by Riley, Peggy
“We had a car.”
“Crashed, it was. By the Jezebel. The devil crashed our car. The Great Red Dragon!”
Amity sighs. “If God sent a car, how would we drive it? He’d have to send a driver, too.”
“I can drive.”
Amity sneaks a look at Sorrow. Sorrow does not know how to drive and, with her head hung down for most of the four days that her mother was driving, she couldn’t have learned it. And even if she saw the arm part of driving, she never saw the foot part that Mother did, under skirts, where no one could see. “How can you drive?”
“I’ve been in a car before you, you know. I’ve been places you haven’t.”
In any contest with Sorrow she is bound to lose. Amity shrugs. “How will He bring us a car?”
“A truck.”
“What truck?” Amity has a bad feeling about this sign.
“A red truck. A faded truck.”
“The man’s truck? You can’t just take his truck.”
“God put it here for us.”
“God gave the truck to the farmer. He won’t just give it to us.”
Sorrow reels Amity in by the end of the wrist strap. “God says the boy will take it for us, just as he took the food. God will make him.”
Dust unfolds a giant paper before them, in the wide shade of the gas station canopy. He pulls it open and it looks like a folded flower, pink and yellow and green, veined with ribbons, red and blue, unspooling, meandering across it. “This is a map,” he says.
The girls touch the paper together. “It’s beautiful,” Amity breathes. Sorrow nods.
“Said I’d get you one. So here you go.”
“What does it do?”
“What do you mean, what’s it do? It’s a map.” He spreads it flat on the cement. “It shows you where you are and where you want to go. Look, this map’s Oklahoma, see? We’re here on the Panhandle, like a handle on a pan, and the pan is the rest of Oklahoma. Down here’s Texas, and up there’s Kansas, Colorado. This purple bit here on the handle is us. No man’s land.”
“It’s your land.”
“Bradley’s land. Not mine. It’s just a small farm, not even big enough to put on a map. Over here is New Mexico and the Santa Fe Trail, which ran right at the end of the road there. You can still see the wagon ruts if you know where to look. I could show you sometime. And past that is Black Mesa, holy land, where the dinosaurs are.”
Sorrow raises her pale eyebrows at this, but whether it’s to exclaim, “Holy land in Oklahoma!” or to scoff at the concept of dinosaurs is hard to say.
“Other way, over here, is the road to town, Boise City, and the scrap yard, the hog farms, and you’d have known about them if you came in that way, ’cause you’d have smelled them. So I’m thinking you came in this way, down from Utah. You all from Utah?”
Amity can only shake her head with wonder. “Is the world so very big, Dust?”
“Dang,” he says. “You sure are stupid.”
Sorrow elbows Amity. She knows what Sorrow wants her to ask, but she knows what he will make of it. She knows what he will think of them. “We want to go home,” she tells him.
“I know it.” Dust nods. “But you have to know where it is.”
Sorrow tugs the strap again. “We need someone to take us. We thought—maybe you could help us.”
“Help you how?”
“Maybe take us home in the man’s truck?”
Dust pushes his cap back. “You got money for gas?”
“Mother has some.”
“Then she can take you.”
“She doesn’t want to go home. She brought us here. Sorrow can drive some.”
“Oh, that’s a doozy,” Dust hoots. “Sorrow can drive but she can’t read a map? She can’t even talk! Look, I can get you more maps, so you can stick ’em together, figure out where you come from, but I won’t take his truck for you, I can promise you that. And I’ll be watching you like a hawk now. See if I don’t.” He stands and brushes the dirt off his jeans. Amity pushes the map back to him.
“You keep it. They’re free. They just give them away. Dang. But fold it up at least. Don’t you people know anything?” He walks away from them, backward, pointing back and forth from his eyes to theirs to say, I’ve got my eyes on you.
Amity takes her end of the strap off. It drops onto Oklahoma. “That’s that, then.”
“That’s not that, then. God will make him take the truck. I’ve seen it.”
“He won’t.”
“You think you know better than the Oracle?”
“I know him better than you. He hates us now. He won’t help us.”
“He doesn’t hate me.” Sorrow narrows her eyes at Amity.
“Why would anybody help us, Sorrow? We don’t even know where home is—we couldn’t find it on a hundred maps!”
“I’m only telling you what the Oracle sees.”
“Well, the Oracle can fold the map, then.”
Sorrow stares at it doubtfully, its squares of creases. “We will go home.”
14
Paper
Amaranth carries a bowl of plain cooked grains up the stairs. She does not know what she will find behind the locked door. She can almost picture Bradley’s wife there, imprisoned for threatening to leave, now deranged and knocking, wasting away. Or perhaps it is some twisted, demented child there, the son he won’t acknowledge, the son he fears. Gothic plots unspool in her head from her brittle paper childhood, all the dog-eared paperbacks of Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, in great stacks from the library. She filled her head with fairy tales and romances, female spies, and damsels in distress who expected rescue. When she met her husband, she emptied her head to make room for his revelations. Now she has nothing and she wishes she had stocked up on survival manuals to stuff herself full of ways to cope.
She tests the door; it is locked still. She tells herself the room may be empty. The knocking is a loose shingle, a wayward branch. But she remembers the flying shoe and the voices.
A brass key hangs from a bent nail on the door frame. She thinks of Bluebeard’s wife and the blood that sang out from her husband’s key, to tell on her. She thinks of the wife’s hands, filled with blood, and Sorrow.
She knocks, heart thumping, and a voice comes, frail and scratchy. “That you?”
She takes the key and turns the lock, then drops the key in her apron pocket. Once in, she is hit with the familiar tang of bleach and piss. She sees an old man, thin and still in a single brass bed, a parade of bones beneath a sheet. She smiles at him. “I’ve brought you up some soup.”
“Who are you?” He pulls his sheet up to his chin.
She sets the soup on a small bedside table and tugs up his window for air. She looks down onto the shingled roof of the porch, sees the burned patch on the dirt where she builds her fires, and then her clog kicks a plastic bucket, half filled with bleach, beside a single worn brown leather shoe.
The old man screws his face up at the sunlight and lifts a twisted hand over his eyes, the skin mottled with liver spots. She pulls the curtains closed again. “Sorry. Will you have some soup?”
“I don’t know you.”
She leans down and speaks loudly, into his face. “Will I feed you?”
“Go away.” He rolls away from her and the bedding hitches up over his buttocks; she scans him for bedsores.
“My name is Amaranth,” she tells him. “I’d like to thank you for letting us stay.”
He doesn’t turn back to her, his voice muffled in cloth. “We don’t want you here.”
She stands, trembling. She knows it’s true. She hurries back out and locks the door. She fumbles the key back onto the nail head, then stumbles back down the stairs, hearing his words, how no one wants her. She heads for the kitchen to count and sort, but a glimpse of paper stops her, stacked on a crate that serves as a coffee table. Old magazines, bordered yellow, National Geographic, window to the world and the only reading matter in her grandmother’s house asid
e from the Harlequin romances. It has been so long since she has held or handled paper, turned a paper page.
She wipes ash and fluff from a cover and a bright green fish darts up from beneath her finger. She could pet it. Inside there are photos of the Great Wall of China, the Serengeti plains, the holey moon, all the paper wonders of the world and heavens, from when she was a little girl, alone and reading, and she wants nothing more than to turn herself into a paper doll and climb inside.
I caught you.
His voice comes, so close she can feel the heat of him. Husband. I caught you.
She jumps to her feet and cracks her knee on the table. Magazines slide from her lap in a paper avalanche.
But it is Bradley who stands there, Bradley who laughs at her.
“I only sat for a moment,” she babbles. “I don’t—I wouldn’t—has something boiled over? Is it the girls? What time is it?” She starts, parched and woozy, for the kitchen.
“Calm yourself down, woman,” he says, pulling his cap off and flinging himself on the sofa. His forehead is white above the red dirt of his face and his hair wet with sweat. “Ain’t you hot with that thing on your head? You’re makin’ me hot.”
She leans on the threshold. “It’s for Saint Paul.”
“Patron saint of hats?”
“Paul said, Cover your head, lest you snare angels.” She checks the rim of her cap and pushes a stray hair in at her neck.
“Well, Saint Paul never came to Oklahoma in the spring. Hotter ’n hell this year and twice as dry. Y’all must have a lot of time on your hands, nothin’ more to worry about than if your hair’ll catch angels. Whole lotta crap in the Bible.”
“Probably.” She takes a breath, her binding tight. “Do you have one?”
“A Bible? Don’t you?”
“No. We don’t use them.”
“God won’t think mucha that.” He pads up the stairs in his dirt-ringed socks. She hears him unlock the door and she bends to tidy the magazines, scoop them back into a stack. He returns with an old Bible and an empty soup bowl. “You feedin’ my pa?”
“I heard him knocking. I’m sorry, I—why do you keep his door locked?”
“Why do you tie up your girls?” He tosses the Bible onto the sofa before her and walks the bowl to the kitchen.
Chunks of brittle leather drop and flake off its cover. She runs a finger over the embossed writing, eases open the cover to see if there are names written inside, birth dates and death dates as she read that families keep, and sees a long line of Bradleys there, just as he said, in pencil and ink. All the Bradleys and the women they married. At the very bottom, she sees this last Bradley and the woman he married. Below their names, linked with an m, are three small red dots.
She hears the sink running. When he comes back, she tells him, “Sorrow runs. First time I stopped for gas, she jumped out of the car and ran right into the street, like she didn’t know what cars were. I strapped her to Amity, to keep her in the car. I didn’t want to lose her.”
He sits on the back of the sofa. “Pa used to sneak to the fields, rip out what I’d planted, pulling up anything that wasn’t wheat. When my wife left, I—well, I couldn’t keep an eye on him anymore. Found him in a fence once, like he was tryin’ to escape.”
She holds his holy book in her hands. She stills her mind and asks God to send her a sign. Then she opens the book and spears a passage with her finger. She reads aloud, “I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy… and burn thine houses with fire…”
Bradley leans over to shut the Bible on her hands, holding her hands within it. “Find a nice bit. ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ ”
“I shall not want.”
He pulls the Bible from her and sets it on the sofa back. He shifts, so she can feel the heat of his thigh along her shoulder. She can feel him over her skin.
“The Bible is an oracle,” she says calmly. “It can be used for divination, to give you guidance. To tell you what to do.” Her hands make hot fists in her lap.
“So you thought you’d ask it. What do you want?”
“We can’t have what we want.”
She feels his breath on the back of her neck. He reaches a calloused finger down to her fists and she opens them, shows him her palms, involuntarily, as if her fingers are petals waking for the sun. He traces her hand’s life line, hovering above her skin in the air. “Gypsies read your fortune and tell you your whole life is down there, written out. No difference.”
Her palm tingles, itches below his. She can feel his finger before he has even touched her and when he does it makes a blue spark jump between them, snapping in dry air. She leaps up and they crack heads.
“Jesus!” he says.
She rushes to the door, out to his porch, and down to his hard earth. She looks up at God’s hot sky and asks Him, again, what it is that she should do as, inside the house, a crash and shatter comes, as if he has overturned the table, sent the magazines’ mountains and great seas flying. She closes her eyes and asks God if their escape was meant to be a test or a sign. Did He crash them to make them stop here, to be here? Or did He crash them to stop them, so that they could be caught? Was it God on this land, in this house, or the devil? For it is surely the devil, in the house, in her body, that makes her listen out for Bradley. That makes her want to touch him and him her.
She waits for him to come rushing out and shake her, slap her. It is what men do. But she only hears him breathing behind the screen door. “I was raised on the Bible,” he tells her when she turns. “The hard love of God. We all were, so I know what’s in there. Says we have free will, but it don’t feel like it. Feels like everything’s mapped out already and you only gotta follow it.”
She thinks of how she left her husband as she walks up the porch steps. “Did you never want to leave?”
“Only ’bout a few hundred times a day. Who’d want to stay here?” He opens the screen, but she pushes back on it, to keep him inside and contain him. Her hands press flat on its weave. He pushes his hands onto the screen then, against hers, and she can feel him through the wire. “We’re all waitin’ for signs.” He flexes his hands against hers, as if he wants to reach through the screen. She can hear the weave of the wire stretching, snapping.
She hears footsteps behind her and she steps back, turns, even as Bradley, still pressed against the screen, is released and tumbles out onto the porch.
Amity sees the two of them, their hands held out and open before them, and she spins on her clog and darts away.
“Daughter!” Amaranth calls, but she won’t stop. “Amity!”
She looks down at her hands and at his hands and sees their palms look quilted, covered with squares from the screen that stands between them, marked with the same sets of lines.
BEFORE: The Banishing
Easter time and Hope had ground seeds to make the colored dyes that children patted onto small, blond goats to turn them red, black, and blue. They were roped and grouped, bleating, outside the temple, where children clapped their pudgy hands when their father came to see. “The four lambs of the ’Pocalypse!” they said, and giggled.
A marvelous addition to their pageant, their father pronounced it, though he stopped short of letting the goats into the temple. Amaranth could only beam at him. Easter was the best of times, with the baby Jesus returned to them, reinstated on His cross, and her husband still at home. It was spring at last, after a hard, long winter, and he had healed from the sicknesses that had plagued him and their community. The whole community had healed. They had lost some children, born too early, and they had lost a wife to icy cold, but now all of them were together and celebrating renewal. The bad times felt far away.
In the temple, children rehearsed. For the first time ever, Sorrow tried to opt out. “I’m too old for pageants,” she said, and tried to hand her Woman of the Apocalypse costume down to Amity. Her two elder brothers, Adam and Justice, said they
would sit out, too, until their father shouted them all down. “I’ll tell you when someone is too old!”
Sorrow pouted but let herself be dressed, putting on her bedsheet drapery, boiled in goldenrod, to be clothed with the sun, like the woman in her father’s Revelation. She placed the crown of twelve cardboard stars over her cap and took her place aboard a rickety cardboard moon. Her hands clutched a huge goose-down belly and she cried out, so realistically aping the pangs of birth—which rang often throughout the houses—that mothers tittered.
Adam roared up behind her in red zip-up coveralls. “Behold, the Great Red Dragon!” He had six cloth heads stitched beside his own head, and each wore a tiny crown. Justice, in another red suit, played his tailed other half, the younger’s lot. The tail swished down all the stars of heaven, knocking toddlers across the temple floor as though they were bowling pins. The two halves of the Red Dragon pursued Sorrow. Around and around the temple they ran, Sorrow squealing, until at last she ran to the altar to be caught up by her father, his arms like the two wings that God gave the woman for escape. Zachariah caught her under her arms and tried to swing her up and Amaranth could see that he could hardly lift her now. She was too tall, too heavy, and he was older, suddenly. He seemed an old man. He tried again, then plopped her down.
Sorrow scowled. “I did say.”
That night, Sorrow was full of complaints. “I’m too old to play like this. I’m a woman now.”
“You may be a woman, but you’re still a daughter and you’ll do as you’re told,” Amaranth told her. Sorrow wore the skirts and cap of a woman, first of the children to begin her bleeding, but her heart and her head were young still. She would be a child, Amaranth supposed, until she was a wife.
“I’m not a child,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
Sorrow was sullen through the performance. She spoke her lines but exhibited no fear when chased by the Red Dragon, nor did she tremble at the thought of it eating up her holy child. Amity was dressed in a bedsheet, oldest of the seven angels carrying the seven plagues. “Go and pour out the wrath of God upon the earth!” she intoned.