by Peggy Riley
‘No, Sorrow!’ Amity calls.
Sorrow begins to spin in place, holding the container out and letting the gasoline go in an arc, like a skirt flung out to bell in prayer.
‘Sorrow, don’t!’ Amity sees Sorrow release the container, so it flies away from her. She hears her strike a match. ‘Sorrow, no!’
The gas in the circle around Sorrow lights in a snap. Blue flames rise around her and she lets out a gravel-tongued roar. Sorrow spins and in her spinning the silky fabric of the old man’s robe threatens to catch, to make of her a whirling tempest, a wheeling chariot of fire. The field around her catches, row after row, as stems spark, radiating from her like a spinning dance passed hand to hand.
Amity hears shouting behind her, hoping Mother will have seen the fire, will have found a way to get some help. She scans the fields, left and right, for Dust, but she cannot see him. Her heart plummets for him and her abandonment, but she cannot blame him for it. Maybe no one can help her sister but she. She is Sorrow’s keeper and this work can only be hers.
Amity runs to her, hands out over the band of her fire. She feels Sorrow take her hands, forgive her, and spin her, around and around – or maybe to try to pull her into the fire itself. Amity sees the edges of her own skirts catch. Sorrow throws back her head and roars her prayer as her robe flames. Amity’s hands burn on Sorrow’s skin while Sorrow’s fire burns Amity, and their heat becomes one heat, her hands fuse onto Sorrow’s hands, and they are one sister, one being, and Amity can feel for herself the rage and want within her sister. She can hear the language of angels, the swarm of bees in Sorrow’s head. She can see her sister with her Father, as she had seen them both, but now she can see Him as if from within her sister’s eyes, His eyes on her, His body on her, in her, like God, setting her alight. Amity tries to pull the fiery robe from her, but Sorrow won’t release her hands.
‘His word is like fire!’ Sorrow shouts. ‘Listen and let it take you!’
‘No!’ Amity yells, and even as she spins she knows this spinning will consume her. And that is what her sister wants. Amity rips her hands from Sorrow’s. She can feel the skin on her palms tear and split as Sorrow grabs hard for Amity and misses. Amity leaps back from her sister and Sorrow’s arms flail, empty. And then Sorrow spins herself, crashing across the flaming sorghum, her hands swatting unseen demons and angels.
Amity is pulled to the ground. The man Bradley throws himself on top of her, pats her to put her out while Mother wails, ‘Sorrow!’
‘It’s okay,’ Amity tries to say, but she chokes out smoke. Her lips feel hot, blistered as sausages. When she can, she will tell them she has fireproofed Sorrow. She has brought Sorrow’s fire into herself. Sorrow can spin, but the fire will not consume her. The fire will not want her, now that Amity has touched her with her healing hands.
She hears the man say he’ll get her to the hospital, hears him tell Mother it’s his fault, there’s weed killer on to kill the shattercane. ‘It’s an accelerant,’ he shouts. But Mother only sobs, ‘It isn’t your fault. It was always mine.’
‘It’s okay,’ Amity tries to say again, and her mouth fills with blood. She reaches her fingers up, to clear it, and she sees her hands are dry and brown and stiff as two small Bibles. Her mind moves her fingers, but her fingers do not.
Bradley takes his shirt off and she flinches from him and his nakedness, but he only wads it, to put it under her head. ‘Don’t move,’ he tells her. ‘Hang in there, kiddo.’
She lifts her head to look for Sorrow, but the man pushes her down, saying, ‘You have to keep your hands above your heart. Keep them up!’ So she holds her hands up to the sky, to watch the smoke between them. She can hear shouting and crying, the choke and thrum of a motor. A motorcycle, she thinks, taking her two best loves. Dust is taking Sorrow away from her, just as he said he would, and no one stops them. No one can stop them. Before her hands, upraised before the heavens, she sees a stream of blue smoke. He is gone. And Sorrow is gone.
BEFORE:
The First Wife
There was no veil, no organ. There was no cake or Champagne.
There was no confetti, no rice, no guests. There were no invitations.
There was only Amaranth and a retired justice of the peace, his wife for a witness. A cassette tape played one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on an endless loop.
There was a preacher beside her, solid and sturdy in a pale linen suit, his graying curls pulled back. Amaranth married him. She was nineteen.
She wore a full-length lemon-colored dress from a Salvation Army shop in the small town where they married, off the highway, headed north. Someone’s cast-off prom dress, she figured, though she had never been to a prom. It had long gauzy sleeves and a fitted bodice covered in daisy-chain lace. It was a little too short. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail, just as he wore his, and there were wildflowers jammed in the rubber band, picked from the cracks in an empty parking lot.
It wasn’t the kind of wedding a little girl dreams of or plans for, but she was not that kind of little girl. She had never played dress-up, never wore her mother’s oversized gown, draped Kleenex on her head, or practiced the step-together-step of the ‘Wedding March.’ Her Barbies had no wedding gowns – not a one of the eight Barbies who lived with the single Ken in their plastic house, on their cardboard beds, in sin. No one she knew was married; her parents hadn’t been. She had never even been to a wedding, but she understood the rituals from TV shows. She knew there should be a dress and a bouquet. She knew there would be a ring and a kiss and a promise to be faithful and eternal, ’til death did them part.
His hand was warm in the crook of her elbow. The gauze of her sleeve was damp and clinging. When she turned to look at him, she felt dizzy, dazed, and thirsty. She felt stripped and exposed. She felt beautiful, but sick to her stomach. She didn’t know that love could make you sick.
He gave her arm a squeeze and she felt all the eyes of the room on her.
‘I do,’ she said into the expectant silence. ‘I do.’
After the ceremony, her husband drove them northward. All she owned was balled in a duffel bag in the back of his van, beside the cardboard boxes filled with tracts and pamphlets. She watched the world roll by through his van window and curled her fingers around the heavy gold ring he had placed on her fourth finger. It was too big for her and she had to make a fist to keep it on, for she had a habit of losing things.
She had grown up in the high desert, down sand roads from a town of a hundred, a stretch of the Mojave where flat land met the San Bernardino Mountains, snow-covered in winter and clouded by dynamite blasts from the quarry in summer. Her grandmother’s bungalow sat squat on a hundred acres of hard-baked sand, Joshua trees, and creosote bushes. It was hard land that yielded little. It was a land to leave behind, as her mother did, as her father did, but it was all that Amaranth knew. Her life was her TV and her bedroom, the sand and the fruit trees, the abandoned houses and rock formations of the mighty, empty desert, where she searched for land turtles and roadrunners, collected red ants in a jar, and waited for her father to come home.
Her father always came back, as her mother never would. ‘Wanted the moon,’ was all her grandmother would say of her, the dark-haired woman in the black-and-white photograph who had borne her, named her, and left. ‘Wanted the moon and ran off to marry it.’ When she was a little older, Grandmother would tell her that it wasn’t her fault. She was a victim of Free Love, the kind that hippies had before babies were born, but she couldn’t make of her father a hippie in her head. Old TV shows were full of hippies, all fringe and headbands, women with long, straight hair like her mother had. ‘Don’t you believe that love comes free,’ her grandmother said. ‘You’re living proof of it.’ She didn’t like the name her mother gave her, but Grandmother said she was lucky not to be named Sunshine Ladybug or Diaphanous Lampshade. ‘It could’ve been a lot worse,’ she was told. Either way, her father called her Amy.
And when he came home it was C
hristmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July all at once. When he came there was honky-tonk on the turntable and groceries in the fridge, fresh milk and butter and potato chips, Cactus Cooler and Delaware Punch, hot dogs and tamales and jars of hot sauce and salsa. Bottles of liquor would come out of the pantry and there would be canasta and three-card stud and laughter around their table, just like on TV. It seemed to be the only time her grandmother smiled.
When he came home there were trips into town, down the sand streets to the asphalt street in his car, to the parking lot that was town, lined with all the shops they had: Grandmother’s hairdresser, where she got her blue rinse, the grocery store, and the coin-op Laundromat. There was the bar called Buzz, where her father would lift her up to a bar stool to drink glass after fizzy glass of Shirley Temples, rims festooned with mermaids and parasols. Best of all, there was the mobile library, parked in the parking lot, where she had already read the whole of the children’s section and was working her way through young adult to gothic and historical. The librarian let her take out a brown paper shopping bag of books at a time and never scolded when they were overdue. After all that, she would drive them, for her father and grandmother did not drink Shirley Temples. Seated on her father’s knees, turning the wheel left and right, she would get them home.
When her father was home to tuck her in, she wasn’t afraid of the dark. When he was home, the closet didn’t make noises and coyotes didn’t howl. Sometimes he would sit and smoke in her room and tell her stories about how he ran away to the circus, how he ran away to sea. But he never wanted to tell her how her mother ran away.
On her first night of marriage, she slept in the back of her husband’s van, parked along a dark stretch off a two-lane highway at the state border. She had never left her own state before. He lit votive candles and set them across the dashboard, like some makeshift altar. He told her they would be home by tomorrow night at the latest. He took off his suit, draping it carefully over the back of the driver’s seat, and knelt on the futon mattress on the van’s floor. ‘Pray with me,’ he said.
She wished she had a bottle of something – anything. Her dress felt tight, suddenly, cheap and childish. She wished she had something frilly on beneath it, something lacy and white, or the blue that tradition said she was meant to have worn for the wedding. She yanked the zipper of her dress down and stepped out of it. She kicked it away to stand in her old bra and underpants, their elastic frayed. She took those off, too, as he watched her.
‘Come, wife,’ he said, and smiled, as if the word was sweet in his mouth.
‘Husband,’ she said, trying it out.
He patted the futon. He held his arm out to her and she knelt, desperate for alcohol. It was all that she could think of. She shut her eyes against the want for it. She felt his hands find her skin. She breathed in the scent of his van, its gasoline and upholstery, and of him, wood smoke and the patchouli-oil smell of his hair. She told herself that this was home now, wherever he was. He would be home.
‘I thank God for you,’ he told her. She swallowed, thirstily, and let him pray.
She loved his van, as she had loved her father’s car. She loved anything that could take you away. She knew that was what her father loved best about his car, too. There were a number of rituals that let her know when he was going. Grandmother’s Deepfreeze would be stocked full of TV dinners. Library books would be swapped by the bagful. Just before he left, there would be some trip away for them, just the two of them, to the dry lake bed where the turkey shoots were, or into Barstow to look at the trains. Once, he took her to a ghost town’s silver mine and laughed when she said they should go in and steal what was left, so he wouldn’t have to go away to work. ‘Millions of dollars, just sitting there,’ he said. ‘And it’d cost more to mine it than it’s worth.’
‘That’s not fair,’ she had told him, and he had laughed at her.
‘Life’s not fair. That’s one thing you might as well know now.’
It wasn’t fair that she got left behind, and when she was ten, she decided she would go with him. She knotted her clothes and her Barbies in a pillowcase. She snuck into his backseat to hide. He was nearly to town, hard rock on the radio, before he reached around for a can of Coors and found her. Then he slammed on the brakes and spun the car around, back for home.
‘I want to come with you,’ she whimpered.
‘I want a lot of things,’ he said. He dropped her off and watched until she had trudged to the house, checking each step for scorpions. When she opened the door, he sped off again, wheels churning sand. Then she jumped on her bicycle and pumped hard on the pedals to follow him, skidding into the ruts he’d made, where packed sand had given way. She thought if she could reach him before the road turned to asphalt, he would have to stop and let her in. She rode as fast as she could behind him, following his tail-lights. The asphalt road was just ahead. He stopped and swerved, jumped out of his car. ‘Go home!’ he shouted.
‘I hate it here.’
‘You don’t know what hate is. You don’t know what I hate.’
She held her breath. If he hated her, the world would end. It would stop its spinning. It would be snuffed right out.
His voice came soft then. ‘You can’t take kids where I’m going.’
‘I’m not a kid,’ she whined. ‘I’d be so quiet. You could just leave me in the car. No one would know.’
‘I’d know,’ he said. ‘And I need you here, to take care of your grandmother. I need you here, waiting for me. Now go.’ He waited until she picked up her bicycle. Then he slammed his door and drove.
The sky above her was inky black, punctuated by stars and planets and constellations, a sickle of moon. A whole world above her, around her, that told her that the whole of her life wouldn’t be this small and mean, this rocky, this sandy, this quiet. The Milky Way twisted above her like a road made of diamonds. It told her she would leave, too, as soon as she could.
On the first day of their marriage, they drove out of California, heading north for Oregon, for Idaho. She had only seen desert and freeways. She had never seen such unbound green, such an expanse of old trees, of silent roads and forests, where waterfalls tumbled beside the van and nobody stopped to photograph them.
Amaranth was accustomed to things being fake, being mocked-up and make-believe. She had lived for the last several years in a world of fantasy lands beneath a fiberglass Matterhorn, which towered over the city and its acres of hot parked cars. For Amaranth, the structure guarded a privileged and secret world, hooped by the elevated concrete track of the futuristic Monorail, alive with the sounds of a steamboat’s lonesome whistle and the nightly crack of fireworks exploding in the sky. It was a world she couldn’t afford to visit, surrounded by cheap, worn-out streets where everything was themed. Motels were alpine, space-age, or Polynesian. Diners served triple-blob pancakes in the shape of mouse ears. Each and every business added ‘land’ to their names, to join in on the fun, to flog their wares and services to unsuspecting tourists in such locales as Camperland, Liquorland, and, Amaranth’s workplace, Tacoland, a Mission-themed stucco building in a cracked asphalt lot lined with palm trees, whose packets of salsa made her think of her father. Vents poured out heat and the scent of grease. Her car smelled of deep-fat-fried tortillas and her arms were sticky from pouring jumbo Cokes into fiesta-striped bucket-size cups. She thought she knew what boredom was in the desert, but she didn’t know about the mind-numbing tedium of fast-food service and a three-dollar-an-hour job. She was seventeen and it was the best job she could get.
She had been working for two years before she met her future husband. She had served every item on the combo menu, in every combination. Employees had come and gone in a loop as endless as the restaurant’s mariachi Muzak. Zachariah had leaned into the tile-arched ordering window and asked her where the nearest church was. He laughed when she told him it was the circus tent next door called Melodyland. ‘Have you heard the good news?’ he asked her.
‘He
re?’ she scoffed. ‘You want good news, go find a happy hour.’
He had laughed and told her she was cute. She called him a letch and he’d laughed again, delighted by her. They got all sorts at all-night fast-food establishments like Tacoland. She had seen it all – college boys on spring break from the Midwest, hoping to score with a California girl; middle-aged sleazeballs, thinking she could be bought with cheap wine and a meal. Sometimes she could.
She found him asleep in his van in their parking lot when she arrived to open up and fire up the fryers. ‘You can’t sleep here,’ she told him, but a few months later, she would be sleeping in the parking lot herself, having run out of sofas and fast friends made over a cheap bar buffet.
A year later, when he came back to the parking lot, he would find her in her car, the doors open and her purse gone. She had been drunk again, drunk out of her mind. ‘Have you heard the good news?’ he asked her, and then, leaning in to her, said, ‘My God, are you okay?’ She was not okay. Not at all.
When they reached his land, he turned up a gravel path, tight between white pines at the base of a gray-rock mountain studded in conifers. Three women stood before a house, rough-hewn wood with hay-bale foundations. It was painted a bright, fresh yellow. There were raised beds overflowing with bean plants and vines in full flower, lettuces, and bushy herbs.
She looked at him. Who were these women?
‘You must be Amy,’ the first woman said with a smile, pulling open the van door and holding out a freckled hand to help her down. Yellow paint striped her arm. ‘I’m Hope.’ The other two women had gone straight to his driver’s-side door and squealed like girls to see him. They were not girls. They were older than Hope and significantly older than Amaranth. They were bone-thin, in faded overalls, and their teeth, when they smiled their hellos, were long and brown at the gums. She watched them each kiss his mouth.