by Peggy Riley
She feels each tiny stitch of it, trying to smooth them flat.
‘You ever see a thing move that you couldn’t understand?’
She thinks of the women spinning in the temple and all she’d seen in the room below. ‘I have,’ she says.
‘We were cutting the field,’ he says. ‘Must have been a big crop, ’cause Bradley hasn’t brought a crew in since. My papi was working and he let me come out with him, to stand behind the straw walker when the chaff dropped. I’d never seen anything so big, so fast, never been so close to something so magic. I must have stuck my arm in. I can’t remember anything, only next thing I’m in the hospital and some nurse is saying my pa is waiting. Only it isn’t my pa. It was Bradley. Anyways.’ He pulls the sleeveless shirt back up over his shoulders.
‘I hope I get a scar as good as yours,’ she says.
‘You’re weird.’ He helps her up and walks her farther into the barn, hay crunching, away from the open doors to a stall. He kneels in the straw and waves her over and she wonders what will happen, what he’ll do next. But he only points down at a cardboard box, writhing with kittens, striped and plain and tortoiseshell, wriggling around a gray mother, nursing.
‘Oh,’ she breathes and reaches in with her good hand until the mother cat screams at her.
‘She’s fierce,’ he tells her. ‘I’m gonna raise them to be mousers. If I stay that long. Might not, you know. You could have one, if you stay.’
‘Could I?’ She points at a white one, its eyes as small and pink as a rat’s. She would have that one and it would be her very own. She wouldn’t have to share it with anyone.
‘You reckon you’ll stay?’
Amity looks at the kittens, wriggling like grubs, hungry as babies, and thinks that, if the time came and God came for her, she’d like to have a litter like that, five little babies, tiny and furry, clustering around her to feed. How fierce she would be then.
21
Ghosts
The fields are red mud, wet dough. Rain has filled the playa, turning flat grass beneath cottonwoods to a lake bed where stilt-legged waterbirds have magically appeared to bend and strut. Bradley assesses the damage in the rapeseed, where rain has stripped the pods of their flowers. Yellow petals crush and smear beneath their feet as Amaranth totters after him, clogs sliding, beneath a borage sky.
He presses thumbnails into browning pods, checking their moisture, waiting for them to dry. ‘Too wet,’ he says. ‘I swath these now, they’ll mold in the ricks. Seed’ll be no good then. If I wait too long they’ll shatter, drop their seed.’ He strides on. ‘Shoulda stuck to wheat. I knew where I was with wheat. I don’t know.’
‘You’ll know,’ she tells him. She skids behind him on her wooden soles, then slips sideways from them into a rut and onto her skirts, hard on the mud.
He holds a hand down to help her up and she holds up a hand gloved in red soil. He laughs at it and she begins to laugh, and then they’re laughing together and at each other, dirty in the fields. She wipes her hands in her skirts and takes his calloused hand in her stained one, coming back to her feet. She does not let his hand go.
‘You keep doing that,’ he says.
‘Falling over?’ Her skirts are streaked and sodden. Mud climbs her arms.
‘You need boots.’
‘I need hosing down.’
‘Go on and get a bath in the house, then,’ he says. ‘Then come on into town with me.’
She drops his hand and turns away from him as a bird lands, stabbing its beak at a seedpod beside her. Bradley flaps his arms at it, stomping and frightening her and the bird to flight. She starts back for the house. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You can’t hide here forever,’ he calls, and that stops her. Her hands grab her skirts.
‘Thought I’d head in,’ he says. ‘Ask around who’s cuttin’ now, hire a draper header.’
She turns toward him. ‘Am I hiding?’
‘Looks it. Maybe he ain’t comin’ for you after all.’
‘You don’t know him.’
‘A man can change his mind.’
She shakes her head at him. He doesn’t know what her husband has done, what he is capable of. She has hardly told him anything of what has happened and she has no idea how she will tell it to him, how to start telling. She cannot afford to become complacent or comfortable. He is coming for them; she knows it. He is only waiting for her to relax and stop watching.
‘Stay, then,’ he says, and he marches past her, toward the house.
‘You stay,’ she says, chasing after him to catch him, grabbing hold of the damp back of his shirt.
‘I ain’t hidin’,’ he says, twisting out of her grasp. ‘Your husband don’t want me. ’Less he wants himself a husband.’
‘Funny.’
‘Thought I’d get a paper, too,’ he calls back, over his shoulder, his thumbs jabbing seedpods reflexively, left and right. ‘See if there’s any news of a church on fire.’
‘Don’t!’ She hops and slips behind him, pulling her skirts up from the muddy ruts. ‘Don’t!’
He stops. ‘What you so afraid of?’
‘Everything!’ she gasps out. ‘He won’t let us go! He won’t let us live without him. We are family eternal – beyond the grave.’
‘That’s a vow you make. Don’t mean it’s true.’
‘He’ll kill us if he finds us here.’
‘Thought I’d kill my own wife when she left. I was that angry. But you can’t keep carryin’ it. It just – goes.’
‘Does it?’ Her hand reaches for his shoulder. He turns his head for the house, so she can study the sinew of his neck, the bone and string of him, the dark hairs of his jaw on the turn to white. She puts a hand on his other shoulder to turn him to her and his arms come around her. ‘Don’t go,’ she says, and she presses herself to him until she can feel the buttons of his jeans at her waist. She presses her hip bones to his thighs.
He looks down at her, opens his mouth to say something, maybe tell her to stop it, maybe to leave him alone, and she brings her mouth up to his, to taste his sweat and salt. Grit slides from his tongue onto hers. His hands move up her back, feeling the bodice and binding she wears. She is bound within them. There is no easy way in to her. Her breath pushes her ribs against her bindings and the circle of his hands. Her collars bite at her neck. She jerks the buttons of his jeans open.
‘Hey,’ he says, and she bends on the mud to him, to take him into her mouth, but he pulls her up, pulls her back up to him, then comes onto her skirts, saying, ‘Christ, Christ, Jesus.’ He looks down at the stain of him, spreading on her stains.
She bunches her skirts in her hands to hide it. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says.
‘Nothing.’ He pushes himself back into his trousers and does up the buttons, turns his back on her.
‘I mean, it’s fine – I don’t need—’ She comes around the side of him, looking up at him. ‘I’m no girl, I just …’
He scratches his head and finds his hat gone. He scoops it up from the field and knocks it clean against his leg.
‘It’s only, I’m grateful to you,’ she starts, ‘and I wanted—’
‘Grateful?’ He jams his cap on and stomps down the row to get away from her.
‘Wait!’
‘I been waiting!’ He stops. ‘Four years, my wife’s gone. Four years and I ain’t even looked at a woman. I’ve loved nothin’ but fields. How long you been gone, and you’re here on your knees to me?’
‘I’ve been faithful.’
‘One of fifty, faithful.’
‘There are thousands of polygamists. Tens of thousands. It isn’t only me.’
‘So that makes it okay?’
‘It makes it hard, but we’re not freaks.’
He takes a step toward her. ‘How’s it work, then? You all got a rota? You got fifty beds or do you share him?’ He looks at her filthy skirts, her bodice, her cap, and he shakes his head at her. ‘This what you do in your church when you’
re grateful?’
She puts her hands over her face. It is.
A crow flaps up behind them, startling her. Its caws come like laughter as it beats the air with jagged wings. She sees its tiny feet tuck, safe under its body, how it rises and leaves them both to their standing, their silence, and another faraway crow caws its laugh.
The seedbed is flooded, more lake than garden now. The seeds she planted have drifted on water, like tiny rafts, and the furrows she made have flattened. She can’t tell if any seeds remain or if they’ll grow. The jars she left there have filled with rain and flushed out their seeds. She has ruined it, all of it, but she scoops the mud back into the bed, waiting for Bradley to come back.
She tucks her daughters in, lights kerosene lanterns for him in the dark. Still he doesn’t come, and she begins to worry that he never will. She feels the fear her husband had when he feared they would lose their land. If Bradley were gone, they would have to leave. What right would they have to stay? And the fear comes, of leaving and of staying. She has to do something, make some kind of plan.
She takes a lantern by its handle and walks from the house, the flame throwing shadows of her over the towers of the castoffs, the car parts. Rusted metal catches the light. The gas station is lit up and she looks around the shop for the light switch or keys. If he never returned, who would care for the place? Who would care for his father?
Behind the station she sees his truck and she runs for it, lamp bobbing, to find him in the burned-out front seat, head flung back and snoring. There is a bottle half poking from a brown bag beside him, and a stack of newspaper. She doesn’t look at it. She watches him sleeping, the lines of his face soft and shadowed, his eyes darting back and forth beneath his lids.
Before dawn he wakes and his steps come shaky on the ground. He follows the light of the kerosene lamp from the pile of junk around the house, where she cannot sleep. He follows her light where she moves his soil, his legs bent like a spider’s, to kick a plastic bucket. He steps into its handle with his boot and it trips him, knocks him over as he tries to shake it off, while she’s saying sorry, sorry. The newspaper flutters down from beneath his arm and he lands on his backside, rocks his hips to rescue the brown-bagged bottle from his back pocket. He pulls it out and feels it, checking to see if he’s broken it. Finding he hasn’t, he unscrews the cap and tips it back to his mouth, paper rustling. He takes a thoughtful swallow and extends it to her. ‘Is it late or early?’ he asks her.
She looks at him and the bottle. ‘Did you eat in town?’ she asks.
‘Sure,’ he says. He stretches his frame along the grass. He smells strong, of alcohol and cigarettes, gasoline. She wants to kiss his mouth.
‘I been drinking,’ he slurs. ‘Old Mullaley’s dead. Cuttin’ in the storm and fork lightning struck a grain bin. Old as my pa and still up farming, not stuck in bed hopin’ to die.’ He sees the newspaper then, soaking up water, and he crawls over the mud path to retrieve it, shaking his knees up each time they find water. He curses, shakes the wet outside of the paper loose so she can just see, in the low light, all the pictures inside it, oversized faces, explosions, and men in camouflage, all the miseries of the world come back from town with him. ‘They’re swathin’ outside Dalhart. Reckon I’ll hire a draper header, make a start.’ He looks down at the newspaper again, as if trying to remember how it came to be in his hands.
‘Are we there?’ she whispers.
He thrusts the paper at her and she flips through the pages, leaning it into a lamplight. She sees fires and the flames, but when she looks at them they are not her fire. There are fires all over the world in the paper. Perhaps no one even knows about their fire.
He takes another slug of his bottle and sets it on the dirt. ‘You ever seen a ghost?’
She thinks of the voice of her husband, the lights behind her in the car, pursuing her. ‘Yes,’ she says. Maybe that is all he is.
‘Thought I seen her tonight. Thought I seen her, walkin’ ahead of me, and I followed her to a bar. I was waitin’ for her to turn ’round and see how fine I was, how I was doin’ fine, and I wanted her to see it. So I followed her in, only when I got to the bar and made her look at me, she weren’t nothin’ like my wife. I’d forgotten what my own wife looked like. Don’t know who it was. And it made me drink more.’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘I know.’
‘You don’t drink,’ he tells her.
‘You don’t know me,’ she says. ‘I did. I used to do a lot of things.’
‘Before you got God.’
She puts her hand around the neck of his bottle. ‘They say God is knocking on your heart, all the time, and you only have to open it for him. I never heard it. And all of a sudden, here I am, fifty wives down.’ She unscrews the top of the bottle and looks at the newspaper, fanning its wars and disasters, and she knows that someone will have reported them. Someone will have seen and told, reporters and authorities. They must be news in other papers. There is no escape. Unless – unless there is no one to tell of it, no one who will talk, or no one who survived.
The paper drops to the dirt, to flap its pages. When she shuts her eyes, she can still see fire. She hands him the bottle to take a sip. He comes to her and takes a long pull on it. She smells the liquor on him and she moves toward him, to burn herself on the liquor of his tongue. He lets her. She could drink him down. She could drink the world all of a sudden.
She pulls her cap off and pulls at her braids. They swing down and he grabs at them, like a baby beneath a mobile. She tips the liquor into him then brings the bottle to her own mouth. She kisses its familiar fire back into him. His hands pull uselessly at her bodice and lacing. There is no way in to her. Only she can pull at his buttons again. Only she can hitch her skirts and jerk her shift aside, to take hold of him and guide him into her, press him in. She fits herself over him. She tastes his tobacco, his sweat, and his liquor. She tastes something bitter on his tongue like aspirin, like regret, and she pushes herself onto him. She feels the place she kept for her husband all these years break within her, there on the wet ground, below the wide, dark sky and the bed she has planted.
Let the end of the world come, at last.
BEFORE:
The Raising of the Temple
There were times of abundance, years when Hope’s raised beds yielded miracles and bumper crops and fields burst with grain and straw. Harvester crews reaped bushels for profit and cutting crews felled ancient trees, planted when the land was young. Money flowed in from farmers’ markets and arrived with the wives who would come.
There were five wives and then there were seven: Dawn, the sixth wife, who would arrive pregnant and give birth to Adam, and the seventh wife, a free spirit raised in a commune, who gave birth to Zachariah’s first son, Justice. Amaranth weaned Sorrow to suckle both boys. If she had to share her bed, she would share their babies. All would be shared. Sorrow danced and spun about them, pinching infants, making mischief with her ever-flying hands, as Zachariah blessed them, bouncing his babies, stroking the milk-full breasts of three wives.
There were eight wives, then nine, women who arrived after summers of preaching, drawn by his stories of the end times and the community that was waiting for them, all of them. The twelfth wife brought unwanted heirlooms that could be sold and deeds to land she had been living on alone, happy to give it to a family, the cost of belonging.
With twelve wives, they outgrew the house. Amaranth thought them family enough, but then there were fifteen wives, twenty wives, parcels of land and silver and cars, and the ring was passed hand to hand around the circle.
Through it all, her husband was as good as his promise. There were no secrets. Her bed was his first and she was a part of every ceremony, every ritual taking of every bride. And it became familiar to lie beside him, to watch and listen to the ragged breaths of her husband and another woman. It became easier to watch them swell and ripen from him, for they all were family, young or old, buxom or bony. No one was lonesome;
no one wanted for more. She could watch him swing any babe into his arms and believe it was her child. She could watch him kiss any wife there and believe it was her wife, too. It was.
Amaranth cultivated her sister wives, learning their ways, teaching them her own and the community’s. She harnessed herself to the work of the family and delighted in its growth and its bounty. She kept accounts of the riches that the family could draw upon, money the women brought. Soon they had outgrown the outbuildings and yurts. Wives and children filled and spilled from every room.
‘Husband,’ she told him, as he returned from another summer away, two older women, future wives, struggling stiffly from his van. ‘Husband, we need to build something here.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and smiled. ‘A temple.’
‘No, a bigger house.’ Weeks later he was scuffing his shoe heel into soil, making a line where cement would be poured. She wasn’t the only wife to remember what it was that he was tracing his line around.
Builders came in from town to lay a foundation. Zachariah watched them watch his wives, all the ages and states and sizes of them, their odd mix of coats and shawls. He watched them work as if he were their foreman, hands on hips and legs spread apart, his long white hair beside the workmen’s yellow hard hats, his pale linen suit beside their ripped jeans and dirty padded jackets. He did not engage in their banter or sidelong comments. He was old enough to be their father. Perhaps their grandfather.
Young wives looked for reasons to walk beside them, to make a great show of not looking at the builders, the bulk of their muscled frames. He began to urge them to hurry. Amaranth caught him examining himself in a mirror, the lines around his eyes, still pale and bright, and the sagging along his shaved jaw. She wondered if he wanted them to hurry before he got older or before they could lure away a wife. She never told him what she saw, but she was glad he could have a small taste of jealousy, a scoop of the dish his wives swallowed every day and never mentioned.