The Kept (9 page)
“He did the best he knew. He didn’t have a father of his own.”
“Did you have a father?” Caleb asked.
“For a while,” Elspeth said after a time.
“Did you have brothers and sisters?”
“No,” she said. “Not like you. It was just us.”
“You and your father and—your mother?”
“Yes.”
Caleb had never heard about the parents of his parents. It had never crossed his mind, and—as when they’d left the borders of the earth he’d seen from the top of his fence post—the world opened up at their acknowledgment, strange people suddenly born into his imagination. He felt closer to his mother than he ever had and helped her to stand. They left clean footprints in the thin veil of snow that penetrated the canopy, and when they cleared the line of elms, the sun made them squint, the wind caused them to shiver, and in step with his mother, Caleb didn’t notice that the snow was much deeper than when they’d entered the shelter of the trees.
C
aleb daydreamed of cities, houses like theirs but as tall as the tallest trees, swaying back and forth in the wind. From the topmost room, they would scan the horizon, searching for the killers, their bodies growing used to the steady rocking.
He waited for his mother to say something, to continue their conversation from earlier, to somehow acknowledge their closeness. Each step took all of her concentration, however, and silence reclaimed her.
They slept in a hole created by a fallen tree, and rose the next morning with the sun high in the sky, hidden from them by the mass of roots and clods of dirt. The cold had sapped what little strength Elspeth possessed—had stolen into her joints and locked them in place. Every time she stood, it surprised her to be on her feet. As they resumed their task once again, they broke through a line worn clean in the snow; animal tracks paced a clear circle around their camp.
The straps were giving way on Caleb’s pack, but when he wondered whether his mother would be well enough to make the stitches strong again, he saw that she, too, had weakened. Her face, which had been regaining some of its old complexion, in the sunlight appeared ashen and drawn. He dug through her bag, and found a package fastened by loose string. Rather than chewing gum, the parcel held small, sugared gumdrops. After all the white and brown of the dead of winter, the blazing yellows and oranges brought a smile to Caleb’s face. He gave a red gumdrop to his mother, who tucked it into her cheek and tried to match his happiness.
E
LSPETH’S BODY WORKED
on its own while her mind slept in fire. Sometimes she jerked away from the burning and became dimly aware of Caleb’s hand at her elbow, and she would try to thank him, but her voice had left and her lips had become so racked with fever blisters they were more water than skin. Other times she heard the calling of birds or the squawking of crows and she would be certain that Caleb had been forced to leave her and she was facedown in the snow, waiting for her last breath so the birds could take their portion of carrion back to their young. Somehow this last image improved her mood, and when Caleb’s arm wrapped around her waist and she understood they’d never stopped, she felt cheated.
They had no food. Their clothes were beginning to wear out, beaten by the wind and the snow. Elspeth’s breath came heavily, sporadically, with a strange wheezing like a baby’s rattle. They walked over long, rolling hills. On all sides, trees cracked from the weight of the snow as it melted in the sun. Sometimes a branch would fall with a massive whoosh and a dead thud. Caleb would jump with fear but his mother wouldn’t react at all.
Together they crested another in the unending line of hills, the land like waves on the oceans and lakes his father read about in his stilted tongue as the children huddled in his bed at night and Caleb sat outside, crouched underneath the windowsill.
Elspeth identified something that had been dragging along in her mind. “Were you in the barn?”
He stumbled. She had given all of her weight over to him. Her feet barely made contact with the ground. He knew that to stop was to die. “I hid,” he said. All the reasons, the excuses he’d readied sounded hollow. “I did nothing.”
A large hill loomed in front of them, and he knew it would be their last. His words seemed to have wrenched the final bit of strength from his mother, and she could no longer lift her feet high enough to clear the snow. He imagined what it would be like to die but it simply sounded like rest. They would rest. And they would not wake again.
His body climbed. He wished it to stop, and tried to communicate this to his limbs, but his head had drifted away and was no longer connected to the rest of him. Atop the hill, Caleb crashed to the ground, his mother falling with him. She made no noise. He squinted in the harsh white blur. The endless land surrounded them, naked, no trees, nothing but smooth snow. An indentation—as if God had taken a scoop out of the earth as one would a cup of flour—sat half in shadow, half in sunlight. Tall and alone at the edge of the dent stood a building.
“A house. Mama, there’s a house,” Caleb said to Elspeth, his voice cracking. She didn’t move. He placed her on their tarp, along with his pack, the Ithaca, and her bags, and tied it as well as he could. With the rest of the twine, he attached the cocoon to his pack, though with each tug the straps dug into his shoulders and threatened to tear entirely.
From the hill, the house had appeared to be less than a mile away, but from the bottom of the bowl it seemed at least twice that. Caleb stopped. He ate some more gumdrops that his stomach immediately rejected in a bright sunburst on the snow. A hawk circled overhead, its call like the earth being torn apart. Caleb stood on unsteady feet and returned his pack to his shoulders, where the skin burned, rubbed raw. Jesse’s boots dug into the snow for traction. “One more.”
A strap went. “Hold on, Mama.” He kicked his toes into the powdery snow and strained to keep the tarp from sliding backward. “Hold on.” Caleb took the last few steps at a run, and collapsed at the top of the hill. The other strap gave way with a small sigh and a pop and he spun and caught the twine as it tried to slither away. The coarse fibers peeled his skin until he wrapped it around his wrists, stopping the cocoon’s descent and bringing it next to him. He lurched onto his stomach. His dwindling heat melted the snow, and sleep started to hug him. Even in his exhaustion, Caleb knew if he closed his eyes whoever lived in the house would find him lying there next to a small, clean spot of yellowed grass where his breath had left him and—next to him—his dead mother swathed in a tarred canvas tarp. He pushed himself onto one knee, then one foot. He grasped the Ithaca and dragged it out of the cocoon by its barrel. The gun had never felt so heavy. He worried he wouldn’t be able to lift it to fire. The house rose ahead, and as he advanced into its cold shadow he saw how massive it was: at least three stories, with a long porch that extended the entire length of the first floor. Chains for swings rattled from the ceiling. The windows were as tall as a man and had each pane intact, but none glowed with lamps. No smoke billowed from the chimney. Caleb took a look back at his mother. Her parched lips didn’t move; no breath clouded in the crisp air.
A shot cracked the sky and Caleb dropped to the ground, pointing the Ithaca at the house as he did. Stinging life rushed back into his limbs. Silence as the report echoed down through the valley.
“Who’s there?” a man’s voice called.
Caleb didn’t dare move.
“I think I got him,” the man said.
Caleb heard the creaking of a door and aimed the Ithaca at the front porch. An old man, cradling a shotgun half as big as his body, let the screen slam behind him. Caleb had never seen someone elderly, nothing more than drawings in books that depicted the ravages of age as soft and giving. This man shuffled at an angle, as if he ducked under a low branch, and most of his scalp shone through thin strands of white hair. Every movement brought a new sound—a sigh or a sniff. On his feet he wore bundles of rags. His clothes were layers of burlap, some torn and filled with holes so that the ones beneath poked through. Caleb didn’t know how the recoil hadn’t knocked him clean off his feet.
“Are you dead?” the old man called.
Caleb had him in his sights. “No,” he replied, his voice louder and stronger than he could have hoped.
“Did I hit you?”
“No.”
“You alone?”
Caleb relaxed and the gun barrel dipped into the snow. “My mother’s with me.”
“Where is she?”
“Did he say ‘Mother’?” said a woman’s voice from inside the darkness of the house.
The old man turned slightly. “Hush, Margaret,” he said. “I said, where is she?”
“She’s here,” Caleb said. He didn’t think the old man had seen him yet but could track him by the sound of his voice. The snow was deep enough to conceal most of him, and the afternoon shadows did the rest. Caleb thought the man was going to step out farther into the snow. Instead, he set his rifle against the railing of the porch and sat down on the top step. He placed his chin in his hands. “I’m an old man,” he said after a while. “I can wait.”
“Wait for what?” Caleb asked.
“Yes, wait for what?” the voice from inside said, more clearly this time, as if it had moved closer to the door. He’d called her Margaret. This made Caleb feel safe.
“For you to show yourself, and show you mean us no harm.” He pointed to the rifle at his side. “I showed you I mean none.”
“You shot at me,” Caleb said.
“Ah,” the old man replied, “that was before you had a voice. Now you’ve got one and you sound like a boy. Are you a boy, son?” The old man brushed something from his sleeve. He certainly didn’t seem threatening.
“Tell that boy,” Margaret said, “that we have pie.”
Caleb’s stomach throbbed with hunger.
“I will do no such thing,” the old man said. “I aim to wait for this boy to show himself and then I’ll know what to do.”
Caleb left the Ithaca in the snow, but memorized its exact location should the man fire again. He got up and the blood drained from his upper extremities. He wanted to sit right back down, so heavy was the wooziness inside his head. He swayed, as if he stood in one of his city buildings.
“What are you doing here?” the man asked.
Caleb, his heart brimming with the answer, could only say: “We’ve been walking.”
“And where’s your mother?” the old man said.
“She’s behind me. She’s real sick.”
“Dammit, why didn’t you say so?” the old man said.
Caleb heard the woman talking quickly inside, but couldn’t make out the words.
“Son, why don’t you and your mother come on in the house?” the old man said.
“Okay.”
The man picked up his gun and as he reached for the door, he paused. “You’ve got to tell me one more thing: Do you mean us any harm?”
“I mean no one harm.” He raised his hands, as if that’s where malice hid, and realized that he’d told a lie. “I mean you no harm.”
The fact that they had arrived somewhere brought energy surging back to him. His mother, however, looked even worse than when he’d packed her up, forehead dull with sweat and her mouth pinched shut. It was the color of her skin, however, that nauseated Caleb—a bilious green so thick she looked less like a person and more like the slugs he and Jesse had found under logs, stomping through the woods in search of things with which to scare the girls. Caleb dragged the tarp to the house.
The door creaked again and the man’s boots thumped toward him. “Your momma, what’s she got?”
“Shotgun pellets,” Caleb said and put his head between his knees. He thought the man might take his gun up again and force them away.
“Guess it’s not contagious,” he said and sniffed. “Let’s get you two inside. Soup’s almost ready.”
“There’s pie,” Margaret said from somewhere inside the house.
The old man snorted. “Wipe your feet.”
O
ut of the constant howl of the wind, Caleb’s ears were emptied of everything but his own heartbeat. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he saw a house unlike anything he could have dreamed. Lamps sat on every available surface. Walls were covered in decoration. Tables had glass tops. Chairs were adorned with elaborate carvings. Floors were hidden by thick carpets, their strands woven together to form beautiful flowers and branches, all in exploding colors. To Caleb, used to the dull wash of snow, the occasional tree, and the rare gumdrops, it was like staring straight into the sun. His head ached.
The old man stood at the other end of the room, his arm around his wife, a woman of similar stature, her clothes the same worn fabrics, her skin as weathered and rutted as his. “Where’s your mother?” she asked.
Caleb waved his hand toward the door.
“Well, don’t stand there like a statue, boy, bring her in,” the man said.
The air outside felt better to Caleb, and he realized he’d been sweating in the house, streams running down his back and the middle of his chest. He’d forgotten how he overheated indoors. The sweat dried and froze on his skin. He managed to carry Elspeth up the steps to the porch, but then his strength failed him. He had to drag her into the house on the tarp, taking care not to bump her head as he pulled her over the doorsill.
“My goodness, get her out of that coffin,” the man said, and rushed forward. He fumbled open a folding knife and cut the twine that fastened the cocoon together. Caleb saw his mother as they must have—filthy, sweating, fevered, with a wound bleeding through her shirt, and he believed himself a failure. They tried to calm him with comforting noises while they looked over his mother. “My name is William H. Wood,” the man said, “and this is my wife, Margaret.” Caleb introduced himself.
“Where are you coming from, Caleb?” Margaret asked, patting his hand.
“Far away,” Caleb said, knowing that but little else. “Very far.”
Before Caleb could realize what was happening, he had placed his head on Margaret and began—for the first time in front of anyone but Jesse—to cry. She patted his back vigorously, as he would a sick sheep. This made him cry harder. Through the haze of tears, he noticed that William had unbuttoned his mother’s shirt, and her bandage lay half open on her chest. Caleb rushed forward and wrenched the old man’s arm behind his back. William dropped the knife, but Caleb maintained the pressure. The old man squealed and asked him to stop. Margaret yelled and tried to pull at Caleb, and when that failed, she simply put her arm around him and rubbed his head, as if what he truly needed was reassurance. When Caleb glimpsed William’s pained expression, their words made it through the haze of anger and he released him. Caleb’s world went fuzzy. “Sorry,” he said, and backed against a couch.
“Just trying to help, son. But I understand. My mistake. Here,” William said, and handed Caleb a clean, damp cloth. He knelt at his mother’s side, wiped the last of his tears, and used his body to block their view as he pulled the final bandages aside. The blood had caked onto her skin, small pebbles of clots and scabs, which he dabbed away. William presented him with some clean bandages and Margaret took away the dirty ones.
“Let’s put her in a bed upstairs,” William said.
“Oh, no,” Caleb said, his words sounding as if they came from the end of a long tunnel. “We couldn’t take your bed.”
They laughed. “We wouldn’t want that, either,” William said, “but we have plenty of empty rooms and empty beds.”
“Nothing but empty rooms and empty beds,” his wife said.
Caleb stumbled. He was aware of William’s arms behind his neck and at the small of his back, and as the world faded around him, he heard William say, “Perhaps we need to take care of you first.”
S
HE’D STOPPED WALKING.
She wanted to call out for water, but her throat could not carry out even this simplest of instructions. The constant chill that had assailed her bones no longer wrapped its cold fingers around her. She could sense nothing but the soreness of fever and the invasive confusion of dreams. She prayed she still clutched her Bible. In her more lucid moments she hoped for a parable that would give her strength, but her knowledge failed her. Jorah would reach onto the vast shelves of his memory and find the exact passage, the exact lines to suit her situation. Her own mind, however, seemed frozen. No words of God, no images struck her to bring light to the dark place in which she lay.
Out of that darkness came a pair of sullen brown eyes, and a small, pointed nose. Gusta van Tessel had been a year younger than Elspeth, and as Elspeth went about her chores—helping with the cooking, sweeping the floors, and tidying the shelves she could reach—Gusta followed, silent and watchful. As Gusta aged, she hardened and turned mean, her black hair long and shimmering and often curled into an elaborate bun that Elspeth’s mother would worry over for too long, until they’d have to rush the lunch preparation and the van Tessels would raise their eyebrows at the undercooked vegetables and the uneven slices of bread.
As a teen, Gusta fell ill, and the family fetched the doctor from town. Their usual physician had been an ancient man with a bulbous, broken-vesseled nose, but this doctor was handsome, with thick blond hair, his carriage well appointed, his medicine bag oiled, the leather new and buckles gleaming. Gusta’s sickness ran its course, and the doctor, who even the boys fawned over, departed. No more than a month later, Elspeth came upon Gusta on the south lawn, stretched out on a bench, arms extended, stark naked. Gusta didn’t notice her, and Elspeth retreated back to the house. The sunburn brought fever and the young doctor. Not long after, it was announced at the dinner table that Gusta and the doctor would marry. Elspeth sank into herself, doing her chores day after day, trying not to think, letting time pass. She hated to see the empty place at the table where Gusta had once sat.
The following spring the well-appointed carriage returned, and the doctor—now with a small beard that aged him somewhat—took Gusta’s hand as she stepped down, pale and painfully thin. Her brown eyes had shrunk since childhood, but in her skeletal state they stood out again, like coffee-soaked saucers. Elspeth’s father unloaded enough luggage for a lengthy stay.
On the first night, long after dinner, Elspeth lay awake at her parents’ feet, fanciful images of the doctor’s house in her head while the moonlight played through the curtains. She imagined Gusta’s life often—the fabrics of their chairs, the patterns on their carpets, the softness of their sheets. The rapping of harried footsteps upstairs made Elspeth and her parents sit upright, so finely, tightly attuned to the needs of the household that they must have looked like the three prongs of a hinge, opening in unison.
Upstairs in the hall, the doctor stood with his hands at his sides, shoulders slumped and head down. An overturned candle had sprayed the floor with wax, and Elspeth considered how to remove it without scratching the wood. Her parents, however, did not look at the stain and stood side by side, hands loosely entwined. Expectant, Elspeth stationed herself a foot behind them at the threshold of the bathroom. In the wobbly light of Mr. van Tessel’s lamp, Elspeth saw past Mrs. van Tessel’s crouched form to the body of Gusta. She drifted in the overfilled tub, her hair swaying back and forth, her eyes and mouth open. Her pallor had fallen to what appeared to be no color at all, an absence of shade so profound it took Elspeth’s breath away. Occasional drips of water from the edges of the tub and the doctor’s hands were the only sounds in the large room. Everything shone with wet reflections, casting glimmering shapes on the walls, the ceiling, and their stunned faces. Gusta’s nightgown had been made translucent by the water, and even in the wavering, weak light, Elspeth could see the dark spots of her areolas and the black mound of her pubis.
Gusta’s husband never left; he sold his marriage house and—in spite of the van Tessels’ offers to the contrary—stayed in the same room he’d been in the night he awoke to an empty bed beside him and grabbed the candle from its holder and sprinted down the hall, too late. Sometimes Elspeth would end up alone in a room with the doctor and not notice him for several minutes, as if he could not muster the force required to be present. When one of the van Tessels became ill, the doctor would get out his medical bag, which year by year grew shabbier, the leather cracked, the clasps broken and then missing. He’d wandered out of the sitting room one summer afternoon, having immobilized Ginny’s turned ankle, and Elspeth waited to let him pass, both of her hands grasping the handle of a bucket that steamed with hot water to scrub the hall floors. Alexis’s voice came muffled from the room, but then Elspeth heard Ginny stating something that had been whispered for years: Gusta had been unable to bear children. The doctor’s halted expression and rushed steps confirmed it. Elspeth looked down at the bucket, her watery reflection staring back at her.
Outside of those infrequent events, Elspeth seldom thought of Gusta after her death. After all, there were more van Tessels, four girls and five boys, and they all needed as much—if not more—care than Gusta. But years later Gusta would come to her in her dreams, peeking around corners, mouth twitching, hoping to be noticed.
C
ALEB AWOKE IN
a bed cloaked in white sheets in a white room. He had been stripped to his underwear. Someone had washed him; he could smell the soap. They’d also cut his hair, and he touched the jagged edges. Once his eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw that his room stood at the front of the house, looking out onto the bowl he had dragged his mother across. Though he would have guessed only a few hours had passed, their tracks had been covered over and blown away so thoroughly that he must have slept for at least a day. He surveyed the room: his clothes folded in a tidy pile on a chair next to the bed; a shelf crowded with books, their spines brilliant red leather with gold lettering; and a framed painting showing three children. Caleb pushed the covers aside and stepped onto the cold wood, his toes curling from the shock. He wiped the dust from the frame. The children all possessed the same brown hair.
“Those are our babies,” William said from behind Caleb. He wobbled across the floor in his surrogate boots. “Sorry to startle you. Wondered if it was you I heard moving around.” He handed Caleb his pants and shirt, stiff and unfamiliar and smelling of flowers, and Caleb dressed while staring at the portrait. “Did you sleep well?”
“They all look the same,” Caleb said.
“I’ve apologized to them for that,” William said and laughed. “They have my big nose and flat face, though their mother’s lovely chin and hair. Some of God’s grace in that, I suppose.”
Caleb shifted his gaze from William to the young faces and back again. He pictured the children as separate parts stitched together and shivered. “They all died?”
“Certainly not. They’ve all moved away, married, had children of their own.”
“Children of their own?” The idea was not completely foreign to him; he’d seen the animals give birth, he’d learned of the parents of his parents, he knew of the families from the Bible, but he didn’t understand how one could simply decide to have children. He wondered if he, too, could have children of his own.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” Caleb ignored the question and continued to stare at the picture. William spoke of the farm that they’d helped run before moving on to their own lives. He pointed out the window and told Caleb about the sinkhole that had once been a cornfield, verdant and lush. “Then one day, once they’d all left us,” he said, “the earth started to fall in on itself, as if someone had pulled a plug on a drain.” The wind blew across the field, and by instinct Caleb covered his face. The snow drifted up from the hills like smoke. “You must be hungry,” William said.
Caleb followed William down a long hallway, something he’d never seen or experienced, and the tight space made him duck his head. “Where’s my mother?”
“She’s doing much better,” William said. “I think it was more hunger and fever that got her than the pellets—you did a fine job, son.” William opened the door to the next room. It was larger, almost the size of Caleb’s entire house. The walls were painted yellow, the ceiling white. The floors were sparkling wood, but spotted with small rugs. In the center of an enormous bed—the head and foot decorated by intricate, wrought-iron curves, the breadth of it enough, he thought, for two horses—his mother slept in blankets that piled high around her like she was floating on colorful clouds. She appeared better, healthier, than at any time since her hand had dangled over the edge of the kitchen table, her blood counting seconds on the floor. “She’s a strong one,” William said. “A lesser woman—shoot, most men—wouldn’t have made it as far as she did.”
“She’ll be okay?”
“I truly think she will.”
Caleb placed his head next to his mother’s hip. The rattling wheeze had left her lungs.
“Let’s get you some food,” William said. He placed a light hand on Caleb’s back and brought him down to the kitchen, where Margaret stood at the counter, a mixing bowl in her arms. A hulking stove took up much of the room, a fire crackling and filling the air with the smell of burning wood. Everything, even the sounds of spoons scraping bowls and cupboards being opened and shut reminded him of home. He listened to Mary and Emma bicker over who had to sift the flour and heard Jesse tromp in and plop down onto the seat next to him.
The old man looked at him with concern. “What have we got for the boy here?” William asked and rubbed his hands together. Caleb ate everything set in front of him: ham, bacon and eggs, toast, apple cider, corn cakes, fried potatoes, and, at the end, a thick slab of blueberry pie. Margaret apologized that the blueberries had come from a jar and said the pie would be better in summer—William said that her worst blueberry pie was still the best in the world—but Caleb hardly heard either of them over the deep, rumbling satisfaction in his stomach. He sat back in the chair, happily bloated, and drank the last of another glass of milk.