Fitcher's Brides (26 page)

Vern exited to the back porch. She faced the house, keys in her hand. One of them must lock up the outside doors. She looked at the lock in front of her and tried to find a key that looked as if it matched. It took her a while to find the one that fit that door. She walked the length of the porch then, locking and unlocking the doors—the same key fit all of them.

Elias hadn't said directly, but she supposed she was responsible for locking up the house at night. But did he lock it? Was the house
ever
locked up? Just because there was a key to a door didn't mean it should be locked. Who would it be locked against?

She left off pondering and stood awhile against the rail. Out across a landscape burnt orange by the sun, she could see people at work on the far side of the orchard. They might have been tilling. Just the sight of them put her heart at ease: She had not been abandoned.

She climbed down and set off for Harbinger village.

Her path was indirect—she wanted to see someone else up close, and there was a cluster of people standing about the newly turned fields. She wandered over to them and bid them all a good afternoon. They smiled and welcomed her in the usual, traditional manner. Beyond the greeting no one had anything to say. Their attention returned to the tilling and planting as if they anticipated something exciting was about to happen in the soil at any moment. Vern watched them until she understood that none of it included her. She continued on her way. Those nearest bid her farewell, as if she were about to travel far from them.

The candle shop stood in the shadows of the buildings across the lane. There were no lights within—no one else had taken over her duties. She could not remember in what state she'd left it. What she found stunned her. The shop was stacked full of boxes, and each of them contained dozens of candles packed in straw. There might have been a thousand candles in the boxes in that room. Half-finished candles still dangled by their looped wicks from the ceiling rack. She touched one of them, her fingers sliding down the greasiness of it. Grease had pooled on the table below, and the candle was too spindly to be useful. The kettle, half full of congealed spermaceti, stood at one end of the table. She must have abandoned the work after only a few dippings.

The molds were all full. She hadn't put away the last batch she'd made. Maybe she'd been unable to find a box. She couldn't remember where she'd found all of the others stacked here. Had the cooper made them for her? She didn't remember asking him, although she remembered a face that she thought was his.

She had thought until then that she would return to her duties; now she saw how unnecessary that was. There were months and months worth of candles here—enough to last the summer. No wonder she'd caught a fever. She had exhausted herself.

The bell sounded at the house, calling the community to dinner. How many shifts would there be now? Even if she couldn't eat during the first shift, she wanted to see how many people were on hand. She left the shop and the duties of candle-making behind.

Tomorrow, she would explore Harbinger itself. The utopia was huge. Vast. Elias had said as much. She closed her hand around the ring of keys. She intended to go everywhere.

V
ERN TOOK HER MEAL IN A
half-filled dining hall. The shifts, it seemed, were running as always, only with fewer people. The system had been determined without her participation, despite Elias's assertion that she was in charge. The emptiness of the refectory suggested that a hundred or more must have accompanied him. During the meal she knew better than to ask—no one would have answered her.

Afterward, she assisted in the kitchen, washing dishes and utensils in a large tin sink filled with water that had been heated to near-boiling on the stove. A slight, older woman named Sarah worked beside her. When she asked how many had gone, Sarah answered that she didn't know, because they'd been gathered from all over the whole of Harbinger and she hadn't been on hand to see them leave. “Took my Daniel, though,” she added proudly. “It's a rare and special thing to go with the reverend. Rare and special.” By implication neither she nor Vern could consider themselves special. One of the men, overhearing, told her it had been “'bout a hundred,” but he was contradicted by both Sarah and another woman, Sarah insisting it hadn't been more than half that—“no,
only
the very special, like my Daniel”—and the other woman saying it was at least two hundred.

Sarah patted her shoulder and, in apparent misunderstanding of her frustration, advised her, “Try not to worry yourself, dear. It's your first time separated, and that's hard for any woman to bear. I been without my Daniel twice before. But you both gonna be together for eternity soon enough, and there's nothing can stand in the way of that, 'cause that's God's will, that is.”

Vern made herself smile, and thanked Sarah for her consideration. She turned back to scrubbing at the plates, but Sarah wasn't finished. She said, “You'll want to rest up, girl, get your strength back so that when he returns, you can greet him proper.” The statement might have been innocuous, but Sarah seemed to leer as she said it.

Vern stood at the sink, almost afraid to look at the faces of the others for fear they would all be grinning in the same grotesque way. Did they somehow know the intimate details of her life with Elias? She glanced sidelong at Sarah, but the older woman was stacking up plates with innocent efficiency, seemingly thoughtless and content, as if that look of depravity had only been in Vern's mind. Riddled as she was with self-doubt, she thought it just might. No one was going to accuse this petite old woman of lewdness.

Vern quit the kitchen at the first opportunity and retreated to her room. As always, the second floor was deserted. Without women attending to her, the sense of isolation was complete. Comforted at first by the distance, she soon became uneasy. The solitude became oppressive, not as if she were alone but rather as if she were surrounded by a population already become ethereal. The whole house hovered in between moments of time; even the dark clock on the landing held silent, the hands motionless, until she arrived at the top of the stairs and set everything in motion again. The community waited for her and never blinked.

She got up and opened the window at the head of her bed, and let the evening breeze in. It billowed the gauzy curtains. She lit a candle and tried to read from her Bible: “And when he was come to the other side of the country of the Ger-ge-senes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs…” Devils and tombs—her mind could not focus on the words. She read whole pages of Matthew without any sense of what they were about. Without realizing, she was straining to hear something.

The breeze carried the hint of distant voices, brief laughter. Absurdly, she imagined that someone somewhere was laughing about her, despite which she wanted to fly there, to take part in the conversation, even laugh at herself, making light of her situation: “Oh, yes, I was quite out of my head when I said those things. Do you know, I actually thought my husband was some sort of nocturnal demon himself.”

She needed the company of others. There were so many unanswered questions that someone in the community must have answers to. What was the fearsome Dark Angel? How many people had taken their own lives here? Was it only the end of the world that frightened them? The idea remained so abstract to her.

She closed her Bible. The last question surprised her, but as soon as she'd thought it, she knew it was true. Everyone
was
afraid. Now her picture of them changed—from clockwork mechanisms to quivering rabbits, so terror-struck that they rushed to judgment, condemned too quickly, took their own lives out of fright.

The end of the world was coming and they couldn't do anything about it, couldn't stop it or change it. Couldn't be certain if they were saved or not.

They were like Amy, weren't they? So sure of their evil core and damned for it despite anything good they'd ever done. Amy hadn't always been like that. Vern could recall how her father had come back that first time from the tent meeting on the commons. The Reverend Fitcher had preached a sermon that persuaded him, and in turn he had explained it to all three girls. Perdition awaited them, it should be expected sooner than anyone imagined, but they might yet save themselves if they followed Fitcher's precepts. Amy had responded as if she'd believed all along that she was corrupt and was free at last to admit it. Maybe the kind of people who enlisted in Elias Fitcher's cause despised themselves the way Amy did. But Vern didn't want to hate herself. What she did hate was what this calling of the world's end had stolen from her.

Abandoned in the midst of hundreds of people who resented her insertion between them and their intermediary to God, she had been
wed
to the harbinger. She was the bride of death, his concubine, his victim. She had no friends here, nor ever would, before or after the world's end. They must all hate her, like that woman who wouldn't let her eat.

For an hour perhaps she lay upon her bed in the throes of self-absorbed despair. Then at some point, out of the darkness spilled music.

Like the earlier voices it ebbed and flowed with the breeze, distant, tantalizing. She had forgotten how music could sound.

She sat up, perched, listened. There—voices whooped in with the instruments. There—a fiddle most certainly, and a piano, and another sound that brayed beneath them.

She picked up the keys, then stopped; turned and placed them on the bed. She removed the marble egg from the pocket between her breasts and set it down there, too. She knew this defied her promise to Elias, but she felt these things did not belong with her when she didn't know where she was going. Surely they would be safer here.

 

Once outside, Vern had no trouble following the sound. It came from down in the village, from the big barn on the far side of the ironsmith's. There were people hollering, joyous.

The barn was open. There must have been fifty or more people dancing, and another fifty milling about. Candles and lamps were lit not just in the barn but in places along the street. The light and the noise spread an exuberance through the night.

People looked Vern's way. They saw her and stopped talking. But she went to them, full of a brand-new resolve, and said, “Hello,” and “Please don't spurn me, don't shun me, I'm no different than you. I'm alone here.” She would
not
be the wife of death. She would be herself, vital and young and kind. She couldn't tell what effect her words were having—she kept trying different ones, hoping to see someone break out in a smile that would tell her she'd made them understand her plight. At least they didn't flee from her, and the music and dancing didn't stop on account of her. Fiddle and piano, and someone cranking the handle of a stringed hurdy-gurdy
—that
was the exotic whine.

She entered the barn, and a young man sitting on a bale of hay by the door jumped up and said, “Here, sit here, Mrs. Fitcher.” Vern gawked at him—he couldn't have been any older than she was. The name he called her felt as if it belonged to someone else. How old she must be to be thought of as “Mrs. Fitcher.” It was the way she didn't want anyone to think of her, but she accepted his offer and sat on the bale. She took in the crowd, many of them staring back. Even some of the dancers as they spun by cast her a glance. She felt tears welling up but refused to give in. She made a brave face, wanting them to see how happy she was to be in their company. She glanced aside to find that the young man had left her, but when she turned back it was as if she'd passed some test, or a cloud had rolled out from behind the moon and banished the doubtful shadows. Dancers had stopped paying her any mind. Others met her gaze with a smile, a true welcome.

The young man came back shortly. He offered her an earthenware cup. “It's only hard cider,” he said, “left from the winter.” She took it and thanked him. He nodded and remained standing beside her. There was plenty of room on the hay, she thought, and moved over, then gestured for him to sit. He performed a slight bow before seating himself. She almost giggled at his formality.

“I'm Lanny,” he said. “It's really Orlando, Orlando Gibbons. I got named after a musical composer, though most nobody's heard of him. Everybody calls me Lanny.” He was a little taller than she. His hair, she saw up close, was actually a brown that had been burned lighter by the sun. His thin beard was a little darker.

“Then I shall, too. You must call me Vern, then.”

“Vern,” he repeated, nodding.

She sipped the cider, which was cool and sharp. “I didn't know anyone danced here,” she said. “I wasn't sure…how we felt about dancing.”

“We didn't dance in the winter much, on account of it's too cold,” he explained. “But now it's warmer, we'll dance on Friday nights sure enough.”

“You sound like you've been here awhile.”

“Since the groundbreaking of the house,” Lanny said proudly. “I was fifteen. Come here with my family.” He pointed at the dancers as if all of them might be his family—she couldn't identify who he meant. “The reverend, your husband, he says dancing is God's pleasure.”

“Does he? I didn't know.”

“He told us about Sister Anne of the Shakers and how she allowed them dancing even though about everything else they might have done was forbidden. And how after she died, they still went right on dancing, in order to communicate with her spirit. So dancing, he said, moved them up closer to Heaven.”

She surveyed the crowd again, looking for the kind of ecstasy he described. “And do you move closer to Heaven?”

He blushed and lowered his eyes. “Sometimes, ma'am. When I have the chance.”

She set down her cup. “Well, I've never done. Would you show me how?”

“You don't know how to dance?” he asked, incredulous.

“Oh, I know how to
dance
, but I've never flown to Heaven on account of it.” She tried to keep a serious face, but her mouth trembled. He laughed, realizing that he'd been teased, and the moment made her nearly burst into tears. The burden of her doubts, so heavy an hour ago, was lifted for the first time since she'd arrived.

Standing, he offered her his hand. “I hope you know how to contredanse and galop.”

She replied, “I think I can do those,” with some bravado. “Contredanse” could mean just about anything here. She would have to watch closely.

They moved through the crowd to the last position just as a new sequence was beginning. The beat of the dance was easy to find, and Vern watched and followed only a fraction of a second behind the woman in the line beside her. She hadn't done a quadrille in a while but it came back almost immediately. Lanny crossed the floor and she passed him, and then turned, switching places. Then he took her hand and they half promenaded, turned, and separated.

The second figure of the set began with them approaching and retreating. People were laughing, enjoying themselves however they went. The energy filled her. Lanny caught her hand and passed her to the next gentleman. He was grinning at her as he did.

They proceeded on through the third and fourth, returning to their partners, falling in line beside one another with faces turned away, promenading once more. Then she moved into the ladies' chain and from there into the step called the great round, which this time ended in a galop, as Lanny had implied. It caught Vern by surprise—she recovered almost immediately, but the surprise was a delight, and she burst out laughing. After that she lost herself in the dance, counting her steps, minding her position as the top of the line became the bottom and the first figure of steps began again.

She danced and whirled, and everyone who took her hand was friendly and as carefree as she felt.

When the tune stopped, everyone applauded the musicians; Lanny led her over to a middle-aged couple. The man was heavy and half bald. He was flushed from dancing. His lady had sparkling eyes and the same beaked nose as her son. Her teeth were bad, though, and she smiled with her lips pressed together. Lanny introduced them as his parents. When they heard who she was, their receptive expressions stiffened for an instant, barely noticeable, but enough to bring Vern back to herself.

She said, “Your son is very kind to dance with me. And I see how he has come to know the dance so well.”

“You did not travel with your husband,” said the father.

He was stating the obvious, and she knew some explanation was expected. “I was ill for some days, Mr. Gibbons—weeks actually, I think—and he didn't want to risk my falling ill again while traveling.”

“It is hard on the road,” he agreed.

“But you aren't ill now,” said the mother, her tone identical to her husband's. Without asking, without truly intimating anything, they were questioning her behavior, doubting her intentions. Did they think she'd come here to tempt their son?

“No, I am much mended—I didn't know how well until I took a few turns upon the floor.”