Mama did, too, but then, she always had. She’d lived so long with the shame of being helpless, she would never raise a hand to him now. She’d seen what he was capable of, understood that the hitting and the screaming and the visits in the night—they were not the worst of what Silas had in him. Polly let out a long-held breath and closed her eyes. She wished it was different, wished there was someone she could turn to. But he’d beaten them all. All, save one.
She rose and walked out of the house into the night air. Inside the barn, whispering soothing words to calm the startled animals, she felt her way through the darkness, tapping her hand along the sides of the wooden pens and unbolting the gates as she went. There was little more she could do for the weary beasts. She hadn’t time to flush them out and it would be noisy, besides. She could only hope they’d take their chance at freedom when the time came. In a stall at the back, the old bay nickered as Polly reached out to stroke his velvet nose. He might have been a fine horse, had he been allowed—as Benjamin Briggs intended—to be raised for young May to ride about town. But Polly’s grandfather Briggs died just a few weeks after buying the colt, and so Silas whipped him into plowing stony pastures just as soon as the animal could budge the blade. Were it not for May’s taking trouble in secret to dress his lash marks, blanket him in winter, and feed him warm gruel when his lungs rattled, he’d barely have lived out his first year. Were he not Silas’s only horse, he’d have been given his rest long before now.
Even so, with May in particular, the bay was gentle and loyal. More than once, Polly had seen him prick up his ears and run back and forth along the paddock fence, snorting and whinnying whenever he heard Silas yelling. He was May’s horse—just as Benjamin Briggs had meant for him to be—and he seemed to know that if they were to survive the curse they shared, they would need to watch out for each other.
“Quiet now,” Polly whispered into his ear. “You’ll let me harness you up easy, all right?” Groping for the leather bridle, the collar, and the breeching, taking each from its hook, she laid the pieces across the horse’s dark, sleek body and fastened them round. Then she backed him out from his stall and led him to the wagon. In no time, she had the traces hitched, the bit loosened, and the horse muzzled, half his handsome face immersed in a feed bag.
“There, boy,” Polly said as she patted his warm neck. “I’ll be back soon enough.”
In the house, she moved about surely and softly, gathering clothing, bedcovers, anything she could pile into her arms and carry out to the wagon. There was some brown bread and hard cheese on a shelf in the kitchen. She wrapped them in a piece of cloth alongside a few apples and stuffed the food into a basket. Then she took it outside, packed it, and tried to imagine if there was anything she had missed. Walking slowly back to the kitchen, she counted out the tasks that lay before her. She would collect Ben, wake her mother from where she slumbered in the rocker by the fire, give her a moment to bid farewell to the place where she’d grown up. Then…the horse, the wagon, the road out. Her head spun just trying to keep up with a future she could not begin to envision, and she took a deep breath to steady her nerves before walking through the door.
Moments later, Polly was ready. “Mama,” she said, touching her lightly. Dressed in a heavy shawl with Ben asleep over her shoulder, Polly stood beside her mother holding the old lamp, her wrist aching under the weight of its wooden base and etched-glass shade. Mama opened her eyes and cried out with a start.
“Hush,” Polly said, putting a finger to her lips. “Bring your things and come silent.” Mama nodded. Nothing more needed to be said. She seemed to understand that Polly was leading them away.
Keeping the light low, Polly watched her mother rise, ready herself, and move soundlessly into the parlor. She walked past the shelves, running her fingers lightly over pictures, bowls, a locked wooden box—objects so fiercely kept it was as though they existed under some sort of a protective charm. Dusted free of grease and ash, even in the most desperate times, they had never been sold for food or clothing. They remind Mama that she was loved, Polly thought. I remind her that she was beaten and forced. How she wished she could be an easier souvenir.
She watched as Mama reached the far corner of the room, hesitating before she bent down quick and slipped her hand into a gap between an old cupboard and the wall. From it she pulled a thin envelope and tucked it into the folds of her dress. Then she continued her silent tally of all that had bound her to this place—the house given form by her father’s hands, the kitchen where she had lost so much life. Shadows flickered dimly on the walls. It was, Polly thought as she opened the door, as if Mama were already a ghost in this place.
“Take Ben,” she said, struggling on the threshold with the lamp and the shawl and the sleeping child, near to dropping them all. “Take him to the wagon and wait.” As Mama embraced the boy’s warm bundle, Polly slid her arm gently out from under and clutched the lamp with two hands.
“It’s all right, Mama,” she said. Standing in the bracing cold under a bright curl of moon, every inch of her existed for one sole purpose: to save her mother, her brother, and herself. But there was something else she had to do. “Stay,” she said, pushing them towards the wagon and turning to run back into the house.
She passed through the kitchen and towards the room in which her father lay sleeping. In the doorway, she stopped, shielded the lamp’s dim light with her hand, and breathed deeply. Why had she come back inside? She approached his bed. She had never seen him like this, so vulnerable. She could do anything in this moment. She realized, staring down at his ravaged face, that he was hers. She squinted hard. He had once been a child. His cheek had been smooth and soft. His pudgy fingers had struggled to pick up acorns just as Ben’s had. How could he have turned so mean? Her hands shook around the base of the Argand.
Though there was no time to stand by his side a moment longer, she found herself rooted to the spot. The heat and smell of the lamp made her dizzy. Would she be able to keep Mama and Ben safe? Surely such a man would track them down. Not because he loved them or would miss them, but because he wanted to own them as much as he did the dilapidated farm. He would hunt them if only to prove that much. Her eyes traveled the length of him, down the buttons of his ragged blue shirt, over stains on his soiled work pants, tallying his gnarled, yellow-nailed toes. To stare at him without fear was to see his power drained away. How easy it was to feel nothing. Her mind cleared, its thoughts unfolding logically with each steadying breath.
Suddenly he coughed, bolting up wild-eyed to stare at her a moment before falling back on the bed. Polly jumped, stifling a scream with one hand as the lamp slid from the other. It fell, her father flopping onto his side away from her, asleep again in the silence before the crash. The sound of breaking glass was all she could hear as flames rose up in a roar from the puddle of spilled oil. Death come easy, said a voice inside her head, her body frozen until the time for doubting had passed.
She turned and scrambled through the house and across the yard to where Mama and Ben were waiting. She heard Mama gasp; the horse shifted and tossed his head so violently that Polly had a time of it loosening the feed bag and untying the reins. She looked back towards the barn, where she could hear the animals panicking at the smell of smoke. She wanted to help them. Run! she screamed in her mind, hoisting herself atop the driver’s bench and slapping the leather reins over the old bay’s back. The cart jerked into motion. There was nothing more she could do.
She prayed the blaze would fade once it had consumed her father, but a single glance told her she’d lit more than a funeral pyre. How quickly the past is made gone. Fire roared up through the windows, the inferno wrapping round the house as she drove away. In the fury of flames Polly could see the blackness of her father’s gaze just as she could feel the force of his will in the suck of their heat. She could find in her heart no space for pity.
Later, there would be time for them to decide what to do. Perhaps there would be mill work in one of t
he bigger towns, for the noisy factories seemed hungry for young women like herself, girls with nimble hands and sharp eyes. Mama might be able to find employment as a domestic, once she became well again. Polly shook off the hope that they would encounter much in the way of charity. If life had taught her anything it was that trusting Fate to human kindness was like leaning on the wind.
With the turning of the cart track just ahead, she allowed herself to look back once more. The fire was hypnotizing, but then…Were her eyes playing tricks? Though she could not be sure, she thought she saw a smaller blaze spat from the larger, moving, running, falling to the ground and rolling over and over, then up and running again. She closed her eyes against the thought, for surely it was a mere twist of the mind. The flames had been too hot. Not even a man possessed of such evil as her father could have survived. Could he?
She faced forward and concentrated on the road ahead. The horse was blowing hard, breath steaming from his chocolate-colored nostrils; every so often when he turned his head at the sound of dry leaves whispering in the trees, he revealed the whites of his eyes and a flowering of foam at his mouth. The old boy wants to leave as sorely as we do, Polly thought. If only the way were not so difficult.
Cold. It was cold on the wooden cart bench where she sat bone to bone next to Mama, Ben still asleep in his mother’s lap. They turned onto the Post Road, a worn track leading away from town. It was several miles to a neighboring cluster of houses round a small common where townsfolk grazed their fat cattle and held meetings when there was something of a communal nature to discuss. How separately they had lived from the people of this world. Polly went but once a week, to bargain for what they could afford by offering what they could live without. Eggs, butter, cheese—during the good months, they could spare a little of each, enough for dried beans, a pot of lamp oil, a jar of pitch molasses. Otherwise, she only left the farm to help Miss Laurel with the children who attended school on the outskirts of town in a building much like the one they were passing now, dark and empty as it loomed over the road. Her father allowed her to go so that she might learn how to do her sums. But the count is easy when you have next to nothing, so Polly told him one thing and did another, losing her troubles in the task of teaching the younger boys and girls how to read. She would miss the hours she had spent with Miss Laurel. She would miss the books filled with stories of a world so much bigger and more wondrous than her own.
Silver clouds blew across the sky. In blackness, the countryside around them disappeared until the thin moon, unveiled, revealed once more the track, the trees, the school, the slant of the horse’s haunches, all of it bathed in a spectral wash. Am I really here? Polly wondered. Her father’s fiery ghost was at her heels. Have I left my life forever?
She shuddered, pushed closer to her mother. They rolled through the town, and in the windows of the neat houses no lamps were lit; not even the bark of a dog pierced their invisibility. Polly felt they were slipping away from all she had known. Who was she now? They had no family she could recall, no friends to take them in. They were reckoned to be folks best left unto themselves. Who were they to be left unto now? These were night thoughts, she knew, the kind that come when sleep will not, the questions no one can answer, least of all a young girl in the dark.
She knew about the dark; Mama had left her to face it alone for years. Polly had often wondered: Was this her punishment for failing Ben? Her mother never stopped Silas, would not even try. This Polly learned early when, the morning after that first endless night, she asked her mother: “Why am I bleeding?” She was standing barefoot in her chemise, the sun outside just a slit on the horizon. “He climbed into my bed and hurt me in the night.”
Mama turned slowly from scraping the sides of a porridge pot and stared. She took a small step to steady herself. Polly recalled that, for what seemed an eternity to a ten-year-old girl, the only sound in the kitchen was the bubble of boiling water set up for washing in a cauldron over the fire. Then, a faint rustle of skirts and Mama went back to her scrubbing—harder, faster.
“You’d best not speak of this again,” she said, breathless from her exertions. “Little girls think all sorts of things are true when they’re not, and you’ve nothing to fear from something that only happens in your head.”
A thin trickle of blood ran between Polly’s thighs. This is not happening in my head, she thought angrily. But then she remembered how terrifying were her father’s rages—how murderous was the look in his eye when he’d tried to drown Ben—and she spoke of it no more. From then on, when he came to her, she lost herself in other thoughts—good dreams to cover the bad, visions of saviors, scenes of heavenly beauty, the sense that she was being lifted away by gentle hands, taken to a golden land and laid upon cotton clouds. She came to know the place well, to trust that its gates would remain open to her if ever she should need to enter. In this way, Polly heeded Mama throughout every dark sleep and lost herself not in the nightmare but in the dream it forced her to summon.
The wagon lurched. Her mother’s head bobbed against her shoulder, and Polly could feel the tears. She wondered why Mama was crying. For the farm? For the father who had been killed? For the boy she married? It could not be for the man he became.
“Was he right, Mama?” Polly asked, clucking at the bay. “The farm. Was it his or no?”
Mama sniffed and raised her head. “Was it his?” she said. “His? No. It wasn’t his. Nothing was ever his.”
“Well, then whose was it?” Polly asked. “Whose is it?”
Her mother looked around as though realizing for the first time that she was free. If she felt any relief, however, it was fleeting, for Polly saw her face cloud over as she receded once more into her shawl. “That’s a matter to be settled once we’re…once you and Ben are safe.”
Polly urged the horse to move faster. “Once Ben and I are safe?” she asked. “What about you? You’ll be safe too, right? You’ll be…”
“Hush, girl,” her mother said. “You don’t need to worry about me now. You did a big thing back there—perhaps more than you intended. It’s you I’ll be thinking about for the moment, ’til we’re sure what’s what.”
Polly nearly pulled the bay up short, but her mother leaned over and pushed forward on her hands to keep the reins loose. “If it’s the fire you mean,” Polly said, her voice rising in panic, “I don’t even know…”
“Quiet!” Mama snapped. “Now you say nothing about the fire, you understand? That’s for me…” She paused. “That’s for me to worry about.”
Polly was not used to the tone her mother had used. She’d spoken sharply, with force. She’d said she wanted both of her children safe. How long had it been since Polly had felt protected? Could she trust Mama to make things right?
She could turn to no place in her mind and find peace. She hoped Silas was dead; she feared she had killed him. Should she expect the constables round every bend? Surely a fire-reader would come to the property, a man whose job it would be to parse the devastation. He would pull from the wreckage a record of the past. Perhaps he would conclude that the blaze simply happened as such things often did—an accident of shattered glass and lamp oil. But if he knew from truth, then he would see it plain as day: her hatred spelled out in smoke and ash. Could her mother keep her safe from such scrutiny?
A red fox screamed—a horrid, womanly sound from somewhere deep in a ravine. There will be time, she thought as she tried to allow the road away from the farm to erase her worries. There will be time for a better life once things have settled. She yanked on the reins to slow the horse as they reached a pitted stretch where the ruts were deep. The carriage swayed and creaked, rolling sideways then down, its wheels at the mercy of the frozen track. She feared they would tip and be stuck here in the cold, for the way was new to her and she did not know where the nearest town might lie. But then the road became dry and smooth again and the horse quickened his pace as though he too wanted to flee the unforgiving ground.
Hours
later—it must have been hours, though Polly could not be sure—they paused to let the old bay rest in the shelter of a stand of giant white pines. With trembling hands Polly handed round the hard hunks of brown bread and cheese. In the vast darkness slowly lifting, they had come to a crossroads, but she found herself too tired to think which way to turn. A new land surrounded them, and the hills and craggy ravines that had loomed so menacingly were behind them now. How long had she been driving? How far they must have come. One way revealed a road that seemed to lead into emptiness, but as she peered down the other, she could make out the white lines of neat, straight fences and tall houses sitting upright in the gloom like well-behaved children.
“Where are we, Mama?” Polly asked. Her mother raised her head but refrained from answering, her features thickening as they often did when she resigned herself to performing a difficult task. When finally she spoke, it was as much to herself as to anyone else.
“Far from where he can find us,” Mama said, reaching over to take the reins. Yanking them sharply to one side, she clucked the horse forward and they pulled gracelessly onto the track once more. Polly watched her mother direct the cart down the road that led towards the tight little settlement. Her mind was numb with cold and fatigue, but when a warm breeze washed round her body she knew the spirits were close. She could feel their featherlike caresses.
Go unto my mother, Polly pleaded silently. Minister unto my mother.
A cock crowed. A bell sounded in the gloom of early morning. Mama had taken charge. How did she know where to go? Polly nestled in closer. Ben was waking now as dawn began to brighten the sky behind a slant of frosted hillside, and she pulled him to her as she stared across the stubble of fields puzzling the valley before them. What lay ahead she could not know, only that every creak and turn of their wheels put the past farther behind.
The Visionist: A Novel Page 4