The Visionist: A Novel (13 page)

The older sisters often include me in their quiet merriments, but this feels different. Indeed, I am dizzy with happiness to be standing near to one who accepts me so completely.

“Well, then you too shall be dressed!” she cries. “A line here, another there…” She is running her powdery finger along my cheeks. “Three across your brow. There. You are an Indian spirit now, just like those we heard in Meeting. Shall we sing the song of Tecumseh, as did Elder Brother Caleb?”

She is winsome, my dear friend, one who has become lighter with every passing week. It is as if her gift—though it has shown itself but once in its full glory—has lifted the sadness she used to know and replaced it with a child’s innocent pleasures. Indeed, the only time when I cannot reach her is when she catches sight of young Ben. It is not that she worries for his happiness—since his first miserable days, he has expressed nothing but great merriment as he speaks with Brother Andrew or makes mischief with the other boys. No, I believe that she pines for a time when she could hold his hand and be the person to make him laugh, when she existed to protect his innocent nature from the menace of the World. As she is not allowed to speak to him, and as there is no evil here from which to shield him, she has become someone he hardly notices. I believe that it is his indifference that breaks her heart.

On this morning, however, we laugh and dance, keeping our play secret from the Deaconess. Polly takes her arms and raises them above her head in the manner of Elder Brother Caleb, her feet jigging in a spritely fashion to the beat of the Indian song. She is smiling, and each time she whirls and catches my eye, her blue gaze fixes me. It cannot be, such elation! It cannot, and after several such turns, I am suddenly frightened, as though a dark spirit has walked across my conscience.

“We must stop now,” I say, touching her shoulder so that she ceases in her dance. “Deaconess Eileen will pinch us as she does the little ones. Let me wipe your face. Hold still.”

Polly freezes and makes blank her expression, eyes closed like a child awaiting a good washing. I cannot help staring upon her beauty—the way her face falls in soft pink slants from her cheekbones, the fine arch of her eyebrows, the thin pink of her lips. As I lift the corner of my apron to wipe clean her lovely skin, ghostly no more, she opens her eyes and pins me once again.

It is rare to look closely at another for a long time, to hold oneself in that tumble. No one has ever stared at me like that before—
into me
is more like the truth. But Sister Polly and I are frozen, and without a word passing between us, we make a game of it. I shall not blink, nor shall she. We stare and stare until tears fill my eyes and I find my mind has begun to wander.
What lies within her?
Her eyes alone show every emotion. As to what she can possibly glimpse in me, I cannot say, for though I know of certain aspects of my bearing, I have never held a mirror to my heart. Only to my faith, which has shone back unassailable. I break away and turn from her at the reminder, brushing the flour from my bodice, shaking hard my skirts. Straying from my purpose, I know I have been pulled close by an invisible hand, so close that I can feel the warmth of her breath on my face.

I look back at her cheeks and rub the corner of my apron gently over her skin. Then I tilt her head to the other side and do the same, setting her straight again.

“Why, thank you, Sister,” she says, curtsying and backing away.

In a twist of perception, she seems to sense my discomfort. “We must work this dough before it dries,” she says evenly. “Here, I’ll cleanse you of your Indian stripes.” And with quick hands, she wipes my face—skin on skin, licking a fingertip to rub clean a stubborn spot below my right eye.

She turns back to her kneading while I burn in the place she has touched and I recognize her power of spirit, that truly it is Mother who has caressed me and filled my heart. Mother Ann warms me from within. Mother Ann teases my brain into spinning. Mother Ann rules me. I step beside Sister Polly at the stone counter and begin the push and pull. We are in time, and as it is I who taught her the rhythm of kneading, we turn and pat the dough with flour in tandem, as though caught up in a dance. Push, pat, pull—like good believers, we labor as one.

When each of us has kneaded enough, we roll the mounds of dough into logs and break off equal-sized bits to make loaves—forty of them! Then we shape and set them on shelves near the ovens to rise. It is skillful work, and best of all, the Deaconess has left us free from bitter comment.

Taking up our towels and dipping them into a bucket of water we have warmed by the hearth, we wipe down the stone counter and make clean the workroom. We do so in turns, but then a game becomes of this as well and we race to the pail to see who can reach it first. There is much splashing, though we stifle the sound of our laughter as best we can, turning our faces into the sleeves of our dresses. Of a sudden, it is now Sister Polly who goes silent. She can barely breathe, so quickly have we moved in our diversion.

“I am blessed to have found you,” she says as soon as she can steady her voice. “You are the only one who has stayed by, who has not flown away.”

All is quiet about us, for our amusement has filled my ears with such clamor that a sudden silence pulses and rules the room. My heart hits hard and I cease all exhalation as she takes my face gently into her hands.

“Sister,” she whispers. “My sweet Sister Charity.” Then her lips brush mine so lightly, it is as though a moth has fluttered close by before retreating into darkness.

Simon Pryor

CHARRED RUINS, FROZEN
ponds. What, you might ask, could the two possibly have in common? Though it happened long ago, the death of young Millicent Hurlbut has never ceased to haunt me. After all, it was responsible for not only my fated tumble into the bosom of the Hurlbut family but also an irrevocable separation from my own. I am telling you this—before I describe the weeks and weeks that followed the submission of my report—because it seems only right that I should attempt to explain the genesis of my corruption.

I knew James Hurlbut to have been a complicated youth, for we were schoolboys together. Kind in one moment yet quick to conjure mischief whenever boredom threatened to slow the empty hours, he lived in constant conflict with his better nature. I can barely stand to admit it now, but I liked the fellow and he liked me—even sought to impress. You see, where he was rich and born into the powerful family that had founded Burns’ Hollow, I was smart and embodied a kind of moral confidence that was foreign to him. In that still-innocent time, I think he understood that like apple trees possessed of a sour harvest when grown from the seeds of fallen fruit, each generation of Hurlbuts had germinated meaner and more profligate than the one before. As it turned out, he and his brother, Calvin, were no exception, but I did not know that then.

Their father, Amos, was perhaps the cruelest of the line, and James suffered mightily under his reign. The patriarch sensed his youngest son’s disdain and treated him all the worse for it. Forced to wear the foppish vestments favored by his forebearers, James worried ceaselessly about the punishment his father would devise should he soil his clothes. Amos tested James’s filial loyalty by making him deliver threats of all sorts to the families of his schoolmates. And I can still recall the fine spring day when his father came upon him as he attempted to woo an innocent schoolmate. “We’ve a maid prettier than that slut!” Amos bellowed as he and Calvin passed by in the family carriage. James, color rising in his cheeks, looked away from the girl with tears in his eyes. He was terrified of his father.

Two lives changed the afternoon Millicent died. Two youths were transformed—one choosing to walk the despot’s path and shun any notion of moral decency, the other accepting a life of servitude as punishment for a tragedy he failed to prevent. James’s telling of a single lie changed both of our destinies.

I can remember as if it were yesterday. I close my eyes and the frozen surface between us is slick and gray. Millicent’s coat is pale blue—so blue that it appears to be made of sky. She trembles on legs thin as my arm at its wrist, and the woolen stockings that bind those stems are the white cream of fresh-churned butter. She stands in tiny brown leather bootlets that have left imprints no larger than a deer’s hooves. And her mitten, crimson against the dull gloom, sears into memory, reaching towards me always, even now, in this very instant. She is six years old.

Calling out from a treacherous spot at the center of the pond—where underground springs make for thin, undependable ice—she begged for help. And how could I not heed her cry? How could I not spin in my boy’s agile mind through every possible plan and then watch the marble roll to a stop on the one I chose?

Perhaps I chose wrongly. Perhaps I could not judge the frailty of such a tricky, cold membrane as ice. I trusted the crust would hold, and even as it cracked beneath me, I did not believe it would disintegrate and merge forever the worlds of life and death it had kept so perfectly separate just moments before.

I am haunted by her like the ghost who beckons to village children from inside an empty house on a lonely cart path. Haunted like the farmer, one Ebenezer Goodson, who has come to me five times now to request my services in proving the existence of an aquatic creature that bursts from the depths of Lake Cullen and pulls his best cows to a watery death. Haunted as so many people are by the twisting of their short, small lives.

James was with me that day.

“It cannot be known that I was here,” he said, his eyes flitting back and forth between his sister and me. “My father…he will never forgive me for letting her out of my sight.”

It was true: He should have been looking out for the little girl. After all, he’d known that she’d followed him as he left home for an afternoon spent skating with me. Indeed, he’d seen her playing by herself at the pond’s edge and cursed her for it.

“That’s not important now,” I said, aghast at the fact that his father’s wrath was foremost in his mind. I grabbed his arm. “You cannot leave. You must help me save her.”

He glanced again at Millicent before looking down. He knew full well that what he was about to do was wrong.

“Leave off, Pryor,” he said, peering to see if the road was empty of witnesses.

“But she’ll die of cold, don’t you see?” I was practically begging. “It’s up to us. There’s no time to run for help.”

“So high and mighty. That’s always been you, hasn’t it?” he sniped. “Thinking you’re smarter than me. You, a printer’s son. You go and get her if you’re so brave. But not a word that I was here. Not ever, or I’ll see to it you pay.”

He shook off my grasp and looked away. Then, he ran.

His behavior disgusted me, but I had Millicent to worry about. Her whimpers were getting fainter, and I noticed that her legs had buckled as cold and desperation set in. I lowered myself onto my stomach as I reached the center of the pond. Inch by inch I crawled across the thinning ice. The front of my woolen coat was frosted and hard as it caught on the surface. My buttons scraped. How I wished I could be a serpent in that moment, just as slithery and undulating. How crude and boyish were my movements, the ice turning more and more transparent as I approached the child.

“Don’t move,” I whispered. “Please, stay still until I’m closer, until I can…”

Then, the crack. Millicent’s high child’s scream. The red gash of her woolen mitten as it raked across my sight and into the churn of gray water. Gone. She had vanished, and though I floundered to reach her, the brittle crust gave way and plunged me into the same frigid hole. I fought until I found her coat with my hand, pulling with all my might. Even if I made it out of the water and onto thicker ice, I was afraid that I would not be able to drag her to shore by myself. I could feel my blood thickening with cold, my movements becoming slower by the second.

The sight of James’s back as he disappeared into the trees will never leave me, but neither will my memory of Millicent as shards of ice slashed at her face and hands. I thrashed through the water—I could see that her eyes were open, but her lips had turned a deep blue that was beginning to spread beneath her skin, fluid as an ink stain. I headed for the shore, and when I felt my chest collide with ice strong enough not to give way as I threw myself upon it, I pulled Millicent next to me. I could not stand. My limbs were frozen and I was incapable of any movement save for a clumsy tumble, the girl passing under and over me as we rolled like a barrel towards the shore.

Only when we reached the frozen ground at the edge of the pond did I allow myself to realize that she was dead. Even so, when I saw a sleigh pulling past, I yelled and screamed—a sound so desperate and primitive I hope never to have to make it again. It brought the driver to a halt; whatever happened afterwards will always be a mystery to me.

Two days later, I awoke, my mother by my side, my father standing gray-faced at the end of my bed.

“They say in the town,” he said weakly, “you should never have crawled out on the ice by yourself. They say…” He could not finish and he did not ask me if any of it was true. Just handed me a sealed note. “This came for you the night you were brought in. A stable lad from the Hurlbut place delivered it.”

As my mother rose and began to weep quietly, he walked to her side, gently put his arm around her shoulders, and escorted her from the room. Numb of mind and shaking with fever, I opened the letter. It was a summons from Amos Hurlbut.

James had been busy after the accident, making sure everyone knew that I was to blame for Millicent’s death. He admitted to being at the pond that day, but said he’d left me in charge of his sister because, worried that she was cold and would need a warmer coat, he’d run home to get her one. He put it about that I’d been careless and that when I noticed she was in trouble, I had acted in an impulsive manner to cover up my failure to watch out for her. Instead of running to town for help, I sought to look the hero and attempted to save her myself, he said. He claimed that my hubris had ensured his young sister’s death, and far-fetched as his story may have sounded to anyone who knew me, no member of a town that lives by the thin strands of the Hurlbut family’s approval had the courage to question it. I was branded a prideful youth who should have known better, a bad seed, the boy who all but murdered poor Millicent.

As soon as I had the strength to leave my sickbed, I went to see Amos Hurlbut. The house was large and hot and filled with things that were either too bright or too fat. The burnished wood paneling gleamed in the white winter light. Overstuffed velvet armchairs sat solidly next to even larger settees. Gilt-framed portraits of corpulent Hurlbut ancestors crowded the silk-covered walls. I had never seen such a display of wealth and I felt ill at the sight and smell of it.

“You are too bright a boy to have behaved in such a tragically stupid manner,” Amos Hurlbut said, sitting behind a desk that put acres of fine leather covering between us. He gestured towards James, who was seated by the fire. “He used to speak well of you.”

I did not respond, did not much care what James
used
to think of me. Sitting stiffly in my high-backed wooden chair, I waited as an animal awaits slaughter: knowing something terrible is about to happen yet uncertain as to what it might be.

“Since the accident, however,” he continued, “James sings a different tune.”

Apparently, upon hearing his son’s version of what had happened on Biddle Pond, Amos saw—even through the haze of his grief—the opportunity to turn tragedy in his favor. He demanded, as penance for my sins, that I be indentured to him for an indefinite period of time. When James took over family matters, I was to serve him with equal devotion. No doubt, having lost a measure of faith in me since the accident, my parents would have little trouble believing the following story: that I was throwing in my lot with the Hurlbuts in the hope of finding my fortune, that I was tired of working with my father in the shop and cared not a whit for the trade he had taught me, that my eye was on the future—not the past—and I could no longer afford to indulge my boyish affections and notions of familial allegiance. In short, I was to tell them that I was abandoning them forever.

Back in the warmth of my own humble abode, I found that once I had opened my mouth and allowed such hurtful lies to spill forth, there was no turning back. Though it pained them to reckon with a side of me they had never before encountered, I played the scoundrel convincingly enough that my parents came to believe the worst of me.

They knew nothing of the blackmail that prompted my callous behavior, for Amos Hurlbut promised to see my father ruined if ever I tried to wriggle free of his hold over me. My father, you see, made his wage as the printer of town penny sheets, many of which were owned by the Hurlbut family. The entirety of his meager living was drawn from that job, and if either Amos Hurlbut or his son ever took his business away, my family would lose everything. That was the chief curse of life in Burns’ Hollow: So intricately bound was the fate of the town to the Hurlbut fortune, it was as though the inhabitants were but marionettes, the movement of their every limb controlled at the will and whim of a malevolent puppeteer.

James Hurlbut’s lie about Millicent’s death stole from me the love I held most dear, for I have not, to this day, spoken again to either of my parents. By cover of darkness, I left my home, slinking into service to Hurlbut and his brigade of crooked lawyers, constables, speculators, even ministers. His reach was all-encompassing and to find myself entangled within it made me servile as a bird dog laying carcasses at his master’s feet.

It has been eight years since I left Burns’ Hollow, permitting myself no more than a weekly visit in secret that I might catch a glimpse of my parents. It is several hours’ ride, and as they are a quiet pair who keep to themselves, they do not know that we still live in the same county. Hurlbut ensures that my name never appears in any of the penny sheets my father might be called upon to print, so you see, I have become a ghost to them. He is bent over his box of type by the light of a single lamp, my mother knits in a chair by the window—this is how I usually find them. I can only press my nose to the glass like the boy I once was and assure myself that they are safe, that the Hurlbuts are still holding up their end of the bargain. But looking in from the outside convinces me of little else, save for the fact that my heart is broken.

The weeks passed quickly as I continued my search for May and Polly Kimball. There was little movement to auction off the Ashland farm—under the best of circumstances, things municipal in nature happen slowly. But something inside me had begun to change. No matter how hard I tried to deafen myself to its sound, a mysterious hand rapped persistently on the window of my conscience. The Kimballs’ misfortune called to me, a siren’s song of unhappiness that swelled with the reckless hope that I might be able to save them. Faced with such familiar bewitchment, I did not seek a mast to which I might, in the tradition of Odysseus, lash myself against temptation.