Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

  ‘I knew you’d come.’

  ‘Not for you.’

  ‘Help me up,’ he says. His voice comes clear and strong. She can afford him no pity.

  She steps back into the square of light from above, making it harder to see him or find him in the room below. She hears him moving, following her into it. ‘I’d have bolted the hatch if I knew you were down here.’

  ‘To bury me?’ He gives a laugh that becomes a long, wet cough. She can hear the fluid in his lungs, from the damp and chill of the room below, even in summer. The cough doubles him over, the slim shape in the darkness that moves closer, comes toward her.

  From above her, she hears footsteps, the sound of wooden clogs turning on boards. ‘Daughter?’ she calls. She looks up.

  ‘Daughter,’ he says, and then his hands are on her and he is pulling her to him, away from the light, and all she wants is to get out, grab her daughters, and go. The slim bones of his fingers shackle her wrist, reach for her face, her mouth and nose, to silence her once and for all, and she shoves him away. He catches her arm and pulls her into a filthy embrace, and then she must scream.

  The footsteps stop above her. ‘Daughter!’ she shouts.

  From above, from the light, a face pokes in. Amity’s face, her dark braids dropping down. Then Sorrow’s face beside her, pale and frowning, beautiful.

  ‘Sorrow!’ she cries.

  ‘Sorrow,’ he echoes, and she turns to him, there in the light. His tunic is stained and greasy, dark stripes marking sweat and waste. His hair hangs in rats.

  ‘Don’t you say her name—’ she shouts.

  ‘I only wanted—’ he falters.

  ‘I know what you wanted.’

  ‘I never wanted – Sorrow—’

  ‘You shut up.’ She pulls away from him, flying backward, toppling back, stumbling over the blankets and the sheet, where arms reach down from the light for her. Two sets of arms. She reaches up to let hands grip her forearms and elbows hook her to lift her, even as he comes for her. She feels her two daughters draw her up, save her, pull her from the room below, even as his hands are in her skirt, around her ankles. She gives one good kick with her wooden sole and feels it connect with bone with a crunch.

  And then she is in the light of the temple and her two girls are there and it is all she wants in the world, her two girls safe, and she is sorry to have wanted more. She thinks of Bradley for a moment, an ache and a loss, then she holds Amity to her, fiercely, breathing her in. She holds an arm out for Sorrow, her own Sorrow, but she does not come. ‘Daughter, you’re safe now,’ she says.

  ‘Am I?’ Sorrow turns to the hole in the floor and bends down toward it, as she did when the fire started, and Amaranth is afraid of what she will do and what she has done. She is afraid of what Sorrow wants.

  ‘Come away from there, Sorrow.’ She follows to draw her up by her shoulders, away from the hole and the room below. ‘We’ve come back for you.’

  ‘Go away!’ Sorrow snarls. Amaranth puts her hands on Sorrow’s shoulders and Sorrow squirms away from her. ‘You threw it away. It’s mine now!’

  The skeletal bones of her husband’s hands reach up from below, for Sorrow to take. The nails are dark and split. Sorrow only smiles at them.

  Amaranth bends before her daughter. ‘This is wrong, Sorrow, what you want. Can’t you see it?’

  ‘You don’t know,’ Sorrow says. She takes hold of her father’s hands and Amaranth pulls at her, to pull her back from him. Sorrow shouts, ‘Let me go – you don’t want him!’

  ‘I want you, Sorrow,’ she says.

  ‘You never wanted me,’ Sorrow snaps back.

  ‘Oh, daughter. That’s not true.’ Amaranth can remember how that felt, not being wanted, left behind and abandoned. She remembers how desperate she was for someone to want her, anyone. Wasn’t that how she came to be here? She holds a hand out to Sorrow and Sorrow looks at it with disdain, like the pathetic thing that it is, offered too late with too little.

  Sorrow reaches down for her father’s hand. ‘Behold, the Lamb,’ she says.

  Bradley’s truck and the car of Wife Forty-Eight sit, bumper to bumper, clipped together with cables. Amaranth turns the key of the car and watches the temple. ‘It’ll take a few minutes to charge,’ she says. ‘Goddamn it.’

  ‘We can’t leave without Sorrow,’ Amity cries through the truck window, straining against her seat belt.

  ‘No one can leave if I can’t start the truck.’

  ‘But we will take her? We won’t leave her here?’ Amity’s voice breaks with a sob.

  Amaranth thinks of the bodies in the temple, the bodies in the room below. She thinks of her husband and of Sorrow, their bodies entwined in the room below, and how she did not want to see it. If the temple were on fire again, right now, she would let it burn to the ground and make it disappear.

  Sorrow and her husband step from the temple. He is bent and scrawny. His face is a skull, dark sockets for eyes, but Sorrow is strong beside him. She looks strong enough to carry them both.

  Amaranth jumps from the truck to them. ‘Ask him what he is hiding from, Sorrow. Ask him why he hides from what he did.’

  ‘Wife,’ Zachariah murmurs. ‘I didn’t – I never meant—’

  Sorrow holds a hand up to him and he cowers from it, as if he is afraid of Sorrow now.

  Yes, Amaranth thinks. It is Sorrow who should mete out his justice, for all that he took from her. But instead, she sets her hand upon his filthy head. She raises the other in benediction, in forgiveness. ‘Give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come.’

  He covers his eyes and turns his head away from the two of them.

  ‘Come away from him, Sorrow.’ Amaranth stalks back to the cars.

  Sorrow smiles. ‘Behold his bride, the New Jerusalem.’

  ‘My God. Forgive me.’ Zachariah crouches into a kneeling prayer.

  Amaranth throws off the jumper cables and slams both hoods. She sees Amity trying to open the passenger door, and she gets in the truck and starts the engine. Amity tries to push past her, to scramble out for Sorrow, but she shoves her daughter back and jams the truck into gear, grinding, and drives them toward the temple. She idles to hold a hand out for Sorrow, one last, desperate hand, but her daughter and husband only take hold of one another. She sees them flame to life in one another’s eyes. She can see there is an invisible strap between them, tying them together, stretching across the whole of the country. There is nothing she can do to pull them apart, no matter how he protests now or how her daughter smiles.

  She slams the truck into drive and hauls toward the path, tires spitting gravel. In the rearview mirror she watches, to see if he will move to the other car, try to follow after, to explain and protest his innocence. But if he has the thought, he doesn’t act on it. Sorrow holds him still and fast, beneath the flat of her hand.

  Amity cries out, ‘Mother – we can’t just leave her here!’

  But Amaranth does. She steers between the thin white pines to drive them from Sorrow’s New Jerusalem, the smoldering, moldering ash of her heaven and desire. And Amity can only scream for Sorrow, soundless in the glass of the cab, until the house and the temple and their family are gone again.

  42

  Home

  Amaranth parks outside the police station, finding a dark spot away from the streetlamps. She grips the steering wheel with shaking hands.

  ‘But we don’t talk to police,’ Amity whines. ‘We can’t tell them anything.’

  ‘That was your father’s fear. Everything is changed now.’

  ‘I don’t want everything changed. I want everything to go back!’

  Amaranth pulls the key from the ignition. The sooner she gets Amity back to Oklahoma, the better. ‘He has broken laws, Amity. Think how he hurt Sorrow. Think of the room below—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, you don’t know. You don’t know everything. You think you do.’

  ‘I do know. I saw him. I saw Sorrow. I
know what fathers do.’

  ‘No, Amity.’ She shakes her head.

  ‘You think he killed everyone, but he didn’t.’

  Amaranth grabs her daughter, a hand on either shoulder. ‘What did you see?’

  Amity turns her head away, toward the police station. ‘He didn’t start the fire and you can’t tell them he did. I saw her, at the hole with Father shouting. I saw her, when he said he wouldn’t let the police split us up and how we should hide. I saw Sorrow start the fire.’

  ‘No.’ She gives Amity a shake. She tries to picture Sorrow, bending mid-prayer in the frenzy at the hatch, while Amaranth pulled at her, trying to make her run. ‘It was him – he wanted to kill us all. That’s why he brought us all into the temple.’

  ‘It was Sorrow,’ Amity insists, turning back to her mother. ‘So that hers would be the only holy child left of his.’

  Amaranth swallows bile down.

  ‘But family is eternal,’ Amity carries on. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re dead or not, it doesn’t matter if you leave them or you go. Even Sorrow’s baby – it’s still with her, even though I killed it. She’s forgiven me, Mother. She spun me. I’ve been spun!’

  Amaranth pulls Amity in to her. She holds her and rocks her, grieving for the two of them. Grieving for the hope that was born and lost, grieving for the faith that turned to poison. She grieves for her husband and her daughter, lost, for the living and all of the dead below. She grieves for every name on the sheet and she grieves for Amity; she grieves for herself, until Amity wriggles free from her.

  She drives them away and through the night until she can stop at a bank of pay phones and drop two quarters into the slot. She asks for the Do Drop Inn in Oklahoma and she dials the number, watching her daughter in the truck’s front seat moving her scarred fingers against the glass. The woman who answers tells her in a bored voice that she does know Bradley and yes, she’ll take a message. What does she want to say?

  ‘Tell him we’re coming home,’ she says.

  When she gets back to the car her daughter asks her, ‘Can we go and get our old clothes back?’

  Driving south, she phones the bar every time she stops them for gas or the ladies’ room, every time they stop to eat handfuls of bread and cheese or sleep, hunched together, in a dark corner of a grocery store parking lot. The sun swings over them. Amity asks when they can stop to spin and pray.

  At the border, she rings the bar again.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the lady. ‘He’s here. Sittin’ up like some kinda dog.’

  ‘Hello,’ Amaranth breathes, the receiver hard against her ear.

  ‘Bought a cell phone so you could reach me,’ Bradley tells her. ‘Forgot you wouldn’t have the number so you could.’

  She laughs and he laughs. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Much the same,’ he says. ‘You?’

  ‘Tell me how you’re the same,’ she says. In the car, her daughter flies her hands through the air, swims them like Sorrow did. She turns away.

  ‘Sorghum’s coloring, what was left. Got the wheat in, so I’ll have somethin’ to grow for next year. Pa’s taken to his bed. His cough’s bad now. Says his lungs need Amity, whatever that means. Prob’ly just means he’s lost what’s left of his mind.’

  Her throat catches and she pulls the mouthpiece away, lest she make a sound.

  ‘You find Sorrow?’ he asks her.

  ‘Yes.’ She cannot bear to tell him all of it. Perhaps she never will. ‘No Dust.’

  ‘No, I picked him up over in Oklahoma City. He hitched that far when his bike gave out, tryin’ to get back. I could skin him for taking your girl back home and skin him again for leavin’ me all that rape to drill on my own.’

  She laughs and finds she is crying. She can see him and Dust together, watching the land, side by side, and she wants only to stand between them, watch the land grow beside them.

  ‘Spent the last of the money on seeds,’ he says. ‘Amaranth.’

  ‘Yes?’ Her heart pounds. There is something he needs to tell her – he has found someone new, or his wife has returned. He has learned the truth about her at last, all the darkness within her, all she has done, and he does not want her to come back. She will have to leave the truck somewhere for him, make some new plan for what to do next, she and Amity. Find somewhere safe to go.

  ‘Amaranth,’ he says.

  ‘Tell me.’ She steels herself for his bad news.

  ‘It’s amaranth. The seeds. What I’m fixin’ to plant. Amaranth.’

  She breathes all her fear out. ‘Is it a good crop?’

  ‘It’s a new crop to me. Still tryin’ to figure it out.’ She hears him breathe in a lungful of smoke. ‘You gotta set the share pretty high so you don’t kill what’s growin’. You think it won’t come to much, but it’s all there, workin’ beneath the surface, settin’ down its roots. And when it comes time to bloom you see it’s bloodred, like blood in the fields.’

  She looks across at the truck and her daughter, waiting.

  ‘That okay with you?’ he says. ‘You still there?’

  ‘I’m here.’ She understands her name then, feels its claim on her. She can grow on his land and be planted. She can learn to root herself and hope to flower. She can plant what was sacred and see what would grow. She knows his planting is his asking her to stay. ‘That’s okay with me,’ she says, and her heart bursts wide, past her daughter, past the weight of what was.

  Even he, down in Oklahoma, must hear it.

  Mother fills the tank and says they will be home soon.

  Their lives are waiting to be picked up, like stitches, but Mother has forgotten where home is. Home isn’t made or chosen, like she says it is. Family isn’t handmade or reworked like cloth. Family is the family that God gives you, the family He wants you to have, even if it hurts you. The hurting is what He is teaching you. That hurting is your family.

  All the world is shouting this truth, but Mother cannot hear it. She hasn’t seen what people do on TV. She doesn’t know how lonely an empty bed is or how bare an unstrapped wrist can feel, no sister to bind you to anything.

  ‘Not long now,’ Mother says every few miles. ‘Look, there’s a sign.’

  The writing at the border says OKLAHOMA. ‘I know. I can read it,’ she says, and Mother looks at her, all surprised.

  Amity thinks of Dust and she thinks of the land. She thinks of the fields and what she could do in them, and then she knows that she is the strap, stretching between what Sorrow is and what her mother wants, and between them is Amity, looking forward, looking backward, head covered, but wearing jeans.

  She looks into her hands and wonders what they will do next.

  See how they twitch and they want.

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