Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  ‘Where have you gone?’ he asks her.

  She can feel his sex crawl on her leg. She cannot tell him she is flat on her back in a room filled with women. She cannot tell him her head is filled with women’s bodies, wives and a husband, his soft, clean hands.

  She pulls herself back to him, this salty scent and their two lonely bodies, this dirt, these rocks. She takes hold of the front of the sewn shift and pulls it hard. She wonders if her daughters below can hear it tearing. When he asks she tells him they are sewn in, all of them, and he takes hold of the fabric himself, rips it wide down the front of her, opening breast and belly and crotch to his eyes and breath and fingers like a slaughter. He reaches his hand between her legs and takes a breast in his mouth.

  She looks up at the dark of the ceiling. She tells herself she is not home. This is not a marriage bed and she will not come for him. She should not. She does not expect to, with this dirt and his skin so strange to her touch. She does not deserve to, with her daughters below and the ghosts of her family so close, here in the bed with her, claiming her still. This is not the purpose of this sex, she tells herself. She wants only to bind herself to him, same as any ritual. But with his mouth and fingers and strangeness she can feel herself bucking, tipping and rocking, becoming truly unfaithful in body and in spirit.

  Come morning, she hauls up his sheets to boil them. There is a dark stain on the mattress ticking, not her stain. It is an old stain, old blood and a lot of it, and she thinks of the Bible’s three red dots. She sets her hand upon it, then lays fresh sheets across, to make it disappear again.

  Does he feel the ghost of his wife in this bed still? Or has she banished it with her own skin and its claim on him? Can he feel how she traces her name in fingernailed loops on him, as if she can stitch herself down to him, like a sheet?

  That night, in the dark of his room, she lies hot and sharp beside him, breathing in the stench of their working. He sleeps, still as the dead. She pulls him to her, his skin humming from the thresher, and he rolls over, laughing. ‘Woman, leave me be,’ he says, but she will not until she bursts into flower beside him, heavy with seed. She holds him in the darkness and he holds her back, no bodies but theirs, and she thinks then that redemption is possible. Even for her. Even in this moment of skin and scent is an affirmation that this is enough, and if God or any of His jealous angels were to look down now, surely they would not begrudge her this wild joy.

  24

  The Living and the Dead

  When Sorrow isn’t watching and the old man falls asleep, Amity sneaks down the stairs to her mother in the kitchen. There she is, scooping out handfuls of her constant beans. She looks tired and sticky when she asks Amity, as she daily does, to take water to the fields, and then surprised when Amity says she will. ‘Good girl,’ she calls her.

  Amity spies for Sorrow, creeping toward the fields with the jars of water held in the crook of her arm, heavy as babies. She steps into the weedy strip along the fields and waits for him.

  Dust hoots at her, calling for water.

  ‘Look at me in the fields!’ she calls back. She lifts her skirt and wafts it over the edge of the field. She lifts a clog and holds it in the air. She holds her breath. She waits and prays for God to tell her it’s fine or to stop her, until she must step down and breathe or risk falling over. Then she pulls the field into her lungs and sets her foot onto the dirt. Then she is running for Dust, running for the field, cradling his water, sloshing and crowing, ‘I’m in the field – I’m in the field!’

  He takes her jars and takes her hands. The jars drop and roll, but do not break. He swings her, fairly swings her in the field. Around and around he swings her, very nearly like a spin, but he wouldn’t know it, like a brand-new form of prayer. And then he stops her, breathless. ‘What do you hear?’

  She pants, her heart pounding. She poises for thunder, heaven opening to pour down venom from every angel’s bowl of wrath. ‘Birds,’ she says with wonder. ‘Crickets. Bees.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  She shuts her eyes. ‘Dirt. Rocks. Sky.’ You.

  He bends to take a handful of chaff. He throws it high, so it falls like straw snow over her, her cheeks, her cap. When she opens her eyes he is looking at her, truly seeing her, and then they are throwing and spinning and cartwheeling in the cut field like the kid she is and the kid he wants to be, there in the fields, before God and all He wants for them. And the world refused to end.

  Sorrow is waiting when she leaves it; she is watching for her from its very edge. There is red dirt around Sorrow’s mouth and down the front of her, as if she has been rubbing it into herself and eating it. Perhaps she has.

  ‘You coming in?’ Dust calls, smiling.

  Amity can feel the straw poking from her skirt and cap as Sorrow’s hands worry themselves around the strap. Her eyes accuse her.

  ‘It isn’t evil,’ Amity says. ‘It isn’t anything. The fields are just dirt, like Mother said.’

  Sorrow rushes at Amity and slaps her dirty hands over her mouth, strap swinging around her neck.

  ‘Sorrow!’ Dust shouts.

  Amity peels back her sister’s fingers, turning her head from her. ‘Nothing happened,’ she says. ‘We didn’t do anything.’

  Sorrow narrows her eyes at both of them, from the dirt of their shoes to their sunburned cheeks.

  Dust lets loose a laugh then. ‘You don’t scare me, Sorrow.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Amity whispers. ‘She’s proud.’

  ‘Scared of a field. You don’t scare anybody.’

  Sorrow looks at Amity and her face is white around her red dirt mouth. She rips off the wrist strap and throws it at Amity’s feet. Then she turns on her clog and goes.

  ‘She’s nothing but a bully,’ Dust says.

  ‘I know.’ Amity watches the shape of her sister, how her long shadow reaches into the fields even if her body won’t.

  They see then, even as Sorrow is looking back at them, that the barn doors are open. Dust goes to check each metal bin and pull each padlock. ‘She wasn’t in here,’ he says. In the barn where he sleeps, his motorcycle has fallen over, the kickstand tucked in. ‘Big deal,’ he says, tenderly righting it, shaking his head.

  Then they hear a horrible howling.

  Dust rushes back to the stable walls, back where the kittens are, and she sees him pulling the tumbling bits of fur apart to count them, ‘One, two, three, four …’ he counts, again and again as the mother cat screams. ‘Where’s the white one?’

  ‘Was Sorrow here?’ is all that Amity can say.

  Sorrow is not on the porch, not at her bathroom door. But she has been there. There is fresh dirt heaped before the door and sticky red dirt handprints up its face. There are all of her signs and symbols, her swirls and fingerprints. Set before it is a broad, flat rock and on it are more of Sorrow’s symbols, her dots and spirals, telling God and the holy world of Amity’s betrayal. She has seen them up and down every wall of the room.

  She doesn’t have to lift the rock. She can see the small white flattened paw sticking out.

  She curls her good and her bad hand in. She knows she cannot heal this. There is no point in rubbing them together to heat them, to press them onto its flesh. Only God can raise the dead and she knows better than to try. She searches for a prayer in her head for the kitten, but all she can think of is, ‘Make Sorrow stop.’ In the corner of a field she buries the kitten, the rock planted over it where Sorrow would never see it. If Sorrow notices that they are gone, she never says.

  She doesn’t tell Dust or the old man. She doesn’t tell Mother. She tucks the murder away with all her other secrets, the ones she keeps for Sorrow that she will not, will not tell.

  BEFORE:

  Eve and Sorrow

  When her daughter was born, Amaranth could only think of Eve. ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow,’ the Bible said. ‘Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’ Giving birth, her husband away and Hope panting over h
er, breathing for her, she knew what she would name her second child, should she live.

  Eve had been a thin and placid child. She asked little of Amaranth. Too little. She wouldn’t latch on, wouldn’t try to suck. She might take a little bit of something, honey or whey offered on a fingertip, but then her head would simply drop to the side. Amaranth was worn from carrying her and worrying for her, exhausted from birthing her and trying to keep her. She had walked for months with eggshell steps, filling like a great balloon of blood and willing her to stay, because she had lost so many. All the beginnings of babies they made slinked inkily into the bowl, season after season, making her body a desert. Perhaps Eve was only as worn out as she.

  Hope did what she could with her poultices and tinctures, treating Amaranth’s tear wounds and trying to strengthen Eve. But it was the other women, the two who kept to themselves, who finally came to say that they would drive her.

  ‘Where?’ said Amaranth, huddled over the limp little body.

  ‘Hospital,’ they said.

  No one knew of the birth or Eve’s existence. Born at home, she was unregistered. There would be forms to fill in, people to tell, things to explain, and Amaranth feared that Eve would be taken from her when they saw she couldn’t care for her. She would lose the only child that she had kept. But soon, even drawing breath seemed too much of an effort for Eve. The women took the baby to the car and she followed, like a dog after meat. She prayed their way down the gravel path, wishing for her husband and miracles, but Eve was pale and blue by the time they reached the local hospital, staggering into the fluorescence, while nurses hissed behind them, ‘Hicks and junkies.’

  Her breasts and her eyes leaked and emptied, useless. They said they would have to keep the baby, to examine it before they sent it to the mortuary. There, she could pick out a coffin and choose her burial or cremation. She knew her husband would not want a record of the death, no paperwork, no government. Hope patted her knee, relentlessly, but she could hardly feel it. Her arms were empty, her body a husk.

  Lights of the town flickered over her face. Potholes made her head bounce into the window, until she wanted to shatter her own head. Colors danced across her, a bright neon martini glass and the green bulb of an olive, flicking off and on. A giant, lit-up beer mug endlessly filled up and drained away, reminding her that there was a way she could forget.

  ‘Stop,’ she said. Voices drew her toward a padded door.

  The two women waited in the car, mouths set and radio news on, talking about a famine, but Hope followed her in and up to a bar lined with glowing bottles: emerald, sapphire, topaz. The air was blue with smoke and she breathed it in. ‘What’ll you have, ladies?’ a man asked, wiping chunky glasses.

  ‘Bourbon,’ she said. ‘No, wine. No, brandy.’

  Hope smiled and slid a twenty toward him. ‘Bottle of Gallo, two glasses, two fingers of Ten High neat.’ She led Amaranth away from the bar stools to set her, dazed, into a booth. Someone dumped coins into a jukebox and some honky-tonk came on. A waitress in a denim skirt plopped the bottle, all the glasses, and a pile of cocktail napkins onto their wood-veneer table. She felt suddenly, sweetly at home.

  Drops rolled off the bottle as Hope filled a glass for Amaranth, put an inch in her own glass, and wiped the ring off the table. Amaranth held the wineglass to her nose. It smelled of grass and rubber. She tipped half the liquid back, cold and slightly effervescent on her tongue, grainy in her throat. She grabbed the other glass and slung the bourbon back, shuddering. She hadn’t had a drink in years.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ she told Hope, feeling the liquor loosen her.

  ‘I know,’ Hope said.

  She tipped the rest of the wine down her throat and set the glass down. She watched Hope reach a hand across the table, as if to refill the glass. But instead she reached for Amaranth’s hand, took it in her own. She wondered what a room full of pool-playing rednecks would make of it. ‘It’s my fault,’ Amaranth said.

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘I lose everything.’ She looked down at the shapeless tunic she was wearing. She thought of carrying Eve beneath her dress, beneath her skin. ‘There’s something wrong with me. Everybody leaves.’

  ‘They don’t, Amy.’

  ‘Don’t you tell me it’s God’s will, so help me.’

  ‘I’d never.’ Hope raised her glass. ‘Look at me. I haven’t had a drink in over twelve years now. God knows I made some mistakes.’

  Amaranth looked at her hand in Hope’s hand, saw their nails were dirty, both hers and Hope’s, dark from digging or trying to save Eve. ‘You never lost a baby.’

  ‘Yeah? I was so high I couldn’t remember it. I nearly drank it out of me, gave birth to a body. Was that God’s will?’ She sank her Ten High and swallowed. ‘I didn’t want it. God doesn’t kill people or save them. People do.’ She shrugged. ‘Zachariah told me I could clean up and start again and he made me want to try. Simple as that. And as hard.’

  Amaranth looked into her glass. ‘You don’t know how dark it is in me.’

  ‘I can guess. We’ve all been given a second chance here.’

  A man in a camouflage cap sidled up to the table, bumping his groin against its edge. ‘Buy you girls a drink?’

  Amaranth looked at Hope, who just smiled sweetly at the man. She looked out the window at her husband’s car to see the dark shapes of the two women inside it, waiting for her as her husband was not. She thought, this is my family, these women here.

  She turned back to him. ‘We don’t like men.’

  ‘Amy!’ Hope laughed as the man reared back from the table, saying, ‘People like you make me sick.’

  She grabbed her glass and pushed it to Hope for a refill. She had only ever wanted a family, to love and belong to, and she thought of the time when she first arrived, when she saw the women there, women she didn’t know and hadn’t expected, and thought she was better than them because he’d married her. She thought with a start that she should have married them, not her husband. It was these women who stayed when her husband did not. It was these women who cared for her and loved her in her failing. Her husband didn’t even know that she had had Eve and already she’d lost her. Her thumb picked at the oversized ring she wore, hers alone.

  She and Hope drained the bottle and ordered more and drank together until the room spun and the music got sadder and her eyes cried wine and all she could say was Eve. She held Hope’s hands and kissed her. She sang with her and tried to dance until she’d knocked a table over and the camouflage man called them lesbians. ‘Lesbians!’ she’d slurred. ‘We only live together!’ They drank until the barman cut them off and the two women came in at last to help them to the car, heads lolling, floor tilting, men hooting, and Patsy Cline singing them out and falling to pieces.

  ‘I love you all,’ Amaranth slurred from the backseat. ‘I would marry you all, every one of you.’

  Come autumn, they were married. Zachariah to Hope and the two women, all of them to Amaranth, by the grave of the second wife. Amaranth passed her ring to the three sets of fingers. The two women kissed each other and Zachariah and Amaranth kissed Hope, again and again. At last, she felt, she had a sister.

  At the ceremony’s end, he took Amaranth to bed, only Amaranth, and they grieved and cried for Eve. It was nothing like after the ceremony with the second wife. He held her alone and was tender with her. He promised he wouldn’t leave her, but she knew he would, come spring, come summer. He would always leave – she knew that now – but she was sure he would come back for her. That was his promise. She was first and last. He would come for her and she would wait, after all the running she had done.

  She stitched the women’s names to the sheet, all the women she loved who loved her, around the name of the second wife. Then she stitched Eve down under her own name, grayed and fraying. She told herself that she would have another child and when she did she would hold it over Eve’s name to tell it that once there was a sister. Eve would alway
s be that sister, even as every wife who died would still be a wife. Family would be family forever. It was their best hope.

  When her daughter came, the name she stitched was Sorrow.

  PART III

  JULY

  25

  The Grain Elevator

  Amity and Dust are flying in the pickup bed, speeding down the highway in the sun. They are pelted with pellets, escapees from the haulage truck laden with the season’s rapeseed. It snaps on their faces, pings off the truck. Clothes flapping, hanging onto hat and cap, they watch the land turn small green fields to broad brown fields where sun on silver silos and metal hog barns makes them squint. They hold their noses from the muck of pigs.

  When they reach the grain elevator, Amity stands to shake the harvest from her skirts. Bradley lopes into the office and Dust hitches a leg over the truck bed to watch him, explaining how it works, how they’ll weigh the truck full then weigh the truck empty. ‘The difference in weight is the seed we’re selling.’

  Mother and Sorrow sit, locked inside the burned-out cab, holding the wrist strap. The farmer walks back to them with slow, serious steps. His head is down and his shoulders hunched. ‘Test weight’s low,’ says Dust. ‘Too dry or too wet. Damn.’ But then the farmer gives a sudden haroop, boots a little sideways crab dance toward the truck. He takes off his hat and flaps it, like he’s too hot for his own good and he knows it. Dust leaps down so they can slap one another on their backs and Mother laughs and claps her hands in the cab, and all feels right with the world. Only Sorrow is silent. Amity hops up and down in the back of the truck, clogs rolling over seed, glad to be unstrapped from her.

  ‘Test weight sixty-two and moisture ten,’ Bradley calls out. ‘Not epic by any stretch, but okay. Best yield I ever cut. Okay, first yield I ever cut, still it means that maybe I won’t lose my damn farm – maybe it means you girls only went and brung me some goddamn luck after all.’ He bangs on the cab’s roof and gives a rooster crow. He runs around to Mother’s side of the truck and hauls her out to swing her. But he’s forgotten she’s strapped, so Sorrow swings out, stunned and straining, swinging around the two of them before she can free herself.