The Visionist: A Novel

by Rachel Urquhart

  Heat from tallow candles shoved into raw potatoes on the shelf that circled the room stifled any hope of drawing an easy breath. We populated a mere hole in the ground, a sort of square-sided paupers’ grave—just as close, just as undiscriminating.

  Trapped in such crude surroundings, the senses come under siege—the grit of smoke and pit dust assault the mouth; the smell of drink and puke and urine and sweat offend the nose; the sound of bullying and boasting, of roaring and the ripping of flesh, of bones being crushed, of pained whimpers and growls—how they deaden the ear; the push of the crowd leaning in and in, their thirst for violence, the absence of humanity, the malevolent pull of one’s own curiosity—whether physical or atmospheric, these are the evils that rage against one’s ability to feel. Even disgust is temporarily suspended.

  And what, you might ask, of that fifth sense? What is it that occupies the eye in a pit fight? The stuff of such nightmares that I have learned to watch the battles in bits, never as a whole. The faces of the men, excited to heights of ecstasy better suited to a grunting toss under the roof of a brothel; the rippling muscles of the dog as he wrestles to overthrow his challenger; the bullish wild chuck using his proximity to the ground to flip his opponent, his overwhelming solidity of mass, his teeth and raking claws making again and again for the dog’s neck and stomach; the tenacity of life when a quick death is by far the better end.

  In this case, the old dog eventually succumbed; the woodchuck barely breathing but alive and in shreds. The spectators’ fun was over, and as quickly as they had filled the earthen theater, they abandoned it. All but one. A lone observer, long and lean of build, with a face so deeply lined you’d have thought the years had been whittled into his cheeks. He wore a solemn expression—indeed, it was clear he’d shared no part in the other men’s rapture. I watched him approach the dying chuck, wondering if there wasn’t something strange about him. Why would he linger in so damned a spot?

  A single sharp report provided me an answer. Smoke trailing from the end of his pistol, the rag he’d used to catch the blood-spatter hung limp in his left hand. Shaken, I asked, “Why?”

  “Must have put a mercy bullet in a hundred animals since I been coming here,” he said, looking up from the corpse. “Can’t stop the fight when torture’s all that moves some men. But the creature unlucky enough to be left breathing? Well, I can make short work of his misery.”

  He turned to climb the stairs, and I had no words with which to call him back. No reason either. A man who suffers through fight after fight only to shoot the last animal standing—that was as strange a sort of goodness as ever I’d known. Making my way past the carnage, I ascended to the bar where the keep indicated to me with a quick nod that the somber Mister Peeles, having pocketed his pistol and cloth, had taken his usual seat.

  I sat down next to him, ordering what I considered to be an essential and well-earned drink.

  “Stake you to the same?” I asked.

  “Lead a man to whiskey these days and you’ll have no trouble making him drink,” he said, his voice a weary and graveled rasp that I imagined to have been born of smoke, liquor, and disgust.

  “Name’s Pryor.” I pushed a glass of murky liquid his way.

  “Peeles,” he answered as we saluted without looking at each other, then drank down the questionable brew in a single gulp. I had learned long ago not to sip my poison in such company, for it signals softness and a sense of leisure enjoyed solely by the rich and is thus an affectation that squelches useful conversation. Besides, why prolong the agony of the burn?

  “You from ’round here?” he asked, looking straight ahead. “I never seen your like in this place.”

  “Next town over,” I replied, nodding my head in the direction of Hatch and Burns’ Hollow. “The incendiary that flared over by the Kimball farm. Know of it?”

  “I read the notice,” he said cautiously. Clearly, he shared the barkeep’s dislike of mill agents who comb over poor farms and damaged properties in hope of securing them cheaply and without complication. They were an aggressive breed of land-grabber—land, always land at the center of men’s greed these days. Brazen enough to lure young country girls from their families with the promise of good wages and freedom from the chafing rules of home, the mill agents were considered lower than thieves by the type to congregate at taverns like the one in which Peeles and I now sat. And I can’t say I felt any differently about them. Their noisy monuments to industry dominated once peaceful fields and turned babbling brooks into foul-smelling runs, boiling with waste and tinted whorishly by the dye-lot of the day.

  “I’m not one of them,” I said quickly. “No, I have business concerning the fire on behalf of the county. Fire inspector’s what I am. But there’s only so much a man can glean from ashes and I’m looking to find out more about the family. You know them?”

  He paused before turning to stare into my eyes for the first time. Paused quite a while, actually, as though trying to determine if it was worth the effort to tell me what he knew.

  “Yessir, I did,” he said finally, his gray eyes focusing ahead once more. I sensed a familiar struggle within him—the reluctance to speak pitted against the need to unburden himself. Most people with anything real to say suffer from it. But it was only when he eyed his empty glass that I recognized the deal to be struck. He would talk so long as I held up my end of the bargain.

  I spotted us both to another round and followed suit as he tipped back his shot then placed the empty glass on the bar.

  “They weren’t like most, if that helps any.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m beginning to get that feeling.”

  Peeles’s way with animals—which explained his quiet abhorrence of the evening’s proceedings and his self-appointed role in bringing them to a quick if startling close—was seen as a valuable skill by many of the country folk who live on outlying farms. He told me he ministered not only to their livestock but to their families as well. Living and dying and sickness and birth, like any doctor, he knew about all that. But he understood something less concrete as well. He understood that poverty, pride, and independence puzzle together to make a wall that rarely admits outsiders. That was why people like Silas Kimball trusted Peeles.

  “I never liked goin’ out to Kimball’s place,” he said. “For one thing, after old Briggs died, it weren’t what anyone would call a proper farm no more. That were a sad thing to see.”

  He looked up at the motley collection of bottles on a dirty shelf behind the bar. We drank another round.

  “If you’ve talked to anyone in town, then you already know that Silas beat young May. And he weren’t much of a father neither, from what I could see. His girl Polly was skinny and drawn like a ghost, and… Well, it’s a funny thing about townsfolk. When it were Mister and Missus Benjamin Briggs living on that farm, they pulled ’em in like a flock of sheep’ll herd round its own. But when Silas come along, it were as if those selfsame folk lost any interest in knowing they was alive.”

  “So you knew both families from years back?” I asked. “From before the time that Benjamin Briggs died?”

  I did not need to delve so deep. But different as it was from my own tale, I felt a strange likeness beginning to bloom between the two. You might say that the troubles of my early years have taught me to climb into the skins of others. To feel myself wrap men’s souls about me, pull my feet into the boots of total strangers, settle their hats firmly on my head so that my view becomes one with their own. It’s a transformation I welcome, despite the attendant complications.

  “Oh I knew ’em all right,” he said. “Enough to see a wealthy man sweat out a fine farm of his own hand then die for no reason. I seen Silas ’round the time Briggs died. I knew then that things were anything but right.”

  “How?” I prodded. “How did you know?” Intuition told me that Silas was the bolt of lightning that split the tree.

  “I don’t put stock in rumor,” Peeles answered cautiously. “You just happen
ed to ask ’bout something no one else cares to know. And with that farm lost in a blaze and everyone gone missing, I figure there ain’t much harm in telling you.”

  He paused. I signaled the barkeep. Peeles recommenced speaking. This was our pattern.

  “It were spring,” he began. “I remember because I had calves born all which way that year. No cow seemed to be birthin’ straight—no sheep neither—so I was everywhere, which means that I heard and saw most everything there was to wonder about. One day, I was walking home on the road that passes the schoolhouse. It were late morning. No one about. The girls were in with the old schoolmarm and damn near everyone else and his son were in a field somewhere. So I was surprised to catch sight of a boy old enough for farmwork. Thin and tall, maybe fifteen years on him, not many more. I knew from the odd gait he kept that it were the Kimball boy. He were quick and light as he run up the bank of the road, then down again in a kind of game. But the sun was shining my way and I’d been up half the night with a breech, so I didn’t catch it right away.”

  “Catch what?” I interrupted.

  “The blood on him, his shirt marked with red, arms covered with it already dried brown. It nervoused me some, I’ll say that. Like old Briggs, I suppose I had a soft spot for the boy in those early years before I come to know better. He ’peared smart, in a twitchy sort of a way, and though he’d never been learned more ’n a little math in school and a little farming from Benjamin Briggs, he tried to have a good manner to him when he was younger. He looked the savage that morning though, something changed ’bout him. All that blood. I couldn’t hardly look at him; then I couldn’t hardly let him go neither.

  “‘What you bin about?’ I asked, but he just stared at me. ‘What you bin at to be covered in blood?’ says I, reaching out to stop him passing me by. ‘And why aren’t you out helping Briggs?’

  “‘He’s gone now. Gone for good and there ain’t no one but me and May.’” Peeles nodded for the barman to refill his glass. “I was barely fit to speak after what he told me,” he said. “But I had to ask: ‘What about the blood?’ I weren’t a bit sure I wanted to know, but I kept on. ‘That Briggs’s blood, boy?’

  “‘The blood?’ he says, almost like he forgot he was covered. ‘That’s him, all right. I tried to help him, see. Went to him right away after he was hit.’

  “‘Hit by what?’ I asked.

  “‘Why, by the beam. It fell just like that, no warning. Just swung down and hit him square in the head.’

  “I didn’t believe the boy,” Peeles said. “How things could up and change so fast. Why, I’d seen Benjamin Briggs buyin’ seed not a week prior. And here’s Silas, covered in his blood. Said he tried to get him up, see if he was still alive.”

  Peeles swirled the whiskey in his glass. “I thought, how’s a thing like that happen? In a new barn? How’s a joint get loose without a farmer like Briggs noticing?” He gulped the drink down. “I said I’d best go out to the farm and so I did. And there he was, in a heap, dragged out from under the wood, blood everywhere.

  “‘Why didn’t you call upon May to fetch me?’ I asked Silas. ‘You know I been round before.’ ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘May run to school the whole way after she saw him. Just cried and run, wantin’ to get away from me, I’m guessin’. Been there ever since. But we’re together now. Yessir, we’re married. And May’s with child—my child—whether anyone like it or no.’”

  Peeles sat quietly a moment. “She can’t have been more’n thirteen. Heard later that after Silas took me back to the farm, he went round the schoolhouse. Walked in the door while the girls were at their lessons. The older ones like May, they sit at the back, see, while the teacher keeps the pups up close where she can watch ’em. They say Silas stood there, quiet like, in the door ’til May looked up. They say that’s when the others saw the blood and started to scream. But frighteningest thing of all was that he was just smiling and pointing at May, smiling an’ pointing like they was in a game of chase and she was It. Fell into a faint, the poor girl did. Never went school-ways again that I know of.”

  He paused. “Townsfolk say Silas was a savage. Marked May for his own that day. The constables came, asked a lot of questions. But in the end, there weren’t nothing they could do but call it an accident.”

  “You think Briggs was murdered?” I asked.

  Peeles stared at me before looking down at the bar and tapping his glass. Once filled, he tipped it back before answering.

  “Silas has murder in him, that much I can tell you for certain,” he said. “I have my opinions about whether he killed Briggs, but that were a long time ago. Don’t matter much now.”

  “And yet it’s the reason you’re so sure he was a murderer, isn’t it?”

  By this time, Peeles’s eyes were rheumy with drink and exhaustion. “Understand me good,” he said. “I’d’ve sooner laid down in a nest full of copperheads than gone to Briggs’s that day. But I felt sorry for May and the boy. That’s why May knew she could trust me when her baby girl needed birthin’. That’s how I came to see things change, came to know how far she sank the day she hitched herself to Silas Kimball. But I’m done thinking about them, Mister. I don’t like the tale—use it any way you will. Far as I’m concerned, the fire was a blessing. Just tell me this: They all live?”

  “Found Silas dead in his bed,” I answered. “Can’t say what’s happened to May and the girl.”

  “And the boy?” he asked, looking down. “He dead, too?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Boy?” I said. “What boy?”

  Peeles stared at me a moment, then looked away and clucked in disgust.

  “That’s a tale for someone else to tell,” he said. “And you won’t find but one or two you can turn to for the whole truth.” He stood, turned to leave, and, with his back to me, lifted his hand as if to swat me away. It was a strange farewell, but he’d had his fill of whiskey and, doubtless, of me as well.

  I sat awhile, tossing back the dregs of my drink. Why was May Kimball proving so difficult to find? A family that’s invisible in full view can disappear without much made of it. Still, with little ones to care for—not so easy.

  She has a son, I thought to myself. Why hadn’t his name been entered into the town records?

  I rode home in the dark, my head swirling in a swill-fueled fog. Where are you, May Kimball? I asked myself over and over. In the back of my mind, a ghost was lurking, and when I fell exhausted onto my bed, stinking of drink and cheap smokes, I could hear—in spite of the enduring tinnitus of tavern chatter—a child’s voice. As ever, it pleaded with me, and before sleep descended—before the room stopped spinning and my mind went blank—I wagered I was lost.

  Sister Charity

  “DOES YOUR SISTER POLLY exhibit operations in her sleep?”

  The question startled me, as I was lost in imagining the life of a sojourner. Until the red book, my nose never twitched at the smell of horse sweat nor spice in the kitchens nor smoke from the stove fires. Such things surrounded me, but I concentrated on doing. There was not time to feel, see, or hear. I paid no mind to the bright blue of a jay, nor did I wonder at how its brilliance brought out the muted world around me. The stories I read each night with Sister Polly had changed me, and though I was glad for it, I understood why books from the World are forbidden here. In a sister less steadfast, they might breed envy, curiosity, even discontent, and none of these is a friend of faith.

  Fortunately, I found it simple to separate idle fantasy from the work I perform as a believer, and so I was able to will my thoughts with ease back to the gathering room in which I sat with my Church Family sisters. The sound of a single sister’s voice above the peaceful burble of quiet conversation had occasioned the turning of many linen-capped faces towards mine. Such a patch of mushrooms we appear! You see? I had never before noticed it.

  Sister Lavinia sat beside me, a gentle presence; not so Sister Ruth, who regarded me from across the room with cold eyes and a mouth purs
ed tight. She is the cruelest of us all, for when my markings first appeared, she whispered it round that the impurity of my true nature was clear for the reading on the surface of my skin. I remain inked with strange designs, but while most believers no longer stare at me, Sister Ruth seems never to cease in her scrutiny. It is humiliating, and though I try to look upon her with sympathy, I fail more often than not. Her meanness protrudes like the bones of a starving dog. Indeed, I wonder if perhaps she was born sour, for I remember her family dropping her here and leaving without so much as a glance back. She was only ten years of age at the time, but she seemed a heavy load they were eager to set down and never bear the likes of again. Standing by Elder Sister Agnes’s side, I watched Sister Ruth’s eyes follow the dust of her kin’s retreating carriage. Her cheek twitched, then her chin, but that was the last and only sign that her abandonment had caused her pain. Looking over at her now, I chastised myself for begrudging such a forlorn soul its bitterness.

  I had yet to answer the question posed to me about how my Sister Polly sleeps, and Sister Prudence, sweet thing, stared at me with the wide, questioning regard of one ever ready to supply the proper emotional display once informed as to what that display should be. Were I to respond coldly now, for a sample, she would utter a soft tsk tsk under her breath, resuming her knitting while shaking her head at the insolence of the inquiry. But I offered no such answer, allowing instead the clicking of my needles to fill the silence.

  “Sister Polly,” I said when I was ready, “is as worn out as the rest of us when she lies down. She sleeps most quietly, not uttering anything like the sounds I have, on occasion, heard coming from even the daintiest of girls gathered in this room.”

  The older sisters giggled—especially Sister Prudence, who never failed to look relieved when called upon to exhibit humor over contempt. They knew that though I had not shared a room with anyone save Sister Polly, I have—in my capacity as caretaker to many a new believer—looked in on most all of the young sisters here, and I could say a pretty piece about what sorts of operations they perform in their sleep were I of a mind to do so.