by Peggy Riley
‘Thought I had rats,’ he says.
‘Bird,’ she says.
‘In there?’ He sets the broom down and goes back to the table, jamming the bottle into the bag and folding his arms. ‘What are you doin’?’
‘It was in your fire. You should cap off your chimney.’
‘I’ll add it to the list.’ He looks at her, all the lids off the bean and the grain bins. ‘Somethin’ cookin’?’
‘Well, you have food here,’ she blurts. ‘Did you know? Grains, some flours. Beans?’
‘Gone off now. Old.’
‘Not all of it. I can sift out what’s good. I – I can pay you for it.’
Bradley hitches a leg up to sit on his table, its joints creaking. ‘I asked what you were doin’ here, Amaranth.’
‘We need food and I can’t – all ours was in the car and that’s gone now and I … of course, I could feed you, too, feed you and your boy. I could work for you – I’m a good cook, I’m a hard worker and there’s food enough. I mean, what are you eating?’ She looks at him, the bone and sinew of him, and she realizes he isn’t eating. Not really. His sustenance comes from cans and bottles. Her shoulders droop. ‘I’m waiting, for a sign.’
‘A sign.’
‘To tell me what to do.’
‘Signs take long where you come from?’
‘They can take years,’ she says. ‘Oh, but we won’t be here for years. God crashed us here, and we’ll have to wait until He tells us where to go next.’
‘You think God crashed you? You crashed you. It was you.’ Bradley reaches around for the bottle and slides it from the paper bag. He unscrews it and takes another drink, watching her all the time. Then he wipes his mouth with his wrist, fingers curled over his face. ‘I’m tryin’ to be nice here, but I’m nobody’s fool.’
‘You’re a good man.’ She winds her hands into the pantry curtain.
He laughs. ‘I wouldn’t kick women out on the streets, but honest to God, I ain’t runnin’ a flophouse. This ain’t a charity; I got a farm to run here.’
‘We want to help you.’
‘I don’t want your help.’
‘You’ll need us in the harvest.’
‘You any idea when my harvest is? You even know what I’m growin’ out there?’
She shakes her head. She can’t even imagine how she will get her children in the forbidden fields. ‘We’re used to hard work. This – isn’t like us, how we are here.’
He hops off the table and sets the bottle down, roots through his drawers for a book of matches. He folds the cover back to light one, then lights his cigarette. ‘When you left,’ he asks her, drawing smoke in, ‘why’d you leave with so little?’
‘It was all I could grab,’ she says. ‘I got the girls, that’s all that matters. I know you think I should have stayed.’
‘No, I was thinkin’ that when my wife went, she took the lot. Must’ve planned it for some time, what she was gonna take and when she’d go. You just grabbed what you could and ran.’
The pantry curtain is around her arm like a tourniquet. She nods, unwinding it, wiggling blood into her fingers. ‘But she left you food here. Before she left. Didn’t she?’
He looks into his pantry again. ‘I suppose.’
‘We had a room like this,’ she tells him. ‘Well, bigger, but there were more of us.’ She thinks of all the food stored in the room below their temple, food made in those last frantic months, women jostling over stove tops, scooping food into boiled jars to preserve it. What they hadn’t thought to keep, and what his wife must have kept, were seeds. Because Hope was gone.
At the back of the pantry she’d found jars of seeds, stacked and unlabeled. She held them up to the light to see them, their myriad shapes: hard brown balls, pale disks and cylinders, yellow crescents thin as fingernail parings. A jar of tiny black specks could be anything – onion or nigella or poppy. She unscrewed a few to sniff them, to see if she might cook with them, but she knew better than to experiment with seeds she didn’t know. ‘How late can you plant here?’ she asks him.
‘Depends what you’re puttin’ in. We plant September, earliest, put in winter wheat and the rape. Too dry to plant anythin’ now, this drouth. Grain sorghum’s gone in and it was too dry when we did it. The playa and the wallows are dry, too. If we had pump or pivot irrigation you could do what you wanted when you liked.’
‘I could water them.’
‘My fields?’ He coughs and picks tobacco from his tongue with dirty fingers.
‘No, your seeds.’
‘What seeds?’
‘The ones in here. You’ve a good patch of soil behind the house.’
‘I know it’s good. Been workin’ it since I was a boy. It was my ma’s kitchen garden.’
‘I don’t know what these are. No labels.’
‘Leave ’em be. Don’t need you adding to my work here.’
‘But they’re good – it’s a waste—’
‘Leave ’em!’ He stubs his cigarette in the sink. ‘I got acres of rape out there and I don’t know what I’m doin’. We was always wheat here but the price drops and someone says they want rapeseed for oil, so you buy it and you plant it and then they call in a loan. You plant soybean, then sorghum, and you keep settin’ your share, diggin’ deep, diggin’ broad, puttin’ in things you never grew before ’cause they say someone’ll buy ’em. And everythin’ you grow you sell and put back into seeds, ’cause they won’t let you save seeds anymore. And then you have to spray and you have to buy their spray. And then out of the blue, folks want organic, but your seeds and spray ain’t green and if you don’t spray you’ll only harvest cheatgrass and shattercane. And then they tell you to plant corn for ethanol when that’s what all the rape was for.’ He turns to the window, hands flat on the tabletop. ‘When all of this was dust once. And before that it was buffalo grass and they made it worse, men like my pa, settin’ their shares too deep. Wantin’ too much. Turning everythin’ over ’til nothin’ would grow.’ He turns back and sees her watching. ‘Hell, anything growin’ here is a miracle.’
‘All growing is a miracle.’
‘No. It’s what seeds do. What they’re made for.’
‘Then that’s the miracle,’ she says quietly. ‘Knowing what you’re made for. Knowing what to do.’
Bradley stares down at his hands, scarred and stained. ‘Well, I was made to work this land. Look what I got to show for it.’
She watches his reflection in the window glass and her own, capped and skirted, tiny behind him. ‘I thought I knew what I was made for.’
‘And then you left it.’ He takes the bottle, pushes past her, throwing back, ‘Don’t put seeds in you can’t tend.’
Once he’s gone, she hears the knocking come from above her, as if it has waited for him to go and her to answer. She does not. She goes back into the pantry, to count and sort, to plan and wait.
13
The Map of the Panhandle
Sorrow works harder to be the Oracle now. The bucket is filled and dumped. The blue china shard is splashed and spun. The baby and the car are ineluctable proof of God’s signs, Sorrow says, even if they were too slow to catch them. Or too greedy, Amity thinks.
Sorrow drags Amity from door to spigot, spigot to door. Finally, late in the hot afternoon, when both of them are damp and cross, caps dripping, blouses sticking, Sorrow raises her arms in the air and makes a great pronouncement. ‘God the Father sends a sign!’
‘Hallelujah,’ Amity grumps.
‘He will send us a car.’
‘He did send us a car.’
‘A car of our own.’
‘We had a car.’
‘Crashed, it was. By the Jezebel. The devil crashed our car. The Great Red Dragon!’
Amity sighs. ‘If God sent a car, how would we drive it? He’d have to send a driver, too.’
‘I can drive.’
Amity sneaks a look at Sorrow. Sorrow does not know how to drive and, with her head hung down
for most of the four days that her mother was driving, she couldn’t have learned it. And even if she saw the arm part of driving, she never saw the foot part that Mother did, under skirts, where no one could see. ‘How can you drive?’
‘I’ve been in a car before you, you know. I’ve been places you haven’t.’
In any contest with Sorrow she is bound to lose. Amity shrugs. ‘How will He bring us a car?’
‘A truck.’
‘What truck?’ Amity has a bad feeling about this sign.
‘A red truck. A faded truck.’
‘The man’s truck? You can’t just take his truck.’
‘God put it here for us.’
‘God gave the truck to the farmer. He won’t just give it to us.’
Sorrow reels Amity in by the end of the wrist strap. ‘God says the boy will take it for us, just as he took the food. God will make him.’
Dust unfolds a giant paper before them, in the wide shade of the gas station canopy. He pulls it open and it looks like a folded flower, pink and yellow and green, veined with ribbons, red and blue, unspooling, meandering across it. ‘This is a map,’ he says.
The girls touch the paper together. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Amity breathes. Sorrow nods.
‘Said I’d get you one. So here you go.’
‘What does it do?’
‘What do you mean, what’s it do? It’s a map.’ He spreads it flat on the cement. ‘It shows you where you are and where you want to go. Look, this map’s Oklahoma, see? We’re here on the Panhandle, like a handle on a pan, and the pan is the rest of Oklahoma. Down here’s Texas, and up there’s Kansas, Colorado. This purple bit here on the handle is us. No man’s land.’
‘It’s your land.’
‘Bradley’s land. Not mine. It’s just a small farm, not even big enough to put on a map. Over here is New Mexico and the Santa Fe Trail, which ran right at the end of the road there. You can still see the wagon ruts if you know where to look. I could show you sometime. And past that is Black Mesa, holy land, where the dinosaurs are.’
Sorrow raises her pale eyebrows at this, but whether it’s to exclaim, ‘Holy land in Oklahoma!’ or to scoff at the concept of dinosaurs is hard to say.
‘Other way, over here, is the road to town, Boise City, and the scrap yard, the hog farms, and you’d have known about them if you came in that way, ’cause you’d have smelled them. So I’m thinking you came in this way, down from Utah. You all from Utah?’
Amity can only shake her head with wonder. ‘Is the world so very big, Dust?’
‘Dang,’ he says. ‘You sure are stupid.’
Sorrow elbows Amity. She knows what Sorrow wants her to ask, but she knows what he will make of it. She knows what he will think of them. ‘We want to go home,’ she tells him.
‘I know it.’ Dust nods. ‘But you have to know where it is.’
Sorrow tugs the strap again. ‘We need someone to take us. We thought – maybe you could help us.’
‘Help you how?’
‘Maybe take us home in the man’s truck?’
Dust pushes his cap back. ‘You got money for gas?’
‘Mother has some.’
‘Then she can take you.’
‘She doesn’t want to go home. She brought us here. Sorrow can drive some.’
‘Oh, that’s a doozy,’ Dust hoots. ‘Sorrow can drive but she can’t read a map? She can’t even talk! Look, I can get you more maps, so you can stick ’em together, figure out where you come from, but I won’t take his truck for you, I can promise you that. And I’ll be watching you like a hawk now. See if I don’t.’ He stands and brushes the dirt off his jeans. Amity pushes the map back to him.
‘You keep it. They’re free. They just give them away. Dang. But fold it up at least. Don’t you people know anything?’ He walks away from them, backward, pointing back and forth from his eyes to theirs to say, I’ve got my eyes on you.
Amity takes her end of the strap off. It drops onto Oklahoma. ‘That’s that, then.’
‘That’s not that, then. God will make him take the truck. I’ve seen it.’
‘He won’t.’
‘You think you know better than the Oracle?’
‘I know him better than you. He hates us now. He won’t help us.’
‘He doesn’t hate me.’ Sorrow narrows her eyes at Amity.
‘Why would anybody help us, Sorrow? We don’t even know where home is – we couldn’t find it on a hundred maps!’
‘I’m only telling you what the Oracle sees.’
‘Well, the Oracle can fold the map, then.’
Sorrow stares at it doubtfully, its squares of creases. ‘We will go home.’
14
Paper
Amaranth carries a bowl of plain cooked grains up the stairs. She does not know what she will find behind the locked door. She can almost picture Bradley’s wife there, imprisoned for threatening to leave, now deranged and knocking, wasting away. Or perhaps it is some twisted, demented child there, the son he won’t acknowledge, the son he fears. Gothic plots unspool in her head from her brittle paper childhood, all the dog-eared paperbacks of Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, in great stacks from the library. She filled her head with fairy tales and romances, female spies, and damsels in distress who expected rescue. When she met her husband, she emptied her head to make room for his revelations. Now she has nothing and she wishes she had stocked up on survival manuals to stuff herself full of ways to cope.
She tests the door; it is locked still. She tells herself the room may be empty. The knocking is a loose shingle, a wayward branch. But she remembers the flying shoe and the voices.
A brass key hangs from a bent nail on the door frame. She thinks of Bluebeard’s wife and the blood that sang out from her husband’s key, to tell on her. She thinks of the wife’s hands, filled with blood, and Sorrow.
She knocks, heart thumping, and a voice comes, frail and scratchy. ‘That you?’
She takes the key and turns the lock, then drops the key in her apron pocket. Once in, she is hit with the familiar tang of bleach and piss. She sees an old man, thin and still in a single brass bed, a parade of bones beneath a sheet. She smiles at him. ‘I’ve brought you up some soup.’
‘Who are you?’ He pulls his sheet up to his chin.
She sets the soup on a small bedside table and tugs up his window for air. She looks down onto the shingled roof of the porch, sees the burned patch on the dirt where she builds her fires, and then her clog kicks a plastic bucket, half filled with bleach, beside a single worn brown leather shoe.
The old man screws his face up at the sunlight and lifts a twisted hand over his eyes, the skin mottled with liver spots. She pulls the curtains closed again. ‘Sorry. Will you have some soup?’
‘I don’t know you.’
She leans down and speaks loudly, into his face. ‘Will I feed you?’
‘Go away.’ He rolls away from her and the bedding hitches up over his buttocks; she scans him for bedsores.
‘My name is Amaranth,’ she tells him. ‘I’d like to thank you for letting us stay.’
He doesn’t turn back to her, his voice muffled in cloth. ‘We don’t want you here.’
She stands, trembling. She knows it’s true. She hurries back out and locks the door. She fumbles the key back onto the nail head, then stumbles back down the stairs, hearing his words, how no one wants her. She heads for the kitchen to count and sort, but a glimpse of paper stops her, stacked on a crate that serves as a coffee table. Old magazines, bordered yellow, National Geographic, window to the world and the only reading matter in her grandmother’s house aside from the Harlequin romances. It has been so long since she has held or handled paper, turned a paper page.
She wipes ash and fluff from a cover and a bright green fish darts up from beneath her finger. She could pet it. Inside there are photos of the Great Wall of China, the Serengeti plains, the holey moon, all the paper wonders of the world and heavens, from when
she was a little girl, alone and reading, and she wants nothing more than to turn herself into a paper doll and climb inside.
I caught you.
His voice comes, so close she can feel the heat of him. Husband. I caught you.
She jumps to her feet and cracks her knee on the table. Magazines slide from her lap in a paper avalanche.
But it is Bradley who stands there, Bradley who laughs at her.
‘I only sat for a moment,’ she babbles. ‘I don’t – I wouldn’t – has something boiled over? Is it the girls? What time is it?’ She starts, parched and woozy, for the kitchen.
‘Calm yourself down, woman,’ he says, pulling his cap off and flinging himself on the sofa. His forehead is white above the red dirt of his face and his hair wet with sweat. ‘Ain’t you hot with that thing on your head? You’re makin’ me hot.’
She leans on the threshold. ‘It’s for Saint Paul.’
‘Patron saint of hats?’
‘Paul said, Cover your head, lest you snare angels.’ She checks the rim of her cap and pushes a stray hair in at her neck.
‘Well, Saint Paul never came to Oklahoma in the spring. Hotter ’n hell this year and twice as dry. Y’all must have a lot of time on your hands, nothin’ more to worry about than if your hair’ll catch angels. Whole lotta crap in the Bible.’
‘Probably.’ She takes a breath, her binding tight. ‘Do you have one?’
‘A Bible? Don’t you?’
‘No. We don’t use them.’
‘God won’t think mucha that.’ He pads up the stairs in his dirt-ringed socks. She hears him unlock the door and she bends to tidy the magazines, scoop them back into a stack. He returns with an old Bible and an empty soup bowl. ‘You feedin’ my pa?’
‘I heard him knocking. I’m sorry, I – why do you keep his door locked?’
‘Why do you tie up your girls?’ He tosses the Bible onto the sofa before her and walks the bowl to the kitchen.
Chunks of brittle leather drop and flake off its cover. She runs a finger over the embossed writing, eases open the cover to see if there are names written inside, birth dates and death dates as she read that families keep, and sees a long line of Bradleys there, just as he said, in pencil and ink. All the Bradleys and the women they married. At the very bottom, she sees this last Bradley and the woman he married. Below their names, linked with an m, are three small red dots.