C
aleb crept along a ridge, the forest, black and endless, on his left and the town of Watersbridge behind him. The snow had melted and then frozen over in an icy sheen. The wind tightened his skin, made his cuts sing and his bruises throb. Ahead, the ridge curled toward the Shane household like the tail of a sleeping dog.
He’d asked Ethan about Martin—ignoring the twinge of betrayal at disobeying his mother—and Ethan had said the Shanes didn’t venture off their land much, a trait Caleb appreciated. Ethan’s gaze wandered over Caleb’s beaten face, but Ethan didn’t like to ask questions any more than he liked to answer them. Caleb said that he thought he’d walked past their house once, and—as he’d hoped—Ethan replied, “I doubt it; they live all the way on the edge of town.” Ethan had given him directions with little prodding, and he’d finished by saying with great disdain, for he thought the Shanes too isolated, “They named the trail leading to their property ‘Shane Road,’ because no one else uses it.” While he walked on it, Caleb wondered if the road didn’t bear his name as well.
When he finally got a full view of the house, rather than the slivered glimpses he’d seen through the trees, he saw the eaves decorated with elaborate carvings, the doors similarly marked, and the yard littered with stone statues of animals, buried to their torsos in frozen snow. He waited for the barking of a dog, the bellowing of a calf to herald his presence, but no alarm sounded.
Someone crossed a window and Caleb lost his breath. Once, he’d fallen from the top of the hayloft ladder, carrying a bucket and rushing to finish his chores before Jesse. He’d thought he was going to die, that his lungs had broken. Yet that injury had a source. This had been nothing but a shadow flitting across the yellow light emanating from the glass, a movement as rapid and fleeting as a bat, and his windpipe constricted as surely as if Gerry had his arm around his neck once more. He pushed his hat up off his brow, chilling the gash at his hairline, the tingling sparks bringing him back to the world, to the dry smell of pine and the flapping of an owl’s wings. High above, the tallest trees creaked in a breeze only they could reach. To Caleb it seemed as though the very air trembled with nerves.
He inched closer. On his hands and knees, he moved like a spider, and he imagined what they would think when they woke in the morning to such strange tracks. At the far side of the house, the brightest lights reached farther out into the darkness. He searched for a better view, pushing his way through the tips of small bushes poking through the snow. He scraped between the trees, under and over the boughs, the sap frozen but adhering to his coat, hat, and gloves, attempting to strip them from his body. In a small thicket of pitch pine, he found both cover and a gap in the branches, a hollow with only a dusting of snow, the needles and cones gathered into a soft rug, close enough to smell the woodfire. From his knees he could see three people. At first, they all had their backs to him, but then a large figure moved and exposed Martin sitting at the table. He slammed his fist on the seat of his chair and threw something with disgust—what Caleb could not guess. Another man took the seat next to him. Unlike Martin, he had dark, curly hair and reedy limbs. Caleb eased back on his haunches, cold attacking his body as soon as he did. The third figure was seated across from Martin, but he could see it was a woman from the bun in her hair and the shining implements that held it in place. The woman and the dark-haired man held hands and bowed their heads. They prayed. Martin, however, picked up his utensils. The similarity that Martin, too, avoided the family prayers compelled Caleb to say it out loud, testing its nature: “Caleb Shane.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. The three of them ate, and he tried to calculate the hour, but time had warped when Martin had walked into the Elm, and Caleb could hardly figure if night was coming or going.
Soft, thick snow tumbled down. Unlike most in Watersbridge, which came from the lake and fell fast as rain, these flakes took their time in meandering down out of the sky, gliding back and forth. Between the languid flakes, he saw nothing else that made him want to believe Martin Shane’s story anymore. No one had batted an eye when he’d hurled something across the kitchen, and Caleb could tell that the other people maintained a safe distance from him. Over the course of the meal, Caleb guessed the only noise came from the screeching of knives on plates and the clanging of spoons in bowls. The room contained no more congeniality or familiarity than the restaurant. He felt Elspeth’s touch again, the care with which she daubed the blood from his wounds. A lifetime of memories told him he had been a fool to entertain the ramblings of this insane man. The city had spun him around and loosed him, dizzy and disoriented, on its wonders. Of course Elspeth was his mother. By telling him not to go to the Elm, he understood, she’d only begun to act as one. It had never been required of her before.
The meal finished, the woman inside turned to the basin beneath the window: She had his hair, his eyes, his lips; part of him had been taken and layered onto her like a veil. He passed his gloved fingers across his own features like he needed to be certain they hadn’t been stolen entirely. He gripped the branches in front of him and pulled, as if the bushes were a quilt he could swaddle himself in. The woman leaned closer to the window and pressed a hand to the glass to shade the light. Caleb let go of the branches and slid backward, not able to turn from the house but desperate to get away. The woman spoke to the men and Martin joined her at the glass. The window clouded with the fog from their breath. Caleb thought perhaps he’d screamed. The branches snatched at his face, his hands. He finally emerged from the thicket. Snow whisked past as he scrambled up the hill.
The front door to the Shane house banged open to reveal Martin and the other man. Caleb stopped. In the crook of his elbow Martin had a shotgun broken open, and he cupped a hand near his mouth to light a cigarette. The other man reached back inside the door and produced a rifle. Caleb drew his Colt. The glow from the house only made it so far, and then the night might help to obscure the trail that would lead straight to him. Or so he hoped. The snow, for once, didn’t fall fast enough to cover his tracks. The moon that had remained hidden behind the snow clouds broke free, and weakly illuminated the path at the top of the ridge. He tried to will himself up, to crest the hill and sprint back to town. But his muscles refused. He stayed crouched in a ball. He shivered. Sweat dripped from his scalp, off his earlobes and the tip of his nose. It stung his cuts. When he was very young—before the boys and girls separated into their own chores and their own groups—they’d played hide-and-seek and he’d always hidden in the same places, and he would watch the shoes of Amos, Jesse, and Mary between the boards of the sheep pen or from the corner of the woodpile, and they would approach without hesitation, knowing he was there. As soon as they came close, he could stand it no longer and simply ran, and Amos, especially, would be angry with him for ruining their game.
Martin kicked at the snow. The two men talked, occasional laughter poking its way through their conversation and piercing Caleb’s hiding spot. Martin locked the shotgun into place while the other loaded his rifle. They cocked the weapons, but their pace was leisurely as they walked toward the thicket. They approached the tracks he’d left. He’d broken clear through the icy surface of the snow and into the powder beneath, and he understood that once the men’s footsteps went from the cacophonous shattering of the icy crust to the soft shuffle of powder, their demeanor would change, and they’d put their guns to their shoulders and not stop until they’d killed him. His knees locked, and he again felt like the small and helpless creature that had watched through the knot in the wall while his sister bled into the snow and his family followed her, one after the other, into darkness.
The pair was less than a yard from his tracks, and Caleb could smell the tobacco on the air, knew it would soon mix with the metallic stench of gunpowder. Martin shifted his shotgun to his hands. The other man stepped into the middle of Caleb’s tracks and Caleb popped onto his feet and raced for the top of the hill. Without looking, he fired his gun once. The trigger yielded with no resistance. Blinded by the darkness and the terror, he grasped the base of a small oak and pulled himself up the steep incline, digging his boots into the snow, trying to reach the solid earth beneath. His foot struck a rock and he shot forward. Whatever stood in front of him he grabbed, scrabbling toward the ridge. A glance back revealed his scarf hanging from a tree like an empty noose, exposed in lantern light. He clawed at the ice itself. He found purchase on the broken stump of an elm and leapt for the clearing as a bullet pierced the wood. The splinters scratched at him.
The sudden freedom of the trail fed his legs and his lungs. He heard shouting and the report of the rifle. But with the thickness of the trees and the uphill angle, the pair had slim chance of a clean shot. It was their luck against his own. He slipped and fell and shoved himself upright again. The trail sloped downward, and as he rounded a bend he heard the sizzle of a bullet and then heard the solid thunk of it nestling into a birch tree. Thin as paper, the bark slid to the ground and rustled as he sprinted past. Their voices suddenly got louder; they must’ve known of a shortcut up the hill. He hugged the tree line, stayed tight to it when the path curved. Friendly with the close air of the Elm Inn, he’d gotten used to the indoors, and the sting of the bitter cold rattled like shards of glass in his lungs. He didn’t know how close the men were behind him, but he didn’t dare lose his concentration and his footing to check. Besides, he’d heard Amos and his father discuss taking aim and killing deer and squirrels by nothing more than the wetness of their eyes and the shine they took from the moonlight.
His feet settled into a steadier rhythm as the path leveled. He hadn’t heard the whistling or dull thud of a bullet in a long time. The snow continued to fall, and he hoped that if the men had gone back to fetch a horse that his tracks would be obscured.
He neared town—the lamps shone over the trees and the noise of the inn echoed through the forest—and he pictured becoming a man like London White’s twin, living in the woods, alone. He would get a dog and a horse and on cold nights he’d sleep beside them. He didn’t think he’d miss people much at all. His breath raspy and ragged, he stopped running. In the sky, the rising moon excused itself behind the snow clouds again. Flakes continued their lazy descent. The path widened. He walked in the ruts of wagon wheels, where uneven rocks had long since been kicked away or ground into the dirt and he thought his trail would be harder to see. The noise intensified, sharpening into laughs and screams, the inn at its peak. He listened. Something else traveled on the air. He stopped. A low thunder rumbled beneath the sounds emanating from the inn. He jumped as far as he could, to the edge of the woods, then hopped again, and slid beneath a broken pine. His lungs burned and he suppressed an urge to cough as the hooves beat louder. The thin, dark-haired man from the Shane house stood in the stirrups—the horse steady enough in the snow and that he could trust its movements and scan the ground for prints. Caleb scooted farther beneath the branch, the cold there deep and invasive. The hoofbeats receded and then approached, slower. Caleb raised the Colt, his hands moving slowly, but they were numb from the cold and sweaty from the terrified run and the gun slipped from his grasp. The unmistakable sound of a man dropping from his mount turned Caleb’s search more frantic. His fingers sifted through the snow. The man struck a match and Caleb saw the brief explosion followed by a dull illumination. It lasted a few long seconds before he heard the hiss of the spent match being thrown away. The man lit another. Caleb held his breath and knew the man did, too.
Somehow he found the gun. The barrel, however, had caught on a section of needles, and a thick icicle cracked and struck a branch on the way down, the din incredible to Caleb’s fearful ears. “Come on out,” the man said.
Caleb tried to see through the underbrush to line up a shot. Before he could, the man fired and snow dropped from the branches with a thump. Caleb could try to blast his way out, but from the trees he’d have to hope beyond hope to get lucky enough to hit something critical before the man could pinpoint his hiding spot and pepper it with bullets.
“I’m coming out,” Caleb said. “Please don’t shoot. I’m just a boy.” It was a fact he’d forgotten over the last few weeks and it came as a relief. He wished he’d carried his mother’s gift with him as evidence. He wanted to say it again,
I’m just a boy
.
Let’s stop now
.
“Toss your gun out first.”
Caleb slid the gun on the snow, and the man kicked it away. He pulled his hat down low; he couldn’t let the man see his face, see the woman in it. The man trained a pistol on him as Caleb crawled out. He had a scar between his nose and his lip that interrupted his stubble. “Why are you spying on us?”
Caleb picked at some sap affixed to his coat.
“I don’t care if you are a boy, I’ll put a bullet between your eyes. Now, tell me, why were you spying on us?” Caleb said nothing and the man struck him with the back of his hand, knocking Caleb to the ground and his hat from his head. When he looked up, though, the man’s expression changed. He sank down, his legs crossed, and he sat in the snow in front of Caleb, who pushed himself up onto his elbows. “You’re him.”
The horse, spooked by the shots, worried at the ground with a hoof and tugged at his bridle, which the man had in one hand. He dropped the reins, but rather than flee, the horse backed up a few steps, struck the ground anxiously a few more times, shook his mane, and calmed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He didn’t want to be the Shane boy. He hadn’t had time to understand what that meant, or how he’d come to have two mothers.
The man’s eyebrows furrowed and rose up in worry, the dark hair undulating in a dance. “But why would you shoot at us?”