The Kept Read Free Page B

across the kitchen chairs to air out. He lit the small stove at the foot of his mother and father’s bed, and resolved again to move Jesse. When he stepped over him he tried to concentrate on the reflection of the lamp in his mother’s wet footprint rather than his brother’s tousled hair and the curve of his ear. He would move Amos, too, and Mary and Emma, and bring them all to rest. The fire would soon make the bodies rot—the cold had been their preservation—and Caleb had lit nothing more than twigs since the three men had killed his family. Nothing would make him careful now. He didn’t care who saw the smoke or smelled the burning wood; everyone he knew in this world had moved on to the next. The lengths he’d gone to over the past five days—or was it six?—would no longer be necessary. With his mother’s presence came a strange sense of freedom: They were all home, and he had nothing left to wait for, nothing to fear, but his mother’s last breath.
    His feet wrapped in old pillowcases to keep them warm and silent, he shuffled into the living room and stared out into the snow. He saw his mother’s tracks extending out toward the barn. Once more he heard the solid thud of her body hitting the kitchen table and the screeching of the legs gouging jagged lines across the floor. He thought there must be some elemental knowledge stuck deep in his blood that should have prevented him from pulling the trigger. Shouldn’t he have been able to tell, even in the darkness of the pantry, even through the wood and the roar of the wind, that the person on the other side was his mother? He checked on her again—sat beside her, crying—and once he’d seen her chest rise and fall twenty times, he composed himself, wiped his tears until his face turned raw, and dragged a chair to the window in the living room to wait out the night.
    The exposure of sitting in plain view unnerved him. To soothe himself, he shouldered Jorah’s rifle and took shaky aim at the landmarks he could pick out in the dark: the dead pine that held their swing in its scraggly grasp; the boulder that marked the start of the stream; the farthest fence post of the sheep pen; and the stump where he, Jesse, and Amos played Chief. If anyone had followed his mother, if anyone waited for them, if anyone smelled the fire or saw the lights, he hoped he would be ready.
    It wasn’t difficult to keep from sleeping. Everything was painted in the shades of the killers—a face in profile, an outline of a body, the long legs and the beard and the greasy hair. Before hiding, he’d taken in the weapons slung over their shoulders, their vivid scarves. He remembered their gaits, how they hunched against the cold and walked gingerly over the thin coat of ice that covered the snow, careful not to slip. In the kitchen his mother coughed and he double-checked the rifle to be sure it remained loaded and patted his pockets, where the bullets clicked reassuringly.
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING, Caleb found his mother’s sweat cold, her breathing shallow. He didn’t know what to do. He wished to crawl back into the pantry, where the days had been lost to him, a collection of hours spent listening intently and shivering and sleeping until time bled together. He knew he had to ignore this impulse and left her, set the Ithaca and the rifle against the dresser in his parents’ room, and lay down on the floor in front of the stove, the warmth and give in the boards amending his pantry-bent posture and relaxing his muscles. Perhaps an hour later, he went to the kitchen, taking a path he’d memorized to keep from seeing the faces of his brothers and sisters, first looking at the window, then the mantel, the scratch on the doorframe, the crocheted quote Mary had made—A ND IF IT SEEM EVIL UNTO YOU TO SERVE THE LORD, CHOOSE YOU THIS DAY WHOM YE WILL SERVE; WHETHER THE GODS WHICH YOUR FATHERS SERVED THAT WERE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOD, OR THE GODS OF THE A MORITES, IN WHOSE LAND YE