by Riley, Peggy
The Scar
Amity does not wear the wrist strap. It lies on the tiled floor of the bathroom, where Sorrow threw it. It lies in the room that Dust hoses out now, the room filled with water and waste and red dirt painted in signs and symbols up and down. He takes great care to remove her stain of a red blood cross.
She waited and listened so long to the ghosts in the room that she thought it was days until Dust came, opening the door and letting in all the light.
“Is she there?” Amity asked him, her voice cracked and broken.
Dust ran some water from the sink and cupped it in his hand for her. He tried to pull her up. “She locked you in here, didn’t she? The hook was on.”
Amity tried to stand, but her legs were stuck. Her hand was throbbing. “I hurt her,” she said. When she came out of the dark room, she was amazed to see that the world had changed, entirely. What was pale red was brick red, bloodred. What was dry dripped. The world was fresh and made clean, as if it were she who had made it so with her sacrifice.
Dust brings the hose out and shuts the door. “I shouldn’t have put that lock on,” he says.
“My wrist strap,” she says. “Will you get it?”
“No. Why’s it your job to look after her?”
“I don’t know, but it is.”
Dust sucks his teeth, but he goes to get it, snapping it between his hands. Amity rips a strip from her underskirt to bind her cut and takes the strap onto her other hand, her wrong hand, her good hand now. Dust shuts the door and hooks the eye again.
“Who’s gonna be the one who tells Sorrow no?” he asks her.
Amity can only shake her head. Not her. Not ever.
The devil sleeps like a dead man, cheeks sunken and jaw unhinged. Amity looks close, to see if fallen angels slip out with every snore, and when he awakens he finds Amity staring into his mouth. “What do you want?”
“You told me to come back.”
“I didn’t tell you to come sneakin’ up on me.”
Amity doesn’t know how to mind people anymore. “I’ll go.”
“Seein’ as you gone and woke me up, you may as well stay. What you got on your hand there?”
She pops her bound hand behind her back. “Nothing.”
“Keep yer damn secrets. I don’t care. Got secrets of my own, you know.”
She smiles at him. She already knows his biggest secret, that he is the devil himself, and then the devil pulls a fast one. The devil hands her a Bible. She doesn’t know it is a Bible, of course, but she knows it when the devil opens it up and reads it, passages she knows in her blood, about the beginning of the world and God’s face over the dark of the waters.
“Let there be light,” the devil tells her. “Let there be firmament and land and vegetation, let there be lights and birds and fishes. Should’ve stopped right there, old God, but He kept it going, makin’ animals, makin’ man, and then, by gum, goin’ and makin’ up woman.”
She waits for him to burst into flames of damnation, but he does not. If the devil can hold a Bible and read from it, then all bets and rules are well and truly off. “I think you’re just an old man,” she says.
“As opposed to what—a horse’s ass?”
“Only I’ve never seen a man so old. You’re God-old. Older than my father.”
“That so?”
“I’ve seen old women. I’ve seen lots and lots of old women, older than you.”
“They live longer, ’cause they don’t do any work.”
“Well, women work harder than Father. All he does is pray and the other thing. Old women die. Are you going to die?”
The old man nods. “Eventually. I’m waitin’ for it.”
“Where will they plant you?”
“Plant me?” He squints at her. “Bury, you mean. ’Neath that tree, if I’m lucky. Put in when I was a boy. Used to be millions of ’em, windbreaks from the government, to slow down that fearsome wind. Came all the way from Siberia, them elms did. You’ve never been to Siberia.”
“I’ve never been anywhere. I don’t like the government.”
“Well, I never been to Siberia, but I was out in the Far East. Did my time and I can tell you I love this country. I don’t care two squats about the government, but I love my flag.” He puts his hand onto his heart and Amity wonders if it’s stopped. He shoves the Bible toward Amity and she dares to sit on the very edge of his bed to be near it. “Now, you go on and read me some. You’re a freeloader in this relationship.”
She looks down at the leather cover. Even if the devil could touch it for himself, she knows better than to try. She can hear something buzzing in the room, like God’s disapproval, as she tells him, “We don’t read the Bible.”
“Why not?”
“Father speaks it. He tells us what it says.”
“Girl, I’m gonna tell you sumpin’ about fathers. Sometimes they want too much and it makes ’em go strange. That man Icarus flew too close to the sun ’cause his daddy wanted them to fly, and most men’ll set themselves on fire outta all they want. A man on fire is liable to tell his children anything.”
“God is a father,” she tells him.
“Well, sometimes God wants too much, too. Think about His son, eh? Think of all the people He killed in the Bible, sweepin’ ’em out like ants.”
She looks at his Bible, but she will not open it. She looks at her white cotton hand and sees a fly land on it, rubbing its legs together with glee.
“You can’t read, can you?” the old man asks her.
“I don’t need to read. I only need to cook and spin.”
“Shoot,” he says. “Who gone and done that to a pretty little girl like you?”
She smiles at him. “I’m not pretty, and that’s a vanity besides, but I’m trying to be good. I’m trying ever so hard.” She shifts her hand to get the fly off and pain grabs her palm. She can’t help but cry out.
“What’s with your hand, girl?”
“Nothing.” She puts it back behind her.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s get them Joads on the road,” and he reaches for his Grapes of Wrath. The next day, when he asks her about her hand, she tells him nothing and the Joads pack their jalopy, but by the third day, when he asks her she says, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m too afraid to look.” The Joads grind to a halt.
The old man stares down the gristle of his nose at her. “Girl, you better find somebody to tell what’s goin’ on with you. I don’t care if it’s me or no, but I reckon I’m as good as any. You can’t shock me. Many has tried.”
She bites the knot and unwraps the bit of skirt from the wound. When it is off she can see her hand is white and puffed up, Sorrow’s cut as red and gaped as a mouth.
“There’s some whiff off your paw, girl,” he says. And as he reads about the Joads, she can feel herself flying clean out the window and away from the house, up from Oklahoma to a world that steams, somewhere lush and green, like their California. Her hand thumps like a heart and the ground shimmies. It buckles beneath her, rises and falls. She circles the house and rises over the fields, where the soil is rich and ripe below her. She stretches her clogs out, long and low below her skirts, but she will not land—she cannot land—not in the field. Birdsong calls her from the white cloth clouds that twist above her, like bedding, and she rises, bodyless, mindless, Godless.
“Amity!” she hears and she crashes down flat. She expects the old man, but she sees it is Dust there and he is slapping her, hard. She feels the weave of a scratchy blanket beneath her good hand.
“You were real brave,” he tells her. “You took it like a man.”
“Did I?” She tries to sit up to look about. “What did you do to me?” She wonders if they broke a rule.
“Put this on it,” he says. He gestures at a brown plastic bottle. “You got an infection, worse than when my ear went septic. Tried to pierce it with a pin, but it closed up.” He tugs his earlobe. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She loo
ks at the dark boards that make the room’s walls, lined with tools and ropes and chains. She sees what looks like a row of stalls and wide barn doors, open on a slant of late sun. She sees an old motorcycle, buffed to a shine, propped on its kickstand.
“Where is this?” she asks him.
“Barn, where I sleep. I found you in the field.”
“The field?”
“You were lying there with your hand up in the air, like you had a question.”
“I was in the field?” Another rule, gone. She hardly had any left to mind now. “Will I live?” she asks him. She looks into her bad hand, but it’s pink now and the cut subdued, like a mouth pursed.
“Let’s wrap it.” He searches the room for a bandage or cotton, something clean, and finally he unbuttons his own shirt and rips the sleeve off it. She lets him wind it around her wound and knot it down. She wiggles her fingers above the bandage and nods.
He rips off the other sleeve, to make them match, and she looks at his bare brown chest. He sees her looking and turns away to put his shirt back on, and that’s when she sees it, a long pink scar running around the back of his arm and across his shoulder blade, across his back, like a wing removed. It is upraised, a fat channel of tissue, like a worm burrowed in it. There are stitch marks running off the scar, as though the doctor had only just tried his hand at sewing.
“That’s a fine scar,” she tells him.
“It’s gross.”
“Can I touch it?”
He looks back at her for a moment then gives a nod, the shirt loose in his hands. She wouldn’t ordinarily ask to touch something. She would wait to be told or just do it, out of need, but it is a big scar and she thinks she can help it. She hopes she can. She reaches out the fingers of her good hand and puts them square on a twist of skin, a hot knot. The scar is soft and fragile, like something not yet ready: a chicken embryo, a rareripe baby. She doesn’t know if she can heal anything with just one hand.
“Thresher,” he says.
Her fingers slip along the length of his scar.
“You can feel where they sewed my arm back on. It’s like I couldn’t grow enough skin. It still goes hot in the sun.”
She feels each tiny stitch of it, trying to smooth them flat.
“You ever see a thing move that you couldn’t understand?”
She thinks of the women spinning in the temple and all she’d seen in the room below. “I have,” she says.
“We were cutting the field,” he says. “Must have been a big crop, ’cause Bradley hasn’t brought a crew in since. My papi was working and he let me come out with him, to stand behind the straw walker when the chaff dropped. I’d never seen anything so big, so fast, never been so close to something so magic. I must have stuck my arm in. I can’t remember anything, only next thing I’m in the hospital and some nurse is saying my pa is waiting. Only it isn’t my pa. It was Bradley. Anyways.” He pulls the sleeveless shirt back up over his shoulders.
“I hope I get a scar as good as yours,” she says.
“You’re weird.” He helps her up and walks her farther into the barn, hay crunching, away from the open doors to a stall. He kneels in the straw and waves her over and she wonders what will happen, what he’ll do next. But he only points down at a cardboard box, writhing with kittens, striped and plain and tortoiseshell, wriggling around a gray mother, nursing.
“Oh,” she breathes and reaches in with her good hand until the mother cat screams at her.
“She’s fierce,” he tells her. “I’m gonna raise them to be mousers. If I stay that long. Might not, you know. You could have one, if you stay.”
“Could I?” She points at a white one, its eyes as small and pink as a rat’s. She would have that one and it would be her very own. She wouldn’t have to share it with anyone.
“You reckon you’ll stay?”
Amity looks at the kittens, wriggling like grubs, hungry as babies, and thinks that, if the time came and God came for her, she’d like to have a litter like that, five little babies, tiny and furry, clustering around her to feed. How fierce she would be then.
21
Ghosts
The fields are red mud, wet dough. Rain has filled the playa, turning flat grass beneath cottonwoods to a lake bed where stilt-legged waterbirds have magically appeared to bend and strut. Bradley assesses the damage in the rapeseed, where rain has stripped the pods of their flowers. Yellow petals crush and smear beneath their feet as Amaranth totters after him, clogs sliding, beneath a borage sky.
He presses thumbnails into browning pods, checking their moisture, waiting for them to dry. “Too wet,” he says. “I swath these now, they’ll mold in the ricks. Seed’ll be no good then. If I wait too long they’ll shatter, drop their seed.” He strides on. “Shoulda stuck to wheat. I knew where I was with wheat. I don’t know.”
“You’ll know,” she tells him. She skids behind him on her wooden soles, then slips sideways from them into a rut and onto her skirts, hard on the mud.
He holds a hand down to help her up and she holds up a hand gloved in red soil. He laughs at it and she begins to laugh, and then they’re laughing together and at each other, dirty in the fields. She wipes her hands in her skirts and takes his calloused hand in her stained one, coming back to her feet. She does not let his hand go.
“You keep doing that,” he says.
“Falling over?” Her skirts are streaked and sodden. Mud climbs her arms.
“You need boots.”
“I need hosing down.”
“Go on and get a bath in the house, then,” he says. “Then come on into town with me.”
She drops his hand and turns away from him as a bird lands, stabbing its beak at a seedpod beside her. Bradley flaps his arms at it, stomping and frightening her and the bird to flight. She starts back for the house. “I don’t think so.”
“You can’t hide here forever,” he calls, and that stops her. Her hands grab her skirts.
“Thought I’d head in,” he says. “Ask around who’s cuttin’ now, hire a draper header.”
She turns toward him. “Am I hiding?”
“Looks it. Maybe he ain’t comin’ for you after all.”
“You don’t know him.”
“A man can change his mind.”
She shakes her head at him. He doesn’t know what her husband has done, what he is capable of. She has hardly told him anything of what has happened and she has no idea how she will tell it to him, how to start telling. She cannot afford to become complacent or comfortable. He is coming for them; she knows it. He is only waiting for her to relax and stop watching.
“Stay, then,” he says, and he marches past her, toward the house.
“You stay,” she says, chasing after him to catch him, grabbing hold of the damp back of his shirt.
“I ain’t hidin’,” he says, twisting out of her grasp. “Your husband don’t want me. ’Less he wants himself a husband.”
“Funny.”
“Thought I’d get a paper, too,” he calls back, over his shoulder, his thumbs jabbing seedpods reflexively, left and right. “See if there’s any news of a church on fire.”
“Don’t!” She hops and slips behind him, pulling her skirts up from the muddy ruts. “Don’t!”
He stops. “What you so afraid of?”
“Everything!” she gasps out. “He won’t let us go! He won’t let us live without him. We are family eternal—beyond the grave.”
“That’s a vow you make. Don’t mean it’s true.”
“He’ll kill us if he finds us here.”
“Thought I’d kill my own wife when she left. I was that angry. But you can’t keep carryin’ it. It just—goes.”
“Does it?” Her hand reaches for his shoulder. He turns his head for the house, so she can study the sinew of his neck, the bone and string of him, the dark hairs of his jaw on the turn to white. She puts a hand on his other shoulder to turn him to her and his arms come around her. “Don’t go,” she says, and she
presses herself to him until she can feel the buttons of his jeans at her waist. She presses her hip bones to his thighs.
He looks down at her, opens his mouth to say something, maybe tell her to stop it, maybe to leave him alone, and she brings her mouth up to his, to taste his sweat and salt. Grit slides from his tongue onto hers. His hands move up her back, feeling the bodice and binding she wears. She is bound within them. There is no easy way in to her. Her breath pushes her ribs against her bindings and the circle of his hands. Her collars bite at her neck. She jerks the buttons of his jeans open.
“Hey,” he says, and she bends on the mud to him, to take him into her mouth, but he pulls her up, pulls her back up to him, then comes onto her skirts, saying, “Christ, Christ, Jesus.” He looks down at the stain of him, spreading on her stains.
She bunches her skirts in her hands to hide it. “It’s nothing,” she says.
“Nothing.” He pushes himself back into his trousers and does up the buttons, turns his back on her.
“I mean, it’s fine—I don’t need—” She comes around the side of him, looking up at him. “I’m no girl, I just…”
He scratches his head and finds his hat gone. He scoops it up from the field and knocks it clean against his leg.
“It’s only, I’m grateful to you,” she starts, “and I wanted—”
“Grateful?” He jams his cap on and stomps down the row to get away from her.
“Wait!”
“I been waiting!” He stops. “Four years, my wife’s gone. Four years and I ain’t even looked at a woman. I’ve loved nothin’ but fields. How long you been gone, and you’re here on your knees to me?”
“I’ve been faithful.”
“One of fifty, faithful.”
“There are thousands of polygamists. Tens of thousands. It isn’t only me.”
“So that makes it okay?”
“It makes it hard, but we’re not freaks.”
He takes a step toward her. “How’s it work, then? You all got a rota? You got fifty beds or do you share him?” He looks at her filthy skirts, her bodice, her cap, and he shakes his head at her. “This what you do in your church when you’re grateful?”