Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  In the night, ashes will blow across the land and across the house, and into Amity’s lap will tumble bits of paper, unburned circles of women’s faces, women’s bodies, hands holding breasts out as though they’re blue-ribbon squashes. In the morning, she will think that God has sent them, pictures of women for her to see and know what is in store for her.

  31

  The Slip

  Sorrow’s altar is changing, all the dirt gone from the door. The sounds of the house are changed, with Mother and the farmer shouting conversations through the windows and the old man’s cough gone silent. The Joads make it to California at last, but they aren’t any nearer to the promised land they travel for, and Dust never leaves his barn.

  Something is changing in all of them, no matter how they try to stay the same.

  Sorrow scavenges the land and its castoffs, fingering the wreckage piled between the gas station and the house. She uses her hands now, not to paint with dirt or stab things, but to dig and sort through what generations of people have discarded and forgotten, bits of dishes and rubber-baby parts, tiny metal cars and wheels. To her pallet altar she adds bottle caps and rusting wires, flower heads made from rotting plastic bags. From the trash she finds, she makes something strange, something beautiful. Something only Sorrow can see is holy now.

  Something is changing in Amity, too. She has proof of it, there, at last. She should be spun.

  When Sorrow first bled it was cause for celebration and ceremony. First girl born in the family, she was first to take the ritual spin, first to shed her little girl’s dress and pinafore and be turned into a woman, with a wife’s long skirts and bindings. The women spun her alone in the temple, no Father, no altar. A room filled with women, spinning, circling the temple’s empty center.

  Mother Hope brewed teas for Sorrow, floating leaves of raspberry, nettle, and motherwort set to steep by moonlight. The water was pale by morning. She watched Sorrow drink it, as though it were some magic potion that would transform her from within. And then it did.

  No one is here to watch Amity transform. There is no spinning. There will be no new clothes for her, handed down from a mother, and no one to bind her. There is only one mother here now, and she is not looking at Amity. She is not looking at Sorrow. She is only looking at the man and all his paper, the paper parts of his women. And Sorrow isn’t looking at Amity; she is only looking at her altar, at the things she stacks and strokes there.

  Alone, Amity rips strips from her underskirt to wedge between her legs. And she doesn’t tell Sorrow. And she doesn’t tell Mother. She is a woman now and can keep her own secrets. But she thinks that – hopes that – when Dust leaves his barn he will see her and know her change.

  The old man doesn’t see it. To him, she is still just a little girl, one he can boss around and chivy. ‘Don’t turn on that TV,’ he orders. ‘Bring me that book. Sit down there.’ Or ‘Grab me a shirt from that chifforobe. Find me some pants. Where in Sam Hill have I put my shoe?’

  She doesn’t remind him how he threw it. She only looks at the dark face of the TV screen.

  ‘Look in my son’s room, will you? He’s taken my pants so I won’t walk around.’

  ‘You can’t walk around,’ she tells him.

  ‘Who says I can’t? I’ve two legs, don’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know if you do or you don’t. They’re always under cover.’ Amity slumps her way into Bradley’s room, sees his unmade bed and a three-legged machine in his window, blocking any means of seeing Dust across the fields. She pulls it down to see it has a glass eyepiece and when she looks through it the sky zooms toward her, like a cloud attacking the house.

  She sees no pants on the floor or the bed and knows she’ll have to look in the man’s drawers to find some. The old thought of rules comes to her and she bats it away. There were no rules left to follow now. His drawers hold socks and undergarments, short-sleeved and long-sleeved shirts. She finds a pair of his pants for the old man, but her hands keep pulling the drawers open and she finds, in the bottom drawer, more pictures like the ones her mother burned, ladies smiling with their open legs. Beneath them is something else, slippery and sliding. She pulls it out and she gasps right at it. She turns to look through the open door, in case someone can see.

  It is a blue dress, deep and dark as the oracle bowl when it’s wet, with two thin ribbon straps, two triangle cups, and a bit of lace up its front, and so shiny it practically leaps in her hands. She wants it. She rubs it against her cheek and smells its musk. This, she knows, is what women wore here. With no one looking, she slips it into her pinafore pocket and takes it.

  ‘Ain’t you found me some pants yet?’ the old man shouts.

  Once he’s in his pants and his one shoe, he tells her he wants to go downstairs.

  ‘You?’ she asks him. But he needs more help than she can offer him. His legs are stuck stiff as a table’s and when she heats her hands to set them on his knees, they only bend back and buckle.

  ‘Will I get Mother to help?’ she asks him.

  ‘You will not. She shifts me around like I’m a side of beef.’

  ‘Will I get Sorrow?’

  ‘Sorrow, in my bedroom?’ That starts him laughing.

  ‘Will I get Dust?’

  ‘I don’t want that half-breed in here, touchin’ my things.’

  At that, she’s out of options, as she won’t talk to the man at all, with his spying machine and his naked women. ‘What does “half-breed” mean?’ she asks him.

  The two of them spend what’s left of the day in the heat of his room, he in his pants and she with her stolen dress, until he finally says, ‘Go on and get that boy of yours.’ She runs for him, the slip leaping in her outgrown child’s pinafore, but when she finds him, he doesn’t notice anything about her. He just says, ‘What?’ She brings him back to the old man.

  ‘Keep that half-breed away from me,’ he whines.

  Amity looks at Dust, but he just sucks his teeth. ‘I won’t touch you, old man.’

  ‘Then how will we get him downstairs?’ she asks.

  ‘He’ll have to touch me, won’t he?’ He crouches down beside the old man’s bed. ‘You want down, you’ll have to climb on.’ The old man mutters, but when Amity sucks her teeth at him, too, he hollers, ‘All right, you savages!’

  The old man reaches his arms for Dust and Dust takes him onto his shoulders like a heavy scarf, like some hard-boned vest, and walks him to the landing. ‘What’d I ever do to you, old man?’

  ‘Stayed, you freeloader.’ The two bump their way down the stairs, the old man calling behind him, ‘Bring that TV down with you!’

  Amity cradles the TV down the stairs, rabbit ears clanging her kerchief, as Dust deposits the old man on the sofa. ‘Well, hello, living room,’ the old man says. He stretches his skinny legs along the length of it and grins. She sets the TV on the table, shoving the old stacks of paper aside. But when she punches the power button, the screen stays resolutely dark. She sets her hands onto it.

  Dust jams a cushion behind the old man’s head. ‘I’m no half-breed, old man,’ he tells him. ‘I’m Mexican, one hundred percent. It’s you whites who’re the mongrels.’

  The old man splutters. ‘My family arrived on the Mayflower, I’ll have you know. Why, they were here to meet the Mayflower, we been here that long!’

  ‘Then you took the Indians’ land. Well done, white man.’

  ‘We never needed wetbacks workin’ this land, not Oklahoma. This ain’t Texas, boy. You should’ve stayed in Mexico.’

  Dust draws himself up straight. ‘I was born in this country. I’m legal as you. Mexicans are in every state, working your land, doing the work you won’t do. You remember that.’ And with that, Dust stomps out the door and Amity wishes she could follow, even if he has no time for her anymore.

  The old man chuckles. ‘Well, I’ll be.’ He tells Amity to plug the TV in and she stands until he points at the wire coming off the back of the box, and he tells her to find a
socket. She stands there holding the wire until he tells her what a socket is and how she should stick the end of the one into the other.

  ‘Like when you make Jesus,’ she marvels. The old man stares until she jams the end in, and then the TV is on with three big gold letters.

  ‘Gimme them letters, girl,’ he commands.

  She raises her arms to make a W shape, then points her arms out to make an E.

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘Wee?’ she says hopefully.

  ‘Wrong again. It’s World Wrestling Entertainment.’ The picture comes on with a roar as two men, big as cows in shiny suits, spin onto a stage lined with ropes. ‘Hallelujah!’ the old man hollers. ‘It’s Saturday!’ The men slap their chests and bark. ‘Don’t you worry. Got sumpin’ to show that you’ll like, come Sunday.’

  ‘What?’ she asks him, doubtful.

  ‘Sunday’s when the preachermen are on. Go and tell your sister.’

  Her hands go into her pocket, to feel the fabric that waits there. Sunday, she tells herself.

  32

  Do Drop Inn and the Mesa

  He drives Amaranth down a thin road between cut fields that runs beside the highway and the hog farms. ‘This is the old road,’ he tells her. ‘The one that used to bring folks to the station when I was a kid. It ain’t Route Sixty-Six, but we got cars enough.’

  ‘I don’t like highways,’ she says. There are no street signs, no lights, just their headlights on the dark road and the hiccup jumps of jackrabbits into them.

  ‘Then you’re my kind of girl,’ he says.

  She’d found him in his room, looking up through his telescope at stars. He’d only nodded when she asked if they could drive. She’d walked past her daughter and his father on the sofa, watching TV like some ordinary family, and she’d shaken her head at how resilient they all must be.

  ‘Where you wanna go?’ he asks her now, his face dark. The dashboard lights have burned out, from Sorrow’s fire.

  ‘Not into town,’ she says. ‘No papers. Take me where you’d go if I weren’t here.’ He pulls her up before a yellow neon horseshoe and a sign: DO DROP INN. The parking lot is half filled with dirty pickups, parked against a set of hitching posts that flank a saloon door. The trucks are laden with gun supports, their beds full of chains and tools, boxes and barrels, bumper stickers about God and beer. He turns the engine off.

  She can picture the bar inside, sawdust on the floor, maybe, a wooden counter lined with farmers and cowboys, their pale mugs of beer, college football on a screen. She tries to picture him walking in with her beside him or behind him, to hide her skirts and her cap. She pulls it off and pops it into his glove compartment when he opens his door.

  ‘You comin’ in?’

  She pictures him drinking too much, too fast, coming back to her on his dirt in the kitchen garden, how he drank when he thought he saw his wife. She pictures them inside, together, sees herself drinking too much beside him, trying to be someone else, shaking her limbs to music she doesn’t recognize, trying to fill up all that darkness with noise and liquid. She shakes her head. ‘No. Take me somewhere you’ve never taken anybody. Not a soul.’

  He thinks for a minute, then pulls the door shut. ‘Women,’ he says, giving her a smile.

  He turns them back to the dirt road and goes past the turnoff for his farm, driving her west. He stops at a shop for cigarettes and a six-pack and when he doesn’t bring a paper back, she is grateful. ‘Have one,’ he tells her, and she pulls a can from a plastic ring, pulls it open, and holds it, guilty as a child, between her skirted legs. He turns them north, up a blacktop road, and they gain elevation. She can feel her ears pop, see the dark scrub in the headlights change to pine and piñon. The air is cool and she rolls down the window, smells juniper and smoky mesquite.

  ‘You keep driving, you’ll hit Four Corners,’ he tells her, ‘where four states meet. You could go anywhere from there.’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’

  ‘Well, you’re goin’ to Black Mesa.’ He tells her it was named for the volcanic lava that formed its tabletops and valleys, that it adjoins two reservations, Navajo and Hopi, and if it were daylight she’d be able to see the cholla and the pines, maybe spot an eagle, a pinyon jay, or a bear. But it’s dark, so she only sees darkness, the dark shapes beyond them. He turns them up a road, rough and rocky, the truck jostling along a length of barbed wire and metal snow markers. He parks and takes his cigarettes, grabs a flashlight from the glove compartment, and takes the beers by their ring. ‘Come on,’ he says.

  ‘What, we’re walking?’

  ‘End of the line,’ he says, whistling his way to the barbed wire and taking his shirt off before it. He lays it over the wire to help her lift her skirts over, snagging and ripping. When she laughs he shushes her. ‘This is private land. Prob’ly dogs,’ he says.

  ‘Is this legal?’

  ‘What do you care about legal?’ He pulls her by the hand in the dark, over sand. His flashlight sweeps a dry creek bed, lined with boulders and tufts of dry grass. The sky above them is frosted with stars, thick in a twisted band of galaxies, close enough to pull down. ‘There,’ he says. He points his light at a hole in the ground, saucer-shaped, the size of a dinner plate. ‘Dinosaur tracks,’ he tells her.

  ‘Come on,’ she says with a laugh.

  ‘What, you don’t believe in dinosaurs?’ He sweeps the light up a row of tracks, staggered along the creek bed, lined up like the gait of an ancient land beast.

  ‘Of course I believe in them,’ she says. ‘Just because my children are ignorant doesn’t mean I am.’ She stops and bends to look at it, to put her fingers into the fossilized edges, like doubting Thomas probing a wound. ‘I saw some bones in a museum when I was a kid, strung together with wire. They were probably plastic. Still, the size of them, I couldn’t believe it.’ Most children were fascinated by dinosaurs. Not her children. ‘Is this really a footprint? How do they know?’

  ‘Everybody wants proof,’ he says. He opens a beer and guzzles it, the beam of the flashlight wandering while he swallows.

  ‘Not my children,’ she says. They have faith, proof of nothing. ‘We should bring the girls out, show them proof of dinosaurs, real proof that the world is older than the Bible teaches, older than four thousand years.’ What would they make of the tracks? How would she begin to take apart everything they knew and believed? Could she?

  He hands the can to her and her lips go over the teardrop hole. She tips the drink back and looks up at the swirl of stars, hoping one will fall so she can wish on it.

  ‘When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut,’ he says.

  ‘Sure,’ she says, handing the can back. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Ma gave me the telescope. Grew up lookin’ up for men on the moon. Just kept extendin’ the legs. I wanted to see their boot prints up there, like it would prove that they’d been and I might go up. Pa’d just say, “Nothin’ up there, boy, ain’t no wheat on the moon.”’

  She takes the crook of his arm and squeezes it, pulls her collars up to her neck.

  ‘Cold?’ he asks her, reaching to rub her sleeve with his other hand.

  ‘No, I just – did you never bring anyone here? Not your wife?’

  ‘She didn’t like getting dirty,’ he says, and he starts to laugh. ‘Should’ve never come to Oklahoma then.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘She must have been miserable.’

  He nods, the laugh falling. ‘I guess she was. She never did want to plant or work things. Don’t know what those seeds were about. She was always tryin’ to get me to tell her things’d be okay, but, you know, I didn’t know if they would be. Every year I think I’ll lose this farm. Every harvest will fail me. Every child we had, well … We had some bad luck.’

  She nods. She knows.

  ‘Life is just seeds,’ he says, shrugging. ‘You know, you plant in the dirt you’re given. It’s all you’ve got. You water, you tend, and sometimes seeds don’t take. Sometim
es it all goes away from you. She didn’t want to hear about that. She wanted promises, and you can’t make promises. They’re just what you want to happen, not what will.’

  She thinks of all the promises she’s made, all the times she’s said I do and I will, over fifty ceremonies. She thinks of the promises made by her husband and how they turned to threats. What she wanted to happen, what they wanted to build, wasn’t what they made in the end. Bradley was right. ‘What would happen if we stayed? With you?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, rubbing his face, ‘it’d probably be much the same. But winters are hard here. You can’t imagine it, this heat, but you couldn’t keep to the porch unless I could box it in. I suppose someday Pa’ll give his room up and the girls could have it, ’less he decides to live forever just to spite me.’

  ‘What would happen – with us? I’m not looking for promises, but—’

  ‘I guess it’d be like this.’ He swallows. They stand in their silences, in the dark of night, with the shards of light above them, flaming. They may have died when the dinosaurs walked here, those stars, but the light is still there.

  Everything seems simple. Possible.

  ‘I want to tell you something,’ she says.

  ‘How much more can there be?’ He crushes the beer can beneath his boot.

  ‘A lot,’ she says.

  He turns to her. ‘Well, I don’t need to know it. That’s all your business, back there, and you’ll deal with it. I don’t need to know what you done. I just want to know what you’re gonna do.’

  She thinks that there is only dirt and sky, Bradley and her. It is all she has and all she wants. She can let go of her husband’s family and the family they tried to make, but then she realizes she can’t let go of the children they made, her children, who her children have become. If she never tells him, he will never really know them. He will never understand her darkness or their fears. But she tells him nothing, as he wants.