Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  Hope took Amaranth by the arm. ‘Let’s get you inside. Such a long drive you’ve had. Come and meet Mother.’

  Amaranth looked back at him. Whose mother? He had no family. It was the one thing they had in common.

  Hope opened the door and took her through a piney entryway into a gloomy parlor, the small windows hung with heavy curtains. ‘Here’s our Amy,’ Hope called into the murk.

  An ancient woman sat shrunken in a needlepoint chair, dwarfed by a tasseled lamp. Hope switched it on above her and the light made the white tufts of her hair glow in a holy aureole. She lifted a knobby-knuckled hand, veined and spotted, and Amaranth took it, warmly. She thought of her grandmother and her final days in her bed, when she seemed to shrink into the rind of her own skin. She thought of how mean her grandmother had become.

  The old woman’s fingers explored her own, twisting the loose band she wore. She held her hand out, palm down, as she had seen other women do when showing off their rings. Before she knew it, the old woman had snatched it off.

  ‘Oh,’ she said to Hope, embarrassed. ‘She’s – taken my ring.’

  ‘Has she?’ Hope said. ‘I’ll get her pills.’ Her husband came in with the two other women and she told him how the old woman had taken her ring.

  ‘It’s her ring,’ he said. He held his hand out for it. The old woman cocked her head, opened her mouth, and slid the ring into it. Amaranth grimaced: the horrible vision of her wedding ring in the sagging, wrinkled mouth of the crone, the sound of it clicking against dentures. ‘Is she mad?’ she heard herself whispering. He glared at her. ‘She’ll choke on it, is all.’

  Hope entered with a handful of pills and a glass of water. ‘Come, Mother,’ she said.

  The old woman shook her head and pursed her lips, but no one shouted or threatened, as Amaranth would have done. Her husband only put his hand on her, his bride, and smoothed the fabric across her belly, as if he could show them all the tiny bean inside her, though she was not showing yet. The five women each made a noise: Hope a gasp, the two women tandem ‘oh’s, Amaranth an embarrassed laugh, and the old woman a pop as her tongue slid out with the ring on it, wreathed in spittle. He dried the ring on his trousers and slid it back onto Amaranth’s finger, still slightly damp.

  He took her up the stairs and along a landing to a back bedroom, sloping under the house’s pointed roof. The gray mountain hung in the small frame of the window. They sat, back-to-back, on opposite sides of a small double bed heaped with the quilts that spoke of hard winters and no heating.

  ‘Who are these women?’ she asked him.

  She heard the bed frame squeak as he bent to unlace his shoes. He slid them carefully beneath the bed. She kicked her own shoes off and slung them under the bed, knocking something hard. When she bent over, she found a porcelain chamber pot. She sat back up and tried to pull him around to her by his shoulder. ‘You told me you had no family. Who are they?’ Someone had put wildflowers in a jam jar by her bedside. Was it her bedside? Where did all the women sleep? ‘Did you lie to me?’

  He turned around to her. ‘What?’

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘I did not think I should take a wife,’ he said.

  Her eyes stung. ‘Fine,’ she tossed out. ‘Take me back.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You misunderstand. I thought it was selfish, to raise one woman above others. To raise you above all.’

  When she spoke, her voice was small. ‘Then why did you?’

  He came around the bed to kneel beside her. ‘I never thought to have a child.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have slept with me.’ She wanted to hurt him.

  ‘But I loved you and I wanted you. And I could see how lost you were.’

  She choked on a sob. She had nothing and no one and he had been her one last hope. He promised her a home and a new, clean life. If she left, she would be going back to nothing: no job, no car. She had sold all she had for money she had already spent on a dress and secret liquor. And then there was the pregnancy. ‘Who are those women?’ she asked him again.

  ‘Women who were lost like you,’ he told her. ‘Women I love, but not like you. I love you, Amy. I always will. My heart has set itself on you.’

  She thought of her mother, who married the moon. She thought of her grandmother, dying. ‘Not the moon,’ her grandmother said. ‘I never said moon. I said Moonies.’

  She looked down at him and made her choice. She knew that she could run away, as her parents had, and raise a child alone in an absence of family, of love, or she could stay. She could just stay, to see where his love would lead them.

  PART IV

  SEPTEMBER

  36

  Driving Back

  Mother drives, but there is no looking backward, no scanning behind to watch what they have left. She stares ahead, hunched and humming, and it is Amity who looks back now, turned around in the front seat of the burned truck to watch the gas station and the road recede.

  Mother jostles a tire in a pothole. ‘Okay?’ she asks.

  Amity nods and faces forward. Her hands are bound and outstretched before her as if she is holding an invisible tea tray. ‘Oven gloves,’ the old man called her. Whenever the road is rough and her hands hit the dashboard, Mother cries out, but Amity says nothing. She cannot feel it. Her hands are two boiled hams on the hocks of her wrists.

  Four days they will drive, to get where they’re going. Home.

  There are no signs to look for now. The end has come.

  37

  Ash

  Amaranth slows to watch for their turnoff, the thin path between the pines that is so easy to miss. Deliberately, intentionally so. The red firs stand, heavy with cones, and the tamarack turns golden, ready to throw down its needles for fall. She brakes and puts her arm across Amity, to hold her back as the truck swings off the road and into the dip that leads to their land. Headlights sweep the bark. Gears grind. She thinks of Bradley.

  ‘I could come if you wanted,’ he said as she was leaving, standing over her, head resting atop her own. ‘But who’d mind Pa? Who’d put rape in for winter? Take twice as long, with Dust gone.’ He turned his head to kiss the parting between her twists of braids and then her forehead. ‘You’ll come back, if you’ve a mind to.’

  She nodded. She wanted him to tell her to stay. She wanted him to promise her that it didn’t matter, all this damage they had done to his food stores, his land, his crops. She wanted him to tell her it didn’t matter how crazy her daughter was. ‘I’ll have your truck. I’ll have to come back.’

  He turned away when she started the truck and belted in Amity. Only when she pulled away from the gas station could she see him looking after her, then waving behind her, waving as the red dirt road stretched between them, taking long, loping steps to walk behind them to wave some more. She wanted to slam on the brakes, fly out of the car, and run back down the road to him, to ask him if he would be there if she came back – when she came back. Because she was certain that as soon as she was gone, he would pick his house up, tuck the fields into his pockets, and vanish. She would follow the red dirt road back to find a red dirt hole.

  It had been a hard, hot summer, undoing the work of Sorrow. Bradley harvested the shepherd’s-crook stalks of the sunflower seed heads and turned over the remnants of the sorghum, unharvested and ruined. He worked in silence and alone while she emptied the rest of his food bins, rubbed menthol into his father’s chest, and salved Amity’s burns. In the kitchen garden, flowers bloomed and no one saw them.

  Now, headlights urge them through the dark and the lodgepole pines. She can smell them, hear them scrape the truck’s sides. Goats bleat, far across black fields. Up the path, high beams catch what is left of the temple, surrounded by a fluttering of faded yellow caution tape, marking it out as a crime scene. Her daughter stirs and she drives past it, so she will not see.

  The front of the farmhouse is black with smoke. Beds that once stood filled with beanpoles and edible greens s
prout dried weeds. A lacy curtain waves through a broken window like a white flag.

  She unbuckles Amity and takes the flashlight, lighting their faces like moons in the cab. She cuts the truck’s engine and all the world about them is dark.

  ‘She will be here,’ Amity says. ‘Won’t she?’

  Amaranth reaches across her to open her door, and Amity slides down off the seat to land.

  The front door of the house stands open.

  ‘Hello?’ she calls into it. She shines the flashlight on the entryway, across the blackened walls and the sodden quilts and tapestries that hang there. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sorrow?’ Amity calls behind her. ‘Dust?’

  Amaranth moves into the house, one arm reaching back for Amity. She shines the light into the parlor, its scorched walls and moldy needlepoint furnishings, the split cushions, the velveteen sofa erupting with springs. She moves around the newel post of the stairway and down the hallway. Glass crunches under their clogs.

  In the kitchen, the floor has been flooded. The icebox door is open, dripping, reeking of milk gone off. Each cupboard door stands open and emptied. The walls are smeared with dark shapes, blood or feces, molasses. She steps on a china saucer and sees that the floor is covered with bits of china, gold-rimmed with tiny pink flowers, from the old, old woman’s trousseau, as if there has been a one-room earthquake, as if every cupboard has vomited.

  She opens a drawer for storm candles and safety matches and lights them, setting them into broken cups. She makes a ring of light for Amity. ‘You stay here,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ Amity whimpers.

  ‘I just want to look upstairs.’

  ‘Please.’

  Amaranth looks at her daughter, her pale face, her outstretched bandages, the dark rings below her eyes. Her daughter is half a head taller since they left this house; how has she not noticed her growing, how her wrists jut from her sleeves? But her face is as taut and frightened as when she was made to run from all she had known. ‘We can look in the daylight,’ she tells her. ‘I’m not leaving you. Okay?’ She gathers up a few of the candles and places the flashlight, gently, between Amity’s two bound hands. ‘It will all seem fine, come morning. You’ll see.’ She leads her child back through the house, their shadows rippling across the walls.

  She settles Amity back into the truck. The interior dome lamp is burned out, but she turns the ignition key half on to switch the headlights to full bright, telling herself it is for Amity. She is not afraid of the dark or the things flapping and flitting in it, catching the corner of her eye. It is only a bit of plastic bag blowing or a Styrofoam cup, caught by the wind.

  Amity stares out into the light. Her hands reach like a zombie’s. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘The fire? You remember.’

  ‘No. Before. What made us all like this?’

  Amaranth turns to her. ‘It started with love. It started with your father and his wanting to help people, to make a family for them – and with them.’

  Amity’s head whips to the side, distracted. ‘Look!’

  A flash of white runs across the headlight beams.

  Amity’s hands flap uselessly at the door handle, to get out.

  ‘We mustn’t scare her,’ Amaranth says.

  ‘Sorrow,’ Amity whispers.

  They peer through the window, but they see nothing more.

  When Amaranth wakes, Amity is stretched across her, sprawled across her lap.

  In the dawn’s light, it all looks much worse. The raised beds before the house have been trod in and flattened. The goats have been in them, she figures, eating the spring buds and summer weeds, once there were no humans to bang buckets filled with peelings to feed them.

  She turns the ignition key off with a groan. She tries to start the car and finds it won’t. The headlights she left on have drained the battery. She’ll have to check the barns for jumper cables. She’ll have to find another car with power.

  The house in the daylight is worse, too, and Amity stays in the car, as if she doesn’t want to see the damage. Walls are polka-dotted with black mold. Amaranth mounts the stairs to search the rooms above and her foot goes through a stair tread, as if the house itself will pull her down into it. She clings to the handrail and hauls herself up to the landing.

  Each bedroom door stands open. There are small things dropped and scattered along the floor. A sodden ribbon, an ashen strap. The plump, headless body of a rag doll bears the tread of a boot print. Inside bedrooms, dresser drawers are open, their contents spilling. She finds blond baby curls and bobby pins, a damp brown envelope filled with translucent milk teeth, and her heart aches for the children who lost them, the mothers who nursed them, the blur and chaos of the family she loved and left.

  And then she tells herself no. The love she longs for is a lie. She must remember.

  In her own room at the back, her drawers and cupboards have been opened and searched. She reaches between the mattress and the springs to find what she has hidden, the proof of her life that she left behind: the black-and-white photograph of her mother, her marriage certificate, and the brittle paper of Eve’s death certificate, a reminder that this was never Eden. She takes a last look at the ransacked room and jams them all into her apron pocket. This is all she has to show for her life here.

  The hatch to the attic is open, but the ladder has been pulled up. She stands beneath it, calling up into the hole. ‘Sorrow?’

  Back outside, she finds that Amity is not in the car. Heart pounding, Amaranth rushes to find her beside the temple steps, kneeling before a huddled pile of trash, a soiled altar of stuffed teddy bears, a Virgin Mary votive candle, a single faded American flag.

  The temple looks as if it has only just been abandoned. But when she looks more closely, through its shattered windows, she can see that the floor has blackened and buckled from the heat. It is studded with debris from the fire. Her husband’s temple, stilled from the spinning of women, silent from the gunshots and the shouting and Sorrow’s rasping tongue, burned now and ruined.

  She thinks of the food in the room below and how hungry Amity must be, how hungry she is. She looks at the thin ribbon of caution tape and wonders what the police found before they unspooled it. She wonders what they took away.

  Amity looks at her. ‘It doesn’t look safe,’ she says.

  It isn’t safe, Amaranth thinks. And it never was.

  38

  Goodwill Industries

  Mother walks her away from the house and the gardens, over their land to count and inventory the cars and campers parked beneath trees. She names the wife who drove each one. She opens trunks and glove compartments, looking for paperwork, looking for supplies and jumper cables. She inserts keys into ignitions, all jangling from the one big key ring Father kept, while Amity follows tire tracks on grass and gravel, looking for the single track that will tell her where Dust’s motorcycle was, bringing Sorrow.

  Amity hears her mother scream and she rushes back to find her inside a car, her head down on a steering wheel. The ring of keys has been flung onto the dirt. ‘It’s dead,’ she says. ‘They’re all dead.’

  ‘Who’s dead?’

  Mother lifts her head. ‘No, Amity, the cars. No one’s dead.’

  ‘How do you know? Where are all the mothers? Where is everybody?’

  Mother leans over to pick the keys up. ‘This is the seventh wife’s car. She drove it across the country to get here. I need the car of a later wife, a newer wife …’

  Mother wanders toward the fields of alfalfa, heavy with purple blooms, no longer forbidden. Amity follows. They hear the drone of bees. Mother claps her hands for the goats, to see if they will come and be milked by her, but they are used to their freedom now. They stare back with their slit-iris devil eyes. Beyond, the barns are fallen, collapsed under their metal roofs. Amity remembers when she saw them on fire, but Mother only gives them a quick search and says there is nothing for them inside.

  Mother finally
gets Wife Forty-Eight’s car to start, though the tires are flat on their rims. She tells Amity they’ll drive into town to buy some cables.

  ‘Will there be food?’ Amity asks her.

  Mother steers them toward the temple. ‘I thought there would be food left here.’ She idles a moment beside the sag of the caution tape. Then she moves them down the dirt trail, driving them to a gas station and to town.

  Mother unwraps her bandages at the pharmacy counter. Amity looks at the spinner racks of glass jars, balms, and unguents. She looks anywhere but down at her hands, being slowly revealed. The pharmacist in his white coat takes a quick look at them and then he runs away from them, into a small glass room, where he speaks to another man and points at Amity, and she turns away from them to stare into a corner filled with wooden legs. And then there are two men, staring into her palms. They ask her to wiggle her fingers.

  ‘What are you putting on these hands?’ the man asks.

  ‘Comfrey and honey. Ash from the fire,’ Mother says. ‘I mash a poultice. I hope—’

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ the pharmacist says, taking in her dress and Amity’s. ‘Under the circumstances. You’ve no eschars. You’ll keep these scars, of course, but they’ll fade over time.’ He flexes Amity’s fingers back from her palms and she can feel the skin stretching. She fears it will rip. ‘Keep these wrappings off now. The skin needs to breathe.’

  ‘We do a burn balm,’ the other man says. ‘Better than honey. I’ll get you a tube.’

  ‘But is she all right?’ Mother asks. ‘Will she be all right?’

  The pharmacist smiles at Amity. ‘You might have considered skin grafts, but this is how she is now. And such a pretty little girl.’

  Amity pulls her hands from his. Liar.