The Visionist: A Novel (16 page)

“Oh I knew ’em all right,” he said. “Enough to see a wealthy man sweat out a fine farm of his own hand then die for no reason. I seen Silas ’round the time Briggs died. I knew then that things were anything but right.”

“How?” I prodded. “How did you know?” Intuition told me that Silas was the bolt of lightning that split the tree.

“I don’t put stock in rumor,” Peeles answered cautiously. “You just happened to ask ’bout something no one else cares to know. And with that farm lost in a blaze and everyone gone missing, I figure there ain’t much harm in telling you.”

He paused. I signaled the barkeep. Peeles recommenced speaking. This was our pattern.

“It were spring,” he began. “I remember because I had calves born all which way that year. No cow seemed to be birthin’ straight—no sheep neither—so I was everywhere, which means that I heard and saw most everything there was to wonder about. One day, I was walking home on the road that passes the schoolhouse. It were late morning. No one about. The girls were in with the old schoolmarm and damn near everyone else and his son were in a field somewhere. So I was surprised to catch sight of a boy old enough for farmwork. Thin and tall, maybe fifteen years on him, not many more. I knew from the odd gait he kept that it were the Kimball boy. He were quick and light as he run up the bank of the road, then down again in a kind of game. But the sun was shining my way and I’d been up half the night with a breech, so I didn’t catch it right away.”

“Catch what?” I interrupted.

“The blood on him, his shirt marked with red, arms covered with it already dried brown. It nervoused me some, I’ll say that. Like old Briggs, I suppose I had a soft spot for the boy in those early years before I come to know better. He ’peared smart, in a twitchy sort of a way, and though he’d never been learned more ’n a little math in school and a little farming from Benjamin Briggs, he tried to have a good manner to him when he was younger. He looked the savage that morning though, something changed ’bout him. All that blood. I couldn’t hardly look at him; then I couldn’t hardly let him go neither.

“‘What you bin about?’ I asked, but he just stared at me. ‘What you bin at to be covered in blood?’ says I, reaching out to stop him passing me by. ‘And why aren’t you out helping Briggs?’

“‘He’s gone now. Gone for good and there ain’t no one but me and May.’” Peeles nodded for the barman to refill his glass. “I was barely fit to speak after what he told me,” he said. “But I had to ask: ‘What about the blood?’ I weren’t a bit sure I wanted to know, but I kept on. ‘That Briggs’s blood, boy?’

“‘The blood?’ he says, almost like he forgot he was covered. ‘That’s him, all right. I tried to help him, see. Went to him right away after he was hit.’

“‘Hit by what?’ I asked.

“‘Why, by the beam. It fell just like that, no warning. Just swung down and hit him square in the head.’

“I didn’t believe the boy,” Peeles said. “How things could up and change so fast. Why, I’d seen Benjamin Briggs buyin’ seed not a week prior. And here’s Silas, covered in his blood. Said he tried to get him up, see if he was still alive.”

Peeles swirled the whiskey in his glass. “I thought, how’s a thing like that happen? In a new barn? How’s a joint get loose without a farmer like Briggs noticing?” He gulped the drink down. “I said I’d best go out to the farm and so I did. And there he was, in a heap, dragged out from under the wood, blood everywhere.

“‘Why didn’t you call upon May to fetch me?’ I asked Silas. ‘You know I been round before.’ ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘May run to school the whole way after she saw him. Just cried and run, wantin’ to get away from me, I’m guessin’. Been there ever since. But we’re together now. Yessir, we’re married. And May’s with child—my child—whether anyone like it or no.’”

Peeles sat quietly a moment. “She can’t have been more’n thirteen. Heard later that after Silas took me back to the farm, he went round the schoolhouse. Walked in the door while the girls were at their lessons. The older ones like May, they sit at the back, see, while the teacher keeps the pups up close where she can watch ’em. They say Silas stood there, quiet like, in the door ’til May looked up. They say that’s when the others saw the blood and started to scream. But frighteningest thing of all was that he was just smiling and pointing at May, smiling an’ pointing like they was in a game of chase and she was It. Fell into a faint, the poor girl did. Never went school-ways again that I know of.”

He paused. “Townsfolk say Silas was a savage. Marked May for his own that day. The constables came, asked a lot of questions. But in the end, there weren’t nothing they could do but call it an accident.”

“You think Briggs was murdered?” I asked.

Peeles stared at me before looking down at the bar and tapping his glass. Once filled, he tipped it back before answering.

“Silas has murder in him, that much I can tell you for certain,” he said. “I have my opinions about whether he killed Briggs, but that were a long time ago. Don’t matter much now.”

“And yet it’s the reason you’re so sure he was a murderer, isn’t it?”

By this time, Peeles’s eyes were rheumy with drink and exhaustion. “Understand me good,” he said. “I’d’ve sooner laid down in a nest full of copperheads than gone to Briggs’s that day. But I felt sorry for May and the boy. That’s why May knew she could trust me when her baby girl needed birthin’. That’s how I came to see things change, came to know how far she sank the day she hitched herself to Silas Kimball. But I’m done thinking about them, Mister. I don’t like the tale—use it any way you will. Far as I’m concerned, the fire was a blessing. Just tell me this: They all live?”

“Found Silas dead in his bed,” I answered. “Can’t say what’s happened to May and the girl.”

“And the boy?” he asked, looking down. “He dead, too?”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Boy?” I said. “What boy?”

Peeles stared at me a moment, then looked away and clucked in disgust.

“That’s a tale for someone else to tell,” he said. “And you won’t find but one or two you can turn to for the whole truth.” He stood, turned to leave, and, with his back to me, lifted his hand as if to swat me away. It was a strange farewell, but he’d had his fill of whiskey and, doubtless, of me as well.

I sat awhile, tossing back the dregs of my drink. Why was May Kimball proving so difficult to find? A family that’s invisible in full view can disappear without much made of it. Still, with little ones to care for—not so easy.

She has a son,
I thought to myself. Why hadn’t his name been entered into the town records?

I rode home in the dark, my head swirling in a swill-fueled fog.
Where are you, May Kimball?
I asked myself over and over. In the back of my mind, a ghost was lurking, and when I fell exhausted onto my bed, stinking of drink and cheap smokes, I could hear—in spite of the enduring tinnitus of tavern chatter—a child’s voice. As ever, it pleaded with me, and before sleep descended—before the room stopped spinning and my mind went blank—I wagered I was lost.

Sister Charity

“DOES YOUR SISTER POLLY
exhibit operations in her sleep?”

The question startled me, as I was lost in imagining the life of a sojourner. Until the red book, my nose never twitched at the smell of horse sweat nor spice in the kitchens nor smoke from the stove fires. Such things surrounded me, but I concentrated on
doing.
There was not time to feel, see, or hear. I paid no mind to the bright blue of a jay, nor did I wonder at how its brilliance brought out the muted world around me. The stories I read each night with Sister Polly had changed me, and though I was glad for it, I understood why books from the World are forbidden here. In a sister less steadfast, they might breed envy, curiosity, even discontent, and none of these is a friend of faith.

Fortunately, I found it simple to separate idle fantasy from the work I perform as a believer, and so I was able to will my thoughts with ease back to the gathering room in which I sat with my Church Family sisters. The sound of a single sister’s voice above the peaceful burble of quiet conversation had occasioned the turning of many linen-capped faces towards mine. Such a patch of mushrooms we appear! You see? I had never before noticed it.

Sister Lavinia sat beside me, a gentle presence; not so Sister Ruth, who regarded me from across the room with cold eyes and a mouth pursed tight. She is the cruelest of us all, for when my markings first appeared, she whispered it round that the impurity of my true nature was clear for the reading on the surface of my skin. I remain inked with strange designs, but while most believers no longer stare at me, Sister Ruth seems never to cease in her scrutiny. It is humiliating, and though I try to look upon her with sympathy, I fail more often than not. Her meanness protrudes like the bones of a starving dog. Indeed, I wonder if perhaps she was born sour, for I remember her family dropping her here and leaving without so much as a glance back. She was only ten years of age at the time, but she seemed a heavy load they were eager to set down and never bear the likes of again. Standing by Elder Sister Agnes’s side, I watched Sister Ruth’s eyes follow the dust of her kin’s retreating carriage. Her cheek twitched, then her chin, but that was the last and only sign that her abandonment had caused her pain. Looking over at her now, I chastised myself for begrudging such a forlorn soul its bitterness.

I had yet to answer the question posed to me about how my Sister Polly sleeps, and Sister Prudence, sweet thing, stared at me with the wide, questioning regard of one ever ready to supply the proper emotional display once informed as to what that display should be. Were I to respond coldly now, for a sample, she would utter a soft
tsk tsk
under her breath, resuming her knitting while shaking her head at the insolence of the inquiry. But I offered no such answer, allowing instead the clicking of my needles to fill the silence.

“Sister Polly,” I said when I was ready, “is as worn out as the rest of us when she lies down. She sleeps most quietly, not uttering anything like the sounds I have, on occasion, heard coming from even the daintiest of girls gathered in this room.”

The older sisters giggled—especially Sister Prudence, who never failed to look relieved when called upon to exhibit humor over contempt. They knew that though I had not shared a room with anyone save Sister Polly, I have—in my capacity as caretaker to many a new believer—looked in on most all of the young sisters here, and I could say a pretty piece about what sorts of operations they perform in their sleep were I of a mind to do so.

Pettiness aside, I was reminded of how pleasant it can be to pass an evening in this manner. The room was warm—chairs circled closely round the stove, lamplight casting a golden glow. I sighed and wound the skein of red wool that had become unruly in my lap. I had been caught up in racing through my chores so that I might arrive more quickly at the end of each day, tucked beneath my covers, ready to listen to Sister Polly read from our book. Do you know that last night, we entered into Arabia and met a king who had not one but eleven wives?

“Imagine what Mother would say about that!” Polly commented with a smile. “The poor Sultan! To think of him here, hauling stones from the field. Much nicer to imagine him with his pipe and flowing robes and…”

“Stop!” I exclaimed. Because truly, I did not like this King of Arabia. The place itself—its endless waves of sand, its camels and strange islands of water in the desert sea—I was happy enough to envision that. But to hear tell about the customs of such a sinful lot… How could my Sister Polly have laughed?

It troubles me still that I did not ask her to put the book away. But once we had moved on from the carnality I so despised, I was able to sleep content in the knowledge that next time we ventured into the World—a World so distant that it posed little threat to the sanctity of The City of Hope—we would be in Egypt. There, I was certain, we would encounter natives of a more principled nature.

Sitting with my knitting in hand, I could not have been further from exotic lands, but I was content. Content in part because it pleased Elder Sister Agnes that I had come. She had approached me in the laundry earlier that day and asked if I might join my sisters for the evening, and though I knew Sister Polly would wonder where I was, I said that I would. The hours I spent in the company of my new friend had become cause for comment among certain of the believers. Those of a coldhearted bent whispered that I might have attached myself on account of her renown as a Visionist, for she was becoming famous. Why, not even one week ago, the Central Ministry at New Lebanon sent Brother Isaac Youngs—he who has visited all of the Eastern settlements to record spirit manifestations of one sort or another.

“Like everyone else, he asked me what it was that I saw when I fell into my Vision,” Sister Polly said when she told me of their meeting. “But truthfully, I was relieved to encounter someone who might explain to me why such things happen. He has spoken to many Visionists…to many sisters is what I mean. I suppose that is why I thought he might be able to see beneath the surface of things. Do you understand?”

I had nodded at the time. But it struck me as strange that Sister Polly needed another to explain what surely was as natural an occurrence in her as is happiness or self-doubt or irritation in the rest of us.

Though I’m not certain that Brother Isaac had much of an answer for her, he did describe some of the happenings he had seen in the other settlements. In Wisdom’s Valley, for a sample, he spoke of witnessing two sisters with closed eyes, unaffected by any distraction yet perfectly joined in a great variety of exercises. He told Sister Polly they sang songs that had never before been heard, in unknown tongues but also in English, with beautiful, intricate, and graceful motions, both in complete unison and perfect time, never stumbling. As well as speaking about them, he acted out the operations of other Visionists he had met before coming to The City of Hope: bowing and shaking, writhing and twisting, shouting for joy and groaning in agony. My dear friend admitted with a smile that she was taken aback by his mimicry but also drawn to its fervor, for she recognized parts of herself in the passion he displayed and felt all the less alone for it.

Needless to say, in near every Meeting, Elder Brother Caleb expresses his pleasure and astonishment over Sister Polly’s gift as well as other, smaller transformations—the quick step he sees in the brethren’s strides as they go about their work; the sisters’ renewed enthusiasm for making baskets, bonnets, and cloaks to sell beyond our walls. Barely two months have passed since her arrival, yet she has set the world spinning faster beneath our feet. We worship with more passion, we are kinder and less impatient with one another, we perform our chores with more heartfelt devotion, and, most miraculous of all, we know that we are seen in all of our labors by a host of Heavenly spirits.

“It gives great satisfaction,” Elder Sister Agnes had said to me that very morning in the laundry, “that our community has found its way into the close embrace of the believers at New Lebanon. But I understand Brother Isaac’s task to be one of weeding out impersonators as much as writing down the Visions of the truly divine instruments.” She checked that a freshly washed white apron did not bear a stain.

I kept my head down as I turned the crank and wrung out the water from the laundered clothes. I did not want to appear to be correcting my eldress.

“Surely,” I said, “if you’ll pardon my forthrightness, Elder Sister Agnes, he would not pass so much as an hour with Sister Polly if he thought her to be false. Once a pretender shows herself, it is my understanding that he moves on.”

She regarded me a moment in silence. “I cannot know the precise nature of the interest Sister Polly holds for Brother Isaac,” she said, her words quiet yet forceful in the precision with which she uttered them. “But do you not ask yourself how the powers of a Visionist could have been bestowed upon one so recently come from the World? Why, you know better than anyone that there are believers who toil a lifetime in service to Mother and yet She bestows her gift on a girl whose body has barely been washed clean, let alone her soul?” A knot of wet neckerchiefs lay before her, and though she needn’t have paid them any mind—they were, after all, for me to shake out and hang—she plucked them one from another, pulling each edge straight before folding it over the drying rack next to the clean aprons. “And you, child. Do you not question how readily you have put your faith in such a novice?”

I wished I could put an end to her suspicion—it pinched like shoes that are too small. I did not want to see it, but my eldress’s bitter envy was plain. If I had been chosen as a Visionist, the honor would have reflected holiness on her. Elder Sister Agnes would have been rewarded for the constancy of her own worship as well as the purity she had instilled in me. I could hardly bear the thought that so revered a believer needed such affirmation. But then, how unlike her first experience with the Visionists in Wisdom’s Valley this time must seem to her. There, she was naught but a visiting teacher, an amazed bystander. Here, she has a congregation of believers to protect and guide. I feel for her, but I do not agree with her.

“Sister Polly is my charge,” I said. “Closer to me, perhaps, than some of the others, but only because you asked that I be her caretaker. You gave me that duty, and I have tried to fulfill it…”

Elder Sister Agnes sighed, smiling as she laid the last neckerchief in its place. “I did indeed ask you to care for her,” she said. “And you have done so with great heart. But I have known you, dear Sister Charity, from near birth. You believe, without question, anyone in whom you can find some good. Any good. I, who have lived longer and seen more than you, know there can be danger in that.”

“Would you have me ignore her now?” I asked, my voice as steady as I could make it.

“I would never ask that you turn your back on a sister,” she answered. “I request simply that you remember
all
of the people who love you here, and that you begin once more to share your daily favor with them.”

She reached out from where she stood as if to touch me, though we were far enough apart that she could not. “Look at the marks that still sear your skin. You bear them without complaint or self-pity despite the behavior of certain of the sisters, who have not treated you as you deserve. But there are many others who miss you in your absence. I pray with my whole being that you shall be well again, and have kept my love…”

Her voice faded as she stood next to the washing table with her arms hanging loosely by her sides. She appeared small and slack, as though work and discipline were the only winds that could fill her sails. I did not like to see her so feeble. It frightened me. Moving towards her, I took her hands. She spoke out of love for me, not dislike of Sister Polly. “I have understood your wisdom well, Elder Sister Agnes,” I said. “You needn’t worry. Tonight, I shall be glad to be back with my sisters again. Then you shall know that, in the important matters, none shines before me any more brightly than another.”

She gripped firmly before letting go and straightening herself to leave. She found strength in the fact that I had not forgotten her teachings, that she had not labored so diligently only to lose me—first to my markings, now to the whims of another sister’s heart. “I shall be pleased to see you later,” she said briskly. “It will remind me of less tumultuous times.”

She turned and left, shutting the door softly, as if she wished to be neither seen nor heard having visited me. She had no reason to hide, yet she slipped away as a shadow fades into light.

Of the sister’s inquiry into the sleep of my dear friend? My answer had been a lie. Sister Polly does not rest soundly, and though she rarely makes a noise except to cry out in a manner so pleading that it breaks my heart to hear it, she tosses as wildly as if a net were thrown over her. I rise each time it happens and sit beside her, stroking her arm and uttering the most soothing sounds I know, but she holds fast to her terror then awakes with a start, regarding me as if I were the cause. Sometimes she addresses me, though it seems clear that she cannot truly be speaking to a dear sister but rather is locked in the hold of some creature she can bear neither sight nor sound of. When I reach forth to calm her, she jumps away and makes herself a crumple of limbs. It alarms me, and when she comes to, though she lets me embrace her and rock her in my arms until she has fallen back asleep, I am left with the uneasy feeling that a malicious presence lingers over us.