Free Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost Page A

change. He had been distant for some time; now they simply lacked their interpreter. The very sight of the girls seemed to remind him of the ragged hole in his life.
    He turned to strangers for solace.
    People appeared in their home whom they’d never seen before. Some brought consolation pamphlets; others arrived with enough food for an extended siege, which should have warned the sisters that more would follow. Most of the time these people arrived early in the afternoon and set up in the parlor, where they read strange poetry about gloomy cemeteries and life in the grave, and children watching everyone from on high. They talked almost exclusively of the dead, as though the room were full of spirits and everyone aware of them. All three girls were made to attend the meetings, although unlike their father they felt no desire to prolong the pain this way, much less wallow in their mother’s loss among ghoulish people who could speak of nothing else. After they’d recognized the pattern to these events, they made a point of trying to leave the house before the guests arrived—with varying success.
    During one of the meetings Mr. Charter tearfully revealed that the girls had had a brother, one who’d been born before Vern, but who had died within his first month. He hadn’t even a name. He’d been sickly at birth, and so Mother and Father had hesitated to give him one, circumscribing their impending loss through anonymity. It was a fearsome revelation to the girls that something so momentous had been withheld from them by both parents for so many years. Previously they’d been concerned about Papa, even frightened by the gloom he wore like a shroud. Now they had cause to distrust him.
    Sometimes at the gathering of ghouls there was a lecturer; often this was someone “on the circuit”—traveling up and down the seaboard to dispense personal views on the afterlife—of which there seemed to be an endless variety. Most speakers were women who had lost someone close—a child more often than not—and who felt that their own experience could inform and guide others; they had a disagreeable tendency to clutch the nearest of the Charter girls to their bosoms during the telling. A few men turned up to speak—priests and circuit riders whose paths crossed those of the death artists. Everyone seemed to know everyone, just as they all seemed to have mapped the territory of the afterlife. Speeches and recitations often were punctuated by periods of weeping, and the girls—save for Amy, who would frequently fall in with the weeping—learned to withdraw the moment it began, else find themselves passed around like handkerchiefs among the bereaved and blubbering. Helpless to intervene, they watched their father slide into a world of constant, raw memorializing. He took up residence in the afterlife.
    It was during this period that Lavinia appeared. One of the later speakers—more than a year after their mother’s death—she’d proclaimed that all lost souls would be reunited on the day the heavens opened, and that Mrs. Charter had surely set up house there in anticipation of their arrival, and that the girls would meet their little brother there, too, by and by. Everyone would be reunited. And that day was coming quite soon. The Parousia—as she called it—was going to take most everyone by surprise.
    Unlike the other speakers who focused upon the closeness of death, the soon-to-be-second Mrs. Charter guaranteed its delivery. It was the first time the girls had ever heard of the Reverend Fitcher—the man who knew the date of Judgment. When the time was right, he would tell everyone, giving them a chance to prepare themselves and put their lives in order. “Put your faith in Him ,” Lavinia frequently insisted, leaving the girls uncertain whether she meant God or Reverend Fitcher. She made proclamations all the time: “Forswear the false