The Kept Read Online Free PDF Page A

out. Soon, he thought, she would be empty. His surgery seemed to be speeding the process: His sloppy digging and cutting had made the wounds worse. Her hair, flecked with rogue strands of gray, had become matted and tangled. He patted her bare arm. The heat had been replaced by a cold clamminess. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched her before he’d shot her. During her long absences he remembered her immense strength—greater than that of any of the boys. Her shoulders were sloped with muscle, and her knotted arms were thicker than Amos’s. He pushed up one of her eyelids and saw nothing but white streaked with blood. She would not survive, he thought again. He picked the pillow up off the floor, where he’d dropped it the last time, before he went scooting like a mouse beneath the coatrack. Some of the goose feathers scattered on the floor and stuck in the wide puddle of blood that had accumulated beneath the table. He raised the pillow over her head, and plumped it between his hands. He clutched the fabric. Every time the courage built within him to crush the material down on her face, stopping forever the spasms and the terrible sound, she would cough or murmur and turn back into his mother. He held his position until his arms shook. A droplet of sweat formed at her widow’s peak. As it traced the curve above her eyebrow, she squeezed her eyes tightly, and he recalled her making the same expression when he and Jesse had come tromping into the kitchen one night. She’d held her eyes shut for long enough that the boys knew to retreat back the way they’d come. This had stayed with him, because the next morning, she’d left and they wouldn’t see her again for six months. He threw the pillow across the kitchen, where it collided with an empty jug that used to hold their sugar. The pillow landed on the floor, while the sugar container spun on the shelf, rattling around on its base before it got too close to the edge and tumbled. It landed, however, directly in the center of the goose down. This small piece of fortune made Caleb smile, and he brushed his mother’s hair from her face and the sound ceased. The calm was worse to him, and when she recommenced, he pulled a chair to the table and laid his head on it, next to his mother’s hip, where he felt every raw breath reverberate through the wood.
     
    W ITH DARKNESS, THE fits ceased. The fever dulled. But her memories continued to unfurl before her, and uncovered events she had worked hard to forget—arguments, trespasses, lies—and she relived the aftermath of the first time she’d spoken to Jorah, who was known then as Lothute.
    “A savage,” her father said in a whisper—all of their conversations whispered so as not to disturb the van Tessels. Their nook of the building had always been the servants’ quarters, and as such, did not hold noise as well as the house proper, the boards not as tight, the corners not as square, the walls and floors unadorned. Worried even about his steps, her father removed his shoes, placed the tired leather next to her mother’s boots, and straightened the two thick, woolen socks that muffled the thump of his wooden leg. “You’ve embarrassed the family over a savage. We must assume Mr. van Tessel has been told.”
    “All I did was say hello,” Elspeth said and her father’s hand snapped her head back. Her lip throbbed but did not split. She’d only heard Lothute speak that morning, never before, and his voice had surprised her, light and airy where she expected gravel crunched underfoot. She’d pretended to shake a rock from her shoe in the cool of the barn while he mended a horse’s saddle. Elspeth had been warned to keep away from him, but she saw them as paired in their silence—neither was spoken to, neither was expected to speak. Besides his darker complexion, he looked the same as they did, wore the same clothes, ate the same food. He did not run around with a tomahawk and a belt full of scalps like the