Free The Kept by James Scott

and hacked at the ice with the shovel, his grunts deadened by the snow covering the ground and the trees and the bodies of his brothers and sisters, mercifully obscuring their intertwined skeletons. The blows—hard, thudding strikes—soon relented as the ice gave way to powdery snow. Each shovelful hit the earth like a whisper. He rested, the sun beginning to fade from the sky behind the hill, the warmth ebbing from the afternoon. His shoulders tightened up toward his neck. His hands bled. The work occupied his mind.
    He kept on in the dark, his hands ringing with the cold, operating on muscle memory alone, digging because he didn’t know what else to do. The shovel finally clinked against a rock. Caleb widened the hole, and worked his raw fingers around the stone. This first marker—small and smooth to the touch—would be for Emma. He placed it beneath the elm, gnarled by the fire, but in its former life the girls had sprawled under it, looking up into its branches and whispering. He retrieved a large, rough rock for Amos, and placed it next to Emma’s. Hours passed, and he persisted. Four rocks, one for each of them, arranged in a square around the tree.
     
    I N THE BARN, the fire glowed as it had been for the past few days, and one of the lamps had been lit. Its light fell on Elspeth, seated on the edge of her pallet, facing the bags and supplies Caleb had piled in preparation to find the killers. “Mama,” he said.
    “My necklace,” she said, her voice harsh and dry. Caleb found the cross had twisted around to her back, and he apologized for moving it out of the way. “Did you see them?”
    “There were three men,” he said. He told her about the red scarves but he stumbled over their descriptions, not able to put them into words.
    “It’s okay,” she said. She patted his hand. “You pulled me from the fire?” she asked and Caleb said that he had. “Where were they hiding? I didn’t see them,” she said. Caleb drew a breath to confess everything but she slumped and he helped shift her feet onto the bed as her head collapsed into her pillow. “My necklace,” she said again. He laid her hand over the cross and she tightened her fist around it. “Where were you?”
    “Making gravestones,” he said.
    She nodded, “Good.” She said it several times, and then faded away once more.
    He leaned against the wall of the barn, his hat in his hands, boots on, and slept for two or three hours—heavy, black sleep. When he awoke, the brightness of the world startled him, and he reached for the Ithaca, as if this light was one of the marauders for whom he’d been waiting.

C HAPTER 6
    T hey went on like that—Elspeth and Caleb—for nearly a week. Each day Elspeth could sit up for longer and stomach a bit more food. Each morning, noon, and evening, Caleb changed her bandages, and the wounds no longer seeped liquid, and the scabs started to meet in the center like ice over a puddle. The snow continued, too, and the black shadow that used to be their home became lost in the sweeping, slow-moving drifts. The four broken posts turned half-white with driving flakes that stuck to the sides like moss.
    Inside the barn, the revived animals heated the air enough for Caleb to walk around without two shirts and two pairs of socks. His mother’s growing strength made him look upon the meager provisions he’d collected with new eyes. He packed and repacked, preparing for the journey ahead. Into an old rucksack that must have belonged to his father, Caleb placed what dried meats they’d stored in the barn for the winter. He rolled a thick wool blanket around clean shirts, extra rags for bandages, empty jars for water, a length of twine to hang their shelter, some matches, and—buried deep at the bottom—one of his favorite feathers, curled and so deeply black that when the sun shone against it, the edges appeared purple. He cleaned and oiled the guns. He took boxes of ammunition and stacked them in his arms,