Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  After the prayer, the sermon ended. Fitcher strode through the crowd, eventually reaching Kate. She told him how his voice had rung like a bell and how his words had banished her doubt. He asked if she had been filled by the sermon and she responded, “Oh, completely.” There was something going on in their dialogue that Amy couldn’t grasp—some embedded code being exchanged, but one that seemed to have nothing to do with her. Kate never so much as inquired about how Fitcher treated his wife. Nothing the two of them said involved Amy at all.

  Kate hugged her before leaving, and whispered again in her ear, “Do nothing to provoke him, sweetheart.” Amy saw this as Kate’s way of telling her that she hadn’t been believed and must endure her state. Kate must think her hysterical. She had been, yes, she was hysterical, but with cause. With such cause!

  She heeded the advice, although it took no effort to do so. He was busy planning his crusade, gathering up the soldiers of God who were to accompany him.

  His whipping of her in the evening was only cursory, as if the process of scourging her now bored him. His mind was elsewhere. She didn’t care. She went to the whipping post willingly, half convinced now that she was insane, and it would just be one more obstacle to her entering the gates of Heaven when the time came. Her days she spent doing whatever was asked of her in the kitchens, leading new arrivals from the gate into the encampment, guiding them to where the horses were being released to pasture, to where the wagons were being abandoned. She didn’t so much throw herself into her duties as try to lose herself in them. Let Amy vanish in servility, she thought. Maybe through compliance, she could enter Heaven.

  Then one night, after Fitcher had whipped and cleansed her, he sat beside her on the bed. She had her eyes closed, luxuriating in the sensations still vibrating through her from the touch of that cold marble anodyne. Beside her head something tinkled. She opened one eye.

  Fitcher had placed his keys on the bed beside her. Her other eye opened. She stared at them, at the light glinting on them. At the one key unlike all the others.

  He said, “Now you are in charge, my dear. Of everything.” He rolled the egg up and set it in the center of the keys. “Keep this with you always so I’ll always know that you’re safe.”

  Such kind words. Such tenderness. In her narcosis her terror seemed a distant memory, unattached and floating far from her. Now she trusted him and had so misjudged him, when all he wanted was to protect her. She could imagine almost anything. She asked, “Who will scourge me if you’re not here?”

  He patted her rump. “Ah, that’s important to you now. You can’t be without it.”

  “It can never end.”

  “Forgiveness is a steep climb. One does not return to Heaven without effort.”

  “Return?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, drawing the syllable out. “You were in Heaven before you were born, and you’ll return to it very soon.”

  “With you?”

  “I shall enter, triumphant, with so many souls in my keeping.” He rattled the keys. “You know about these because I’ve instructed you. Go where you like.”

  “Except for the one place.”

  “That’s right.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She could not remember him having kissed her since the wedding.

  The keys seemed to hiss; or was it the trees outside her open window?

  “Elias?” she asked, rolling over, wanting to pull him down on top of her.

  The room was empty.

  Amy lay back and tried to sleep. It was a hot late August night, and she lay lethargically atop the sheets.

  Whenever she closed her eyes, the light of the lamp or the candles flickered, as though something had passed through the room. The first time she thought Elias had returned, but he wasn’t there. No one was. It must have been a breeze from the window, although none was blowing upon her.

  She finally rolled onto her side with her back to the egg and the ring of keys. Out of sight, the keys seemed to exert an even stronger pull on her imagination. She told herself she must be good, she wanted to be good, and good meant not prying, not looking where she’d been told never to look. She was the dutiful, obedient daughter. Even Kate had said not to look, hadn’t she? Why, then, could Amy not help but dwell on that glass key, on her husband’s secret rooms that no one was to visit? Where does he live? she’d asked her sister.

  Amy tossed and turned. She got up and blew out the lights. She stood and looked out upon the camp, drained of color by the moon. Could any of them see her up here, naked in her window? Would they have understood all the knots and twists in her soul? How could she want to be good and still wish to defy his imposed restrictions? She picked up the keys and the egg from the bed and placed them on the table before lying down again.

  She never did find sleep.

  In the morning, exhausted, she sat in the rear of the Hall of Worship and listened to him exhort the community to behave like perfect Christians while he was gone. They were to listen to Reverend Flavy, attend to his vision. He said nothing whatsoever about her or her plans for Harbinger. Nothing about raising new buildings for all the latecomers. Nothing at all.

  He bid them farewell, strode down the aisle and out of the room as if he didn’t even see her. The hall emptied as the devout followed him through the foyer and onto the front lawn. They cheered him and his legion as they set out: dozens of wagons, fifty or more horses, men, women, and children. There must have been twice as many as on his previous crusade.

  Amy felt in her pocket for the egg and the keys. She turned away from the cheering throng and went up the stairs to the third floor.

  He didn’t live on her floor, she knew that. She’d seen every room there. His quarters had to be here, somewhere.

  The hallway was darker than on the second floor. She walked along, looking at each door, looking for some indication that one of them might lead where the others didn’t. The end of the hall was as dark as night, but her eyes adjusted until she could make out the thin reddish line of light spilling from under a door there, a door set back in its own alcove, unlike any other door in the house. She sorted through the keys by feel. The glass key was slick as ice. She transferred the egg to her other hand.

  She entered the alcove. The wall of chill air inside it surprised her. She looked back down the hall, which remained empty. Her breath misted before her. Then she fit the key into the hole and turned it. It clicked and the door swung open in invitation. She saw the skylight first—the stained-glass panel of Adam and Eve. Something about it looked familiar, and she wandered in until she was directly beneath it. She couldn’t quite place where she had seen it before, but knew she had. Then her belly bumped up against something, and she gave up trying to identify the stained glass and looked down.

  Her sister stared up at her from inside a huge tub, from underwater.

  Vern’s eyes had gone milky and soft, the lips were slightly parted, showing the hint of her lower teeth. Her neck was pressed up against the side of the tub. There was no body, only more heads, forming a ring in the middle of which five arms had been planted like small trees. Some of the fingertips were rotted to bone.

  They were dead; Vern was dead.

  Amy almost swooned, but caught herself. She forgot that she held his egg. It slipped out of her grasp and plunged into the cauldron.

  She thrust her hand in to retrieve it. Her fingers found the egg, but also Vern’s lips. Her knuckles slid down her sister’s teeth. She screamed and, clutching the egg, yanked her hand out. The egg had turned bright red.

  She saw everything around her now. There were dismembered torsos hung upon the wall beside tongs and scythes and other strange devices; she looked away, and found feet and more hands sticking out of a barrel across the room. Aghast, she turned, and there was his ax propped against the wall beside the door. She saw it all.

  Nowhere she looked shielded her from what she’d seen, only compounded the horror until it all boiled over. Amy fled out of the room, back through the
icy air, back into the hall.

  She picked up speed—faster as she saw that the doors on either side now hung open, faster to get away before whatever lurked there could emerge. Down the steps and down her own hall, the keys thrust ahead of her as if drawing her to her room, ready to unlock the door, but it was open already, thank God! And she ran straight inside, straight into him, into his arms, already open to catch her. She shrieked and jumped back.

  Her brain flew apart at the collision, but not before she’d hidden the dripping egg behind her. She sought for words, but there were none she could assemble. She could only gawk at him.

  Fitcher, with half-lidded eyes, held up a leather-bound book, and said as if nothing were odd, “I forgot my Bible and had to come back for it. I’d forgotten you, too, in my haste—to say goodbye.” Snail-like, he seemed only to notice her quaking terror sluggishly, and then, brows knit, he looked her up and down. Staring at her feet, he ticked his tongue against his teeth. “Oh, dear,” he said.

  Amy followed his gaze to her feet. Her slippers, her pale blue slippers, were now dark and wetly red. They smeared the floor where she stood, the blood as thick as syrup. His walking stick, tucked beneath his arm, pointed at them as though in accusation. She twisted her head to see the smeary prints she’d left in the hall—just the ball of her foot and her toes. She’d been running. She closed her eyes in search of an explanation. There was none. She let go the egg. It thumped on the floor, then rolled around her. He lowered his stick to the floor and stopped the egg against its tip—the egg incarnadine, as if alive.

  “My poor apostate Amelia, all of our efforts and still you failed me. Not even was I gone from the road.” He pocketed the small Bible in his long black coat. “Now, what shall I do?” he asked himself almost idly, then closed his hand around her neck and pushed her into the hall.

  His fingers were talons, his arm a plank. She had no time to struggle, she could barely keep her footing, forced backward. He drove her up the stairs and to the third floor, following the trail she had left. She half twisted in his grip to make the climb.

  The doors along the hall were open. Gray and silent men stared out from the rooms. One of them, his hair as wild as ever it had been in life, was Michael Notaro, but torn by the fence. She shrieked then, but it came out through his clutch no more than a bleat. She bucked, twisting and turning her torso but her head was fixed. They flew now, down the hall, straight for the door she’d left open. She imagined she saw herself impelled toward it. I’m not here, she shouted in her head, I’m far away. My soul is far away!

  And so it seemed that her body swept into the room so fast that her spirit separated from it, lagged behind and hung safely in the dark alcove, barred by the chill wall between her world and his. The door slammed, cutting off her view. Her spirit didn’t need to watch him raise the ax nor hear her screaming stop.

  Twenty-seven

  KATE HAD READ IN HER BIBLE: “Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and Few there be that Find it”; but as the time of Fitcher’s apocalypse approached, the number of those seeking the way increased a hundredfold at least—and that was just along her road.

  Most of the travelers were sent ahead of his crusaders. They all called themselves “Fitcherites” now. The derisive sting had been stripped from the word. They worshipped the man and were proud to be named after him. There were some who had used the epithet to slur others but now counted themselves among his staunchest defenders. Many of these individuals publicly proclaimed their change of heart at the various local tent meetings. Such public expiation persuaded many who lurked on the fringes to “come into the light.”

  Jekyll’s Glen was evolving into a canvas city. The new structures weren’t really tents so much as huge awnings on poles, but there were dozens of them. The first was raised for one afternoon and evening of preaching, and had captured perhaps ten people—a mix of locals and a family who were passing through on their way to Harbinger.

  Kate happened to go to town the same afternoon to buy supplies, encountering not only the tent meeting but also the first squatters settled along the Gorge Road.

  Under the tent, a short, pop-eyed preacher had been proclaiming that “We spend our lives exposed to peril—and of our own making—just as anyone who walks along a slippery precipice is sooner or later going to fall. Well, my friends, as the psalm says, we’ve been set in slippery places and will surely be cast down into destruction!” Returning home, she mentioned the tent preacher to her father. Within the hour, he’d gone off to town himself to take part, leaving her in charge of the tolls. He didn’t come home until late.

  Within the week, awnings flanked the main road in and out of Jekyll’s Glen like a transported Middle Eastern bazaar. Awnings stood in vacant lots, in front of houses, and even on the lawns of the two churches. The sermonizing went on round the clock.

  The latest converts counted among them many preachers of the traveling sort, who went normally from town to town on one circuit or another, but found themselves united in the service of the greater preacher, Fitcher. Either they realized this was the way the divine wind was blowing, or they had sense enough to hedge their bets. Here they only had to stand along the street and proclaim loudly to draw an ample crowd. Harbinger fed them a growing audience by closing its gates to anyone lacking the specific consent of Reverend Fitcher, and he was still on the road amassing legions. The crusaders included Lavinia but not Mr. Charter. He had stayed home on orders from Fitcher, who expressed concern about his general frailty. Better for everyone that Mr. Charter stay home to act as gatekeeper. Afterward, he would be brought up to the house—before the end, naturally. Accepting his exile with stoic resolve, Mr. Charter had insisted that Lavinia go without him. One of them at least should be there to assist their commander. Fitcher depended upon his lieutenants.

  With Lavinia gone, Mr. Charter seemed to change shape. The guise of adamant authoritarian was shed like a skin. Although he still maintained his rightness as passionately as ever, he withered: His diminished role robbed him of the zealot’s essence. While he would have denied it had Kate confronted him, Mr. Charter was humiliated. Not only had he been refused his rightful place, but he was seeing finally that his wife’s affections were not his to command and never had been. Lavinia desired only Fitcher. So long as Mr. Charter shared her view, her enthusiasm, with equal passion, he had a place with her. Zeal had forged their union. In being forced to accept a reduced and distanced position, Mr. Charter gained a less happy perspective of how things were.

  It transformed his relationship to his youngest daughter: Kate became the surrogate wife and mother—a role she recognized from Vern’s having occupied it before her.

  She and he ate their meals together and read their Bibles together; sometimes her father would lie back on his bed, utterly drained, and she would read to him by candlelight.

  One night she came to read and was settling herself upon her chair when Mr. Charter, lying upon his bed and with an arm thrown over his eyes, confessed, “I do miss her so.” Kate nodded but didn’t ask for clarification. He must have sensed her perplexity, however, because he continued, “Your mother. I’ve had no compass since she left us. I try to sight upon her but she’s nowhere. Sometimes I remember something she said—I can almost hear her voice the way it was, and my heart fills with her, as if she’s within me. And then I don’t know where to look. I cast about, and she isn’t there. I’m so lost, Katie.”

  She put down her book and did not read, but let him drift to sleep while she sat by his side and held his hand.

  During the day, when she wasn’t preparing meals or tending to other quotidian tasks, she assisted him at the pike, where she soothed the ire of those who objected to having to pay a toll before going on. Even when it was explained to them who the pike belonged to and that the money was used for the upkeep of Harbinger, they often raged: What did Harbinger need in the way of maintaining, when the whole world was only weeks away from complete annihilation? Kate would answer, re
asonably, that for the few remaining weeks, people still had to eat, and animals had to be tended. Did they wish to die of starvation before their appointed time because no one wished to contribute?

  Her reasoning usually settled them down, although she didn’t believe any of it. In truth much of the collected money was languishing in bags in their cellar. No one had bothered to come and retrieve it since August, from which she concluded that things must be just as chaotic behind the iron fence.

  And then Harbinger closed its gates.

  Those who walked there only to find themselves turned away until Fitcher returned came wandering dejectedly back down the road. They would stop and talk with Kate or her father, mostly to despair that they’d come all this way only to be told they must wait a little longer. One man, as he returned, proclaimed: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther.” He explained the situation and many who heard him turned back toward Jekyll’s Glen. Most of those denied entrance wanted to make sure that they would be remembered later on when they had to trudge up the road again, and not asked for another toll. Kate’s response was to give them back their coins. She suspected that once Fitcher did return, the collection of tolls would be suspended, in which case they all would have been clamoring for a refund if she kept the money. She could not help but wonder why a pike had ever been set up on this road at this spot. Turnpike roads were nearly a thing of the past. Why not collect the fees at the front gate? Yes, Mr. Jasper had claimed that Fitcher didn’t want his people soiled by the touch of money, but Fitcher himself had never intimated this was the case. If people were delivering their entire fortunes to Fitcher, why bother to separate a meager toll from them first? She could not work it out. It seemed only cruel.