The Kept Read Online Free PDF Page B

the smell. Yet the snow gave way to ice and the ice to frozen ground and the frozen ground to a land strewn with slate and limestone, and in an hour with the pick he hadn’t made a grave fit for a chicken.
     
    E LSPETH HAD BORNE Mary up the hill, the path at that time unfamiliar and unworn. Several times she had to turn around to try to find an easier route. Small trickles of water made footholds treacherous, and she would brace herself to stay on her feet. Her clothes became soaked in mud and torn by small branches. The baby, strapped to her chest, gurgled with each bounce.
    In the yard, freshly shorn sheep chased one another around their makeshift enclosure. Jorah stood on the porch, as if he expected her, his black hair blown across his face, while Elspeth forged through the mud, the smell of animals and urine thick in her nostrils. He squinted at the bundle in her arms. As she drew closer, his expression broke into one of pure joy, something she’d never before witnessed, and he leapt from the porch and ran to her, his unshod feet sliding in the mud and the turned earth of the field. She said, “It’s a girl. Our girl.”
    “Our girl,” Jorah repeated and lifted Elspeth into the air and spun them around until they tumbled to the damp soil, dizzy, clutching at each other, and when they were through laughing, Elspeth’s cheek touched the vulnerable spot on top of the child’s skull where—in their excitement—the hat had fallen from it. She ran her fingers across the crease where Mary’s impossibly tiny head met her even more unlikely neck, where the tufts of infant hair grew long and softer than anything in her imagination.
     
    C ALEB WENT BACK outside and placed Jesse on top of Emma and Mary and Amos, who lay in a pile atop the chairs from the living room, which he’d broken with Jesse’s boots and the butt of his Ithaca. Splinters of wood and useless nails surrounded them, all of it startling against the previously uninterrupted snow and ice. Amos’s bulk had been enough to force Caleb to reconsider where he’d lain Emma, and he brought her to her older brother and placed her on top of him, twenty steps from the house—he counted them as he brought the others. His father he could not budge from the bed. Caleb would wait for his mother to pass, and then let them lie together.
    As a child, Caleb hadn’t known of death. He saw cows, sheep, and pigs butchered, but he and his family—people—were different. When his father read the stories of the Bible, Caleb assumed those men and women were still walking the earth somewhere. But two years prior—his tenth birthday less than a month past—he had gone late at night to check on the sheep, guided by the moonlight and his perfect memory of each stone and root in the path. He’d watched as a man crossed the fields below, the grass waist high. The man stepped with great deliberation, and Caleb knew enough not to move. He carried a gun; Caleb saw the moon reflect off the steel. A shot rang out, and Caleb ducked and waited for the sting of the bullet. It was the man, however, who jerked backward and disappeared from view. Caleb’s father—he recognized his upright walk—emerged from a stand of trees at the foot of the hill, waded through the grass to where the man had dropped, stood over the depression in the grass, and leveled his gun. A second report chased the man’s small cry out into the world. At that time, Caleb had lived in the house and slept in the same bed as his brother, and for months after that, when they were both woken by his nightmares, Jesse would cover Caleb’s mouth with his hand and hug him, muffling his screams, squeezing Caleb back into himself.
    Water plinked all around him, falling from the branches and the roof. He stopped and listened. He stood beneath the elm tree that hung over their house, and found himself in the path of one of the steady drips, each as cold and finite as a bullet. This would be the last time he would ever