by Peggy Riley
She hears the sink running. When he comes back, she tells him, ‘Sorrow runs. First time I stopped for gas, she jumped out of the car and ran right into the street, like she didn’t know what cars were. I strapped her to Amity, to keep her in the car. I didn’t want to lose her.’
He sits on the back of the sofa. ‘Pa used to sneak to the fields, rip out what I’d planted, pulling up anything that wasn’t wheat. When my wife left, I – well, I couldn’t keep an eye on him anymore. Found him in a fence once, like he was tryin’ to escape.’
She holds his holy book in her hands. She stills her mind and asks God to send her a sign. Then she opens the book and spears a passage with her finger. She reads aloud, ‘I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy … and burn thine houses with fire …’
Bradley leans over to shut the Bible on her hands, holding her hands within it. ‘Find a nice bit. “The Lord is my shepherd.”’
‘I shall not want.’
He pulls the Bible from her and sets it on the sofa back. He shifts, so she can feel the heat of his thigh along her shoulder. She can feel him over her skin.
‘The Bible is an oracle,’ she says calmly. ‘It can be used for divination, to give you guidance. To tell you what to do.’ Her hands make hot fists in her lap.
‘So you thought you’d ask it. What do you want?’
‘We can’t have what we want.’
She feels his breath on the back of her neck. He reaches a calloused finger down to her fists and she opens them, shows him her palms, involuntarily, as if her fingers are petals waking for the sun. He traces her hand’s life line, hovering above her skin in the air. ‘Gypsies read your fortune and tell you your whole life is down there, written out. No difference.’
Her palm tingles, itches below his. She can feel his finger before he has even touched her and when he does it makes a blue spark jump between them, snapping in dry air. She leaps up and they crack heads.
‘Jesus!’ he says.
She rushes to the door, out to his porch, and down to his hard earth. She looks up at God’s hot sky and asks Him, again, what it is that she should do as, inside the house, a crash and shatter comes, as if he has overturned the table, sent the magazines’ mountains and great seas flying. She closes her eyes and asks God if their escape was meant to be a test or a sign. Did He crash them to make them stop here, to be here? Or did He crash them to stop them, so that they could be caught? Was it God on this land, in this house, or the devil? For it is surely the devil, in the house, in her body, that makes her listen out for Bradley. That makes her want to touch him and him her.
She waits for him to come rushing out and shake her, slap her. It is what men do. But she only hears him breathing behind the screen door. ‘I was raised on the Bible,’ he tells her when she turns. ‘The hard love of God. We all were, so I know what’s in there. Says we have free will, but it don’t feel like it. Feels like everything’s mapped out already and you only gotta follow it.’
She thinks of how she left her husband as she walks up the porch steps. ‘Did you never want to leave?’
‘Only ’bout a few hundred times a day. Who’d want to stay here?’ He opens the screen, but she pushes back on it, to keep him inside and contain him. Her hands press flat on its weave. He pushes his hands onto the screen then, against hers, and she can feel him through the wire. ‘We’re all waitin’ for signs.’ He flexes his hands against hers, as if he wants to reach through the screen. She can hear the weave of the wire stretching, snapping.
She hears footsteps behind her and she steps back, turns, even as Bradley, still pressed against the screen, is released and tumbles out onto the porch.
Amity sees the two of them, their hands held out and open before them, and she spins on her clog and darts away.
‘Daughter!’ Amaranth calls, but she won’t stop. ‘Amity!’
She looks down at her hands and at his hands and sees their palms look quilted, covered with squares from the screen that stands between them, marked with the same sets of lines.
BEFORE:
The Banishing
Easter time and Hope had ground seeds to make the colored dyes that children patted onto small, blond goats to turn them red, black, and blue. They were roped and grouped, bleating, outside the temple, where children clapped their pudgy hands when their father came to see. ‘The four lambs of the ’Pocalypse!’ they said, and giggled.
A marvelous addition to their pageant, their father pronounced it, though he stopped short of letting the goats into the temple. Amaranth could only beam at him. Easter was the best of times, with the baby Jesus returned to them, reinstated on His cross, and her husband still at home. It was spring at last, after a hard, long winter, and he had healed from the sicknesses that had plagued him and their community. The whole community had healed. They had lost some children, born too early, and they had lost a wife to icy cold, but now all of them were together and celebrating renewal. The bad times felt far away.
In the temple, children rehearsed. For the first time ever, Sorrow tried to opt out. ‘I’m too old for pageants,’ she said, and tried to hand her Woman of the Apocalypse costume down to Amity. Her two elder brothers, Adam and Justice, said they would sit out, too, until their father shouted them all down. ‘I’ll tell you when someone is too old!’
Sorrow pouted but let herself be dressed, putting on her bedsheet drapery, boiled in goldenrod, to be clothed with the sun, like the woman in her father’s Revelation. She placed the crown of twelve cardboard stars over her cap and took her place aboard a rickety cardboard moon. Her hands clutched a huge goose-down belly and she cried out, so realistically aping the pangs of birth – which rang often throughout the houses – that mothers tittered.
Adam roared up behind her in red zip-up coveralls. ‘Behold, the Great Red Dragon!’ He had six cloth heads stitched beside his own head, and each wore a tiny crown. Justice, in another red suit, played his tailed other half, the younger’s lot. The tail swished down all the stars of heaven, knocking toddlers across the temple floor as though they were bowling pins. The two halves of the Red Dragon pursued Sorrow. Around and around the temple they ran, Sorrow squealing, until at last she ran to the altar to be caught up by her father, his arms like the two wings that God gave the woman for escape. Zachariah caught her under her arms and tried to swing her up and Amaranth could see that he could hardly lift her now. She was too tall, too heavy, and he was older, suddenly. He seemed an old man. He tried again, then plopped her down.
Sorrow scowled. ‘I did say.’
That night, Sorrow was full of complaints. ‘I’m too old to play like this. I’m a woman now.’
‘You may be a woman, but you’re still a daughter and you’ll do as you’re told,’ Amaranth told her. Sorrow wore the skirts and cap of a woman, first of the children to begin her bleeding, but her heart and her head were young still. She would be a child, Amaranth supposed, until she was a wife.
‘I’m not a child,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’
Sorrow was sullen through the performance. She spoke her lines but exhibited no fear when chased by the Red Dragon, nor did she tremble at the thought of it eating up her holy child. Amity was dressed in a bedsheet, oldest of the seven angels carrying the seven plagues. ‘Go and pour out the wrath of God upon the earth!’ she intoned.
Her sister Gratitude tipped the first bowl, the sores on men, and the Red Dragon writhed with relish. Truth tipped the second and great red cloths were opened out, waiting wives turning the temple floor to blood. Joy and Harmony tipped bowls of berry juice into Grace’s gold bowl to blot the sun. Zachariah lit a candle at the altar beside the blue china bowl and Sorrow, still standing on her cardboard moon, crossed her arms above her counterfeit belly. ‘This is real,’ Amaranth heard her say. ‘I don’t see why we’re playing at it.’
Zachariah, not one to be shown up, had his own part to play. He flung off his white robe t
o reveal the purple and scarlet he wore beneath, adorned by the strands of pearls and paste jewels that women had brought with them over the years. From beneath his white curls there dangled hooped golden earrings. ‘It is I, Babylon the Great,’ he called out. ‘Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.’ Women about the room clapped and cheered. One dared a wolf whistle and he gave a mocking curtsy, as if to display his absent cleavage.
‘The war in heaven is begun,’ Sorrow called out from the altar table. ‘This is no play!’
Her father snapped at her, reminding her it was his line, but at seeing her, intent on her bowl, he was suddenly serious. ‘Tell me what you see.’
She raised one arm in the air, while the other rested on her pillowed front. ‘One of us carries the Lamb as God’s seed.’ Wives exclaimed and cried out.
‘Sorrow!’ Amaranth hissed. ‘Stop making a show of yourself.’
Zachariah put his hands on his child. ‘When will it come?’
‘The Lamb will see that the scroll is opened,’ she said. ‘The Lamb will break the seals.’
‘Who is it that will bear the Lamb?’ he asked his wives.
Sorrow looked from wife to wife.
Amaranth watched Sorrow in worship, watched her spin among the women. All were watching for blood now and each was praying it wouldn’t come. She studied Sorrow’s flat bodice, the fullness of her skirts, the smugness of her face. She saw how their uniforms concealed their bodies. The binding made them all of a kind, which was its purpose, but it and the skirts could hide pregnancies for months.
Amaranth asked Hope for her herbal bag and Hope made up a pouch of wild yam and chasteberry. She put a small indigo bottle into Amaranth’s hand and told her it was pennyroyal, said it should be used topically, as it was toxic, but it was effective.
Sorrow wouldn’t take the herbs or let her mother run a bath with the tincture or rub it on her belly. ‘I’m too big to be bathed,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
As for Amaranth, her own cramps had led to bleeding, thick, black-red clots and strings. She counted her days back and counted too many. Then she stuffed herself with rags and cramp bark, knowing in her bones that something was leaving her. She was surprised at the rush of her own grief after so many losses, as if she, too, had wished to bear the Lamb.
Hope bartered eggs for a chemical pregnancy kit, but Sorrow wouldn’t use it. She claimed she had no urine every time her mother caught her in the outhouse. ‘Stop following me!’ she’d shout. Finally, when Zachariah was deep in prayer in the room below, she snatched Sorrow and Hope drove them into town. Sorrow was nauseated, sick in the car. She squeezed her eyes shut as they left their land, whimpering the whole way.
‘What if they find something?’ Amaranth whispered.
‘It had better be divine,’ was all that Hope would say. She turned the car radio up and a man reported that seven people had been blown up by the side of the road in a faraway land that Sorrow had never heard of, in a war none of them understood or were aware had started.
In town, Sorrow didn’t understand why her mother wanted her to show her naked loins to a strange man. She cried out when her feet were placed into stirrups. She screamed at her mother as the greased speculum was inserted and squeezed open like scissors. ‘Mother, make him stop!’
Amaranth thought of their children, how they were growing up. She remembered when the first boys realized that there were two sexes, and that boys were in the minority. ‘When do we get us some wives?’ Adam had asked, hands on the hips of his skirts.
‘What would you do with wives, little man?’ Amaranth had swatted him, wondering what his mother had told him would happen to him once his voice had broken, once he sprouted hair. Every woman there would be his sister or his mother. How would he get wives?
‘When I get me some wives,’ Adam said, edging his rump away from more swats, ‘I’m gonna tell ’em all what to do, ’cause that’s what the man does.’
When the boys were older still, she would hear them rough-housing in the room below. Once, she heard the sound of cloth ripping and whipped open the hatch, thinking someone was stuck in a hinge. She was ready to discipline them, tell them it was no place to play, when she heard a boy’s voice say, ‘You’re just a girl – you can’t make Jesus.’
‘I can too make Jesus. Just watch me!’ The other voice was Sorrow’s.
When they returned from town, Amaranth called her family into the temple. It was her first time and there was no precedent for it. If the wives wondered why she should initiate worship, they knew better than to voice it; she was the first wife. The women and children were assembled before Zachariah heard them and lifted the hatch and rose through the floor to them, surprised but pleased. He remarked that going into town must have shocked her into action as it did him, each trip, every summer. If only they were as aware of the dire conditions of the outside world as he was. If only they knew how near the end they were.
Amaranth stood at the center of the room. She spun slowly, to look each wife and child in the face. ‘Someone has been at my daughter.’
‘Wife,’ he cautioned. ‘Amy.’
She pointed to him. ‘She has been broken into. She is no virgin.’
‘Who tells you this?’
‘I tell you! Look what comes from a faith such as ours – look at us!’
Zachariah took hold of Sorrow’s chin. ‘What have you done, girl?’
Sorrow whimpered, ‘Father.’
Then he roared from the altar. ‘This is holy work we do! This is my holy child! Who’s been at my holy daughter?’ He left Sorrow to circle his family, master of them all, pushing Amaranth from its center. She moved to the altar, to take Sorrow’s hand, and Sorrow let her. He looked each member of his church up and down until he came to a stop before his sixth wife and his seventh, each the mother of a growing boy. How tall they were, suddenly, beside him. Young men. Not children. He looked each boy in the eye. ‘Which of you has been at my daughter? Your sister?’
‘There were harvester crews up,’ Wife Six, Dawn, said quickly.
‘And junkies, looking to buy – it could have been anyone!’ Wife Seven said.
Each stepped before her son, her child, and Amaranth could remember the triumph each woman had showed when her child was pulled from within her, the tiny button that marked them out as first son, second son. What man didn’t want a son?
Zachariah hauled both boys to the altar, mothers clutching and trailing, and bent them over the table. He ripped down Adam’s cotton britches – they were too old to wear skirts now – and then he pulled down Justice’s beside him. He shoved the tunics out of the way. Then he took hold of the cross and he whacked their buttocks, one after the other, until their mothers pulled at him, calling, ‘Hit me instead!’ and lifting their arms up to catch his cross.
‘I will hit you!’ he said, and he raised the cross above their heads.
‘Please, Father,’ Sorrow cried, clutching her mother.
Zachariah stopped, breathing hard but gripping the cross. ‘You will tell me the truth,’ he said to both of the boys.
Adam turned his head to him. ‘Really?’
Zachariah hefted the cross higher and Sorrow went to catch his arm.
Adam rose to his full height, taller now than Zachariah. Braver. ‘The truth is she is my sister and you are a dirty old man.’
‘Get out of my temple!’ Zachariah swung the cross as women and children leaped out of his way. Sorrow staggered back from him. ‘Get out of my church!’
Adam would not look at Sorrow or his mother. He gave Zachariah a small nod, reached back for Justice, and the two of them strode out the temple door, mothers following, each howling and accusing the other.
‘Husband,’ Amaranth cautioned. ‘They are your sons.’
‘Who needs sons?’ He spoke childishly, rashly. ‘The first was never my son. Adam was a rotting seed in her when she came.’
She remembered the girl then, young Dawn, black-eyed and enormous with
her first child, product of her stepfather. ‘You said blood didn’t matter. You said families were made from love, and so they are. Look at us.’
‘You asked if I could see what came of a faith such as ours.’
Amaranth looked at Sorrow, saw how desperately she searched the windows for Adam. ‘I meant a faith with too many women.’ And boys who grow up, she thought.
‘Was she with child?’ he asked her.
Amaranth looked at her daughter. ‘No,’ she said.
If your right hand offends you, cut it off. They had all heard him say it.
The boys were driven into town, left, and banished. Their mothers clung to fence posts, forcing themselves to stay without their children. It was only a matter of time until they packed their meager possessions in the night and snuck off to follow them, to freedom, the sixth and seventh wives.
Amaranth found Sorrow in the temple, searching her bowl for the sense in it. ‘I’m sorry I had to take you,’ she told her. ‘You didn’t know what you were doing. We have made your world too small and that is our fault.’
Sorrow gripped the bowl. ‘It’s what these places are made for.’
‘What?’
Sorrow placed a hand on her chest, then another on her crotch, pressing her skirt in. ‘It is what these places are made for.’ When Amaranth spoke, saying no, Sorrow, you’re wrong, Sorrow silenced her. ‘I have eyes, don’t I? Don’t I see how it works?’
‘Not with a brother. It’s not your fault but – it’s wrong, Sorrow. I didn’t know we had to teach you that.’
‘My brothers,’ she spat, ‘were trying to keep me safe.’