by Riley, Peggy
No one sees her light the match to flame it. No one sees how Amity screams. No one sees Sorrow set fire to the truck.
No one sees Amity and Sorrow at all, not Dust, who said he would watch them, not Mother or the man, who only watch one another, showing each other their hands.
No one is watching the sisters at all now, except God the Father, of course.
BEFORE: The Daughter of Waco
Fire broke out in the metal barns across the fields, barns where the fourth and fifth wives had worked and slept since the house filled up with wives. The fire might have spread, might have burned the land down around it flat, or skipped and jumped across the ripening fields to the campers and tents where the families slept, or sparked the hodgepodge house and the temple. But it did not. For Amity was watching and Amity screamed.
Amaranth reached across her bed for her husband, but he was gone, she was alone, and Amity was shouting Fire! Fire! Amaranth leaped from her room as women and children tumbled from bedrooms, hastily doing up buttons and ties. Fire! they heard.
Outside, across the fields, they could see an orange glow from the east, as if the sun were rising early. Amaranth counted the heads of wives while wives counted children. Missing were Wives Four and Five, Wives Nine, Ten, and Twenty, and their husband. All children were counted and cuddled.
“What do we do?” she asked Hope.
“Come on,” Hope said, hoisting her skirts and legging it toward the fields. Running behind her were Amaranth and Dawn, Wife Six, but all three stopped at the edge of the forbidden fields. This was no time for rules, Amaranth knew it, yet she felt she couldn’t enter. She clutched her robe and she wrung her hands. She wondered what would happen to their family, their community, if their husband were suddenly gone.
“For fuck’s sake,” Dawn clucked. “It’s a stupid rule,” and she lit out for the barns. Still, Amaranth stood, unable to disobey. She stood and watched until ash began to blow at her, stinging her eyes, forcing her back to the rest of her family.
When Hope and Dawn returned, faces streaked with black, they spoke their news. Five wives were found, but no husband. The fourth and fifth wives were taken to the VA clinic in the city and left with no forms of identification but as much money as the wives could muster in a hurry. The ninth and tenth wives stood and watched while the flames died down, stomping out any sparks that flew, while Wife Twenty-One would only say that the fire was nothing to do with her. She’d been with the goats.
A thorough search was made of the tents and cars, the temporary buildings, and any structure that had not been burned. No one could find Zachariah and no wife would claim to have been with him. Heads turned to thoughts of Rapture; surely he had been taken in the night. Other heads turned to gossip, whispering if it was Amaranth’s night with her husband, why didn’t she know where he was?
It was Sorrow who said that they should clear the altar and check the room below. And there he was, in a deep, deep sleep. It took multiple wives to shake him until he came to, roaring and sore-headed, red-eyed and shouting, “I am trying to open the scroll!” They all looked at Amaranth, their eyes asking why he would choose to sleep alone on a night that should be hers.
Amaranth dragged up piles of linen from the room below, to wash and bleach them. They reeked of urine, chemicals, ammonia. The white sheet with their stitched names had been soiled. There was a transistor radio, its batteries drained, and bits of biblical text she didn’t recognize scrawled onto the walls. Something snapped beneath her clog and she bent to collect it. A thin glass tube wrapped in cloth.
She showed it to Hope, who had combed the cooling metal barns. Hope told her that she had seen chemicals in trash barrels, set alight: iodine and ammonia, paint thinner, drain cleaner. Discarded batteries, heaps of them, far more than their community could need for its jumble of portable radios. Coffeepots and filters, when none of them drank caffeine.
“What were they cooking?” Amaranth asked her.
Hope was too angry to guess. “There was cold medication there, fancy decongestants, things we never had here—when we’ve had to make do with willow and eucalyptus, mustard plasters. Selfish bastards,” she said.
The ninth and tenth wives stood before the altar. Their faces were gaunt and their work clothes black with smoke. Their teeth were as stained as the teeth of the fourth and fifth wives. Amaranth held the glass tube out, while Zachariah watched passively, his head bobbing on the slender stalk of his neck. She noticed how much weight he had lost. Had no one seen he wasn’t eating? She looked about at the wives, but no one spoke. No one knew what to say.
Amaranth squared up to them. “We know what you’re doing,” she said. “We know what you’re making in those barns.”
The two wives looked at one another. One coughed wetly into her hand and looked down into it.
“You’re making him sick, do you know that? You’re feeding his fantasies and his fears. You’re—you’re making bombs, aren’t you, like the ones in the East?”
Wives about the temple began to stir.
“We have to protect ourselves,” called the thirty-ninth wife, the daughter of Waco. She had come to them years after the firestorm started by the government during the standoff with her prophet, David Koresh. “We have to be ready, for when they come.”
“No one’s coming here,” Amaranth said.
“They’ll come to see about the fire now,” the daughter of Waco said. “They’ll search our land and our houses. They’ll take our children. It is our right to bear arms and we must.”
Wives began to whisper.
The daughter of Waco had told them what the siege was like, how they were told that people were coming for them. They were told to put on gas masks. They heard helicopters circling over the compound, then shots and windows smashing, felt the choke of tear gas. She said the news reported that the Branch Davidians shot first. “But we didn’t,” she said. “I will next time.” She told them the government drove tanks over the graves of her people and ran their flag up their church flagpole.
Wives began to speak. “You said we would be safe here!”
“You are safe. Look, you’re safe,” Amaranth called. She looked to her husband, for the words he would say to calm them all. She could see the doubt in their faces. So many had arrived after the towers had fallen. Their ranks had swollen as city women came, their compact cars filled with canned food and handguns, fearful and desperate to live off the land but having no idea how to begin. She could only imagine what had happened from the women’s descriptions, the towers of finance falling and the people jumping, the clouds billowing below as the towers shrunk in place, as if consumed. Her husband had said it was a sign of God’s displeasure, a testimony that their community was on the right path.
“Husband,” Amaranth pleaded with him now, holding the glass tube out. “Were you trying to kill us? Were you trying to bring the end of the world?”
His eyes were cloudy, unfocused.
Finally, Wife Nine spoke out. “Not bombs,” she said.
“What, then? Poison? Would you poison our well and kill us? Make something for us and ask us to drink it?” She thought of the Kool-Aid administered in Jonestown by the cult leader who was building Eden in Guyana. She could still see the bodies of the dead, lying flat and embracing one another. She had seen it on TV as a child, the camera flying over them.
“Not poison,” said Wife Ten.
“Meth,” said Wife Nine.
“Crystal meth?” asked Hope.
“Why would you be making that?” Amaranth asked.
Zachariah gave a dopey, smoky laugh.
Hope and Dawn cleaned out the one barn that could be salvaged and pulled down the one that couldn’t. They itemized what had been burned and Amaranth realized, with a start, that the fields had been forbidden to them not out of her husband’s fear of his wives running away or leaving or out of a desire to keep them safe, but to protect the barns and what they brewed.
“They’re junkies,” Hop
e said of the two in the hospital. “They were junkies when I met them and I guess they’re junkies still. They were clean for a long time. Well, I thought they were clean.”
“They’ve been running a lab, right under our noses,” Dawn said.
“I suppose this is why they’re always driving into town,” Hope said. “Bringing supplies back. Dealing.”
“We’ve probably all been living off their meth making for years. We’re the meth church.”
“Stop it,” Amaranth said. It was true that they were the only wives who regularly drove to other cities and towns. She remembered when they had driven to Mexico. But she could only think of their kindnesses to her when she needed them most. She reminded Hope and Dawn that they were family, come what may. It was the vow they had made, each to the other. It took the fourth and fifth wives a long time to heal and when they did, their hands had been singed into keloid claws, lest they should forget the work they did. God would not allow them to use those hands again.
No one reported the fire, so no one knew to come. No one came to investigate, for nothing was insured and no claims were made. Still, the daughter of Waco was convinced that the government would start Armageddon at any time.
Amaranth thought it was only the newest wave of eschatology to hit them. The world was filled with sects who waited for the end. Here, wives were afraid that outsiders would overrun them, townie addicts who would hear of the drugs they produced and come to buy. Wives grew ever more insular. No one volunteered to drive into town, to run the errands that the fourth and fifth wives had run for so long. No more errands were needed now, and no one wanted to leave.
Wives in the kitchen began their process of stockpiling, preserving more than they could ever hope to use before the next year’s harvest. Amaranth knew that they only needed something productive to do with their fear and that preparing for disaster would keep them focused and comforted. They lined the walls of the room below, her husband’s secret place for prayer, devotion, quiet contemplation, and clandestine drug taking, with shelving. It would become the storehouse of the wives’ labors, packed with the food and supplies that they would need. And then it was all they talked about. All they wanted and hoped for. It kept them busy while Amaranth and Hope worked to clean out their husband, holding him while he sweated and shivered and yelled the drugs out, cursing them to hell and begging to be killed.
She didn’t know he could make home feel like hell.
She didn’t know that preparing for the end of the world would make it that much more likely to come.
Part II
JUNE
16
The Devil in the House
Amity runs from the fire and the smoke. She runs from her sister and her sister’s matches.
She runs from the truck that is flaming now, pouring smoke through the door she kicked open to run, because she is not ready for heaven.
“I will make God come,” Sorrow said.
Dust is dark in the fields and the man is a faraway stain. Amity tries to shout to them, but the smoke has choked her. She can do no more than bleat and cough. Mother is in the devil’s house and she won’t come out for Amity’s clapping. She makes herself reach the devil’s screen door, pull it back on its hinges, and slap the door with her clog. “It’s Sorrow,” is all she can crack out. And then the man is running toward them, in from the fields with his long spider legs. “Is that smoke?”
“Where is she?” Mother asks her, grabbing her hard by the arm. And then she’s running after the man, faster than Amity can catch up, toward the rising plume of smoke that spins behind the gas station, turning the orange ball black.
She doesn’t want to follow. She has betrayed her own sister. She drops to the porch and folds her hands over her cap. She wonders what her sister will do to her.
They bring back Sorrow and set her onto the porch, but no one swaddles Sorrow now, no one says “sorry” or coos. The man sets her down as though he is stacking logs for the winter and Mother sweeps into the house behind him, Sorrow all but forgotten.
“You okay?” Amity whispers.
Sorrow’s face is black with smoke. She pulls the blankets around her knees. “I’m cold,” she says.
Amity shuffles to her, to tuck her in. She knows people get cold when they are afraid. It has happened to her, too, though it isn’t cold here and she can’t imagine it will ever be anything but bone-dry inferno, night or day. From inside the house she hears chairs scraping and drawers slamming, the voice of the man, upraised, shouting, and her mother, wheedling, pleading, like the mothers back home. When she pokes the blankets in around Sorrow, Sorrow snatches Amity’s wrist. “Tattletale.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The devil will fork your tongue and fry you.”
“You wanted a key,” Amity says. “You didn’t need to set it on fire.”
Sorrow squeezes her wrist, tighter than any wrist strap. “You don’t know what I need.”
“I do, Sorrow. You need home. You will get there.”
“How will I?”
“I know that when you want something, you get it. That’s what I know.”
Sorrow smiles at that, her teeth white as stars in her night-dark face. She snuggles down into the blankets, pulling Amity’s arm in with her. “The Father will come now,” she says. “I’ve called to him.”
Mother flies through the door and the screen. Amity hears the man, shouting behind her, “Coulda set the whole damn thing on fire! What if the pumps had caught? It’s a gas station, for Christ’s sake!” He slams the door.
Mother worries her hands. “Cars are machines—they’re full of gas and electrics. You didn’t know what you were doing, did you? You didn’t know that they could catch fire?”
Come morning, the man smacks the door beside them. He stomps his boots hard on the porch’s boards, not caring if he wakes them. He cuts the words of Mother’s calling with the back of a slap-giving hand, cuffing the air.
Mother turns to them, hands on hips. “This is not home,” she pronounces.
Sorrow rolls her eyes at Amity, as if this is any kind of revelation.
“But there are chores. You work at home. You would never lay about like this there.”
“What work would you have us do?” Sorrow asks. “We cannot pray. We cannot worship. What would you have us do, sweep dirt and pump gas?” She dares a laugh.
“I’ve had enough of your lip,” Mother says. “You don’t speak to me like this at home.”
“This is not home, you said.”
Mother stands over her. “You will respect me as if it were. You will respect me as you would any one of your mothers. You will do your work with glad hearts, just as at home. You will earn your keep here.”
“Keep,” Sorrow says. “Who would keep this?”
Mother stamps her clog and hurries into the house. In a heartbeat, Sorrow is up and out of her blankets, still filthy from the fire, and when she hears the front door open again, she lights out for the path to the gas station. Amity has never seen her move so fast, as if the devil has her in his sights, but it is only Mother behind her, crashing out of the house with a broom. She sighs when there is no Sorrow to give it to. Amity holds her hands out for it.
“You tell me what happened. Did Sorrow start that fire? Would she?”
Amity can only whimper, “Mother, please.”
“We could stay here, don’t you see? There’s food here.”
“Sorrow would never allow it.”
“Sorrow!” Mother hisses. “I’m tired of what Sorrow wants.” And then she is grabbing Amity to pull her inside.
Amity clings to the door frame. “No man’s house! It’s a rule!”
“There are no rules.” And Mother slams them both inside.
All rules must be broken, it would seem, and Mother will break them. Mother will make her break them, too. Mother hauls her across a shadowed room and yanks her up stairs even as Amity hangs on to the handrail, catching hold of each baluster with her cl
og.
“Let go,” Mother grunts, dragging her. “We made the rules up, every one.” Mother pushes her up toward a door, mercifully locked, but then she whips a key from a nail there and opens the very door to the devil.
Amity screws up her eyes, but she cannot help but see. She looks inside the devil’s bedroom. She sees his bed and chifforobe and the devil’s two horned feet, looks up the devil’s legs to his white raisin face, his bald head like a speckled hen’s egg, with wispy bits of hair in a feather fluff atop.
“This is my daughter.” Mother gives her a little shove forward, into his evil lair.
The devil opens his mouth and licks his pleated lips. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“She can keep you company. She’s looking for ways to be helpful.”
“Is she, now?” The devil gives her a crooked smile and pats his bed. “Come on and get a proper eyeful.”
Amity doesn’t want to sit on the devil’s bed. She doesn’t want to get any closer to him at all. She knows how he puts his number on the skin of the saints, how he writes his name on sinners’ souls. She looks away at his devil playthings—his black plastic box with its metal ears, his shotgun.
“You gonna just stand there and gawp at me?” The devil looks a bit sorry for himself, clever devil.
“Say hello, Amity,” Mother says, and gives her another little shove. Amity’s mouth pops open. Now the devil knows her name! But Mother is out the door and behind it before Amity can protest.
“You’re gonna catch flies,” the devil tells her.
She snaps her mouth shut, afraid she’ll catch worse than that.
“Did you set my boy’s truck on fire?” the devil asks her.
She shakes her head.
“Who did, then?”
She gives him a look that says, Why don’t you know? He’s the devil so he must know everything. That’s most certainly a rule.