“SHE DROPPED RIGHT OFF, POOR SWEET,” JOSIE WHISPERED.
Rose hung her cloak on a wall peg and sank into a chair. “Thanks for putting her to bed and watching over her, Josie. You must be exhausted.”
“No more than you, from the looks of it. Are you sure you don’t want me to keep Mairin in the Infirmary for a spell?”
“Nay, I’m happier when she’s under my eye, especially at night. There’s so much going on inside that little head, and I want to be around if it starts emerging. You run along and get to bed.”
“Call if you need me, dear,” Josie said. “I’ll be up much of the night, anyway, with Sister Viola down with her autumn cough and fever. She’s so frail, I keep expecting it to carry her off, but she always pulls through. Rose, you’re falling asleep in your chair. Get to bed this instant.”
Josie helped Rose out of her work dress and into bed, then fussed over the blankets. Rose was asleep within seconds, in the middle of Josie’s whispered chatter.
When Rose’s eyes opened again, the room was dark. She heard a mumbled voice. At first, Rose thought Josie must have decided to stay after all, and was chattering with herself to keep awake. But as she listened more carefully, the muttering made no sense.
Rose hoisted herself up on her elbow and listened. It was Mairin, babbling, undoubtedly in her sleep. Rose wanted to awaken her, to hold and comfort her, but some instinct told her to be still, to listen for words, clues to Mairin’s fears.
Minutes inched past, and Mairin said no more than a few mumbled syllables. Rose’s knee began to ache. She lowered herself back under the covers, her head on the pillow, and tried to stay awake to listen. If it hadn’t been for the persistent ache in her knee, Rose might have lost her struggle and been fast asleep within seconds. If she had done so, she might have leaped out of bed and done her poor knee lasting damage when Mairin screamed in anguish.
“No, no, no! No, don’t!” Her pleas subsided into staccato cries that sounded at times like a sobbing child’s, at times more like a frightened animal’s.
Rose was alarmed, yet disappointed. Mairin’s outcries could easily be related to the ongoing abuse she had experienced. Rose had hoped Mairin’s nightmares would provide more direct access to whatever was buried in the girl’s memory, but even in sleep, she was hidden. Rose decided to try another tactic. She slid out of bed and went to Mairin, staying quiet, to avoid rousing her too early. The crayons and paper lay on the table set next to Mairin’s bed.
“Mairin.” Rose shook the sleeping girl’s shoulder. Mairin’s eyelids flew open. She whimpered and curled in a tight ball, like a cornered animal expecting an attack. She clutched her doll against her chest.
“It’s me—Rose. I’m sorry I startled you. You were having a bad dream, and I was worried about you.”
Mairin’s body loosened, but she kept her distance. Rose switched on the bedside lamp. The girl’s stillness and wide pupils gave her the look of a startled fawn.
Rose picked up the paper and crayons, and laid them on the bed in front of Mairin. “I was thinking, if your dream frightened you, it might help if you drew for a while. It has helped before, hasn’t it?”
Mairin’s gaze shifted to the paper, and she reached out a hand for the crayons. She picked them up, then dropped them again, as if she expected to be punished.
“Draw all you want,” Rose said. “I’ll crawl back into bed and not bother you. Keep the light on. If you need me, just call out. Good night, now.” She slid back into her own bed and turned on her side, so her back would be to Mairin. She waited, trying to stay alert and failing. Just as she was relaxing into sleep, she heard the faint rat-scratches that told her Mairin was drawing. She pushed herself to stay awake, in case Mairin was so upset she might sneak out; but in the end, sleep took her.
When she awakened again, gray light streaked in her window, and the room was silent—too silent. Ignoring the warning twinge in her knee, Rose twisted around to find Mairin’s bed tousled and empty. She tossed off her covers and leaped out of bed, but then she wasn’t sure what to do. Get dressed. If Mairin had taken off again, Rose couldn’t mount a search in her nightclothes. She grabbed the same work dress she’d worn the day before, carefully hung on a wall peg by Josie, and slipped it over her head.
As she went toward her built-in drawers to find a fresh kerchief to crisscross over her bodice, she passed close to Mairin’s bed and saw several sheets of paper crumpled along with the bedsheets and the girl’s nightgown. She turned one over and smoothed it out. Mairin had drawn another tree. This one was even more disturbing than her first. The deep hues were broken by lightning slashes of red and orange, and the headless snake coiled its way up the violet trunk.
Rose turned over two more rumpled pages. The first was a lovely bird with green eyes and bejeweled wings spreading forward as if to surround whoever held the drawing. The image did not strike Rose as frightening, but she supposed it might have a different effect on a child.
The third drawing looked like Mairin’s attempt to impose order on the terrifying chaos of her imagination. A checkerboard, each square outlined with precision in black crayon, covered the page. Perhaps this drawing had been her last, because she hadn’t filled in any colors. Or perhaps she hadn’t needed colors, just order.
Aware of a sense of urgency, Rose rolled up the drawings and stowed them in a small cupboard built into the wall of her retiring room. If she could, she wanted to keep both Wilhelm and Gilbert from learning about the sketches. They would only encourage the two leaders to keep using Mairin as a pawn in their struggle for power. She’d been tossed about all her life. Perhaps that was the reason she’d drawn a checkerboard, though it seemed a sophisticated image for a child who lived in the trees.
Rose had just shut the drawings in the cupboard when a click told her the retiring room door had opened. She whirled around. Mairin stood in the doorway, fully dressed and holding her doll.
“Mairin! I thought . . . I got very worried when I woke up and saw your bed empty.”
“I’m sorry. I just went to the bathroom.”
“Well, I noticed you’d dressed, so I was afraid you’d left.”
“I’m sorry,” Mairin repeated. But she neither cowered nor ran away. Instead, she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. It doesn’t matter where she’s been, Rose thought It only matters that she’s come back.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Rose said. “Let’s leave your doll on your bed during school time, shall we? That way the other children won’t feel left out.”
Mairin nodded and placed her doll on her pillow.
“It’ll be breakfast time soon. Are you hungry?”
This time Mairin’s nod was more vigorous. “Can we eat with Agatha again?” she asked.
“I’m sure she would love it,” Rose said.
Mairin had slipped easily into her role as Agatha’s helper. As soon as Polly brought a tray from the kitchen, Mairin pulled a chair near Agatha’s and sat on the edge. She always fed Agatha a bite first before eating anything herself. When she did eat, Mairin copied Agatha’s slow chewing, almost down to the second. She was rewarded by a warm smile from Agatha. The former eldress was perfectly capable of feeding herself with her left hand, but it was like her to choose a child’s growth over her own fierce independence.
Rose remembered, from her own childhood, Agatha’s easy ways with young people. When Agatha had listened to her endless prattle, she’d felt like the most important person on earth, and certainly the most interesting. Now she felt just a twinge of jealousy as she watched Mairin unfold in Agatha’s sunshine. But she was glad for Mairin, too.
“Mairin, may I tell Agatha about your drawings?”
After Mairin’s brief nod, Rose described the three new drawings to Agatha. “Could they truly be spirit gifts, do you think?”
Agatha’s cloudy eyes traveled to her small desk. “Rose, dear, look in the drawer. You should find a drawing.”
Rose wasn’t alone in her curiosity—Mairin hurried to stand next to her as she pulled out a yellowed sheet of paper. The drawing—done in spidery black, blue, and red ink—depicted a garden filled with exquisite and unearthly flowers. Each was drawn with intricacy and precision, and none looked like anything Rose had ever seen. She handed the drawing to Agatha.
“You did drawings, too?” Mairin gazed at Agatha with hope.
Agatha handed the paper to the girl and said, “This is very precious to me. I was about your age when I drew it. I regret it was the only gift drawing I was ever given, but I will always feel blessed for having received it. Tell me, child, when did your own pictures come to you—were you awake, or asleep?”
“Asleep.”
“You dreamed the pictures?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember dreams, but something woke me up, and I just knew what to draw.”
Rose marveled at the ease with which Agatha drew a response from Mairin. However, she also noticed another jealous pang. Clearly a thorough confession was called for, but Rose wasn’t sure how she’d explain to Agatha, her confessor, how she, a pampered adult, could feel envy because of the friendship budding between Agatha and Mairin. Could it be that Rose wanted, for herself alone, the privilege of being Agatha’s “daughter” and Mairin’s “mother”? This was just the sort of thing she had vowed to forsake—these jealous, exclusive ties. Yea, a confession was in order, and the sooner, the better.
By the time Rose stopped castigating herself, Agatha was explaining her own drawing to Mairin.
“You see, what we want, we Believers, is to create a heaven on earth, a home as pure and glorious as the celestial home we will journey to someday. But we don’t always understand how to do that. The celestial world is a paradise beyond our imagining. So sometimes angels, heavenly spirits, come in dreams or when we worship to show us the way. Do you understand that, Mairin?”
The copper in Mairin’s eyes had taken on a sheen. “Yes,” she said. “I think so. It sounds beautiful.”
“Yea, indeed, it is beautiful. That’s what I was trying to draw—in my own poor way—the astonishing beauty of the heavens, like exquisite flowers we have never seen on earth.”
Agatha’s thin face relaxed in a smile, and her tightly stretched skin seemed to loosen. “When I drew this, we were getting fewer and fewer gifts. I think everyone was ready to settle down a bit.” Agatha chuckled, and Mairin giggled in response, though she couldn’t have known Agatha was remembering a period of Shaker history that went somewhat out of control.
“We weren’t dancing so much anymore, which disappointed me, so I was dancing all by myself in some woods. I must admit I sneaked off now and then, but I never stayed away long. This time I twirled and shook and jumped, the way I’d seen the sisters do it, and I felt like I was being taken into another world, an unutterably lovely world. Then suddenly Mother Ann appeared to me, dressed all in white with sparkling jewels sewn into her robe. Hundreds of angels swirled around her.”
Agatha leaned her head back on her rocker and closed her eyes. “Mother Ann spoke to me. She said, ‘Child, go home and draw flowers, glorious flowers, and look at them whenever you need to remember your true home.’ Then she blessed me and was gone.”
Agatha opened her eyes. “You never saw a girl run so fast as I did to get home to the Children’s Dwelling House. I had red and blue and black ink because I was helping Sister Iris mark the lessons of the younger girls. It took weeks of work, but I never forgot the vision Mother Ann had blessed me with, and I did as she bade me—whenever my faith wavered, I looked at my gift drawing and remembered my true home.”
Both Mairin and Rose sat spellbound as Agatha finished her story. Rose had never seen or heard about Agatha’s drawing before, perhaps because Rose herself had always been of a more practical bent; she had never received a direct message from Mother Ann, though she knew such experiences were possible. She simply—and to her disappointment—had never been chosen as an instrument.
Agatha leaned toward Mairin and covered the girl’s light brown hand with her own thin blue-veined one. “Think, Mairin. Try to remember your dream. How did you know what to draw?”
Mairin’s face puckered in concentration. Rose remembered her own childhood and suspected that Mairin wanted desperately to please Agatha. But the girl took her time and seemed to be focusing on her dream. Finally she opened her eyes and frowned.
“I’m not sure,” she said, “but I don’t remember seeing a beautiful lady and lots of angels. It was scarier than that. The things I drew, I just saw them in my dream, and I knew to draw them. Only I don’t remember if Mother Ann told me to draw them.” Mairin’s pupils widened with fear.
Though her own eyesight was probably too poor to see the anguish in Mairin’s eyes, Agatha responded to the tone in her voice. “The visits of Mother Ann are different for everyone,” she said. “You have not lived with us for long, so perhaps she came to you in hidden form. Nevertheless, it is very like her to give you pictures to draw.”
Agatha sank back in her rocker, spent.
“It is past time to get Mairin to the Schoolhouse,” Rose said, planting a light kiss on Agatha’s cool forehead. “And time for you to rest.”
Agatha clutched Rose’s wrist. “Stay just a moment,” she said. “Mairin, dear, would you take this tray back to the kitchen? Thank you.”
She waited for a moment after the door closed behind Mairin before motioning Rose to sit again.
“I know our experiences were very different,” Agatha said, “but my heart tells me that Mairin was visited by Mother Ann.”
“You surprise me,” Rose said. “I was sure you’d say it was just a bad dream. Why would Mother send such odd messages?”
“Mother does not always send bright and beautiful messages, after all. Remember that she lost all her own children. I truly believe she has come to Mairin’s aid because she is a child, and a needy one. Mother Ann has appeared in disguise because the child might not understand—but appear she has. I believe her message is as much for us as it is for Mairin, perhaps even more so. Mairin is in grave danger, I feel it, and those drawings are messages from Mother Ann to warn us. We must listen. We are all she has. We must not fail her.”