Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  ‘Try to use your hands, child,’ he says. ‘They’ll forget what they’re made for.’

  At this, she looks up at him. She is forgetting what her hands can do, too.

  People stare in towns here, same as Oklahoma. They walk and laugh and buy too much, just like there. She can see the signs of the shops up and down the street, now that she isn’t being told to hide or stay down, and the windows piled high with baked goods and ice creams, women swinging shopping bags in wide, proud arcs. There seems to be so much that people want in the world.

  Seeing a sign, she spells out the letters in GOODWILL INDUSTRIES and she thinks that’s what they all need, some goodwill. She looks inside at the clothing, hanging and stacked, and thinks of the day when Sorrow ran and Mother sent her to buy something that she could make into a wrist strap. How surprised she was to see all the manner of ways that a woman could dress back then, when she exchanged a coin for a white belt that had lost its dress.

  ‘We don’t need anything,’ Mother says.

  Two girls walk past then, seeing Amity’s dress and pinafore, her mother’s dress and apron, the raw skin of her outstretched hands. They bend their heads together and, once past, they let out loud guffaws, exaggerated and oversize laughs, butts swinging. Amity curls herself over her hands. She wishes Sorrow were there. She misses her wrist strap.

  Mother shifts the brown bag on her hip, the apples and cheese, the squishy loaf of bread. ‘Perhaps we could afford something.’

  The thrift store is filled with garments and housewares, racks of clothes and stacks of furniture, tables on sofas, chairs upside down. There are shelves of old books and crockery, china, and crooked-heeled, foot-worn shoes. Amity brushes by a rack of blue jeans, faded and ragged-hemmed, as Dust’s were, while Mother flicks dresses across a metal rod: flowers, polka dots, stripes. She rubs fabric between careful fingers and reads labels. ‘These are man-made. Cotton and wool is what you want. Nothing that says “Keep Away from Fire.”’

  Amity stares at a rack filled with slippery fabric and elastic straps, breast-shaped and crotch-shaped. In a fire, they’d be the first to go and quite rightly, too.

  Mother takes her into a curtained cubicle to stand with her arms out, so that Mother can untie and unwrap her, pull dress after dress over her head. The full-length mirror shows her, shows all of her. She has never seen all of herself, all at once, and she steps close to it, closer, until she hits her nose on it. The mirror shows a dress, short, exposing her knees, a pleated riot of burgundy roses in blowsy bloom. Mother cinches a satin bow, pink and shiny as her unwrapped hands, about her waist. ‘Lovely,’ she says.

  ‘Will this stop people from staring?’ Amity asks.

  Mother looks in the mirror and at herself in her own long skirt and braided hair. Her eyes tell Amity that people will always stare at them, no matter where they go. She pulls Amity’s sash open and unzips her.

  Amity whispers, ‘I just don’t want people to look at me.’

  ‘I know,’ Mother says. ‘Me, neither. You go and choose something.’

  She follows Amity over to the denim and her hands stroke the jeans and tops, uncertainly, fingering labels as if she suspects more fires are coming.

  Once Amity is dressed, Mother counts the modest fold of bills in her apron pocket and pays for Amity’s clothing. She folds Amity’s old dress and pinafore and slides them toward the young girl behind the counter. ‘Perhaps someone can use these,’ she says.

  Amity rubs her legs together, each clad in its own denim tube. She bounces on the rubber soles of her new secondhand sneakers and looks down at her T-shirt-covered front, where cartoon fruit sits. Her hair is in two looped braids beneath Dust’s kerchief. She wishes he could see her now.

  The girl leans on her elbows and snaps her gum. ‘You all from that cult that caught fire?’

  Mother frowns at her and snatches a long dress from a rack, dark and plain. She says nothing as she hurries into the cubicle with it, stopping only to snatch a handful of those slippery, flammable undergarments.

  Back home, Mother makes them a picnic, slicing apples, cheese, and bread to eat on a patch of weeds in the afternoon sun, where goats watch, from a distance. There is nowhere to sit inside that isn’t damp or smelly. Mother doesn’t eat. She pushes her food about and stares at the house. She pats the coil of jumper cables and tells Amity that when she gets the truck going they might as well go, and Amity can only stare at her then. How could they go without Sorrow? Why wouldn’t she come out?

  Amity thinks of all the things that Sorrow loves and how she has none of them here now. No bowl, no Bible, no Father, no hellfire on TV. No one to watch her spin or pray. Of all the things Amity has to offer, she decides the best thing is herself – and sandwiches. She folds bread over cheese into awkward, spongy half-moons. She forces her hands around an apple.

  When Mother bends over an engine, Amity creeps into the house. She trembles in the entryway, in the cool and the damp. ‘I know you’re here,’ she whispers. ‘I just want to see you.’ She thought Sorrow would be waiting for them, arms crossed to scold them from the front door. She thought Dust would be there, waiting for a lift back to Oklahoma. ‘What took you so long?’ he’d ask and hop in the back of the truck. ‘Get me out of here,’ he’d say.

  But he is not here, not waiting for her. His note said he was taking Sorrow. She could read those letters, the ones spelling Sorrow and home. But when she looked at it, checking every letter, she knew she wasn’t in it. She couldn’t find the letters of her own name. He hadn’t written her good-bye.

  Still, it wasn’t Sorrow’s fault. Everyone moved heaven and earth for Sorrow. Why shouldn’t Dust? Her hands drop the apple. She sits on the bottom stair and sets the fold of bread down, which springs open to display its cheese. Either she or the sandwich will lure out Sorrow.

  39

  The Temple

  When Amaranth looks up from the car’s engine for her daughter, she is not there. Amity is gone again. ‘Amity?’ she calls toward the house and the gardens. She calls to the fields and the goats.

  At the temple, she sees someone has broken the caution tape to enter it. The ends wave like arms. She looks up the concrete steps and into the temple, but the room is empty. Undisturbed, but filthy. Sodden lumps dot the wooden floor.

  ‘Amity?’ she calls. She stretches a clog to nudge one. Almost uniform, the debris is, spread across the floor like low hummocks on a lunar landscape. She taps the lump with her toe to find it is fabric, heavy cloth, stuck hard to the floor, the rucked boards that were once planed and smoothed by the turning of a hundred wooden shoes. Amaranth bends down to find it has a waistband and gathers. The piles are skirts, dropped where each wife stood, spinning, and she thinks, my God. Rapture. Her husband was right.

  Wives had been taken, pulled to heaven from their skirts. And she ran away from it, ran her own children from Rapture. Her final test of faith and she has failed it. She lost faith in her husband and his vision, and now she has damned them all to a hell on earth. No God could ever forgive her for it. There can never be repenting enough.

  She lifts the skirt, as if it could reveal the wife who wore it, so that she might be mourned. But she sees no clogs beneath it. No stockings, blouses, or undergarments. And then she knows that the skirts were not shed in Rapture. They were dropped, on fire.

  God did not take them, none of them. They ran away, as she did. They all ran away and she is no worse than any other wife, running to save her skin and her children’s. She chides herself: how quick she is to believe and to judge. They are only skirts in tidy piles, like Lot’s wives burned for turning, all turned to ash instead of salt.

  Across the temple floor she sees the altar table, carbonized, lying on its side. It is clear of the hatch, which stands open. She can almost hear the shouting, hear the hatch being closed. She can hear her husband screaming, ‘I will open the seals!’

  ‘Amity?’ she calls. ‘Are you down there?’ Would she go down there? ‘Amity?’ S
he looks back at the house and the land around the cars for her daughter. Where is she? And then she is afraid. Has Sorrow found her?

  She kneels at the burned mouth of the room below. It is dark below, down where the temple foundations are. There are no windows or doors and only the shaft of light through the hatch hole. ‘Daughter?’ she calls down. ‘Daughters?’ She hears something. A scratch and a moan. And then she fears that Amity has fallen in – or been pushed. She swings her legs into the hole. She kicks at the air like a child on a swing, thinking of the flashlight, there in the truck, but she reminds herself that she is not afraid of the dark, not afraid of the room below, or of ghosts.

  She drops down into it, feels herself falling to the floor of it, lumpy, soggy. Blankets are there, warmth for the end of the world, damp now from whoever had tried to put their fire out. Her clogs trip over the bedding. Knees bent, her arms swinging before her, she gropes her way forward, out of the hatch’s light, to feel for the wall. It reeks of rot, of decay and waste, worse than the inside of the ruined house. ‘Amity?’

  A scratching comes and she thinks of the metal shelves with their foodstuffs, the sacks of grains and rice. Rats, she thinks, and shudders. Only rats.

  She kicks something hard on the floor and she crouches, thinking shelves will have fallen or been pulled down. She might be walking on all of their food. She freezes, so as not to destroy any more of it, whatever the rats have left her. Her fingers feel through cloth and find stitches, the spidery stitches made by wives of many generations. Stitches made by her.

  Something is breathing. She holds her own breath and decides in the silence that it must be her. Her daughter is not in the room below. She is weak with relief, but still she can feel her heart slapping her chest from within.

  She creeps forward, slowly, clog step by clog step, until her hands find glass jars, stacked and whole. Safe. Her hands find bags of grain that are soaked, no doubt sprouting, and sacks of apples rotting, fermenting. She finds the carboys of water they took turns to fill and haul down.

  The room is Rapture-ready, but Rapture never came. Still, God hates waste. In the dark she fills her arms with Mason jars, beets in vinegar, tomatoes in molasses, whatever her hands can find. She waddles them over the lumps of the floor to pass them up through the hatch hole, to shove them across the temple floor, where they topple and roll above her. Then she creeps back, to gather more.

  She hears the scratching again – a twitching. Something heavy, moving against the metal shelves. ‘Amity? Is it you?’ She hears a low, ghostly moan and she thinks of the old, old woman, buried beneath the temple, inside its very foundations. She wishes for the flashlight.

  And then her feet are caught. Her heart pounds and she bends to the stitching. She feels the shapes beneath it then, and she cannot place them or imagine what they are, and she can only remember how wives dropped their children, down through the hatch, and how she pulled her own children free, running them away, while the children of forty-nine wives were shut in for safekeeping and the altar table slid across to hide them. So that they could not be taken. She remembers how the flames took hold as she ran.

  Had wives run without children? Had the children not been taken at all, but left down here?

  Her hands leave the sheet. She cannot bear to lift it. She clutches at her skirt.

  She has to get out of here. She no longer cares about the food they stored or the sheet that might prove to the outside world that they had lived and loved there, one family all. Everything is tainted now, by all that has been done. She reaches up for the hatch, to pull herself up, and then she hears it.

  The voice that stops her. The voice that haunts her.

  ‘Wife,’ she hears. ‘Amy.’

  40

  Spinning

  Amity plays hide-and-seek with Sorrow. Sorrow wants Amity to find her. Amity knows it by the apple core, lying brown and dainty on its side. She knows by the cheese crumbs, leading her up the stairs.

  She looks and listens for Sorrow. She hears doors slam and follows the sound to the top of the landing, where she is struck by the emptiness, by the absence of family. The house is too big without them, spilling out of bedrooms, bustling by with hands full of linens and babies. The house is too quiet now.

  She sniffs the air for Sorrow. She thought she would only have to follow the smell of her fire, but all the house smells of Sorrow. She peers into bedrooms, sees their empty, unmade beds. She calls down the corridor. And then she watches as the long legs of the wooden ladder are slowly lowered from the attic, inviting her up.

  She looks up the length of them, up into the eaves of the house, expecting Sorrow’s grin or grimace. ‘Sorrow?’ she calls up to the roof and the silence.

  She hooks her elbows around the rails and climbs up, her clawed hands unable to catch hold of the rungs. She moves, one sneaker at a time, up into the smoked A-frame of the roof. Her head pokes up through the attic floor and she can see their giant bed, made for all the children, the floor covered with air mattresses, cushions, and blankets where they all slept together in a tangle of limbs.

  ‘Sorrow, I’m here.’ Amity shuts her eyes.

  Across the room she hears clogs shuffle over floorboards. She smells Sorrow’s acrid smoke. ‘We just want to see you.’

  ‘Don’t you look,’ she hears back, breathy.

  ‘We won’t hurt you.’

  ‘You couldn’t hurt a fly.’

  Amity nods, her eyes shut, and waits until she feels two bony hands cover her eyelids. She feels tears squeeze out from beneath them, as if they pour from Sorrow’s palms. ‘Are you okay?’ She knows better than to ask about Dust.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Sorrow tells her, and Amity nods.

  Like blindman’s bluff, Sorrow leads Amity through the house, eyes shut, her arms tugged and pulled as if by their missing strap. Amity winces, waiting to be smacked into a wall as her sister walks her. Sorrow pulls her down the stairs and at every step she expects to put a foot out and find the tread is gone beneath her, that Sorrow has walked her off the edge of the world.

  When the heat of the sun hits her face, she knows Sorrow has walked her out the front door. Her eyelids flicker open and she catches, for a moment, the sight of a shape in a dark skirt and dirty blouse, cap jammed tight as muslin on a jar. She looks like any wife or mother. She feels Sorrow’s hands slap back over her eyes.

  ‘I told you not to look,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Amity bites her lip, afraid of what Sorrow doesn’t want her to see.

  ‘You will be sorry. Come on.’

  Amity feels herself dragged over dirt and up cement steps to floorboards. Her sneaker slips over lumps and bumps and Sorrow’s hands dig into her face, but she trips. Her ankle twists and her useless hands fly out to break her fall. She sprawls across the temple boards, arms sliding over fabric. Dazed and flat, her eyes open. She looks up at the dark skirted shape of her sister, bending down to scoop her up. She sees Sorrow’s face.

  ‘Don’t!’ Sorrow shoves a hand out and turns away, shielding herself with her other hand, but Amity has seen her. She is beautiful, beautiful as she ever was. Amity has taken the fire from her and into her hands, just as she had hoped. She had healed Sorrow after all.

  ‘Sorrow,’ she says. ‘Look at me.’ She holds her boiled hands out. She waits for Sorrow to pinch them or kick her, to exert her revenge at last, but Sorrow only drops her own hands from her face. ‘The fire didn’t get you.’

  ‘No,’ Sorrow says, as if she is sad about it.

  Amity closes her eyes and she can see the fire rise up about them. She can hear how Sorrow shouted, from the field and from the altar. She can see all the fires she started. Then she feels Sorrow take hold of her wrists and pull her upward, walk her forward, and she is afraid.

  But Sorrow says, ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.’ The promise and threat of their prayer.

  ‘Through the cities of war, I will be with you,’ Amity finishes. She feel
s herself walked in a circle. Her heart leaps for Sorrow.

  ‘When you walk through fire you shall not be burned.’

  Amity finishes the prayer. ‘And the flame shall not consume you!’

  And then Sorrow spins her, faster and faster, at last. Her eyes shut, the room wheels in her head and all about her. She feels herself spinning with the stars and the sky. She feels herself in a circle of women, visible and invisible through all of time, family eternal. They are there in her body, there in her blood. She knows they are waiting for her, reaching down from cloudy heaven. And Rapture, when it comes, will come as a vortex, twisting the faithful up to God with the dead. That is what they are spinning for – they are spinning to feel how the world will end. When Sorrow releases her, Amity spins free in an orbit about the room as the wives did, flinging her body in a whirlwind as she has only witnessed, whipped like the spinning top of God. And she is embarrassed by her jeans and her sneakers then, rubbing and squeaking over the floor. She should be dressed for spinning, in a woman’s skirts and cap. She has forgotten who she is. She has been vain enough to think that people have been looking at her, when she should only be staring at God.

  And then it is all she wants – to be who she was.

  From below her, from beneath them both, she hears a voice. She hears a scream.

  Amity looks at her sister and she is only smiling.

  ‘Father,’ Sorrow says.

  41

  The Room Below

  ‘Wife,’ he calls her.

  Through the dark of the room below, she hears his voice with a jolt that shakes a scream from her, and she knows why he didn’t follow them, why the cars that pursued her were never his, why the police couldn’t find him or question him, why he hadn’t come for them after all. He was down below.

  He had been here all along. He was the one who stayed, finally, and waited for her return. And then she is sorry to have come back, Sorrow or no. Her eyes strain in the darkness, but she cannot see him. No husband, handsome, the white suit of his wedding days. No husband as she found him, lost and bewildered in his haze of drugs, nor the beauty of him, lost in prayer, beyond any of their reaching. He would be wasted away to nothing, she knew, living on the scraps of the room below, or scavenging the house as she thought Sorrow must have done. He might be only skin and bone, much as his second wife was now.