The Visionist: A Novel (15 page)

They had lived in The City of Hope for what seemed a second lifetime, during which her brother had become like a phantom to her. She saw him in Meeting, but other than staring at her in terror when she’d had her Vision that first Sabbath Day, he refused to meet her gaze. Sometimes the pain of his absence was so acute, heavy-heartedness would engulf her and she felt nothing but gloom as she looked at the believers, stamping out their sins, singing their salvation.

In the dining hall—another chance to see him—the believers would stand behind their low-backed chairs, awaiting the sign from their Elder Brother and Sister to sit and begin eating. She did not care about the food. She was searching for Ben. In the earliest days, she hunted in vain. Ben was held away from meals that first week, fed alone on account of his sorrowing. Charity said that she had heard he could not be quieted except when given an elixir made from cicely, garden coltsfoot, honey, and Madeira wine. He was held to drink it by Brother Andrew, she said, who was kind and well versed in sympathizing with the sorrows of young new believers, and it had brought Ben peace.

The story angered Polly. Should she not have been the one at Ben’s side? She had always been good at calming his fears, even when plagued by her own. Away from him, she could do nothing.

Short and tall, slim and stout—her only chance of spotting her brother was to peer through a forest of women wearing long dresses in dark browns and blues with loose-fitting neckerchiefs fastened over their chests.

“It’s to hide your womanliness,” Sister Charity had said to Polly on the day she had first attempted to tie her own.
My womanliness?
she remembered thinking.
I am nothing but ribs and skin.

But then again, Polly had been taught a thousand strange lessons each day. To cut her food into squares and never on the diagonal, for such was the slant of the Devil. To keep separate the bounty that lay on her plate, never mixing it into a hash, a habit so commonly practiced by the World’s people. To eat well, finishing all that had been placed before her and then to “Shaker” her plate by sopping up the leftover juices with the last of her bread. To waste nothing. To leave her plate clean in order that she aid the sisters whose task it was to wash up after meals. To sit still and tall. To refrain from even looking at the brethren.

Before each meal, the sisters and brethren marched into the dining room in parallel lines without so much as a glance sideways. She had often passed Ben so close that she could smell the barn where the brethren had worked since rising at the four-thirty bell. The warm, sweet perfume of the cows as the men moved by reminded her of home. Mama. Polly could not think about Mama anymore. Not since she’d abandoned them. And Ben. What labor could the brethren have asked of so thin and frail a child? She wanted to call out to him, signal that he was in her presence once more and that everything would be as it was, only better. But she could not make a sound and heard nothing in her head except for the thud of dutiful footfalls as the believers filed into the dining hall, each keeping to their side of an invisible partition and turning to sit at opposite ends of the room.

They dance here almost as they do in Meeting,
Polly thought,
though with none of the same abandon.
It amazed her—how many lines the believers could find to follow in this rigid world.

Ben never looked at her, his stare fixed in front of him as he walked in step with the brethren, each following the solemn procession with their right foot stamping just the slightest bit louder than their left. Out of the corner of her eye, she would watch him sit when directed while Brother Andrew helped cut his meat and pour his drink. Her brother barely gave his plate a glance before stabbing at his potatoes with his fork and lifting them to his mouth. What faint traces remained of the boy she remembered! On the table in front of her, platters brimmed with food. They appeared, as if by magic, in a corner cupboard with shelves that moved silently up from the kitchen when one of the sisters pulled hard on a rope that hung close by the wall. No one spoke. They were, she thought, a silent congregation of eaters.

Polly knew she had to finish her food, but there were so many times when she found that she could not. Her stomach heaved and her breathing became shallow and quick. She was becoming sick with longing and she wished that she could feel the spirits close about her, poised to take her from the pain. But they would not come.

“You appear ill, Sister,” Elder Sister Agnes said to her one day. She had stepped into Polly’s line of vision as if to break the numbing spell. “Did something you ate not agree with you?” She appeared impossibly tall as she stood and awaited her answer.

“No,” Polly said. “I became dizzy is all. I don’t know—”

“Are you well enough,” she interrupted, “to come to my chambers after you have finished your morning chores? I believe it is
my
turn to speak again to the Visionist, now that so many others have had their fill.”

Polly could not find her voice fast enough.

“The answer is a simple one,” Elder Sister Agnes said.

“Yes,” Polly replied. “I will come.” And with a curt nod, the eldress was gone.
Will this be the day I confess?
Polly wondered. Perhaps this was her opportunity to banish Elder Sister Agnes’s doubts. She had worked and worshipped with great vigor, after all. She had become a good Shaker, hadn’t she? Might that be enough?

Simon Pryor

AS I QUESTIONED
the inhabitants of Ashland, I should not have been surprised to find such willful apathy. Though for more than a decade they had turned a blind eye to the Kimball family’s misfortunes, they were happy to dole out condemnation as though it justified their lack of sympathy. There was not a bar owner for miles around who didn’t angrily shake a tally in my face and declare Silas Kimball a thief, a drunkard, and a man who boasted openly of his cruelty at home. Benjamin Briggs’s accidental death was lamented, but as for May, she had been a girl of loose morals who sowed the seeds of her own misery when she married so feral a specimen. Polly, the unfortunate fruit of this unholy union, was ignored by all save a schoolteacher and her students, the children she had helped to learn how to read and do their sums. One does, on occasion, come across people who renew—if briefly—one’s faith in humanity.

In fact, it was the teacher who told me where I might find the man who would know more about the Kimballs than anyone else, for he had tended to their animals and was the only person Silas never ran off the place. He went by the name of Peeles, she said. Mister William Peeles.

That is how I found myself in a saloon at the far end of Ashland. Not a genteel spot, I’ll say that. Dark, smoky, full of customers of the rabbling sort—the place scarcely spoke to my more refined sensibilities. Still, as there was liquor and a penny cigar to be had, it was as good a place as any to approach the man I hoped would further my inquiry.

I was glad that the wear of a dusty ride coated me in a patina of collegial scruffiness. It allowed me to slip less conspicuously from my comfortable chair by the fire into a world far grittier and unpredictable. The men who watered here bore little good feeling towards townsfolk like myself. They worked hard in forge and field and found those whose professions did not leave calluses, burns, stooped backs, missing fingers, the reek of sweat, and the dirt of real labor to be an untrustworthy lot indeed. I cannot say that I much blamed them.

My companions spoke loudly and loosely, doubtless a result of the alcoholic bilge they drank in such copious amounts. Ever since the temperance preachers had begun their self-righteous invasions, whiskey had become increasingly difficult to come by. Wherever the amber fluid flowed freely, one felt the urge to suck it down as might a man who fears he will never drink again.

I approached the bar. “Is there a gentleman by the name of Peeles here tonight?” I asked the saloonkeeper.

“Who wants to know?” he answered with suspicion, wariness being a requisite trait in all taverners. He weighed my request as he gave his clouded whiskey glasses a cursory wipe before putting them back on the counter.

“I was told I might find him here,” I said. “Wanted a word concerning the Kimball family.”

“Got an eye on the land already, do you?” he asked with barely concealed disdain. “You mill folk don’t know much shame, do you?”

“I’m no mill agent,” I assured him. “Just an inspector looking to find anyone who might have survived.”

He went back to his cleaning. “Peeles’ll come,” he said after a brief silence. “For all I know he’s already down there. You’ll recognize him—he’ll be the last to leave once it’s over and done with.”

He nodded to an open hatch in the floor at the back of the room. It seemed to be swallowing the tavern regulars in great numbers, and though it took me a moment to jostle through the crowd, I too eventually found my way down into a pit surrounded on three sides with rough-cut boards for seating. I closed my eyes against the heat and fug. A fight was about to begin and the placing of bets was well under way.

I regard such amusements with loathing, but this was not the first time I had found myself crawling into the cramped bowels of one drinking establishment or another and waiting for the games to begin. It was neither a fistfight nor a wrestling match between men that attracted the crowd. Not a bit of it. The drinkers were in high spirits because some enterprising fellow had bagged himself a woodchuck and found someone equally opportunistic and cruel to put up a dog. The custom is as straightforward as they come: The man in the pit holds a writhing grain sack containing the wild contender—anything larger than a common cat, with teeth and claws will do—while another stands a few feet away jiggling a piece of raw meat before a cur that has been near-starved for days. As harmless as a chuck may appear, a large male is serious business when cornered. His opponent? The unfortunate creature chosen to fight an animal more formidable than a bag full of rats is usually a veteran of particularly churlish disposition, a dog no man would be sorry to lose.

True to form, the cur across the pit from me was old and battle-scarred—an underdog, as it were, against such a powerful adversary.
Oh, that the worn-out mutt might simply be left in peace,
I thought. The cruelty and brutishness of men is, on occasion, more than I can bear to witness.

So why did I stay? The work, always the work. I am used to depravity of one sort or another—indeed I have been well trained—and it is often in such a Hades that one finds men brim-full of useful information, especially once the fight has ended and the victory rounds have commenced. The well-lubricated winners are primed for indiscretion born of elation, while the losers—having spent their last crumpled notes to numb their disappointment—don’t much care what they say. I am served in either circumstance. Temperance be damned—I bless the power of alcohol to transform.

Heat from tallow candles shoved into raw potatoes on the shelf that circled the room stifled any hope of drawing an easy breath. We populated a mere hole in the ground, a sort of square-sided paupers’ grave—just as close, just as undiscriminating.

Trapped in such crude surroundings, the senses come under siege—the grit of smoke and pit dust assault the mouth; the smell of drink and puke and urine and sweat offend the nose; the sound of bullying and boasting, of roaring and the ripping of flesh, of bones being crushed, of pained whimpers and growls—how they deaden the ear; the push of the crowd leaning in and in, their thirst for violence, the absence of humanity, the malevolent pull of one’s own curiosity—whether physical or atmospheric, these are the evils that rage against one’s ability to feel. Even disgust is temporarily suspended.

And what, you might ask, of that fifth sense? What is it that occupies the eye in a pit fight? The stuff of such nightmares that I have learned to watch the battles in bits, never as a whole. The faces of the men, excited to heights of ecstasy better suited to a grunting toss under the roof of a brothel; the rippling muscles of the dog as he wrestles to overthrow his challenger; the bullish wild chuck using his proximity to the ground to flip his opponent, his overwhelming solidity of mass, his teeth and raking claws making again and again for the dog’s neck and stomach; the tenacity of life when a quick death is by far the better end.

In this case, the old dog eventually succumbed; the woodchuck barely breathing but alive and in shreds. The spectators’ fun was over, and as quickly as they had filled the earthen theater, they abandoned it. All but one. A lone observer, long and lean of build, with a face so deeply lined you’d have thought the years had been whittled into his cheeks. He wore a solemn expression—indeed, it was clear he’d shared no part in the other men’s rapture. I watched him approach the dying chuck, wondering if there wasn’t something strange about him. Why would he linger in so damned a spot?

A single sharp report provided me an answer. Smoke trailing from the end of his pistol, the rag he’d used to catch the blood-spatter hung limp in his left hand. Shaken, I asked, “Why?”

“Must have put a mercy bullet in a hundred animals since I been coming here,” he said, looking up from the corpse. “Can’t stop the fight when torture’s all that moves some men. But the creature unlucky enough to be left breathing? Well, I can make short work of his misery.”

He turned to climb the stairs, and I had no words with which to call him back. No reason either. A man who suffers through fight after fight only to shoot the last animal standing—that was as strange a sort of goodness as ever I’d known. Making my way past the carnage, I ascended to the bar where the keep indicated to me with a quick nod that the somber Mister Peeles, having pocketed his pistol and cloth, had taken his usual seat.

I sat down next to him, ordering what I considered to be an essential and well-earned drink.

“Stake you to the same?” I asked.

“Lead a man to whiskey these days and you’ll have no trouble making him drink,” he said, his voice a weary and graveled rasp that I imagined to have been born of smoke, liquor, and disgust.

“Name’s Pryor.” I pushed a glass of murky liquid his way.

“Peeles,” he answered as we saluted without looking at each other, then drank down the questionable brew in a single gulp. I had learned long ago not to sip my poison in such company, for it signals softness and a sense of leisure enjoyed solely by the rich and is thus an affectation that squelches useful conversation. Besides, why prolong the agony of the burn?

“You from ’round here?” he asked, looking straight ahead. “I never seen your like in this place.”

“Next town over,” I replied, nodding my head in the direction of Hatch and Burns’ Hollow. “The incendiary that flared over by the Kimball farm. Know of it?”

“I read the notice,” he said cautiously. Clearly, he shared the barkeep’s dislike of mill agents who comb over poor farms and damaged properties in hope of securing them cheaply and without complication. They were an aggressive breed of land-grabber—land, always land at the center of men’s greed these days. Brazen enough to lure young country girls from their families with the promise of good wages and freedom from the chafing rules of home, the mill agents were considered lower than thieves by the type to congregate at taverns like the one in which Peeles and I now sat. And I can’t say I felt any differently about them. Their noisy monuments to industry dominated once peaceful fields and turned babbling brooks into foul-smelling runs, boiling with waste and tinted whorishly by the dye-lot of the day.

“I’m not one of them,” I said quickly. “No, I have business concerning the fire on behalf of the county. Fire inspector’s what I am. But there’s only so much a man can glean from ashes and I’m looking to find out more about the family. You know them?”

He paused before turning to stare into my eyes for the first time. Paused quite a while, actually, as though trying to determine if it was worth the effort to tell me what he knew.

“Yessir, I did,” he said finally, his gray eyes focusing ahead once more. I sensed a familiar struggle within him—the reluctance to speak pitted against the need to unburden himself. Most people with anything real to say suffer from it. But it was only when he eyed his empty glass that I recognized the deal to be struck. He would talk so long as I held up my end of the bargain.

I spotted us both to another round and followed suit as he tipped back his shot then placed the empty glass on the bar.

“They weren’t like most, if that helps any.”

“No,” I said, “I’m beginning to get that feeling.”

Peeles’s way with animals—which explained his quiet abhorrence of the evening’s proceedings and his self-appointed role in bringing them to a quick if startling close—was seen as a valuable skill by many of the country folk who live on outlying farms. He told me he ministered not only to their livestock but to their families as well. Living and dying and sickness and birth, like any doctor, he knew about all that. But he understood something less concrete as well. He understood that poverty, pride, and independence puzzle together to make a wall that rarely admits outsiders. That was why people like Silas Kimball trusted Peeles.

“I never liked goin’ out to Kimball’s place,” he said. “For one thing, after old Briggs died, it weren’t what anyone would call a proper farm no more. That were a sad thing to see.”

He looked up at the motley collection of bottles on a dirty shelf behind the bar. We drank another round.

“If you’ve talked to anyone in town, then you already know that Silas beat young May. And he weren’t much of a father neither, from what I could see. His girl Polly was skinny and drawn like a ghost, and… Well, it’s a funny thing about townsfolk. When it were Mister and Missus Benjamin Briggs living on that farm, they pulled ’em in like a flock of sheep’ll herd round its own. But when Silas come along, it were as if those selfsame folk lost any interest in knowing they was alive.”

“So you knew both families from years back?” I asked. “From before the time that Benjamin Briggs died?”

I did not need to delve so deep. But different as it was from my own tale, I felt a strange likeness beginning to bloom between the two. You might say that the troubles of my early years have taught me to climb into the skins of others. To feel myself wrap men’s souls about me, pull my feet into the boots of total strangers, settle their hats firmly on my head so that my view becomes one with their own. It’s a transformation I welcome, despite the attendant complications.