by Riley, Peggy
“I’m not stupid,” Sorrow tells him. Amity says nothing; she isn’t sure herself.
“Right, then. Tell me what you got.”
“What I’ve got?”
“Tell people sumpin’ new about the end of time. Stop wallowin’ in what they already know and tell ’em what they can do about it. We need a rainmaker. Give us some hope. That’s what sells.”
Amity thinks of home and shakes her head. She can’t remember anything of hope but the mother who left with Adam and Justice, and none of them had anything like hope then.
Sorrow studies the ceiling, deciding. “There is no hope. The end is near.”
He points at the TV now, where a woman has joined the man, sitting beside him and crying as symbols flash below them both. “They’re not selling good news. You wanna cry like that at folks?”
The TV woman begins to howl then, pointing at the numbers, her padded shoulders jerking up and down. “No,” she says. “Why isn’t he crying?”
“Give him time. Look at ’em, Sorrow. You see them numbers getting bigger? People fork out cash for misery. People love to watch sufferin’. You can sell that, if you want to.”
She shakes her head. “We don’t believe in suffering. We worship and we love. We don’t want to cry like that for people.” Sorrow sits up straighter now. “I don’t want to have to dress like that and I don’t want that black stuff running down my face.”
“What are you selling, then?”
“Father tells us that there is a family of God and all can belong to it and be loved, forever. That’s what makes women come.”
“With their tea sets.” He shoots Amity a wink.
“I wouldn’t cry if I was a preacherman,” Sorrow says. “Father never cries.”
“You could be a preacherlady,” the old man says. “But you’d have to study. You’d have to learn to read and write. You gotta know your Bible and what people want to hear of it.”
“Father says we must have the Bible inside us. We don’t have to read to find God.”
“Well, I’m tellin’ you that your father is wrong. And he’s on the run now, ain’t he, so what does he know?”
Sorrow starts to snap back at the old man, then her shoulders droop. “I thought he’d come by now.”
“I don’t think he’d dare,” the old man says. “God wasn’t never scared of police. Think of Jesus. Did He run from the cross? He did not.” He lets Sorrow think on that, then he tells her, “Anyways, you’re forgettin’ the biggest part of preachin’.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you need sumpin’ flashy to wear.”
At that, Amity backs to the screen and the porch. She’s tired of God and she’s tired of her sister. The old man was hers and Sorrow took him. Even the TV was hers first, but Sorrow gets everything. Sorrow always takes what she wants. She slips away, while no one is watching, to the gas station to open the door to Sorrow’s altar. There, in the darkness, she takes her clothes off. She looks at her dark shape in the room’s wavy mirror, but she sees nothing but ghostly skin. And onto this skin, she slides the inky fabric of the blue dress, slippery on her body, loose and flowing where she has only known ties and straps. And then she puts all of her clothes back on over it, to wear her dress like a secret.
She finds Dust in his barn, kneeling before his motorcycle, worshipping it with oil. She watches kittens roll in straw and swishes her hips to feel the blue slip slink beneath her skirts until Dust looks up. “You need the bathroom, go,” he says.
“I don’t need the bathroom,” she says, cross now.
He cannot see her secret. She will have to show him.
He swings his leg astride his motorcycle and pulls the choke out, turns the key. The engine fires and stalls, filling the barn with an oily blue smoke.
“Is it supposed to do that!” she yells as he restarts the engine.
“I’m still fixing it!” he yells back. “Piston ring!” He switches the engine off and she pushes open the barn door, kittens scattering, to let out the blue smoke and breathe. “Piston ring’s sticking.” He slaps the seat, as if disciplining a child.
“When will your bike be ready?”
“Soon. Real soon.”
“And then will you go?”
“Once the harvest’s done,” he says. “I wouldn’t leave him my work.”
Amity kisses him, square on the cheek.
“Hey,” he says and he wipes the spot, embarrassed.
“Will you show me your scar?” she asks him.
“You’ve seen it.”
“I healed it. I want to see it healed.”
He gives the scar a rub beneath his shirt. “You are so weird,” he says.
“Am I? How am I weird?”
He lets his shirt down off his back. His scar is red and upraised, just as before.
“Your scar has come back,” she tells him.
“Where do you think it went?” He tries to pull his shirt back on, but her hands are already inside it, rubbing at the knots of his scar. “Stop touching it.”
“But I healed you.”
“You can’t heal people. Nobody can. Let go.” He buttons his shirt up and she undoes her pinafore. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t look,” she says. When he turns away, she tugs the round collars from her neck and wriggles out of the too-short sleeves. She drops her dress off her arms and removes the underblouse to expose the deep V of the blue slip, its billowing cups and the bones of her chest. She thinks of the girls she saw in town, with their legs out and their hair down, and she pulls the kerchief off. “You can look now,” she says, and she lets him turn. She lets him look. And because he has nothing to say and his mouth is open, she moves toward him, fastens her mouth upon his.
She looks at him, blurry, close-up, and he pulls his mouth away and wipes it with the back of his hand. She reaches for his belt buckle.
“Amity!” He scoots back from her. “What are you doing?”
“It’s all right,” she says.
“It isn’t. You don’t do this.”
“I do,” she says. “I’m bleeding.”
“Jeez,” he says. “Oh, jeez.”
“I watch things. I know what to do.”
“Well, I don’t. You’re just a kid. Put your dress on.”
“I’m old enough to make Jesus now. Look at me.”
Dust slaps her hands away and does his shirt up, buttoning it all the way to the top, as if to keep her out of it. “There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there? There’s something wrong with all of you. Why isn’t anybody doing anything?”
“I don’t know,” Amity tells him. This is all she knows and all she wants, and her hands are outstretched, empty. They reach for something to heal.
But Dust is running away from her. He sprints from the barn and she follows him, cutting across fields for the house and the gas station. She trails behind him, blue slip fluttering, sticking to her skin in the heat, and she wonders if it’s a kind of game, some prelude to Jesus-making, a step in the process she’s never seen, despite her watching. Maybe they do things differently here.
She watches him reach for Sorrow’s door, bang on it and shout like a man possessed. No one can resist Sorrow, not even Dust. When Sorrow opens it to him, he reaches for her, puts his hands right on her and shakes her, and Sorrow doesn’t yell. She doesn’t pull away or shove him back, as she should. She lets Dust touch her and she lets him speak. She listens to him—she actually listens—and when she sees that Amity is watching, she pulls him into the bathroom, into her secret place with her secret altar, where she takes no one but Amity. Amity wonders what he’ll find in there, what he’ll make of the things spread across her altar.
She wants to fling the door open and pull Dust out. He knows that Sorrow is dangerous in darkness—he saw how Sorrow cut her—but he doesn’t know everything Sorrow can do in a dark room. And if he didn’t want to do it with Amity, would he with Sorrow? Would Sorrow let him? And if he didn’t want t
hat, what on earth was it that he wanted from Sorrow? What would anybody want?
Amity pulls the blue slip off over her head and buttons her dress up. She stuffs the slip into a pile of trash. The door stays closed and she knows then that Sorrow has taken her Dust, taken him like the TV and the old man. Taken him, like Father. Taken him, like God.
34
Buds
Amaranth listens to Sorrow laughing. A noise that lifts her heart and tells her all things are possible now. There is nothing more she need wish for. On the other side of the house she stands, easy in conversation, speaking out loud, as any ordinary girl might. It is a far cry from last Sunday, when the television boomed preachers all day, robed men in glass churches, hellfire preachers on polyester settees, all hand claps and hallelujahs, while her children stared in silence.
Sorrow is changing; she can change.
The kitchen garden is a lush green from watering, a ragtag oasis of leaves and stems and fisted buds in every color: orange, fuchsia, violet. The storm moved the seeds from their ordered rows and floated them into untidy masses and clumps. Still, it will be a sight when the plants unfold and show their faces.
Another high-pitched giggle bursts from Sorrow and she cannot keep from grinning herself. When there is time, she decides, they will talk about Sorrow starting school, making friends her own age, girls who will teach her what normal girls are like. She will come to see how bright she is, how capable, once the fog of her father has cleared, once she has forgotten.
And chickens, she thinks. Chickens for Amity, who likes to take care of things.
Bradley comes back to her, shaking his head. “They’ve got my pa on the porch playin’ dress-up. I don’t know what they’re plannin’.”
“Well, whatever it is, go with it. Enjoy it. Sorrow’s laughing. Did you hear her?”
He strokes stray hairs back from her forehead, hairs that would have been kept by a cap. “Know what you’re growin’ out here yet?”
“I thought they’d be herbs.” She thought these would be healing herbs, actually, black haw and blessed thistle, squaw vine and lady’s mantle. It’s what she would have grown, if she were his wife. She was relieved to see no angelica, pennyroyal, calamint. If his wife’s seeds had grown emmenagogues or abortifacients, she would have felt compelled to tell him, so he would have proof of the reason his wife had miscarried, proof that the world wasn’t randomly cruel, that it wasn’t God but a woman who had chosen her own fate. These were herbs their community knew well, despite their constant desire for children.
“I hoped they’d be food,” he said. “Ma had carrots and beans out here.”
“They aren’t,” she says. “They’re flowers. Just flowers.”
“Flowers! What good are those?”
She laughs. “They’ll be beautiful.”
“Just like my wife,” he says. “Growing somethin’ nobody needs. Ain’t worth the water.”
“Beauty is its own purpose.”
“That so?” He squats down to look and shakes his head at the folly of them. “Flowers. When you plant seeds next time, make ’em somethin’ we can use.”
She laughs as he walks to the house, calling jokes to her daughters. It’s the closest she’ll get to a promise.
35
Shattercane
Sorrow rehearses, so that she will be ready.
“Stop spinnin’ around,” the old man calls from the porch. “You’re makin’ me seasick. Put down that old bit of bowl.”
Sorrow tells the old man about the little boy prophet. He tells her that the tent circuit is full of boys and men like him, prophesying disaster, telling the fortunes and futures of the faithful. “That’s the devil’s work,” Sorrow says.
“What else is prophecy? Just tellin’ the future, Bible-wise.”
Sorrow listens to him as if he is the first person ever to look at her and to see her and not want something. Amity watches them both, but there is no role for her in Sorrow’s show. She sits in the shade beneath the scabby tree, writing her name and Dust’s name, all the letters she knows in the world now, over and over on top of one another in the dirt with a stick.
“Do you believe?” Sorrow spins and points her arm out.
“I can’t hear you,” the old man cackles. “Speak up! Stop wiggling! Sock it to me, sister. Give it to me straight!”
Sorrow spins and laughs out loud.
Amity can only think of Dust and all that Sorrow won’t tell her. “I showed you the TV,” Amity said. “I took you to the old man. We don’t have secrets, you and me.”
“It’s nothing to do with you,” was all that Sorrow would say. Nor would Dust tell. He kept his distance from her, wouldn’t meet her eye, ashamed as he seemed to be of her. “I’m just trying to help, Amity. It’s stuff you don’t need to know,” is all he would give.
She wishes she had hidden somewhere, even inside the horrible room, so that she could see what they did and how they did it, so that she could see what it was that he wanted and make herself be it, if she could.
The day of Sorrow’s debut, Amity makes a handbill of sorts, following the old man’s instructions. Her name had to be written up large across a sheet, he told her, so people would know when to come and where. They tie his bedsheet to the front of the porch and she writes the letters as big as she can across it with old paint, running back and forth to look at his version of the word in the dirt. Even so, some of the letters don’t turn out like his. CMIN SOOON, she scrawls. SOROW.
Amity sweeps the porch for Sorrow. She drags kitchen chairs into the shade and gathers plastic-wrapped foodstuffs from the man’s small shop by way of refreshment; the old man insisted that there were always refreshments at entertainments, to bring in more cash. The old man finds a tie in his chifforobe and puts it on, dampens down what’s left of his hair, while Sorrow practices, daringly, in the bath upstairs, splashing and chanting for hours on end.
She gathers Sorrow’s audience, helping the old man to a chair, hectoring Mother and Bradley to come in from their hoeing and spraying. They sit in the shade and fan the backs of their necks in the last of the day’s heat. Dust wouldn’t come.
When Sorrow appears from the house, she is transformed. She is magnificent. She flings back the screen door and glides onto the porch, a shimmering vision in the old man’s silken robe from the Far East, a black tasseled sash pinching in her tiny waist. She turns her back to display a red satin-stitched dragon, teeth bared and claws curled. She has even removed her cloth cap to show pale, clean braids pinned into a halo. Her cheeks blush from the bath and all their looking.
Mother and Bradley elbow one another when they see her and the old man bobs his head in approval. And then Dust is beside her, settling onto a chair. Amity turns to him, to thank him for coming, and she watches his eyes widen, his mouth go slack. He cannot keep his eyes from Sorrow. No one can.
“Do you believe?” Sorrow asks. She starts to spin and stops herself, wavers. Then her arm shoots straight out, pointing at every watching face. “Do you believe?”
“I thought we were getting a show,” Bradley mutters. Mother scolds him as Sorrow bolts for the screen door. “Sorry,” Bradley calls. “Come on back.”
“Everybody gets hecklers,” the old man calls out. “Suck it up.”
Sorrow straightens the placket of the shiny robe and steps back to the edge of the porch. She makes a ball of her hands and flings them upright, as if she has thrown something hard at God. The black sleeves pool down onto her bony shoulders, showing the white sticks of her arms. “God the Father asks that we believe in Him, even when He’s hard to find, even when it seems He’s gone. God the Father asks us to believe in the unseen, to wait and watch for His signs even when we’re sure they’ll never come to us.” She drops her arms and the sleeves flow down to smother her hands. “God the Father is not here, but He is coming. Do you believe?”
Mother hisses as the man shifts in his chair. “How will this help her?” he lashes back.
�
�Go on, girl,” the old man calls. “Stick to the script.”
Sorrow stares stonily at her feet, but when Dust calls out, “Come on, Sorrow,” she gives him a rare smile that fires her face. Amity slumps in her chair and wishes the ground would take her in for comfort.
“The Lord will give you such a show,” Sorrow says. “A holy show that will shake you to your core. Are you ready?”
“Shoot,” Bradley says.
“I prophesy that the Lord will come like a storm from the north. He will pour out seven bowls of wrath onto your soil and ruin it.” A pink rash climbs up her neck. “Can you feel how He bakes your land?” Sorrow points out to the harvested fields. “This is the time for seers and prophets. They preach from the devil’s box with their hands out for money and a face full of tears, but the Lord says, He doesn’t need your money. He doesn’t want your clapping or crying. He wants your blood and your bodies. He needs the whole of your minds and your hearts, for there is nothing but Him. He is all there is. There are false prophets at work in the world who’ll say that you’re saved if you pray enough or pay enough, but they are wrong. I tell you I am the last, true prophet. I have seen the wrath of God! I will be His Second Coming!”
“Jesus,” Bradley says, and he stands up. “Will you listen to her?”
“Please,” Mother says. “Let her finish.”
“I can’t,” he says. “Will you tell her? Will you tell her she was raped and the whole thing she’s doing here is wrong—just—”
“Stop it, please,” Mother begs.
He turns to Sorrow, hands out. “Look, I know what happened to you and when they catch him, I hope they lock him up for a long time, but somebody’s gotta tell you it’s nothin’ to do with the world ending or God. He’s your father, Sorrow. And he raped you and it’s wrong.”
Sorrow’s hands press to her chest. “This is holy work.”
“Sorrow!” Mother’s hands fly to her mouth and Sorrow turns on her.