Fitcher's Brides (20 page)

Turning onto her side, Vern drew up her knees and curled at the foot of the bed. Was this the love he'd spoken of so eloquently in his sermon? Love beyond flesh, beyond worldly desire? Where was her ghost in the wall now with his promises of things to come? Of husbands and suitors and happiness? This was how he would save her? What dream was this ensnared her now? None of her own devising. She would have dreamed far better than this ill use.

“My duties,” she moaned, then covered her head with her arms. This time she pressed her face into the covers by choice, to bury the sobs that began with the word “Papa.”

V
ERN WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
to the sound of a large bell being rung. It took her some moments to orient herself. She unfolded her legs. Her pelvis ached.

She pushed back the curtain at the head of her bed, but through the slats in the shutters could not see the source of the alarm, though it was surely the bell behind the house.

She grabbed a simple dress and put it on without petticoats. For a moment she considered her shoes, but as the bell ringing didn't stop, she instead ran to the hall and down the stairs barefoot. It might have been a fire signal, and she did not want to be trapped inside the house because she'd dawdled over what slippers to wear.

She saw no one at all until she'd passed through the rear hall and out to the porch.

It was gray and cold outside—much too cold to be barefoot and wearing a dress with nothing under it but a simple chemise. Nevertheless, she braved it, ran down the steps and into the yard. People were talking, shouting, confused, pointing this way and that. The bell ringer—a short barrel-chested man—let go of the handle, and the bell rang once more and stopped. Vern heard the words “hanged” and “dead in there” in the snippets of conversation. No one spoke to her until she asked the man who had rung the bell what had happened.

He said, “Oh, ma'am, Mrs. Fitcher, a fellow's hung himself is what's happened. Up in the dormitory.” He gestured over his shoulder at the wing opposite the chapel. “The men's side,” he added.

“The men's side,” she parroted, turning to look. There was a crowd gathered around a door there, and Vernelia walked across the yard. She didn't see Fitcher anywhere. Members of the crowd spied her approaching and stepped aside, seeming to signal others with their motion, so that as she approached, the group parted before her as they had done after the wedding. She couldn't tell if they recoiled in fear that she might touch them or from some idea that she was sacred and must never be touched.

Even in the doorway, they moved out of her way, allowing her to enter and climb the stairs up to the second floor. More men stood on the landing. She came up behind them. Her wet feet squeaked on the boards. One of the men heard, but identifying her, he stiffened and backed out of her way, and looked as if he might dive over the railing. The other men became aware of her and moved aside. By the time she reached the landing she had an unobstructed view of the dormitory beyond.

The room ran the length of the wing. Bunk beds had been built to either side of a center aisle—hundreds of them. The air carried a stale and unpleasant odor, as if something were slowly decomposing in there and no one had the good sense to open a window. There was no ceiling but bare beam rafters below the roof, with what looked like sharp-snouted Jenny lights hanging from them—and, near halfway along, one man. He was stark naked, dangling from a short length of rope. He had a darkened, distorted face. His tongue protruded, purple, between his lips. His eyes bulged as if at the moment of death he had seen something fearful. Three other men were attempting to lift him down.

Then one of the men beside her on the landing stepped out and blocked the view. He said, “Ma'am, respectfully, I think you should not be seeing this.”

“Who was he?” she asked. She didn't recall the dead man from the wedding reception, but there had been so many people congratulating her; and he wouldn't have looked like that.

“Please,” he said, his voice tight with urgency.

“Is it because this is the men's dormitory?”

“That's so. The women live over across the way, above the chapel. No women come here. Never.”

“But, are none of you married?”

“Most of us are, ma'am.” The look on her face must have suggested that this explained nothing, and he added, “We're saving each other from lustful deeds. Sinful acts. The way Reverend Fitcher has instructed. With time drawing nigh, such acts must be accounted. We all have to answer to the one true God for what we've done. There's no hiding what's in your heart. We daren't lose our place, what he's secured for us. And I surely must fear for your own place if you don't leave here. It's not seemly, you seeing old Bill this way.”

The man's sincerity and absolute sureness scared her more than her husband's behavior the previous night. They didn't know, these people, what lust really looked like. But there was no point in protesting, and she chose to retreat.

Even as she turned to leave, putting one foot out to step down, she saw her husband enter at the bottom—enter and look right up. For a moment neither of them moved, trapped in mid-motion, about to rise or descend. Then Elias Fitcher backed away from the newel post as if out of courtesy, offering her neutral space.

She walked down the stairs, her pink and cold feet all too visible from below, and she wished she had put on her slippers now because she could not disguise that she was barefoot any more than she could pretend she hadn't intruded here: She could see already in what ways she was objectionable.

At the bottom, however, Fitcher said nothing. He allowed her to pass on outside and started up the stairs, a shepherd more concerned with the flock than with any single sheep. Or was it the dead who mattered more? His shirt was loose and his sleeves rolled up. His left forearm bore scabbed lines like tattoos where she'd scratched him last night.

She walked back through the gauntlet, and no one said a word, as silent as conspirators caught with their daggers out. She went back beside the bell, where she'd started. The alarmist pretended he didn't see her, focusing intently upon the door. Many more people had gathered now, all across the yard, hanging back as if fearfully certain the death would be close to them.

Within a few minutes four men came out bearing the body. He was still naked. He hadn't even been covered for decency's sake; it seemed unnecessarily cruel to expose a dead man to his neighbors this way: How could her husband have allowed this to happen? The man's head hung loose over their arms, nearly dragging on the ground. His throat seemed banded by a black collar—circled by an inverted “V” where the rope had crushed it. The men laid him down on the grass. Elias Fitcher stepped out of the darkness behind them.

Behind Vern a woman began to scream, and she started to turn to see who it was. Before she could, the woman knocked into her, and Vern slipped on the wet grass and fell. The man who'd rung the bell stuck out his arms to catch her, and lucky for her he was there or she would have cracked her head against the bell. One of his hands caught her shoulder but the other glanced off and slid inside her dress, quite accidentally. Even as his cold fingers came in contact with her flesh, he was lurching away, horrified by the intimacy. She caught her balance and stepped back from him, her face hot with embarrassment. The woman ran wailing and waving her arms, but Fitcher was staring darkly and directly at Vern.

The woman collapsed on her knees. Her cries carried over them: “Oh, Bill, Bill, why go without me? Why?” She tried to kiss his face, but hesitated at his grotesquely twisted mouth. Her nervous hands hovered over him, seeking to touch him, hold him, but clearly prevented by his state. Finally she clutched at his hair and doubled so far over that her head pressed against the ground. Everyone stood around as though her display was wholly alien to them, and they didn't know how to react.

Reverend Fitcher exclaimed, “Oh, my poor sister, poor dear Alice, come look away, look away from this tragedy!” He gathered up Alice and pressed her face to his own chest. “This is not William, don't look upon him. William has gone now. William is in the other Kingdom.” All at once she threw her arms around him, and bawled to the sky. As if this were a signal, other women now came forward and surrounded her. They took hold of her and pried Alice from Reverend Fitcher, then closed ranks, blocking her view of her husband, and together walked her away from the body, up onto the porch, and through one of the doors.

Fitcher knelt as she had, beside the body of William. He closed the eyes, pried the mouth open enough to stuff the tongue back inside. He took hold of one arm, and climbed to his feet. Immediately others grabbed on to the other limbs and they all lifted the body again. As they carried it off, Fitcher chided the crowd in general. “This man has damned himself as surely as if he had killed one of you. He should never have been seen in such a state as this,” he said. “It's unforgivable, but it is how he chose to clothe himself for death, and so it is how he must be, here and upon the far plain. His appearance can only breed thoughts of depravity among us. Were I a harsher prophet of the Old Testament, why, your wives might have to put out their eyes for having seen him thus—such is the justice meted out in our Book. But I am not such a one.
We
are not vindictive here. Vengeance belongs to the angels.

“I shall intervene on our behalf with the Lord and beg His forgiveness for our company's inadequacy to prevent this. Let this damned soul bear the blame. He is responsible.” He let go the arm suddenly and swiveled about. “But there
will
be punishment!” he shouted. Spittle flew from his lips, and his face was stretched hard and red. “There will be
reckoning
! No one is blameless. No one. And the time comes swiftly upon us. Think on that, all of you!” Then he turned back to the corpse, lifted his part of the burden, and continued hauling it away.

The people started to move off, many of them with a speed that suggested they wanted to put as much ground as possible between them and the place where the naked man had lain. Vernelia tried to thank the bell ringer for catching her. “Sir—” she started to say but he interrupted. His face was pinched with fear.

“You can advocate for me, can't you?” he asked. “Tell him they sent me down to sound the alarm? William, he was already dead, we couldn't have saved him nor stopped him none. He'd done himself while we were eating. None of us missed him right away, or we would have stopped him.

“And then you fell and I—I didn't mean to touch you that way.” He clutched her hand. “Please, missus, I beg you—tell him to intercede for me. Stop the Dark Angel from coming for me next. I couldn't help—couldn't help none of what happened. Me. Stephen Ellsworth. You tell him. You speak for me—” He realized abruptly that he was touching her again and flung her hand away so hard that she stumbled. He backed up against the bell, where he turned and ran across the open yard toward the orchard.

 

Vern retreated from the cold and her own confusion, into the warmth and safety of the house. In her room she moved the lovely firescreen and stoked the fire, placing more logs above the embers and then pumping with the small bellows until flames ignited before her. She dragged the wheelback chair over beside the hearth and warmed her feet. Waking to the alarm bell, she'd forgotten her own fear. How odd that a stranger's death could so divert her. But death was like that bell—so loud that they must all hear and give it their attention.

Elias's presence—his nearness to her in the stairwell—seemed utterly removed from the silent intruder who had used her so coarsely the night before. Although sex was a subject not to be discussed openly, might she not entreat or entice him to express his ardor with more gentleness hereafter? He reached the same destination if he did, and she arrived, too, the sweeter for that. She soon convinced herself that so decent a man must recognize the error of his behavior. She must pick the right time to speak of it. She could see that Elias was distressed, that he felt responsible for the death. Of course he did—they were his flock. He guided them. If one of them fell, he must see it as a personal failure.

She wondered then about the bell ringer and his petition. What was the Dark Angel? Did he think death was looking for another victim? She must inform Elias about that, too.

She was still sitting by the new fire when he entered her room. Once again, there was no sound to direct her attention, but a sense of a presence, which led her for a moment to imagine that the spirit of Samuel had arrived—it was that same preternatural change in the atmosphere. She looked about her expectantly, finding, just inside the closed door, the slender figure of Elias Fitcher. He had put on his long black coat and buttoned up his collar. He held a small package in front of him, which he carried to the card table. Then he came across the room and Vern stood to greet him. She had by now convinced herself that the previous night's proceedings were merely a matter of clumsiness on his part, of inexperience. She blushed at the thought of being more schooled in matters of sexuality than he. She had a compulsion to throw her arms around him.

“My darling,” she said, “how terrible that was. I'm so sorry you had to…” Her voice failed. She clasped a stone figure; fear leeched from his body into hers and she released him and moved back, asking, “What is the matter?”

“I can see you have no sense of it,” he said gravely, “which concerns me. You fly out of the house in an unlaced dress that barely suits the intimacy of a bedroom, and without shoes, showing off your ankles and feet to the entire community. You—”

“I thought there might be a fire. That bell—I'd no notion of what it meant, and I ran!”

“You conveniently fall into one of the men so as to force him to place his hands on you—no, not merely on but inside your undone clothing!”

“I did not fall conveniently. That woman, that poor Alice, pushed me when she ran to her husband's body.” She fought not to show tears, but her whole being was reacting to the calumny of his accusation. “That Mr. Ellsworth was as mortified by the incident as—”

“So you know him by name?”

“He told it to me.”

“Why would he do that, eh?” he asked.

“Because of this very thing. He was afraid.”

“What does he have to fear if he be honest?”

“I don't know. Something he called ‘the Dark Angel.'”