Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  A pan boils over on the stove top, flooding scum across the burners, down to the floor. She makes a mess of everything, she thinks, dabbing the spill: beans, leaving, daughters, men. Who could want her as she was?

  Bradley closes the paper and she looks up.

  ‘Nothin’,’ he says. ‘Another lucky escape.’

  She thinks of her leaving and the paper in her pocket. She thinks of all she knew and allowed and did. Her every cell wants to run away from it. She wants to explain, or justify, or apologize, but she only says, ‘Soup?’

  29

  The Devil’s Box

  Sorrow builds an altar in the bathroom.

  ‘Look,’ she says, proud and shy, opening the red dirt marked door so Amity can see it, safe from the threshold.

  Her altar is a bright blue wooden pallet, up on its end. Atop it is an armless rubber dolly, its hair burned into wiry coils. Its arm sockets are stuffed with stiff brown feathers and bits of colored string and twine, fluorescent blue and orange. Its legs stick straight out, and in its lap, wrapped like a baby, is the blue china shard.

  ‘Anyone can build a temple,’ she tells Amity. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  Amity doesn’t know why anyone would choose to build a temple in the dark of a bathroom, but then she thinks of the room below. She slides herself a step back, beyond the threshold, too far for Sorrow to reach. She doesn’t tell Sorrow about the temple made of books and computers. She wants to keep that secret to herself, like the secret of what is happening within her.

  The old devil hadn’t been impressed by her Grapes of Wrath.

  ‘What in Sam Hill do I want that for?’ he said. ‘I got my own. It’s a first edition. You’ll have to take yours back, you know. You can’t keep a library book; they’ll send the police after you.’

  ‘I don’t like the police,’ Amity told him. She looked at the devil’s shotgun and thought of her Waco mother.

  He was similarly unimpressed with Amity’s tale of a paper with a picture of her father that she couldn’t read. ‘Girl, we gotta sort you out,’ he told her. ‘We gotta learn you your ABCs.’ But he didn’t. Instead, he worried about all he didn’t know. ‘Why don’t nobody tell me nothin’?’

  ‘Nobody tells me nothing, too.’

  ‘That’s ’cause we’re youngest and oldest. We’re the bread on a stupid sandwich. I reckon that’s why they’ve got me watching you.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m watching you,’ she said.

  He was impressed with the story of the plastic oracle, however. ‘Sort of like this one,’ she told him, pointing at the black box in the corner. ‘Except those ones switch on and you can see all these pictures on it. Yours just sits there.’

  ‘It does not sit there! Lookee here, you switch that TV on.’

  ‘What’s a TV?’

  ‘Go on and push that silver button.’

  When she did, the face of it was transformed. A fine white electric snow came, roaring a chaos of hiss and bee buzz like Sorrow’s angel language but a million times worse. She put her hands over her ears. ‘Make it stop!’

  ‘Hang on,’ the old man said, and he leaned over, nearly rolling out of his bed, to lunge at two silver poles on its top. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Go wiggle them rabbit ears. Go on.’

  She set her hands on the rods and the box went silent. And then, as on the computer, there was a picture, tiny people inside it, sitting on a sofa, moving, while invisible people laughed. It was better than the library’s box.

  ‘Look what your hands can do,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t let go, now.’

  Amity looked at her hands on the metal rods. Yes, she thought. Look how they heal the TV.

  Now she doesn’t want to hear about the Joads. She wants to stand with her arms out, turning snow into pictures. She spins the dial and there is always a new picture waiting for her. Children eat soup. Men punch one another in the face. Once, a man stares out at her and tells her, just her, that they are still at war. ‘Still at war?’ she hollers. ‘It’s started – we didn’t even know – the war in heaven!’

  ‘War in heaven? Change the channel,’ he says.

  She spins the dial, around and around. She knows that she is making the pictures. They are coming from her hands, through the rods, from God. She can’t wait to tell Dust about it, this better, moving oracle, even if the old man wants her to stop.

  ‘You wanna do some readin’?’ he asks her.

  She can hardly hear him to answer. She cannot move her eyes from the pictures, dazed by the light and the heat of it, the power in her hands.

  ‘Your eyes’ll go square.’ He gives a harrumph that becomes a mighty, chesty cough.

  ‘But I’m making the pictures,’ she tells him. She holds out her hands to show him and the box makes snow.

  ‘Bull pokey you are. Them pictures is whizzing about in the air. The antennae pull ’em down so you can see ’em, and the box sticks ’em all together.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Amity looks at her hands again. Her hands are antennae. Now she knows their name, antennae, bringing down God.

  ‘Open that book there now and turn that thing off,’ he says. ‘Show me where we were.’

  The screen pops and crackles without her. ‘Those Joads will never get to California.’

  ‘You can’t read, so you won’t know if they will or won’t. I could tell you when they got there it was a land of milk and honey and they all had pie.’

  ‘I think someone keeps sticking more pages on the end of the book when we’re not looking.’ She looks at him, suspicious.

  ‘Turn that off,’ he says. He tries to swing his legs off the bed, lunging at the power button. ‘Damn legs,’ he says. ‘Damn old legs.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Well, they don’t work, do they? Look at ’em.’ He pushes back his covers to show off the long and crooked bones of him, his kneecaps purple as prunes. She turns and pushes the power button off.

  ‘I can heal you.’

  ‘You can what?’

  She holds out her antennae-hands for him.

  ‘I seen healers, you know,’ he says. ‘I seen tent shows and revivals and ballyhoos. All that dust left us wantin’ miracles, but they never came.’

  Amity rubs her hands together. ‘Will I heal you?’ She extends them toward his kneecaps. He watches her hands, growing nearer.

  He stops her. ‘I might only get one crack at your healing. Lookee here.’ He begins to unbutton his pajama top to show off his grizzled chest and she turns her head. She thinks of her father. ‘Fix this,’ he says, banging on his breastbone. He takes a breath that coughs and rattles.

  ‘Okay,’ she tells him. ‘Shut your eyes now.’

  She rubs her hands together and places them flat across his plane of bone and skin. He takes a ragged breath and she can feel the air in him, under her hands, blow coarse as sand. She closes her eyes and she can see her hands slip into the skin of him, into his bones. She feels them slip through a gap in his Adam ribs and reach for the bags of gristle he breathes through. She feels the sacs cook in her fingers, ooze and bubble, until whatever is stuck inside him turns to liquid and runs clear, just as it did in Sorrow’s belly when she touched it. She slips her hands back out of him and when she opens her eyes again, his skin is whole and clean, as if she hasn’t touched him at all.

  He takes an experimental breath. ‘I didn’t feel nothin’.’ He takes another. ‘Did you heal me?’ He breathes in hard and waits to choke on it. He breathes again. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he says.

  Amity smiles. ‘I should hope not.’

  As repayment, he says she will learn her letters. She doesn’t know what letters are or if there’s a rule about them or not, and either way he makes her open his book and hold it.

  ‘What’s that letter there?’ he asks her.

  ‘Three sticks,’ she tells him. ‘Like a headless man.’

  ‘That’s a t. T goes “tuh.” You say it.’

  ‘T goes “tuh,”’
she apes. She thinks of all the things in the world that she might know if she could read about them, and she doesn’t know if God wants her to know them or not.

  ‘T goes in Amity, don’t it?’ the old man says.

  ‘Ami-tee,’ she says. ‘There’s a t in me.’

  ‘You start off with an a, like that letter there.’

  ‘A, like two hands up in prayer.’

  ‘And the next one’s an m there.’

  ‘M like a mountain.’ She thinks of their driving.

  ‘Come here and let me show you the next one,’ and she scooches close to him on the bed, to learn how to read.

  30

  Sheets

  Amaranth boils beans while he flicks the newsprint, dwarfed by the yellowing pile of papers he adds to daily, nightly, all the shootings and swindles and explosions of the vast, sad world that he brings to his table, brings into his house. How can Bradley stand to look?

  ‘He’s not coming,’ she tells him. ‘He would have come by now. He’s dead.’ He looks up at her. ‘I hope he’s dead.’

  ‘It’d be reported. If he knows they’re after him, he’ll keep running. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not running.’ She stabs at the beans. They spin and bubble, each trying to pull itself above the surface, only to be pulled back down by the water, or the other beans.

  ‘You want me to stop looking?’ he asks her. ‘Pretend nothing happened?’

  Yes, she thinks. ‘No,’ she answers.

  He finishes the paper and tosses it onto the pile, his inept haystack. ‘If you went to the police, you could clear this whole thing up.’

  ‘No,’ she tells him. Again.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re still protecting him.’

  ‘I’ve told you. It’s Sorrow I’m protecting.’

  He shrugs and gets up, bumping the table as he tries to bring his knees out. The stack of papers shifts and his arms go around it in an awkward embrace, to hold it together. But once he leaves, paper slides from the stack, fluttering down with pictures of storms and drowning houses, piles of bodies lying still. Paper after paper falls and flaps open, like a flood of paper sweeping through the house, and she wishes a great wall of water would come and wash all the pictures and stories away from her.

  The kitchen is a mass of paper, all fire and famine and fluttering flags – but there is not a single picture of Sorrow. That is how she wants it. She won’t have strangers knowing what her husband did, licking their fingers and flicking them past her.

  Everything she sees is filthy now. The land and its dust continue their assault on the house. It is the end of summer and she can feel it like a frenzy, like back home, when wives were waiting, turning over the house and the rooms in anticipation of their husband’s return. Here, she attacks dirty windows with vinegar. She rolls the old man from hip to hip to whip sheets from beneath him until he complains he’s not a slab of meat, but it doesn’t stop her. She rips Bradley’s sheets from his bed and catches the scent of him, his skin and her skin, and she can’t remember when she last reached for him. It is all those newspapers, coming between them like a dam, all those words and disasters. There are balls of socks and wads of underpants, wrapped with her long brown hairs. There are drawers half open, spilling their contents, and she shoves them in with hips and clogs, but the bottom drawer is set in crooked. When she yanks it to right and shuts it, she can see it is filled with magazines. Not National Geographic.

  These are of women. All hair and teeth, bulbous breasts and shaved pudenda. She shoves the drawer back in, but it refuses to go. The women rock back and forth below her, plucked and perfect, licking paper lips. The bodies of home are imperfect and hairy. They harden with work and sag with children. She doesn’t know what has happened to the state of women while she’s been away, marrying and nursing, tending her family. Is this how women are meant to look? Is this what he expects or wants to see?

  She throws the bedding and underclothes over the banister to boil in the kitchen, running water hot until it is scalding, hotter than her skin can stand, and forcing her hands into them. She misses the washtub and wringer of home, the many hands that squeezed sheets clean, the hands that pinned sheets to long lines strung in the garden, where children could hide in the wet, snapping maze of them. She misses her family, God help her. And she knows it is wrong now. She knows the damage it did, while she thought they had been healing.

  Her children were raised to see bodies as sacred, belonging to God. But they also saw how bodies were shared. They knew the chaste nature of their binding, the covered heads, but they had seen their father with a multitude of women, in and out of bedroom doors and tents. They will have heard about or spied, through temple windows, the unbinding that came as women were spun from wife to wife. Children were curious, even her children. How would they know where their own bodies stopped and someone else’s began if everything was shared? Here, in this world, there were women on display, spread-eagled over paper, women who looked like whores but weren’t, while her family, her children, were dressed like saints, like nuns or pilgrims, but were not and never had been. Their bodies were God’s, for Him to do with as He wished.

  On the black-marked dirt she builds a fire and she feeds it paper, all the paper of the house, the paper disasters, paper women and floods, the folds and open mouths, their heads flung back in burning. She stands in the face of the smoke and sees her family – how can she not? Burning and spinning, wild with fear, and she does not run away from it this time. She does not run from the fire she makes. She remembers how hard she had to pull Sorrow, to get her away from him.

  Bradley comes down to her from the house, newspaper in his arms. He sees the fire but only asks her why the drawers of his room are all open and why his father has no bedding, and she remembers that the sheets are in the sink and none of her work has been done, when all she was doing was trying to make the whole dirty world clean. She swallows smoke.

  He sees the ash of paper on her, white against her dark skirts. ‘You got to do something,’ he says. ‘I think you’re crackin’ up here.’

  ‘I know it,’ she says.

  ‘You can’t wait for him to come.’

  ‘He won’t come.’

  ‘You know what he’s done and you know no one knows it.’ He looks at her, no matter how she turns away.

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Then tell the police—’

  ‘I know what we did to her, I know!’

  ‘What he did,’ he says.

  ‘What we all did – what we allowed – what I allowed!’ She walks in a circle, watching the fire. ‘I can’t tell the police, because I knew it was happening and I let it happen, don’t you see? If they take me away, who will care for her? Will you? Shall I leave her here?’

  ‘No one’s taking you away,’ he says. ‘He raped your daughter. You didn’t. I think he raped you all.’

  ‘Stop it.’ She stumbles away toward the field and her knees hit the dirt, then her hands. She cannot breathe for smoke. She saw it and did nothing. The light in her husband’s face was Sorrow; the fire in her eyes was he. That was what she saw and she turned her face from it. Like her children, she did not question it. She had told herself that Sorrow and Zachariah had a closeness that she had never had with her own father. She rejoiced in it for Sorrow. She thanked God for it, even envied it. But what he did with Sorrow had nothing to do with a love of God. She did not do enough. She did not stop it.

  Even at the end, he was courting her, wasn’t he? His fifty-first wife would have been Sorrow if they hadn’t run. And then would it have been every daughter?

  She hears him behind her and she tells him, ‘She wouldn’t have thought it was rape.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘He thought he was God. She thought he was God.’

  ‘Bastard.’ He shakes his head at it. ‘Thing is, she ain’t a kid now. She’s older than you think; craftier, too. All kids are. By her age, I’d left school and I was running this place and there
wasn’t a thing you could’ve told me. She’s old enough to pick her own way through this, if you treat her like you know she can.’

  ‘You don’t have children,’ she says.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he flings back.

  ‘You don’t, so you—’

  ‘No,’ he says. His voice is hard now. ‘I didn’t get to have children, but I’ve raised Dust as my own and I like to think I could make a better job of it than you all did. I like to think I’d at least have kept them safe.’

  ‘I took them away! I made them safe!’

  ‘Did you?’ He looks at her kneeling, crouching, the weight of the clothing she wears. She thinks of the weight of their faith and rules, their strange ways. She feels the binding they still wear, for no purpose now. Who was here to see it or know if they didn’t wear it? No one, if they were all who were left. She has to dismantle every structure they have and she doesn’t know how to begin. She doesn’t know what to replace them with.

  She stares into the dirt and tells him what the paper won’t. ‘The police were looking at us before the fire. We thought they would take our children, because of what they thought he was doing – what he was doing. It’s why he started the fire – I’m sure of it – to get us to run. So they couldn’t take us.’ He would burn the world for Sorrow, but had he burned them all instead?

  ‘They’re his sins. They ain’t yours.’

  Her shame is palpable. ‘Aren’t they? You don’t know what else I’ve done, how bad I’ve been. Before I met him, I used to wonder what it would be like if someone could see how bad you were, really see how dark it was inside you, and want you anyway. What would that feel like? I thought I knew, but – I don’t know now.’

  ‘I see you,’ he says, but he does not touch her or bend beside her to help her up. He stands, looking out, and he lights a match. The world flames up around him and then goes dark. They are all of them dark inside. He blows smoke at her fire.