Fletcher's Ford

by Eric Marks

He’d been staying at Quaco two and a half weeks. It was mid August, and with homecoming week a month past and the Labour Day rush yet to arrive, the seaside village was deserted most days. He was the only guest at the local inn.

     Mr. Dobbin rather enjoyed the quiet. His doctor had ordered him to take a vacation that would provide a modicum of exercise and a retreat from the stress of his law practice. So, Mr. Dobbin had booked himself three weeks at an inn on the shores of a bay he had never heard of, as far from Boston as he cared to drive in a day.

     He passed the time walking and sketching, a hobby he had enjoyed in college and rediscovered during his convalescence from a double bypass surgery several years before. Mr. Dobbin had tried to wring as much as he could out of life early, and while this had made him comfortably wealthy, it had also very nearly killed him. He had experienced two heart attacks since the bypass, the most recent severe enough that his doctor had warned him if he suffered a third, neither his money nor the remaining veins in his leg would be likely to save him.

     Even on vacation, Mr. Dobbin followed a daily routine. He rose as early as he would have in Boston, watching the sun rise over the bay and reading newspapers with coffee in his room. He breakfasted late, donned a waxed canvas satchel containing lunch and a few sketching supplies and set off wherever the impulse took him. With its covered bridges, long, crescent shaped beach and scores of Victorian sea captain’s homes, the little village offered a variety of interesting and challenging views. When he returned to the inn in the afternoon, Mr. Dobbin liked to paint his best sketches in watercolour.

     What he hadn’t counted on was the fog.
 Where it came from was a mystery. Sometimes it spread over the water and seemed to follow the tide; other days, it clung to the land. It was seldom more than forty feet deep; from the hills surrounding the harbour, one could actually look down on it, as though viewing a cloud bank from a airplane. It seemed to descend without warning and depart without cause. Several times, Mr. Dobbin had found himself separated by an impenetrable mist from the scene he had been sketching. What was worse, he now knew from experience that the sun likely was still shining just a few hundred yards away.
   
 He’d had a good morning sketching fishing boats left high and dry at the wharf. While he lunched, the edge of the tide remained well beyond the stone jetties that guarded the harbour, so when he set out again, he walked west, along the top of the great beach and into the diked marshland beyond it.

    Before he left the village, he hoped to sketch the Isle o’ Haute, a squat, rocky island that dominated the horizon. But the damned thing kept moving. At times, it seemed no larger than a speck on the horizon; then, within an hour, it would loom many times larger, as though it had drawn near. At first, Mr. Dobbin thought something must be wrong with his vision, but then the innkeeper had told him it was a mirage, well known to locals. Since then he’d watched the island’s peripatetic course closely, trying to find a way to capture this most elusive quality.

    Today, the island seemed to be very near indeed, so close that it had lost its squat appearance and seemed to jut from the bay like the basalt pillar it was. Mr. Dobbin could make out the sharp vertical lines of its cliffs and the hump of its crown. When he observed that it also appeared to be floating on a cushion of air above the water, Mr. Dobbin sat down in the marsh and began sketching rapidly, glancing up from his pad only to confirm the unusual perspective.

     Because his attention was fixed on the island and his drawing, Mr. Dobbin couldn’t say exactly when the fog began to roll in. It came from behind him, over the land, and not until wisps of it were intruding on his peripheral vision did he realize that he was sitting with his back to a white wall.

     In a few minutes, he could see neither the long eastern sweep of beach and marsh he had walked, nor the rocky western headland he had been using as a landmark. All had been blotted out by the creeping fog.

     The easiest solution would have been to walk toward the beach, in the direction he had been facing while sketching the island, then turn left toward the village. But Mr. Dobbin was reluctant to do so. For one thing, he knew the tide was coming in, and he had lost track of how quickly it was approaching. He knew that between him and the village lay a wide channel through the marsh that had been shallow enough when he had crossed it, but which raged with current as the tide rose.

      He didn’t want to be cut off, so he turned his back on where the beach had been and struck out more deeply into the shrouded marshland, hoping that if he held to a straight path, he would soon cross a road that paralleled the shore.

     As he picked his way through the wild rye and salt marsh hay, feeling for sinkholes with a piece of driftwood, Mr. Dobbin marveled at the eeriness of the fog. It was literally chilling; the marsh was a good ten degrees colder than the sunlit beach had been. The dense mist scattered the sunlight striking it from above and obliterated shadows, destroying any natural sense of direction. With each step, he grew more aware of the fog’s unique smell: hints of sulphur, bog iron and salt, but also crushed sage and wild mustard, the scent of plants trod underfoot. Strangest of all, it deadened sound, so that the cries of gulls, the throbbing of boat engines and even the regular, plaintive moan of the village foghorn seemed more distant than they should have been.

      He’d been in the fog about twenty minutes when a flash of light caught his attention. He stopped and scrutinized the direction it had come from. When the glint came again, he changed course to investigate. He thought perhaps it was the sun glancing off the window of a farmhouse.

     Less than 30 yards away, he found the source - an oasis of light in the foggy landscape, cleared by some anomalous gust of wind. There, sitting in the broad, sandy delta carved by a brook as it entered the marsh, sat the wreck of a car, the sun intermittently flashing from the reflector of a smashed headlight. In the fog beyond the wreck, Mr. Dobbin could seen the outlines of telephone poles and a steel railed bridge.

     After the monotony of the fog, he found the sun drenched colours of the little clearing dazzling. Around the chrome-and-yellow wreck, pale red sand spilled over bleached stones before mingling with darker soil cut from the banks of the marsh by the water.

     The brook explained the breach in the fog bank, he realized. A current of air would follow the course of the water, carving a wispy canyon through the marsh. Relieved at having found his way out so easily, he turned his attention to the wreck.

     He was surprised to discover it was a vintage sports car - a Dodge from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. Like Mr. Dobbin himself, it appeared to have taken a beating in middle age. The front end was badly crumpled on the driver’s side, the frame bent, the axle twisted. The doors had been wrenched open and the windshield was long gone. The black upholstery was streaked with dust, strands of yellowed grass and brown algae deposited by high tides or spring floods. What violence had not damaged, the water had, pitting the glossy, lemon yellow paint with a pox of black corroded spots bleeding streaks of red rust.

     It must have been someone’s dream car once, Mr. Dobbin thought - before it was broken, dragged away and abandoned. But what kind of person hurtles their ruined dreams into the sea?

     As he climbed the embankment to the road beside the bridge, he turned back for a last glance at the wreck, wheels locked for good on the sandy creek bed. Then, the wind over the brook shifted, and the drifting fog swept the sight away.


     When he arrived back at the inn, Mr. Dobbin went immediately to the kitchen to order a sandwich and then to his room. He tried to finish his sketch of the floating island, but the fantastic image he had worked so hard to capture no longer inspired him. Instead, he found his attention wandering to the sight of the wrecked car revealed by the clearing in the fog.

     He tried to draw it from memory and, after a couple of false starts, found he could do a passable job. By dinnertime, he had sketched a reasonable semblance of the scene and added just enough colour to distinguish the sunlit wreck on the creek bed from the duller hues of the fogged-in marsh. It was by far the most interesting sketch he had produced that day, so he took it to the dining room with him to show to his hosts.

     Dinners at the inn had become quite casual, with the innkeepers joining their only guest. After a fine meal of salmon and wild greens, they exchanged the high points of their respective days. In due course, Mr. Dobbin told of how he’d become lost in the fog, and produced his sketch for inspection.

    The hostess, Mrs. Ivers, asked him where he’d found the colourful wreck. When Mr. Dobbin described the bridge on the creek west of the village where he had exited the marsh, Mr. Ivers nodded.

     “It’s called Fletcher’s Ford. If I’m remembering correctly, the bridge was built at a place where farmers drove their livestock across the brook to pasture in the marsh. Seems like a strange place to leave a wreck, though.”

     Mrs. Ivers smiled at her husband while she and her daughter Sydney cleared the table. “Well, there’s no accounting for locals. Maybe the creek was named after the car, dear. Are you sure it wasn’t a Mustang, Mr. Dobbin?”

     “It wasn’t a Ford, it was a Dodge.”

     The voice came from the dining room doorway, where the inn’s elderly handyman, George McAllister, stood. He’d evidently come in to ask the Ivers something and caught sight of the drawing. He turned to Mr. Dobbin and asked, in a curious voice, “Did you make this?”

    Mr. Dobbin admitted that he had, and repeated the barest details of his adventure that afternoon.

     “Do you recognize the car, George?,” Mr. Ivers asked.

     “Aye. My cousin Bertie owned it.”

    “Is he going to fetch it out of the creek anytime soon?,”  Mrs. Ivers interjected, as  she bustled about the table.

     The handyman scratched at the back of his hand. “Not hardly. He’s been dead for more than thirty years.”


     The table was cleared and the coffee served, and over a cup of black tea, the old man began his tale.

     “There was a priest here then, name of Wicklow. It was to be his last parish, though no one knew it but him and his bishop. He had cancer of the blood - leukemia - bad now, but as good as a death sentence then.

     “Some said that what happened was God’s way of comforting him. That’s faith, I guess. I sometimes wonder if it couldn’t have happened to any man who was in the right frame of mind.”

     He fixed Mr. Dobbin with a speculative look, and continued.

     “Father Wicklow was an old-fashioned sort - no living family, and he’d given his life to the great communion. He’d lived up north, missioning to the Indians and Eskimo. He was a fine man; served his church and parishioners well. When it came back he had cancer, they shifted him here to the coast - warmer air and quieter duties, I suppose. I doubt he asked for it. He wasn’t that sort of man.

    “Most people don’t appreciate this today, but there was a time when the parish priest was a pressure valve in the community. The bulk of them - men like Father Wicklow - had broad shoulders, and folks heaped their problems there to take the load off themselves for a while. And the priest - well, he’d just shoulder the burden and be glad to ease the weight on someone’s soul. Leading by example, they called it.

    “There were some who could be right pious about it, but Father Wicklow wasn’t like that. He never raised people’s weaknesses against them. And he never held his own strength or patience up as any special virtue. To him, it wasn’t any more than any other man could do; and the strength wasn’t his, it was his Lord’s.

     “There he was, a dying man, come to a strange place to take on the sins of all and sundry and lead them to forgiveness. He wasn’t mad nor the least bit vain, so I’d guess he must have been brave.”

     The old man paused and sipped his tea.

     “It may be that bravery wasn’t enough, or that he could feel his body failing him. My aunt kept house for him, and one night when she was there late, she heard him praying upstairs; the sound came down through the fireplace. What he was praying for was strength to meet the needs of his parishioners. Right humble, he was. She didn’t know he was ill at the time, mind; if she had, she said, she’d have cried.

     “Father Wicklow arrived just before Easter. At some point - around the end of May, I believe - he began having strange dreams.

    “At first, he said, he’d wake with a little start, as though something had disturbed him. He said it was like hearing a thunderclap at a great distance or muffled by thick walls. He’d listen for a while, hear nothing more, then go back to sleep. In the morning, he wondered whether he’d really woken up at all. This happened twice before the dreams began.

      “On the third night, Father Wicklow woke as before, to the sound of a muffled bang, and again heard nothing more. But as he settled back to sleep, it seemed to him as though he was still awake. It was like he was paralyzed, he said - lying there, eyes open, unable to move a muscle but aware of every sound in the room - the ticking of his clock, a scurrying that might have been a mouse, the sound of a car passing on the street and the sight of its headlights moving across the ceiling of his room from east to west. Then, he realized there was someone in the room with him.

      “The figure he saw was always the same - a tall, heavyset man whose head seemed to be wrapped in a sort of hood about his neck. He couldn’t see the figure’s face; it was always turned away or in shadow. The hooded man never spoke to him, only gestured with his hand for the priest to follow. And follow he did; as though he had no power to do other than what the hooded figure bade him.

     “It wasn’t like walking, the Father said, though he could feel every cold footfall. It felt more like swimming in the bay - feeling his muscles pulling him smoothly through the cool night air as though it were water.

     “They walked perhaps a mile through the village, Father Wicklow and his guide. They stopped before a house in the main street, a house the priest knew well. It was the widow Greeley’s home. She was an old woman - no one knew how old, but 90 if she was a day. She’d lived all alone since her husband had died eight years before. It was a warm, welcoming place, but not that night.

    “That night, there was a terrible stillness about it. I know, I know; it was the middle of the night. But that’s what Father Wicklow told me he felt - a terrible stillness and a terrible silence, as though it was an empty shed. When he turned from the house to the hooded figure, it was gone.

    “The next thing Father Wicklow knew, he was waking up in his own bed at daybreak, and he knew that he’d been dreaming. But the dream had been so real, he checked the soles of his feet and the hem of his pajamas to see if they were dirty. He thought he might have been sleepwalking - but no, there wasn’t a sign he had been out of bed.

     “That morning - about 11 o’clock - the postmistress called him. The widow Greeley hadn’t picked up her mail, and her morning milk was still sitting on the doorstep. Would he mind going over with her to take a look?”

     “And was she - dead?,” Mrs. Ivers asked.

     “Oh yes. In her sleep, very peaceful, like. Folks reckoned it wasn’t at all a bad way for her to go. Father Wicklow knew that, too. It wasn’t the death the troubled him; it was that he’d known she was dead before he’d been told.

     “It was a few weeks before he had the dream again. This time, he was dreaming of something else and woke to that muffled sound of a thunderclap or a hammer ringing, and the bedroom clock ticking, and the rustling noise of a mouse, and the hiss of a car passing in the rain, and the sight of its headlights moving across the ceiling as it passed, from east to west. And there the figure stood again: a silent, heavyset man, his face in shadow, a hood about his neck. Again, he beckoned; and again, Father Wicklow followed.

      “He told me later he should have been frightened, but he wasn’t. He knew, with the same certainty he’d known Mrs. Greeley was dead, that the figure posed no threat to him. But he wondered at the strangeness of it - of who or what was leading him, and to what scene.

     “He was right to wonder, for it was to be a long walk that night. Four times the hooded figure stopped on the lonely road and stood and stared at a darkened house. Three times it beckoned again, and led the priest onward. The journey lasted hours, and the hooded figure never uttered a sound; but when it stopped before a house, the silence seemed to change somehow. Father Wicklow said the stillness made his mind tense, like listening to a fiddle that’s out of tune.

     “At the last house, the figure left him. Once again, he woke at dawn in his own bed, and there were no signs he had ever left the room.”

     “Who died?,” Sydney asked, wide-eyed.

     “No one. At least, not then.

     “Father Wicklow spent the day in a lather of worry. Should he tell anyone? Was the strain of his duties and his illness becoming too much for him? Was he simply overwrought? He spent even more time than usual in prayer and contemplation and decided, at least tentatively, that the answer to all these questions was ‘no’. The dream did mean something; it wasn’t simply a product of his mind. But he didn’t know - perhaps couldn’t know - what it all meant.

     “No one died that day, nor the day after, nor the day after that. Father Wicklow began to doubt his intuition. Then, on the fourth day, there was a death in the first house the hooded man had stopped beside. Father Wicklow knew the other deaths would come to pass, if not all at once, then gradually, in the fullness of time. And, one by one, they did.”

     “Who died?,” Sydney asked insistently. Her mother touched her shoulder.

     “Sydney, dear, please...”

     “It’s a fair question, miss. The butcher: a happy man in perfect health. His hand slipped while he was cutting up a sheep’s carcass and he severed his femoral artery and bled to death on the spot. After that, a labourer, of a stroke. Next, an infant girl, only a little more than a year old, of crib death. Finally, a teenaged boy, who died in two weeks of a brain tumour no one had suspected he had.”

     “What did Father Wicklow do?,” Mrs. Ivers asked.

     “Do? What could he do? Run into the houses and tell people, “You’re going to die?” This man was a priest, a priest with leukemia, no less; he knew in the depths of his soul that we are all going to die. So, he did what a good priest would do: he comforted the afflicted. He found himself thinking more about those in his care, especially those whom the hooded figure had singled out. He started preparing them to deal with change and sorrow. And, in the same way, he started preparing himself.

      “The dreams continued for a while, each exactly the same as the last, but with one small difference: the number of houses visited by the hooded figure shrank with each death.

      “On the night after he buried Billy Sloane, the boy with the brain tumour, Father Wicklow dreamed of the hooded man again. Only, this time, the figure did not beckon to him. It did not raise a hand nor make any motion at all. And, when Father Wicklow woke the next morning, he could barely remember having seen it. He knew then that everything had returned to normal: that whatever it was that had been happening, its moment had passed.”

     The old carpenter drained the last of his tea, and turned the bone china cup upside down on its saucer.

     “And was that the last time Father Wicklow saw the hooded man?,” Mrs. Ivers asked.

     The old man lifted his cup again and seemed to study the leaves left in the saucer. When he looked up, it was to Mr. Dobbin that he turned.

     “No,” he said slowly. “It was the last time but one.”


     “Father Wicklow told me all this August 27, 1968 - the night my cousin Bertie put his car over the bridge and into Fletcher’s Ford. I was a volunteer fireman then, you see - thirty-six years old. Got called up in the middle of the night to go to an accident up the west road, and when I got there, someone said it was Bertie. They told me to go home, and not to look. But I had to go to him; he was my youngest cousin. So I walked through the fog to the creek.

     “Father Wicklow was already there. There wasn’t a thing they could do. Bertie was home for a visit on leave from the army. He’d been driving back from the city after midnight when some fool kid, playing a trick, like, had jumped out in front of him on the road.

     “Well, Bertie was always quick thinking. He ran his car over the other side of the road, off the bridge and into the creek. It was only a twelve foot drop, but he was going fast and it killed him. The car landed some fifteen yards from the bridge - right where it sits in this painting. If the boy hadn’t run and woke a neighbour, no one would have known. The sound of the crash had been muffled by the fog.

     “When I got there, Father Wicklow was praying over the body. Bertie’d been thrown clear of the wreck. The first thing I noticed was that the Father was crying, and I’d never seen the like of that before. The second thing I saw was Bertie.

     “There weren’t seat belts in them days, not like there are today, and Bertie was a big fellow - heavyset. He’d been thrown through the window when the car hit the creek bed. The edge of the roof had cut into his scalp at the forehead as clean as a surgeon’s knife and peeled everything back past his ears, and when he’d hit the windshield and then the rocky ground, his features had been sheared down to the bone. He was a faceless man, and the flesh of his scalp hung loose round the back of his neck like a hood.

     “That was why Father Wicklow had been crying. Me, I fainted dead away - and later, Father Wicklow told me his side of the story - me and the kid that had caused the accident. It was his way of telling us that death is a mystery.

     “It was the strangest story I’d ever heard. Still is, and I’ve thought on it for thirty-five years. I can’t explain what Father Wicklow dreamed, nor what this man has seen today. But I know one thing for certain.”

     He gestured toward Mr. Dobbin’s painting, and all eyes followed his trembling hand.

     “That wreck’s been gone since September, 1968. We pulled it out of Fletcher’s Ford so Bertie’s mam and dad wouldn’t have to see it every day.

     “It was less than a month later that we buried Father Wicklow.”


by Eric Marks