Fitcher's Brides (37 page)

He scratched the stubble on his chin. “Well, that's peculiar, isn't it? She should have. I can't see why he would have refused her. Or else should have put her in charge—Lord, someone oughta be. An abomination,” he repeated. “If she's here, she could well be down to the village. I think she made the candles, didn't she? Like the one before her. I think so. You could look there. Someone might tell you something.”

“She had a friend who was close to Reverend Fitcher, who also did not go on this crusade. His name was Notaro, I believe.”

Flavy winced at the name. “Oh. Horrible thing. Impaled trying to scale the fence out in the woods.” He closed his eyes and made a little shake with his head. “And that was before it got bad. People used to talk about the Angel of Death taking lives in here. Talked of it like something evil lived in among us good, God-fearin' folk and singled out the sinners at its discretion. Some here attributed Notaro's death to it. I tell you, if that annihilating angel is about, it's not doing its job anymore.”

Kate could think of nothing more to say to Flavy. She thanked him and headed out the back doors to the rear porch.

This view had also changed since she'd seen it last—the rear lawn was now lost beneath the tents, wagons, belongings, and people. Cookfires smoldered, imbuing the air with a greasy haze. More than cooked meat, the air smelled of too much unwashed humanity, of unwholesome effluence in a hundred uncovered pits. It was a barnyard smell—pigs rolled in dung.

Against the dormitory wing on her right a row of little shacks and cages stood—feather-strewn coops for chickens that even now scratched and strutted around and under the porch. Feathers floated on the breeze.

She overlooked Harbinger's converts and thought,
No promised afterlife was ever shaped or stank like this
.

To get to the village, Kate had to make her way through the camp. Nothing had been erected to any plan, no straight lines, just tents any old where. She zigged and zagged through them, climbing over bundles, logs, tin pots, and the occasional sleeping Fitcherite. Dogs wandered past her, people glanced up, some so filthy that by comparison Kate was a fairy-tale princess in their midst. One man made a rude, grasping overture to her as she passed by, but was too drunk to stand and pursue her. She realized that anything could happen here, and in broad daylight. No one would stop it.

She passed into the orchard. The trees were heavy with apples, and there were people on ladders picking them, as there were people in the fields. The corn had been harvested and the stalks bundled up or cut down. Elsewhere, people were gathering squashes and pumpkins. Even in the face of chaos, she thought, there remained people who didn't let their lives unravel.

She remembered the chandler's shop. Fitcher had pointed it out to them the day the family first toured Harbinger. The door of it was open and the smell of melted spermaceti leaked from within. She called her sister's name even as she entered.

Three men looked up. One wore an apron. All three made their slight bows and said, “Welcome,” the way everyone had done on the first morning she'd visited. She answered in kind, then asked if they had seen her sister—that she understood Amy had been put in charge of making candles for the community.

“True, she was,” said the man with the apron, who identified himself as John Marsden. “And we'd have been fine if it weren't for all the new ones here. So we been making more of them. Lots of people knowed how. I thought your sister'd gone with the good reverend out to spread the word.”

“No, she stayed behind.”

“If 'n' that's so, I can't recollect as I've seen her in a while. You fellas?”

The other two shook their heads. Kate had the impression the other two wouldn't have recognized her. She thanked them, then turned to go. She saw a small framed picture on the wall behind the candle rods. It was a silhouette cutout of two people in profile—a man and a woman. She wasn't sure at first what was familiar about them. John Marsden said, “We found that lying on the floor under the table. Looked like it'd fallen down, so we hung it up. I seem to recall it's a couple what used to be the chandlers way back a year or two.”

“They died,” said one of the other men. “Angel o' Death took 'em.”

“Aw, Harley, you an' your Angel of Death. Sorry, Miss Charter, but—”

“That's quite all right. I've already heard about the angel.” As she left the shop, she muttered beneath her breath, “I believe, in fact, we've spoken.” She couldn't be absolutely sure, but she thought the silhouettes in the picture resembled the young man Pulaski and his runaway bride. If so, it answered the mystery of where they'd gone if not what had become of them. Where Amy had gone, however, remained a mystery she did not solve.

T
WO NIGHTS AFTER HER FAILED
attempt to find Amy, the spirit of Samuel Verity began appearing to Kate. She was not entirely surprised that he did.

As is often the case in dreams, she and the spirit seemed to be in her house, but at the same time she was aware that the dream interior wasn't her house, that the doors lining the walls were nothing like her doors, the halls were all wrong, and that she trailed the spirit through endless, winding corridors that would have required a castle or a fortress to contain them.

She'd never seen the ghost before. Vern had described him to her once as a dark-haired man who had no mouth, but the man who led Kate through the labyrinth had both mouth and a beard. He was dressed elegantly, as if for a gala event, and he held her hands, which she saw were gloved. She must be attending the event with him. Music played somewhere. A waltz.

He smiled and said, “Your turn is coming.”

“My turn upon the floor?” she asked.

“Upon the stage of the world.”

“But the world is ending.”

He shook his head. “Yours is about to begin. You are next to be courted, next to be asked.”

“No,” she argued, “there's no one for me. My sisters had suitors, both of them, and even so they married someone else.”

“You will be asked before the end time arrives. You will wed.”

The news troubled her. She almost answered that she didn't wish to wed, but that wasn't entirely true. She had convinced herself it couldn't happen with time so short. She had accepted that life would not offer her anyone. She didn't want just a mate. She wanted a kindred, and was realistic enough to know that few people ever met their kindred, even without the final grains of sand pouring out of the world's hourglass.

She couldn't hope. It was too ridiculous, and she might have disagreed with him, except that he chose that moment to vanish completely, leaving her in the strange corridors alone, lost in a maze. She wandered along, calling out, receiving no answer, hearing now and then little scrapes and shuffles as if something trailed her just out of sight; but there were no shadows that could hide anyone, no hidden recesses. Finally, she simply tried one of the many doors. Opened it, and woke up.

She sat up and looked around herself. The two stripped beds across the room were holes torn in the fabric of her existence. Mr. Charter was all that remained of her family—even Lavinia was absent. She thought of the dream, of the promises being made. “It's nonsense, my girl,” she told herself.

The wall sounded with two sharp raps. Kate stared at it, wanting to say “No, you aren't real,” but holding her tongue and thinking, beneath her fear, that this was part of the pattern—she ought to have expected it. The focus bore upon her now. Her sisters had run the pattern and disappeared. Now she was the fox, with the hound close upon her heels.

Dressing, she was careful to make no other comment to attract the wall.

 

No further dreams of the strange house and the ghost troubled her—at least none she remembered—until the night before the crusade made its triumphant return. Only three nights remained until the world's end. The crowded road had been in an uproar all day. People had begun to fear that Fitcher wasn't going to return, that he'd abandoned them and they were doomed, damned, or otherwise cast adrift. It had been late in the night before they'd quieted down and dispersed to their respective encampments. Kate might have been more anxious of the end time's approach herself, if dealing with them hadn't exhausted her utterly.

Deep in the bowels of the night she awoke to find herself standing in the parlor. Her nightdress was gone and she was wandering naked through her house. The chill in the air raised goose bumps on her skin immediately she awoke. She could recall no dream, only the vaguest impression of a voice, a presence—something that had spoken to her, told her things she could not hear when awake. Apparently, it had undressed her as well.

Outside, the night was pitch-dark. There should have been a half-moon shining down, so the sky must have been overcast. She rubbed her arms. Something was leading her into the same trap where Amy and Vern had gone before her. She was terrified, maybe even more than she might have been if this hadn't happened to them first; but she was also furious at the ease with which this force manipulated her. She checked her thighs for blood, but found none.

She started to leave the parlor, but stopped in the doorway. A gray figure was descending the stairs. Noises came from it—murmured breathy words. For a few moments she stood paralyzed as the figure approached. Then through her fright she realized it was her father. She stepped back to hide herself from him.

Mr. Charter still wore his nightshirt and a cap upon his head. He muttered as though in conversation with someone, “Yes, I understand, I'll honor my promise. She's to…to wed, and shall be. Certainly she shall be.” He walked past the parlor, threw open the front door, and strode out into the night as if he could see perfectly. Kate dashed back up the stairs. She found her gown in the hallway and put it on before chasing after him.

From the front door, she tried to see anything. If he was out there, he'd wandered too far away for her to make him out. She was about to go back for a lamp, when she heard the dull
thock
of the pole across the road bouncing against its support. A few moments later the sound came again. Kate crept across the yard. She stepped cautiously to avoid the blanket of acorns.

Soon she could perceive the shape of the sentry box and the white of Mr. Charter's gown. He was raising the pike as if to let a wagon pass under, then tilting his head as if following its progress up the road. As soon as the phantom wagon had passed, he released the pole and let it drop, which he would normally not have done; and the pole loudly struck the stump across the way. Then he began again. He reached out as if collecting a fee, and proceeded to raise the pole. She was surprised no one else had come to see what the noise meant. Perhaps they were too scared.

Kate came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Papa,” she said. “Papa, wake up.”

He let go of the pole and it hit with a loud whack. He jumped at the sound, looked about himself, then turned around, facing his daughter. “What am I—”

“You walked in your sleep, Papa.”

“Did I?” He seemed completely disoriented, and had to regard the pike again. “I must have. I was walking with God, Katie. God was at my side. We were walking through a beautiful meadow and the sky was full of rainbows. It was Heaven, surely.”

“Yes, Papa.” She took his hand and drew him toward the house. He stumbled along willingly, but no longer strong in his stride. In his sleep he had been as steady as the father she remembered from childhood.

“God's been speaking with me awhile now. It's because time is short. All that divides this world from the next now is vapor.”

“Then you've seen Mother?”

He stopped walking. “Your mother, Katherine? No, I haven't seen her. That—that's odd, isn't it? I haven't seen her at all.” Trembling, he allowed himself to be led back inside, and up to his room. Kate lit a candle and used it to light the Betty lamp that hung near his bed. She tucked him in, then sat beside him. He was like a child in that bed, a little boy wearing the expression of someone much older who'd forgotten something critical and now, having been shown it, knew that their faculties were crumbling.

By candlelight Kate read to him from a book of Washington Irving's stories, a piece called “The Wife.”

“‘Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity.'”

In many aspects this brief essay about the surprising strength that a friend of the author's, having fallen on hard times, discovered in his wife, was all about her own mother. Kate would have selected any other of the stories by the fictitious Geoffrey Crayon, Esq., but Mr. Charter—as he had often done before—petitioned her to read that seemingly cruel and painful piece.

Near the end, the wife in the story linked her arm into her husband's and told him, “Oh, we shall be so happy!” More than once, her father had listened to this passage with tears upon his cheeks. This night, though, he dozed after only the first page.

Kate closed the book. Instead of returning to her room, she rocked awhile in the chair, staring into the greasy black smoke of the Betty lamp and speculating that whatever had accompanied her father down the stairs, it certainly wasn't God. She couldn't help but recall Amy's suspect Angel of Death, and how she had been able to make herself known to Kate from far away. From the heights of that damned house.

 

The crusade of the Next Life returned early the next afternoon. A handful of people preceded the main body up the road, announcing the imminent arrival of “the most holy reverend.” They grinned with a kind of fanatical madness, a joy that did not belong to the earth.

It was October the thirteenth. No one had ever thought they would return so late.

The road was soon occluded by squatters. Word somehow spread even to the far side of the turnpike, so that people came walking back from the direction of Harbinger and crowded around the pole, their eyes wide with desperate hope, asking Kate and her father if Fitcher had yet been spied. Even as she told them he had not, a great roar came from farther down the road, and as everyone looked in that direction, he appeared above the crowd.

Fitcher sat a horse this time, like a commanding general awash in his victorious troops. He greeted everyone as he passed, waving his walking stick. He leaned down and touched their outstretched hands. People parted for him, but stayed close, trying to touch him, his stick, his boots, even the tired horse. They squealed, they cried. Some reacted to the touch violently, flinging their arms up, twitching like Shakers. They had to be dragged aside, set down in the grass. Foam bubbled on their lips, and some babbled insanely in foreign or improvised tongues. A plump woman began to spin about in circles and slapped those nearest before they scrambled back out of her windmilling way. The tension had cracked like the wall of a dike, and pent-up frothing fanaticism burst out.

Fitcher rode through like an avatar. His smile was benign eminence. At the pole, he reined in but did not dismount. For a moment he stared down at Kate with cold consideration, as if contemplating a meal, and she felt herself flush in response. Her cheeks burned and she stepped aside, behind her father.

Mr. Charter reached up to shake Fitcher's hand and welcome him back. On the horse behind him, visibly transformed, rode Lavinia. Kate did not immediately recognize her. Lavinia had let her hair down, and she wore men's riding clothes—breeches and a boiled white shirt. The severity and darkness of her had vanished. Her sharp features had filled and softened. Kate found herself thinking that her stepmother was surprisingly lovely. Lavinia turned her horse and rode onto the lawn.

Behind her flowed a multitude. If the last crusade had doubled the population of Harbinger, the takings of this one threatened to quadruple it. The mass of people extended as far as could be seen back down the road. They moved forward slowly, turning the confines of the road into a warren enclosed by trees. They spilled out onto the lawn of the house. They circled Fitcher now that he had stopped. One of them held Lavinia's horse as she dismounted. She seemed to move with the fluidity of someone half her age. Kate noticed, and observed that her father noticed, too.

“It is a great success,” Fitcher proclaimed. “A triumph. We've collected hundreds more on this campaign. Our new world will thrive with new life.” He twisted around to overlook his flock, and called out, “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house!'” The mob cheered, and the sound rolled like a huge wave down the road, echoing back from farther than could be seen.

“Now, we must go on, only a little farther. We will charge them nothing here,” he said to Mr. Charter. “We've all their goods, their monies, and it will all come to us in Harbinger. Their dedication is not in question. Now,
you
must come to the house, too. Move in. It's time, you know, only mere days remain to us and I do not want you to find yourselves outside the fence when all around is obliterated. We can't lose our gatekeeper, or his family.” His gaze flicked to Kate, then to Lavinia. Then he straightened in his saddle and shouted, “Onward!” They cheered him again.

As he rode under the upraised pike, he began to sing the new words Mr. Isaac Watts had written to the tune of “Antioch,” which Kate had heard only a few times in church: “‘Joy to the world! The Lord is come! Let earth receive her King; Let ev'ry heart prepare Him room…'” Unlike Kate, the crowd seemed to know the song well. They picked up the words and sang along. Their song roared past. It was, thought Kate, a beautiful song, but it sounded like a martial chant to her now. In the sky to the west, the front of a storm was rolling in.