The Visionist: A Novel (6 page)

Thus, the sooner I take note of all evidence, the better. And the quicker I can question anyone within a mile or ten, the less likely I am to be fed a string of exaggerations: Yesterday’s fire becomes today’s Vesuvius of destruction, such is our addiction to the misfortunes of strangers.

“What can you do,” I was asked by one beleaguered farmer, “when all that’s left is a pile of ashes?”

“Resurrect it,” I said. For even the tiniest grains of soot must add up to a flaming torch on one side or, on the other, an honest pan of grease placed too close to the hearth.

Divining truth requires instinct and, of course, more than a few broad assumptions concerning human nature. One must know, for a sample, that men will tell you
where,
women will tell you
what,
and a sharp-eyed child will fill in everything between.
The dog was tied up there, the old well used to be here, the hog pen opened down-valley to soften the stench.
So says the Mister, whoever he may be. As for his wife, she chirps on about berry cobbler, children dressed in tatters, cups and saucers handed down from distant kin. And their boy? Just let him think he’s got it figured and you’ll have advanced your inquiry beyond measure.

Notes are fine where detective work is concerned, but when looking at the scene of a fire, a set of crude sketches takes the advantage. Approach a recalcitrant neighbor with a book full of questions and you’ll knock against lips pursed tighter than those of a dead scold. But show him, with apologies for your artistic ineptitude, a few scratches depicting where you
think
the stove might have been, and he’s yours. The more you get wrong, the more he will set you right, for there is hardly a person alive who can resist correcting another man’s mistake. From this, one could infer humankind to be uniquely helpful as a species, but I suspect that it all boils down to the deep pleasure we take in showing up one another for the fool.

Of course, in the end it’s witnesses that are the real problem when it comes to a country fire. In the city, it is quite common that a man living just across the street will never have met—or even know the name of—the person who has suffered or caused the nearby incendiary. Being a total stranger, he will offer up his testimony without the slightest hesitation. The rural lands are different. You cannot reside in the country and reside alone. You rely upon one another in times of hardship, celebrate in times of plenty, and are known by name to everyone with whom you conduct business. Friend, banker, merchant: They will all have formed a close attachment to whoever is under suspicion of setting a fire. A companion knows that he will lose a valuable neighbor should he give voice to his doubts, just as a businessman with debts to collect knows he will not get paid should his customer be convicted.

What’s a decent fire inspector to do? I shall tell you. He must find and fasten on to one Mrs. Bumby. That’s right—you are familiar with Mrs. Bumby. There’s one in every hamlet the world over. She’s the busy bee, the sage sure to answer the questions on everyone’s lips, including your own:
Who, how, and why.

Mrs. Bumby knows. She belongs to all the social groups, attends church every Sunday, listens in at the baker’s and the bank and the Dry Goods. Listens and talks and then listens again. What’s more, she remembers. But she must not be hurried. Mrs. Bumby has a yarn to spin and she will do so after her own fashion. “Well, I don’t know a thing about the man,” she will say, staring through the steam that rises from her cup of tea. “Except…”

Except.
Who knew such an unremarkable word could be so entrancing? Oh, she’ll flutter her eyelashes, knot her kerchief, and sigh before protesting that she is only guessing.
Really, I don’t know a thing. Except…
That’s Mrs. Bumby, bless her hollow heart.

Have you heard enough? Fear not. I’ve a tragedy to examine and so my lecture must come to an end. Somewhere an hour’s gallop or so to the north there are ashes to be read like tea leaves, and it would seem I am just the gypsy for the job.

Sister Charity

IN THE DAYS
after Elder Sister Agnes came to me it was decided that I would be released from confinement. She had been unable to scour the markings from my skin. But as she had found no contagion, I was deemed harmless enough to rejoin my fellow believers. To be sure, there were changes with which to reckon: With my body claimed by the Devil, I was no longer fit to serve as my eldress’s assisting sister, and in my absence, all of my effects had been moved and replaced with Sister Columbine’s. She would now sleep where I had lived for as long as I could remember—in a small chamber above the meetinghouse hall, next to where Elder Sister Agnes resides. I lied and told myself that I understood—I wanted to save my eldress the pain of having to comfort me even as she pushed me away—but truth be told, it broke my heart to have been exchanged and I hated my markings most of all for the love they cost me.

It happened so seamlessly. My belongings had been packed into a blanket box and placed in one of the smaller rooms on an upper floor of the North Family dwelling house. Though I knew there had been tittering among the younger sisters, the decision to move me had taken place behind closed doors. Nothing official was said, and on the surface, life continued as though I had always been just another believer. I
was
just another believer and to have thought otherwise had been my undoing. My newfound deformity was my rightful comeuppance.

I hung my dresses and placed my things in the cupboards built into the walls of my new chamber. The little notes and samplers I had received from my elder sisters over the years; my quill and ink pot; my embroidery ring, thread, and thimble; my knitting needles—inside every room in every building, the painted cupboards hold a multitude of artifacts, personal and otherwise. In the sewing room, they are fitted with drawers in which spools, extra pins and needles, scissors, and patterns lie ready for the general making and mending of clothes and linens. In the dairy, they are lined with marble so that they might stay cool on the hottest of summer days, the better to keep sweet our milk, butter, and cheese. Why, in certain of the chambers—though this reveals a matter of some delicacy—they are lined with tin and vented into the chimneys: small enclosures made to hold our chamber pots and air them to the outside.

Dirt in any form—the foul smells of stale breath and body, the dust of laziness, the grime that conspires in corners, beneath beds, even jammed into gaps between the floorboards—is a sure sign of sin. It identifies an idle mind and an unclean soul, and no sister or brother will suffer it here. Indeed, from my labors as a nurse to the sick, I know that filth shows itself in many guises including the demon, Disease. In the Great Cities of the World—or so I have been told by those who once resided there—such smut flows in the streets and through the minds of the inhabitants that whole populations are smitten down by illness born of imprudence and moral depravity.

We believers live in close quarters—I have but a second empty bed in my chamber, while to either side of me there are rooms with three, four, even six sisters apiece. Still, we do not take ill as do the people of the World. Good health is a reward hard-earned: Our fastidiousness protects us. That, and of course our faith. I see the occasional ague or pox in my work in the healing room, but rarely—unless it is consumption—am I not able to contain and cure it. Indeed, save for when a sister or brother has been mortally wounded in an accident, or comes to me coughing up blood—the sign of one of the worst afflictions brought in from the World—I have seen but three believers die of anything but the natural winding down of their earthly lives. Be that as it may, though it is a step out of union to say it, I am glad that for the time being I am to sleep alone. To mind another’s habits can become tiresome. And though we are all well schooled in the ways one should live as a good believer, some sisters are better at following the rules than others, especially when it comes to showing kindness and mercy to the afflicted.

I may no longer be the sister closest to Elder Sister Agnes, but I pass only a single day in my new surroundings before she calls me back to the Church Family for assistance. Doubtless it is because she wants me to learn the young sisters in the North Family workshop. The carding, the spinning, the dyeing of wool, the retting of flax in warm water to rid the fibers of their toughness and ready them for scutching so that we might weave them into linen—all must be taught. The toss and pull of the great loom is the work of elder sisters, but there is simpler weaving to be done. And then, the mending, always the mending of tears and lost buttons from a summer spent toiling in the fields. So many chores to study to perfection. Patience and constancy, I tell the new girls. Patience and constancy win out in the end.

I ready myself for the walk to my eldress’s workroom above the meetinghouse hall. Once I have received her bidding, I shall make my way back down the hill to the buildings of the North Family, for as we are only a small community of believers here, we divide ourselves into two groups—the Church Family and the North Family—each with its own dwelling house, barns, and workshops. The Church Family, where I used to reside, is the larger and holds those who have committed fully to our ways and signed our covenant. It is to their meetinghouse that all believers come for worship on the Sabbath Day.

Otherwise, we do not see one another frequently, for the North Family contains within it the Novitiate Order—those who, having recently arrived into our faith, require much teaching and purification. Most will sign our covenant when they are ready, but some find the righteous path too narrow and difficult. Entrenched in the wicked ways of the World, they refuse all efforts on the part of our elders and eldresses to purge them of their sins. I have seen many a husband leave his wife, many a mother and father abandon their children, all because the allure of the World’s excesses is too great. Of course, even when a family comes whole before us, we explain that they shall never know each other in the same way again. In our midst, they shall be brothers and sisters—children, like the rest of us, of our Holy Mother Ann and Jesus Christ.

I smooth my hair under my cap and pull my warm cloak and hood about me. Nature may have colored the leaves of autumn with an untempered palate of orange, red, and yellow, but we are less frivolous in our ways. Our buildings are painted in order that, no matter which community a believer visits, the houses might easily be recognized for the function they serve: Yellow is the color of the dwelling houses, gray-green marks the school, mustard brown for places of work, white for the ministry and the meetinghouse where we worship—this last with its inside ceiling beams painted the pale blue of Heaven. Nothing here exists to satisfy the senses. Even our roses, picked in high summer to make rosewater, must be clipped cleanly beneath the bud lest a wayward sister attempt to pin the flower by its stem to her frock and distract a brother from his work. Of course, rarely do I reflect so fully on such details—only when called upon to teach the young girls who come under my guidance. Then the full mystery of our way is revealed to me anew and I am awed by the completeness of our worship.

Though the morning has barely begun, all are busy at work and I am relieved to meet no one else along the road as I make my way. Passing the brethren’s workshop, I hear one of the elder brothers speaking quietly to a group of young believers, teaching them about coopering or some such skill. His voice is so calm that his words seem like an incantation afloat on the morning breeze. The boys are learning trades their flesh parents most likely would never be able or willing to teach. They are not unhappy. I must remind myself of this when I witness the initial pain of separation, kin from kin.

Just across the carriageway stands the meetinghouse. I enter from the west, through the sisters’ door. Inside the cloakroom, I feel under my feet the gleaming wood planks that line the bright room and make not a creak beneath my weight, their sheen and fit a sign of our steadfastness to Mother’s Way. I know well the floor upon which I stand, for through my infancy and childhood, I crawled and walked it every day of my life. No longer, save in worship, I suppose. How life has changed since the warm days of summer, since before the markings appeared.

Up the narrow stairs I climb to Elder Sister Agnes’s workroom, lift the metal latch on the door, close it quietly behind me, and walk in. Then, gasping at the shock of it, I nearly trip over a small huddle of people. Visitors are normally to be welcomed in the office of the ministry, but if these poor wretches came to us in the middle of the night, the meetinghouse would have been the first building they encountered.

“Sister Charity,” my eldress says to me, “we have two new believers. Take them—they are tired from their journey, and their mother and I have their indenture to discuss.”

Such are the only moments in my earthly life that I can hardly bear, for even when the gathering is over, it resounds in my memory with an unfathomable emptiness. I tell myself that the children will be full again, that they will smile at the privilege of an afternoon spent sledding, they will laugh as they gather berries for pie, they will grow to be strong and steadfast. Time makes it so—I know this to be true. The passing days and weeks and months and years. Again and always, it is time and slow forgetting. And yet.

Only the older girl pulls back when I enter. The mother and her boy—so gray in dress, so pale in countenance—are weeping. It surprises me that my eldress has stood their misery for so long before becoming stern. She had no doubt been soothing at first, when the ragged threesome shuffled in. She would have assured the children that they would be cared for, kept safe and warm and well fed by a new Mother here, our own Mother Ann Lee, who shines Wisdom and Love down upon us from Her place in the Heavens. But there is, though I daren’t express it aloud, the stony truth of the matter: A spiritual Mother, no matter how perfect, cannot hug her young charges to her or wipe away their tears with kisses. How the sight of their misery makes me glad for my abandonment: The gift I was given in the first days of my life is that I need no one like those children do their broken kin.

I nod in answer to Elder Sister Agnes’s request. My feet feel as though they have been nailed to the floor. Like so many before them, the girl and her brother will be made to renounce their family of the flesh and submit to mortification before an elder brother or sister—such horrors as a child can possibly confess, the filching of an apple perhaps, a pinch in school for which another was blamed. Then they will swear themselves against the filth of carnal relations. For days—weeks even—having come to a corner of their hearts that is cold and hard, they will shuffle from place to place like the walking dead.

I do not question our way. Still, I imagine that I see a stoniness pass across the little boy’s face, blotched and swollen from crying. No matter how poor, how sickly they seem, no matter what food and warmth and medicine they stand to receive, the price of losing their mother is the dearest they’ve known.

And what will happen to their only kin? After greeting the worn woman kindly and sending for her horse to be watered and fed, Elder Sister Agnes will have told their mother that she must sign away all claim to her children, that only in their eighteenth year will they be allowed to choose either to enter their names by their own hand into our covenant or to leave and follow their fortune in the World. Until such a time, my eldress will have informed her, they must remain separated from all blood relations.

No mother or father, daughter or son, hears such news gladly. Why, this woman—such a wastrel she is—already looks askew to me, as though the mere thought of such a severing were enough to bring about a troubled state of mind. Mothers cannot easily comprehend what seems, on its wintry surface, such an unnatural farewell.

The boy suddenly screams, grabbing hold of his mother’s skirts so that as she tries to walk to the door and leave her children with me, he is dragged on his knees, then his stomach, as his grasp slips down the folds until finally he must let go and fall to the floor. He jumps up and hurls his body into hers once more.

“Ben,” the mother implores, bending down to him, “here you’ll not go hungry anymore, or wake up crying from the cold. Oh, Ben, I promise…I’ll watch over you from…”

She is unable to finish comforting him.

“You must know,” Elder Sister Agnes tells her gently, “that you can stay with us. Why do you flee? You are tired and unwell. Take shelter here, at least until you are stronger.”

The mother wipes her tears away and shakes her head, looking at her daughter. “No,” she says. “I have…business to which I must attend. I have heard tell that you take in the unfortunate. That is why we are here.”

“And from what misfortune do you flee?” my eldress asks. “Are you alone in the World?”

The mother has not taken her eyes off her daughter. It is as though she is talking only to her kin, with no thought of explaining her situation to anyone else.