The Visionist: A Novel (12 page)

Sister Charity

I DO NOT
know why I took it. I never give a thought to the keepsakes, the diaries, the dolls, the slingshots, the balls made from old socks stuffed hard with wood shavings. I bundle them together and give them to the brethren to burn. Like the clothes and blankets alive with fleas and bedbugs, such objects from the past can only cause a persistent sting. Our new believers, whether rich or poor, lose their belongings along with their old lives. Only then can they be cleansed and born anew. In the case of Sister Polly and her kin, even the departing mother had been urged to bathe and exchange her tattered green dress for a set of clean petticoats and stockings, a worsted wool gown, decent shoes, and a cape.

“She cannot know what awaits her in the World,” Elder Sister Agnes said, once Sister Polly had been tucked away that first night. “The least we might do is arm her with the trappings of decency.”

The memory of my eldress’s kindness makes my duplicity all the more wicked. But you see, it was after the Vision that I saw it peeking out from under the great stone carriage lift where Sister Polly and her family had dismounted from their rickety wagon. Since then, knowing what I did of my new friend’s gift, I could not help picking up the thing and slipping it beneath my apron.

The thing. You see? I can barely give it a name. It was a book, bound in red leather, too perfect to be thrown away. Although I have known a sister or two to keep notes in a secret diary, reading and writing is forbidden here unless it is a compendium of songs or prayers or rules to aid us in worship. Ministry elders and deacons keep careful record of all that we make, harvest, sell, slaughter, and consume. They write daily journals that describe the weather, meetings of note, who has died or taken ill or eloped in the night. And of course, like the kitchen sisters who commit to paper their recipes for meat pie, elderberry wine, and sweet cakes, I add my own curative formulas to a well-thumbed journal of healing. All to say, I know better than to cast my eyes over idle words. For the Devil resides in books, where only sin and fantasy can be set forth.

All I can say is that selfsame Devil must have pushed the rule out of my mind for the handful of heartbeats it took to snap up my prize. Why I allowed him to hold me in his sway I cannot say. Perhaps it was because I knew that the book—its leather smooth and cool in my hand, the embodiment of my waywardness—belonged to her.

I said nothing for weeks, tucking it beneath my mattress in the hope that I would forget its existence. I am well aware that the road to Hell is paved not with good intentions but with the smallest of sins—a contrary thought, a lie, a careless stitch left uncorrected. I suppose I was waiting for Sister Polly to become so entrenched in our ways that she would lose all desire to glance at anything from the World. Then I might be able to rifle through it and, seeing it for the dross it was, feed it by the page into the fire of our little stove. But something in me knew better. Something in me knew that the time would come when, as her friend, I would want her to have it.

“Here,” I said one night before extinguishing the candle that stood between us. “I found this not long after you arrived and could not bring myself to burn it.”

Her hand shook as she reached out to take it from me.
“Far from Home,”
she said, almost as if she were talking to herself. “
An Englishman’s Voyage to Worlds Unseen.
How strange. I hardly remember stopping to…” She looked up, suddenly secretive. “That this should be the only object I took not in service of keeping us fed and warm. And that it should be the only one to survive…” She looked up quickly and smiled. She had stopped herself before telling me something.

“Survive what?” I asked.

She flipped through the book’s pages without answering me, and while the fluttering sound sent chills down my spine, her face glowed with pleasure as her eyes scanned the words. How I wished she would put it away.

“I don’t even know why I chose it,” she said, looking up at me. “Just grabbed it blindly, I suppose.” She turned it over in her hands. “It’s an account of a journey. A distant one at that. If ever you wanted to know about the World you so despise, then this”—she stared at the author’s name—“this Horatio Wolcott seems a good man for the job.” She lifted the volume to her nose and breathed in the scent. “Here, smell it. It won’t poison you.”

I hesitated, then found myself bending down as if to kiss it. The book smelled of milled wood and leather harnesses, and though I knew I should be disgusted, the effect it had upon me was calming. We expect the things that are bad for us to give off some sign of their malignancy, but instead the little red book pulled me in. It promised something.

I drew back. Here was the Devil’s temptation pure and clear, for I had never before thought of allowing myself to be distracted from my steadfastness as a believer.

Sister Polly laughed at the look of alarm on my face.

“I…I should never have kept it,” I stammered. “I have told you that books are forbidden, and yet I offer you this. What must you make of me?”

She put it in her lap and gazed at me in silence. As I had never before shared a sleeping chamber with another sister, I had known nothing of the soft whisperings exchanged between girls when it seems as though the rest of the world is asleep. I had come to prize such time spent with my friend. Indeed, there were moments during the day when I could think of nothing else. Was this, too, the Devil’s work? I knew not, nor did I much care, for another fear loomed larger in my mind. Would the presence of the book ruin our nights? Would a souvenir from the past put an end to us?

“I make of you,” she said slowly, “that you are kind and brave to have rescued this for me. Shall we look together and see what wisdom it holds?”

“No!” I said. I felt a surge of panic, as though the book’s leather cover encased a box full of demons we might never be able to push back inside. “No!” I begged again, covering my ears. “Please, do not open it or look at what it says. You cannot be sure that it doesn’t hold all manner of…oh, please, Sister Polly. Put it away!”

Her regard was not unkind. “If it frightens you, then of course I shan’t open it. Here,” she said, sliding out from beneath her covers and tucking the book under her mattress. “I would give it back to you, but then I’d worry that, should some prying soul discover it, you would be blamed for the kindness you have done me. Don’t lose a moment’s sleep now. It is done—hidden and gone and never to be spoken of again.”

The candle sputtered into darkness of its own accord, and without its glow, the room went black. I closed my eyes, and while I remember thanking Mother for my sister’s grace, I fell asleep in the midst of promising that I would not let joy weaken my resolve to follow the narrow path. Please, Mother, I prayed as I traced the raised outlines of my markings, I shall remain in union with my sisters and brethren. I shall be better. Do not punish me further.

She must have heard my plea for mercy, for she answered it with the gift of true happiness. In the kitchen the following day, where Sister Polly and I had been told to remain after the breakfast clearing, I felt a lightness of spirit such as I have rarely known. There was Deaconess Eileen across the way, making mince for the pies, but it was not she who excited in me this tumult. Quite the opposite, for she is, I must say, a mean old wretch. I know that it is not right to judge another of my sisters, but Deaconess Eileen twists her pinches so fiercely on the young ones who do not heed her bidding that they are marked for weeks with rose-shaped bruises. I have tried to soothe them with hogs’ lard and comfrey. Even so, they stay and stay. Such long-lived remonstrances they are! The poor girls fairly jump into nearby cupboards to avoid the woman’s nasty hands. I have even heard them say that she sometimes appears by night at their bedsides to whisper into their dreams.

In the cool of the side room, however, there are only my Sister Polly and me, busy in our work to make the daily bread for the believers as well as for sale to the World. The money we earn allows us to buy what we cannot make for ourselves. Hence, we prepare extra stores of medicines, cloaks, bonnets, blankets, and seeds—all of them known to be of superior quality and thus well desired beyond our walls. In this way, we profit from the rich, the better to aid the poor and saved.

It is pleasant to labor in the dim light of the pantries and storerooms, to be surrounded by good smells and the presence of the kinder sisters who, under the darting eyes of Deaconess Eileen, rule the ovens with capable hands. Most of us change jobs every few months so that we may join in all of the chores that help to make The City of Hope a place of peace and equality. But some sisters are so practiced in their positions that they are kept on as teachers to help the rest move well through their work. Save for the Deaconess, the sisters of the kitchen are as sweet and soft as the cakes they bake, and other than the solitary hours I spend in the healing room concocting curatives and treating all manner of ills, I am at ease here as nowhere else, even in my bedeviled state.

Sister Polly and I. Together we measure into slant-sided dough boxes small mountains of flour tossed with sprinklings of salt and yeast. I whisper to her of the Deaconess’s faults. We pour milk heated with butter and sweetened with sugar into holes we make with our fingers. She laughs and feigns a stern look, reminding me that I am never to grow wicked, that I am to be good enough for the both of us. Then, it is to kneading that we give ourselves over, and we do so in time to a song my new believer has learned in Meeting. Such a pretty thing it is, too.

Soft and high, Sister Polly’s tone is clear. Indeed, I feel that she was made to sing, that it is as new a joy to her as to a young song sparrow, as new a joy to her as she is to me. I never saw what a somber life I led before, spending day after day in the company of old women who know much and young girls who know nothing at all. I take from one and give to the other, and rarely have I had the time or sense to wonder at my isolation. That Sister Polly should come to me at the same time as the Devil himself—this is the most blessed miracle I have ever known.

I have said that we are a group of believers, living in union. True, but when I think that we are also human, then I see us in another light—brighter and more beautiful in some cases, harsher in others. Sisters my age are clever at joining together when they are in the presence of one who—for reasons she will never understand—was left on a doorstep as a babe to grow old among strangers. To these girls, I am an oddity because I have known neither the World nor the sort of mother who lives in it. I am naught to them but a walking, breathing book of rules. For though the sisters of whom I speak are the silly ones, their experience of the World binds them like an unspoken oath. They know to laugh at the same foolish sights, to whisper when I enter a room and then quickly look back at their work when they are certain that their mean-spirited stares have hit their mark.

Of course, the children are different—yearning to be loved, comforted, lauded, coddled. In moments of weakness, I wonder why no sister ever fussed over me as I do them. It is not that I am ungrateful for Elder Sister Agnes’s stern teaching. Indeed, I know that I am more capable of love for never having taken it for granted. But I also know enough of human nature to have noticed that one behaves towards others as one wishes to be treated oneself. My eldress was kind in her way, loving within the bounds of what is accepted here. That has always had to be enough.

Such thoughts are of little matter now, for my Sister Polly has chosen me as her dearest and there is none here who can turn her. Why, just last week, when Sister Columbine took her by the arm to pull her from my side and into some whispered intimacy, she turned back and caught me by the waist.

“You are kind, Sister Columbine, to invite me into your company,” she said, “but as I am only half myself without dear Sister Charity, you must take us as one.”

Sister Columbine forced a smile, and it was not long before she found an excuse to be on her way. How glad I was that my Polly and I were alone again, two parts of a whole.

Look! In the messy mixing of the dough, the Visionist has become covered in flour and the sight delights me. She is adept at many things but they are the coarser labors—the clabbering of cream, the scouring of pots, the carding of wool—such work as is done on farms that are too poor to have occasion to make fine-flour breads and spice cakes. In the kitchen, her delicate hands are clumsy as a colt’s hooves, and I must stop my work and bend double at the sight of her as she struggles with sticky strings of dough.

“You shall be wearing the midday meal long before it can be placed near the oven for rising!” I whisper, laughing. “Your face is white as a phantom’s!”