The Ballad of Ami Miles

by Kristy Dallas Alley

  Then I remembered Nina had said that Penny was the same age as her, so that meant she was, what, fourteen? Which meant my mother had her when I was about two, barely older than that little boy on the playground. It had never crossed my mind that my mama might have had another baby after me. All those times I’d wished for a sister, but just then it was hard to feel happy like I’d always imagined I would. There was a buzzing in my ears, and my vision started to close in. I felt myself sway, and my mama cried out my name. Marcus stepped forward and helped her walk me over to a chair, then squatted down beside me.

  “Put your head down between your knees,” he said, and I did. “Take slow, deep breaths. Count five in and five out, okay?” I nodded to show that I’d heard him. His voice was gentle but firm. I stayed bent over for a minute, counting out breaths the way he’d said, then slowly sat up. Marcus was still kneeling beside me, and my mother was watching me with a worried face. Penny was looking around at the curious faces of some of the other people in the room who were starting to drift toward us.

  “Can we do this at home?” she asked my mother. Our mother, I thought, and almost laughed. It was that crazy kind of laughter like when Amber and I looked at the huge pile of stuff on her couch before I ran away, and I knew that just like that time, if I started to laugh, it would turn into crying. Beside me, Marcus nodded.

  “I think that’s a good idea. Ami, do you feel okay now? Can you walk a little? I think some fresh air might be good, and we can all go home.” Whose home? I thought, but I just nodded and stood up. My mother stepped forward like she wanted to take my hand again, but I took a step back without thinking and she stopped.

  “Yes,” she said, “let’s go home! I swear, these trips feel longer and harder the older I get. We just need to get our bags.” She was already moving toward the back of the room, where a few other travelers were still sorting through a mishmash of bags and cartons. It looked like they were taking their personal things but leaving most of the stuff they’d found on their trip, and I guessed there was a system of dividing it all up or putting it to use fairly. My mother had two bags, and Penny had just one. The three of them each took one, leaving me with nothing to carry. Mama and Marcus talked softly on the walk back to their cabin, and they would both glance back at me or Penny or from one to the other of us from time to time. I looked straight ahead and didn’t say anything the whole way, though I could see Penny looking over at me a few times from the corner of my eye. Finally, we reached their cabin, and we went inside.

  The door opened into a cozy sitting room, with a little kitchen off to the side. I hung back in the doorway, not really knowing what to do with myself while the three of them moved around, putting the bags in their bedrooms. This is their home, I thought. They live here together.

  My mother got us all glasses of water, and we sat down to talk. She and Marcus sat together on the couch, Mama looking nervous now, clutching his hand to steady her own. She looked at me, and I saw that her eyes were grayish blue. Couldn’t tell that from my drawing, I thought. At least Penny doesn’t look more like her than I do. I knew it was ugly to think such a thing, but I thought it would just be too much if she got to look like our mama on top of getting to be raised by her.

  “I just knew if you ever came, it would be while I was out on a trip,” my mother said, breaking the silence that was about to stretch out too far. “Every time I left, I was afraid I’d miss you. I’d tell Marcus what to do, to wait till I got back if he could. So when he came to meet me when we got back today, as soon as I saw his face, I knew!” She was smiling at me as she talked. For some reason, that didn’t sit right with me.

  “I’ve been here more than a week,” I said. My voice sounded flat. “I showed Miss Helen your picture, the drawing you left? She told me she talked to your husband, but she didn’t mention Penny to me. I didn’t know anyone here.” I stopped, not sure what else I wanted to say. My mother frowned, then quickly forced her face back into a smile.

  “Oh, Helen can be a bit gruff, but she’s got a soft heart. I’m sure she made you feel right at home. Did you meet some of the other kids, make some friends?” I could see her straining to keep a smile on her face, but her eyes were darting from me to Penny to Marcus like they couldn’t find a safe place to land. Part of me wanted to be that safe place, but another surprising part of me wanted to see her struggle the way I’d been struggling while I waited for her.

  “I met them,” I said. “I’d never met anyone my age before I got here. I’ve never known anyone younger than Amber.” I let the name hang there, a challenge. Amber meant Heavenly Shepherd, something only my mother and I shared. She was the one my mother sent the Lake Point brochure to and trusted to keep her secret until I needed to know. I stared into my mother’s eyes until she looked down at her lap. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. A few minutes ago, I’d felt so happy, but that happiness was being replaced by angry questions.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked bluntly.

  “We all have to go out on supply runs when it’s our turn. There are things we need sometimes that we can’t make or grow here. We could get along, I guess, but there’s still so much out there, it seems silly not to make use of it.” She looked at her husband’s face for agreement. Somehow that made me even madder.

  “No,” I said, “why did you leave me?”

  “Ami,” Marcus said gently, “there’s plenty of time for us to talk about all that later.” He moved his eyes from me to Penny, like he thought maybe she didn’t need to hear all of this.

  “No way,” Penny said. “I want to hear this too. I’m not a baby anymore.” Mama and Marcus looked at each other and seemed to speak with just their eyes. My mother sighed like she’d just lost a fight.

  “What did they tell you, your grandparents?” she asked me.

  “I asked you first,” I replied. They both gave a little laugh. They seemed less surprised by my stubbornness than I was.

  “I guess that’s fair,” my mother said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. I knew this must be hard for her, but it was hard for me too, and she was the one who created this whole mess, not me. But it was Marcus who spoke next.

  “Look at me, Ami. Now think about your grandfather Solomon, and I think you’ll be able to answer your own question about why we had to leave.” I peeled my eyes away from my mother to look at him. The expression on his face was patient, like he was just waiting for me to get it. And then I did.

  “You were there? At Heavenly Shepherd?” I asked. The pieces were starting to fall into place. “But you’re not…”

  “Your father? No, I’m not. I met your mother when you were about a year old.” I looked from Marcus to my mother and tried to imagine them younger, back at the compound with the rest of my family. If there was one thing my papa Solomon had, it was opinions. Ideas about right and wrong, about should and must and must not. Of course I had heard him preach about brown and white people mixing in marriage many times. It was one of his pet subjects, but it didn’t really need to be, did it? It wasn’t like there were a lot of different kinds of people coming down the hi-way anymore or living on the farms around us or coming to visit at Heavenly Shepherd.

  Except one time, there was. One time a man with dark brown skin came down that hi-way, and he and Elisabeth Miles fell in love.

  My face must have shown that understanding settling in, because Marcus smiled sadly and nodded. But that was just the answer to the first part of the question, the part about why they left. The second part was about why they didn’t take me with them. My mama must have realized this because she started trying to answer it. But that meant …

  “Wait a minute,” I said slowly. “How can that be? You left right after I was born! You ran away from the C-PAF man.”

  She shook her head sadly. “I figured that’s what they’d tell you. There never was no C-PAF men, Ami. That was just a story—”

  “Yeah,” I said with a hard little laugh, “I found that out after I got here.
Which I figured out you must have too. But I thought you still believed it when I was born, so it still made sense that you thought you had to run to keep from getting taken.”

  “Ami,” she started, her voice not sounding very sure. “When we left the compound, I was a scared, pregnant girl. I was barely sixteen when I had you; did you know that? Your daddy, well … he wasn’t … he didn’t stick around. He was a lot older than me, and he just showed up at the compound one day. At first, I thought he was a traveler passing through, but then it seemed like my parents had planned it.” Her voice trailed off.

  “That sounds about right,” I said, my voice angrier than I meant it to be. I felt like I might be sick. My mother looked down at her hands and nodded. I saw a tear spill over and slip down her cheek.

  “When you were born, oh, Ami! You were just like the sweetest, most perfect little angel. And my mama and daddy, well, they acted like I’d performed a miracle. They fussed and carried on over you like you was the last baby on earth, which I guess to them you were. And Billie and Rachel and Jacob too. It was like you were everybody’s baby. If I wasn’t the only one that could nurse you, why, I don’t think I would’ve ever even gotten to hold you! I was so young, and Ruth was always so much stronger than me. Before long, it was like you were another of her babies. They treated me like I was just your big sister, not your mama at all. And I guess after a while I just went along with it. I wasn’t … it wasn’t like I had decided I was ready to be a mama. I was just a child myself in a lot of ways. But I always loved you, Ami.” She looked hard at me, searching my face to see how I was taking all this.

  “Not long after your first birthday, I met Marcus.” She looked at him then and smiled through her tears. He nodded, and she looked back at me and kept going. Every once in a while, her eyes would shoot over to Penny, to see how she was taking all this, I guess. I could tell that it hurt her to tell this story, and part of that was having to let Penny hear it.

  “Marcus, he came down the road looking for survivors. It’s hard out there, harder than you might think, and he was coming south from what was left of the cities. I know you’ve been sheltered, protected from what all is out there, Ami, but some of it is bad. There’s bad people up around where the big cities were. It’s … it’s not like what you’ve known.” Marcus looked serious and nodded, prompting her to go on.

  “So he wanted a safer place, where people were kind and he could pitch in, help out, maybe find someone special to keep him company.” She smiled over at him, and I saw how young she still was. I tried to imagine her as a girl of seventeen, just barely older than I was then.

  “But my daddy, well, I guess you know how that went. He wasn’t having it. You’d think, in all this big, empty world that has more than half fell apart, that he could find it in his heart to make a place for a healthy young man just wanting to be part of something, but you’d be wrong. I begged my mama to speak for Marcus, but of course she would never go against her husband.” That last word sounded so bitter I wondered if it left a bad taste in her mouth.

  “It was too late for me, though.” Marcus spoke now. “As soon as I saw your mother, I knew she was meant for me. And I knew that she knew it too. So I moved on down the road like Solomon said, but I didn’t go far. I set up camp on an old abandoned farm a couple miles down the road. Couldn’t risk him or your uncles finding me in the woods when they went hunting, and that farm was pretty well picked clean of anything useful, so I didn’t expect any company there. I got some, though.” Now it was his turn to smile over at my mother. Courting, I thought. That’s what that looks like.

  “Oh, you knew I’d come,” she replied, swatting at his broad shoulder. “You only picked that old place because you could see I’d been there.” She turned her eyes from him and spoke to me now. “That farmhouse was all caved in and rotted even back then, but the barn was in pretty good shape. Had a metal roof on it. I’d go there sometimes to get away from my family. It was my own secret place, and I hid my treasures there.” She spoke like she knew I would understand exactly what she meant. I’d had the same family, after all, the same upbringing. The same kinds of innocent little-girl secret treasures. In all the years I’d been missing my mother, I’d thought of her as an adult, tired and bitter like Rachel and Billie, steady and sure like Ruth. But she had been just a girl, after all, when she had me, more like me than the adults who’d raised me. How would I handle the same situation? I wondered. How had I handled it when Zeke Johnson had shown up in the yard? I’d run, just like she did. But I hadn’t left a daughter behind.

  “I started sneaking over to that old barn every chance I got,” my mother said. “We tried to figure out what to do. I knew how much my parents wanted babies to carry on the family line, so I thought if I could have another one, my daddy would soften toward Marcus and his … being different. I didn’t understand back then that it was about more than that for him. He wanted control, just like always. He didn’t want it to be my choice; he wanted it to be his.” Now it was my turn to look at my lap, thinking about my big plan. I had told myself that if I could find a husband on my own and bring him back to the compound, Papa Solomon would accept that and forgive me for running away. But hearing my mother now, I knew that deep down I’d always doubted that plan. It was Papa’s way or the hi-way, always. And I had chosen the hi-way, just like my mother had. He would never forgive that.

  “When my pregnancy started to show, I knew I couldn’t hide it from the family for long. My sisters saw it first, and even though they didn’t tell, I knew they wouldn’t stand up to Daddy for me. I begged them to help me think of the best way to tell our parents, but they said there was nothing they could do. We were all scared of what my daddy would do. Amber was sweet to me about it and helped me cover it up as long as I could, but she was just a girl herself and an outsider with no sway over anything. Finally, one day I saw my mama looking at me funny, staring at my little round belly starting to push against those awful dresses we had to wear. Then she looked me dead in the eye and asked, ‘Is it him?’ I knew who she meant, and I told her yes.” She started to cry now, but she kept talking.

  “My own mama, Ami, she just looked at me so cold and told me I had to go, said not to even think about tryin’ to take you with me. My own baby girl! She said…” She was crying so hard then that she couldn’t talk for a minute. “She said I was a filthy whore, that they wouldn’t let me ‘contaminate’ you with my filth. She said if she’d had any other choice, she wouldn’t even have let me nurse you because…” She broke down again, and Marcus put his arm around her and made soft shushing noises into her hair. I looked over at Penny and saw that she was watching her parents and crying. But I just felt numb. It was like I was hearing and seeing everything from far away. She shook her head and started again.

  “Because she knew I was a common slut when I didn’t complain about…” She stopped and looked at Penny. Then she took a deep breath and sat up straighter. “Because I didn’t complain when they brought your daddy in to mate with me.” Her voice turned bitter and hard, and it was like she was spitting out the words. “They bred me to a stranger like I was some dog, their own daughter. Told me a lot of pretty stories about how it was God’s plan. Then my mama had the gall to say I was no better than a bitch in heat because I did my duty without complaining.” Her words were like knives in my heart.

  “I wanted to take you with me, Ami; you have to know that. But I knew they’d never let me. And after all the ugly, hateful things my mama said to me, well … I didn’t think I deserved to have you. I’m stronger now, but back then … all I had ever known was them. I told myself I would come back for you once we found a safe place and this baby was born, but part of me knew they’d never let you go. That night while everyone slept, I packed the few things I had and ran to Marcus. We knew we couldn’t stay there, but we didn’t know where to go. Marcus had heard about a settlement in Georgia, so we planned to go east and look for it.”

  She stopped and looked at Mar
cus, like he knew this part was too hard for her to tell. He put his arm around her shoulders and took over telling the story. “We thought we knew where we were going, but we got lost. I had an old map, but some of the roads had crumbled, and the turnoffs were grown over. It’s not easy to find your way from one place to another when you can’t stick to one main road like the one you took to get here. We ran out of supplies and had to scavenge. Your mother was just a skinny little thing to begin with, and she was losing weight. We were worried about the baby getting what she needed to grow and be healthy. I was able to hunt a little, but it was winter, and a colder one than usual. Then it snowed, a big heavy snow that lasted for days. We were lucky enough to find an empty house in decent shape to stay in and ride out the storm. We holed up in the den with the fireplace and managed to stay warm, and there was plenty of snow to melt for water, but we just about starved. Your mama was weak and sick and scared. I was out of my mind with worry, going out in the snow to try to find food. One day, I managed to shoot a rabbit that I cleaned and boiled in melted snow over the fire.”

  “I could barely get him to eat any of it,” my mother broke in. “He kept trying to give it all to me. Finally, I told him that if he starved to death, I would soon follow since I was pretty much bedridden by then. That got him to eat a little and drink some of the broth.” He shook his head but smiled at her and said his piece.

  “Finally, after about five days, the snow stopped and the sun came out and melted it all away. By then, your mama was too scared to leave that house, afraid of giving birth on the road. The sun brought all the animals out of their hidey-holes, and I had a little more luck with hunting. We stayed there through the spring, getting by on dandelion greens and wild lettuce and berries, whatever else I could scavenge and hunt, and then, finally, Penny was born.