The Visionist: A Novel (27 page)

I cursed, leaping quickly to my feet as May’s horse began to paw at the ground. His eyes were wild and white-rimmed, his nostrils flaring as they emitted clouds of steam in the cold dawn air. Arching his neck and nodding furiously, he hurled his great head upwards and screamed, a piercing call, shrill with panic. Old as he was, he had once been a handsome animal—hardly one I’d call a nag now that his spirit was so plainly on display. Built more for the hunt than the plodding chores of farm work—a rich man’s horse is what he’d have been in another life. Benjamin Briggs’s horse, I thought, though no doubt just a colt when his master died.

The nag had worked himself into a state, throwing his head this way and that, tilting it sideways to stare down at me with one spooked eye, all the while nickering low and then screeching, backing and starting again and again in the close wooden stall.

“I daren’t get near,” the stable boy called out. He had come running from his overturned pail just as the men ran off with May, and now he stood paralyzed by the animal’s desperation. “He’ll run harder at the door if I try. Look, he’s already cut up his front legs a good bit. Would’na thought so old a horse had that kind of fight in him but he’s turned wild.”

My thoughts raced to the stall itself. I needed to get down in the muck of it: Perhaps one of the men had dropped something during the struggle—it was all I had to go on. Moving slowly I met the animal’s wild, rolling eyes and spoke as if to a frightened child. I intended to open the door and set him free, if I could only get near enough without spooking the animal into harming itself any further. I extended my hand towards the horse’s muzzle, palm facing upwards. There was no stopping myself from shaking. I was frightened, I’ll say that, telling myself over and over to keep calm, mind my wits, never drop my eyes from his.

“See now?” I said. “I won’t hurt you. There. You can watch as I take a small step. I shall move just the tiniest bit closer to you. There now. Easy…”

I felt for the moist, steamy breath and the velvet muzzle. So close now.

“There, we have done it, see?” We touched, the animal and I, my cold bare hand grazing the soft fur of his elegant nose. We were both easing towards each other, and I felt him beginning to go calm as the trust between us grew.

A scream as his nose whipped away and upwards. The horrid sound of hooves exploding against wood, a sickening crack as he hurled himself down from where, just a half-second before, he had reared up, towering above me. I thought I had passed muster with him, but then he decided to trust in me no longer, for he punched his delicate legs through the stall door, screaming again and again as he pulled his forelegs free of the detritus and reared, this time flinging his limbs so hard that the sound of his leg breaking as it hit the shattered boards was itself alive—moist and hard, pure viscera. I could not pause to think or feel, could not but look at what had become of the noble beast, fallen now but still thrashing, fragments of white bone sharp and jutting from where his leg had all but snapped in two.

My pistol. I reached without thought for the Colt I carry with me yet rarely find reason to fire. Inching my fingers round its smooth, cold handle, I pulled the gun from my belt, acting on instinct, kneeling and leaning with all of my weight to still the horse’s flailing head, holding the gun steady against the quivering fur behind the poor beast’s eye. Then I fired. One single explosion: all movement slowing in the spray of blood that covered me. A wisp of blue smoke rose from the black hole in his skull.

I could hear little but the echo of my shot, though men had come running and shouting from all directions. They had not yet reached the barn. Raising myself up on quaking legs, I peered around the stall. One of the walls was wet and stained red. But as my focus sharpened, my gaze snagged on a flash of white amidst the dung and straw.

Buried but peeking out from beneath the refuse of the stall was a sealed packet of papers. The animal’s frightened pawing must have unearthed it. Lunging over the dead horse’s neck, I grabbed for it before others had the chance to notice. Something in crude char was scrawled across the face—May Kimball had put to good use the stalk she had burned in the flame of my lamp.

It read:
TRASK.

Barnabas Trask? I had no time to ponder his connection to May Kimball. The men were moving in. Varnum Tanner had been disturbed from his bed, they murmured. He was on his way. I backed to the edge of the crowd. My exit would be ghostlike. I had told May about the fire, that much had been accomplished. But only part of my errand was complete, and I felt burdened by memory, death, and the sudden disappearance of another life I had tried to save.

Sister Charity

THE WHEEL SPINS,
my foot on the treadle, the wool feeding out, the yarn twisting thin. It spins without thought from me, the yarn getting longer and longer, all sight of the beginning lost in the loose-combed wool and no end to it either. How I hate the noise in the workshop today—the slapping and creaking of the great loom, the talk, talk, talk of my sisters.

My Polly’s womb was hard under my fingers, and had I not slipped a near-full measure of the White Poppies into her tea, she would have cried out in pain as I pressed it beneath my hands. Perhaps I squeezed it so firmly because I wanted to be sure that what I thought I felt was true, perhaps I did so out of hurt and anger. I will say that my thoughts were black. I, who had believed her to be even greater than a Visionist, discovered her to be little more than a rutting farm girl. That was why her mother dropped her here, as do so many. For if a young girl does not abandon her own infant with us—as was my fate—then it is common enough for a mother to abandon a pregnant daughter. Such is the logic of carnal sin: Pass along the shame, hide it as though to put it out of sight is to cleanse the earth of it forever.

No doubt, the girl I had known as my dearest friend had known another in a very different sense. A farm boy? A young man about town? I could not say to whom my Polly had lost herself before coming to The City of Hope, but the imagining of it disgusted me so that it was all I could do not to run from inside the workshop and throw up in the snow. How I wished I could purge my disillusionment with the same ease.

As Sister Polly lay on the table, her mind misted over, could she truly see the Harvest Feast as I described it? Or had she misled me then, too? Like the interloper in the bushes, was she blind to all that we do here? Has she always been blind? It is particularly galling to me that, with her face as pale as the moon, the believers imagine her to be holier than ever. “Mother’s Light!” they whisper when they look upon her. Am I to allow them to fall further under the spell of such a lie, or do I save them from the fate that has befallen me? When is it better to dash faith on the rocks of truth? That is the question before me.

I thought of seeing my dear sister staggering up the stairs of the workshop not three days earlier to help in the sorting of newly dyed wool. She took her place and wound the yarns round the folding wooden swift. Crimson against her blue-white skin, the skeins reminded me of blood. My eldress had been right all along. I was indeed blinded by love.

Now, I spin and spin and nothing around me holds its shape save the wool I feed into the wheel, faster and faster. My mind travels back, and I am a girl again. Elder Sister Agnes holds my hand, and we are alone in the apple orchard on a cool fall day. I am small enough that she can lift me into the branches of one of the trees, for in it I spy a red fruit hanging high above us, its skin gleaming against the deep blue sky. I am reaching and reaching, though my caretaker’s body sways uncertainly under the weight of me and she begins to laugh. We teeter this way then that, all the while my arms flailing. My fingers want only one thing in the world: to claim what I cannot reach.

She asks, laughing: “Would you not take the one beside it?” I squeal and shake my head. “The one below, then?”

Again I shake, this time so hard that we careen to one side and fall down. She laughs again, and the sound is all the happier for the fact that we are away from the other believers and, for once, my eldress is free to play. It is rare that she indulges in such silliness, and I know somehow that if I settle for an easier apple, our game will end. A strange determination grows within me; I want so much for this lightness between us to endure that I become serious, intractable in my intent. Our mirth begins to dissolve, and though I try to pull her up from the grass, she is tired of my insistence and grows cold and irritable. Fear is welling up inside me, and I want none of it.
Oh happiness, do not disappear!
I cannot imagine when we will laugh again, and I begin to cry for the apple.

“Why do you persist in wanting the one fruit you know I cannot help you to reach?” she asks, her tone suddenly reproachful. “Are not all the other fruit in this orchard sufficient to satisfy you?” She looks angrily at me, and I know that she is right to be cross. I am being selfish, ungrateful for the bounty that surrounds me. Still I cannot forget the single red apple, the way it looks against the infinite blue of the heavens. My eldress turns and begins to walk quickly up the hill, back to the houses, back to work and the emptiness of union with so many. I want her for my own. I want her to see me more brightly even than she sees Mother. Without her vision, I cannot find myself.

It is a silly tale. I was no Eve drawn to the serpent’s urging hiss. Or was I? Did not her apple stand for temptation? And is not temptation the hope that things might be better if only…? My apple—the one I could not reach—was pure hope. And though Eve’s brought down all manner of trouble, could mine truly have wreaked the same havoc?

I never allowed myself to think upon that fruit again because it seemed like blasphemy to wonder if hope was such a dangerous thing. To wonder if whatever it was that Eve had sought deserved to be punished with the curse of Original Sin. The notion filled me with shame, for what child would dare to consider such a thing? I gave myself, body and soul, to the believers that day. I recast my heart such that it would allow me to think only of others.

It has been but a few days since I went to the healing room with Sister Polly. Elder Sister Agnes has been kind since I discovered the truth about my friend. I can fathom not what she knows or how she came to know it—only that she can see that things have changed. She invites me to remember our early years together, but her words ring false and leave me feeling lonely.

You were the first sign that I deserved love.

She is now full of souvenirs I cannot myself recall.

A kind child, always bringing me presents. A bird’s nest once. A perfectly round pebble. A silky milkweed pod scaled like a fish!

Strange that I can have erased my memory of love, past and present.

I looked in on you every night and wished for the angels to guard your pillow. Have I not proven myself loyal to you?

I wish I could confess to her: My heart is frozen, my faith intangible as air.

Truth be told, I find the eldress’s tenderness harder by far to bear than its stern counterpart. I was never made to understand that her love for me was so full and lush; indeed, it seems as if she is recalling a life led with some other child.

Now, as I sit and work the treadle, the taste of humility is bitter. How dare I imagine that my life before Sister Polly was not enough? That she, above all others, was the prize? Elder Sister Agnes had been right to scold me, for I had chosen one blessed fruit to be better than all the rest, and in doing so, I had dared to imagine that I deserved to possess it.

I spin and spin, and my foot works the treadle more quickly still. The yarn will break—has broken—and all the sisters cease in their work and stare at me, the clatter of my wheel as loud as the noise in my head. I leave the workshop and make my way to my eldress’s chamber. The time has come for me to ask: When can a Meeting be called that I might walk The Narrow Path?

The morning of my public trial, the sky dawns dull and gray. Taken aback by the crowd my eldress has summoned to the Church Family meetinghouse—everyone in the settlement has come—I find that I cannot distinguish between faces. Seriousness seems to have turned them hard and heavy, for the believers suspect my faith to be weakening. Why else would I undertake so difficult a test of my devotion?

Walking to one end of the long room, I breathe in deep the air that—even on a cold late-winter day—is hot and damp with nervousness. It will be difficult to stay the path should I become dizzy and confused. If I blink or raise the back of my hand to wipe sweat from my brow, will I waver? And if I waver, how can I hope ever to reach Zion?

The believers walk to the edges of the space and begin to sing the song that is to accompany my every step. In deep tones, more authoritative than our usual singing, they drone:

They repeat the verse, louder and louder, stamping in rhythm. I place my feet along the seam between two floorboards. Barely thicker than a strand of sewing thread, it extends all the way to the other end of the room. If I step off while on my journey, I will show my failings. Then, I wonder, will the others know of the doubts that so confound my soul?

The dance of The Narrow Path is new to us in The City of Hope, and so strange. Most of the sacred pictures that have been received and recorded—we call them Gift Drawings—are full of forbidden color, yet forgiven their beauty for the fact that they represent messages from the spirits. The Narrow Path is a more somber piece of business, drawn in black ink over seven sheets of paper and depicting a pantomime of penance so complicated as to test the most devout believer. For several nights, I have practiced it alone in the attic sewing room. I am ready to perform its movements while walking the thin line between floorboards so that I might be perfect and prove the cleanliness of my soul, so that I might keep from stumbling, so that I might reach the end. I tell myself as I position my feet on the line:
When I
reach Zion, all shall be made clear.

Heel to toe, heel to toe, how soft my shoes, how shaky my balance!
With the balls of my feet true to the path, I crouch down and scratch at the floorboards, reaching for the invisible pistol to my right.

“Away, pride!” I cry, standing and then pointing the gun at my heart. It is my fingers that explode against my chest (for we have no weapons here) but the force is real to me, and I sway under its power before crouching once more to replace the instrument of mortification.

Heel to toe, heel to toe, how slick my brow!
I kneel just a few paces down the path and come upon a tomahawk left for me by the Indian spirits that I might hack at my anger and be free.

“Away, rage!” I scream, rising and thrashing at my arm so as to chop it from my soul. Then towards the floor again I bend low and lay the weapon down.

Heel to toe, heel to toe, how tired my legs!
I come upon a field of sharp stones and, ducking to take one and then another, I hurl them against my lust.

“Away, lust and carnality!” I command, for these are the sins I hate most. Then I toss the stones back, stand once more, and continue on my way. The believers’ chanting grows more fervent, as though my actions excite in them passions of a strange origin. I try not to listen to their song.

Heel to toe, heel to toe.
How loud their roaring as I touch upon pincers, a broom, and a gallows so that I might pluck out sloth, sweep gluttony from my soul, and hang the disbelief of reprobates lest their treachery entice me.

The spear, the axe, the basket full of serpents, these await me down the path.
Heel to toe, heel to toe.
To the shovel, the hetchel, the hammer, whip, and tongs I must go.
Heel to toe, heel to toe.
My mind grows weary from self-mortification, but Zion shimmers at the end of the thin line and I can almost smell the blossoms on the boughs of its fruit trees.
Heel to
toe, heel to toe…

The sound of creaking freezes me in my tracks. What cold wind threatens to blow me from the path of righteousness? Has the Devil come to dislodge me from my purpose? My intention flames out. I cannot move forward. I look behind me to see who is at the door, but as I twist like a fish on a hook, I cannot hope to keep balance, stumbling slowly until I find myself down. The ground veers to meet me; I see a flash of white-blond hair.

She rips off her cap as she pulls open the door, turns and stares at the crowd. Her color is high, her expression furious.

“How could you doubt her?” she hisses. Her skirts billow wildly in the wind as she glares into the faces of the believers. Her voice is low, almost demonic. “How could you let her doubt herself?”

The believers go quiet at the sight of the Visionist. They are terrified by her wrath. They think she speaks for Mother. I press my cheek to the floor and close my eyes.

Only I know that she is speaking for herself. Only I know that she speaks for me.