Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  27

  The Plastic Box Oracle

  Dust shouts at Amity. ‘You couldn’t wait, could you? You want what you want when you want it. You’re as bad as Sorrow. What if I lost you? What would you do? What would your ma do to me?’

  She sits and takes it. She could take it all day, but once he’s shouted himself quiet she hops off the bench and holds her hand out to him. ‘Can we go get the book now?’

  ‘Oh, jeez,’ Dust says.

  The purple-haired woman demands his library card, but when she sees it presented to her she says, ‘This is a children’s card. The Grapes of Wrath is an adult book.’

  ‘What’s an adult book?’ Amity asks.

  ‘One with dirty bits in,’ Dust says.

  The woman tuts and Amity nods; the Joads were nothing but dirty.

  Dust pulls a nylon wallet from his pocket. ‘I got ID. You can see I’m not a kid. I got a learner’s permit means I can drive.’ And before Amity knows it, the librarian is stamping a new card and Dust is setting a book in her hands. ‘There you go. Grapes of Wrath. Happy now?’

  Amity looks at the cover. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘It is. Lookit.’

  ‘Where are the grapes and the man’s big hand?’

  Dust looks at her. ‘You can’t read.’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t need to read.’

  ‘You do,’ he tells her, walking her back to the counter. ‘People will take advantage of you. I could tell you anything and you’d believe it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘But I could. You can’t trust people.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re bastards.’ Dust hands the book to the woman and she stamps it. ‘You could learn to read,’ he says. ‘I’ll find you a site on how to do it.’

  ‘What sight?’

  ‘Come on.’ Dust pulls her to a row of veneered study carrels filled with white plastic boxes.

  ‘What are these, Dust?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen a computer before? Oh, man.’

  ‘What’s a computer?’

  ‘Here. You can read on it and look for things.’

  ‘Like an Oracle? Is it an Oracle?’ She leans toward it as he sits and taps at keys. ‘Could it help us find Father?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘What’s his name?’

  Amity tells him all she knows, even secret things, but it isn’t much. She knows his name is Zachariah and that he has fifty wives and twenty-seven children, more or less, including the first two, who were banished. She tells him about the fire. Dust nods and types the words she gives him: ‘Zachariah + church + fire + fifty wives.’ He also types in other words, ‘cult + polygamy,’ but he doesn’t say them to her. Then there are lights and colors and symbols, a blue spinning circle. He pulls up pictures of churches on fire, buildings consumed in infernos, but none is their temple. The box shows pictures of black children huddled together and crosses burning, then a flock of young girls in bright, ruffled dresses being put on a bus. Their hair swoops and swirls. Amity shakes her head at it. ‘That isn’t us, but it looks like my cousin. Look at how pretty they are.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he asks her.

  The screen fills up with symbols and Dust takes them all in. But she stops him when she sees it – a picture of Father, but not as she’s ever seen him. It was taken a long time ago, for he looks young and dark-haired, handsome. He holds a tray of symbols across his chest.

  ‘This says he’s wanted,’ Dust says, his voice full of wonder.

  ‘Sorrow wants him.’ Dust only stares at the screen. ‘Am I stupid?’ she asks him.

  ‘No. You’re ignorant. That’s not your fault.’

  ‘What does it say, all those things?’

  He hits a few more buttons and walks to the counter. He gives the woman some coins from his hard-earned harvest and gets a piece of paper in return. ‘I don’t know what you know,’ he tells her.

  ‘I don’t know what I know.’

  ‘You better ask your ma, then. I don’t know what she wants you to know.’

  Outside, Dust folds the paper into a tiny square and then Amity can see he is wearing a new pair of jeans, stiff and dark, creased from being folded. ‘Look at you, fancy!’ He has a brand-new red kerchief around his neck and he smiles at her looking. ‘Can I wear it?’ she asks him, pointing.

  ‘Jeez, you’re a pest. I only just got it.’ He fingers the knot.

  She pulls her cap off. ‘I want to be a Mennonite.’

  ‘A Mennonite? I don’t want your dirty old hat.’ He scowls, but he unknots the kerchief, begrudgingly draping it over her head.

  She ties the kerchief firmly under her chin. ‘You don’t want fifty wives, do you, Dust?’

  ‘I don’t even want one,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve seen enough of wives to know that. Bradley was married, you know. You should’ve heard them.’

  She nods to him, but she doesn’t believe him. Everybody’s married. It’s only a matter of time. She tosses her cap in the first trash can they pass and she tries very hard to walk back through town as she thinks a Mennonite might.

  BEFORE:

  The Second Wife

  When the old, old woman died, the ground was too hard to bury her.

  Amaranth and the women cleaned her and wrapped her in her linens, then carried her to a metal barn across the frozen field, because they were not yet forbidden.

  By the thaw, she was only skin and brittle bones. Her husband dug a hole in the garden six feet deep. Onto the body they dropped down her photographs, her documents, any paperwork that bore her name. They dropped in the first of the year’s shoots: kittentails, hyacinth, death camas. Her husband spoke a few words of her generosity and her capacity for love; he told them all that upon the soil and the rock of her they would build their church.

  Amaranth couldn’t grieve for her. She was too full of her own grief, for the baby her body had lost the year before – their purpose for their marriage – and the husband who left her, back to the roads to preach. ‘This is my work,’ he had told her as she clung to him, when she begged and then ordered him to stay. Her grief had skinned her raw.

  The summer he was away, the old, old woman was failing. Her breaths came thin and she hovered over life like a hummingbird. Hope and the women carried on with the weeding, hoeing, dead-heading, and harvesting, for their garden had to feed them through the hard winter to come. Amaranth moved like a ghost through the house and its rooms, weeping and waiting.

  When her husband came home, the old, old woman came back to life, as if she, too, had been waiting. He went straight to her bedside, made up in the shadowed parlor, to pray. Coming to his feet, he announced that he had had a revelation: he and the old, old woman were to marry.

  Amaranth raged at him, not caring whether the other women saw. ‘You are married. You can’t just go away and forget you’re married.’

  He spoke to her and to all of them. ‘When she dies, we have no right to live here. We treated her like family, but we are not.’

  ‘Fine,’ Amaranth spat. ‘Let her adopt you.’

  ‘All she ever wanted was a family,’ he said gently. ‘She hoped to be a bride. That is her ring you wear. She never wore it. There was no time to have a family once she had nursed and buried her parents. She was an only child.’ He looked pointedly at Amaranth.

  ‘It isn’t legal. It isn’t right. You only want her land,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I want her land. Why should the government have it? What did they ever give to us? They will seize this land and then where will we go?’

  Amaranth rushed upstairs, sickened. She had no idea her husband had been planning this – he must have been since the first moment he met the old woman and asked her if she’d heard the good news. What did he mean to do with Amaranth, then, with his first wife? Divorce her or disgrace her? Send her away, cast her out? She wept afresh for the baby she lost; if she had been able to keep it, none of this would be happening.

  He brou
ght her a china teacup of lemon balm and an old white sheet. It was threadbare and yellowing, its edges worked with spidery stitches that had been made by hand. When she examined them, she found the stitches made names: Eugenie, Martha, Leah, Ann. He showed her the name in the bottom corner and told her it was his great-great-grandmother, his ancestor who left Missouri with her family and had arrived, widowed and childless, on the Great Salt Lake. The names in the other corners were her sister wives.

  ‘Sister wives?’

  ‘My ancestors were among the first pioneers of Utah, the Latter-day Saints. She became fourth wife to a farmer on the trail.’

  ‘So you think it’s normal to have more than one wife? You’re genetically predisposed?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I left that church. It has nothing to do with me or what I believe. I have seen how the Principle can unravel faith, destroy families. It happens all over the world. It always has.’

  ‘So does murder.’

  He looked at her, pained. ‘I had no idea that your love was so selfish.’

  She leaped from their bed. ‘Selfish? I’m your wife, for God’s sake! Is it selfish to marry?’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘This is why I thought I would not. But once …’ He was looking at her stomach, at the flat front of her dress, and she hated him for it. She decided, in an instant, that she would leave him. She wouldn’t wait to be told to go.

  ‘God asks us to live in love,’ he told her. ‘He doesn’t put any limits on love.’

  ‘Well, I do.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can see it. I will make her family, to protect what we’ve built here and to protect you. I have made you a vow. I will not lose my family, not again. I could not bear it.’ He wrapped his arms around her, so that she couldn’t leave. She could not breathe. He held her until all the fight had left her, whispering, ‘Families aren’t only given to you. The best of families are made by choice and made from scratch.’

  She told herself that it didn’t matter if he married an old, old woman. It wasn’t a real marriage; there would be no paperwork and no one would know. Only he felt it would give them legitimacy on the land, a moral right, and she could see the sense in the logistics of it. Why should the government profit from an old woman’s childlessness? But it was hard to submit to preparing the house for an autumn wedding, hard to make a bouquet of the last of summer’s flowers. It was hard to powder and dress the woman, lay her back in her bed, and see in her rheumy eyes that she had no idea she was a bride.

  At the moment of the ceremony, Amaranth stood with the stitched sheet of his ancestors and the weight of her wedding ring in her fist, wondering how she would learn to share them. Her husband spread his arms wide, encircling the bed and the old, old woman. ‘Love asks us to make our hearts a home, big enough to shelter anyone. Think of all the women in the world with no one. Who will be their family, if we do not?’

  Amaranth watched the gaze of each woman draw inward, as if remembering her own history of loneliness, loss, and betrayal. And she hung her head. He had given her a shelter, hadn’t he, by marrying her? She was grateful to belong to a family and to have someone to try to love with her whole heart. Why did she begrudge an old woman at the end of her life the same?

  She smiled at him, to show him she could put her selfishness aside, her fear, her anger. She shook the stitched sheet across the old, old woman, so that he could tell the story of his family. She took her ring off and held it out.

  ‘This woman never wore this ring. She gave her own ring to me, so that I might marry.’ He took the ring and placed it on the end of the woman’s twisted finger, easing it over her painful, swollen knuckles. ‘I take you for wife,’ he pronounced. ‘I take you for family.’

  ‘I take you for family,’ the women echoed.

  ‘I take you for wife,’ Amaranth said, shuddering, trying to keep her smile intact.

  He kissed the ring on the woman’s finger. He kissed the woman’s grizzled mouth. He took the ring and slid it back onto Amaranth’s finger and kissed her, his lips already damp.

  Amaranth waited for the three women in the circle to laugh then, to reveal at last that this had all been a painful joke, designed to dupe her, to mock her desperation to be loved. But they were silent, visibly moved.

  Her husband held his hand out to her and the women filed to the kitchen, murmuring about cake. He sat on the bed beside the old woman and pulled Amaranth down to sit. He held her and stroked her, promised that nothing would change between them. Amaranth would be at the very center of his life and his marriage, come what may. Then he lay down beside the old, old woman. Amaranth tried to get up, but he pulled her down flat, a wife on either side of him. He took Amaranth’s hand and turned to kiss the old, old woman.

  He placed a hand on the old woman’s sagging face. She covered her own face, her eyes shut, streaming, humiliated. He placed a hand on the woman’s flat chest and he cupped Amaranth’s breast. He slid his hand up Amaranth’s skirt and she turned her head, afraid that he felt the old, old woman with his other hand. And then he was over her, staring down into Amaranth’s eyes.

  She heard the old woman take a phlegmy breath. He pushed Amaranth’s skirt up to her waist and he moved himself inside her, shaking the bed frame, shaking the old woman by his side. He moved within her, pushing her head back into the bed. His breath grew rasped and loud and she prayed with each movement – give … me … a … child – until he hauled himself out of her, suddenly, and came in an arc across the stitching of the old sheet and the body of the old, old woman. He looked down, startled, into Amaranth’s eyes.

  And so a ritual was born.

  In the morning she scrubbed the sheet and threaded a needle. She stitched herself down to him and his family, there, in the very center of the sheet. Two months later his second wife was dead, and when they buried her with all her artifacts, her husband said it was to keep them safe.

  Amaranth only thought how it would make her disappear as if she never had existed, never lived or wanted or married or died there. Amaranth wondered if he would do the same to her when she died. Make her disappear.

  28

  News

  Bradley licks his finger at the kitchen table, to flick a page of newspaper. He scans the page, finger poised and wet, searching the paper as he has the papers in the heap before him for news of a church on fire. He squints at the small print and she thinks of the kitchen drawer filled with eyeglasses back home, left behind at the death of a wife, picked up and worn again as younger wives aged.

  There is a paper in Amaranth’s pocket. It crinkles as she bends to scoop beans from the bins, less than half full now. Dust handed the paper to her in the parking lot. ‘I didn’t show Amity,’ he told her, but she could see from his face that he had read it. She could see how he looked at her now. She read and reread it when no one was looking, and when she finally showed it to Bradley, he went straight into town for a newspaper. Every day he buys one now.

  The paper Dust gave her says that her husband is missing and wanted for questioning by local police. It does not mention who else is missing or if anyone else is wanted. It does not mention the number of wives or children missing. The police do not know who lived there, of course, which had been the purpose of their secrecy. ‘Multiple wives and children’ is all the paper will commit to.

  It does not say that Amaranth is missing or wanted, that she took her daughters and abandoned her husband, her family, saved her own skin. The paper doesn’t know that she lived there or bore her children there. There isn’t a scrap of paperwork for anything that anyone else did, but her marriage was his paper marriage. There will be a record of it, somewhere. They will want to find her, once they know she exists.

  The police want to speak to her husband to investigate claims of molestation from ‘an estranged plural wife of the compound.’ She knows this will be Hope – it must be Hope – and that it means she is all right, somewhere, safe and still trying somehow to make everything right. It was Hope who had s
ent the police when she had first left, in the vain belief that she could help Sorrow. Hope couldn’t have known that speaking to the police would lead to the siege, that her former family’s fears would rise until they bubbled over into the fire that would destroy them. Even after all that happened, she still missed her friend, dearly.

  Most of what happened is not in the paper. There is no mention of the siege at all, or of the days and nights of terror the police brought. It says that Zachariah is wanted for shooting at a police officer, though he did not, and for setting their temple on fire, which he must have done. The police take no responsibility for anything that happened. Their siege, undocumented, will be no Waco.

  Down the side of the article, there are paragraphs in boxes on the history of polygamy and interviews with local townspeople. ‘Did you know there was a polygamous cult in your neighborhood?’ they are asked. One local business owner is quoted as saying, ‘We knew they were strange, but we didn’t know by how much.’ It concludes with the suggestion that their cult had a ‘death wish, common in splinter groups such as these – a desire to offer believers up as a kind of sacrifice.’ She knows, at the end, no one wanted to die. They were afraid and exhausted, frightened beyond measure for their freedom and children, but no one wanted to die. No one but her husband wanted the world to end at all.

  Every word that Bradley searches for serves to shame her. Here is proof of her betrayal, black-and-white proof of all their community did and failed to do. How could he want her to stay now, when the man she loved is become a monster, wanted by the police for arson, shooting, and the rape of his child? That word isn’t there, that hateful word, but she knows it is what he is looking for.

  Who is this man she is married to, still? And why is there a picture of him, on Dust’s paper, that she had never seen? Why is he holding a rack of numbers across his chest and staring at the camera with the look of hatred he gave when the knock came at the temple door and he thought he would lose his family? It says he served time in prison, years before she ever met him, for setting alight a police car outside the Short Creek compound.