by Riley, Peggy
She puts her hands over her face. It is.
A crow flaps up behind them, startling her. Its caws come like laughter as it beats the air with jagged wings. She sees its tiny feet tuck, safe under its body, how it rises and leaves them both to their standing, their silence, and another faraway crow caws its laugh.
The seedbed is flooded, more lake than garden now. The seeds she planted have drifted on water, like tiny rafts, and the furrows she made have flattened. She can’t tell if any seeds remain or if they’ll grow. The jars she left there have filled with rain and flushed out their seeds. She has ruined it, all of it, but she scoops the mud back into the bed, waiting for Bradley to come back.
She tucks her daughters in, lights kerosene lanterns for him in the dark. Still he doesn’t come, and she begins to worry that he never will. She feels the fear her husband had when he feared they would lose their land. If Bradley were gone, they would have to leave. What right would they have to stay? And the fear comes, of leaving and of staying. She has to do something, make some kind of plan.
She takes a lantern by its handle and walks from the house, the flame throwing shadows of her over the towers of the castoffs, the car parts. Rusted metal catches the light. The gas station is lit up and she looks around the shop for the light switch or keys. If he never returned, who would care for the place? Who would care for his father?
Behind the station she sees his truck and she runs for it, lamp bobbing, to find him in the burned-out front seat, head flung back and snoring. There is a bottle half poking from a brown bag beside him, and a stack of newspaper. She doesn’t look at it. She watches him sleeping, the lines of his face soft and shadowed, his eyes darting back and forth beneath his lids.
Before dawn he wakes and his steps come shaky on the ground. He follows the light of the kerosene lamp from the pile of junk around the house, where she cannot sleep. He follows her light where she moves his soil, his legs bent like a spider’s, to kick a plastic bucket. He steps into its handle with his boot and it trips him, knocks him over as he tries to shake it off, while she’s saying sorry, sorry. The newspaper flutters down from beneath his arm and he lands on his backside, rocks his hips to rescue the brown-bagged bottle from his back pocket. He pulls it out and feels it, checking to see if he’s broken it. Finding he hasn’t, he unscrews the cap and tips it back to his mouth, paper rustling. He takes a thoughtful swallow and extends it to her. “Is it late or early?” he asks her.
She looks at him and the bottle. “Did you eat in town?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. He stretches his frame along the grass. He smells strong, of alcohol and cigarettes, gasoline. She wants to kiss his mouth.
“I been drinking,” he slurs. “Old Mullaley’s dead. Cuttin’ in the storm and fork lightning struck a grain bin. Old as my pa and still up farming, not stuck in bed hopin’ to die.” He sees the newspaper then, soaking up water, and he crawls over the mud path to retrieve it, shaking his knees up each time they find water. He curses, shakes the wet outside of the paper loose so she can just see, in the low light, all the pictures inside it, oversized faces, explosions, and men in camouflage, all the miseries of the world come back from town with him. “They’re swathin’ outside Dalhart. Reckon I’ll hire a draper header, make a start.” He looks down at the newspaper again, as if trying to remember how it came to be in his hands.
“Are we there?” she whispers.
He thrusts the paper at her and she flips through the pages, leaning it into a lamplight. She sees fires and the flames, but when she looks at them they are not her fire. There are fires all over the world in the paper. Perhaps no one even knows about their fire.
He takes another slug of his bottle and sets it on the dirt. “You ever seen a ghost?”
She thinks of the voice of her husband, the lights behind her in the car, pursuing her. “Yes,” she says. Maybe that is all he is.
“Thought I seen her tonight. Thought I seen her, walkin’ ahead of me, and I followed her to a bar. I was waitin’ for her to turn ’round and see how fine I was, how I was doin’ fine, and I wanted her to see it. So I followed her in, only when I got to the bar and made her look at me, she weren’t nothin’ like my wife. I’d forgotten what my own wife looked like. Don’t know who it was. And it made me drink more.”
“Sure,” she says. “I know.”
“You don’t drink,” he tells her.
“You don’t know me,” she says. “I did. I used to do a lot of things.”
“Before you got God.”
She puts her hand around the neck of his bottle. “They say God is knocking on your heart, all the time, and you only have to open it for him. I never heard it. And all of a sudden, here I am, fifty wives down.” She unscrews the top of the bottle and looks at the newspaper, fanning its wars and disasters, and she knows that someone will have reported them. Someone will have seen and told, reporters and authorities. They must be news in other papers. There is no escape. Unless—unless there is no one to tell of it, no one who will talk, or no one who survived.
The paper drops to the dirt, to flap its pages. When she shuts her eyes, she can still see fire. She hands him the bottle to take a sip. He comes to her and takes a long pull on it. She smells the liquor on him and she moves toward him, to burn herself on the liquor of his tongue. He lets her. She could drink him down. She could drink the world all of a sudden.
She pulls her cap off and pulls at her braids. They swing down and he grabs at them, like a baby beneath a mobile. She tips the liquor into him then brings the bottle to her own mouth. She kisses its familiar fire back into him. His hands pull uselessly at her bodice and lacing. There is no way in to her. Only she can pull at his buttons again. Only she can hitch her skirts and jerk her shift aside, to take hold of him and guide him into her, press him in. She fits herself over him. She tastes his tobacco, his sweat, and his liquor. She tastes something bitter on his tongue like aspirin, like regret, and she pushes herself onto him. She feels the place she kept for her husband all these years break within her, there on the wet ground, below the wide, dark sky and the bed she has planted.
Let the end of the world come, at last.
BEFORE: The Raising of the Temple
There were times of abundance, years when Hope’s raised beds yielded miracles and bumper crops and fields burst with grain and straw. Harvester crews reaped bushels for profit and cutting crews felled ancient trees, planted when the land was young. Money flowed in from farmer’s markets and arrived with the wives who would come.
There were five wives and then there were seven: Dawn, the sixth wife, who would arrive pregnant and give birth to Adam, and the seventh wife, a free spirit raised in a commune, who gave birth to Zachariah’s first son, Justice. Amaranth weaned Sorrow to suckle both boys. If she had to share her bed, she would share their babies. All would be shared. Sorrow danced and spun about them, pinching infants, making mischief with her ever-flying hands, as Zachariah blessed them, bouncing his babies, stroking the milk-full breasts of three wives.
There were eight wives, then nine, women who arrived after summers of preaching, drawn by his stories of the end times and the community that was waiting for them, all of them. The twelfth wife brought unwanted heirlooms that could be sold and deeds to land she had been living on alone, happy to give it to a family, the cost of belonging.
With twelve wives, they outgrew the house. Amaranth thought them family enough, but then there were fifteen wives, twenty wives, parcels of land and silver and cars, and the ring was passed hand to hand around the circle.
Through it all, her husband was as good as his promise. There were no secrets. Her bed was his first and she was a part of every ceremony, every ritual taking of every bride. And it became familiar to lie beside him, to watch and listen to the ragged breaths of her husband and another woman. It became easier to watch them swell and ripen from him, for they all were family, young or old, buxom or bony. No one was lonesome; no one wanted for more. She could wa
tch him swing any babe into his arms and believe it was her child. She could watch him kiss any wife there and believe it was her wife, too. It was.
Amaranth cultivated her sister wives, learning their ways, teaching them her own and the community’s. She harnessed herself to the work of the family and delighted in its growth and its bounty. She kept accounts of the riches that the family could draw upon, money the women brought. Soon they had outgrown the outbuildings and yurts. Wives and children filled and spilled from every room.
“Husband,” she told him, as he returned from another summer away, two older women, future wives, struggling stiffly from his van. “Husband, we need to build something here.”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled. “A temple.”
“No, a bigger house.” Weeks later he was scuffing his shoe heel into soil, making a line where cement would be poured. She wasn’t the only wife to remember what it was that he was tracing his line around.
Builders came in from town to lay a foundation. Zachariah watched them watch his wives, all the ages and states and sizes of them, their odd mix of coats and shawls. He watched them work as if he were their foreman, hands on hips and legs spread apart, his long white hair beside the workmen’s yellow hard hats, his pale linen suit beside their ripped jeans and dirty padded jackets. He did not engage in their banter or sidelong comments. He was old enough to be their father. Perhaps their grandfather.
Young wives looked for reasons to walk beside them, to make a great show of not looking at the builders, the bulk of their muscled frames. He began to urge them to hurry. Amaranth caught him examining himself in a mirror, the lines around his eyes, still pale and bright, and the sagging along his shaved jaw. She wondered if he wanted them to hurry before he got older or before they could lure away a wife. She never told him what she saw, but she was glad he could have a small taste of jealousy, a scoop of the dish his wives swallowed every day and never mentioned.
He rushed the builders, even as they said it was too cold to pour cement. The pad wouldn’t harden, they said, should an early frost come. He told them to stop shirking and start building. Even so, the builders didn’t finish. Nearly Christmastime, with Sorrow and Amity and his many children beside themselves with excitement, and the temple consisted of a concrete pad and a cinder-block foundation. The builders packed up their tools and wanted paying; they had their own families at home. Zachariah sent them away and told them not to return in the new year, out of spite.
That night there was an unseasonable snow and the fresh concrete cracked and chipped. He cursed the builders, having the kind of tantrum she would have expected from Sorrow. “Husband, calm,” she said, putting a hand on his forehead.
He shook it off. “The world is ending, woman. There is no calm.”
Amaranth could only hope his rush and worry had nothing to do with what lay below the foundation. Her husband had marked the rectangle with his heel and said, “Upon this rock, we will build our church.” And he built it upon her, the old, old woman who had owned the land. His second wife. Her body would be bone now, nothing but teeth and spiraled nails and flat land to hold a church up.
On the last night of the year and the decade and the century and the millennium, he gathered his family around where the temple would be. Women wrapped themselves in layers, every piece of clothing they had. They swaddled sleepy babies in blankets. They huddled in a circle to watch their patriarch raise his hands to the frosty sky.
He started grumpily, piteously, deriding the builders and their lack of a work ethic, the lack of a shelter on such a night. But then, as if remembering the occasion and the company, he began to preach as he always had done when he had met his wives in some town, some city, some field, or parking lot. “All the world prepares for the end of time. You can feel it, like a sickness. I feel it in my haste. Machines conspire against us. Our enemies lie in wait. The world is coming apart at the seams and the great clock wound by God is out of time. Do you feel it?”
The two newest women, not yet wives, nodded and sobbed, clinging to one another. To Amaranth, it felt like a news report from the moon. Over the last years he had spoken names to them, examples of the wickedness of the world, but they meant nothing to her: Hale-Bopp and Heaven’s Gate, sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, the Order of the Solar Temple, Waco.
He told them to make their reparations and say their good-byes. They all must be ready to meet their God, temple or no. The newest wives began to cry out; they begged to go into town, to call their loved ones. Amaranth clutched her daughters to her—Sorrow complaining, Amity compliant—knowing she had no one to contact. Here was all she loved.
Sorrow squirmed away to stand with her father, to raise her hands as he did.
“Here is your family,” he called to them. “Here is the family that chooses you! Fear God and give Him glory!”
“Fear God and give Him glory!” they called back.
“For two thousand years ago a baby was born who changed the world. A baby was born, like any baby, born like every child born here. Let us remember that every child can change the world. Every baby can be a new Messiah!”
Wives with rounded bellies patted them. Wives with babies rocked them. Older women’s eyes glistened, hopeful and dreamy. Each could remember a world of solitude, of hostile and silent cities, lonely nights that stretched into lonely years. Each spoke of what her family meant, how it saved her when the world itself had failed.
The newest wives spoke first of their terror and the lifeline that was thrown to them when they heard him speak in the parking lot where they had gone looking to steal or buy anything but redemption or hope. An old wife called out, her voice low and scratchy, “I had no one and nothing. Here, I have a family.”
“I have found people who do not judge me,” said Dawn, the sixth wife. “I have found a place to heal,” said the fourth and fifth wives together. “I have found a sisterhood,” Hope said, and she gave Amaranth’s elbow a squeeze.
All eyes fixed on Amaranth, and as she opened her mouth to speak, a new wife spoke out, “It’s almost midnight!” Eyes fixed on battered wristwatches and babies’ faces; eyes fixed on husband and the sky.
Sorrow began her counting down, proudly. “Ten. Nine.”
Adam joined the counting. “Eight.”
“God,” a woman breathed out while another gave a nervous giggle.
“Seven.”
“Praise the Lord!” called a dark-skinned wife, her face wide in smile.
“Six.”
Amaranth felt a surge of love radiating from the circle. She had only ever wanted to feel a part of a family, to feel a part of something bigger and older and deeper than herself.
“Five.”
“I love you,” a wife called across the circle, to no one in particular.
“Four.”
“I love you,” another called back.
“Three.”
Amaranth called out to her husband, to everyone. “I love you.”
“Two.”
Then all of them called it, “I love you, I love you,” in a tangled chorus until—
“One.” And Zachariah reached his arms out in either direction, as if to say good-bye.
Sorrow cried out, “I want to see God!” They waited for him to be taken up. They waited to follow, to see the very face of God together.
When the sun was pink in the far horizon and children had fallen asleep where they stood, he turned and walked away from them. Mothers huddled their children into their shelters and cars and beds, unwrapping their layers with frozen fingers, too cold and tired to give thanks anymore. The world had not ended and no one minded. In the spring, they would start to build their temple again.
22
The Field
Machines cut the fields down, toppling stalks, chopping them off, and flinging them into piles. Amity watches from the old man’s window.
Mother asked for help in the harvest, but Sorrow said no and told Amity she’d better not, either, though Mother said th
ey were needed in the fields.
“Fields,” Sorrow snapped. “Fields, Mother!”
“There is nothing in these fields,” Mother said, and another rule burst into flame before them. “We made up the rule to keep you out of them.”
“What was in them?” Amity asked, pestering, but Mother ignored her.
“Rules are all we have,” Sorrow said.
“People are all we have.”
Sorrow scoffed. “We don’t need people.”
“We don’t need rules. They’re like a story,” Mother said. “Like a fairy story you read. Well, you wouldn’t. But you know what a story is?”
Sorrow shook her head and Amity thought of the Joads, still trying to get to California. She didn’t think they’d ever find Eden at the rate the old man was reading to her.
“Next you’ll tell us Father’s stories are made up,” Sorrow said. “Or that the Bible is made up.” She’d grinned at Amity.
“Well, the stories of the Bible are written by men, so they are stories, yes.”
“But not made up! It is God speaking, every word, and I should know it!” Sorrow marched across the porch. “You speak with the devil’s mouth. You shake the devil’s body!”
“Stop it, Sorrow.”
Sorrow pointed her strapped hand, making Amity point. “I see how you look at that man. I hear you in his kitchen. He is shamed for the way he looks at us.”
“He’s not looking at us.”
“I see him look.”
“He’s not looking at you. Not all men look at you.”
“Can’t we pray?” Amity said, and both her mother and sister glared at her. “If we pray we’ll know what to do.”
But when the farmer caught Mother trying to pry Sorrow’s hands from the newel post and drag her to the field, he hauled Mother into the kitchen, where they could hear him yelling at her through the screen. “She’s afraid of it, ain’t she? What’s the point of scaring her more? I don’t want her out there, working near equipment, if it scares her. It’s too dangerous. She’s a hazard.”