The Kept by James Scott Page A

circle around their camp.
    The straps were giving way on Caleb’s pack, but when he wondered whether his mother would be well enough to make the stitches strong again, he saw that she, too, had weakened. Her face, which had been regaining some of its old complexion, in the sunlight appeared ashen and drawn. He dug through her bag, and found a package fastened by loose string. Rather than chewing gum, the parcel held small, sugared gumdrops. After all the white and brown of the dead of winter, the blazing yellows and oranges brought a smile to Caleb’s face. He gave a red gumdrop to his mother, who tucked it into her cheek and tried to match his happiness.
     
    E LSPETH’S BODY WORKED on its own while her mind slept in fire. Sometimes she jerked away from the burning and became dimly aware of Caleb’s hand at her elbow, and she would try to thank him, but her voice had left and her lips had become so racked with fever blisters they were more water than skin. Other times she heard the calling of birds or the squawking of crows and she would be certain that Caleb had been forced to leave her and she was facedown in the snow, waiting for her last breath so the birds could take their portion of carrion back to their young. Somehow this last image improved her mood, and when Caleb’s arm wrapped around her waist and she understood they’d never stopped, she felt cheated.
    They had no food. Their clothes were beginning to wear out, beaten by the wind and the snow. Elspeth’s breath came heavily, sporadically, with a strange wheezing like a baby’s rattle. They walked over long, rolling hills. On all sides, trees cracked from the weight of the snow as it melted in the sun. Sometimes a branch would fall with a massive whoosh and a dead thud. Caleb would jump with fear but his mother wouldn’t react at all.
    Together they crested another in the unending line of hills, the land like waves on the oceans and lakes his father read about in his stilted tongue as the children huddled in his bed at night and Caleb sat outside, crouched underneath the windowsill.
    Elspeth identified something that had been dragging along in her mind. “Were you in the barn?”
    He stumbled. She had given all of her weight over to him. Her feet barely made contact with the ground. He knew that to stop was to die. “I hid,” he said. All the reasons, the excuses he’d readied sounded hollow. “I did nothing.”
    A large hill loomed in front of them, and he knew it would be their last. His words seemed to have wrenched the final bit of strength from his mother, and she could no longer lift her feet high enough to clear the snow. He imagined what it would be like to die but it simply sounded like rest. They would rest. And they would not wake again.
    His body climbed. He wished it to stop, and tried to communicate this to his limbs, but his head had drifted away and was no longer connected to the rest of him. Atop the hill, Caleb crashed to the ground, his mother falling with him. She made no noise. He squinted in the harsh white blur. The endless land surrounded them, naked, no trees, nothing but smooth snow. An indentation—as if God had taken a scoop out of the earth as one would a cup of flour—sat half in shadow, half in sunlight. Tall and alone at the edge of the dent stood a building.
    “A house. Mama, there’s a house,” Caleb said to Elspeth, his voice cracking. She didn’t move. He placed her on their tarp, along with his pack, the Ithaca, and her bags, and tied it as well as he could. With the rest of the twine, he attached the cocoon to his pack, though with each tug the straps dug into his shoulders and threatened to tear entirely.
    From the hill, the house had appeared to be less than a mile away, but from the bottom of the bowl it seemed at least twice that. Caleb stopped. He ate some more gumdrops that his stomach immediately rejected in a bright sunburst on the snow. A hawk circled overhead, its call like the earth being torn