Free The Kept by James Scott Page A

impressed by their heft.
    For lunch he made cornmeal cakes, picking out the grubworms with quick hands, trying not to burn his fingers on the stone. The animals perked up at the scent, and Caleb knew their interest signaled the restoration of their health. He sometimes thought of staying but pushed the wish aside by shutting his eyes tight and thinking of the gunshots and the emptiness in the faces of his brothers and sisters. For the first time he lit the lamps that lined the middle of the barn, and he saw the animals, thin but alive, their bones cast in sharp relief beneath their taut skin, their shining eyes watching him. At the last stall, he discovered the horses had died in the night. He slammed the bucket to the ground and the water sloshed out and puddled at his feet. The horses—hardly recognizable as such, they’d grown so thin and frail—had fallen together, curling into each other. Caleb got down in the muck and folded himself into their embrace as well. The mud was cold and stiff. The horses had materialized one day, grazing in the valley below. Jorah had owned some workhorses once, but they’d died before Caleb knew them. Sometimes Amos pretended to remember them, but Mary would dismiss this as nothing but dreams, pictures culled from the words of their father. Caleb and Jesse had spotted these horses at the same time, but it had been Jesse who went to tell Jorah. Their father’s look had not been one of delight, as theirs had been; he shielded his eyes from the sun with a flattened hand and scanned the horizon. The horses—he would explain later—had been broken and wore the marks of being saddled. He ushered everyone inside and sat on the rock at the edge of the cornfields and watched the animals for most of the afternoon before he whistled for Amos and the two of them disappeared down the hill. When they’d returned, Caleb had been awed by the horses’ size, their knotted muscles, their veins thick as one of his fingers.
    As he curled against the belly of the horse, he thought of his move to the barn, which had begun after he’d watched the man in the valley spasm and fall, the sound reaching Caleb’s hiding place long after the flash of the powder. Day by day, he spent more time with the animals—who were simpler and easier to understand—waking earlier and staying later, Emma or Mary bringing him his lunch. After one fitful night in which gunshots sprung him awake again and again, and Jesse clamped his hand to his mouth each time, the two boys paced the inky darkness of the yard, then spent a while on the fence—not talking, Jesse keeping Caleb company—before Caleb wandered into the barn. He’d slept in the loft with no nightmares. The next night in the house, he woke screaming. In the barn, tranquil slumber. He grew used to the outdoors, but inside he would flush and burn with heat. Part of him thought perhaps Jorah radiated evil, and at night it seeped into his head and poisoned his dreams, and he yearned to ask Jesse about it, but he could never manage to find the words.
     
    E LSPETH PRACTICED WALKING. She creaked her way to her feet and took tentative, choppy strides, reminded of the children’s first steps—their first betrayals—how when Amos had begun to walk, she’d rushed to the lip of the hill and stood atop a stump, contemplating whether to throw herself off.
    Down the aisle of the barn she limped, and considered how it must affect Caleb to see the animals in such a state. She didn’t know the boy well—she barely knew any of the children—but she understood, of course, that he loved the barn and the animals it contained. The walk quickly drew the breath from her, and she rested against the railing of the final stall, where the two horses’ bodies shrank each day, their teeth baring themselves and their rib cages poking through their tightened skin.
    On the second day, she made it to the end of the barn and back. She felt more herself, and though her body wasn’t ready,