by Peggy Riley
‘This is Oklahoma,’ he says. ‘Don’t you know?’
She sets her hands in her pinafore pocket, feels her secret drop out of her sleeve to hide there.
‘I should get you a map,’ he says.
‘That would be nice.’ She doesn’t know what a map is, but anything he gave her would be all right with her.
‘Won’t help you walk to Canada, though. I don’t figure Sorrow would walk even half that far. Wouldn’t make it to the end of the road. She’d just sit down in a ditch and expect somebody to come by and pick her up.’
She giggles and turns away from him. The car and the truck and the dust cloud are gone.
He puts his boot through a gap in the low hedge by the roadside. ‘C’mon, there’s a shortcut back,’ he says.
‘Through the field?’
‘It’s fallow. You can’t hurt it.’
‘Fields are forbidden.’
‘Who says?’
‘God. My father.’
‘Why?’
She looks at him. What can she tell him of all their rules? She doesn’t know why herself. ‘Bad things happen there.’
‘They don’t,’ he says. ‘Only place where good things happen. You still here come harvest, you’ll see.’ And with that, he is into the field and gone and she wonders if that is why fields are bad. Because she wants to follow him.
9
Rules
Amaranth circumnavigates the house beneath the noon sun. Her eyes follow the length of boards, apricot now from the red dust; their paint peels and curls like rose petals. She mounts the porch steps and pulls back the screen door. The doorknob burns in her hand and she scuttles back down to the dirt and the tree.
She makes a loop around the house, past the patch of chalky soil and the powder-blue propane tank. She comes around to climb the porch, open the screen, and push the wooden door back. It slams in her face, as if the house itself has rules it wants to keep.
The next attempt she manages a foot inside, where she can smell the dust and must of the shadowed room, feel her feet on its painted boards. His voice in her head shouts: No man’s house! No man’s house! until she has to run back outside, shaking, fists over her ears, telling herself how ridiculous she is, afraid of ghosts and a man’s old house. She must get inside while her daughters are gone, while the farmer works and no one can see her.
She climbs the porch and turns the knob. She flings back the screen and shoves the door open, throwing herself into the room to grip the back of the sofa before the voice can even draw breath. Then it gives her all it’s got. Betrayer! Judas! Whore of Babylon!
She clings to the sofa like a shipwreck and shuts her eyes. One hand grips coarse velvet and horsehair. The other, she realizes, holds a thin cotton shirt, unbuttoned and abandoned. The farmer’s, by the dirt of it. She bends to smell the smoke and the skin of him, then her hands fly up, shocked by the intimacy of it. What is she doing? And then she is spinning and the room is spinning and her husband’s Revelation is roaring in her head: You have abandoned the love you had at first! Remember from what you have fallen and repent! If not, I will come to you and remove you from your church!
She backs her way to a wall, rough paper hung straight over boards. There are dark squares on the paper, where pictures have been removed. A nail digs into the back of her cap like an accusatory finger.
Jezebel! She hears. Repent of your immorality. Those who commit adultery I will throw into great tribulation. And I will strike your children dead!
She yanks her cap free. She deserves his prophecies and condemnations. She has heard them all before. Salome, Delilah, Lilith! Eve. Eve. Eve!
She pleads to the empty room and his vengeful God, ‘My children are starving. Your children are starving. Please.’
The voice pauses, as if considering. It becomes a tinny tapping. Tap-tap-tap. Like a ring onto glass. The pricking of her conscience. The devil’s fingernails on her skull.
Tap-tap-tap.
She turns, expecting Bradley, tapping on the window, calling to her, ‘Get out of my house.’ But he is not there. There is no one.
She walks silently across the floorboards to look through an open doorway. ‘Hello?’ she calls into a faded, sunny kitchen. She calls up the spindled stairway. ‘Hello?’
Tap-tap-tap. She hears its rhythm, like words: Let me out.
Her heart pounds back – let me out – and all she wants to do is run.
Tap-tap-tap and the thump of her heart, tap-tap-tap and the flash of something, caught in the corner of her eye. She dives behind the sofa, awaiting the devil and his justice, come for her at last.
Tap. Tap. Tap. More insistent now. Let. Me. Out. It is coming from within the room, she realizes, and she peers up, sees the glint of something inside the woodstove, a twitch of movement behind its smoke-smeared glass. Then the tapping. When she bends before it, she can see it is the pointed beak of a baby bird. It blinks its yellow eye.
She flips the stove handle to open the door and catch it, but the bird darts out, flaps madly in the dark room. It rises, hits the ceiling, and drops. It rises to beat the air again, hits a wall, and lands, dazed and trembling. Its heart thrusts its puffy chest out, hard and fast as her own startled organ. She reaches down to take the bird and it scuttles back from her, frightened as she is, as if she is its monster, its devil.
She opens the door to flood the room with light. The bird studies her, deciding, then gathers the last of its courage. It waddles a step and shoots out the door and she watches the baby flap and lift until it is only a needle point in the flat, white sky and she is alone again in the room with the thump of her heart, the hum of a faraway tractor, and the papery shiver of the old tree’s leaves.
And then the tapping comes again. Louder now. A knocking. It makes ash trickle from the open stove. It makes dust drop from the boarded ceiling.
It is coming from upstairs.
She puts a hand on the newel post. There is someone in the house with her.
The knocking draws her feet up the dogleg stairs, up to a dark landing with three closed doors. Knock. Knock. Knock.
It cannot be her husband. It cannot be the devil. And yet she calls, breathless, ‘Hello?’
She turns the first doorknob, but it is locked. She knocks on the door. ‘Is someone there?’
And then she hears a voice from behind the door that sends her hurtling back down the steps, out the door and down the porch, down to the dirt and the old tree and the very edge of the fields, gasping, staring out at the farmer.
‘Let me out!’
10
The Spinning
Sorrow swishes her hands through smoke. ‘I can see the temple,’ she says.
‘No, you can’t,’ Mother says, feeding grass into flames.
Sorrow dances her hands over them. ‘We should pray,’ she says.
‘We should wash,’ Mother answers.
Amity had brought floury armfuls of clothes from the trunk and given them to Mother, who praised her and thanked her, and then went through every inch of fabric, every stitch and seam. ‘Is this all you found, daughter?’ she’d asked. ‘Are you sure?’ And Amity’d felt like crying.
‘God doesn’t want us clean, he wants us faithful,’ Sorrow insists.
Mother drops another underskirt into a steaming bowl of water, working the oil and honey from it. Already, strung across the length of the porch railing, there are skirts and blouses and stockings, flapping and drying in the sun, waving like old friends.
‘If we prayed, we would know what to do,’ Sorrow says.
‘We can’t pray without the temple,’ Mother says.
‘But God is everywhere,’ Sorrow sniffs. ‘Even here.’
Mother lifts her eyebrows at her. ‘I think you are feeling better now, daughter.’
‘I am healed,’ Sorrow says, smug as a cat.
‘How are you healed?’
‘God the Father heals me.’
‘Is that so?’
Amity dips
her head at this, so Mother won’t see her smiling. She heals Sorrow, too, she thinks, with the thing she found in the trunk. When she set it into Sorrow’s palm, the bright blue piece of china, Sorrow looked down at it with wonder. ‘Am I Oracle still?’ she asked.
Amity could only gape at her. If Sorrow wasn’t Oracle, then there was no order to the world. If the signs and answers weren’t in the Oracle bowl, they were nowhere. Sorrow was the holy one and always had been. She was Oracle and firstborn of the Father, the first daughter. She was his helper, beside him at the altar, by his hand in worship. She was the one who watched for God. Even before they all knew of her gift, Mother said Sorrow had been set up on the altar so they could watch her. Mother said it was because she was naughty and putting her on the altar calmed her, all that attention, but Amity is sure it only increased her natural holiness, made her aware of the gift God had given her up in heaven.
The blue Oracle bowl had been Sorrow’s tool forever, for at least as long as Amity could remember. The bowl was as old as the church, old as the house and their family, older even than the second mother, whom Amity had never met. The bowl might be as old as God Himself, but now it was broken.
The Oracle bowl was there to show Sorrow the seven seals and all of God’s signs. She watched them, in its water, and spoke of what she saw to her father and his church. ‘Blessed is she who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, for the time is near,’ she’d say. Amity hadn’t known the bowl could be broken. She didn’t know it was possible to break such a thing, any more than it was possible to break a church or a family. ‘What do you see, Sorrow?’ Amity had whispered, but Sorrow had only stared at the blue shard, eyes wide.
Mother dries her hand and strokes a finger down Sorrow’s cheek. ‘What shall I do with you, daughter?’
Sorrow leans into it, so that Mother will cup her face. ‘Pray with me.’
‘No, Sorrow,’ but already Sorrow is taking her mother’s two hands and pulling her up. Already she is walking her in a slow circle, around and around before the fire.
Amity itches for them to open their hands and take her into their ring. She wants them to spin her proper, but they will not. They cannot. She is a child still and cannot be spun. Only women and wives can spin in worship. Another rule.
Now Sorrow and Mother speed their circle. Their skirts flare out and their clogs pump the dirt. They spin their circle faster and faster, twirl until they are a blur and the red dust rises to surround them like rusty angels. Amity watches as they fling their heads back, pulling hard against one another’s hands, and Sorrow opens her mouth in prayer. Then Mother releases her, so that she spins off toward the tree, toward the house, like a red dust whirlwind.
Mother stops suddenly, panting, as if trying to catch her breath.
‘I miss this! Mother, don’t you? The temple?’ Amity hops to her, to catch hold of her hands and swing them. And then she can see that Mother has stopped because of the man, the man who has come from his fields to stare at them.
‘The dust,’ Mother calls. ‘Stop, Sorrow! Look at the dust we raise!’
It coats the house boards, the railing of skirts and petticoats. Sorrow swings back around the house, spinning still, shouting her guttural prayer as she winds and wheels, caterwauling. Then she freezes. From above her, there comes a scraping sound, from inside the house. A window yawns open.
‘God,’ says the farmer.
The devil, thinks Amity.
Through the window there comes flying a large brown leather shoe. It drops square at Sorrow’s feet.
The man stomps toward his house, then turns back to Mother, pulling something from his pocket and shaking it at her.
‘What’s this?’ Mother asks.
‘For your car.’ He crosses to the porch steps and Mother follows.
‘What do you mean for our car? You said you couldn’t fix it.’
‘Sold it for scrap. Got you some money – so you can go. Just go.’ He opens the screen door with a whine. He pokes the money at Mother and goes inside.
Sorrow picks up the leather shoe and puts her hand into it. She waggles it at Amity. ‘I have the devil by his shoe. This is the devil’s house and he will hobble now, when he comes.’
Mother looks at the screen, fists clenched, and then she plunges straight inside it.
‘Mother!’ Amity calls. ‘Don’t!’
Sorrow drops the shoe and takes Amity by the hand.
Amaranth is inside his house before she can be frightened of it. And then she is only angry. ‘Where are you?’ she calls. He has kicked his boots off. They lie, fallen, behind the sofa. Dirt from the treads lies like worm casings. ‘Bradley!’ she calls.
He bounds down from upstairs two at a time, in his dirty socks. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘You don’t just walk into people’s houses.’
‘And you don’t just sell people’s cars! You – you take this back.’ She holds out the sweaty ball of money.
‘I can’t.’ He walks past her into the kitchen and flicks a buzzing light on.
She follows him in. ‘I didn’t ask you to sell it. I didn’t say you could sell it.’
‘You said you need money, I got you money.’ He strikes a match and lights a cigarette, throws the rest of the pack at the table.
‘That car was all I had,’ she says.
‘Then you didn’t have nothin’.’ He blows smoke out the screen. ‘You had a wreck. Lucky I didn’t get charged to get it towed – off my land.’
She nods and leans against a cupboard, adding the money mentally to the money in her skirts. How on earth can they move on with this? ‘I had things in that car,’ she says. She sounds petty, but she doesn’t care.
‘Flour and feathers. Your girl got what she could. Good girl, that Amity.’
Her thumb goes to her bare finger. No wedding band and nothing left to sell. Amity wouldn’t have known to look for it.
He sits to smoke, stretching his legs beneath a clattering drop-leaf table. ‘I can’t have you all stayin’ here.’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Can’t have you dancin’ ’round my yard like lunatics, hangin’ your scanties like some Chinese laundry on my porch. Come harvest, I won’t have time for this. Got my hands full already and no one here to do the work.’
‘I can help you.’
‘Fat load of good you done so far.’ He taps ash onto the tabletop and she moves to him, scoops the ash into her palm, then throws it in the sink. He shakes his head at her.
She wonders how long it is until harvest, when he might need to take on extra hands. She wonders how she could help him then. She wonders if he has food.
‘So that’s that, then,’ he says and scrapes his chair back. He opens the door to a rusting Frigidaire and she glances into it to see what he has: cans of beer and condiments, opened cans of soup and beans. The squat dome of a half package of baloney and a stack of cheese in plastic sleeves. He sees her looking. ‘You want one?’ He snaps a beer can off a six-pack ring and holds it out to her.
She turns her head away and he laughs at her. She imagines opening a beer with him, sitting down across from him, at his table, the spray of the pull top, the fizz of foam on her tongue, and the cold bubbles of alcohol rushing down her throat. She swallows.
What if she confided in him, told him all that had happened to bring her to this moment? Would he understand her? Would he sympathize? Would he tell her what to do, tell her how to push on for Mexico, or help her find a better plan? Would he ask her to stay? Would he tell her she was right to leave her husband after all?
‘Well?’ He wiggles the can before her.
She sets her two thin piles of money on the table.
‘That’s yours,’ he says.
‘It’s for the use of your porch. We will go.’
‘I ain’t rentin’ you my porch. And I don’t see you going.’ He pops the tab on his beer and takes a long slug
of it. He reaches in to pull another can out, then he stomps back up the stairs, leaving her money to lie where it is, calling a quiet ‘’Night’ down behind him.
There are coffee grounds speckled over Formica countertops. There are giant tubs of Folgers and Coffee-mate in his cupboard. There are drawers filled with battered cutlery and rusting tools: cheese graters, cherry pitters, paring knives with blades sharpened into crescent moons. Rubber bands, bread bags, foil balls, books of matches from bars: Mac’s, Dino’s, the Do Drop Inn.
She thinks of the commercial refrigerators back home, scavenged and bartered, crammed full to the brim with the industry of women: curds and creams, sausages and cheeses. What wouldn’t she give for chokecherries, huckleberries, sweetgrass honey from their hives? Hand-milled and roasted chicory, fresh and frothy goat’s milk?
She counts out the money for her car. Through his window, she sees the dark shapes of her children, playing shadowy hand games before the fire, and she pulls out a ten-dollar bill. She yanks open his fridge and takes the baloney, a squeeze bottle of mustard. From the crisper, two wizened, forgotten apples. She ransacks his cupboards to find cups and plates, two mugs. Leaving the kitchen, she stops to peek behind a kettle-cloth curtain, thinking she will find a sink and toilet and use it, rather than crouch again behind the tree.
She finds, instead, a pantry cupboard, the size of a closet and lined with shelves, covered in sticky paper and fly droppings. It smells of weevils, of flour gone off. But there is food. Food in rusted cans, food cloudy in Mason jars. There are plastic bins on the floor filled with dried beans and grains: kidney and lima beans, split peas and lentils, pearl barley, black-eyed peas. Food. Food enough to feed them all for weeks.
‘Thank you, God,’ she whispers. At last, a sign.
Overhead, she can hear him walking, doors opening and shutting. She hears voices and the hiss of a TV coming on. She plunges a hand into turtle beans, cool and heavy, and drops a fistful in her apron pocket. Then she snatches up her plundered items and goes.