The Visionist: A Novel Read Free Page B

have imagined. Or so it might have been.
    Mama was ten-year-old May Briggs then, the sole kin left to a man widowed and mourning a wife and son lost in childbirth. Polly imagined her as a girl struggling to fill a woman’s shoes and a man’s empty heart, a child depended on for tending to everything from chores in the house and barn to minding the count. It was only right that if her father saw fit to take in this strange new boy, May should strive to make him feel welcome. It was surely what her own mother would have done, wasn’t it? So she fed Silas and taught him how to care for the chickens and find the eggs they’d hidden in the yard; how to milk the cows with a gentle pull-and-squeeze so as not to get kicked and have the pail knocked dry; how to speak so people could understand him and stop thinking of him as half-boy, half-animal. She did this for her father, that he might have one less thing to trouble over.
    Polly never understood how such simple lessons could have led where they did. How the townsfolk could have whispered that young May Briggs broke her father’s heart when she married Silas in secret at thirteen. How a farmer as careful as Benjamin Briggs, with a barn tight and new, could have gotten himself killed by a falling loose beam. How, according to gossip, someone had to have worked the joint. How there was but one person who’d want such a decent man dead.
    Silas. They say he’d grown to hate Benjamin Briggs as dreams of owning the farm himself began to fill his head. He assumed, by all rights, that the land would go to him if he married May. He didn’t know about law. He figured property just passed from man to man, as it always had, so he’d good reason to want Benjamin Briggs dead. Still, no one could say for sure what really happened. “Accidents” are like that. Plenty of suspicion, no investigation, case closed.
    May was only a girl when Benjamin Briggs died—married to a boy just two years her senior, pregnant with his child, alone in a life that must have seemed turned on its head. And though Polly had asked in every way she could figure how it came to be that such a strange incident stole her grandfather from her, Mama would never say. Just stared, frightened-like, then turned away. Fact was, Polly had seen the back of her mother so many times that she had begun to think it was she who’d cursed the farm, for she was the seed Mama carried when everything went wrong.
      
    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