Free Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost

hand across the top of it, almost as if he were calming it down. “The table. Well, two weeks.”
    â€œVery good. I shall return then to collect it.”
    Jasper nodded slowly. It seemed to Kate that her father’s anger had fatigued him.
    As her father turned to leave, she quickly asked, “Then you don’t believe the end time is approaching?”
    Jasper brushed his hand across the tabletop again and said as if to it rather than in reply, “The world will end or it won’t, without my participation.”
    â€œKatherine,” her father said, and she fell in obediently behind him.
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    â€œYou ought not to dignify such talk by treating it seriously,” said Mr. Charter to his daughter as they walked home. “That man is not saved and not planning to be. He cares nothing for the truth.”
    â€œI thought he seemed to care a good deal for it, Papa.”
    â€œWould you disagree with me, child? He said the Reverend Fitcher didn’t want his people touching money—yet here am I in the very position he claims that Pulaski youth was, and am I not one of his ‘Fitcherites’? I daresay, I am.”
    Knowing where her interests lay, she held her tongue. Her father took the silence as compliance. “He’s a gossipmonger. The world is a foul place, Kate, we’ve all made it thus. And those who are of the world will find themselves brought down soon, and they’ll beg then for God’s mercy, but too late, the gates will have closed. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, they shall be expunged, their corruption erased, and then we who listened will step out upon a cleansed Earth, ready for purity.”
    Kate listened, less inspired than embarrassed for him. She could remember a time when he hadn’t preached when he spoke. He’d been gentle with his daughters, never raised his voice, never threatened to rain down fire and brimstone upon them. “The clarity of their love” was Vern’s phrase for how it had been between their father and mother, a version that seemed to have emerged out of a dream Kate had before she was ten, in which she had a mother who laughed and sang lullabies with a lovely voice, who combed and braided her hair, and who told her fairy tales at bedtime. It hadn’t been so long ago—only six years, yet nothing save echoes remained.
    Their financial troubles had come first. Some sort of wild speculation had caused the market to collapse—an unprecedented economic disaster. Their money—invisible though it was to the girls—had evaporated, and overnight their father had become estranged from them. Mother had shored him up for a while, but when he was gone—either looking for work or working at any task he could find just to feed them—then their mother crumbled, apologizing through her tears, trying to explain to the children that forces larger than they could understand had tried to crush the family and now they all must rally, they all must endure. She made them promise to help their father any way they could, to support him, for he was so miserable. Often he would be gone for days on end, and when he returned he was sunburned and unshaven and he smelled, and he seemed smaller, as if time and distance had wrung the blood from him. Vern had overheard her father say how he wished his daughters were all married off and gone, because now he would never be able to provide a dowry for any of them. Why, he could barely feed them.
    They might have come through the hard times, but within months their mother had fallen ill, and nothing and no one seemed able to save her. Papa couldn’t go for work, didn’t dare leave her alone, yet not to work was to not have any money for doctors, for medicine, which forced him to take any menial job at all that might keep him nearby. Even sweeping sidewalks, cleaning gutters for a few pennies.
    After her death he cut himself off from his daughters. It wasn’t much of a