Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  And chickens, she thinks. Chickens for Amity, who likes to take care of things.

  Bradley comes back to her, shaking his head. ‘They’ve got my pa on the porch playin’ dress-up. I don’t know what they’re plannin’.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, go with it. Enjoy it. Sorrow’s laughing. Did you hear her?’

  He strokes stray hairs back from her forehead, hairs that would have been kept by a cap. ‘Know what you’re growin’ out here yet?’

  ‘I thought they’d be herbs.’ She thought these would be healing herbs, actually, black haw and blessed thistle, squaw vine and lady’s mantle. It’s what she would have grown, if she were his wife. She was relieved to see no angelica, pennyroyal, calamint. If his wife’s seeds had grown emmenagogues or abortifacients, she would have felt compelled to tell him, so he would have proof of the reason his wife had miscarried, proof that the world wasn’t randomly cruel, that it wasn’t God but a woman who had chosen her own fate. These were herbs their community knew well, despite their constant desire for children.

  ‘I hoped they’d be food,’ he said. ‘Ma had carrots and beans out here.’

  ‘They aren’t,’ she says. ‘They’re flowers. Just flowers.’

  ‘Flowers! What good are those?’

  She laughs. ‘They’ll be beautiful.’

  ‘Just like my wife,’ he says. ‘Growing somethin’ nobody needs. Ain’t worth the water.’

  ‘Beauty is its own purpose.’

  ‘That so?’ He squats down to look and shakes his head at the folly of them. ‘Flowers. When you plant seeds next time, make ’em somethin’ we can use.’

  She laughs as he walks to the house, calling jokes to her daughters. It’s the closest she’ll get to a promise.

  35

  Shattercane

  Sorrow rehearses, so that she will be ready.

  ‘Stop spinnin’ around,’ the old man calls from the porch. ‘You’re makin’ me seasick. Put down that old bit of bowl.’

  Sorrow tells the old man about the little boy prophet. He tells her that the tent circuit is full of boys and men like him, prophesying disaster, telling the fortunes and futures of the faithful. ‘That’s the devil’s work,’ Sorrow says.

  ‘What else is prophecy? Just tellin’ the future, Bible-wise.’

  Sorrow listens to him as if he is the first person ever to look at her and to see her and not want something. Amity watches them both, but there is no role for her in Sorrow’s show. She sits in the shade beneath the scabby tree, writing her name and Dust’s name, all the letters she knows in the world now, over and over on top of one another in the dirt with a stick.

  ‘Do you believe?’ Sorrow spins and points her arm out.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ the old man cackles. ‘Speak up! Stop wiggling! Sock it to me, sister. Give it to me straight!’

  Sorrow spins and laughs out loud.

  Amity can only think of Dust and all that Sorrow won’t tell her. ‘I showed you the TV,’ Amity said. ‘I took you to the old man. We don’t have secrets, you and me.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ was all that Sorrow would say. Nor would Dust tell. He kept his distance from her, wouldn’t meet her eye, ashamed as he seemed to be of her. ‘I’m just trying to help, Amity. It’s stuff you don’t need to know,’ is all he would give.

  She wishes she had hidden somewhere, even inside the horrible room, so that she could see what they did and how they did it, so that she could see what it was that he wanted and make herself be it, if she could.

  The day of Sorrow’s debut, Amity makes a handbill of sorts, following the old man’s instructions. Her name had to be written up large across a sheet, he told her, so people would know when to come and where. They tie his bedsheet to the front of the porch and she writes the letters as big as she can across it with old paint, running back and forth to look at his version of the word in the dirt. Even so, some of the letters don’t turn out like his. CMIN SOOON, she scrawls. SOROW.

  Amity sweeps the porch for Sorrow. She drags kitchen chairs into the shade and gathers plastic-wrapped foodstuffs from the man’s small shop by way of refreshment; the old man insisted that there were always refreshments at entertainments, to bring in more cash. The old man finds a tie in his chifforobe and puts it on, dampens down what’s left of his hair, while Sorrow practices, daringly, in the bath upstairs, splashing and chanting for hours on end.

  She gathers Sorrow’s audience, helping the old man to a chair, hectoring Mother and Bradley to come in from their hoeing and spraying. They sit in the shade and fan the backs of their necks in the last of the day’s heat. Dust wouldn’t come.

  When Sorrow appears from the house, she is transformed. She is magnificent. She flings back the screen door and glides onto the porch, a shimmering vision in the old man’s silken robe from the Far East, a black tasseled sash pinching in her tiny waist. She turns her back to display a red satin-stitched dragon, teeth bared and claws curled. She has even removed her cloth cap to show pale, clean braids pinned into a halo. Her cheeks blush from the bath and all their looking.

  Mother and Bradley elbow one another when they see her and the old man bobs his head in approval. And then Dust is beside her, settling onto a chair. Amity turns to him, to thank him for coming, and she watches his eyes widen, his mouth go slack. He cannot keep his eyes from Sorrow. No one can.

  ‘Do you believe?’ Sorrow asks. She starts to spin and stops herself, wavers. Then her arm shoots straight out, pointing at every watching face. ‘Do you believe?’

  ‘I thought we were getting a show,’ Bradley mutters. Mother scolds him as Sorrow bolts for the screen door. ‘Sorry,’ Bradley calls. ‘Come on back.’

  ‘Everybody gets hecklers,’ the old man calls out. ‘Suck it up.’

  Sorrow straightens the placket of the shiny robe and steps back to the edge of the porch. She makes a ball of her hands and flings them upright, as if she has thrown something hard at God. The black sleeves pool down onto her bony shoulders, showing the white sticks of her arms. ‘God the Father asks that we believe in Him, even when He’s hard to find, even when it seems He’s gone. God the Father asks us to believe in the unseen, to wait and watch for His signs even when we’re sure they’ll never come to us.’ She drops her arms and the sleeves flow down to smother her hands. ‘God the Father is not here, but He is coming. Do you believe?’

  Mother hisses as the man shifts in his chair. ‘How will this help her?’ he lashes back.

  ‘Go on, girl,’ the old man calls. ‘Stick to the script.’

  Sorrow stares stonily at her feet, but when Dust calls out, ‘Come on, Sorrow,’ she gives him a rare smile that fires her face. Amity slumps in her chair and wishes the ground would take her in for comfort.

  ‘The Lord will give you such a show,’ Sorrow says. ‘A holy show that will shake you to your core. Are you ready?’

  ‘Shoot,’ Bradley says.

  ‘I prophesy that the Lord will come like a storm from the north. He will pour out seven bowls of wrath onto your soil and ruin it.’ A pink rash climbs up her neck. ‘Can you feel how He bakes your land?’ Sorrow points out to the harvested fields. ‘This is the time for seers and prophets. They preach from the devil’s box with their hands out for money and a face full of tears, but the Lord says, He doesn’t need your money. He doesn’t want your clapping or crying. He wants your blood and your bodies. He needs the whole of your minds and your hearts, for there is nothing but Him. He is all there is. There are false prophets at work in the world who’ll say that you’re saved if you pray enough or pay enough, but they are wrong. I tell you I am the last, true prophet. I have seen the wrath of God! I will be His Second Coming!’

  ‘Jesus,’ Bradley says, and he stands up. ‘Will you listen to her?’

  ‘Please,’ Mother says. ‘Let her finish.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Will you tell her? Will you tell her she was raped and the whole thing she’s doing here is wrong – just—’
r />   ‘Stop it, please,’ Mother begs.

  He turns to Sorrow, hands out. ‘Look, I know what happened to you and when they catch him, I hope they lock him up for a long time, but somebody’s gotta tell you it’s nothin’ to do with the world ending or God. He’s your father, Sorrow. And he raped you and it’s wrong.’

  Sorrow’s hands press to her chest. ‘This is holy work.’

  ‘Sorrow!’ Mother’s hands fly to her mouth and Sorrow turns on her.

  ‘You didn’t want me to be the Mary. You didn’t think it would be me, but the Father saw it.’

  ‘Your father isn’t God, Sorrow,’ Bradley starts.

  ‘But you can’t be the Mary without the child,’ Sorrow carries on. ‘So you took me away and you took me from him and you killed it, here, on this man’s cursed land! This wicked land!’ Sorrow swings to the man, even as he’s turning for Mother, telling her to say something. ‘Don’t you think I can hear you upstairs, profaning with my mother? I hear your rutting, and so does the Father. They can hear you both, way down in hell. I see that your land will turn to sand in your fingers for wickedness. All you grow and want will blow away!’

  ‘I’m not listening to this crap,’ Bradley says, starting for the house.

  Mother slides from her chair to the dirt as she babbles, ‘It’s my fault, mine.’

  The old man struggles up from his chair, his voice a rasp. ‘Sorrow, girl, you ain’t the Mary. That ain’t how the Second Coming works and whoever it was told you that did so for his own purposes, but you can’t read the Bible so you don’t know any better. And that makes you a fool.’ With that, the old man runs out of breath and takes a rattled one back in.

  Sorrow shakes her head at all of them. ‘I’ll tell you who’s the fool,’ she says. ‘I never wanted to be the Mary, no matter what he did to me. I wanted to be the Father and I will be.’

  The old man hacks and clutches his windpipe. Amity rubs her hands, to charge them for healing, as he bangs on his chest and gasps for air.

  ‘Repent while you can, for the world is ending!’ Sorrow shrieks. ‘I can see it! God the Father will come and strike you down, one by one!’

  ‘Shut up about your father, girl.’ The old man coughs and splutters until he’s squeezed out. ‘Aw, git me on back to my bed. What am I doin’ out here, anyway?’ Bradley puts an arm around him, half carries him into the house.

  Mother reaches up for Sorrow. ‘This is my fault.’

  Sorrow looks down at her. ‘When you killed the baby, you made this happen – when you killed the Messiah, you tried to stop the world ending – but it will end. It is ending!’

  ‘No,’ Mother says, struggling up in her skirts. ‘It’s my fault for indulging you and not seeing – not stopping – not stopping my husband—’

  ‘Your husband? My father!’

  ‘Stop it, Sorrow, please.’

  ‘But I don’t need the baby. I don’t need the Father and I don’t need you! I will be the holy one! I will make it come!’ Sorrow leaps off the porch and past them, black robe rippling.

  Dust stands, knocking his chair backward. ‘She’s mad, isn’t she?’

  Amity can only shake her head at the furniture, her mother sobbing, the sign sliding down the front of the house. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Dust pulls her away from the porch. ‘Something bad’s gonna happen. Why won’t anybody do anything?’

  ‘Because it’s Sorrow! Nobody ever does anything about Sorrow!’

  ‘Well, I’m taking her home.’

  Amity yanks her arm from him. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘I’m not taking you. And you can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘She won’t go. She won’t go anywhere without me.’

  ‘She doesn’t care about you,’ he says. ‘You should hear the things she says about you.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she flings, stung. ‘You can’t take her. She’s my sister. She’s mine!’ Amity rushes after Sorrow, following her into the fields, where she moves across the dark, seeded land and the rape stubble. Sorrow zigzags between giant sunflowers, heads nodding as Amity follows, the coarse hairs of the leaves and stems scratchy on her face, her hands, and arms. Dust pounds the dirt behind her, chasing Sorrow, chasing her.

  Sorrow shoves her way through the plants, but they snap back upright, hitting her full force and getting even, the stems weeping milk everywhere Sorrow has been.

  Amity hears a match being struck. ‘The end of the world will come with fire!’ she hears and she waits for smoke, for a sunflower to catch and go up like a mighty candle, but she only hears it sizzle and die. Sorrow kicks it.

  ‘They’re too green,’ Amity calls.

  ‘Stop following me!’ Sorrow turns on her.

  ‘I always follow you.’

  ‘Well, don’t!’ She lights a match and holds it out to Amity, flame dancing between her fingers. Amity watches, wondering what the end of the world will look like when it comes at last, as Dust catches up. He runs past Amity and right to Sorrow. He takes hold of Sorrow by her slippery arms. ‘Stop this, Sorrow. I told you I’d help.’

  ‘Help?’ she says. ‘I know what you want. I know what you all want.’ Sorrow whips her robe open to show, beneath it, her pantaloons and apron. Amity gasps at her in her underclothes. Sorrow puts her hands into her apron pocket and bulges it out, to make a belly, looking at Dust and laughing. Then she pulls her hands back out, holding the paring knife. She twists it to catch the sun on its blade and Amity’s hand throbs in response. She swings it halfheartedly at a sunflower.

  ‘Give me the knife, Sorrow.’ Dust holds his hand out.

  Sorrow gives a thin-lipped smile to Amity. ‘Shall I, sister, give it to him?’

  ‘Don’t you hurt him!’

  Sorrow sneers, ‘He doesn’t care about you.’

  ‘Shut up, Sorrow,’ Dust says. He takes a step closer, his hand outstretched. ‘I promised I’d help, didn’t I? Leave Amity alone.’

  ‘Everyone leaves Amity alone. That’s why she’s always watching.’ Sorrow looks at Amity. ‘All she does is watch.’

  Dust grabs hold of Sorrow’s wrist and shakes it. ‘Drop it,’ he says.

  Amity watches Dust holding Sorrow and she thinks of them together. ‘I do more than watch.’

  Sorrow leers at her. ‘Oh, do you?’

  ‘I heal with my hands,’ Amity tells her. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘I know no such thing. I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘I do more than heal. You think it was Mother, but it was me. I put my hands on your baby and I took it.’ She rubs her hands together, to show her, to remind her what she did.

  Sorrow lunges at Amity with a cry, but Dust has too tight a hold on her. He squeezes her arm until she has to throw the knife down, but when he bends to pick it up, she slips away between the dark stalks.

  ‘You okay?’ Dust asks her.

  Amity cannot look at him. ‘She hates Mother for what she did. But it was me. She should hate me.’

  Dust only puts his hand over her mouth. ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘Listen.’

  They hear Sorrow’s feet running and stopping, changing direction. They hear the rustling of stalks. He points across the field and they see a flash, a match flaming up. ‘She’s in the rape!’

  Sorrow stands in the snap of the knee-high stubble. She lights a match and throws it down. They watch a patch of stubble catch.

  ‘Burning won’t hurt it,’ Dust says. ‘Nitrogen’s good for the soil.’ But even so, he watches, to see what she will burn next. Flames lick from the stalks and a column of smoke rises like a sea beast from dark water.

  Sorrow sees Dust’s barn, just as Amity has the thought of it, and runs for it, Dust and Amity on her heels. Sorrow gets to the door first, opens it, and rushes in. Dust flies behind, kicking the stand up on his bike and rolling it out as Amity claps for kittens. She bends for a kitten, for two, and shoos them outside. They slink around her ankles and she has to kick at them, frighten them into running, and
she calls for the mother cat.

  Sorrow sees her. She screams and rushes toward Amity and Amity must grab hold of the barn door, to slam it shut on her sister, trapping her inside. Dust helps, pressing the door shut with his whole, straining body. They hear Sorrow gasp for breath on the other side of it and stop, panting. ‘Sorrow?’ Amity breathes. Sorrow gives a tiny, tinkling laugh, like something breaking.

  ‘Don’t open the door,’ Amity says, thinking of the kitten, of what Sorrow did. They hold it closed together. Then they hear a cackling and a crackling, like paper being balled.

  ‘Don’t open that door,’ Dust says, but Amity cannot help herself. It is Sorrow. She pulls the door back, and air rushes in to feed the smoke. There comes a fiery ball of flame. Amity beats her way in, sees Dust’s bed and the hay bales on fire. Dust pushes past her, shirt up against his face, and Amity follows until she cannot breathe. She cannot see him or Sorrow and she thinks that this is how the world will end, in the choking smoke of an angry God. She gropes her way back to the door, shouting into the dark for help, for rescue, and finding the light as Dust bursts free from the barn, coughing. He drags Sorrow by her waist. She swings in his arms to be free of him, and they collapse onto the ground together, coughing, clinging.

  Amity sees it first: the plastic container in Sorrow’s hands.

  Dust grabs at it. ‘Gas – for the bike,’ he says, but Sorrow is too quick for him. She leaps up to dance back across the fields. He gives a hacking cough and rubs smoke from his eyes. Amity looks at the barn, at the smoke pouring out through the door, and she thinks of the gas station, of the fuel there, all a sister would need to end the world. ‘Come on,’ Dust says.

  Sorrow stands in a faraway field, dark down a row of sorghum, where the plants stand tall as rows of corn. Their blade-long leaves curve down from their stems like skirts. Bright green by day, they darken as the sun sets, the sky going orange. Sorrow moves between them, twitching them. Amity sees her take the cap off the container and splash it about her.