The Kept by James Scott

idle, would not give her the rest of sleep, did not depend upon her wholly. When she relented and put him down, he pulled himself up by the rungs of the chairs and stayed standing on his own. His gurgles sounded more and more like words with each passing day, and he possessed a soft mat of hair. In the sun it was like gold, and Elspeth hated it. She caught herself wanting to cut it off, to take Jorah’s straight razor and restore the baby to what she thought of as its natural state. Mary played quietly in the corner, stacking blocks Jorah had fashioned from scraps of wood. She knocked them down and Elspeth bit her lip, wishing the child to stop. But whenever these thoughts struck her, Elspeth would cradle Amos and read her Bible to herself, surprised it didn’t ignite in her hands. She clutched him to her, hard, and once she left a series of finger-shaped bruises on his arm as he wriggled to be free, to be placed on the floor to run through the open door and out into the fields where she would never get him back. The bruises went from black to blue to yellow, but sometimes, even when Amos grew tall and muscled, she would see them on his upper arm, black as pitch, and she would look away.
     
    C ALEB BUILT A fire in the makeshift stove, a pile of bricks arranged in the shape of a box, topped with a flat stone, with a hammered and bolted chimney capped with chicken wire that carried the smoke through a hole in the side of the barn. Before he’d installed the wire, a family of raccoons had crept down the metal shaft, drawn by the scent of food, and when he lit the fire the next morning, they came screeching and snarling from the bricks. Caleb had been forced to stab one with a pitchfork when it got cornered in the horses’ stall, the horses stamping wildly, the raccoon screeching and clicking and baring its teeth.
    In the loft, his bed, his lantern, his bedpan, and his small pile of clothes were exactly as he’d left them. A biscuit—the last thing Mary had cooked—sat fuzzy with mold on the crate where he kept his things: a few books of animal pictures his mother had brought back with baby Emma, a collection of arrowheads, and another of feathers he could not identify. They seemed silly to him now, a child’s playthings, and he was embarrassed by how he would sit in the weak light of his lamp and rub the feathers against his face, thinking of the strange birds that had left behind these clues, species he’d never seen that flew only at night.
    The door to the loft looked down on the smoldering rectangle where the house once stood and the rustling canvas under which his mother slept. He threw the shovel as hard as he could, and almost reached the first fence around the barn, which separated the pigpen from the pasture. The snow was not deep, but he jumped anyway, enjoying the brief moment of nothingness, his body no longer his own, the wind screaming past. He landed with a thud and rolled forward, coming to rest on his back. The sky was gentle blue, unaffected by what had happened beneath it.
     
    W ITH THE HORSES, the mule, and their greatest efforts, the barn had been built. Jorah leaned the new walls against trees as they did so. He sat in the branches to hammer everything into place, and once he’d finished he cut them down to make room. Her husband went about his work with a clouded countenance, which she first took for concentration, but then understood to be something far deeper. She lifted a protesting Amos into her arms. Mary played with pinecones a few strides away.
    “We should baptize that boy soon,” Jorah said. He pressed his hand flat against one of the corner posts of the barn and then aligned his foot with the base, checking its orientation. Satisfied, he slapped his palms together.
    “Of course,” she said. “Today?” The afternoon threatened to slip away, and the wind had picked up, signaling a storm or—at the very least—rain.
    “Now,” he said. “Mary’s dress is on the top shelf of the