The Visionist: A Novel (7 page)

“My husband left us—I know not where he went,” she says. “Perhaps to the city. Perhaps to seek his fortune in more generous country. He will not be back, of that I am certain.”

“And why do you say that?” Elder Sister Agnes asks. “No child can be signed into indenture with us if the father does not agree to our terms.”

The woman finally looks away from her daughter and directly into my eldress’s eyes. “Because I know him, Madam. He will not be back.”

Elder Sister Agnes regards her closely before nodding slowly. Hers is a history that is not unfamiliar. “And your home? What has become of it?”

“It was never ours,” she says, holding Elder Sister Agnes’s gaze. “It was my husband’s, and I suppose it shall remain in his possession until such a time as he chooses to dispose of it.”

I have been watching the girl. Her expression is blank but I can tell that she is listening intently. I have the sense that she was not expecting her mother to leave. That is usually the case, for how could the woman have persuaded her children to give her up? They have already been abandoned by one parent; losing another would be unthinkable.

“I want only that my children be safe,” the mother says, looking back to her daughter. “They and I will be better for it.”

I watch the tall, thin girl clench her fists. She and her mother lock eyes once again, a message passing between them. She stands so straight that a board might have been slipped down the back of her simple frock, and as she walks towards where her kin are so miserably entwined, her steps are silent. It is as though some part of her has left the room. I cannot explain it except to say that an absence inhabits her, as though she has become a specter, her soul rising above the sadness. Kneeling, she puts a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Mama,” she whispers. “I’ll do it. I’ll take him.” But as she tries to wrest the boy’s arms from around his mother’s legs, her raw knuckles turn white.

Elder Sister Agnes stands and nods impatiently at me. She is telling me to step forth, but again I resist. It is perhaps the boy’s will that gives me pause, or the girl’s strange dignity. And the mother, I wish she would stay. I have a bad sense of what the World will do with her.

Putting aside my doubts, I cross the floor, bend down to force the boy’s hand from his mother’s leg, and clasp it firmly in my own. Then we rise as one, stepping aside as the mother moves quickly towards the door.
Please don’t look round,
I think. She stops with her back to the room, a shaking hand upon the latch. Lifting it appears to require the strength of David. Then, with a click and a swirl of her soiled skirts, she is gone. Elder Sister Agnes’s heels thud dully as she strides across the room and follows the mother out into the stairway. The boy’s hand jerks madly in mine, his lower lip trembling, while the girl stares ahead with a countenance blank as a sheet.

Their mother will find her cart full of baskets of bread, jugs of cider, warm clothes, blankets, and feed for her horse. We do not send away the poor, the weak, and the weary with nothing. Yet, I think, even Elder Sister Agnes fears somewhere inside her heart that the woman is empty now, empty and alone until the end of her days.

Simon Pryor

THE ROADS BEYOND
town are possessed of an eerie atmosphere. One passes, of course, the occasional sheltered valley farm, fields clean and tidied for winter, buildings robust and orderly, nothing shoddy about the place. But riding farther one encounters the less fortunate, those whose newer pastures look to be veritable graveyards of stumps, whose farmsteads are empty and neglected, forgotten by all but the seasons. I passed forlorn lots where the houses and barns appeared little cared for, surrounded by rings of refuse tossed from every window, weed-choked yards ruled by roving swine and flocks of crows.

Some properties—tied to their absentee owners by title alone—are little more than overgrazed hillocks and random fields of rock, juniper and milkweed gone brown and dry. It takes a tenacious breed of farmer to resist the fertile promise of Ohio and Illinois, leaving behind the hardship of our meaner climes. I cannot blame them. It feels somehow colder in the hinterland, with everything given over to an air of life at its least forgiving—the soil rockier, the sun less generous, the wind gusting more harshly.

I journeyed along the Post Road, searching for the track leading down to the Ashland farm. A shop boy in town had pointed me in the right direction, though clearly he thought my destination an odd one.

“Why’re you lookin’ to visit him?” he’d asked. “Crazy. That’s what he is. Everybody knows it.” Unwittingly, he’d given me as valuable a clue as any other. My investigation had officially begun.

Just as the boy had described, the turnoff to Silas Kimball’s farm was marked by a singular tortured birch rising up over the road, its white bark flashing in silver shafts of afternoon sun. I had passed a river along the way and heard water trickling down the hills that bound this section of road. Indeed, the way down to the site of the fire appeared more like a streambed than a passable thoroughfare. I put the tree’s forbidding shadow behind me and attended to new concerns that my horse would break a leg on the uneven rocks and clumps of grass.

A final twist in the track revealed sooty clouds wisping from the few beams that remained upright. My mount behaved skittishly, shying at the smell of fire still heavy in the air. The buildings—a farmhouse, shed, and barn—looked to have been laid out nicely on the land, which at one time must have presented a pleasing prospect of fertile fields, a forest of tall trees in the distance, a cattle pond, and an orchard. In all, it was a neat little package gone to seed and turned hellish by sudden misfortune. Ash covered the leaves of nearby maples and oaks while smoke still puffed from patches of lower vegetation that had not yet given up the last of their coals. Though I had encountered many such scenes of ruin, I wondered at the strength of the fire that must have blown through and left such desolation in its wake.

I dismounted and tied my horse upwind. The remains of the farmhouse were charcoal and dust now, beams protruding like the bones of a huge carcass. I peered into the old shed and noted tools, a plow, and bits of old machinery whose parts would have been harvested for making repairs. The wreckage included pitchforks with prongs bent in the heat to resemble the unruly coif of a restless sleeper; and scythes, sickles, hoes and ax heads whose wooden handles had been consumed by the fire. I discerned the twisted metal wheel strakes and ashen timbers of what looked to have been a log cart, but saw not a trace of what might once have been a wagon. No farmer, I thought, lives this far from town without a nag and a trap.

A herd of pigs ran squealing from the ruins of the barn. The bodies of the beasts trapped inside—cows and oxen by the look of it, a sheep or two—were still smoldering, but that hardly seemed a deterrent to the rooting swine. I wrote down the deaths in the margins of my sketchbook. No sign of a horse.

No cart, no horse, and, as yet, no human remains. The outline of a story began to form in my mind.

Flesh burns with a cloying sweetness, and even in the crispness of the day, the air felt sticky and ghoulish as I retraced my steps to the farmhouse. Walking across what had been a small porch and into the space that had held the kitchen, I noticed no footprints in the ash inside the house—a fact I found odd at first given the usual neighborly scavenging that goes on. Upon further reflection, however, I began to wonder if the Kimballs had been a family nobody wanted to get close to, for pariahs give off the scent of their misery just as foul air harbors disease, and persistent misfortune cannot help encouraging fear of the curse at its origin. I bent down to pick up the crude blade of a charred kitchen knife. However lowly and isolated their existence, this family lived in a world of their own and my work would be made all the easier for it.

Away from the animals, cold air helped to mask the worst of the fire’s atmospheric effects. Indeed, granted say in the matter, I would choose every time to suffer the frozen-fingered toll of inspecting a winter blaze. The putridity of a summer burn often lasts for weeks, muddling the senses of anyone forced to linger. Standing among these ruins, I felt blessed to be able to think with some clarity. That is when I noticed a rifle lying on the ground to the right of what had once been the threshold. No doubt it had previously hung above the entryway, but its inclusion in the wreckage indicated that there had been someone present at the start of the fire. Why? Because assuming he has had time to plan his exit, a man rarely leaves home without his weapon. Even a farmer sowing corn in a distant field knows that there is a chance he might shoot a meaty hare for his supper. In my experience, a gun laid upon its hooks signals that the man in charge is at home.

I bent down to study the fallen rifle more closely. An arsonist would purposefully leave it to burn if he thought it might reinforce his story: that the fire roared up so quickly and with such force he’d had no time to salvage even his trusty Springfield. Why then had I not found the farmer Kimball waiting for me when I arrived, wringing his hands and shaking his head over his apparent lightning strike of bad luck? His talk would have been of claims-to-be-filed and his manner—though convincingly exhausted—that of an eager assistant to my investigation. This was a vignette I’d witnessed before. But there was no sign of him.

I turned away from the gun and began my inspection of the kitchen. Kimball still cooked over a hearth in old pots and pans, which lay neatly piled near the stones. He had no stove. But none of the cooking vessels was tipped haphazardly on its side as though it might have spilled a greasy stew that fed the fire as effectively as, no doubt, it inflamed the gut. Only a single cauldron stood apart, a blackened glaze baked within. In a corner, the outline in ash of a table lay across the ground like a carpet. Broken plates and forks were scattered round its edges. I picked up a shard of china. It was decorated with a pretty pattern, one that somehow seemed too fine as compared with the rest of the objects I could see. Where had it come from?

The table had been set for a number of people. And with such a complete if primitive kitchen, it seemed clear that Kimball had had a wife. Children, too—though as babies will sit on their mother’s laps at mealtime, how many I could not tell. Where were they? A convincing fire-setter would have had his family in tow when I arrived, the better to impress upon me their abject misery and need. I scribbled these details along with a quick sketch, noting that the incendiary might well have taken place in the evening, perhaps in the midst of preparing what had so charred the inside of the lone used pot. Several heavy brown bottles lay shattered about the room. That I did not find them all together told me that they had been secreted away in nooks and crannies, a suspicion that suggested the presence of someone who needed a drink more often than others might have wanted him to have it. Again, like the false distress of an arsonist, I had seen this pattern before, and usually it pointed to darker facts.

The room I passed into next had been some sort of parlor, and the charred remains of its contents were of a different nature entirely from those I had found in the kitchen. Indeed, as I mentally reconstructed the room, it seemed to be as out of place as had the fancy china in the kitchen. Small, ornamented brass locks suggested keepsake boxes; an ash-pile of shelf upon shelf of books was apparent. A brass compass—glass shattered and face melted away—appeared to have come from some faraway land, for it was inscribed with symbols oriental in nature. This room had been kept in perfect order—I could tell by the arrangement of fallen objects peeking out from the dust. To the untrained eye they represented tragic disarray, but to me they exemplified the ordered chaos of a wealthy man’s study. It was strange, I thought, as I made a list of my findings. Books, but no chair in which to sit nor lamp by which to read them. Not so much as a candleholder either, the likes of which I had noticed in the detritus near the hearth.

In the hallway, I could barely make my way through the wreckage. A second story had come down, and by the looks of the ash, it had been full of the kind of material that burns quickest in a fire. Cloth, straw bedding, and—what was this? Books again? Their presence made little sense to me. Other than the strange set piece I had seen in the parlor, this farmhouse did not strike me as an abode full of people with time to edify their minds by reading books. It felt like a poor and lonely place, with fences left to mend and barely enough livestock to get a small family through the winter.

I made my notes and moved into the last room—the space in which the man and woman of the house must have slept. A barren chamber it was, more in keeping with the kitchen than it was with the strange parlor. I sketched the outlines of the wardrobe and wrote that it had held very little, for the mark left in the ashes did not indicate that it had burned as hot as it might have had it been stuffed with finery of one sort or another. The ash print of a bed signaled the only other piece of furniture that had occupied the room. All was as I would imagine save for two things: the charred ground beneath my feet sloping ever so slightly near where the bed had stood, and the unmistakable sound of grinding glass beneath my boots.

This is where the fire had burned longest. I could tell by the extent to which the floorboards had been eaten away. This is where it had begun. But how? And why did the shards upon which I stood appear to derive from two different vessels? The glass of one was coarse and broke only under heavy tread. The other was fine and took barely any weight at all to crush into slivers. I bent down and picked up the mouth of a cider jug—the only part of a drinking vessel you will find intact in the wreckage of a fire, for the glass or potter’s clay is thickest at the neck. The finer shards were more difficult to identify. Delicate as the pearlescent inlay of a shell, they did not fit with the sparse nature of the room in which they lay. I stared round, leaning down to pick up a heavy chunk of wood. It alone had survived the heat of flames no other wood could withstand. Dense in nature—a solid block of burled fruitwood, perhaps—it was the sort of material from which fine possessions are carved. I turned it in my hands until its purpose revealed itself: the base of a handsome lamp, a lamp whose delicate glass shade lay in pieces beneath my feet, a lamp with no business illuminating so bleak a chamber.

Walking outside once more—of course it was all outside now—I stopped to inspect the well. The pump handle had been pushed down even though most people know to leave it up after they’ve drawn water, thus making it easier to loosen should the arm of the mechanism become stiff with rust during a period of disuse. I also noted that the ground around the well appeared less charred than elsewhere, indicating that someone had tried, however uselessly, to draw water at some point before or during the fire. Where, I wondered, was the bucket? I searched the blackened grass closest to the house and found nothing. Strange. Then, expanding the sweep of my gaze outward towards the edges of the cornfield, I saw the pail lying on its side.

I had not noticed initially that the stalks were newly trampled where the bucket had been dropped. Someone had moved carelessly through them. I walked back towards the house tracing a faint line of indentations in the ash-covered grass and surmised that whoever had run from the fire had stopped next to the well, perhaps found the metal handle too hot to work properly and continued on, tossing the bucket aside just as they reached the field. Disturbingly, the tips of the dried leaves on the cornstalks were singed. I quickened my step, following the trail of scorched vegetation towards the cattle pond at the field’s edge.

Water. The swift-flowing current ran into the pond at one end, then over a small dam at the other. Along with its proximity to the Post Road, the property’s location at the edge of a river would have made it ideal for sale to one of the many mill agents who roam the county in search of land upon which to construct their mills. Here, burbling before me, was the reason for Hurlbut’s interest in the dilapidated farm. No doubt he sought to buy it cheap at auction, then dip into the deep pockets of a mill owner and sell it at a profit. The waterway rattled small stones as it churned. Industry, I thought, is nothing without a source of power to make it chug and clang.