The Visionist: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

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