The Visionist

SHE DARNS HER father’s socks without needing to watch her work. Just as well, for the kitchen is dim save for the light thrown by the old Argand lamp, a relic from her grandfather Benjamin Briggs’s time, a better time, a time she never knew. She feels the rough wool, the stick of her wooden needles as she weaves a net from shore to shore of the gaping hole. On the floor beside her, the pile of clothes needing mending is as high as her waist, but there is this: When her father is gone, the house is peaceful, and she and her mother need never speak of him.

Even so, he will be home soon. In the gloom of late afternoon, Mama’s face is melancholy and the blue of her eyes is that of a willow-painted plate, scrubbed too hard, too often.

“Ben,” she says to her young son playing with his bits of string and birch twigs by the fire. “Pick up your things now, there’s a lad. It’s coming on time for supper and your father…” She looks up with a doe’s sense of impending danger as the door swings wide then bangs shut, the sweet apple smell of early fall gusting in from the orchard.

“Come ’ere!” Silas Kimball growls at the boy, dropping to his bony knees, pinning him to the floor. Silas thinks he is playing—cracked boots encrusted with manure from the cows and pigs, cold hands, beard smelling of cheese and whiskey.

“No holding me down!” Ben cries. “No holding down!”

But though Silas leans harder on the boy—his skinny six-year-old frame laid low as a sheep for shearing—Ben manages to wriggle free and runs across the boards to hide in Mama’s skirts.

“No better’n a runt hog, my son,” Polly’s father says in disgust. “Worthless half-wit.”

Polly hangs her head. Whose fault is that? she thinks, remembering the day she’d left Ben asleep in his cradle so that she could run and feed the milk cow before he woke. From the barn, she’d heard a scream and, bolting back towards the house, saw Silas holding the baby’s head in a bucket full of water as Mama tried to wrench Ben from his father’s slippery grasp. He’d wanted a son for years, one who could help him on the farm. But Mama’s womb was weak and she had lost child after child until, by the time she finally managed to birth Ben, Silas had become so crazed with rage and the burden of never-ending debt that he saw the boy as naught but a drain, one he’d rather see dead than struggle to feed.

Whose fault is that? Polly would never forgive herself for letting Ben out of her sight. Though she had been but a nine-year-old girl at the time, Mama had trusted her to take care of her new brother. And the water? It changed Ben. After that day, no matter how he might grow in other ways, he would never be more than a sweet, vulnerable child. Silas had tried to murder him, but it was Polly who’d failed to protect him. Whose fault…?

After the outburst, all is quiet except for the rasping of her father’s breath and the child’s muffled sobs. Mama stirs the stew pot with Ben clinging to the skirt beneath her apron. Polly’s needles click as she watches. She is always watching. Motes of dust dance in the grease-scented air, swirling as her mother moves around the room. They make a mockery of her, for Mama tends to her cooking and tidying as though she wishes not to disturb, as though she wishes not to be present at all, yet 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 like a little time on my own, sell this land—my land—set myself up pretty somewhere. Just like Mister Fancy Coat told me,” he says. “Rest up without you and your waste. It wouldn’t be so difficult to manage now, would it? Gettin’ so’s I could be alone, I mean. Things happen after all, am I wrong? Takin’ sick, disappearings—like they say, twist of Fate.” He pushes Mama towards the table and lays down the knife. Even in the thin light of the lamp—its wick running low—the gleaming blade catches Polly’s eye. Mister Fancy Coat.

“I seen whole families go,” Silas continues. Kicking Mama’s feet out from under, he glares at her as she buckles to the floor and covers her head with her arms. “Death come easy here,” he says. “It’s livin’. That’s the struggle.”

He walks away, taps his hand over the tops of the cupboards in hopes of finding a forgotten bottle of cider; with his back turned, he cannot see Polly as she rises and guides Ben gently into her chair. She moves quickly and reaches out, her fingers barely grazing the cooking knife’s handle before she pulls away and slips quickly back into her place. He has found his prize, uncorked it, and he guzzles the liquor as he turns back to face the room. “Problem is, can’t do much more than slap you up ’til I know what’s mine,” he slurs, yawns. “Tired now, that’s what I am. But tomorrow? Tomorrow, we sort this out. We make sure your daddy didn’t leave me out of his prayers. We make sure—just like Mister Fancy Coat said—that you tell me the truth ’bout any dealings between you. Give me a nod,” he orders, kneeling to grab Mama’s chin and shake her head up and down. “Yes…that’s right,” he says, still pulling at her. “Yes, Silas.”

Silas stands unsteadily and looks at Polly, a queer smile hooking up one side of his mouth. “Lucky for you I met up with this little friend,” he says, holding up the bottle, then pulling it to him like an infant as he shuffles across the kitchen floor. “Lucky, too, that I’m in need of a lie-down.” One boot then another falls as he makes his way towards the room where he lies with Mama every night. “There’s always a tomorrow, ain’t there? Can’t count on much, but that’s for certain.”

Polly hears him tumble into bed.

She knows the stories about her father’s kin. His parents had been born of a bad lot—just two of a hundred ruffians, townspeople said, all descended from one drunk Dutchman up by the New York Lakes. He was—would always be—Silas Kimball, the son of stoop-backed, black-toothed marginals. Smelling like smoke and animal fat, mongrel skins for warmth, teeth ground down to nubs: talk had it that the three of them appeared as savages when they walked the path to town in need of a trade. His mother made dolls tied from sticks and corn silk and tried to barter them for food and cider, but the figures scared people with their haunting look and she couldn’t raise much. When Silas came, she bound him to her with hemp cord and fed him in plain view, not a thought given that she was baring herself for all the town to see. Wild as skunk cabbage, living in a makeshift shack in the woods, stealing from the fields of nearby farms—in most people’s opinion, as Polly heard it, the Kimballs were barely human.

Benjamin Briggs, Polly’s grandfather from Mama’s side, had been different. Wealthy, they said, an educated merchant and gentleman farmer come out from Hartford. But he couldn’t work alone the land he had tamed and there was no help to be found in town that wasn’t already at labor in the fields. So it came to pass that when young Silas showed up at his door—not long after the boy’s parents went missing—Polly’s grandfather gave him work and a roof over his head. Whether the vagrants were dead or just set to scrabbling in some other place, no one knew. But with them gone, Silas walked into a brighter future than ever he could 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.