by Riley, Peggy
She studies the farmer’s house and the land around it. The house might have food inside, but it is forbidden to them. Land behind it, a rectangle gray from alkaline water, has been worked and turned, but it hasn’t been planted. Potato-sized dirt clods break apart in her hands. His fields show no corn or beans, no trailing vines of squash or peas. She knows he will be growing cash crops, same as they did, food they could not eat until they milled it and ground it, food that wouldn’t be ready for weeks or months. She prides herself on her self-sufficiency, but she knows in her bones that her best hope of help remains with the farmer, despite how he dislikes her.
She fills the tin bowl with water and walks to the edge of his fields. Bowl on her gathered hip, she walks beside the scrub hedge, where crickets click. But at the corner of the field she stops. She must. She thinks of their rules, left behind them now. She lifts a clog and sets it down into the field, water slopping and settling. She waits for the voice that will come to say Field. She steps into a furrow between green, hip-high stalks and walks toward the farmer, slowly, steadily. You will not go in the field! she hears.
Clog step, clog step, she moves toward him. Marching now.
The field, she thinks. I’m in the field.
He sees her running and runs toward her and then the voice booms in her head and she feels her ears roar and pop. The land swings up before her, to knock her back to the dirt, and the world goes dark.
And then it is cool. A wet hand on her forehead and her cheek. And then she feels a tugging at her cap and fingers at her collars. Her eyes fly open to him and she flings her hands up to ward him off.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?” And it is the farmer before her, not her husband, kneeling over her, blocking the sun.
She starts to her feet and the ground seesaws, left to right. He presses her back down and her hands hit the tin bowl, dropped. “Water,” she says. “Water.”
He reaches for the bowl and holds it below her chin. There are precious few inches she hasn’t managed to spill. He cups the back of her head to help her drink, she pulls away from him, fighting his hands, saying, “No, it’s for you. Water.” She scoots back over the dirt, away from him, farther than he can reach.
He looks at her and he looks at the bowl. Then he tosses his cap down and unbuttons his shirt, leaving it open over his shoulders, and she turns away as he cups the bit of water to splash on his face and his chest, the back of his neck, and beneath his arms, where the hair is dark and damp. When his shirt is on again, she swivels her head back and smiles.
“That what women do where you come from?” he asks her.
“What, faint?”
“No,” he says, and chuckles. “Bring out water to the fields.”
“Fields are forbidden,” she says.
“Are they?” He looks down at her, lying in a field. “You should stick to the shade, all that fabric you got on.” He picks up his cap and knocks the dirt from it against his leg. “I don’t know your name, do I?”
She thinks of her names, all the ones she has used and the ones she’s been given. She could tell him anything. But she finds herself wanting to tell him the truth. “Amaranth,” she says. “It’s a plant. A grain.”
“I know what it is.”
“I was always called Amy.”
“Fine name, Amy.”
“I don’t like it now.”
“Well, I’m called Bradley ’cause everyone here on this land is Bradley, like it or not. We’ve been Bradley here longer’n this has been a state.”
“That’s nice,” she says. “To have that history.” She doesn’t even know her own.
“Nice like a straitjacket. That what you come racin’ out here to tell me?”
“No, I—no.”
“Maybe you come out to tell me what you’re gonna do? What you gonna do, Amaranth?” He holds a hand out to her, but she doesn’t take it. “That what you come out to tell me?”
She stares at his hand, up his arm to the strong bones of his face. She wants his help up. She wants his help with everything, but she has forgotten how to trust. She has forgotten everything.
“Well,” he says, and walks away from her, smacking at the standing rows with his cap.
She watches him go, wondering if she should leave him or chase after him, come leaping out of crops later with her desperate pleas for help. She picks up the bowl and totters after him, calling, “It’s just, I don’t know what to do. We can’t stay—you don’t want us to stay. We don’t want to stay, but—how will we leave now? How can I get us somewhere safe with the money I have?”
He stops. “How much?”
“Twenty-three dollars.”
“Well, that won’t get you far. Not even a tank of gas. Bus tickets, maybe, over to Enid? I could drive you somewhere, Oklahoma City, more buses go on from there.”
“You couldn’t know where we’re going.”
“I wouldn’t follow you. Jesus, you’re one paranoid—”
“No,” she says. “He would find you, make you tell.”
“Your husband?” He puts a hand over his eyes to scan his fields, as if he’s searching for brake lights. “No wife’s worth it,” he says, but when she doesn’t laugh he tells her, “You really think that, you need a shelter. You need the police.”
“No police!” She clutches the bowl.
“They after you, too?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want you involved. I don’t want you to know. We won’t stay—we can’t stay—but I don’t know how to go.”
“You all need more money.”
“I have nothing to sell. I only have nothing.” Even the ring, if she could find it, would be worth one tank of gas, two. It would hardly get her through the next state, even if she could drive her car.
“And you don’t reckon you can just go home?”
“There is no home.” She looks up at him and the hot white sky behind. She sees a brown hawk stalking, wings wide, to hunt some creature that crouches in the fields. He sees her watching and follows it with his eyes. They are silent as they watch its flight, silent as its wings, holding their breaths together to watch the hawk circle and take aim. And then they hear the screech of it, watch it pull in its wings and plummet to the ground.
8
The Car
Sorrow pulls Amity hard by the strap. She even dares to whisper before the boy, “Don’t you leave me.” But Amity has to. As soon as Dust came to tell her men were coming for the car, she knew she would have to, for all that is still inside it. She pulls her arm from Sorrow’s. She can feel Sorrow’s eyes on her, burning her all the way down the red dirt road, after Dust. She hops and skips to keep up with him.
By their car she sees the farmer and two fat men, round-bellied and bearded, adjusting their trousers beside a giant tow truck. She watches them slap one another on the back and hoot about women drivers, until the farmer sees her and ducks his head. The men attach a metal hook to the car’s front axle, which is sticking up. When they start a motor, a giant spool tries to wind the car in to it, but the car hangs on to the tree with all its vehicular might. The farmer holds his hand out to keep Dust and Amity back, while the two men grunt, gesture, and swear until the wire is finally stretched tight and singing. The car protests and grinds against the black bark until finally it is made to lurch upright, rise like the dead, and walk on its bumper before crashing back down to the ground, right side up and smashed flat. It shimmies on its shock absorbers.
Amity rushes around to the trunk. The farmer calls out, saying watch the cable, and she presses her thumb into the release button, hard as she can. But the lid is dented, squashed against its frame. It won’t open. She hops and points until Dust steps beside her and the man pokes a crowbar into the gap. Then the lid pops open with a puff of flour and feathers.
“Oh, man,” says Dust.
“What the…” says the man.
All that Mother packed is jumbled and broken. Honey soaks petticoats. Goat cheese has melted to a ranc
id, oily slick. She plunges her hands into the mess of it.
“There’s broken glass,” Dust says, but she nods. She knows. She flings out their filthy linens and pillows. She shoves aside the greasy bedding and honeyed envelopes, while the fat men and the farmer argue over money. Finally they shake hands, sealing some deal, and Dust tells her to get out of the trunk, it’s time to go.
“Wait,” she begs. She leans in, balancing on her belly, feeling far into the edges and corners of the trunk until she finds it, at last. Her fingers curl around it in triumph. She pulls it into her sleeve and hops back down.
When the car is rolled away, the space that was beneath it is rotten with paper and candy wrappers, strewn like gems across the glass and feathers and dirt. The farmer puts his fingers into the weeping wound of the tree bark, then he gives it a pat. “Who wants to follow it to the yard?” he says.
“For sure,” Dust says, but Amity can only look up into his face in silence. She cannot answer or speak to the man. It is still a rule.
He smiles at her. “Way you banged through that trunk, thought your mother had a body in it. Maybe your pa.” He laughs. “Y’all are pretty strange creatures, ain’t you?”
She blinks up at him. He doesn’t know the half of it.
Down the road, the truck makes a dust train, fanning out like a smoky veil, as it turns and speeds away. The man goes back for his truck and Amity can only watch it.
“C’mon,” Dust says.
“Is it far?”
“To the scrap yard? Just past town, twenty miles or so. I go to pick parts.”
“We couldn’t walk twenty miles,” she says.
“Why would you want to?”
“Sorrow wants to go home.”
Dust bends down to look at an envelope. He sees the drawing there and looks up at Amity. “Bradley said your ma crashed ’cause she fell asleep.”
“We drove four days.”
“Where did you come from? Do you even know?”
Amity looks at the picture of the temple in his hand and shakes her head.
“Four days, you came pretty far. You can drive all across the country in three, if no one falls asleep. Not that I’ve done it, but I aim to. I aim to see the whole of the country and the other ones besides. Listen, were you driving into the sun or away from it?”
“Neither,” she says. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to know or tell. She only knows how the sun pursued them, swinging left to right above their heads, melting their winter to make this spring. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“This is Oklahoma,” he says. “Don’t you know?”
She sets her hands in her pinafore pocket, feels her secret drop out of her sleeve to hide there.
“I should get you a map,” he says.
“That would be nice.” She doesn’t know what a map is, but anything he gave her would be all right with her.
“Won’t help you walk to Canada, though. I don’t figure Sorrow would walk even half that far. Wouldn’t make it to the end of the road. She’d just sit down in a ditch and expect somebody to come by and pick her up.”
She giggles and turns away from him. The car and the truck and the dust cloud are gone.
He puts his boot through a gap in the low hedge by the roadside. “C’mon, there’s a shortcut back,” he says.
“Through the field?”
“It’s fallow. You can’t hurt it.”
“Fields are forbidden.”
“Who says?”
“God. My father.”
“Why?”
She looks at him. What can she tell him of all their rules? She doesn’t know why herself. “Bad things happen there.”
“They don’t,” he says. “Only place where good things happen. You still here come harvest, you’ll see.” And with that, he is into the field and gone and she wonders if that is why fields are bad. Because she wants to follow him.
9
Rules
Amaranth circumnavigates the house beneath the noon sun. Her eyes follow the length of boards, apricot now from the red dust; their paint peels and curls like rose petals. She mounts the porch steps and pulls back the screen door. The doorknob burns in her hand and she scuttles back down to the dirt and the tree.
She makes a loop around the house, past the patch of chalky soil and the powder-blue propane tank. She comes around to climb the porch, open the screen, and push the wooden door back. It slams in her face, as if the house itself has rules it wants to keep.
The next attempt she manages a foot inside, where she can smell the dust and must of the shadowed room, feel her feet on its painted boards. His voice in her head shouts: No man’s house! No man’s house! until she has to run back outside, shaking, fists over her ears, telling herself how ridiculous she is, afraid of ghosts and a man’s old house. She must get inside while her daughters are gone, while the farmer works and no one can see her.
She climbs the porch and turns the knob. She flings back the screen and shoves the door open, throwing herself into the room to grip the back of the sofa before the voice can even draw breath. Then it gives her all it’s got. Betrayer! Judas! Whore of Babylon!
She clings to the sofa like a shipwreck and shuts her eyes. One hand grips coarse velvet and horsehair. The other, she realizes, holds a thin cotton shirt, unbuttoned and abandoned. The farmer’s, by the dirt of it. She bends to smell the smoke and the skin of him, then her hands fly up, shocked by the intimacy of it. What is she doing? And then she is spinning and the room is spinning and her husband’s Revelation is roaring in her head: You have abandoned the love you had at first! Remember from what you have fallen and repent! If not, I will come to you and remove you from your church!
She backs her way to a wall, rough paper hung straight over boards. There are dark squares on the paper, where pictures have been removed. A nail digs into the back of her cap like an accusatory finger.
Jezebel! She hears. Repent of your immorality. Those who commit adultery I will throw into great tribulation. And I will strike your children dead!
She yanks her cap free. She deserves his prophecies and condemnations. She has heard them all before. Salome, Delilah, Lilith! Eve. Eve. Eve!
She pleads to the empty room and his vengeful God, “My children are starving. Your children are starving. Please.”
The voice pauses, as if considering. It becomes a tinny tapping. Tap-tap-tap. Like a ring onto glass. The pricking of her conscience. The devil’s fingernails on her skull.
Tap-tap-tap.
She turns, expecting Bradley, tapping on the window, calling to her, “Get out of my house.” But he is not there. There is no one.
She walks silently across the floorboards to look through an open doorway. “Hello?” she calls into a faded, sunny kitchen. She calls up the spindled stairway. “Hello?”
Tap-tap-tap. She hears its rhythm, like words: Let me out.
Her heart pounds back—let me out—and all she wants to do is run.
Tap-tap-tap and the thump of her heart, tap-tap-tap and the flash of something, caught in the corner of her eye. She dives behind the sofa, awaiting the devil and his justice, come for her at last.
Tap. Tap. Tap. More insistent now. Let. Me. Out. It is coming from within the room, she realizes, and she peers up, sees the glint of something inside the woodstove, a twitch of movement behind its smoke-smeared glass. Then the tapping. When she bends before it, she can see it is the pointed beak of a baby bird. It blinks its yellow eye.
She flips the stove handle to open the door and catch it, but the bird darts out, flaps madly in the dark room. It rises, hits the ceiling, and drops. It rises to beat the air again, hits a wall, and lands, dazed and trembling. Its heart thrusts its puffy chest out, hard and fast as her own startled organ. She reaches down to take the bird and it scuttles back from her, frightened as she is, as if she is its monster, its devil.
She opens the door to flood the room with light. The bird studies her, deciding, then gathers the last
of its courage. It waddles a step and shoots out the door and she watches the baby flap and lift until it is only a needle point in the flat, white sky and she is alone again in the room with the thump of her heart, the hum of a faraway tractor, and the papery shiver of the old tree’s leaves.
And then the tapping comes again. Louder now. A knocking. It makes ash trickle from the open stove. It makes dust drop from the boarded ceiling.
It is coming from upstairs.
She puts a hand on the newel post. There is someone in the house with her.
The knocking draws her feet up the dogleg stairs, up to a dark landing with three closed doors. Knock. Knock. Knock.
It cannot be her husband. It cannot be the devil. And yet she calls, breathless, “Hello?”
She turns the first doorknob, but it is locked. She knocks on the door. “Is someone there?”
And then she hears a voice from behind the door that sends her hurtling back down the steps, out the door and down the porch, down to the dirt and the old tree and the very edge of the fields, gasping, staring out at the farmer.
“Let me out!”
10
The Spinning
Sorrow swishes her hands through smoke. “I can see the temple,” she says.
“No, you can’t,” Mother says, feeding grass into flames.
Sorrow dances her hands over them. “We should pray,” she says.
“We should wash,” Mother answers.
Amity had brought floury armfuls of clothes from the trunk and given them to Mother, who praised her and thanked her, and then went through every inch of fabric, every stitch and seam. “Is this all you found, daughter?” she’d asked. “Are you sure?” And Amity’d felt like crying.
“God doesn’t want us clean, he wants us faithful,” Sorrow insists.
Mother drops another underskirt into a steaming bowl of water, working the oil and honey from it. Already, strung across the length of the porch railing, there are skirts and blouses and stockings, flapping and drying in the sun, waving like old friends.