Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  The man, a Mr. Jasper, came out and shook Mr. Charter’s hand, then crouched down beside the table and ran his palm around one of the good legs as if he couldn’t see it and had to touch to know what it was. His hand was large and dry and spotted with stains. He leaned his head down, and Kate could see the bald circle at the crown. “Decent work,” he said. “Nice turnings. They made a good piece here. Wasn’t a flaw did this. Someone got clumsy whilst moving it. I can fix you up another, cut it here, right below the knee”—he pointed at a thick spot high up on the leg—“fit a dowel and put you a new one on. I’ll get the turnings to match pretty fair but the color won’t be the same. Still an’ all, you shouldn’t note the new leg unless you’re looking for it.” Without moving his head, he raised his eyes. “So you’re new here, then.”

  “Yes, just arrived yesterday,” replied Mr. Charter. “We’re with Fitcher.”

  Jasper said, “That so. Lots of folks are, here. People coming through all the time now on their way out to Harbinger. He hasn’t said when yet, has he?”

  “No.”

  “No. I expect when he does, we’ll be running out of places to put everyone. The world will come pouring in, that’s for certain, pouring in just to see if it all goes as he says. They’ll be fighting to get in at the end, but I guess from hearing him that they’re gonna be too late. That’s so, yes? So, you’re with him but you ain’t out at Harbinger, or you’d be using them for to fix this table leg, since they got their own lathe and all out there. Their own smith, wheelwrights, their own everything. It’s a little town. Yessir, got their own version of everything. Even a mill, I believe I’ve been told. Where are you, then?”

  “House on the Gorge Road.”

  Kate chimed in, “It’s called the Pulaski house.” As soon as she said it, she sensed a change in Mr. Jasper. He didn’t shrink from them or even bat an eye; but something stilled in him. She said, “There’s something about that place, isn’t there?”

  Her father glanced at her. “Whatever do you mean, daughter?”

  “I don’t know. But the black man who carted our belongings—”

  “That’d be Stephen, I expect,” Jasper chimed in. “Stephen the stevedore.” He was careful not to smile too much at his own joke, but gauged their reactions.

  “He came over almighty strange when he learned where we were living.”

  “He did, I’ve no doubt. He moved those people in there. That place, it belonged before to another of your Fitcherites.”

  “Fitcherites?”

  “That’s the name people got for the followers of Reverend Fitcher. You’ll hear it attached to yourselves before long.” Then he added, “It’s not in disrespect, at least not all the time—just a way to identify them as come to Harbinger. And you’re right, miss, there’s something about that place that sets people to talking. Pulaski and his young bride moved in there, would have been two, more like three years back. About the time your preacher started building his community out there on the far side of the gorge. I guess they were supposed to keep the unwelcome from getting past or something, which is why there’s that turnpike set up there. Anyhow, something happened to her, to the wife. She just up and disappeared one night. Nobody saw her after, and there was talk that young Pulaski had kilt her and hid her body in the house, and for a time after that he didn’t have many friends hereabouts. And then when he disappeared, well, the stories just rolled right along like wheels looking for a wagon.”

  Mr. Charter asked, “You mean to say, both of the people who lived in our house disappeared?”

  “Yes, sir, they did. Nobody’s sure what it was about. I mean, the furnishings were all left behind. You must’ve found ’em, as no one would claim them, and not many wanted to set foot inside anyhow and nobody wanted to buy ’em for fear there’s some taint on ’em. Some fine craftsmanship there, too. Good chairs. I expect whoever sold you the house didn’t breathe a word of this to you.”

  “My wife—that is, my wife made the arrangements, through someone known to her in Reverend Fitcher’s group. I’m sure they never said…”

  “Well, and I don’t mean to trouble your mind, either. But you are going to hear some tall tales around town associated with your house. Some will let on as it’s a haunted place, and some will say that something came in the night and snatched the people away. I’ve heard tell that some of the folks at Harbinger believe the Angel of Death dwells among them.”

  “And what do you say, Mr. Jasper?” Kate asked.

  “Well…what I say really shouldn’t matter, miss, since I wasn’t there.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Kate, that’s very forward,” her father warned with unusual sharpness.

  Jasper ignored him. “In that case, miss, I think there’s only two ways you go down that road. One comes back here, where nobody saw either of them pass by. The other crosses over the gorge, and it ends at Harbinger. I think they fell in with your Mr. Fitcher, one after the other.”

  “But why would they hide? If they were already part of the community. Why would his wife not tell him where she was going?”

  “I may have misspoke. They weren’t part of the community. Your Mr. Fitcher didn’t want his people consorting with nonbelievers or touching money, so he hired this fella to collect his tolls. I don’t know as how they’re hiding. Just maybe no longer caring about the things left behind in this world,” he said. “You say you haven’t been out there yet.”

  “Sir, we shall be going shortly,” Mr. Charter replied, with inordinate anger in his voice. “We’re still settling in. Our belongings just arrived, including this table.”

  “Well, you’ll see soon enough how someone could just be swallowed up in that big place. You’ll see that. And maybe you’ll see Pulaski. And if you do, then we’ll all know—”

  “My table, then?”

  Mr. Jasper brushed his hand across the top of it, almost as if he were calming it down. “The table. Well, two weeks.”

  “Very good. I shall return then to collect it.”

  Jasper nodded slowly. It seemed to Kate that her father’s anger had fatigued him.

  As her father turned to leave, she quickly asked, “Then you don’t believe the end time is approaching?”

  Jasper brushed his hand across the tabletop again and said as if to it rather than in reply, “The world will end or it won’t, without my participation.”

  “Katherine,” her father said, and she fell in obediently behind him.

  “You ought not to dignify such talk by treating it seriously,” said Mr. Charter to his daughter as they walked home. “That man is not saved and not planning to be. He cares nothing for the truth.”

  “I thought he seemed to care a good deal for it, Papa.”

  “Would you disagree with me, child? He said the Reverend Fitcher didn’t want his people touching money—yet here am I in the very position he claims that Pulaski youth was, and am I not one of his ‘Fitcherites’? I daresay, I am.”

  Knowing where her interests lay, she held her tongue. Her father took the silence as compliance. “He’s a gossipmonger. The world is a foul place, Kate, we’ve all made it thus. And those who are of the world will find themselves brought down soon, and they’ll beg then for God’s mercy, but too late, the gates will have closed. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, they shall be expunged, their corruption erased, and then we who listened will step out upon a cleansed Earth, ready for purity.”

  Kate listened, less inspired than embarrassed for him. She could remember a time when he hadn’t preached when he spoke. He’d been gentle with his daughters, never raised his voice, never threatened to rain down fire and brimstone upon them. “The clarity of their love” was Vern’s phrase for how it had been between their father and mother, a version that seemed to have emerged out of a dream Kate had before she was ten, in which she had a mother who laughed and sang lullabies with a lovely voice, who combed and braided her hair, and who told her fairy tales at bedtime. It hadn’t been so long ago—
only six years, yet nothing save echoes remained.

  Their financial troubles had come first. Some sort of wild speculation had caused the market to collapse—an unprecedented economic disaster. Their money—invisible though it was to the girls—had evaporated, and overnight their father had become estranged from them. Mother had shored him up for a while, but when he was gone—either looking for work or working at any task he could find just to feed them—then their mother crumbled, apologizing through her tears, trying to explain to the children that forces larger than they could understand had tried to crush the family and now they all must rally, they all must endure. She made them promise to help their father any way they could, to support him, for he was so miserable. Often he would be gone for days on end, and when he returned he was sunburned and unshaven and he smelled, and he seemed smaller, as if time and distance had wrung the blood from him. Vern had overheard her father say how he wished his daughters were all married off and gone, because now he would never be able to provide a dowry for any of them. Why, he could barely feed them.

  They might have come through the hard times, but within months their mother had fallen ill, and nothing and no one seemed able to save her. Papa couldn’t go for work, didn’t dare leave her alone, yet not to work was to not have any money for doctors, for medicine, which forced him to take any menial job at all that might keep him nearby. Even sweeping sidewalks, cleaning gutters for a few pennies.

  After her death he cut himself off from his daughters. It wasn’t much of a change. He had been distant for some time; now they simply lacked their interpreter. The very sight of the girls seemed to remind him of the ragged hole in his life.

  He turned to strangers for solace.

  People appeared in their home whom they’d never seen before. Some brought consolation pamphlets; others arrived with enough food for an extended siege, which should have warned the sisters that more would follow. Most of the time these people arrived early in the afternoon and set up in the parlor, where they read strange poetry about gloomy cemeteries and life in the grave, and children watching everyone from on high. They talked almost exclusively of the dead, as though the room were full of spirits and everyone aware of them. All three girls were made to attend the meetings, although unlike their father they felt no desire to prolong the pain this way, much less wallow in their mother’s loss among ghoulish people who could speak of nothing else. After they’d recognized the pattern to these events, they made a point of trying to leave the house before the guests arrived—with varying success.

  During one of the meetings Mr. Charter tearfully revealed that the girls had had a brother, one who’d been born before Vern, but who had died within his first month. He hadn’t even a name. He’d been sickly at birth, and so Mother and Father had hesitated to give him one, circumscribing their impending loss through anonymity. It was a fearsome revelation to the girls that something so momentous had been withheld from them by both parents for so many years. Previously they’d been concerned about Papa, even frightened by the gloom he wore like a shroud. Now they had cause to distrust him.

  Sometimes at the gathering of ghouls there was a lecturer; often this was someone “on the circuit”—traveling up and down the seaboard to dispense personal views on the afterlife—of which there seemed to be an endless variety. Most speakers were women who had lost someone close—a child more often than not—and who felt that their own experience could inform and guide others; they had a disagreeable tendency to clutch the nearest of the Charter girls to their bosoms during the telling. A few men turned up to speak—priests and circuit riders whose paths crossed those of the death artists. Everyone seemed to know everyone, just as they all seemed to have mapped the territory of the afterlife. Speeches and recitations often were punctuated by periods of weeping, and the girls—save for Amy, who would frequently fall in with the weeping—learned to withdraw the moment it began, else find themselves passed around like handkerchiefs among the bereaved and blubbering. Helpless to intervene, they watched their father slide into a world of constant, raw memorializing. He took up residence in the afterlife.

  It was during this period that Lavinia appeared. One of the later speakers—more than a year after their mother’s death—she’d proclaimed that all lost souls would be reunited on the day the heavens opened, and that Mrs. Charter had surely set up house there in anticipation of their arrival, and that the girls would meet their little brother there, too, by and by. Everyone would be reunited. And that day was coming quite soon. The Parousia—as she called it—was going to take most everyone by surprise.

  Unlike the other speakers who focused upon the closeness of death, the soon-to-be-second Mrs. Charter guaranteed its delivery. It was the first time the girls had ever heard of the Reverend Fitcher—the man who knew the date of Judgment. When the time was right, he would tell everyone, giving them a chance to prepare themselves and put their lives in order. “Put your faith in Him,” Lavinia frequently insisted, leaving the girls uncertain whether she meant God or Reverend Fitcher. She made proclamations all the time: “Forswear the false prophecies.” “The Reverend Fitcher sits upon the Throne below Jesus Himself, from where he can look straight into your soul.” “He will gather the good and bring them straight into Heaven.”

  Mr. Charter, already fully lubricated with the elixir of the afterlife, succumbed to the message immediately. Had that been the extent of his devotion, the girls might have accepted his spiritual transmission. But Papa had succumbed to the messenger as well as the message. Lavinia was the bridge between worlds for him: Her presence kept him in sight of eventual reunion. His daughters suspected her of evil powers, or casting a spell over his will, but they had no way to persuade him of this, no word the equal of hers, no promise that could soothe his soul—especially if they were right. They had known him to be a gentle man; in Lavinia’s shadow, his inherent irresolution became apparent.

  Their mother’s piano served as final proof. Lavinia insisted it was too large for the parlor. She wanted to put other furniture in there. Over the girls’ protests, Mr. Charter had done what they would never have believed him capable of—he had sold the piano. Watching the men haul it away had been like watching their mother’s coffin carted to the cemetery a second time.

  Thereafter they were allied against their stepmother. Kate and Vern learned quickly to mask their opinions and to protect Amy from direct interrogation because she was helpless when it came to dissembling. Invariably Papa now sided with Lavinia against them in all matters. He, who had never punished them, could now be coerced by Lavinia even to draw his belt.

  Whenever Reverend Fitcher preached within a few days’ journey, Mr. Charter left the girls in Vern’s care to travel with his new wife to hear the prophet’s words. Vern had accepted maternal duties as soon as her mother had fallen ill, and watching out for her sisters was no hardship; but now it felt provisional.

  When her father returned, he was always charged with new fervor, new sureness of the world’s peril. He immersed them in his belief, quoting from Reverend Fitcher’s sermons or parroting the same biblical passages, crying, “God says I am with you always to the end of the world!” as if by exercising his own enthusiasm, he might persuade the girls. Rather than take them to see Reverend Fitcher, it was as if they were to be their father’s flock, Lavinia’s flock. As if they were being saved for some future event. Meanwhile, Lavinia wrested the role of mother back from Vern, usually by giving her orders, assigning her some task to reestablish the household hierarchy. Of all the sisters, she surely hated the woman the most. Kate merely considered herself the least persuaded of the trio.

  Thus, as she followed her father up the road, she focused upon the world around her, and only paid enough attention to his preaching to know when to nod or murmur a response. There were tulip poplars, elms, and chestnut trees, bare as yet but sure to blossom. She imagined collecting the chestnuts come winter and roasting them over the kitchen hearth, as the family had done in Boston. Amy used
to shriek each time one popped, certain, though it had never happened, that it was going to explode and do her harm.

  Kate saw the white straight trunks of beech trees, and the hawthorn, dogwood, thimbleberries, and staghorn sumacs. It would be a beautiful place soon, and if it was not Boston, at least it offered its natural lushness as recompense.

  They approached the house without passing anyone on the Gorge Road, and it was surely an illusion that tricked Kate’s eye, for as she looked ahead at the turnpike, she thought she saw the pole slowly lowering onto the posts as if it had been fully raised only moments before. There was no sign of Amy, no one about at all, and she checked her father to see if he was seeing what she saw. He continued to rail against “those who would trample upon the Doctrine of God,” clearly unaware of anything out of the ordinary. When she looked again, the pole was in position, motionless.

  They walked across the yard, and she gave the turnpike a final, probative glance before entering the house.

  Once inside, Kate knew immediately that something was wrong.

  Vern caught her eye the moment no one else was watching and there was fear in her look. Kate assumed initially that Lavinia must have invoked a cruel punishment for some misbehavior during their shopping excursion, but when the stepmother entered the room, Vern hid her unease and helped with the tea that had been brewed for Papa’s return. Lavinia did not seem conscious of any disturbance, and she would have been all too willing to recite Vern’s transgression had there been anything to report.

  Yet each glance Vern gave her was a silent tocsin, and the time they sat in the parlor seemed interminable, Amy prattling with Lavinia about the need to plant vegetables—shouldn’t they do it soon, and what should they be planting this early, and could they find someone to plow up the ground for them. Amy couldn’t sit still while she talked, which drew a sharp “Don’t fidget so, child!” from Lavinia, but that was the equivalent of a familiar ritual, a litany between her and Amy. Amy’s behavior was so typical in fact that Kate knew she was unaware of whatever troubled Vern.