One could imagine that I was young for such toil but I never felt it to be so. The chores I performed made me a stronger believer. That, over all things, is what I desired. Purity. Industry. Chastity. Faith. Kindness. Union. Elder Sister Agnes may have been stern in her teachings but she was never unkind. Indeed, I do not think that she was capable of such behavior towards me. For though I would never discuss the matter openly, my arrival brought with it the mantle of motherhood as much as it did the opportunity to fashion a perfect Shaker. I was a gift to her. I was her gift to them.
I knew myself to be fortunate in this regard, for on occasion, I saw cruelty operated upon my younger sisters by those who should have known better—older believers who came to us with twisted hearts, believers in name only, whose souls had already been too much infected by the evils of the World. One such history has lodged in my memory. A sickly sister named Clarissa—she had attained perhaps twenty-four years in age—took into her charge a young novitiate answering to the World name of Daisy. The child, an orphan, had come from privileged circumstances and bore all the marks of an easy life. She was well fed and clean, and Sister Clarissa—who had never before known luxury—often warmed her cold hands by thrusting them down the back of Sister Daisy’s dress, and sat across from her on bitter winter evenings with her feet buried beneath the child’s skirts, resting them in the heat of the young girl’s generous lap. As Sister Clarissa became increasingly ill—her eyes burning feverishly bright and her skin taking on an unruly flush—the meaner corners of her soul revealed themselves and her charge bore the brunt.
One day, she took up young Daisy’s hand. “Such a plump little bun!” she exclaimed. “I wonder what are its juices?” A pair of scissors lay nearby, and snatching them up, she pressed the sharp edge against the child’s skin and forced a crimson line of blood. It was shocking to behold, yet as Daisy was brave and thought this to be a test of her nature, she neither flinched nor complained, and I remember thinking well of her for it.
Not so Sister Clarissa. “Silly little toad!” she cried. “Did I not affect you?” Daisy remained silent, peering into the livid face of her caretaker. I left in search of Elder Sister Agnes, who came upon the scene soon enough and reprimanded the sickly one sharply. Nothing more was said. Indeed, Sister Clarissa died of her illness soon thereafter and the believers excused her strange behavior as nothing more than an unfortunate symptom. Thus was her passing noted with due respect, though it was generally felt that in death she had entered a realm better able to bear with her singularities.
I speak of this only because there are times when the deep goodness of believers is fragile as the wing of a damselfly. Sister Clarissa was damaged before her arrival in our midst. I, on the other hand, have felt neither spiritual nor material hardship in my life, and so I count it as my work to accept and forgive. I see that every day, we give and work and worship, humbling ourselves through deep and heartfelt bows before the eternal spirits we encounter in Meeting. All of this we do to subdue our carnal natures, to conquer that which is the inevitable result of time spent living alongside the filth of the World, to create a second Heaven here on Earth. Not every soul can withstand such sacrifice.
It does me little good, however, to idle in the past—especially when I am faced with such troubles as plague me at present. Last week, as I was washing, the first blossoming bared itself, curled into a pink, fern-shaped welt over the ribs on my left side. As I have never known such decoration—no believer had ever come to me in the healing room and asked me to erase her skin—the sight surprised me. With the passing of every hour, the whorls became redder and soon covered my stomach and the tops of my legs. When finally they reached up my neck and over my high collar, I could hide them no longer.
They frightened me—they were so clearly Other. I could find no name for the condition, no mention of it in the medical journals we have kept for decades. I tried to calm the lesions myself, smoothing pastes fashioned from the pounded leaves of figwort and sheep sorrel. I wished my white skin to return, but the sores would not leave and they have since become angrier—strange paisley forms swirling about without reason. Indeed, not long after they made their appearance, young Sister Columbine screamed at the sight of a perfect sample snaking across my hand and told our Elder Sister Agnes that I had been visited by the Devil. Such a thought did not please my eldress and her orders were sharp.
I wonder what it is that disturbs her more: the hideousness of my infection or the evil of the power that has so defaced me. Can it be the contrast I present to the miracles that seem to have blessed so many of our neighboring settlements? It is the time of the Visionists after all, and though we have yet to welcome one here in The City of Hope, their songs, dances, even the strange drawings they pen—are known to us all. Whatever the explanation for my eldress’s disgust, she has separated me from my sisters and confined me to the healing room for a time uncertain in length. I have never resided in the place where I spend so many hours curing others. I wonder, Who will tend to me?
The answer was not long in coming. When I had been quarantined for three days, Elder Sister Agnes paid me a visit. She found me alone, for no sister dared rest in my presence. Even my meals were left outside the door, my dinner bell a sharp knock followed by a scurry of footsteps down the hall. I rested in a long, narrow cradle bed, its slanted wooden sides up close against my arms. I lay as if already inside my coffin. I may have been learned for my age, but I found burgeoning womanhood to be a trial and had already suffered many humiliations of the flesh. How I longed for a simpler time, beating my very breasts to push them back inside me! Now, to add to my shame, the Devil wrote upon my skin when it pleased him and I felt despair descend more heavily upon me with every passing day.
Elder Sister Agnes has come to help me, I thought. She has faith enough for the both of us. Can her goodness prevail where mine has failed? Has she come to drive evil from my being? Does she stand before me because she alone believes in my virtue? She looked barely a moment at me before she spoke.
“You cannot know it,” she said, straightening the bottles of tinctures already in perfect alignment along each shelf. “But in the days since you have been ill, I have spent many a beseeching hour in prayer. I find myself full of wretched self-doubt, for surely I have erred in my teachings. Why else would you have been possessed in such a manner?”
She came closer. “If this,” she said, pointing at my mottled skin, “be a sign of evil within you, then how can I not bear the blame? I raised you. Your faith has grown from the seeds I planted. If your goodness be false and rotten, then how can my own be true?”
I saw tears falling down her cheeks before she spun quickly away, drying them on a corner of her apron then breathing out as she set straight her shoulders. I had never seen her cry and it twisted my heart to know that I was the cause of her sadness and thus could not comfort her. She turned once more to look at me.
“It shall be my baptism to cleanse you myself,” she said. “I will not be afraid of whatever it is that afflicts you. I will not lose you to the Devil just as I will not lose myself.”
Listening to her make twins of our miseries, I felt sure she could cure me. I did not understand what she meant to do, for I had tried everything I could think of and still the markings left their stain. But I did not question it when she asked me to rise from my sickbed and remove first my apron, neckerchief, and white linen cap, then my collar and my worsted dress, then my winter petticoat, my knit stockings, and, finally, my chemise so that I stood naked before her. And though I wept for the shame of it—while in my sickbed, I had lain fully dressed until the tolling of the night bell told me that my brethren and sisters were readying themselves for bed—she did not look away or attempt to assuage my humiliation. Quite the opposite, for my condition caused her to gasp. Winding across my body, the sinister loops and fronds were frightening—in their strangeness of course, but also in their beauty, for they looked painted upon me with a most delicate, if determined, ha
nd.
She pointed to a table on which she had placed two sheets and directed me to lie between them. I concealed myself gladly. With a strange silver tool she looked long into my eyes, my ears, my throat for signs of the Devil’s presence. I imagined she might glimpse wicked spirits in the cavities of my flesh like maggots in a corpse. I feared she might speckle me with leeches or try to cup and blister the bad out from under my skin, but I needn’t have worried. Instead, with the sheet still covering me, she ran her hands down the length of each of my arms and legs, first in stroking movements then clenching and unclenching as though she were molding me out of clay. She pressed her fingers round my stomach and tapped along my ribs as I have seen the brethren do along a bend of wood when they wish to make certain their work is sound. Then, in a motion that I found most difficult to endure, she bent her head to my narrow chest and laid her ear upon my bosom.
If Elder Sister Agnes did not scare the Devil, then she succeeded in scaring me. I could hear her breath—it came in short exhalations—and I felt its warmth blow over my ribs and stomach as tears ran down the sides of my face and wetted the sheet beneath my head. At length, a sob choked forth from within me and she rose with a look of some confusion. It was as though I had awoken her from a dream and she moved quickly away, walking the length of the healing room, lost in thought. Such was her intensity that I imagined she had found the Devil after all, that he lurked somewhere deep within me, beyond the reach of even so devout a believer. Certain now that I would be sent away, alone for the rest of my days never to see The City of Hope again, I began to cry.
Elder Sister Agnes approached me once more. Placing her hands in the clefts where my arms met my chest, she lifted me to sitting. I could not stop my sobbing—it came out in great hiccups—but she was tender now and careful not to let the sheet fall from my body as she perched herself on the edge of the table and wrapped her arms around me. I had not been held like this for many a year and the shock of it stopped my crying more quickly than if a hand had covered my mouth and nose and I had ceased to breathe. She held me and rubbed my head, ran her palm down my back over my long hair, which I had loosened the better for her to pore over the all of me. I sensed I was melting from the warmth that flooded my insides and I wondered if this was goodness spreading through me, fighting back the Devil and his evil hand.
I held fast to my eldress when I felt her begin to pull away from our embrace. I wanted to make last the glow that had enveloped me when she took me in her arms. But she had remedies to prepare, and as I listened to the slop of water from a nearby bucket, I searched within that I might replace my need with Mother Ann’s presence. I prayed silently that one as faithful and true as Elder Sister Agnes could rid me of my cross. From what I knew of the circumstances surrounding her own mortification, I imagined that one who holds so fast to perfection would have found it difficult to confess her sins and thus purge them from her soul. Only a trial similar in hardship could rid me of my markings, but I felt ready.
I remember mostly the sharp stubble of the brush as she passed it round and round, circling over my body until the prickling scream of my skin faded into numbness. When she had scoured near every inch of me, she left without a word and I slept. I had held myself tightly for days and now, to feel the sting of the brush’s bristles was to believe that I had been cleansed of all signs of the Devil. In my dreams, I thought I saw straight through to Elder Sister Agnes’s sad heart, for surely she could not have hurt me so much without suffering herself.
I awoke alone in sheets that were stippled with blood. Rising from the table, I pulled the covering away but it clung to my wounds as though armored with the hooked thorns of spring meadow rose. My reflection in the looking glass stared hazily back at me and I felt I might faint, for beneath the angry red rings made by Elder Sister Agnes’s brush, the markings decorated me still. In the flickering of the candle I viewed my naked self, unhealed and stamped with whirls of paisley that appeared golden in the dancing flame. They dared me to find the good in Mother Ann’s strange teaching. They dared me to see that She—The Woman Clothed With The Sun—had allowed the Devil into my soul as a test of my devotion and that I could prove myself only by carrying the burden bravely. I understood then, as I blew out the candle and stood in darkness, that to attempt to deny my cross, to crawl out from under the weight of it, was only to render it heavier still.
Polly
IT HAD BEEN but a few hours since her father had threatened them. Had he come at Mama with a shovel? Crept in and dropped a fieldstone so close to Ben as he sat on the floor that his fingers had near been crushed? Was this the night he’d swiped at them all with a broken bottle and left a gash the length of a hare’s ear on Mama’s arm? Polly often found it difficult to separate his rages one from the next.
But as bad as those times were, this night frightened Polly more. Mister Fancy Coat, her father’s strange elation, his sudden suspicions…Things are going to change, she thought. Her father had a plan, she was sure of it. He’d as good as spelled it out: rid the farm of the three of them, then sell it. Death come easy here, he’d said, and Polly knew he was right.
Why, when she thought on it now, she had seen Silas leaning on a gatepost not so very long ago, talking to an odd-looking man who was all puffed up and dressed in frilly city clothes. Mister Fancy Coat: a mill agent sure as she was a drunkard’s daughter. She’d watched her father point towards the fast-running river that poured down the wooded hillside—the only forest of white pine, chestnut, ash, oak, and sugar trees for miles around. The water emptied out into a cold, clear pond at the other end of which a dam quickened the flow once more before it slowed to a meander and lost itself in distant fields.
Polly imagined the future. Close to the Post Road and surrounded by land well suited to the slow birth of a working town, their farm was the perfect site for a paper or textile mill. She remembered seeing the stranger nod and clap Silas on the back, his coattails whipping in the wind like the trappings of a well-dressed scarecrow. Mister Fancy Coat. He was no farmer.
Once a welcoming place, now, like stink round pigs, her family’s farm echoed only the poor, dirty lives of those it sheltered. The house her grandfather Briggs left behind had long passed into another world. His fine parlor might have been filled with company if ever Polly’s mother and father had visitors. But with no one venturing out their way, the silent space felt to her like a trinket shop full of bric-a-brac from a past life. The odd setting of pretty china, a brass compass, her grandfather’s books, many of them moved up into the attic as much to stop cold from seeping through the cracks as to keep Silas from using the volumes for kindling. These were the things she studied when there was a moment’s peace, the few objects her mother had managed to save from the happier days of her childhood.
Grandfather Briggs’s snake-rail fences were still standing, though there were gaps where wooden posts had fallen and never been set right, and along the tracks he made neat, milkweed and juniper had staked their claim. Except in the plots where Silas planted his weed-choked crops, Nature had begun to take back the land, and everywhere, even inside the little house, Polly sensed the encroaching wildness. Her father struggled behind the seasons as he did his plow: It was all he could do to sow corn and alfalfa soon enough after the long winter to replenish their stores and keep the animals fed. When he drank too much and forgot to read the skies, whole pastures of cut hay lay to rot in the drenching summer rains. And though he knew enough to let his fields go fallow from time to time, he grew impatient with thinking about what had been sown where, planting the earth over and over until he had laid waste its soil and was left with nothing but stunted stalks and patchy grass that refused, in spite of his fury, to grow full. He exhausted Nature as he exhausted everyone else.
The farm was overgrown or empty; there was no between. Polly’s bedroom—where, as a child, her mother had nestled under soft covers each night—was now a cold, barren space beneath the eaves where she and Ben slept on narrow pallets f
ull of night-biters and ancient barley straw. In the great room just below, Silas and her mother shared a bed and a beaten old wardrobe, little more. Piece by piece, they had sold off most of Mama’s furniture and possessions, and what was left—save for the treasure in the parlor—was crude, overused, and out of date, made largely from worn wood, threadbare cloth, and old straw.
Some things, of course, changed little with time and circumstance, like the heavy old cooking pots and the gun above the door and the blades, scoops, and prongs of the farming tools her father left leaning against the gray clapboards. But Polly knew that her house had lived two lives. All summer long, it weathered and opened to the warming sun. Now, buffeted by cold winds and surrounded by a glittering frost every morning, it seemed to shrink against the coming winter, and Polly felt the beams bracing themselves, as did she.
Shaking her head free from thoughts of the past, she snapped to and stared about, unsure of what to do. Slowly, it came to her. Silas would be the death of them, whether tomorrow or the next day. Poor enough, drunk enough, greedy enough, mean enough—he was a poison fruit grown ripe. Silas would be the death of them. She knew it.
The Visionist: A Novel Page 3