by Riley, Peggy
“Sister wives?”
“My ancestors were among the first pioneers of Utah, the Latter-day Saints. She became fourth wife to a farmer on the trail.”
“So you think it’s normal to have more than one wife? You’re genetically predisposed?”
“No,” he said. “I left that church. It has nothing to do with me or what I believe. I have seen how the Principle can unravel faith, destroy families. It happens all over the world. It always has.”
“So does murder.”
He looked at her, pained. “I had no idea that your love was so selfish.”
She leaped from their bed. “Selfish? I’m your wife, for God’s sake! Is it selfish to marry?”
“It is,” he said. “This is why I thought I would not. But once…” He was looking at her stomach, at the flat front of her dress, and she hated him for it. She decided, in an instant, that she would leave him. She wouldn’t wait to be told to go.
“God asks us to live in love,” he told her. “He doesn’t put any limits on love.”
“Well, I do.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see it. I will make her family, to protect what we’ve built here and to protect you. I have made you a vow. I will not lose my family, not again. I could not bear it.” He wrapped his arms around her, so that she couldn’t leave. She could not breathe. He held her until all the fight had left her, whispering, “Families aren’t only given to you. The best of families are made by choice and made from scratch.”
She told herself that it didn’t matter if he married an old, old woman. It wasn’t a real marriage; there would be no paperwork and no one would know. Only he felt it would give them legitimacy on the land, a moral right, and she could see the sense in the logistics of it. Why should the government profit from an old woman’s childlessness? But it was hard to submit to preparing the house for an autumn wedding, hard to make a bouquet of the last of summer’s flowers. It was hard to powder and dress the woman, lay her back in her bed, and see in her rheumy eyes that she had no idea she was a bride.
At the moment of the ceremony, Amaranth stood with the stitched sheet of his ancestors and the weight of her wedding ring in her fist, wondering how she would learn to share them. Her husband spread his arms wide, encircling the bed and the old, old woman. “Love asks us to make our hearts a home, big enough to shelter anyone. Think of all the women in the world with no one. Who will be their family, if we do not?”
Amaranth watched the gaze of each woman draw inward, as if remembering her own history of loneliness, loss, and betrayal. And she hung her head. He had given her a shelter, hadn’t he, by marrying her? She was grateful to belong to a family and to have someone to try to love with her whole heart. Why did she begrudge an old woman at the end of her life the same?
She smiled at him, to show him she could put her selfishness aside, her fear, her anger. She shook the stitched sheet across the old, old woman, so that he could tell the story of his family. She took her ring off and held it out.
“This woman never wore this ring. She gave her own ring to me, so that I might marry.” He took the ring and placed it on the end of the woman’s twisted finger, easing it over her painful, swollen knuckles. “I take you for wife,” he pronounced. “I take you for family.”
“I take you for family,” the women echoed.
“I take you for wife,” Amaranth said, shuddering, trying to keep her smile intact.
He kissed the ring on the woman’s finger. He kissed the woman’s grizzled mouth. He took the ring and slid it back onto Amaranth’s finger and kissed her, his lips already damp.
Amaranth waited for the three women in the circle to laugh then, to reveal at last that this had all been a painful joke, designed to dupe her, to mock her desperation to be loved. But they were silent, visibly moved.
Her husband held his hand out to her and the women filed to the kitchen, murmuring about cake. He sat on the bed beside the old woman and pulled Amaranth down to sit. He held her and stroked her, promised that nothing would change between them. Amaranth would be at the very center of his life and his marriage, come what may. Then he lay down beside the old, old woman. Amaranth tried to get up, but he pulled her down flat, a wife on either side of him. He took Amaranth’s hand and turned to kiss the old, old woman.
He placed a hand on the old woman’s sagging face. She covered her own face, her eyes shut, streaming, humiliated. He placed a hand on the woman’s flat chest and he cupped Amaranth’s breast. He slid his hand up Amaranth’s skirt and she turned her head, afraid that he felt the old, old woman with his other hand. And then he was over her, staring down into Amaranth’s eyes.
She heard the old woman take a phlegmy breath. He pushed Amaranth’s skirt up to her waist and he moved himself inside her, shaking the bed frame, shaking the old woman by his side. He moved within her, pushing her head back into the bed. His breath grew rasped and loud and she prayed with each movement—give… me… a… child—until he hauled himself out of her, suddenly, and came in an arc across the stitching of the old sheet and the body of the old, old woman. He looked down, startled, into Amaranth’s eyes.
And so a ritual was born.
In the morning she scrubbed the sheet and threaded a needle. She stitched herself down to him and his family, there, in the very center of the sheet. Two months later his second wife was dead, and when they buried her with all her artifacts, her husband said it was to keep them safe.
Amaranth only thought how it would make her disappear as if she never had existed, never lived or wanted or married or died there. Amaranth wondered if he would do the same to her when she died. Make her disappear.
28
News
Bradley licks his finger at the kitchen table, to flick a page of newspaper. He scans the page, finger poised and wet, searching the paper as he has the papers in the heap before him for news of a church on fire. He squints at the small print and she thinks of the kitchen drawer filled with eyeglasses back home, left behind at the death of a wife, picked up and worn again as younger wives aged.
There is a paper in Amaranth’s pocket. It crinkles as she bends to scoop beans from the bins, less than half full now. Dust handed the paper to her in the parking lot. “I didn’t show Amity,” he told her, but she could see from his face that he had read it. She could see how he looked at her now. She read and reread it when no one was looking, and when she finally showed it to Bradley, he went straight into town for a newspaper. Every day he buys one now.
The paper Dust gave her says that her husband is missing and wanted for questioning by local police. It does not mention who else is missing or if anyone else is wanted. It does not mention the number of wives or children missing. The police do not know who lived there, of course, which had been the purpose of their secrecy. “Multiple wives and children” is all the paper will commit to.
It does not say that Amaranth is missing or wanted, that she took her daughters and abandoned her husband, her family, saved her own skin. The paper doesn’t know that she lived there or bore her children there. There isn’t a scrap of paperwork for anything that anyone else did, but her marriage was his paper marriage. There will be a record of it, somewhere. They will want to find her, once they know she exists.
The police want to speak to her husband to investigate claims of molestation from “an estranged plural wife of the compound.” She knows this will be Hope—it must be Hope—and that it means she is all right, somewhere, safe and still trying somehow to make everything right. It was Hope who had sent the police when she had first left, in the vain belief that she could help Sorrow. Hope couldn’t have known that speaking to the police would lead to the siege, that her former family’s fears would rise until they bubbled over into the fire that would destroy them. Even after all that happened, she still missed her friend, dearly.
Most of what happened is not in the paper. There is no mention of the siege at all, or of the days and nights of terror the police brought. It says that Zach
ariah is wanted for shooting at a police officer, though he did not, and for setting their temple on fire, which he must have done. The police take no responsibility for anything that happened. Their siege, undocumented, will be no Waco.
Down the side of the article, there are paragraphs in boxes on the history of polygamy and interviews with local townspeople. “Did you know there was a polygamous cult in your neighborhood?” they are asked. One local business owner is quoted as saying, “We knew they were strange, but we didn’t know by how much.” It concludes with the suggestion that their cult had a “death wish, common in splinter groups such as these—a desire to offer believers up as a kind of sacrifice.” She knows, at the end, no one wanted to die. They were afraid and exhausted, frightened beyond measure for their freedom and children, but no one wanted to die. No one but her husband wanted the world to end at all.
Every word that Bradley searches for serves to shame her. Here is proof of her betrayal, black-and-white proof of all their community did and failed to do. How could he want her to stay now, when the man she loved is become a monster, wanted by the police for arson, shooting, and the rape of his child? That word isn’t there, that hateful word, but she knows it is what he is looking for.
Who is this man she is married to, still? And why is there a picture of him, on Dust’s paper, that she had never seen? Why is he holding a rack of numbers across his chest and staring at the camera with the look of hatred he gave when the knock came at the temple door and he thought he would lose his family? It says he served time in prison, years before she ever met him, for setting alight a police car outside the Short Creek compound.
A pan boils over on the stove top, flooding scum across the burners, down to the floor. She makes a mess of everything, she thinks, dabbing the spill: beans, leaving, daughters, men. Who could want her as she was?
Bradley closes the paper and she looks up.
“Nothin’,” he says. “Another lucky escape.”
She thinks of her leaving and the paper in her pocket. She thinks of all she knew and allowed and did. Her every cell wants to run away from it. She wants to explain, or justify, or apologize, but she only says, “Soup?”
29
The Devil’s Box
Sorrow builds an altar in the bathroom.
“Look,” she says, proud and shy, opening the red dirt–marked door so Amity can see it, safe from the threshold.
Her altar is a bright blue wooden pallet, up on its end. Atop it is an armless rubber dolly, its hair burned into wiry coils. Its arm sockets are stuffed with stiff brown feathers and bits of colored string and twine, fluorescent blue and orange. Its legs stick straight out, and in its lap, wrapped like a baby, is the blue china shard.
“Anyone can build a temple,” she tells Amity. “I’ve seen it.”
Amity doesn’t know why anyone would choose to build a temple in the dark of a bathroom, but then she thinks of the room below. She slides herself a step back, beyond the threshold, too far for Sorrow to reach. She doesn’t tell Sorrow about the temple made of books and computers. She wants to keep that secret to herself, like the secret of what is happening within her.
The old devil hadn’t been impressed by her Grapes of Wrath.
“What in Sam Hill do I want that for?” he said. “I got my own. It’s a first edition. You’ll have to take yours back, you know. You can’t keep a library book; they’ll send the police after you.”
“I don’t like the police,” Amity told him. She looked at the devil’s shotgun and thought of her Waco mother.
He was similarly unimpressed with Amity’s tale of a paper with a picture of her father that she couldn’t read. “Girl, we gotta sort you out,” he told her. “We gotta learn you your ABCs.” But he didn’t. Instead, he worried about all he didn’t know. “Why don’t nobody tell me nothin’?”
“Nobody tells me nothing, too.”
“That’s ’cause we’re youngest and oldest. We’re the bread on a stupid sandwich. I reckon that’s why they’ve got me watching you.”
“I’m sure I’m watching you,” she said.
He was impressed with the story of the plastic oracle, however. “Sort of like this one,” she told him, pointing at the black box in the corner. “Except those ones switch on and you can see all these pictures on it. Yours just sits there.”
“It does not sit there! Lookee here, you switch that TV on.”
“What’s a TV?”
“Go on and push that silver button.”
When she did, the face of it was transformed. A fine white electric snow came, roaring a chaos of hiss and bee buzz like Sorrow’s angel language but a million times worse. She put her hands over her ears. “Make it stop!”
“Hang on,” the old man said, and he leaned over, nearly rolling out of his bed, to lunge at two silver poles on its top. “I can’t do it,” he said. “Go wiggle them rabbit ears. Go on.”
She set her hands on the rods and the box went silent. And then, as on the computer, there was a picture, tiny people inside it, sitting on a sofa, moving, while invisible people laughed. It was better than the library’s box.
“Look what your hands can do,” the old man said. “Don’t let go, now.”
Amity looked at her hands on the metal rods. Yes, she thought. Look how they heal the TV.
Now she doesn’t want to hear about the Joads. She wants to stand with her arms out, turning snow into pictures. She spins the dial and there is always a new picture waiting for her. Children eat soup. Men punch one another in the face. Once, a man stares out at her and tells her, just her, that they are still at war. “Still at war?” she hollers. “It’s started—we didn’t even know—the war in heaven!”
“War in heaven? Change the channel,” he says.
She spins the dial, around and around. She knows that she is making the pictures. They are coming from her hands, through the rods, from God. She can’t wait to tell Dust about it, this better, moving oracle, even if the old man wants her to stop.
“You wanna do some readin’?” he asks her.
She can hardly hear him to answer. She cannot move her eyes from the pictures, dazed by the light and the heat of it, the power in her hands.
“Your eyes’ll go square.” He gives a harrumph that becomes a mighty, chesty cough.
“But I’m making the pictures,” she tells him. She holds out her hands to show him and the box makes snow.
“Bull pokey you are. Them pictures is whizzing about in the air. The antennae pull ’em down so you can see ’em, and the box sticks ’em all together.”
“Is that so?” Amity looks at her hands again. Her hands are antennae. Now she knows their name, antennae, bringing down God.
“Open that book there now and turn that thing off,” he says. “Show me where we were.”
The screen pops and crackles without her. “Those Joads will never get to California.”
“You can’t read, so you won’t know if they will or won’t. I could tell you when they got there it was a land of milk and honey and they all had pie.”
“I think someone keeps sticking more pages on the end of the book when we’re not looking.” She looks at him, suspicious.
“Turn that off,” he says. He tries to swing his legs off the bed, lunging at the power button. “Damn legs,” he says. “Damn old legs.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Well, they don’t work, do they? Look at ’em.” He pushes back his covers to show off the long and crooked bones of him, his kneecaps purple as prunes. She turns and pushes the power button off.
“I can heal you.”
“You can what?”
She holds out her antennae-hands for him.
“I seen healers, you know,” he says. “I seen tent shows and revivals and ballyhoos. All that dust left us wantin’ miracles, but they never came.”
Amity rubs her hands together. “Will I heal you?” She extends them toward his kneecaps. He watches her hands, growing nearer.
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br /> He stops her. “I might only get one crack at your healing. Lookee here.” He begins to unbutton his pajama top to show off his grizzled chest and she turns her head. She thinks of her father. “Fix this,” he says, banging on his breastbone. He takes a breath that coughs and rattles.
“Okay,” she tells him. “Shut your eyes now.”
She rubs her hands together and places them flat across his plane of bone and skin. He takes a ragged breath and she can feel the air in him, under her hands, blow coarse as sand. She closes her eyes and she can see her hands slip into the skin of him, into his bones. She feels them slip through a gap in his Adam ribs and reach for the bags of gristle he breathes through. She feels the sacs cook in her fingers, ooze and bubble, until whatever is stuck inside him turns to liquid and runs clear, just as it did in Sorrow’s belly when she touched it. She slips her hands back out of him and when she opens her eyes again, his skin is whole and clean, as if she hasn’t touched him at all.
He takes an experimental breath. “I didn’t feel nothin’.” He takes another. “Did you heal me?” He breathes in hard and waits to choke on it. He breathes again. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he says.
Amity smiles. “I should hope not.”
As repayment, he says she will learn her letters. She doesn’t know what letters are or if there’s a rule about them or not, and either way he makes her open his book and hold it.
“What’s that letter there?” he asks her.
“Three sticks,” she tells him. “Like a headless man.”
“That’s a t. T goes ‘tuh.’ You say it.”
“T goes ‘tuh,’ ” she apes. She thinks of all the things in the world that she might know if she could read about them, and she doesn’t know if God wants her to know them or not.