The Visionist: A Novel (4 page)

I wonder what it is that disturbs her more: the hideousness of my infection or the evil of the power that has so defaced me. Can it be the contrast I present to the miracles that seem to have blessed so many of our neighboring settlements? It is the time of the Visionists after all, and though we have yet to welcome one here in The City of Hope, their songs, dances, even the strange drawings they pen—are known to us all. Whatever the explanation for my eldress’s disgust, she has separated me from my sisters and confined me to the healing room for a time uncertain in length. I have never resided in the place where I spend so many hours curing others. I wonder,
Who will tend to me?

The answer was not long in coming. When I had been quarantined for three days, Elder Sister Agnes paid me a visit. She found me alone, for no sister dared rest in my presence. Even my meals were left outside the door, my dinner bell a sharp knock followed by a scurry of footsteps down the hall. I rested in a long, narrow cradle bed, its slanted wooden sides up close against my arms. I lay as if already inside my coffin. I may have been learned for my age, but I found burgeoning womanhood to be a trial and had already suffered many humiliations of the flesh. How I longed for a simpler time, beating my very breasts to push them back inside me! Now, to add to my shame, the Devil wrote upon my skin when it pleased him and I felt despair descend more heavily upon me with every passing day.

Elder Sister Agnes has come to help me,
I thought.
She has faith enough for the both of us. Can her goodness prevail where mine has failed? Has she come to drive evil from my being? Does she stand before me because she alone believes in my virtue?
She looked barely a moment at me before she spoke.

“You cannot know it,” she said, straightening the bottles of tinctures already in perfect alignment along each shelf. “But in the days since you have been ill, I have spent many a beseeching hour in prayer. I find myself full of wretched self-doubt, for surely I have erred in my teachings. Why else would you have been possessed in such a manner?”

She came closer. “If
this,
” she said, pointing at my mottled skin, “be a sign of evil within you, then how can I not bear the blame?
I
raised you. Your faith has grown from the seeds
I
planted. If your goodness be false and rotten, then how can my own be true?”

I saw tears falling down her cheeks before she spun quickly away, drying them on a corner of her apron then breathing out as she set straight her shoulders. I had never seen her cry and it twisted my heart to know that I was the cause of her sadness and thus could not comfort her. She turned once more to look at me.

“It shall be my baptism to cleanse you myself,” she said. “I will not be afraid of whatever it is that afflicts you. I will not lose you to the Devil just as I will not lose myself.”

Listening to her make twins of our miseries, I felt sure she could cure me. I did not understand what she meant to do, for I had tried everything I could think of and still the markings left their stain. But I did not question it when she asked me to rise from my sickbed and remove first my apron, neckerchief, and white linen cap, then my collar and my worsted dress, then my winter petticoat, my knit stockings, and, finally, my chemise so that I stood naked before her. And though I wept for the shame of it—while in my sickbed, I had lain fully dressed until the tolling of the night bell told me that my brethren and sisters were readying themselves for bed—she did not look away or attempt to assuage my humiliation. Quite the opposite, for my condition caused her to gasp. Winding across my body, the sinister loops and fronds were frightening—in their strangeness of course, but also in their beauty, for they looked painted upon me with a most delicate, if determined, hand.

She pointed to a table on which she had placed two sheets and directed me to lie between them. I concealed myself gladly. With a strange silver tool she looked long into my eyes, my ears, my throat for signs of the Devil’s presence. I imagined she might glimpse wicked spirits in the cavities of my flesh like maggots in a corpse. I feared she might speckle me with leeches or try to cup and blister the bad out from under my skin, but I needn’t have worried. Instead, with the sheet still covering me, she ran her hands down the length of each of my arms and legs, first in stroking movements then clenching and unclenching as though she were molding me out of clay. She pressed her fingers round my stomach and tapped along my ribs as I have seen the brethren do along a bend of wood when they wish to make certain their work is sound. Then, in a motion that I found most difficult to endure, she bent her head to my narrow chest and laid her ear upon my bosom.

If Elder Sister Agnes did not scare the Devil, then she succeeded in scaring me. I could hear her breath—it came in short exhalations—and I felt its warmth blow over my ribs and stomach as tears ran down the sides of my face and wetted the sheet beneath my head. At length, a sob choked forth from within me and she rose with a look of some confusion. It was as though I had awoken her from a dream and she moved quickly away, walking the length of the healing room, lost in thought. Such was her intensity that I imagined she had found the Devil after all, that he lurked somewhere deep within me, beyond the reach of even so devout a believer. Certain now that I would be sent away, alone for the rest of my days never to see The City of Hope again, I began to cry.

Elder Sister Agnes approached me once more. Placing her hands in the clefts where my arms met my chest, she lifted me to sitting. I could not stop my sobbing—it came out in great hiccups—but she was tender now and careful not to let the sheet fall from my body as she perched herself on the edge of the table and wrapped her arms around me. I had not been held like this for many a year and the shock of it stopped my crying more quickly than if a hand had covered my mouth and nose and I had ceased to breathe. She held me and rubbed my head, ran her palm down my back over my long hair, which I had loosened the better for her to pore over the all of me. I sensed I was melting from the warmth that flooded my insides and I wondered if this was goodness spreading through me, fighting back the Devil and his evil hand.

I held fast to my eldress when I felt her begin to pull away from our embrace. I wanted to make last the glow that had enveloped me when she took me in her arms. But she had remedies to prepare, and as I listened to the slop of water from a nearby bucket, I searched within that I might replace my need with Mother Ann’s presence. I prayed silently that one as faithful and true as Elder Sister Agnes could rid me of my cross. From what I knew of the circumstances surrounding her own mortification, I imagined that one who holds so fast to perfection would have found it difficult to confess her sins and thus purge them from her soul. Only a trial similar in hardship could rid me of my markings, but I felt ready.

I remember mostly the sharp stubble of the brush as she passed it round and round, circling over my body until the prickling scream of my skin faded into numbness. When she had scoured near every inch of me, she left without a word and I slept. I had held myself tightly for days and now, to feel the sting of the brush’s bristles was to believe that I had been cleansed of all signs of the Devil. In my dreams, I thought I saw straight through to Elder Sister Agnes’s sad heart, for surely she could not have hurt me so much without suffering herself.

I awoke alone in sheets that were stippled with blood. Rising from the table, I pulled the covering away but it clung to my wounds as though armored with the hooked thorns of spring meadow rose. My reflection in the looking glass stared hazily back at me and I felt I might faint, for beneath the angry red rings made by Elder Sister Agnes’s brush, the markings decorated me still. In the flickering of the candle I viewed my naked self, unhealed and stamped with whirls of paisley that appeared golden in the dancing flame. They dared me to find the good in Mother Ann’s strange teaching. They dared me to see that She—The Woman Clothed With The Sun—had allowed the Devil into my soul as a test of my devotion and that I could prove myself only by carrying the burden bravely. I understood then, as I blew out the candle and stood in darkness, that to attempt to deny my cross, to crawl out from under the weight of it, was only to render it heavier still.

Polly

IT HAD BEEN
but a few hours since her father had threatened them. Had he come at Mama with a shovel? Crept in and dropped a fieldstone so close to Ben as he sat on the floor that his fingers had near been crushed? Was this the night he’d swiped at them all with a broken bottle and left a gash the length of a hare’s ear on Mama’s arm? Polly often found it difficult to separate his rages one from the next.

But as bad as those times were, this night frightened Polly more.
Mister Fancy Coat,
her father’s strange elation, his sudden suspicions…
Things are going to change,
she thought. Her father had a plan, she was sure of it. He’d as good as spelled it out: rid the farm of the three of them, then sell it.
Death come easy here,
he’d said, and Polly knew he was right.

Why, when she thought on it now, she had seen Silas leaning on a gatepost not so very long ago, talking to an odd-looking man who was all puffed up and dressed in frilly city clothes.
Mister Fancy Coat:
a mill agent sure as she was a drunkard’s daughter. She’d watched her father point towards the fast-running river that poured down the wooded hillside—the only forest of white pine, chestnut, ash, oak, and sugar trees for miles around. The water emptied out into a cold, clear pond at the other end of which a dam quickened the flow once more before it slowed to a meander and lost itself in distant fields.

Polly imagined the future. Close to the Post Road and surrounded by land well suited to the slow birth of a working town, their farm was the perfect site for a paper or textile mill. She remembered seeing the stranger nod and clap Silas on the back, his coattails whipping in the wind like the trappings of a well-dressed scarecrow.
Mister Fancy Coat.
He was no farmer.

Once a welcoming place, now, like stink round pigs, her family’s farm echoed only the poor, dirty lives of those it sheltered. The house her grandfather Briggs left behind had long passed into another world. His fine parlor might have been filled with company if ever Polly’s mother and father had visitors. But with no one venturing out their way, the silent space felt to her like a trinket shop full of bric-a-brac from a past life. The odd setting of pretty china, a brass compass, her grandfather’s books, many of them moved up into the attic as much to stop cold from seeping through the cracks as to keep Silas from using the volumes for kindling. These were the things she studied when there was a moment’s peace, the few objects her mother had managed to save from the happier days of her childhood.

Grandfather Briggs’s snake-rail fences were still standing, though there were gaps where wooden posts had fallen and never been set right, and along the tracks he made neat, milkweed and juniper had staked their claim. Except in the plots where Silas planted his weed-choked crops, Nature had begun to take back the land, and everywhere, even inside the little house, Polly sensed the encroaching wildness. Her father struggled behind the seasons as he did his plow: It was all he could do to sow corn and alfalfa soon enough after the long winter to replenish their stores and keep the animals fed. When he drank too much and forgot to read the skies, whole pastures of cut hay lay to rot in the drenching summer rains. And though he knew enough to let his fields go fallow from time to time, he grew impatient with thinking about what had been sown where, planting the earth over and over until he had laid waste its soil and was left with nothing but stunted stalks and patchy grass that refused, in spite of his fury, to grow full. He exhausted Nature as he exhausted everyone else.

The farm was overgrown or empty; there was no between. Polly’s bedroom—where, as a child, her mother had nestled under soft covers each night—was now a cold, barren space beneath the eaves where she and Ben slept on narrow pallets full of night-biters and ancient barley straw. In the great room just below, Silas and her mother shared a bed and a beaten old wardrobe, little more. Piece by piece, they had sold off most of Mama’s furniture and possessions, and what was left—save for the treasure in the parlor—was crude, overused, and out of date, made largely from worn wood, threadbare cloth, and old straw.

Some things, of course, changed little with time and circumstance, like the heavy old cooking pots and the gun above the door and the blades, scoops, and prongs of the farming tools her father left leaning against the gray clapboards. But Polly knew that her house had lived two lives. All summer long, it weathered and opened to the warming sun. Now, buffeted by cold winds and surrounded by a glittering frost every morning, it seemed to shrink against the coming winter, and Polly felt the beams bracing themselves, as did she.

Shaking her head free from thoughts of the past, she snapped to and stared about, unsure of what to do. Slowly, it came to her. Silas would be the death of them, whether tomorrow or the next day. Poor enough, drunk enough, greedy enough, mean enough—he was a poison fruit grown ripe. Silas would be the death of them. She knew it.

Mama did, too, but then, she always had. She’d lived so long with the shame of being helpless, she would never raise a hand to him now. She’d seen what he was capable of, understood that the hitting and the screaming and the visits in the night—they were not the worst of what Silas had in him. Polly let out a long-held breath and closed her eyes. She wished it was different, wished there was someone she could turn to. But he’d beaten them all. All, save one.

She rose and walked out of the house into the night air. Inside the barn, whispering soothing words to calm the startled animals, she felt her way through the darkness, tapping her hand along the sides of the wooden pens and unbolting the gates as she went. There was little more she could do for the weary beasts. She hadn’t time to flush them out and it would be noisy, besides. She could only hope they’d take their chance at freedom when the time came. In a stall at the back, the old bay nickered as Polly reached out to stroke his velvet nose. He might have been a fine horse, had he been allowed—as Benjamin Briggs intended—to be raised for young May to ride about town. But Polly’s grandfather Briggs died just a few weeks after buying the colt, and so Silas whipped him into plowing stony pastures just as soon as the animal could budge the blade. Were it not for May’s taking trouble in secret to dress his lash marks, blanket him in winter, and feed him warm gruel when his lungs rattled, he’d barely have lived out his first year. Were he not Silas’s only horse, he’d have been given his rest long before now.

Even so, with May in particular, the bay was gentle and loyal. More than once, Polly had seen him prick up his ears and run back and forth along the paddock fence, snorting and whinnying whenever he heard Silas yelling. He was May’s horse—just as Benjamin Briggs had meant for him to be—and he seemed to know that if they were to survive the curse they shared, they would need to watch out for each other.

“Quiet now,” Polly whispered into his ear. “You’ll let me harness you up easy, all right?” Groping for the leather bridle, the collar, and the breeching, taking each from its hook, she laid the pieces across the horse’s dark, sleek body and fastened them round. Then she backed him out from his stall and led him to the wagon. In no time, she had the traces hitched, the bit loosened, and the horse muzzled, half his handsome face immersed in a feed bag.

“There, boy,” Polly said as she patted his warm neck. “I’ll be back soon enough.”

In the house, she moved about surely and softly, gathering clothing, bedcovers, anything she could pile into her arms and carry out to the wagon. There was some brown bread and hard cheese on a shelf in the kitchen. She wrapped them in a piece of cloth alongside a few apples and stuffed the food into a basket. Then she took it outside, packed it, and tried to imagine if there was anything she had missed. Walking slowly back to the kitchen, she counted out the tasks that lay before her. She would collect Ben, wake her mother from where she slumbered in the rocker by the fire, give her a moment to bid farewell to the place where she’d grown up. Then…the horse, the wagon, the road out. Her head spun just trying to keep up with a future she could not begin to envision, and she took a deep breath to steady her nerves before walking through the door.

Moments later, Polly was ready. “Mama,” she said, touching her lightly. Dressed in a heavy shawl with Ben asleep over her shoulder, Polly stood beside her mother holding the old lamp, her wrist aching under the weight of its wooden base and etched-glass shade. Mama opened her eyes and cried out with a start.

“Hush,” Polly said, putting a finger to her lips. “Bring your things and come silent.” Mama nodded. Nothing more needed to be said. She seemed to understand that Polly was leading them away.

Keeping the light low, Polly watched her mother rise, ready herself, and move soundlessly into the parlor. She walked past the shelves, running her fingers lightly over pictures, bowls, a locked wooden box—objects so fiercely kept it was as though they existed under some sort of a protective charm. Dusted free of grease and ash, even in the most desperate times, they had never been sold for food or clothing.
They remind Mama that she was loved,
Polly thought.
I remind her that she was beaten and forced.
How she wished she could be an easier souvenir.

She watched as Mama reached the far corner of the room, hesitating before she bent down quick and slipped her hand into a gap between an old cupboard and the wall. From it she pulled a thin envelope and tucked it into the folds of her dress. Then she continued her silent tally of all that had bound her to this place—the house given form by her father’s hands, the kitchen where she had lost so much life. Shadows flickered dimly on the walls. It was, Polly thought as she opened the door, as if Mama were already a ghost in this place.

“Take Ben,” she said, struggling on the threshold with the lamp and the shawl and the sleeping child, near to dropping them all. “Take him to the wagon and wait.” As Mama embraced the boy’s warm bundle, Polly slid her arm gently out from under and clutched the lamp with two hands.

“It’s all right, Mama,” she said. Standing in the bracing cold under a bright curl of moon, every inch of her existed for one sole purpose: to save her mother, her brother, and herself. But there was something else she had to do. “Stay,” she said, pushing them towards the wagon and turning to run back into the house.

She passed through the kitchen and towards the room in which her father lay sleeping. In the doorway, she stopped, shielded the lamp’s dim light with her hand, and breathed deeply. Why had she come back inside? She approached his bed. She had never seen him like this, so vulnerable. She could do anything in this moment. She realized, staring down at his ravaged face, that he was hers. She squinted hard. He had once been a child. His cheek had been smooth and soft. His pudgy fingers had struggled to pick up acorns just as Ben’s had. How could he have turned so mean? Her hands shook around the base of the Argand.

Though there was no time to stand by his side a moment longer, she found herself rooted to the spot. The heat and smell of the lamp made her dizzy. Would she be able to keep Mama and Ben safe? Surely such a man would track them down. Not because he loved them or would miss them, but because he wanted to own them as much as he did the dilapidated farm. He would hunt them if only to prove that much. Her eyes traveled the length of him, down the buttons of his ragged blue shirt, over stains on his soiled work pants, tallying his gnarled, yellow-nailed toes. To stare at him without fear was to see his power drained away. How easy it was to feel nothing. Her mind cleared, its thoughts unfolding logically with each steadying breath.

Suddenly he coughed, bolting up wild-eyed to stare at her a moment before falling back on the bed. Polly jumped, stifling a scream with one hand as the lamp slid from the other. It fell, her father flopping onto his side away from her, asleep again in the silence before the crash. The sound of breaking glass was all she could hear as flames rose up in a roar from the puddle of spilled oil.
Death come easy,
said a voice inside her head, her body frozen until the time for doubting had passed.

She turned and scrambled through the house and across the yard to where Mama and Ben were waiting. She heard Mama gasp; the horse shifted and tossed his head so violently that Polly had a time of it loosening the feed bag and untying the reins. She looked back towards the barn, where she could hear the animals panicking at the smell of smoke. She wanted to help them.
Run!
she screamed in her mind, hoisting herself atop the driver’s bench and slapping the leather reins over the old bay’s back. The cart jerked into motion. There was nothing more she could do.

She prayed the blaze would fade once it had consumed her father, but a single glance told her she’d lit more than a funeral pyre. How quickly the past is made gone. Fire roared up through the windows, the inferno wrapping round the house as she drove away. In the fury of flames Polly could see the blackness of her father’s gaze just as she could feel the force of his will in the suck of their heat. She could find in her heart no space for pity.