by Riley, Peggy
“She’s spoiled,” Mother said.
“I won’t argue with that,” he said. “But it’s too late.”
Sorrow’s face was tight as binding. She pulled Amity close. “You will not go in that field,” she said. And at that very moment she knew it. She understood why fields were forbidden. Fields could make you want more for yourself than God and Sorrow wanted you to have.
“C’mon back to this story,” the old man says.
Amity jams the wet towel into the gap around his window, as Mother told her to, to keep the dust of harvest from the house. The old man says all of Oklahoma used to feel like that when he was a boy, like the very air was made of dirt. It was all you could do to breathe it in.
“It’s too hot,” she tells him, fingers on the glass to look out at the harvest and all she’s missing.
“This ain’t hot,” he tells her, coughing. “When I was a boy you could cook an egg on your own head, it was that hot. You could put your cow out in the sun and have steak for lunch; just take a bite off her rump.”
He opens his old book at the front again. “Listen here,” he said. “ ‘In the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.’ ”
“Wait—are you starting over from the beginning?” she asks.
“So what if I am? I’ll tell you, girl, for a man born in California, your man Steinbeck knows his apples from his onions, even if all we grow is wheat. Well, I grew wheat. Don’t know what he’s growin’ out there, damn fool boy.”
“Why do you grow things when the land wants to be dust?” she asks him.
“Land can’t think, girl. It ain’t got no opinions. Land just does what you make it do.”
“It turned to dust on the Joads. It didn’t want to grow wheat for them.”
“We made it grow. We weren’t no Joads. We didn’t go nowhere.” He puffs his chest out and takes to coughing, giving such savage hacks that she finally has to bang on his chest to get him to stop. “My ma did that,” he tells her, and he lies back again, comforted. “We were the ones that stayed, even when dust put the sun out.”
“Just like the end of time,” she whispers.
“You cut me open, you’ll find me stuffed full of it, like a vacuum bag. It’ll kill me one of these days. You wait and see if it don’t.”
Amity looks at him. “I’ve seen people die.”
“Well, I have, too, but I don’t go ’round braggin’ ’bout it.”
“I hope you don’t die,” she tells him.
“Well,” he says. “Well.”
The field is calling to her, calling from the old man’s window, calling from the house. It calls from the dirt-strewn threshold, where Sorrow kneels to rock, and Amity would do anything to get away from her. The field calls her like Dust calls. She runs to its edge to call back, “Don’t you have any rules, Dust?”
“No!” He broadcasts seed in low, wide arcs, reseeding sorghum. Every time he finishes a row he walks toward her. “I don’t need rules. I have sense and guts.”
She looks at him doubtfully. “Guts?”
“What your body knows. When something strikes you as right or wrong, right there.” He gives her stomach a poke. It flips beneath her pinafore at his touch.
She puts her hands on top of it. She knew he was right. Everything about him was right. Where his fingers poked did a leap every time she thought of him.
He snaps a grass stalk and twirls it between his fingers to make a whirligig. “You’ll miss the harvest,” he tells her.
“I know,” she says, miserable. “We missed it at home, too.”
“God makes fields grow. God makes the harvest and the seed and the rain. They should have taught you God is a field.”
“He isn’t,” she whispers. “God is God, God is the Father.” It’s all she knows for sure.
“I don’t believe in God. Not your God.”
“What if you go to hell?” she asks him, eyes wide.
“Your God is hell.” He shows her his hands, filled with seeds. They wiggle on his hand from sweat, from static, but they wiggle like they’re alive. They wiggle like they want to grow, right now, right into his skin.
She looks at the field and the cut crops, the flying dust. She looks at the boy and her stomach barrel-rolls. And it feels good.
If God made the land and God made the field and God was earth, then how could it be forbidden? If her body wanted the field and the dirt, to run in it and laugh inside it, then how was it wrong? And if God showed her Dust, then he was of God. It made her wish she’d thought to ask at home, when someone might have answered her. Why did she never ask why?
23
Harvest
When the seed in the ricks is dry enough, Dust drives the faded harvester and Bradley stops him often, shouting to check the sieve, check the chaffer and the fans. Dust does as he’s told, never arguing, never sulking, as Bradley nods up at the boy, shouting praise and correction in equal measure. They both keep their eyes on the path of the sun and the chain they drag behind them, grounding the static lest they start a fire in the stubble, where black birds squat in the shade of the swaths and rise up, complaining, at the noise of the engines or at Amaranth’s approach, the swing of her skirts. They flap and drop back behind the machine to pick at whatever is left in its wake, seed or grubs, as the big-wheeled harvester floats down the rows like some paddleboat on a sea of grass.
In the heat of day, Bradley calls a break and the boy runs the harvest to bins in tar-black barns in the middle of the field while he oils and adjusts the old machine, shirtless, turning brown and hard as seed. She brings them out jars of water and food in napkins, watches them eat, wanting to linger in the easy companionship of the man and boy while her own daughters scowl at her from the house. How has she come to raise two such lazy creatures?
There is work in the harvest, hard work. She cooks dense food that will keep them going, patties and salads of beans and grains, flavored with shoots from the land, the rain: chickweed, wild garlic. She butchers a store-bought chicken he brings her from town, fries it in flour and Crisco. She flits about his kitchen, playing house, emptying the bins of food, while her children avoid her. Only in moments between the hard work of harvest, the carrying and hauling, the walking and baling, does she think of the two of them and wonder what they see of her, there in the fields.
When they get back to work, she wants to fling herself down before him and his machinery, to be cut fast and eased down into stubble, cut hard and made into something good and real.
By night, she stalks bugs in the seedbed with the kerosene lamp. She fingers the fragile shoots, brushing away aphids to crush in her hands. She does not know what she is growing, what the green dusting of the dirt will become. By sundown he is behind her, exhausted, happy, hopeful. She touches his cheek and down the strings of his neck, unsnapping his shirt to kiss the hollow at the base of his throat, the bridge of his clavicles. She unties her apron and lets it drop. She rolls down her thick stockings, tucks them safe inside her clogs. She pulls the tie of her bodice as he leans his forehead onto hers, saying, “Come on in the house.”
She wants to, but she could stop this still. It would only have been liquor the first time. It could be forgotten. The dark tree above them strains across his house. New leaves stand, bright as mint. Could the ghost of her husband reach her there? Was wanting this man in his bed, in his house, any different from wanting him in the dirt? When he takes her hand and tugs her, she collects her things and follows.
“Mother?” Amity calls. “Mother?” Sorrow calls. They watch her on the porch, at the door. “Shh,” she says, and pulls it between them.
He leads her up the stairs. This is wrong. Sin, her head says, and she knows it is. She follows him across the landing, past the old man calling, “That you, son? That you?”
He opens the door to his bedroom, musty, old dust
and skin. When he switches the light on, she sees a double bed, an old bureau, a spindly telescope before an open window, letting in all the dust of his harvest to coat every surface, the stacks of receipts and newspapers, the crushed cans and cigarette packets on the floor. He flings back his dirty covers and dust puffs up, balls of socks fly, so they laugh and sneeze. He steps out of his clothes and hops under the covers, shy.
She sets her clogs and her apron down to unlace her bodice, eye by eye. She unties the neck lacing of the overblouse and contemplates the layers still to go as she sees the window, open, over her daughters and switches his light off. In the gloom, she pulls off the tight underblouse and then begins to roll the binding that flattens them, unwinding the strip from around her and winding it again to make a ball that she can toss at him. He catches it, rolls it in his hands, and watches her, unbound, the heavy, swinging shape of her in her last layer of linen. How many layers they have. She unhooks the overskirt, the skirt, and the underskirt and shuffles out of the bloomers until she stands in the white cotton shift all wives wear, sewn over the shoulders and split between the legs.
She touches his chest, the bone and skin, the rack of ribs. His nipples harden beneath her hands. She runs her tongue across them and his taste is different from her husband’s: dark, metallic, a rock in the mouth. She thinks she should stop comparing them, but doesn’t know how.
His fingers find her nipples through her cloth and press them, like testing grain, and she knows these will be different for him; she’s suckled children and his own wife and bed were childless. His wife before her will have had breasts that were small, maybe, tight and high as a girl’s, thin, flat hips like a boy’s. She doesn’t care. She is used to these comparisons in her own bed. Whose empty breasts sagged like sleeves before or after her, back home? Whose taut breasts needed no binding to sit flat beneath her husband’s hands?
“Where have you gone?” he asks her.
She can feel his sex crawl on her leg. She cannot tell him she is flat on her back in a room filled with women. She cannot tell him her head is filled with women’s bodies, wives and a husband, his soft, clean hands.
She pulls herself back to him, this salty scent and their two lonely bodies, this dirt, these rocks. She takes hold of the front of the sewn shift and pulls it hard. She wonders if her daughters below can hear it tearing. When he asks she tells him they are sewn in, all of them, and he takes hold of the fabric himself, rips it wide down the front of her, opening breast and belly and crotch to his eyes and breath and fingers like a slaughter. He reaches his hand between her legs and takes a breast in his mouth.
She looks up at the dark of the ceiling. She tells herself she is not home. This is not a marriage bed and she will not come for him. She should not. She does not expect to, with this dirt and his skin so strange to her touch. She does not deserve to, with her daughters below and the ghosts of her family so close, here in the bed with her, claiming her still. This is not the purpose of this sex, she tells herself. She wants only to bind herself to him, same as any ritual. But with his mouth and fingers and strangeness she can feel herself bucking, tipping and rocking, becoming truly unfaithful in body and in spirit.
Come morning, she hauls up his sheets to boil them. There is a dark stain on the mattress ticking, not her stain. It is an old stain, old blood and a lot of it, and she thinks of the Bible’s three red dots. She sets her hand upon it, then lays fresh sheets across, to make it disappear again.
Does he feel the ghost of his wife in this bed still? Or has she banished it with her own skin and its claim on him? Can he feel how she traces her name in fingernailed loops on him, as if she can stitch herself down to him, like a sheet?
That night, in the dark of his room, she lies hot and sharp beside him, breathing in the stench of their working. He sleeps, still as the dead. She pulls him to her, his skin humming from the thresher, and he rolls over, laughing. “Woman, leave me be,” he says, but she will not until she bursts into flower beside him, heavy with seed. She holds him in the darkness and he holds her back, no bodies but theirs, and she thinks then that redemption is possible. Even for her. Even in this moment of skin and scent is an affirmation that this is enough, and if God or any of His jealous angels were to look down now, surely they would not begrudge her this wild joy.
24
The Living and the Dead
When Sorrow isn’t watching and the old man falls asleep, Amity sneaks down the stairs to her mother in the kitchen. There she is, scooping out handfuls of her constant beans. She looks tired and sticky when she asks Amity, as she daily does, to take water to the fields, and then surprised when Amity says she will. “Good girl,” she calls her.
Amity spies for Sorrow, creeping toward the fields with the jars of water held in the crook of her arm, heavy as babies. She steps into the weedy strip along the fields and waits for him.
Dust hoots at her, calling for water.
“Look at me in the fields!” she calls back. She lifts her skirt and wafts it over the edge of the field. She lifts a clog and holds it in the air. She holds her breath. She waits and prays for God to tell her it’s fine or to stop her, until she must step down and breathe or risk falling over. Then she pulls the field into her lungs and sets her foot onto the dirt. Then she is running for Dust, running for the field, cradling his water, sloshing and crowing, “I’m in the field—I’m in the field!”
He takes her jars and takes her hands. The jars drop and roll, but do not break. He swings her, fairly swings her in the field. Around and around he swings her, very nearly like a spin, but he wouldn’t know it, like a brand-new form of prayer. And then he stops her, breathless. “What do you hear?”
She pants, her heart pounding. She poises for thunder, heaven opening to pour down venom from every angel’s bowl of wrath. “Birds,” she says with wonder. “Crickets. Bees.”
“What do you see?”
She shuts her eyes. “Dirt. Rocks. Sky.” You.
He bends to take a handful of chaff. He throws it high, so it falls like straw snow over her, her cheeks, her cap. When she opens her eyes he is looking at her, truly seeing her, and then they are throwing and spinning and cartwheeling in the cut field like the kid she is and the kid he wants to be, there in the fields, before God and all He wants for them. And the world refused to end.
Sorrow is waiting when she leaves it; she is watching for her from its very edge. There is red dirt around Sorrow’s mouth and down the front of her, as if she has been rubbing it into herself and eating it. Perhaps she has.
“You coming in?” Dust calls, smiling.
Amity can feel the straw poking from her skirt and cap as Sorrow’s hands worry themselves around the strap. Her eyes accuse her.
“It isn’t evil,” Amity says. “It isn’t anything. The fields are just dirt, like Mother said.”
Sorrow rushes at Amity and slaps her dirty hands over her mouth, strap swinging around her neck.
“Sorrow!” Dust shouts.
Amity peels back her sister’s fingers, turning her head from her. “Nothing happened,” she says. “We didn’t do anything.”
Sorrow narrows her eyes at both of them, from the dirt of their shoes to their sunburned cheeks.
Dust lets loose a laugh then. “You don’t scare me, Sorrow.”
“Don’t,” Amity whispers. “She’s proud.”
“Scared of a field. You don’t scare anybody.”
Sorrow looks at Amity and her face is white around her red dirt mouth. She rips off the wrist strap and throws it at Amity’s feet. Then she turns on her clog and goes.
“She’s nothing but a bully,” Dust says.
“I know.” Amity watches the shape of her sister, how her long shadow reaches into the fields even if her body won’t.
They see then, even as Sorrow is looking back at them, that the barn doors are open. Dust goes to check each metal bin and pull each padlock. “She wasn’t in here,” he says. In the barn where he sleeps, his motorcycle has f
allen over, the kickstand tucked in. “Big deal,” he says, tenderly righting it, shaking his head.
Then they hear a horrible howling.
Dust rushes back to the stable walls, back where the kittens are, and she sees him pulling the tumbling bits of fur apart to count them, “One, two, three, four…” he counts, again and again as the mother cat screams. “Where’s the white one?”
“Was Sorrow here?” is all that Amity can say.
Sorrow is not on the porch, not at her bathroom door. But she has been there. There is fresh dirt heaped before the door and sticky red dirt handprints up its face. There are all of her signs and symbols, her swirls and fingerprints. Set before it is a broad, flat rock and on it are more of Sorrow’s symbols, her dots and spirals, telling God and the holy world of Amity’s betrayal. She has seen them up and down every wall of the room.
She doesn’t have to lift the rock. She can see the small white flattened paw sticking out.
She curls her good and her bad hand in. She knows she cannot heal this. There is no point in rubbing them together to heat them, to press them onto its flesh. Only God can raise the dead and she knows better than to try. She searches for a prayer in her head for the kitten, but all she can think of is, “Make Sorrow stop.” In the corner of a field she buries the kitten, the rock planted over it where Sorrow would never see it. If Sorrow notices that they are gone, she never says.
She doesn’t tell Dust or the old man. She doesn’t tell Mother. She tucks the murder away with all her other secrets, the ones she keeps for Sorrow that she will not, will not tell.
BEFORE: Eve and Sorrow
When her daughter was born, Amaranth could only think of Eve. “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow,” the Bible said. “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” Giving birth, her husband away and Hope panting over her, breathing for her, she knew what she would name her second child, should she live.