The Visionist: A Novel (3 page)

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.”

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.