The Visionist: A Novel Read Free

still the dust flurries about and makes a fuss.
    Silas springs up and storms outside to drench his head beneath a gush of icy water drawn from the well. Polly can hear him hawking and spitting in the yard. How she despises him. He hasn’t it in him to be kind, not for as long as Polly has known him. He consumes life, sucks it dry. She pictures him coughing up debris like an irritable barn owl, his pellets laced with tiny bones.
    “Not a penny of credit left at the Dry Goods,” he says as he comes in from washing, his hair dripping, his troubles tumbling forth like rocks down a hillside. “And here I am, thinking you and the girl been making bonnets while I work myself sick in the fields every day.” He takes a step closer, and though Mama will not look away from the supper she stirs, Polly can see her shoulders stiffen.
    “What is it you do all day, tell me that.” His voice has become soft. “Why, it’s close on winter and I don’t see the dairying done,” he says. “I don’t see the potatoes dug. I don’t see nothin’ but two whores and an idiot settin’ by in my house.”
    Then he turns on Ben and makes to kick at him, wanting Mama to look his way, knowing she would throw herself between harm and her boy in a minnow’s twist. She twirls round and takes a step towards him, pushing Ben behind her. Polly puts down her mending and half raises herself.
    “That’s better,” Silas says, lifting his arm. “You’ll look to me when I talk, I’ll learn you that much right now.” Polly sweeps in on her brother and pulls him to her, hiding his face as her father swings the back of his hand at Mama’s head and smacks her so hard that she falls against the hot iron pot.
    “That’s for being lazy,” he says, brown gravy seeping up the bodice of Mama’s faded green dress. He wallops her again. “That’s for being the child-whore I married. That were my biggest mistake. Tyin’ myself down. And for what? A litter of runts? Hang from my belt like hairless possum pups, that’s what you three do. But things are going to change now. You watch and see.”
    He scans the darkening room. Polly wants him to look her way, to see the fury that burns inside her, but he will not. Her strength, she wants him to feel it. But tonight, as on so many nights, all she can do is watch, watch and cover Ben’s eyes and ears.
    This night is different, she thinks. The feeling flashes through Polly’s mind though she can’t say why. Not an hour had passed since the boy’s singsong voice had filled the kitchen. Now, Silas picks up the knife Mama uses to cut carrots and field onions and brandishes it like a child playing pirate.
    “Another thing,” he says. “Something I heard from a gentleman I been talking to. Something about wills and land being left to little girls. You know anything ’bout that?” He draws closer to Mama. “Your papa weasel ’round me like that? Don’t you lie. I never thought to be worried on it before now, but his talk got me wonderin’. Seems there’s a fair number of boys left high and dry by their dead fathers. Wives’ dead fathers, too.” He laughs. “Seems a man isn’t to be trusted no more. We leave. ” He imitates a whiny complaint. “We drink. We got notes against us. Better to pass everything on to you women, that’s the story I heard.”
    Beneath the anger, Polly senses a strange elation coursing through him, quickening his movements. Her heart pounds as she studies him. He is in debt to every saloonkeeper in town, but it’s clear he’s not been denied his fill at one or another of the taverns on this particular day.
    He is an outcast. Who would have spotted him a belt or two? And there’s the look in his eyes. They glisten with something close to glee. Usually, she can see the signs—she has learned to take meaning from a clue as common as the sound of his boots on the step outside—but she does not know how to read him now.
    “See, I care ’cause I been thinkin’ I might