Fitcher's Brides (30 page)

“S
HE PROBABLY THINKS SHE'S TOO
important for us now,” argued Amy.

Kate was complaining again about Vern's absence. She must have said something every single day for the past month—ever since Papa and Lavinia had gone off to Pittsburgh—and Amy was sick of it. Vern's absence was all her sister dwelt on anymore: Where was Vern and what kind of life might she be having inside Harbinger, and why didn't she ever come for a visit? And what had happened to the spirit guide in the wall?

The two girls were sitting by the roadside on this sunny afternoon, barefoot and wearing light cotton dresses and nearly nothing else. It was too hot these days for corsets and crinolines.

Vern hadn't traveled with the Fitcherites (as Kate called them—and Amy had picked up the habit). The girls had stood in the yard beside Mr. Charter and Lavinia and watched the crusade go by, wagon after wagon, and some on foot. There must have been a hundred or more. Fitcher rode in a Concord coach drawn by four horses, and with four people on the roof above him. He shared the interior with one other man, who was skinny and dark. They didn't recognize him. Fitcher had the coach stop at the Charter house, and he got out to welcome Mr. Charter and Lavinia on board. While they climbed inside, he went to Amy and Kate. “I know I can count on you both,” he said, “to discharge your duties.” He hugged each of them in avuncular fashion, then got back aboard the coach, which rolled ahead before the door was even closed.

Kate complained that she should have confronted him about Vern's absence. That subsequently Vern still hadn't paid them a visit bothered her more than the initial lack of communication. Amy had the same ready answer she'd been promoting since the letter had arrived earlier in the summer.

The two girls spent their whole days working the pike. When someone came by, they had to determine whether to ask for money, which was to say they had to identify those who were already members of Harbinger. Anyone could have said they were in the community and been let in for free, but folks who'd traveled so long to get there didn't have the presence of mind to lie about it; plus, Amy thought, you could just tell.

Insects buzzed about and birds called from deeper in the woods. Amy had to get up and move every so often, because there were ants and they were attracted to her. She'd eaten a Johnnycake with honey on it earlier, which the ants found appetizing. Wherever she moved, within ten minutes the ants caught up. She'd licked her hands clean, but there was a drop of it on her dress that she couldn't get out, and that was enough for the ants. She could have gone back to the pump and cleaned up, but didn't want to be absent should someone come by—especially because it might be Michael Notaro. Even though Kate knew all about it, Amy remained protective of her relationship with him. Kate continued to pester her to ask him about Vern. In fact she had asked him, not so long after they'd gotten Vern's letter. He had hardly seen her himself, but he knew that Vern had been given the job of making candles for the community—a piece of information that Amy found particularly delicious. He also claimed that Vern had taken sick, but that didn't make any sense to Amy, seeing as how the letter made no mention of it. She decided that Vern was pretending she was sick in order to avoid having to make candles and pretending to them that her life was wonderful because she didn't dare say anything else. It was just like the way she'd inflated her relationship with Henri back in Boston. In any case, Amy did not share what she'd learned with Kate.

Notaro would willingly have reported Vern's circumstances to her daily, but Amy made it clear she didn't really want to hear about her sister anymore.

Kate wanted to go to Harbinger herself. Amy argued that she couldn't handle the raising and lowering of the pike alone. She wasn't strong enough. Kate insisted she could, even going so far as to push the thing up on her own, though it took all her strength. Amy's response then was to say, “Kate, she'll come visit us if she can, you know she will. I know you don't want to think so, but maybe she doesn't want us to see her. Or maybe she wants to surprise us with our own place there. Or maybe even, she's finding you a suitor—after all, the spirit promised you'd have one, too.”

If all other arguments failed, then Amy pleaded with her not to go because it would stir up trouble for her and Michael, and if that happened, it would destroy the only thing Amy had. She didn't think that Kate believed anything she said, but Kate did hold off walking to Harbinger. At least in some small part Kate must have believed as she did that Vern had spurned them.

 

A few times, after she'd been with Michael Notaro, Amy tried to communicate again with the spirit of Samuel. She wanted to let the spirit know that she'd met someone just as it had sworn she would, but there was never a response to her raps or her quiet calls. The walls never snapped. She never heard a voice. She wanted to believe the spirit had been real, simply as reinforcement of her belief in the relationship she was having. However, the ghost's coincidental disappearance with Vern's departure left Amy convinced that Vern had manufactured the whole thing. She simply ignored the way the ghost had terrified her the very first night, excising from memory what she couldn't explain.

Kate disregarded Amy's theory of the ghost. She felt that the ghost must have traveled to Harbinger with Vern, or maybe been a part of Harbinger all along. Ghosts didn't just leave, did they? Haunted houses couldn't pass their ghosts on to other houses. So if Samuel was gone now, then he'd either come in the first place specifically to advise them, or he was Vern's guardian, attached to her rather than the house. Kate refused even to consider that Vern might have invented him. She acted as if Vern was some sort of saint: Vern hadn't deceived anybody; and Vern wouldn't have forgotten about her sisters.

Amy knew better.

Their conversations were invariably about her eldest sister unless she managed to focus it upon herself. She would ask, “What if he wants to marry me, Kate, what then? Should I say yes?” and Kate would ask her to describe what she thought her life would be like, married to Michael Notaro. It was almost as if Kate didn't think the Next Life was going to happen after all. Kate petitioned Amy to invite Notaro to dinner, too. She was, Amy thought sourly, acting like the elder of them: like a stepmother who wanted to meet the suitor to decide if he was a good match for her daughter.

Amy would never have let him grace their dinner table. She knew that all Kate wanted was to ask him about Vern. She made up the excuse that he could not have explained his absence from Harbinger long enough to share a meal with them—which wasn't entirely a lie. Even though he had keys to the main gate, if someone were to spy him leaving except on his way to get supplies, they might report him. As he'd told her, “I got to keep myself looking right so that nobody starts to wondering about me.”

It only dawned on Amy after weeks and weeks of repeated suasion that there might be something wrong after all—that Kate might have legitimate cause for worry; but it was a fear in which she did not wish to share: She had convinced herself that inquiring after Vern could only bring trouble for her and Michael. Underneath it all, she resented that Vern had talked to a spirit who would have nothing to do with her.

That was how things remained until a night shortly before the crusaders of the Next Life returned from their Pittsburgh campaign.

 

A wagon came through very late. Kate heard it and got up, leaving Amy asleep. She put a shawl on over her nightdress, lit a candle in a lantern, and went downstairs and outside.

There was a breeze. It blew her hair into her face until she batted it aside. Crossing the yard she stepped on acorns and twigs, jumping at each stab in the bottom of her foot.

She could smell the vinegary lather of their horses, hear the chime of the bridles, the creak of boards upon axles well before she could make out anything at all of the travelers, and that just lumpish shapes. Their guiding lantern hung off the driver's side, casting its wan light down at the side of the road. She held up her own lamp as she neared.

The wagon contained a family of five who had obviously been driving all day to get here. The woman was driving the team, her husband beside her. She wore gloves and a slouch hat, the front of which stood up against her forehead. The wind had probably fixed it there permanently. The woman cast a tired glance her way across her shoulder and the man beside her. Kate said, “Welcome to you. Harbinger's just up the road a little farther.”

“That's good,” said the woman. “I know, 'cause they told us, that we's to pay you here to go on in.”

“Then you're coming from the Reverend Fitcher's group itself?”

“Yes'm,” the husband answered. “We saw the light of the Next Life when we heard him speak. Knew we wanted to be saved, wanted our little girls saved, too.”

Kate moved the lantern to see three small girls in the back of the wagon, none of them older than five. The child in the middle was awake, sucking her thumb. She looked back at Kate fearlessly. For a moment Kate felt as if she were looking upon herself, and experienced a strange sense of displacement, as though she'd stepped into some hole in time itself, even though there was no such episode in her past. Yet the sensation remained, even when she moved back to the couple.

The man was already holding out his hand with the coin in it. She accepted it, then set down the lantern and pushed on the pike. It was difficult by herself, but she'd pushed it up for Amy, and she would do it for this family. The pike rose, but not high enough. It bounced back down. She was tired and her arms ached. She could have asked the man to help, but Kate insisted to herself she could do this. She doubled over the end of the pike, dropping every bit of her weight and strength upon it, and the pike rose high enough to let them pass. Her feet came off the ground.

The man said, “Much obliged,” as the wagon lurched slowly forward. The tiny light on its side shrank to nothing in the night. The wind billowed up inside her nightdress and blew it above her naked legs. She jumped off the pole and it thwacked against the post opposite, bouncing once. Pushing the dress down, she looked around herself at the complete darkness that would have drunk her up without the small lantern. The sensation of being watched was unmistakable.

She picked her lantern up and walked back across the yard, managing not to step on anything sharp this time. She hoped no one else would be coming tonight.

In the doorway she glanced back, but the dark was as solid as cast iron.

Inside, she spent a few moments rubbing her feet before continuing back up the stairs to their room. Wind was blowing the curtains up at the landing, but she didn't smell any rain in the air. The cool breeze felt good, although she thought she'd never get back to sleep.

Approaching her bed, she saw the shape in the sheets. It was Amy.

Kate stopped still. Why had Amy gotten into
her
bed? She called her sister's name.

Amy was lying on her side, eyes closed, facing the wall. She was muttering in her sleep. Kate distinctly caught the words, “Yes, I hear.” An instant later, something snapped inside the wall.

Kate stepped away from the bed.

Amy whispered something else, and the snap repeated. Kate backed to Vern's bed, where she sat and listened to the knocks and the breathy hints of her sister's voice replying.

The spirit had returned.

Kate knew that Amy had tried for weeks to communicate with it without luck. While she maintained that it had traveled with Vern to Harbinger, to guard her, that was a hopeful explanation of the spirit's absence, turning it into a guardian angel because the alternative seemed to be an admission that it wasn't at all what it pretended. But, ghost or angel, if Samuel
had
returned, then he had abandoned Vern to do so.

Something terrible had happened to Vern.

She knew it now more surely than ever.

The remainder of the night she sat propped up on her sister's bed, staring at the wall and at her sister prone below it, listening for the knocks as whatever lurked invisibly inside it spoke words she couldn't hear, but that Amy clearly now did, just as Vern had before her. Eventually, sitting, Kate dozed. If the conversation ever stopped, she didn't know.

When she woke next the faintest light of a cloudy wet morning was bleeding into the room. Amy was back in her own bed as if nothing had happened and Kate had dreamed everything. The lantern stood on the floor by her dirty feet. The candle in it had melted to a puddle.

 

Mr. Charter and Lavinia returned a few days later. A steady rain had been falling for hours.

The girls were standing in the sentry box when the swarm appeared. Next Life converts came marching up the road like an infestation. They filled the road from side to side. They clogged the length of it as far away as the bend where Michael Notaro liked to hide his wagon while he paid his visits.

Somehow word of the converts' arrival reached Harbinger, because Notaro came driving out before long in search of Fitcher. Passing through the turnpike he pretended not even to see the sisters, which nettled Amy a little even though she knew he was doing so to protect her. She and Kate stood the pole upright by running a rope around it to the tree beside them. There would be no toll asked from this crowd. It would have been impossible to collect. Still, some of the converts seemed to recognize that they were obliged to pay at a turnpike station, and came over and handed coins to the girls. One man on the far side of the congestion flung up a handful, and for a moment it rained money. Each time someone came forward with their toll, one of the girls had to leave the protection of the box and step out into the rain. They'd taken turns but were both wet and uncomfortable long before the bulk of the crowd had passed.

Some of the people looked to have walked all the way from Pittsburgh. Some must have walked there and back, too, but it was impossible to tell them apart. Their clothes were filthy, their feet dragged. They just wanted to see Harbinger and now were close enough that their exhaustion was leaking out around their will. They were an army of corpses.