The Visionist: A Novel Read Online Free
Author: Rachel Urquhart
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
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
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