The Visionist: A Novel (34 page)

Charity looked fiercely about her as she spoke. Before she could utter another word, one of the brethren cried out, “Whose servant is she, Sister Charity? Pray, tell us now so that we may know the truth!”

The room fell silent.

“Why, the Devil’s is whose!” Charity hissed. “He is her master. He sent her here to deceive. To wreak havoc. He used her to speak his gospel in this holiest of places. She breathes his Evil and lives for his Word. She is no believer! Look! She bleeds with his child!”

A clamor rose from the gathering of believers while in the gallery the spectators had grown quiet. All faces were turned towards Polly. Red-faced, teeth bared, eyes blazing with hatred: The believers came at her so suddenly with their wrath that it hit her dull and hard as a wood splitter’s mallet.

“Who is this creature?” bellowed one of the brethren. “We must drive her hard away!”

“Yes!” cried another. “Oh, damn her Devil!”

“Yes,” answered a chorus of angry voices. “Damn her Devil! Damn her Devil!”

Polly kept her gaze on Charity, for without something to focus on she knew she would faint. Her friend’s eyes had filled with tears, her chin quivering violently as she stared back. Polly could only beg silently, speak as they had spoken so often before without words or gestures. But then her friend was gone again. Eyes narrowed, Charity screamed, “He is here! He stands among us! He must be made gone!”

Polly’s legs trembled at the force of the roar that rose up around her. The believers were closing in, and though she searched the crowd frantically, her mind was confused and her vision blurred. The inspector was leaving, attempting to push past a woebegone woman who was crying beside him. It was Mama. Were they leaving without her?
Wait!
she wanted to cry.
Take me from this place!
But no one would have heard her over the melee.

Blood dripped down the insides of both of her legs now. No matter. The men and women of the World were standing, shaking their fists at Polly, laughing, mocking the believers. In a brief moment of clarity, Polly spotted a door. She crept towards the opening. It was, she saw to her dismay, the Brethren’s Door—even now, the rules of this place sought to bind her—but she shook them off and inched nearer.

She was almost there, just a few more steps and she would be able to reach the latch and make her escape. But the believers turned and looked back, one of them sounding the alarm with a great yell. She could not recognize his voice, for all of their shouts merged into a chorus of righteous indignation. All save for Charity, whose cheeks, Polly saw, were slick with tears, whose mouth hung open as though aghast at the scene she had created. Polly looked away and, with a force she did not know she possessed, threw herself at the door and onto the stone step outside.

Then she was bolting, stumbling towards the carriages that lined the road. The cold air cleared her head and blew strength into her legs as she willed herself forward, straining to make it to the closest buggy. She was closing in, was almost there when something caught her eye and fairly froze her midstride: The figure of a man moved purposefully ahead of the crowd, chasing her at a dead run. Polly’s heart seemed to stop, for though she could not see his face, he seemed horribly familiar. Thin, wearing a dark hat and cloak, he stood in high relief against the splashes of color worn by the other visitors.

She gasped, tripped, rose, and tripped again. She knew she was hallucinating, for it couldn’t be her father. Yet the mere thought of him had conjured his form and blocked all else from her mind. His darkness was poised to descend, and Polly’s skin prickled in anticipation of his touch. Breath thickening in her lungs, she moved forward on legs that could barely carry her, and in the last moments when she could still feel ground beneath her feet, she rolled her eyes heavenwards and begged for her angels to come.

She felt his arms close round her as the world went black, and distinct from the din that rang out around her, a single voice echoed inside her head as she felt herself slowly fading away.

“Polly,” it whispered. “Polly, I am here to gather you home.”

Sister Charity

SISTER POLLY CLIMBED
down the stairs slowly, and I knew she’d sipped the poison. The sisters standing around me hissed and burbled like a pot of porridge. They could let nothing she said or did go without comment. They observed her every move as children watch a bug caught in a jar.

I cannot judge them for it. I myself could not help from studying her in that moment, a watchman whose eyes never close, whose ears can hear the movement of a clock’s hands circling round the hours. Was it really her thimble Sister Polly went to retrieve? The thimble I gave to her? That was her excuse for making us wait.

Time had run together over the last several days, and just as I could no longer remember when my skin shone white before the markings came, I could no longer remember life without Sister Polly. All these winter months, I had thought one balanced the other. My markings were the work of the Devil; my friendship was a gift from Mother. Had not Sister Polly entered my life just when I needed her most? Was I not being offered a chance at salvation?

The answer, as I now see it, is yes. Salvation was dangled before me, a stick waved teasingly in front of a dog, and I leapt for it. But it was never intended that I should be saved. The Devil, just as he drew upon my skin, was having his fun. He gave me Sister Polly that I might dare to hope I could, someday, be pure. He infected my heart with love for one who was bound to betray me.

Though we imagine it to be mild, the truth is more beastly than we are taught. Lies slither silently and leave things where they stand while Truth crashes about, breaking down what once seemed unassailable. Since the night in the healing room, I kept my racing thoughts to myself. I stayed awake trying to plan what it was that I should do. I lay listening to her moan. Down the dark hallways of my mind I ran, seeking all manner of action. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if, what if, what if.

Suddenly, I knew the path I must walk. It obliged me not to take up weapons against evil—no tomahawks or stones. I am done with such tests. My new course was no gentler, for it leveled destruction even as it sought to save. I had to follow, and it led me to denounce her.

In the weeks after Sister Polly’s last Meeting, it was my eldress—of all people—who made me to understand my mistake.

“She was subjected to great cruelty before she came to us,” Elder Sister Agnes said. I was not accustomed to hearing her express sympathy for a girl she had always treated with suspicion. “People do not come here to escape circumstances that are happy.”

We sat alone, sewing in my eldress’s workroom. For me, time had split in two: the months before Sister Polly left, and the months since. “What cruelty?” I asked. “She never spoke of it to me.”

My eldress knotted her thread and snipped the end with a scissors. “She had a father who would not…leave her alone.”

I was quiet as I pulled my needle in and out of the cloth before me. My task was the sewing of initials onto handkerchiefs for the brethren. “He beat her?”

“He may have,” she answered.

“And was there a boy?” Once upon a time, those words would have been too embarrassing for me to utter. Not now.

Elder Sister Agnes was silent. Then, “No, there was not.”

“Well, there had to have been someone who…”

My eldress stopped sewing and looked at me. “Her father. The child was his.”

I put my sewing ring in my lap. I could barely breathe, so great was my disgust.

“Her own father?”
I said. I was naive and had never even imagined such inhumanity was possible.

“She was not who you thought she was,” my eldress said, as though the statement might comfort me. “But she was not who
I
thought she was, either.”

Is anyone who we think they are?
I wondered.
Are you?

My hands shook as I tried to resume my embroidery. “Did she die?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice from cracking. “After she left us?”

Elder Sister Agnes was quiet as she worked. “I don’t think it will do you good to think about her anymore, dear Sister Charity. You loved her and were a good friend to her. But she is in a better place now, wherever it may be.”

There was much my eldress had not told me, of that I was certain. She had not become the woman she was by being indiscreet. She did say that, in the end, Polly came to her and confessed, but she never shared with me the substance of her confession. And I never asked. The finest layer of dust had settled over that part of my life, and I felt, somehow, that to disturb it would be to visit further insult on the strange months of my awakening.

I wondered how much Elder Sister Agnes knew about my full role in the events of Sister Polly’s last day, for I kept secrets as well. I never mentioned the Black Hellebore to her. Did she realize that I had made the Visionist bleed? That it was I who near killed her? Indeed, for all I knew, my friend
was
dead from the hemorrhaging and Elder Sister Agnes just didn’t have the heart—or mind—to tell me. The blood—its profusion had stunned me.

My beloved Polly carried her father’s child and I never knew.

How this haunts me as the brown mud of March yields finally to April’s tentative green. All month, I hetchel the flax and card the tow. I spin more mops than could cleanse the Earth. Now, to making soap and cleaning the houses I should turn, for spring is upon us. The young brethren, freed from school, stack stone after stone, thrown aside to make way for the plowing of the fields. Brother Benjamin works among them. The fences must be stood right again after the weight of the winter snows; the planting of hardy crops must begin—corn, beets, potatoes. How low we stoop, how hard we toil in our service to Mother, particularly so in these months of renewal.

My fingers bleed from the labors I perform. I wrap them at night and still the white bandages are soaked red by morn. It is said that ruffians from the World pulled Mother Ann through the mud by her ankles so that her skirts might rise and reveal her sex. It is said she was beaten by angry mobs. It is said she suffered such a horrid fate as only a woman can know at the hands of men. Thinking on her perseverance and faith, I disgrace myself worrying about my own blistered hands. Thinking on what happened to my Sister Polly, I can scarcely allow myself a drop of pity.

Why can I not be the girl I was when I heard the music of my beliefs in the whirl of the spinning wheel, the boil of the distillery cauldrons, the crisp cutting of medicinal pills? My blessings and prayers I once counted in every stitch, for oh, did I sew my soul into the seams of our city! I was both dust and broom, sheep and yarn, grain and bread.

No longer. The strange thing of it is, my markings are gone and my skin is now as white as a linen kerchief. I am pure enough even that Elder Sister Agnes asked me to replace Sister Columbine and take up my
rightful
position as one
destined
to be like her someday, an Elder Sister. My “Vision,” you see, was thought to have saved the believers from ill-placed faith. I was said to have outed the Devil and shown Sister Polly for who she truly was.

Of course I said yes to my eldress. I want no more attention than I had already gotten, and to refuse—well, let us say that no one would ever forget it. But I will never be like Elder Sister Agnes, for I am surly with disillusionment.

Indeed, I have my own idea as to what really erased my markings. I believe they left me when I gave up trying so hard to be good. Funny, all that time I thought that if I could only be a better believer, they would disappear. But that is not what the Devil wanted at all. He wanted to kill my faith, and once he succeeded, his work with me was done.

I ask myself: Had I known the burden of the Visionist’s past, would I have been merciful? Just as I refused to hear the truth when she sought to tell it, I did not seek it when she sought to conceal it. My penance? It surrounds me. I sing, dance, perform my chores as though already dead.

In the sisters’ attic, I stand under the massive eaves of the dwelling house where she claimed to have gone in search of her thimble before the final Sabbath Day Meeting. She told a half-truth when she said she had dropped it, but I knew that she never went back to get it. In the dark, the night after I drove her away, I came here, dropped to my knees, and felt along the floor. I could not rest until I had found it.

It lay beneath the stove. How cold the tiny cup felt in my palm. Icy and sharp, smelling only of tin. I ran my fingernail over her name. It had taken days for me to scratch it neatly with my needle.
If she is capable of hatred,
I thought,
then may she despise me. If she can curse, then may she fill the air with furious noise.

I have since returned often to this place. Now, I look round and I see everywhere the order of our lives. It is printed in the numbers labeling each drawer, built into cabinets under the slope of the roof. It is in the rhythm of pegs dotting the walls. It is mapped out in the straight paths far below me. It thrums from every last one of our buildings, huddled close. Were there brethren and sisters about, I would see them walking in lines from one colored shelter to another—sure of their place within this safe, sealed world.

I alone rebel, for in the back of the highest drawer in the attic, I have hidden the red book. I don’t show it to anyone, but I am no longer ashamed to read it when I am by myself. Sister Polly proved to me that to open a book is to step into another world, a place I had assumed was hateful and full of sin. I always thought the red book was dangerous because once inside the stories it told I never knew if I would be able to get out. And how could I foresee what temptations awaited me? How could I know what words I might read that would forever change who I am? But in the end, I was wrong—about everything. For it is what happened
outside
the red book that made me different. And, in the end, it is the red book that takes me back to myself.

I open the small attic window and a damp breeze blows in. How much of my life I have passed in this room, folding the clean sheets and blankets, then tucking them neatly away. Sewing and darning and laughing. In these sad days, it is here, closest to Heaven, that I feel most at home.

I sought to punish Sister Polly, but I try to comfort myself that I sought also to save her. I even dare to think that perhaps, if she was pure again, we might… What does it matter now? As she bled in Meeting, I saw how the Black Hellebore was gutting her and I knew that my plan had to succeed; I knew she must be flushed out into the World and taken to a doctor. We could not help her here. My means were clumsy and deceitful—I watched her bleed, stumble, and fall—but I believe that I truly meant to save her.

Sitting so close to the high window, I close my eyes and dream the same thing over and over: the pine burial board is straight and smoothly cut, the winding sheet white and clean. They lay my cap upon my head and place my collar about my neck. I wonder:
Will my cloak repel the chill?

The psalm that whispers in my ear says this:

That is my wish. To fly—my body tumbling to the stones below, my soul soaring to Heaven that I might rest my eyes upon Sister Polly, that she might forgive me, that we might once again laugh together in the world unseen.