This night is different, she thinks. The feeling flashes through Polly’s mind though she can’t say why. Not an hour had passed since the boy’s singsong voice had filled the kitchen. Now, Silas picks up the knife Mama uses to cut carrots and field onions and brandishes it like a child playing pirate.
“Another thing,” he says. “Something I heard from a gentleman I been talking to. Something about wills and land being left to little girls. You know anything ’bout that?” He draws closer to Mama. “Your papa weasel ’round me like that? Don’t you lie. I never thought to be worried on it before now, but his talk got me wonderin’. Seems there’s a fair number of boys left high and dry by their dead fathers. Wives’ dead fathers, too.” He laughs. “Seems a man isn’t to be trusted no more. We leave.” He imitates a whiny complaint. “We drink. We got notes against us. Better to pass everything on to you women, that’s the story I heard.”
Beneath the anger, Polly senses a strange elation coursing through him, quickening his movements. Her heart pounds as she studies him. He is in debt to every saloonkeeper in town, but it’s clear he’s not been denied his fill at one or another of the taverns on this particular day.
He is an outcast. Who would have spotted him a belt or two? And there’s the look in his eyes. They glisten with something close to glee. Usually, she can see the signs—she has learned to take meaning from a clue as common as the sound of his boots on the step outside—but she does not know how to read him now.
“See, I care ’cause I been thinkin’ I might like a little time on my own, sell this land—my land—set myself up pretty somewhere. Just like Mister Fancy Coat told me,” he says. “Rest up without you and your waste. It wouldn’t be so difficult to manage now, would it? Gettin’ so’s I could be alone, I mean. Things happen after all, am I wrong? Takin’ sick, disappearings—like they say, twist of Fate.” He pushes Mama towards the table and lays down the knife. Even in the thin light of the lamp—its wick running low—the gleaming blade catches Polly’s eye. Mister Fancy Coat.
“I seen whole families go,” Silas continues. Kicking Mama’s feet out from under, he glares at her as she buckles to the floor and covers her head with her arms. “Death come easy here,” he says. “It’s livin’. That’s the struggle.”
He walks away, taps his hand over the tops of the cupboards in hopes of finding a forgotten bottle of cider; with his back turned, he cannot see Polly as she rises and guides Ben gently into her chair. She moves quickly and reaches out, her fingers barely grazing the cooking knife’s handle before she pulls away and slips quickly back into her place. He has found his prize, uncorked it, and he guzzles the liquor as he turns back to face the room. “Problem is, can’t do much more than slap you up ’til I know what’s mine,” he slurs, yawns. “Tired now, that’s what I am. But tomorrow? Tomorrow, we sort this out. We make sure your daddy didn’t leave me out of his prayers. We make sure—just like Mister Fancy Coat said—that you tell me the truth ’bout any dealings between you. Give me a nod,” he orders, kneeling to grab Mama’s chin and shake her head up and down. “Yes…that’s right,” he says, still pulling at her. “Yes, Silas.”
Silas stands unsteadily and looks at Polly, a queer smile hooking up one side of his mouth. “Lucky for you I met up with this little friend,” he says, holding up the bottle, then pulling it to him like an infant as he shuffles across the kitchen floor. “Lucky, too, that I’m in need of a lie-down.” One boot then another falls as he makes his way towards the room where he lies with Mama every night. “There’s always a tomorrow, ain’t there? Can’t count on much, but that’s for certain.”
Polly hears him tumble into bed.
She knows the stories about her father’s kin. His parents had been born of a bad lot—just two of a hundred ruffians, townspeople said, all descended from one drunk Dutchman up by the New York Lakes. He was—would always be—Silas Kimball, the son of stoop-backed, black-toothed marginals. Smelling like smoke and animal fat, mongrel skins for warmth, teeth ground down to nubs: talk had it that the three of them appeared as savages when they walked the path to town in need of a trade. His mother made dolls tied from sticks and corn silk and tried to barter them for food and cider, but the figures scared people with their haunting look and she couldn’t raise much. When Silas came, she bound him to her with hemp cord and fed him in plain view, not a thought given that she was baring herself for all the town to see. Wild as skunk cabbage, living in a makeshift shack in the woods, stealing from the fields of nearby farms—in most people’s opinion, as Polly heard it, the Kimballs were barely human.
Benjamin Briggs, Polly’s grandfather from Mama’s side, had been different. Wealthy, they said, an educated merchant and gentleman farmer come out from Hartford. But he couldn’t work alone the land he had tamed and there was no help to be found in town that wasn’t already at labor in the fields. So it came to pass that when young Silas showed up at his door—not long after the boy’s parents went missing—Polly’s grandfather gave him work and a roof over his head. Whether the vagrants were dead or just set to scrabbling in some other place, no one knew. But with them gone, Silas walked into a brighter future than ever he could have imagined. Or so it might have been.
Mama was ten-year-old May Briggs then, the sole kin left to a man widowed and mourning a wife and son lost in childbirth. Polly imagined her as a girl struggling to fill a woman’s shoes and a man’s empty heart, a child depended on for tending to everything from chores in the house and barn to minding the count. It was only right that if her father saw fit to take in this strange new boy, May should strive to make him feel welcome. It was surely what her own mother would have done, wasn’t it? So she fed Silas and taught him how to care for the chickens and find the eggs they’d hidden in the yard; how to milk the cows with a gentle pull-and-squeeze so as not to get kicked and have the pail knocked dry; how to speak so people could understand him and stop thinking of him as half-boy, half-animal. She did this for her father, that he might have one less thing to trouble over.
Polly never understood how such simple lessons could have led where they did. How the townsfolk could have whispered that young May Briggs broke her father’s heart when she married Silas in secret at thirteen. How a farmer as careful as Benjamin Briggs, with a barn tight and new, could have gotten himself killed by a falling loose beam. How, according to gossip, someone had to have worked the joint. How there was but one person who’d want such a decent man dead.
Silas. They say he’d grown to hate Benjamin Briggs as dreams of owning the farm himself began to fill his head. He assumed, by all rights, that the land would go to him if he married May. He didn’t know about law. He figured property just passed from man to man, as it always had, so he’d good reason to want Benjamin Briggs dead. Still, no one could say for sure what really happened. “Accidents” are like that. Plenty of suspicion, no investigation, case closed.
May was only a girl when Benjamin Briggs died—married to a boy just two years her senior, pregnant with his child, alone in a life that must have seemed turned on its head. And though Polly had asked in every way she could figure how it came to be that such a strange incident stole her grandfather from her, Mama would never say. Just stared, frightened-like, then turned away. Fact was, Polly had seen the back of her mother so many times that she had begun to think it was she who’d cursed the farm, for she was the seed Mama carried when everything went wrong.
She feels his weight in her dreams. So many nights, his acrid stink has covered her—blocking out her senses, taking her from the world she can see and hear and feel. His flesh is cold, his black hair prickly; he is sure and quiet. She does not scream or fight. As he pins her arms over her head with one hand, she looks beyond him. She hears a babble of voices over his chuffing. She accepts a thousand kindnesses raining down upon her from a crack in the ceiling. His beard scratches her cheek and her ear is filled with the wet roar of his breath. Still, her mind rises to pass throngs of angels misting round her like whirling
clouds. They spin. They call out. How they dance across the night sky. Though his thighs bear down on her, she will not be restrained. She cannot breathe or move, and yet, as she takes leave of the angels and travels miles and miles from the heavens, she imagines she is running through a field of wildflowers, her arms spread wide and her face turned to the sun. She is vanishing beneath him, dividing into twin spirits that join hands as they fly far away.
This is what nighttime feels like: an odd cleaving of body and soul as she goes where he cannot follow. But she is lonely and imagines herself walking, elbows brushing, with a friend. She conjures the sound of chatter and nonsense song. She will sing and dance the sun to its cradle. She will talk with the wisdom of an old towering oak. Her fingers will shimmer the air like leaves. She longs to tremble free of this dirty life. She is fifteen.
Quiet Polly, seated by the fire with her long straight frame carried high, awake now, her gaze steady. She thinks of the daylight hours. Day upon day, after coming home from helping Miss Laurel at the schoolhouse, she says little, save to offer assistance when the chore is too hard or heavy for her mother to carry out alone. Together, they fill the washing tub and carry pails of milk from the barn. Together they slop the pigs, toss grain to the chickens, fork hay into the manger. Seeing sweat at her mother’s brow as she churns the butter, the blue-gray circles that color the loose skin beneath her eyes, Polly takes the old dash from her callused hands and recommences the slow, resistant work. Ben is the doll both of them dress and feed. He smiles, laughs, sings, and his noise is a language from another land.
How she would like her father gone. The fire snaps. Her ears ring with the memory of Ben’s cries. She wants to hold the boy tight to her always—as if they could be one—but in her gut her hate glows like coals. How she would like her father gone.
Sister Charity
The City of Hope
Albion, Massachusetts
October 1842
I HAVE NEVER answered to a name from the World. I am Sister Charity and thus have I grown up in The City of Hope, setting down roots so deep in our soil that my sisters and brethren imagine me to be a tree of great strength. We are 118 all told, and I know something of most everyone—apart, of course, from the leering hired men who come from the World to help at harvest time and the stragglers who arrive with the bad weather and leave with the good, those we call “winter Shakers.” I did not arrive in childhood, like the orphans who come by the wagonload when one of our ministers buys their freedom from a home. Nor am I like the children whose mothers and fathers are alive and, not wishing to become believers themselves, abandon their young and must be flushed from our midst like crows from a cornfield. Though I am barely fifteen years old, I can shoulder the burdens and responsibilities of a believer twice my age. For I am different, and therein lies my gift.
I say this not because I think myself to be above my sisters—certainly not now, given my affliction. But I was delivered as an infant, less than a month old—left without kin on a stone step at one of the entrances to the meetinghouse. I never knew a relation of the flesh. It is my Shaker sisters who have informed every thought, every action, every skill I possess. Thus, besides my regular chores and the duties I perform preparing curatives in the healing room, I am often called to the aid of the Elder Brothers and Sisters of the Gathering Order and trusted to care for new girls without overly indulging their anguish. It falls to me to wash and cut their hair and pull their dresses—tatty or fine—over their heads in exchange for a simple striped blue cotton frock in summer, a brown woolen one in winter. It is my duty to unlatch lockets from around their necks and pry beloved dolls from their clutches, for no such vanity or plaything from the World is allowed by our kind. This may seem hard-hearted but I ask: What good does it do a girl to hold on to a heart-shaped keepsake of her flesh parents who must, by our covenant, be banished from her thoughts? And what joy is it to play at mothering a doll when, as well by our covenant, she can never in her life with us experience such a bond?
As to my mothering, it would have been truer to our way for me to have been raised by all the sisters present at the time of my appearance—fed by some, bathed by others, soothed and clothed and learned by more of our number still—but because I was an infant I was placed in the care of a single believer. Thus it came to be that my upbringing was entrusted to Sister Agnes—as she was known in those early years—a believer held in great esteem by everyone in our settlement.
A glance at my caretaker—she is Elder Sister Agnes now—would not reveal the tenderness she allowed herself to visit upon me when I was young. Her blue eyes shine hard and are quick to spot clumsiness and an idle hand. And though she is far from aged, she combs back her graying hair in a tight bun and creases her brow such that it seems permanently set into an expression of disapproval. Who could imagine her chafed red hands caressing my baby cheek, or her upright bearing crouched low behind a cupboard in a game of hide-and-seek?
Yet in the privacy of our rooms, she sometimes sang and bounced me on her lap with the devotion a flesh mother might have shown a beloved son or daughter. She was patient as she taught me to dance our dances and sing our songs, the better that I might worship well in weekly Meeting. When I was older, she told me stories about the first Visionists, wishing that I might someday witness the miracle of Mother Ann’s chosen instruments for myself. Of course, I do not know what she truly thought of me, nor what she might feel about me now. And, to be sure, for every one moment of intimacy there were ten, twenty, one hundred when she appeared driven only to raise me up as a dedicated believer. I was the chore assigned to her.
I suppose that when one knows nothing of one’s origins or whether a soul on this Earth truly cares, it is natural to scavenge what love one can find—watching, waiting, always on guard for the dropped morsel. I read and read again the hearts of those around me and so find sustenance in the more generous aspects of their natures. That is how I have come to know that there exists a softness beneath the hard attitude my caretaker presents. She can indeed be formidable, but she is not so dissimilar from the many others in our settlement who carry secret wounds. Often as not, those who find this place seek it out for the balm of its routines, the haven a life of unquestioning worship can provide.
In near twenty years of service to Mother Ann, Elder Sister Agnes has become perhaps the most well-regarded sister ever chosen to oversee those of us who find their calling in The City of Hope. She did not always reside here, having first made herself known in the place we now call Wisdom’s Valley. A young bride, bruised and rejected by all of her kin—she told me about her past. When she was sixteen, she married the only boy she’d ever known—a farmer’s son from down the road. They were happy at first—as a steadfast Shaker, she had difficulty admitting it, but it was the truth and my eldress does not lie. Time passed and her husband inherited his father’s farm. He needed children, he told her; she’d best get on with birthing them. Elder Sister Agnes tried to give him what he wanted, but her body forced out the fruit of his seed the way winter’s frost heaves up stones from a field. She could bear him nothing but misery so he began to hit her. It didn’t matter to him that her milk money kept the farm going. It didn’t matter that the yards of palm bonnet trim she braided bought them food and fuel and grain all the year long. What mattered to him was that she could not give him a child.
I cannot recall what prompted my eldress to tell me all this. I can only think that she did so because some sadness in me reminded her of her own difficulties. I have never been a popular sister. Respected and favored by the more senior members of the community, I enjoy a position that is unique. But such good standing comes at a cost, rendering me the object of jealousy among the younger sisters. The snubs have always been small. Taking my place at the dining table, I feel the sting when the sister next to me turns purposefully—if by minuscule degree—away from me. Picking up my knitting, I am jostled so that the skein falls to the floor and I am left to scramble after its unspooling yarn
. There are whispers and sudden silences when I enter the schoolroom. I am that strangest of creatures: a celebrated outsider.
My eldress is not blind to my troubles. Especially when I was young, she wanted me to know that cruelty can be overcome. She said that she ran from her husband only to find that every neighbor’s door was closed to her. She sought shelter from her mother and father only to find that they, having thought themselves rid of a costly mouth to feed, would have nothing to do with her.
“Do you see how threadbare is the family tie?” she asked me, for no story was worth telling unless it had a lesson to teach. “I had heard of other women who’d gone over to our kind. At least there would be food and a roof over my head. At least I would be safe.”
When she shuffled, cold and battered, into the village of Watervliet—it was known by its World name then—she had little idea of the refuge she would find. The Shakers welcomed her. They fed her, dressed her welts and gashes, gave her clothes to wear and a bed to sleep in. Then, most glorious of all, they offered her confession, and when she was done, they made her to understand that her barrenness was a gift, that to bear children—to engage in carnality of any kind—was the utmost sin. They took the thing she most despised in herself and made it her salvation.
In these later years, Elder Sister Agnes has won admiration not by virtue of her warmth or humor but rather by her devotion. She demands that her charges strive to mirror her zeal, and her expectations of me in particular amount to nothing less than that I should follow in her footsteps and become a prominent eldress—with Mother’s blessing of course. To this end, she taught me our work long before I was of the age most sisters have attained when first they come to live with us. I was barely as tall as the back of one of our chairs before I learned to spin the swift and wind our newly dyed yarns into skeins. Standing high on a stool, I washed pot after pot in the kitchens and, in the dairy, strained cheese enough to feed an army. The brethren made me a tiny ironing board so that I could labor at my eldress’s side in the laundry, pressing handkerchiefs and napkins. In spring, summer, and early fall, I followed along as the older sisters collected herbs and flowers from the fields into white tow sheets for drying—only one specimen each day, lest the plants be mingled by mistake and cause a fatal error in the mixing of remedies. In a game devised to teach me the work I now perform so well, I chanted the names of the leaves, buds, and tree barks, matching them with the curatives they would become. “Touch-me-not, lady’s slipper, wild hyssop,” I sang. “Dropsy, nervous headache, worms.”
The Visionist: A Novel Page 2