Amity & Sorrow Read online

  AMITY AND SORROW

  PEGGY RILEY

  Copyright © 2013 Peggy Riley

  The right of Peggy Riley to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 0 7553 9439 5

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.tinderpress.co.uk

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Praise for Peggy Riley

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part I: May

  1. The Red Country

  2. Marriage Bed

  3. The Bluebottles

  4. Plum Chickasaw

  Before: The Leaving

  5. Stitches

  6. The Day of Washing

  7. Weight of Faith

  8. The Car

  9. Rules

  10. The Spinning

  Before: The Fiftieth Wife

  11. The Gas Station Oracle

  12. Home Preserves

  13. The Map of the Panhandle

  14. Paper

  Before: The Banishing

  15. The Key

  Before: The Daughter of Waco

  Part II: June

  16. The Devil in the House

  17. The Switch

  Before: The Wife Who Wasn’t

  18. The Sacrifice

  19. Seedbed

  20. The Scar

  21. Ghosts

  Before: The Raising of the Temple

  22. The Field

  23. Harvest

  24. The Living and the Dead

  Before: Eve and Sorrow

  Part III: July

  25. The Grain Elevator

  26. The Tiny Prophet

  27. The Plastic Box Oracle

  Before: The Second Wife

  28. News

  29. The Devil’s Box

  30. Sheets

  31. The Slip

  32. Do Drop Inn and the Mesa

  33. The Sunday Preachermen

  34. Buds

  35. Shattercane

  Before: The First Wife

  Part IV: September

  36. Driving Back

  37. Ash

  38. Goodwill Industries

  39. The Temple

  40. Spinning

  41. The Room Below

  42. Home

  Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright. Her work has been produced, broadcast and published in magazines and anthologies. She has been a bookseller, festival producer and writer-in-residence at a young offender prison. AMITY & SORROW is her first novel.

  For more information on Peggy Riley, visit www.peggyriley.com or follow her on Twitter: @Peggy_Riley

  Praise for Peggy Riley

  ‘Amity & Sorrow, grace and hope, honor and innocence, bliss and deliverance – all of this from one beautifully nuanced story about the nature of family and the power of faith. I savored every word’ Lori Lansens, author of The Girls

  ‘[I was] hooked from the very start … beautifully crafted, tightly restrained, and yet enormously powerful and dramatic novel’ Essie Fox, author of The Somnambulist

  ‘A startlingly original, intelligent and beautiful first novel that I found riveting from page one. I can only wait with great anticipation for what comes next from Peggy Riley’ Michael Connelly

  ‘A beautiful and terrifying book. Peggy Riley tells a complex and enthralling tale of family love and religious belief with uncommon wisdom, grace, and skill’ Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind

  ‘Fierce and disturbing … Riley’s debut novel is a harsh but compassionate look at nature vs. nurture through the lens of a polygamous cult’ Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

  ‘[An] accomplished, harrowing debut … Riley’s descriptive prose is rich in metaphor … [and] the haunting literary drama simmers to a boil as it deftly navigates issues of family, faith, community, and redemption’ Ann Kelley, Booklist (Starred Review)

  About the Book

  One father; two daughters; fifty wives. They’re waiting for salvation. Pray it never comes.

  In the wake of a suspicious fire, Amaranth gathers her barely-teenage daughters, Amity and Sorrow, and flees from the rural fundamentalist cult run by her husband. After four days on the run, Amaranth crashes the car, leaving the family stranded at a gas station, innocent and terrified.

  Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a downtrodden farmer, who offers sanctuary. But while Amity blossoms in this new world, free from her father’s faithful tyranny, Sorrow will do anything to get back home. And Amaranth herself needs to know what happened to the other wives, the other children.

  AMITY & SORROW is a novel about God, sex, and farming; an unforgettable journey into the horrors a true believer can inflict upon his family. It is the gripping story of these remarkable women, the beauty and suffering of their former lives and their heartbreaking, hopeful, doubtful future. It is the darkest novel about love and the Good Life you will ever read.

  For Graham

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank everyone at Little, Brown: my editor, Judy Clain, whose clarity and concision helped to make Amity & Sorrow a leaner, better book; her assistant, Amanda Brower; publisher Michael Pietsch; Liz Garriga; Jayne Yaffe Kemp; and everyone in the art department. Many thanks to Tinder Press in the UK – to editor Charlotte Mendelson for her support and encouragement throughout this twisty process; her assistant, Emily Kitchin; Samantha Eades; Vicky Palmer; Yeti Lambregts; and all the team at Headline.

  Grateful thanks to my agent, Joy Harris, for taking a leap of faith with me.

  Thank you to New Writing South and director Chris Taylor for their support during the writing of my first draft. Not only did they provide a grant so that I could take up a place at Arvon, they also supplied a free read by the Literary Consultancy. Many thanks to Hilary Johnson for her manuscript assessment and for introducing me to writer and editor Caroline Upcher, who helped me see my book with fresh eyes.

  Thank you to Sara Maitland and Susan Elderkin, authors who were particularly generous with their time and their feedback.

  Thank you, early readers and dear friends: Tim Macedo-Hatch, Monique L’Heureux, Sue Bickley, and my great friend Katherine May, who twice read drafts in a hurry, when I needed her most. Thank you to the coven and to friends and family, near and far.

  Thank you to the writers and readers on Twitter and to the #amwriting online community for their generous support. You provided good company and solace during many a draft.

  I would like to acknowledge books that were particularly helpful while putting the world of the book together: Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for its consummate history of Mormon fundamentalism; The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, a history of the Dust Bowl and the Oklahomans who stayed; and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which casts a grand shadow over any book
about Oklahoma, farming, drought, or road trips.

  Finally, many thanks to my husband, Graham, for building me the Blue House and for making a home for my heart.

  Prologue

  Two sisters sit, side by side, in the backseat of an old car. Amity and Sorrow.

  Their hands are hot and close together. A strip of white fabric loops between them, tying them together, wrist-to-wrist.

  Their mother, Amaranth, drives them. The car pushes forward, endlessly forward, but her eyes are always watching in the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind them for cars.

  Amity watches through her window, glass dotted by chin, nose, forehead, and calls out all she can see to Sorrow: brown fields and green fields, gas stations and grain elevators. She calls out the empty cross of the power pole. She is watching for the end of the world. Father told them it would come and, surely, it will. They will see its signs, even far from him. Even here.

  Sorrow has her head down and her back curled over so she cannot watch. She cups her belly and groans.

  ‘Carsick,’ says Mother.

  Homesick, thinks Amity.

  Their mother is taking them from their home and all they know, and they have no idea how they will ever get her to turn around and take them back.

  When their mother took them, she ran them from the fire and the screaming, down the gravel path to the car, and Amity could see for the first time ever where the gravel path led, how it met a rocky trail, how it plunged through a band of evergreens to join a jostling potholed road that only smoothed when it came into town, the town she had heard tell of but never seen for herself.

  But Mother said, ‘Heads down, daughters. Hide.’

  Amity did as she was told, so she never got to see the streetlights or the shop fronts, the dark, quiet streets of evening, or the small families in small houses, doing whatever it was that ordinary town families did. She didn’t see the metal shutters roll up at the volunteer fire station or the squat red engines emerge, though she did hear the sirens and see their lights flashing through her shut lids. She didn’t see that the engines drove back the way they had come, covering the old car’s tracks with their own toothy treads. She didn’t see them struggle to get up the rocky trail and the gravel path, or try and fail to put the fire out. For there, in the car, there was only driving and darkness, the watching of their mother, the roads behind them and the sound of her sister, sobbing, as home stretched away from them, mile after mile.

  PART I

  MAY

  1

  The Red Country

  Amity watches what looks like the sun. An orange ball spins high above her on a pole, turning in a hot, white sky. It makes her think of home and the temple; it makes her feel it is she who is spinning, turning about in a room filled with women, their arms raised, their skirts belling out like moons. She thinks how the moon will go bloodred and the sun turn black at the end of the world. She is watching for it still.

  ‘Amity!’ Her mother calls her back to earth, back to the gas station and the heat and the hard-baked ground, beckoning from beneath the metal canopy that shades the pumps. ‘Did you find anyone?’ Amity walks back to her, sees that there is dried blood on her mother’s face and figures she must have some, too, but neither of them can get into the bathroom to wash. The door is locked.

  ‘I found a man,’ Amity says. ‘I talked to him.’

  ‘It’s okay. I told you to. What did he say?’

  The bathroom door is marked with a stick lady wearing a triangle dress. Locked behind it is her sister. ‘He said it locks from the inside. There is no key. It’s a bolt she turned.’

  Mother slaps the triangle lady with the flat of her hand. ‘Sorrow, you come out of there right now. We are not stopping here!’

  Amity pulls on her sleeve to cover her wrist, its bareness, the bruise blooming on the bone. All of this is her fault. If she hadn’t taken the wrist strap off, her sister wouldn’t have run.

  ‘Where did the man go?’ Mother asks.

  Amity points at the flat of fields, where heat and haze make them shimmer like flu. She points to a yellow field, violent yellow, like yolk smeared across the land.

  ‘You didn’t go out there!’

  ‘No!’ says Amity, shocked.

  Four days they drove, until Mother crashed the car.

  Four days they drove from home to here.

  Four days and the seasons have changed around them, the dirty ends of snow from home melting and running to make rivers, mountains flattening to make plain land, then fields. Four days Amity had been tied to her sister, to keep her from running, until the car hit a tree and spun over a stump and Amity took the strap off and Sorrow flew out of the car and ran.

  The sky is spinning orange when the man comes from his fields. Dirt rides in on his overalls, spills down from his turned-up hems. With every step, it scatters like seed. ‘Hey,’ he calls to Amity and he raises his hand to wave. Then she sees him see her mother. She sees him take in Mother’s clogs and long, full skirts, her apron and her cloth cap, as if he hadn’t noticed Amity’s own. His eyes follow the stripe of blood down Mother’s face. ‘Hey,’ he says again and Mother nods to him, primly. ‘Closin’ up now. Was there somethin’ y’all needed?’

  Mother looks at Amity. ‘I thought you told him.’ Then she points at the bathroom door. ‘My daughter,’ she says.

  ‘Is she still in there?’ He pounds his fist on the stick lady, calling, ‘Come out of there, hey – what’s her name?’

  ‘Sorrow.’

  ‘Sorrow?’ He squints and bangs harder on the door. ‘Sorrow!’ He turns to Mother. ‘Maybe she’s unconscious?’

  ‘She’s stubborn. How can you not have a key?’

  ‘It’s a bolt. Jesus!’ The man rushes into a little shop and crashes around inside it, then he runs back out to his fields, darkening beneath the fiery sky.

  Mother watches him go, saying, ‘Has he just run away?’

  But he does come back, pulling up in an old Chevy pickup, its red paint turned pink from hard sun, and clambers down with a noisy box of tools. A boy jumps down from the truck bed to follow him, brown-skinned and lanky with a long tail of black hair that reaches halfway down his back. Amity steps behind her mother and grabs hold of her skirts to watch him.

  The man and the boy jangle through the tools. They try ratchets and hooks, rasps and claws. They hit the door hinges with chisels, but they cannot lift it out of its frame for the bolt.

  ‘Sorrow,’ Mother pleads. ‘Open the door.’ But not a sound comes from her.

  Finally the man takes a sledgehammer to the doorknob. He batters away until he smashes it off and then there is only a hole in the door. The man calls through it, tries to stick his hand into it, but it won’t fit. ‘You go,’ he tells the boy, but his hand is too big, too.

  ‘You,’ he says to Amity.

  Amity cowers until Mother pulls her out of her skirts. Then Amity creeps toward the door and bends to look in, sure she will find Sorrow staring back at her or her finger aimed to give Amity’s eye a poke. But there is only darkness. She slides her hand through the hole, slowly, craning her wrist to find the bolt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. She turns it with a click.

  And then she is being pulled back, out of the way, and the man and her mother are yanking at the door and it is opening. And only then is Sorrow revealed, there in the bathroom, there in her awful red glory.

  The man goes inside to pull her up from the floor, as if he doesn’t mind the blood on the tiles, the blood at her hem, the blood on her skirts, or the blood in her hands. He catches hold of the bloody strap hanging from her wrist. ‘Jesus, girl, what you gone and done?’

  Mother screams then, ‘Don’t touch her!’ And she rushes in to Sorrow, clogs slipping on the blood, and she grabs hold of Sorrow, to push her from the man. And the man grabs her mother, shaking her and shouting, ‘What’s wrong with you, woman? What’s wrong with you people?’ And Amity is saying, ‘She’s all right, she’s all right now,’ and
the man’s saying Jesus, and her mother’s saying don’t, and then there’s only Sorrow, rising up from the tiles and coming slowly to her clogs with her palms open, bloody, to quiet them all.

  ‘Behold,’ she says. ‘Behold.’

  Two sisters walk, hand in bloody hand, through the darkness, following a man and a boy they do not know, being followed by a mother. They walk the path that loops away from the gas station and the dirt road and the stump where the car crashed, the path that leads them between piles of trash and junk and the far, dark fields. They cannot see what these things are, these shapes beside them, these washtubs with no bottoms, these bentwood chairs with no seats, these window frames and paint cans and stacks of tractor tires. They might be anything in this darkness. Maybe low, metal monsters, crouching in clumps and clusters to snatch at passing skirts with rusty claws. When they see them they’ll know that this is a land that throws nothing away, a land once made of small family farms like this one, a land now surrounded by industrial-scale cropland, a highway, and hog farms. When the wind blows from the right direction, you can smell the stink of them; you can hear the squeal.

  When they reach the house, the three females fear it. Not for the look of the place, a gap-toothed, rough-hewn, clapboard two-story, painted white a long, long time ago. Not for the four windows, up and down, dark and empty as sockets. Not for the porch that sags beneath it or the old, scabby tree that grows to the side of it, branches arching over to smother the roof. They would fear any house.

  When the man pulls open a screen door it groans on its hinges. When he pushes in the front door, so that all of them can see inside the dark mouth of his house, they shiver. They are forbidden to go in. It is a rule.

  The man invites them inside, but they all of them shake their heads. To his offer of a bath or a coffee, Mother will say no, but she will accept a couple of his blankets, a tin bowl for washing, a plastic pitcher of fresh water. When the man says he can run Sorrow into town, see a doctor in the morning, she tells him, ‘She’s fine.’