The Visionist: A Novel (8 page)

But a more gruesome find awaited me on the banks of the pond, for there lay a blackened body. By the size and shape of the corpse—as well as the charred form of a belt buckle and what was left of a pair of tough leather farming boots—I knew it to have been a man. Indeed, judging from the path I’d followed through the field, I was near certain that it was the farmer Silas Kimball who lay before me, unless he’d had a grown son he’d managed to keep with him on the farm. This changed everything. I could see Kimball running in flames through the field, falling just shy of the water that might have saved his life. He had endured a tortured end, the bones of his hands curled into fists, his head thrown back, his jaw agape—a posture of agony. “Crazy” as he may have been, I could not help feeling for him.

I sat beside the body, noting and sketching the details. I drew a map of his futile scramble and described what was left of him, taking rough measurements with my tape and estimating his size and build. He no longer had an identity beyond what little I could salvage, and I could not help thinking how bare we are in death, how quickly our bones join a field of broken sticks, how life’s end strips us of everything that makes us unique. Our history remains, but even there, the mark we leave is dependent on the impressions of others.

With the last of my notes and drawings complete, I turned my mind to the story I would present in my report. Whatever “official facts” I submit, I always write down what I imagine actually to have happened. My reasons are not the least bit admirable, for one can only tell a believable lie when armed with the truth. If Silas Kimball was dead, then who had set the fire? I thought back to the rifle. It was more likely that a woman running from a blaze would leave the gun behind. With the lives of her children in danger, a mother has no thought of future protection; she concerns herself with the peril of her immediate predicament. The table had been set and the charred substance I assumed had been the family’s supper made it likely that Kimball’s kin had been at home on the evening of the fire. Yet the horse and cart were missing. Someone had successfully run from the scene, never, perhaps, to return. My wager was that it had been Mrs. Kimball and her children. As to the nature of the crime—if it was a crime: It was distinctly feminine. A man would have employed more brutish instruments to set a blaze, while the use of a fancy lamp—my best guess as to the source of the flame—suggested a lady’s touch.

I suppose it is a weakness of which I should be ashamed, but I am never glad when the evidence points to the woman. It’s an irrational bias. After all, the world is replete with cruel and devious females. But hardship plagues the country wife, and in my experience, poverty and drink do not a gentle husband make. I thought back on the shop boy’s comment and the crude brown cider bottles in the kitchen and by the bed. Somehow, though I could not begin to guess at the details, the circumstances surrounding this fire reeked of desperation, not greed.

Polly

SHE WOKE IN
a room not her own. Her bedclothes, crisp and white, smelled nothing like the lard soap she had scrubbed over slatted washboards at home, hard enough to bloody the joints in her fingers. Here, the clean sheets were folded under a mattress lumpy with shredded corncobs and tucked so tightly across her feet she could not turn to look about.

At what? Where was she? She lolled her head to the side. She was resting in a narrow bed across the room from someone—the girl who’d led them away from Mama. It was dark out. Night or early morn, she could not tell. But the moon that had lit their way still shone brightly through the panes of the large window between the beds.

Mama! Mama!
She heard the screams so loudly in her head. Ben screaming,
Mama!

The scene came slowly back to her now. The stern face of the woman who opened the door of a white building and urged them to come out of the cold; the crisp white cap she wore atop her head; her dark dress. A simple woman with a heart big enough to take them in. Polly had reasoned then that Mama directed them to the house only because it sat close to the road and seemed to enjoy a position of prominence in the compound. But it turned out that Mama had known about these people, these “Shakers.” Had she planned to abandon her children here from the moment Polly set the house aflame? Had she realized that they would be separated from her? Tears pricked at Polly’s eyes. Strong as her mother had seemed as she spoke to the woman of leaving her children where they would be safe, Polly could not forgive her this new betrayal. She squeezed her eyes shut. After all they had been through, how could she have left them?

Putting a hand to her hair, she felt that it had been pulled tightly from her forehead and fastened at the back. It smelled different—washed, medicinal—and her scalp pulsed with the blue-bruised feeling she remembered from when Mama would take a comb and peck into her tangled tresses, every sharp tooth pulling out nests of hair that blew free into the fields around their house.

Their house. Their house in yellow and black flame. Their house a plume of smoke in the cold night air. She could still feel Ben curled beside her on the cart bench—where was he now? He should be nestled up against her here, on this narrow pallet, under the tight-woven warmth of this blanket. She wanted to cry out, call him in for supper, in from the rocks in the grass where he used to sit, making piles of pebbles and sticks and clover leaves torn from their stems to look like hearts.

But the severe woman had tried to talk him away from her—as though a child could stand to hear what she had to say:

Again, Polly heard his screams inside her head, but this time they were for her. Mama had gone, a door closing and the air in the room suddenly wholly different. The girl who now lay across from her had held out a hand strangely decorated with graceful red curls. Somewhere, Polly could hear the echo of Mama’s sobs as she waited for the older woman in a room close by and yet so far away.

The girl with the paisley hands had halted before opening the door to lead them outside. “Shh now,” she said to Ben. “Try not to cry.” And before Polly could move to stop her, she knelt down and held out her arms. Polly felt sure Ben would recoil but he did not. Instead, he hugged her, burying his head into this stranger’s neck and whimpering softly. She held him a moment—how it had ripped at Polly’s heart to see her little brother find comfort in the arms of another—then rose again and led them outside along the pathway through a village whose houses were all shaped alike. It had been very neat and trim, very quiet. Even at a later and busier hour, Polly could not imagine children shouting or herders whistling. No clop of horses’ hooves. No harping shop-women, no tuneless drunkard’s song. Only silence.

Where was everyone? She had thought they might be the only people for miles around until a door into one of the buildings opened and a young man in dark clothes and a white shirtwaist stepped out and walked towards them. He nodded. “Good day, Sister Charity.” Charity. What a strange name, Polly thought, for one complicit in such a cruel separation. She watched as the girl refused to meet his gaze; they exchanged no further greeting. It was as if they were afraid of each other.

“This is Brother Andrew,” the girl told Ben. “He will care for you now. There, take his hand.” Ben had looked terrified and spun round to run for Polly, crying her name over and over. She, too, had reached for him, but the girl stepped between and held Polly back as Brother Andrew took the child gently by the hand and pulled him towards the door from whence he had appeared. Once they had gone, Ben’s cries became softer by the step, as though he were vanishing farther and farther into the depths of the building, never to return.

Polly remembered shaking and clutching her arms about her.
No, no, no, no, no, no…
The word kept filling her mouth, and though she had never before known herself to protest aloud in the moments when her mind spun away, she felt an agony so old and deep, she could not be silent. She had lost sight of Ben once before and he’d nearly been murdered.
No, no, no, no, no, no…
She had lost sight of him, and the moments her father had held him under water had changed him forever.
No, no, no, no, no, no…
He was just a sweet, simple boy. What sense could he have made of his abandonment? With Mama gone, Polly was all he had left. She looked around her, falling slowly—so slowly that she wasn’t sure if it was she or the world around her that had slipped away. The ground was cold as she crumpled to the stone path before hitting her head. Then, nothing but blackness.

Back in the chamber, the girl opposite stirred and shifted. She wore her hair woven into a long, thin braid. The color of ginger cake, it wound across her back and over her shoulder like a serpent. Above the collar of her chemise, her skin looked red and beaten. Did they hit people here? How long had the ginger girl been in this place, and how had her time been passed? In happiness? Despair? She looked to be close to Polly in years, but with a face so still in sleep, she seemed doll-like, almost ageless. Had she, too, been left here by her mother? Had arrangements been made so that she could be taken from the one who had borne her? Polly watched closely as her eyes opened wide, suddenly large and glistening, fluttering out of sleep in an instant.

“You are finally awake,” the ginger girl said. “You fainted yesterday morn, and though you are not heavy, it took myself and another sister to carry you here. I made you drink a sleeping draught. To calm you. You were dirty and your hair was full of lice. We washed you—scrubbed and picked until you were clean of all life except your own.” She sat up, smoothing the covers over her legs, making the bed neat around her. “As you may have heard, I am Charity, but known as Sister Charity to all within this place. You, too, will be a sister soon, after your confession. Sister Polly. Sister Polly, the new believer.”

Polly heard the girl’s voice coming to her from afar, as though each of them stood atop her own mountain calling into the wind through cupped hands. Confession? She wanted to lean forward and cry,
What? What is it you are saying? Tell me again!
But she was lying down, bound beneath her bedcovers, and she found herself clinging to each sentence in her mind just long enough to card it into meaning.

“I do not know where I am,” she said, afraid of the sound she would make in this stark new place.

“You are in The City of Hope,” the girl answered. “Your home. You must forget all that you have left behind, for your life begins now. Soon you will hear the bell and we shall rise and wash. It is Sabbath so we shall go together to the meetinghouse this afternoon, and you will be able to see all the believers who live here.”

“Shall I see my brother then, too?” Polly asked. She felt her heart awaken, beating inside her ribs as though it wanted to get out. “Will Ben come to the meeting place?”

A veil dropped over the ginger girl’s face. “I cannot deny,” she said, “that you will see young Benjamin, but he is nothing to you now, nor you to him, and you must look through one another as if you were naught more than apparitions. You must see into the spirits of the believers
behind
him and draw from their purity, for you have no flesh kin now.”

Polly looked up at the ceiling. It was smoothly painted. No cracks through which her angels might come to rescue her. She closed her eyes again.
The City of Hope.
Where was the hope in losing everything and everyone she had ever known? How long would she be held here? How would she find Ben and whisk him away? Away to…where?

“Why must I pretend that my brother is not my brother?” she asked. She no longer felt afraid of this stranger. Nothing moved her anymore, not love, not worry, not even sadness. She had become as hard and dry as a winter seed.

“Mama said she had business to attend to,” Polly said, not intending to speak her doubts out loud. “Perhaps. And yet, how could she have left us in a place where there can be no love?”

The girl let out a sigh. “There is love here, you will see. Brother for brother, sister for sister. But flesh bonds are forged in the fires of carnal sin. Your Ben, like you, was born of a filthy act. Here, that filth will be lifted. You shall see for yourself, if you are willing to renounce your blood ties and confess. Should you refuse, then you do not belong among us.”

The room was quiet as Polly tried to absorb what the girl was telling her. Certainly there had been evil in her old life. But there had been tenderness as well, hidden in the instants when she and Mama brushed hands while picking berries, or looked up and smiled at each other having finished a particularly burdensome chore. Tenderness tucked away into the time she spent chasing Ben through the barn in fun or coaxing him from his secret hideaways. Had not Mama glowed proudly at the sight of Polly poring, in secret, over the books in her attic room? Had they not shared many such small but rebellious alliances? The luxury of a sweet from the Dry Goods. A soft pair of mittens Mama knit for her—privately, of course, so that Silas would not punish her for using up valuable wool. Such flickers of love had sustained Polly when all else seemed hopeless and cruel. How would she survive without them now?

She had no choice. She and Mama might have found work once they’d left the farm, but who would have looked after Ben all day? And there was the danger that they might be chased down and tried for arson—perhaps even murder. Or else, discovered by a man—her own father—who wanted them dead. Without her children, Mama would find it easier to hide from the law, perhaps even to begin her life anew in another town, under another name. Without them, she might even be able to slip free of Silas. Polly shuddered. What wheels had she put in motion when she set their house on fire?

The obvious dawned on her:
She
was the reason Mama had left them here. It was
she
who had laid waste their home, perhaps even killed Silas. What choice had she left Mama but to take the blame should the truth about the fire come out? She’d no right to be angry, but she was.

Closing her eyes, Polly tried to will the angels to her side but they, too, seemed to have abandoned her. She and Ben had nowhere else to go. They would have to stay in The City of Hope, hide there until Polly could be sure that the world beyond its walls was safe—whatever
that
meant. How, then, to stay in the good graces of these strange people?

Work. Polly realized that industry was all that could save her now. She would work until she could work no more, toil like she had never before toiled, make of herself an indispensable…
believer.
Labor would ease her sorrows and fears. Exhaustion would be her solace. She had discovered herself to be a fighter when it came to those she loved. In this new place—so foreign to her in every way—she would walk among strangers, pliable as dough. She was a lone traveler. She was no one now.

Polly rose and mimicked the ginger girl’s every move, pulling on a borrowed brown woolen dress and slipping her feet into worn leather shoes belonging to a sister who, it seemed, no longer needed them.

“How could it be,” Polly asked as she ran her fingers over the soft, well-woven cloth, “that a girl could find no use for clothes such as these?”

Sister Charity pursed her lips and regarded her sharply. Had she been foolish to be so inquisitive?

“You wear the dress,” the sister said, “of one who was offered a life of fullness and purity here, but chose instead to run away. She has joined the filth of the World from which you have just come. She did not deserve the attention we gave her.”

Charity yanked the quilt from her bed and shook it. “We shall see if you are different,” she said. “Then, when you prove yourself a good believer, you shall have your own set of clothes, made for you and no one else. Why, the sisters will even make you a cap, for you are comely and of an age when your hair and the nape of your neck could distract the brethren.”