Caleb thanked him. The sky had already turned the color of deep water, and Caleb was worried his mother might return to the hotel and miss him. “Could you tell my—Jorah—where I went?”
Frank fixed him with an odd look. He lifted his chin. “What’s that under your coat?”
Caleb stopped. Frank motioned for Caleb to remove his scarf, and Caleb slid the gun from its hiding place. Frank took a step back. “It’s my shotgun.”
“Well, Lord, boy. You can’t just go marching around town with a gun under your coat. And you especially can’t go marching into the Elm Inn with a gun under your coat, as much as you’d probably be smart for doing so.” He held out his hand. Caleb folded his arms around the weapon in a hug. “Come on, Caleb, for safekeeping.” He sighed. “You go in there with a loaded shotgun and you better be ready to use it.”
Caleb relinquished the Ithaca to Frank, who concealed it behind his apron and looked up and down the street. “Careful now,” Frank said and shut the door to the hotel, leaving Caleb alone in the quickening darkness.
He followed Frank’s directions, moving among the people. He tried to watch the faces for killers that would be emerging from their dark houses at this hour, but he had trouble keeping track of everything at once—his feet, the ground made uneven by the carriages and the horses, the crowds, and the bustling noise that shrank him. A trickle of water turned Caleb’s attention to a shadowed figure lurking in the space between the barbershop and the dress shop. He’d just finished urinating. He held something shiny in the crook of his arm, and he slid it into his belt. Then he hitched his pants in a way that confirmed the presence of a gun, the addition of weight exaggerating the gesture. The gloom gathered around his face and Caleb saw nothing more than the barest silhouette. He coughed, a mean explosion of noise that made Caleb hunch and duck his head, and went on his way. Caleb stowed his fears, pushed aside the Elm Inn, took a deep breath, and followed the man as he passed the church. Caleb maintained a cautious distance, afraid the man would wheel on him any second, but he was too consumed with his own lurching, uneven steps to notice a boy behind him. As they walked along, twenty feet apart, the light gave out, and the black descended like a blanket. Caleb challenged himself to keep going, his dim awareness that they were mirroring Frank’s directions growing into understanding.
The Elm Inn was indeed on the side of the hill, built on stilts. The whole structure had been made of rough pine, and—even in darkness, covered in snow—it appeared prickly, laden with waiting splinters. Light poured from the windows, as did loud laughter, shouting, and music. The man staggered up the steps, and brushed past someone vomiting onto the snow from behind the railing that surrounded the porch like an ill-conceived fortress. Both men were inside before Caleb could make himself mount the steep staircase leading to the front door. It didn’t take him long to sound out the first two words scorched into the very wall of the building:
ELM INN.
The second part he didn’t even attempt:
VACANCY.
A small shutter hung next to the word and Caleb flipped it to the side, exposing a
NO.
The main room writhed with life. The inn had a large open foyer, where men played cards like at the hotel, but here women sat on their laps, wearing small outfits. Caleb noted the heat as well, barreling out of two enormous fireplaces—one to his left and one to his right. A bar ran the length of the building, obscured by smoke from the fire, lamps, cooking, cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. Staircases on either side led up to the second story, where a walkway led to rows of closed doors. A woman opened one, a disheveled man after her. He slapped her on her bottom and she rang a bell next to her door.
“Help you, boy?” In front of Caleb, a man sat squeezed into a chair. He was enormous, the size of a bull, his sides escaping over the arms of his seat. Caleb wondered how big a man could get. On his head he wore a hat that only served to accentuate the massiveness of his skull. At his feet were the ruins of a table. On his lap he held a metal box. “I say, help you?”
“No,” Caleb said, and moved to walk past him.
The man sprang up with surprising quickness and put a firm finger to Caleb’s chest. “Kid, you got to pay to even see what the Elm has to offer.” He shook the metal box, and it rattled with coins.
“Aw, let the boy have a peek, Ethan,” a voice said from behind the mountainous man whose hand—Caleb was certain—could have shoved him right through the pine wall and all the way back to the Brick & Feather Hotel. A disappointed Ethan gave Caleb a poke that knocked him back a yard, confirming his assessment of the man’s power. “Don’t worry me,” he said, and spat toward a metal spittoon beside the door, the ground splattered with his many attempts.
The voice that had saved Caleb belonged to the same man who’d told him to come to the Elm in the first place. Caleb prepared to reintroduce himself but became confused when he saw the man owned not one but two sturdy legs. Caleb dismissed the notion that perhaps legs could be reattached in the larger world. This man had no stubble: His face was smooth and unwrinkled. Caleb wasn’t able to see his scalp through his hair, and his clothes were certainly not held together by needles. They were, in fact, the nicest clothes Caleb had ever seen. They shimmered in the lamplight, which swayed with the movement of the room. This was an entirely different man. Who happened to look almost exactly like the man his mother had chased him from earlier that day. “Has the glamour of the Elm Inn left you speechless, young one?”
“What?” Caleb said.
“My child, you look as though there’s something you’d like to say.”
“I met someone who looked like you,” Caleb managed.
“Ah, my lovely brother,” he said. “And yet here you stand.” The man smiled, and Caleb smiled back, realizing he’d made a joke. He liked the way the man talked. All of his words had a kind of magic to them, almost like they were music.
“He has a wooden leg,” Caleb said, thinking it a very interesting thing to say until he remembered that, of course, the man’s own brother would know this fact.
Yet the man laughed and the smile never left his face. “He does, indeed.” He raised his pant legs, exposing dark socks supported by black bands and metal clips. Between the two, however, was pink flesh. “I, on the other hand, do not. My young friend, have you never visited us before?”
Caleb glanced around, surprised in the calm, enveloping presence of this man to find the two of them in a flurry of activity. “No. Never.”
“Well, my dear boy, there is a lot to be learned here. Do you like to learn?” Caleb nodded, and the man reached out a clean hand tipped with perfect fingernails and patted him on the head three times. “Of course you do—knowledge is the key that unlocks all of life.” He turned on his heel in a manner that Caleb had never seen, a manner that he hoped to practice in his hotel room as soon as he returned. Caleb followed in his scented footsteps.
E
DWARD WALLACE WAS
a giant of a man. His office was an old rail car, and he dwarfed the steps leading to it. He rested both hands on his cane as he spoke to Elspeth and Charles. He sat on the top step, his knees poking up like two mountain peaks. His back contained a permanent hunch from leaning down for people to hear him. Had he been standing, Elspeth imagined, she wouldn’t have been able to make out a word over the saws and picks and the squeal of pulleys.
“Kind of scrawny,” he said as if she wasn’t there. He reached out and squeezed her biceps twice, testing. “Seems strong, though. Sure he can work the lake?”
“Of course he can,” Charles said. Elspeth was concerned, though. For the most part her injuries had mended, thanks to Margaret’s care, and though she’d done her fair share of removing stumps and rocks from the fields, she wasn’t sure how she would tolerate the continuous exertion. She would avoid midwifery and in exchange, she would have to keep pace. Besides, Charles wasn’t that much bigger than she was, excepting his belly. She studied him quickly and rounded her shoulders and pushed her hips forward to match his.
“We certainly need the manpower. That icehouse isn’t going to fill itself.” Wallace’s face twisted. “Charles, give us some privacy, would you please?” he said. Charles’s fingers played over his hat with frenetic energy. Elspeth was sweating, tensing, ready to flee, about to be found out, a woman among the men, an impostor and a fake. Charles thanked Wallace, placed his hat back atop his head, and walked several paces. Wallace shooed at him with his cane, and Charles shuffled up the hill, away from the lake.
Wallace leaned forward on his elbows, close enough she could smell something—pipe smoke, maybe—on his clothes. “He told you about the job, correct? The dangers inherent?”
“I’m well aware. Charles laid it all out for me,” she said. Wallace was unconvinced. “And I need the money.” He waited some more. “I trust Charles,” she said.
This satisfied him in some way, and he rapped his knuckles on the railing of the stairs, and the cast iron rang like church bells. “Good, then. Best of luck to you both. Charles has his positives, but he can also be a bit”—he thrust himself up with the power of his cane and towered over her—“odd.”
The odor of woodfire drifted across them, and Elspeth couldn’t help but think of her own skin to the flames.
At the top of the hill, Charles leaned on the railing of the icehouse ramp. “What’d he say?”
“I begin tomorrow,” she said.
He asked her to get a drink with him. The sounds of the other men had increased in her time with Wallace; they walked up from the lake, a steady mass of them, all chatting and laughing, happy to be done for the day, their collective heat bringing a wave of steam. She agreed, and regretted it as soon as the words had left her mouth.
As they merged with the crowd, Charles explained to Elspeth—Jorah—how they cut the ice from the lake with long saws and created a channel down which they floated the blocks. He pointed to all the stations on the steely ice. He and Elspeth would probably be on the banks of the water, he said, where they picked the blocks of ice up with a set of tongs and swung them by crane and pulley to a cart that would be taken to the icehouse by horses. The canal was a black stripe against the solid surface of the lake. She answered his questions about her family with a series of masculine grunts. He spoke of his own wife and their children.
They headed into a dingy tavern and Charles ordered two whiskeys. Elspeth didn’t have the head or stomach for such things, but rather than give herself away, she threw the brown liquid back with a flick of her wrist and covered the blaze in her throat with her deepest cough.
“We had a boy die in birth,” he said after he’d had another drink. “The cord had been wrapped around his neck and he lived for a few days, almost a week. The whole thing just about broke my wife clean open—me, too—and we set a place at the table for him before our other boys got old enough to object.” Charles bit at his nails, mind stuck at his dinner table, and drank another shot of whiskey.
Elspeth feared the sound of her own voice as the alcohol invaded her, but a cloud had settled over the two of them, and if she had spoken, she doubted he would have heard her anyway. Her thoughts—those that she kept hidden even from herself—had broken loose and she couldn’t hope to stop them.
She always pictured train tracks from above, lines and circles across the land like stitches on the earth. On that morning, she’d had to run to catch the train, and a porter had helped her aboard as the cars lurched into motion, the speed pushing her onto her heels. Snow glistened with melting water as they swept past. In the lowlands, the unending sheets of white gave way to patches of yellowed grass.
As usual, she hadn’t planned on taking the child. Emma had turned two and could speak in complete sentences and move around the yard on her own. Elspeth left at the beginning of winter, and tried to find a different type of work, but everywhere she turned she was deemed unfit, unprepared, or uneducated. To her, the cries of infants sang from every door and window, slowing her steps on the plywood walkways of town, calling for her to help. Unable to ignore them any longer, she went into the doctor’s office she’d been circling for days and offered her services. The next morning, she crouched in her usual position, rags at the ready, pail of hot water at her feet, gleaming tools cleaned and laid out in neat and tidy rows. Everything waited in its correct place.
On the train home—the grass patches becoming more and more scarce as the train veered north—the baby didn’t move. Elspeth tickled its feet, tried to get the baby to grab onto her thumb, her nipple, anything, but the baby refused. Elspeth wished for Jorah. The children had all fallen ill at one time or another, and he had nursed them back to health with herbs and medicines he stored in jars in a trunk at the foot of their bed. The baby turned blue, the splotches of color joining and deepening, the veins dark and threatening, and Elspeth debated running into the corridor for help, but she couldn’t leave the child or risk the inquiry.
She waited too long. Before nightfall, the child stopped breathing, the blue fading, leaving the skin pale and rigid. Elspeth wrapped the body in a shawl, pressed it to her shoulder as if it were alive, and walked the corridor. The motionless child that she clutched in her arms had been taken by a God seeking revenge on one who spoke His word but would not follow His direction. He had given her no hints, no signs, direct or implied, that she should take this child. And now He’d shown her what He’d do to her for ignoring His wishes.
A man passed down the aisle as she did. She rocked back and forth on her hips, and placed a finger to her mouth, asking for quiet while the baby slept. The man gave a small bow of apology and stepped into an empty compartment to allow her to pass. She came to the end of the train. The icy wind tore at her clothes like claws. Elspeth couldn’t look at the swaddled child. The stars maintained a fixed position above the train as it hurtled forward. She dangled the child over the tracks. She let go. The stars did not flinch.