The Kept Read Free

between his morning chores and the first blush in the sky, and she would pretend to be asleep as his weight reshaped the bed beside her and she, too, drifted off, listening to the sounds of his breathing.
    She retrieved the matches, stepping over Jesse’s body once again. Seeing her children sprawled in the kitchen affected her more now that the shock had worn off, and her whole body began to quiver. She stood there, shaking, sweating, not certain where to start. Her numb fingers went to work trying to untangle Mary’s dress from the range, and she stopped to breathe into her cupped hands to warm them. Mary shook like a doll with her efforts, but it was no use. Elspeth would have to cut her loose tomorrow. How Mary would have cried at that thought, after the many hours she’d spent in the yard clutching her dress in her arms to keep it from the dust. Even the chickens seemed to understand her concern, and did not nip at her toes or flutter at her feet as they did the rest of the Howells. But everything would have to wait for tomorrow and the light of day. She would place the bodies out in the barn with their brother Caleb. Once the house heated, the smell would be too much to take. Burial was out of the question this time of year. Even Jorah would not have been able to dig deep enough to safely keep the bodies.
    As she straightened Mary’s dress, she heard a scratching in the pantry, and it relieved Elspeth to have company, if only a mouse. Her voice almost leapt from her throat to call the boys, who loved to catch the mice and keep them in homes they built from scrap wood. She approached the door gingerly, afraid of frightening the animal. The floor creaked. A bright flash and she was thrown into the air. She landed on the kitchen table, nostrils and throat full of a burning smell, her body rent. It felt as though she had fallen apart.
     
    T HE PANTRY SMELLED of gunpowder. The acrid smoke swirled and then disappeared, sucked through the hole in the wall created by the elbow of Caleb Howell and the kick of his gun—his prized possession—a twelve-gauge Ithaca shotgun. The thirty-inch barrel ran most of the width of the pantry, leaving no room for recoil. Six more paper shot shells sat in the mass of blankets between his legs. He cleared the spent rounds, still smoking, and awkwardly loaded two more before pressing his face to the pantry door and looking through the hole created by the shot. It was warm on his cheek. He’d heard the grunt as the pellets hit and the scraping of the table legs as the murderer’s body dragged it across the kitchen floor.
    Through the smoldering gap in the wood, he saw one hand draped over the side of the table, blood dripping from the index and middle fingers. The steady tap helped him keep time. He waited for twenty, then another set of twenty. Caleb couldn’t count higher than that.
    Moments before, it had been comforting in his delirium to hear sounds again other than the fabrications of his terror and the incessant moan of the wind through the bullet holes and the scratching of the elm against the roof.
    He had been asleep when the men had come last. The first shot had sent him scrambling to the edge of the hayloft door. The sun threatened to rise. His sister, who’d been coming to fetch him for breakfast as she did most mornings, lay in the snow. When the men stepped into the doorway and over the threshold, Caleb caught only a few details: the long beard of the first; the gangly, unsteady legs of the second—like a newborn calf; and the way the third moved like water. Each carried a gun. Each wore a red scarf: the bearded one dangled loose about his shoulders, the gangly one wrapped around his neck and the third tied his long hair back with his. Caleb heard another shot and moved into the darkness of the loft. The crack of gunfire kept coming and he willed himself to press his eye to a knot in the rough wood. They emerged from the house, the three of them, and the gangly one