The Visionist: A Novel (19 page)

This seemed to quiet Elder Sister Agnes a moment; then she directed Polly to read on.

“Great talents, Sister Polly. Do you think that Holy Mother Wisdom would fault you for seeking to show such things?” Elder Sister Agnes did not look up from her basket when she spoke. “Might
you
be ‘of the children of darkness’?”

Polly pondered the question. She had not sought to display any great talent. She had only fled into her mind when the world around her—its noise, its smell, its touch—became too much for her to bear. Was she “of the children of darkness” each time she fell into the dreams where she had so long taken refuge? The Elder Sister’s questions shook her. Did the wisdom she supposedly gave to the believers exist if she could not fathom its source?

“I have not sought to mislead,” she said. “Nor to claim attention, if that is what you mean by ‘darkness.’”

“And what else could I have meant by ‘darkness,’ Sister?” At this, Elder Sister Agnes looked up and stared Polly straight in the eye. “Can it be that you were thinking of some other manifestation?”

Polly attempted to keep her voice steady. “I…I have only known the darkness I feel before my dreams come to me, for they exist to pull me away. They are a shield. But it is different here. My mind fills with angels and other voices both when I am happy and when I am afraid. And they come when I feel the need for them in others, like Sister Rebecca. I do not take them lightly, Elder Sister, if that is what you fear.”

“Read,” the eldress replied.

“And what do you make of that verse, Sister Polly? Is it possible that you can envision ‘sweet pleasures’ because you have tasted them yourself?”

This Polly could answer quickly, and she did so with some annoyance. “I have never tasted ‘sweet pleasures,’ nor had any need of curbing desire. Indeed, when I behold the believers pass the Horn of Plenty in Meeting and laugh to receive its bounty, I envy them. For they know what I do not, and that is pleasure, even if it is of the holiest and purest kind.” Polly spoke without regard to what she was saying. She could not stop herself. “As to desire, I imagine the taste of such a thing to be bitter and disgusting beyond words. No, Elder Sister, I can envision nothing of what is written here.”

Her answer was met with silence, but Polly had the feeling that the eldress was listening to her words with something akin to sympathy. “Go on, child,” she said, waving her hand.

Elder Sister Agnes put down her basket and gazed round the room. She looked tired, her face gray and lined, her eyes a metal blue. “Have you ever feared that you would be judged harshly by the
Book of Life,
Sister Polly? Is that why you resist confession?”

Polly looked at her feet. Her thoughts snagged on death, on whether things would have been better had she tied a millstone to her neck. How often she had been tempted. How many mornings she had risen to watch Mama’s misery unfold and wondered if it would not be better to die. It had so often seemed the only escape. But then little Ben would clamor to be fed, and the cows would need milking, and her mother would require help gathering in berries, or wild onions, or potatoes, and before Polly could think much more about the freedom granted by the grave, she was through yet another day and lying in wait for what night would bring.

“I cannot say, Elder Sister, how my name will be written.” Polly paused before going on. “But, though I know it is a sin, I have often thought to die of my own hand. It is only since I arrived here that my mind has been free of such evil ideas.”

The Elder Sister’s face softened, to Polly’s great surprise, and her voice became kind. “What could drive a young girl to contemplate such an end?”

“I…I suppose it is something that no one so good as you could understand,” Polly replied. Her voice was shaking now and she felt she might cry. She must not show weakness; it would only open a hole in her armor.

The older woman seemed to drift into another world before fastening her regard once more on Polly’s face. “I believe I know why you came here, Sister Polly. It was fire that drove you away from your home, was it not?”

Polly’s heart stopped, then resumed a quick beating. She must tread carefully. She must not tell the whole truth but she mustn’t lie either. Why, of late—though she dropped the lamp when her father surprised her—she could not be certain as to whether or not she had truly intended to kill him. She hated him with all her heart. Could she have dragged him through the flames and saved him? Was that her crime: to leave him lying in his bed? She shook her head at the memory of the heat and smoke, the moving ball of fire that leapt from the house and filled that final glance back.

She could not explain any of this. Mama forbade her, and though she did not understand why, she had the sense that her actions could be misconstrued. Arson, murder. If they were pinned on her, she would be hanged. “Yes,” she answered, looking into Elder Sister Agnes’s eyes. “There was a fire at our house. My mother and Ben and I came upon it on our way home from town. As my mother told you, my father left us. There was no one to save, so we rode away. Rode away and Mama brought us here.”

“Your father,” the eldress said. “Why do you think he has not come for you? Surely it takes a hard man not to come home after hearing that his wife and children have suffered a fire. And then there is the land. Why would he not claim it for his own and sell the ruin?”

Polly looked to the window and saw that the afternoon had turned dark. What could she say?

She stared blankly at her eldress. “I cannot tell you what happened to my father, Elder Sister Agnes. He hasn’t come looking is all I know.”

The eldress held her gaze, seemed to be looking beneath Polly’s very skin for the answer to what she hoped would be the final question. “So who will tend to the property now?” she asked. “Is that why your Mama left you here? So that she might rebuild it on her own? Seems strange that a woman alone would attempt such a thing. With your father merely ‘gone,’ do you even know if the farm was hers?”

Polly was confused by so practical a question. In truth, she’d not thought for a moment about the farm since asking her mother that first night if it had belonged to Silas. She had been so eager to put behind her the life she once led, she had not considered matters of ownership.

“As it does not apply to me, Elder Sister,” she answered haltingly, “I know nothing of the law regarding damaged property. Perhaps you could explain…?”

Elder Sister Agnes pursed her thin lips. Her basket was almost finished, ready to take its place as a tool in the universe of useful things. This one had been fashioned with a flat lid that slid up and down the handle so that flowers and leaves collected from the fields and gardens would not blow away, would not escape to rejoin the earth and replenish it. How like the believers, gathered in and bound to such ordered isolation from the World.

Polly sighed and turned to the final page of her pamphlet, dropping her head in supplication to the rules written out before her. Her candle barely lit the words as she struggled to make them out in the flicker of its flame. She did not wait for the order to read.

It was a poem. She had once loved poems. With words free from precise meaning, they reminded her of dreams. She had found them in books that lined her walls against the cold, books she had borrowed from Miss Laurel, books that had been Polly’s secret. Full of poetry, stories, essays—waking dreams so sacred that not even her mother knew of the fullness they made inside her mind.

He never knew. He would have torn out the pages and burned them in a rage. He did not trust those of a bookish turn. He could neither read nor write, scorning the habit, using his hatred of it as a marker to isolate himself from others. He only allowed Polly to attend school because he needed someone who could make the count when buying and selling goods in town. But each day, those hours in the schoolroom—they were the only gift he ever gave her. And then, only because he did not come searching.

Mother Wisdom’s Promise.
Her eyes could barely focus. Elder Sister Agnes broke her silence only to tell Polly to skip to the final verses.

No questions followed, yet Polly could not help pondering what she had read.
Disgusting.
The farm where she last knew a mother and a father. She saw the porch and the narrow front door. She heard the sound of crying, of bellowing, of dishes breaking, of misery. She smelled the choking burn of smoke.
Was he still alive?
Could it have been her father’s form bursting through the door in flames? Would he travel the same road as had she to find her here?

She did not understand the poem. She had known no “alluring charms,” no “pleasure false or vain delight.” She had known the World to be hard and dirty, a poor and embittering place, her father ruling its domain as Mother Ann ruled Her believers. Had he, like Her, the power to move through souls?

Polly shuddered, and her candle spit as the wick ran out, its flame drowning in tallow. Now, as the only light in the room fell from the lamp by which the eldress worked, Polly stopped reading. She was quiet, listening to the clicking and squeaking of basket switches, the tock of the clock, the slow
creak-creak
of the eldress’s rocker, her steady, determined breaths.

“There was a fire inspector who came by your farm,” Elder Sister Agnes said calmly. “Did you know?” She raised her eyes just enough to catch any reaction Polly might display, but the girl gave her nothing. “It was printed in a notice. As was your father’s name. Silas Kimball. It said that he had died, Sister Polly. In the fire.”

Polly forced herself to breathe though every muscle was a knot and her brain spun to think what else the eldress might know. Her father, dead? Could it be true? What else had this inspector discovered? Were there constables on the hunt to find her and her mother? Could Mama possibly have already been caught?

She thought suddenly of the small gray birds who make their nests amidst pebbles on the ground, of watching one fake an injured wing to distract danger away from its eggs, hopping, body tipped awkwardly to one side, half-spread feathers dragging through the dirt, seemingly an easy prey. She slumped, sliding slowly to the floor.

“Sister Polly?” the eldress asked. “Child? Can you hear me?” She rose from her rocker.

Polly moaned, opened her eyes, and felt the boards solid and hard beneath her. She was so tired. And her gut—it burned.
How I wish I could rest here,
she thought.
It would be so much easier.
But she knew she must leave while Elder Sister Agnes’s curiosity about the fire had temporarily displaced her desire to hear Polly’s full confession. She dragged her fingers over the flat surface and imagined her arm as a wing.
Such clever little birds.

“I am fine,” she said softly. “Dizzy from the heat, that’s all. I haven’t eaten yet today. I’m sorry I…I never intended to cause alarm…”

“It was time for you to take your leave,” said the eldress abruptly. “You have learned enough for one day. Indeed, more than you expected.” Her voice was as tight as the weave of splints, her changing manner a pattern of light and dark.

“You shall not need a candle,” she said. “For you, Sister Polly, are full of brightness. Though the afternoon light has faded, you can apparently see where others cannot. Go now and I shall not worry.”

She raised her head and watched her pupil rise from the floor, turn, and make her way carefully down the stairs in the gloom of the narrow space. Polly felt caught, and as she entered the cloakroom and lifted the metal latch on the sisters’ door, she was relieved to breathe in the cold evening air. It smelled of open sky and the smoke of a hundred distant stove fires. Hurrying along the icy paving stones, she was eager to find the warmth of one of those fires, eager to be in the company of sisters, eager to wrap herself in the safety she felt as one among many.

Then, she saw it: an inkblot of black in the darkening gloom. Surely her eyes, tired from reading, were playing a trick. Surely the bright gleam of light from the candle, the sudden darkness of the stairwell—they had filled her vision with spots. For if not, then at the edge of the farthest white fence lining the road sat a dark figure atop a horse.

Him. It could not be… The wind played with the folds of his cape so that he appeared larger in the billow of his habit. She watched as his horse pawed at the frozen ground, heard a conspiratorial nicker before the rider tugged the reins and urged forward his steed—its chin tucked low to its broad, square chest.
Him. Back from the dead to take her away.