Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  He rushed the builders, even as they said it was too cold to pour cement. The pad wouldn’t harden, they said, should an early frost come. He told them to stop shirking and start building. Even so, the builders didn’t finish. Nearly Christmastime, with Sorrow and Amity and his many children beside themselves with excitement, and the temple consisted of a concrete pad and a cinder-block foundation. The builders packed up their tools and wanted paying; they had their own families at home. Zachariah sent them away and told them not to return in the new year, out of spite.

  That night there was an unseasonable snow and the fresh concrete cracked and chipped. He cursed the builders, having the kind of tantrum she would have expected from Sorrow. ‘Husband, calm,’ she said, putting a hand on his forehead.

  He shook it off. ‘The world is ending, woman. There is no calm.’

  Amaranth could only hope his rush and worry had nothing to do with what lay below the foundation. Her husband had marked the rectangle with his heel and said, ‘Upon this rock, we will build our church.’ And he built it upon her, the old, old woman who had owned the land. His second wife. Her body would be bone now, nothing but teeth and spiraled nails and flat land to hold a church up.

  On the last night of the year and the decade and the century and the millennium, he gathered his family around where the temple would be. Women wrapped themselves in layers, every piece of clothing they had. They swaddled sleepy babies in blankets. They huddled in a circle to watch their patriarch raise his hands to the frosty sky.

  He started grumpily, piteously, deriding the builders and their lack of a work ethic, the lack of a shelter on such a night. But then, as if remembering the occasion and the company, he began to preach as he always had done when he had met his wives in some town, some city, some field, or parking lot. ‘All the world prepares for the end of time. You can feel it, like a sickness. I feel it in my haste. Machines conspire against us. Our enemies lie in wait. The world is coming apart at the seams and the great clock wound by God is out of time. Do you feel it?’

  The two newest women, not yet wives, nodded and sobbed, clinging to one another. To Amaranth, it felt like a news report from the moon. Over the last years he had spoken names to them, examples of the wickedness of the world, but they meant nothing to her: Hale-Bopp and Heaven’s Gate, sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, the Order of the Solar Temple, Waco.

  He told them to make their reparations and say their good-byes. They all must be ready to meet their God, temple or no. The newest wives began to cry out; they begged to go into town, to call their loved ones. Amaranth clutched her daughters to her – Sorrow complaining, Amity compliant – knowing she had no one to contact. Here was all she loved.

  Sorrow squirmed away to stand with her father, to raise her hands as he did.

  ‘Here is your family,’ he called to them. ‘Here is the family that chooses you! Fear God and give Him glory!’

  ‘Fear God and give Him glory!’ they called back.

  ‘For two thousand years ago a baby was born who changed the world. A baby was born, like any baby, born like every child born here. Let us remember that every child can change the world. Every baby can be a new Messiah!’

  Wives with rounded bellies patted them. Wives with babies rocked them. Older women’s eyes glistened, hopeful and dreamy. Each could remember a world of solitude, of hostile and silent cities, lonely nights that stretched into lonely years. Each spoke of what her family meant, how it saved her when the world itself had failed.

  The newest wives spoke first of their terror and the lifeline that was thrown to them when they heard him speak in the parking lot where they had gone looking to steal or buy anything but redemption or hope. An old wife called out, her voice low and scratchy, ‘I had no one and nothing. Here, I have a family.’

  ‘I have found people who do not judge me,’ said Dawn, the sixth wife. ‘I have found a place to heal,’ said the fourth and fifth wives together. ‘I have found a sisterhood,’ Hope said, and she gave Amaranth’s elbow a squeeze.

  All eyes fixed on Amaranth, and as she opened her mouth to speak, a new wife spoke out, ‘It’s almost midnight!’ Eyes fixed on battered wristwatches and babies’ faces; eyes fixed on husband and the sky.

  Sorrow began her counting down, proudly. ‘Ten. Nine.’

  Adam joined the counting. ‘Eight.’

  ‘God,’ a woman breathed out while another gave a nervous giggle.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Praise the Lord!’ called a dark-skinned wife, her face wide in smile.

  ‘Six.’

  Amaranth felt a surge of love radiating from the circle. She had only ever wanted to feel a part of a family, to feel a part of something bigger and older and deeper than herself.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘I love you,’ a wife called across the circle, to no one in particular.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘I love you,’ another called back.

  ‘Three.’

  Amaranth called out to her husband, to everyone. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Two.’

  Then all of them called it, ‘I love you, I love you,’ in a tangled chorus until—

  ‘One.’ And Zachariah reached his arms out in either direction, as if to say good-bye.

  Sorrow cried out, ‘I want to see God!’ They waited for him to be taken up. They waited to follow, to see the very face of God together.

  When the sun was pink in the far horizon and children had fallen asleep where they stood, he turned and walked away from them. Mothers huddled their children into their shelters and cars and beds, unwrapping their layers with frozen fingers, too cold and tired to give thanks anymore. The world had not ended and no one minded. In the spring, they would start to build their temple again.

  22

  The Field

  Machines cut the fields down, toppling stalks, chopping them off, and flinging them into piles. Amity watches from the old man’s window.

  Mother asked for help in the harvest, but Sorrow said no and told Amity she’d better not, either, though Mother said they were needed in the fields.

  ‘Fields,’ Sorrow snapped. ‘Fields, Mother!’

  ‘There is nothing in these fields,’ Mother said, and another rule burst into flame before them. ‘We made up the rule to keep you out of them.’

  ‘What was in them?’ Amity asked, pestering, but Mother ignored her.

  ‘Rules are all we have,’ Sorrow said.

  ‘People are all we have.’

  Sorrow scoffed. ‘We don’t need people.’

  ‘We don’t need rules. They’re like a story,’ Mother said. ‘Like a fairy story you read. Well, you wouldn’t. But you know what a story is?’

  Sorrow shook her head and Amity thought of the Joads, still trying to get to California. She didn’t think they’d ever find Eden at the rate the old man was reading to her.

  ‘Next you’ll tell us Father’s stories are made up,’ Sorrow said. ‘Or that the Bible is made up.’ She’d grinned at Amity.

  ‘Well, the stories of the Bible are written by men, so they are stories, yes.’

  ‘But not made up! It is God speaking, every word, and I should know it!’ Sorrow marched across the porch. ‘You speak with the devil’s mouth. You shake the devil’s body!’

  ‘Stop it, Sorrow.’

  Sorrow pointed her strapped hand, making Amity point. ‘I see how you look at that man. I hear you in his kitchen. He is shamed for the way he looks at us.’

  ‘He’s not looking at us.’

  ‘I see him look.’

  ‘He’s not looking at you. Not all men look at you.’

  ‘Can’t we pray?’ Amity said, and both her mother and sister glared at her. ‘If we pray we’ll know what to do.’

  But when the farmer caught Mother trying to pry Sorrow’s hands from the newel post and drag her to the field, he hauled Mother into the kitchen, where they could hear him yelling at her through the screen. ‘She’s afraid of it, ain’t she? What’s th
e point of scaring her more? I don’t want her out there, working near equipment, if it scares her. It’s too dangerous. She’s a hazard.’

  ‘She’s spoiled,’ Mother said.

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ he said. ‘But it’s too late.’

  Sorrow’s face was tight as binding. She pulled Amity close. ‘You will not go in that field,’ she said. And at that very moment she knew it. She understood why fields were forbidden. Fields could make you want more for yourself than God and Sorrow wanted you to have.

  ‘C’mon back to this story,’ the old man says.

  Amity jams the wet towel into the gap around his window, as Mother told her to, to keep the dust of harvest from the house. The old man says all of Oklahoma used to feel like that when he was a boy, like the very air was made of dirt. It was all you could do to breathe it in.

  ‘It’s too hot,’ she tells him, fingers on the glass to look out at the harvest and all she’s missing.

  ‘This ain’t hot,’ he tells her, coughing. ‘When I was a boy you could cook an egg on your own head, it was that hot. You could put your cow out in the sun and have steak for lunch; just take a bite off her rump.’

  He opens his old book at the front again. ‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘“In the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.”’

  ‘Wait – are you starting over from the beginning?’ she asks.

  ‘So what if I am? I’ll tell you, girl, for a man born in California, your man Steinbeck knows his apples from his onions, even if all we grow is wheat. Well, I grew wheat. Don’t know what he’s growin’ out there, damn fool boy.’

  ‘Why do you grow things when the land wants to be dust?’ she asks him.

  ‘Land can’t think, girl. It ain’t got no opinions. Land just does what you make it do.’

  ‘It turned to dust on the Joads. It didn’t want to grow wheat for them.’

  ‘We made it grow. We weren’t no Joads. We didn’t go nowhere.’ He puffs his chest out and takes to coughing, giving such savage hacks that she finally has to bang on his chest to get him to stop. ‘My ma did that,’ he tells her, and he lies back again, comforted. ‘We were the ones that stayed, even when dust put the sun out.’

  ‘Just like the end of time,’ she whispers.

  ‘You cut me open, you’ll find me stuffed full of it, like a vacuum bag. It’ll kill me one of these days. You wait and see if it don’t.’

  Amity looks at him. ‘I’ve seen people die.’

  ‘Well, I have, too, but I don’t go ’round braggin’ ’bout it.’

  ‘I hope you don’t die,’ she tells him.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Well.’

  The field is calling to her, calling from the old man’s window, calling from the house. It calls from the dirt-strewn threshold, where Sorrow kneels to rock, and Amity would do anything to get away from her. The field calls her like Dust calls. She runs to its edge to call back, ‘Don’t you have any rules, Dust?’

  ‘No!’ He broadcasts seed in low, wide arcs, reseeding sorghum. Every time he finishes a row he walks toward her. ‘I don’t need rules. I have sense and guts.’

  She looks at him doubtfully. ‘Guts?’

  ‘What your body knows. When something strikes you as right or wrong, right there.’ He gives her stomach a poke. It flips beneath her pinafore at his touch.

  She puts her hands on top of it. She knew he was right. Everything about him was right. Where his fingers poked did a leap every time she thought of him.

  He snaps a grass stalk and twirls it between his fingers to make a whirligig. ‘You’ll miss the harvest,’ he tells her.

  ‘I know,’ she says, miserable. ‘We missed it at home, too.’

  ‘God makes fields grow. God makes the harvest and the seed and the rain. They should have taught you God is a field.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ she whispers. ‘God is God, God is the Father.’ It’s all she knows for sure.

  ‘I don’t believe in God. Not your God.’

  ‘What if you go to hell?’ she asks him, eyes wide.

  ‘Your God is hell.’ He shows her his hands, filled with seeds. They wiggle on his hand from sweat, from static, but they wiggle like they’re alive. They wiggle like they want to grow, right now, right into his skin.

  She looks at the field and the cut crops, the flying dust. She looks at the boy and her stomach barrel-rolls. And it feels good.

  If God made the land and God made the field and God was earth, then how could it be forbidden? If her body wanted the field and the dirt, to run in it and laugh inside it, then how was it wrong? And if God showed her Dust, then he was of God. It made her wish she’d thought to ask at home, when someone might have answered her. Why did she never ask why?

  23

  Harvest

  When the seed in the ricks is dry enough, Dust drives the faded harvester and Bradley stops him often, shouting to check the sieve, check the chaffer and the fans. Dust does as he’s told, never arguing, never sulking, as Bradley nods up at the boy, shouting praise and correction in equal measure. They both keep their eyes on the path of the sun and the chain they drag behind them, grounding the static lest they start a fire in the stubble, where black birds squat in the shade of the swaths and rise up, complaining, at the noise of the engines or at Amaranth’s approach, the swing of her skirts. They flap and drop back behind the machine to pick at whatever is left in its wake, seed or grubs, as the big-wheeled harvester floats down the rows like some paddleboat on a sea of grass.

  In the heat of day, Bradley calls a break and the boy runs the harvest to bins in tar-black barns in the middle of the field while he oils and adjusts the old machine, shirtless, turning brown and hard as seed. She brings them out jars of water and food in napkins, watches them eat, wanting to linger in the easy companionship of the man and boy while her own daughters scowl at her from the house. How has she come to raise two such lazy creatures?

  There is work in the harvest, hard work. She cooks dense food that will keep them going, patties and salads of beans and grains, flavored with shoots from the land, the rain: chickweed, wild garlic. She butchers a store-bought chicken he brings her from town, fries it in flour and Crisco. She flits about his kitchen, playing house, emptying the bins of food, while her children avoid her. Only in moments between the hard work of harvest, the carrying and hauling, the walking and baling, does she think of the two of them and wonder what they see of her, there in the fields.

  When they get back to work, she wants to fling herself down before him and his machinery, to be cut fast and eased down into stubble, cut hard and made into something good and real.

  By night, she stalks bugs in the seedbed with the kerosene lamp. She fingers the fragile shoots, brushing away aphids to crush in her hands. She does not know what she is growing, what the green dusting of the dirt will become. By sundown he is behind her, exhausted, happy, hopeful. She touches his cheek and down the strings of his neck, unsnapping his shirt to kiss the hollow at the base of his throat, the bridge of his clavicles. She unties her apron and lets it drop. She rolls down her thick stockings, tucks them safe inside her clogs. She pulls the tie of her bodice as he leans his forehead onto hers, saying, ‘Come on in the house.’

  She wants to, but she could stop this still. It would only have been liquor the first time. It could be forgotten. The dark tree above them strains across his house. New leaves stand, bright as mint. Could the ghost of her husband reach her there? Was wanting this man in his bed, in his house, any different from wanting him in the dirt? When he takes her hand and tugs her, she collects her things and follows.

  ‘Mother?’ Amity calls. ‘Mother?’ Sorrow calls. They watch her on the porch, at the door. ‘Shh,’ she says, and pulls it between them.

  He leads her up the stairs. This is wrong. Sin, her head says, and she knows it is. She follows him acr
oss the landing, past the old man calling, ‘That you, son? That you?’

  He opens the door to his bedroom, musty, old dust and skin. When he switches the light on, she sees a double bed, an old bureau, a spindly telescope before an open window, letting in all the dust of his harvest to coat every surface, the stacks of receipts and newspapers, the crushed cans and cigarette packets on the floor. He flings back his dirty covers and dust puffs up, balls of socks fly, so they laugh and sneeze. He steps out of his clothes and hops under the covers, shy.

  She sets her clogs and her apron down to unlace her bodice, eye by eye. She unties the neck lacing of the overblouse and contemplates the layers still to go as she sees the window, open, over her daughters and switches his light off. In the gloom, she pulls off the tight underblouse and then begins to roll the binding that flattens them, unwinding the strip from around her and winding it again to make a ball that she can toss at him. He catches it, rolls it in his hands, and watches her, unbound, the heavy, swinging shape of her in her last layer of linen. How many layers they have. She unhooks the overskirt, the skirt, and the underskirt and shuffles out of the bloomers until she stands in the white cotton shift all wives wear, sewn over the shoulders and split between the legs.

  She touches his chest, the bone and skin, the rack of ribs. His nipples harden beneath her hands. She runs her tongue across them and his taste is different from her husband’s: dark, metallic, a rock in the mouth. She thinks she should stop comparing them, but doesn’t know how.

  His fingers find her nipples through her cloth and press them, like testing grain, and she knows these will be different for him; she’s suckled children and his own wife and bed were childless. His wife before her will have had breasts that were small, maybe, tight and high as a girl’s, thin, flat hips like a boy’s. She doesn’t care. She is used to these comparisons in her own bed. Whose empty breasts sagged like sleeves before or after her, back home? Whose taut breasts needed no binding to sit flat beneath her husband’s hands?