, only scattered flakes at first, but then in thick sheets, erasing the stars. His feet hung free. He chewed on an old boot string. His father’s rifle sat across his thighs.

He imagined himself leaping down from the loft as the birds scattered at the first shot. Perhaps before that. He would have heard them coming, or detected some change in the air, like the mornings when Emma would come to get him for breakfast and he’d be at the edge of the loft even before the creaking of the door. This would be the opposite, a call like the one that had brought his father to the other side of the hill late one night, a low, rumbling thunder like a storm miles off, so faint it might be nothing more than the creaking of the trees, except somehow his bones would know different, and he would have jumped down from the ladder and grabbed his Ithaca. He loaded it as he crept along, the shells clicking into place. Emma saw him and he motioned her inside. Her eyes betrayed no fear, so strong was her faith in her brother. Or maybe he picked her up under one arm and placed her safely in the house, telling her to latch the door. He edged along the periphery of the pen bent over, under the cover of the fence. One hand planted on the post and he vaulted over it. He circled back around them, down a path in the hill between birches and elms and evergreens that only he knew, and as he came up behind them he would say, “Put those weapons down. There’ll be no killing today.”

But of course he would kill them, because they would not drop their weapons, and he would feel no remorse. Afterward, his father would find the perfect Bible passage to make everyone feel that what he’d done was right with God. Even Caleb would listen. And he would believe it—and the man who was saying it—deep in his core.

They would bury them in the plot on the other side of the hill, where Caleb had first discovered death, a simple marker their only connection to the living world. He could also penetrate the frozen ground and dig a perfectly rectangular grave. That was what the Caleb who could kill would do.

The Caleb who could not fire his father’s outsized rifle into the night sky, imagining the bullet losing speed and falling harmlessly into one of the rolling fields below, perhaps sending up a small cloud of snow, probably not. His shoulder throbbed from the kick of the gun and he knew he’d have a bruise for a week. The sound was lost in the descending blanket of snow. It was a call to the killers, a sign from Caleb that he would find them, that he would be different when he did. Or so he hoped.

Elspeth murmured. When he got to her, everything appeared to be the same; he wondered if he’d imagined the noise. He checked the bandages, cleaned the wounds with whiskey, and dabbed at her forehead with the rag. When he withdrew it, her unsteady pupils tried to follow him. “Caleb,” she said. She forced a smile and small dots of blood burgeoned on her cracked lips.

Caleb feared she saw his guilt, but hoped she saw how he’d changed: He would defend them, he would find those men, and he would kill them for what they’d done to his family.

E
LSPETH HAD BEEN
living in dreams so long the pale dawn confused her. The bandages made no sense, either, and then she remembered the shot, and her last seconds of consciousness. The wraps were clean but loose and tied with poor knots. In spite of the pain, she tried to stand, and surprised herself by getting to her feet. She shuffled to the barn doors and leaned her weakened body against them until they opened. The air struck her and nearly knocked her over, and she searched for her balance, the task made more difficult by the dizzying effect of the snow swirling lazily outside. Nausea rippled within her.

The house was gone. In its place, a blank hole. The elm that had overhung their home had shriveled into something black, no longer quite a tree. In the clutch of her fever, she’d thought it strange that they slept in the barn and now she realized why—the men who had shot her and her family had razed their home. The closest trees had their branches shortened and twisted by the heat of the fire. The ice clinging to the bark had saved the forest, preserved the rest of the yard so that it appeared as though God himself had plucked the house from this world, as one would a blueberry from its bush. Elspeth noted the four posts that had been the entirety of the house she’d left on her first trip. The fire had made them its grave marker.

The cold mud pulled her down, down into the embrace of the Devil. Her hand went to her chest, where her cross always resided, but all that met her fingers was a naked chain. She gave in, the faces of her children turning away from her, and when they turned back, they were as she’d found them some days ago, waxen and unmoving, fear and accusation stuck forever in their skin. She struck her knee on a stone in the mud as she yielded. Something rustled above her—the wings of a demon beating, flying down from the rafters, close to her. The heat burned her face and the only relief she could find lay in the mud and she surrendered, allowing the cooling powers to provide for her, knowing all the while that they were a gift of the Devil.

C
ALEB SHOOK HIS
mother lightly. She groaned. He pulled the blanket over her bare shoulder. Even in the icy mud, her skin was hot. She’d bled through her bandages. Her eyes, glassy and unfocused, pointed in the direction of the house. His image of her rising, yawning, and stretching away the shotgun pellets he’d inflicted upon her, ready to take off after the men who’d murdered their family, was completely gone.

She hadn’t done serious damage, merely opened a few wounds with exertion. Rivulets of sweat wiped the dirt away in thin stripes. He melted snow over the fire and used one of the clean rags to set about washing her. She’d lost weight, and it laid bare her veins and muscles. He started at her feet and worked his way up until he reached her thighs, then he worked inward from her arms. He removed what was left of her dress. As he did so, she called for his father in a feeble voice that cracked and turned to breath toward the end. The sound of his father’s name made him shake. His eyes averted, he even removed her muslin drawers, which were badly stained. He could smell them at arm’s length and added them to the fire. He blindly dabbed at her, and dunked the rag in the bucket, the scalding water forcing tears to his eyes, his skin prickling and he withdrew his clenched fist quickly, sending a wave of steaming water across the floor of the barn. The hay needed refreshing and the bedding needed cleaning, so he spread a blanket on the ground for her. To keep her warm while he worked, he dressed her in some of Jorah’s old work clothes that had hung on a peg near the horses, the buttons on a flannel shirt giving him greater access to her bandages than a dress could afford. He draped the wet sheets and quilt from the rafters over the fire, and the drops of water sizzled on the stone. Of all of this, he felt proud.

He stared at the space where their home used to be. He heard them, his father’s high voice reading to them, the boys laughing, the girls arguing. There was nothing to mark where they’d been. He considered the other side of the hill, the four lumps that would remain there even though his father would no longer pull the weeds surrounding them or tend to the tidy field of grass.

He crossed the yard. When the snow melted each spring, rocks would appear in the fields where before there had been none, like the earth had given birth to stone eggs. The large pile of cleared rocks formed a sizable hill, bigger under its wintery cover. During the summer, the loose rocks would provide housing for snakes and rodents alike, and Amos would sit in the tree with his hand-carved slingshot and hunt. He would send Caleb to collect his prizes.

Caleb climbed the small hill, tricky with its uneven footing, and hacked at the ice with the shovel, his grunts deadened by the snow covering the ground and the trees and the bodies of his brothers and sisters, mercifully obscuring their intertwined skeletons. The blows—hard, thudding strikes—soon relented as the ice gave way to powdery snow. Each shovelful hit the earth like a whisper. He rested, the sun beginning to fade from the sky behind the hill, the warmth ebbing from the afternoon. His shoulders tightened up toward his neck. His hands bled. The work occupied his mind.

He kept on in the dark, his hands ringing with the cold, operating on muscle memory alone, digging because he didn’t know what else to do. The shovel finally clinked against a rock. Caleb widened the hole, and worked his raw fingers around the stone. This first marker—small and smooth to the touch—would be for Emma. He placed it beneath the elm, gnarled by the fire, but in its former life the girls had sprawled under it, looking up into its branches and whispering. He retrieved a large, rough rock for Amos, and placed it next to Emma’s. Hours passed, and he persisted. Four rocks, one for each of them, arranged in a square around the tree.

I
N THE BARN,
the fire glowed as it had been for the past few days, and one of the lamps had been lit. Its light fell on Elspeth, seated on the edge of her pallet, facing the bags and supplies Caleb had piled in preparation to find the killers. “Mama,” he said.

“My necklace,” she said, her voice harsh and dry. Caleb found the cross had twisted around to her back, and he apologized for moving it out of the way. “Did you see them?”

“There were three men,” he said. He told her about the red scarves but he stumbled over their descriptions, not able to put them into words.

“It’s okay,” she said. She patted his hand. “You pulled me from the fire?” she asked and Caleb said that he had. “Where were they hiding? I didn’t see them,” she said. Caleb drew a breath to confess everything but she slumped and he helped shift her feet onto the bed as her head collapsed into her pillow. “My necklace,” she said again. He laid her hand over the cross and she tightened her fist around it. “Where were you?”

“Making gravestones,” he said.

She nodded, “Good.” She said it several times, and then faded away once more.

He leaned against the wall of the barn, his hat in his hands, boots on, and slept for two or three hours—heavy, black sleep. When he awoke, the brightness of the world startled him, and he reached for the Ithaca, as if this light was one of the marauders for whom he’d been waiting.