Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost Read Free Book Online Page A

right up to the flagstones surrounding the front door of the house.
    â€œWhat’s this?” Vern asked.
    â€œThis would be the place called the Pulaski house,” he announced, “only the Pulaskis is not among us anymore, nor ’n’ those before them.”
    It was a catslide house, a two-story clapboard with a long sloping rear roof, double chimneys in the middle, and windows all around. Bare bushes showing their buds were planted to either side of the front door. On the southern side, dozens of trees had been cut to stumps to let sunlight reach the house. To Vern there was something ugly and dismembered about so many stumps, which tainted the house. Kate looked through the windows at the empty rooms and thought only that it was an unknown quantity, a question that couldn’t yet be answered. The air smelled of spring forest, wet and on the cusp of new possibilities. A breeze stirred the tops of the trees, and birds twittered and darted overhead. Amy was relieved that there was a house at all: a house where they might be happy if only they could forget that happiness would not be theirs for long.
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    A hallway ran from the front foyer to the back of the house—or so it seemed at first. Further investigation proved that the door at the back let onto a kitchen that extended across the entire rear, like the top of a “T.” On each side of the hall was a single large room—one would serve as a parlor and the other, with its own door to the kitchen, would be a dining room.
    The cooking hearth in the kitchen was broad and deep, and though it still contained a pivoting crane for hanging pots over a fire—the way people had cooked for centuries—the lower half of the hearth was filled by a fine cast-iron stove, the sight of which put Amy at some ease. She had dreaded the idea of cooking like some old fairy-tale witch.
    Three lard-oil lamps stood on the mantel, and two half-used candles lay beside them. A door at the back of the kitchen opened onto a narrow spring room containing a pump. They would at least have water for baths, even in the cold. Outside the spring-room door was piled a full two cords of split wood.
    A rough-hewn wooden table stood opposite the hearth, its thick top scarred with cuts. An envelope lay there with their father’s name written on it in a long, sharp, masculine hand. They left it alone and continued to explore the house.
    The stevedore had piled their belongings in the foyer and pushed some into the dining room, as if he hadn’t wanted to come any farther than necessary into the house. Exiting the kitchen through the empty dining room, the girls had to shove the trunks aside to get into the hall again. The stevedore and his cart were gone.
    The stairway to the second floor began just past the doorway into the dining room. It took up half the width of the hallway, and led to a small triangular landing and three more steps up to the second floor. The second floor was divided into two long rooms separated by another hall. Each room contained a small fireplace near the back, where the ceiling sloped. One of these would become the girls’ room, but they must wait upon their father’s choice.
    While the first floor had been empty, the second floor conveyed the feeling of a house abandoned in haste. In one room two narrow beds stood at angles in the middle. There was a third bed in the opposite room, and all three had been stripped of bedclothes. Amy idly plumped up one of the mattresses, exploding dust into the air. She squeezed it and the mattress crackled. She decided it must be stuffed with barley straw—hardly the most comfortable of choices.
    Farther along in the second-floor hallway, a Hitchcock rocking chair with cane seat lay overturned as if it had skittered and fallen when its occupant jumped up. A layer of dust edged the legs and rungs, and light cobwebs were strung between the stenciled rails of the back. The girls left it where