Amity & Sorrow Read online

  The farmer swings down from the cab, engine running. ‘What the hell?’ he says, rushing at her fire, kicking dirt at her flames. ‘What the hell, woman?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she starts.

  ‘Damn right you’re sorry. Saw your fire four fields over. Take just the one spark to burn every damn crop of mine down. We have drouth here, woman, look about you. What you thinkin’?’

  She looks at his tinder-dry fields. ‘I’m not thinking. Clearly.’

  ‘I’ll say.’ He stomps the fire flat with his boots. Then he sees her car and gives a low whistle. He juts his chin at the tree. ‘Chickasaw plum there. Only tree on the whole goddamn road and you found it.’

  ‘Can you fix my car?’ She puts her hand into her apron waistband and pulls out all the money she has in the world now. Her unfolding and counting have made the few bills left as supple as leather. She holds it out, but he shakes his head. ‘You have to fix it,’ she tells him. ‘You’re a gas station.’

  ‘Maybe. Ain’t a service station. Hardly even pump gas, now the highway’s gone in. No one comes. Only folks like you, lost.’

  She squeezes the money in her hand.

  ‘Where was you headed?’ he asks her.

  She cannot tell him. She doesn’t really know. Turning away from him, she says, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘Well, that’s why the good Lord invented motor hotels.’

  She laughs. Of course she had slept, she must have. She would find herself suddenly awake at an intersection and wonder how she had come to it. She had woken at a suburban stop sign, roused by a car’s insistent honking from behind. One time it was a long-haul truck that only narrowly missed her, asleep where she was in the middle of the road. Its lights full on in the darkness, the truck was an avenging angel, delivering justice. The driver stormed out, leaned his beefy face into her open window to tell her off, tell her she wasn’t fit to drive and all that, but she only asked him what state they were in. The trucker stared at the sight of her two girls, tied together, honey smeared across their lips.

  ‘Where you come from?’ the farmer asks her.

  She shakes her head. She dare not tell him. She shows him her money again. ‘Please help me. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he says. ‘Go home.’ He starts for his truck.

  ‘But how?’ She stares at her miserable handful of money. She stares at the last curl of smoke going out, drifting over the wreck of her car and his tree and out to the flat of his fields.

  BEFORE:

  The Leaving

  No one knew who fired the first shot.

  No one knew who started the fire.

  For weeks they had been fasting and watching, praying and waiting. Because of the patrol cars. When they arrived, the countdown for the end of the world began anew. Fear twined across their land and looped around the wives, pulling them tight to their husband, tight to their rituals.

  By day, patrol cars idled on their gravel path. Officers drank from Styrofoam cups, radios crackling. By night, red and blue lights spun across the front of their temple while within it women were spinning like hoops, like wheels. Women spun in solo orbits, lost in chanting, lost in prayer, then they spun together in a wide circle that swung around the room, around the altar, and the hole in the floor that led to the room below them. When they spun they could forget patrol cars, forget that they were being watched and judged. When they spun they only thought of how the heavens turned above them and how God cupped them all in His wide, white hand.

  ‘Who will be with me at the end of days?’ he called from the center of the temple: preacher, father, husband.

  ‘I will!’

  ‘Me, Father.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Who will see the might of the Lord against the fallen?’

  ‘I will, husband.’

  ‘I.’

  ‘Who will rise in glory? Who knows now, in their hearts, in their bones, that the end of time is coming? Who will watch to see it come?’

  ‘I will, I will,’ the wives called in response.

  ‘Who will bear the Lamb?’

  Her husband had been looking for signs of the end for years now. Gossip from wives and news reports from the car radios that still worked only confirmed it. Millennium bugs and the towers collapsing had started a chain of evil, with earthquakes that split the land and unjust wars that split its people. They felt safe together and safe on his land, hidden like jewels. But more dark stories came with every woman. He told them the end was coming. Couldn’t they feel it, every one? Soon, it was all he could preach or even think about.

  He read them Revelation from memory. By then, it was the only Book he would speak, pouring the words of God out in hot, steaming bowls of wrath, while his face flickered red and blue, red and blue.

  That last night in their temple, he called them to prayer and told each wife to wake her children, to bring them to the temple. ‘Husband,’ Amaranth said. ‘You have had them at prayer all day. They are terrified and tired. Let them sleep.’

  He gave her a look that rattled her teeth. ‘I will have my children at the end.’

  Women roused children from their motley assortment of sleeping places, from the cars and trailers and yurts and sheds that stood across the frozen early spring land. Sorrow was up, child no more now, but Amaranth had to shake Amity awake in the attic bed. ‘Bring down a change of skirt and petticoat,’ she whispered. Amity did as she was told. Amaranth ran through wives and baffled children and into the kitchen to pop spelt rolls into her pocket, dropping them onto the key that sat there.

  In the temple there were candles lit in bobbins all across the planked altar, blazing in jam jars in each rough-hewn windowsill. Women brought their children in and all grew hushed when they crossed the threshold, stepping from the red and blue to the soft, pale light inside. Wives formed a ring about the room, encircling their husband and the altar and Sorrow.

  He roared his Revelation. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock! If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come!’

  There, from outside the temple door, there came a knock. Wives screamed out. Children whimpered.

  ‘This is a holy place!’ he called. ‘No law or government will defile our church!’

  Another knock came.

  ‘Will I answer it?’ Amaranth asked him, stepping into the circle. She saw how Sorrow gripped the edge of the altar with clenched fingers. ‘Husband, I will answer.’ She walked toward the door.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ called a wife from the circle. ‘Lock it!’ called another. The wife from Waco began to scream, uncontrollably, ‘It’s a trap; this is how it happens!’

  A baby began to wail and a mother bounced it, shushed it.

  Amaranth reached to open the door and her husband called out.

  ‘Stop! Hide the children. Hide them below. They will not take my children!’

  Amaranth’s hand froze on the door. Children were their glory, their purpose. How should they be hidden from police, as if they were shameful, as if they were not made, all of them, in their holy love?

  He dragged the altar table back from the hole in the floor and lifted the hatch. ‘We must keep them safe,’ he said.

  Women clung to their children, then bent to soothe them and explain. They dropped them, child by child, down into the hole, down into the dark of the room below. As for the children, they were happy enough, for down below there were piles of blankets, quilts to lie in and to jump on. There was food to last them for months of Armageddon, should it come to that.

  Amaranth watched toddlers handed down by older children who swung in to follow them, but when Amity started down to the hole, she stopped her. ‘Stay with me,’ she said, and Amity nodded. She pulled her daughter toward the door to hide her in women.

  The knocking at the door was a pounding now and Amaranth ran back to open it even as her husband shouted, shutting the hatch and moving the altar, candles swaying, ‘We will pray! You will pray!’


  The women joined hands to make their circle. They began to spin their circle about the room. Amaranth opened the door on a chubby female officer in a navy polyester uniform. She had spoken with the officer before, but she did not smile or greet her.

  The officer looked into the temple, to see inside the thing they had been watching from the outside: the plain wooden interior and the candles, the circle of women rushing by. She saw the officer startle at Sorrow’s open-throated, guttural cries and her husband’s upraised hands.

  ‘That the girl there?’ the officer asked her, pointing at Sorrow.

  And then she heard a shot ring out behind her. One single gunshot and women began to spin in a frenzy. Only the wife from Waco was still, gun in her outstretched hands. The officer crouched and grabbed for her own gun, shouting into her radio over Sorrow’s prayers and the pounding of clogs, ‘I need backup!’

  Amaranth scanned the room for daughters, for Sorrow, clinging to her father, for Amity, pressing herself against the wall. Amaranth forced her way through the spinning women, weaving among them, crashing into them, while her husband shouted, ‘I will break the seals!’

  And then there was only grabbing and clutching and dashing and rushing and hands in her hands, hands pulling away, and the screaming of women, the silence of children, and the smoke and the flames and the driving away.

  5

  Stitches

  Go home, he said. As if it were that simple.

  Amaranth scoops the last pathetic handful of oats from the dirt beneath the car. She searches the scrub for something she can feed her daughters, any edible weed she might boil into a gruel. She looks for wild sorrel or chicory, picks dandelion and horehound. She snaps the pinkish tops of henbit. She pulls a Chickasaw plum cherry from the tree and rolls it between her fingers. When she nibbles it she finds it bitter and throws it down.

  Go home, he said, when she has risked their lives to leave it, when she has hidden and lied and left, left her family and home and all the world that her daughters knew. This was her one chance and she has ruined it, squandered it. Less than a week from home and she has failed, utterly and completely.

  He narrowed his eyes when she told him she couldn’t go home, that there was no way of driving now and no one they could call for help. ‘No one?’ he pressed.

  ‘We have no phone,’ she explained. No phone, no electricity. They cooked with propane and heated their house and outbuildings with wood from their forests. They weren’t on the grid and no local government knew who lived there or under what circumstances. That was how her husband liked it. She had liked it, too.

  ‘There’s gotta be somebody you can call,’ he said. ‘Somebody who cares you all are gone.’

  Amaranth tries to lever the license plate off with a branch. Police might find it and run it against their records. The tags were hopelessly out of date. Worse was the thought that her husband would find the plate and know for certain that they were there. What would he make of a farmer who had tried to help his family, who had seen and dared to touch his daughter, a farmer who had shaken her and told her to go home? What would he do to him?

  The branch snaps. She has only managed to pucker the metal. She throws what’s left of the branch with a shout and stomps back down the dirt road, pausing before the small shop. There will be food and drink inside it, and she thinks of all the gas stations she stopped in to fill their tank, how she stared at the packets of food while she waited to pay, the foam-filled cake snacks, the cans of fizzy pop from her childhood. She could take something for her daughters. She could even set money on the counter inside, so it wouldn’t be theft. But she does not. Not because her children do not know this chemical food or that she fears its effects on them, but because she has seen a pay phone.

  There, on the side of the gas station, above a water spigot, is an ancient pay phone. Someone has cracked the receiver and attempted to graffiti it with a marker. It takes her a long time before she can lift it to listen for a dial tone, convinced that the farmer has already used it, called the police to tell them she is there.

  But no sound comes. The phone is dead. She hangs it up, grateful. And worried.

  She stands at the hedge edge of the farmer’s field and watches him working. He is a low shadow, flying across his fields on the back of a tractor, plowing ruts into dirt. In the distance is a grove of thin trees, grouped around a dry wallow. Clouds of red dust rise and drift, coloring the sky. She waits until he comes in for water. ‘Have you called the police?’ she asks.

  He opens the spigot on the back of his neck. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Your pay phone’s broken. Do you have another phone?’ Water spatters off him. It dots her skirts. She catches it in her hands.

  He shakes the water from his neck and hair. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I need to know,’ she says, ‘if you’ve told anyone we’re here.’

  ‘Who would I tell? What would I tell ’em?’ He moves to the shade of the metal canopy and pulls a box of cigarettes from his jeans. ‘I had a phone. Had it ripped out some years ago. Got tired of people callin’ me up, askin’ for money.’ He holds the pack out to her. ‘You married?’

  ‘No,’ she says, to the cigarette. Then, ‘Yes, I am. Married. Are you?’

  He scrapes a match on the side of a gas pump. ‘Yep. My wife took off. Don’t know where. So I know what it’s like for your husband, you going.’

  ‘You don’t. He’s not waiting at home for me, I can tell you that. He’s coming after me.’

  ‘You think so?’

  She nods, her throat tight.

  ‘He drink?’ he asks her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hit you? Hit your girls?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s he done that’s so bad? What’s he done you can’t forgive? You think marriage is some picnic? It ain’t.’ He takes a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Maybe you done somethin’, somethin’ you think he can’t forgive. And maybe he can’t, but I’m tellin’ you, he’d rather not be alone. You either made a vow or you didn’t.’

  ‘I made a vow,’ she tells him. ‘I made a million of them. Don’t you dare tell me how marriage works when your own wife left you.’

  He blows out smoke at her but she doesn’t turn away. He stalks back to his fields, calling back over his shoulder, ‘I want you gone.’

  She soaks dirt from oats and watches her children sleeping. In the dark of night, she listens to him, in his house. The scrape of his chair leg, the endless scratch of matches being lit, aluminum cans being scrunched and tossed. She is waiting for him to crash through the screen door and sweep them all off his porch, back to the dirt and the road and the wreckage.

  Are you married? he asked. He has no idea.

  Lights switch on and off inside. She hears a brief burst of static, white noise from an old television, and a burst of recorded laughter before the volume is turned right down. And then it is silent, still, and dark. She can almost hear the house breathing with each breath that the man takes, inhaling and exhaling his smoke through window screens and the tree rapping on the roof.

  She grew up in a small house like this, in a dark place with no streetlights, just like here. The land was hard and the people harder, but the sounds of night were of sand switch-backing beneath snake bellies, the cries of coyotes, the lonesome who-who-who of a horned owl from a Joshua tree. The rumble of her grandmother’s empty-mouthed snoring, dentures foaming in a glass. In her bedroom, she would click her flashlight on and off, pointing light at the dark shapes of furniture and toys that she knew were creeping toward her every time she closed her eyes.

  Her daughters have never known such silence and it makes their sleep fitful. The house she took them from was a clamorous one. Women moved from room to room along hodgepodge hallways, clogs thumping, skirts swishing, following the skitter of tiny feet, bare on boards, constant as rain. Doors opened, slammed shut. Children whined and giggled. At the very end, at its fullest, every bed and every
room was full and no one wanted to be alone.

  She doesn’t know what to do with this silence. It rings in her ears, this lack of noise. It makes this man’s voice all the louder. Are you married?

  Yes, she is married and married again. She is married fifty times, once for every wife. She was married to him first and last, married to him always. Each wedding is like a thread, sewing her down to him and to all of them – her family, their hard and strange ways – for eternity. She has had to run far and fast to pull herself loose from him, to rip those stitches, but still she can feel how bound she is, how very, very married.

  She hears the man turn over in his bed, above the porch. She hears him smoke and sigh.

  6

  The Day of Washing

  Come bright morning, Mother says it’s time to wash. ‘Hands, clothing, hair, and faces!’ she sings out. Amity sloshes back and forth from the gas station, hauling water and handfuls of grainy pink soap from the bathroom dispenser while Sorrow lolls on the blankets.

  ‘Come and be washed,’ Mother calls, but Sorrow won’t.

  Amity whips her cap off and tugs her braids down. She cannot wait for her mother’s fingers in her hair. Once a fire is built on the dirt and the water boils in the tin bowl, she lies back in her mother’s arms and wonders if she was held like this when she was a baby, back before there were so many other little bodies who needed holding.

  Mother lathers the soap in her strong, wet hands, making the world smell of marzipan. She picks apart Amity’s greasy plaits and scrubs her scalp clean as a sheet on washing day. Mother smiles down at her and Amity basks in it, shutting her eyes to hold the picture, and she is suddenly glad to have left home and come here, glad to be held and seen.

  ‘You look like a little seal,’ Mother says with a laugh. She rinses Amity’s head, then pushes her away. ‘Come, Sorrow,’ she calls.