by Riley, Peggy
“Hello?” she calls into it. She shines the flashlight on the entryway, across the blackened walls and the sodden quilts and tapestries that hang there. “Hello?”
“Sorrow?” Amity calls behind her. “Dust?”
Amaranth moves into the house, one arm reaching back for Amity. She shines the light into the parlor, its scorched walls and moldy needlepoint furnishings, the split cushions, the velveteen sofa erupting with springs. She moves around the newel post of the stairway and down the hallway. Glass crunches under their clogs.
In the kitchen, the floor has been flooded. The icebox door is open, dripping, reeking of milk gone off. Each cupboard door stands open and emptied. The walls are smeared with dark shapes, blood or feces, molasses. She steps on a china saucer and sees that the floor is covered with bits of china, gold-rimmed with tiny pink flowers, from the old, old woman’s trousseau, as if there has been a one-room earthquake, as if every cupboard has vomited.
She opens a drawer for storm candles and safety matches and lights them, setting them into broken cups. She makes a ring of light for Amity. “You stay here,” she says.
“Don’t leave me,” Amity whimpers.
“I just want to look upstairs.”
“Please.”
Amaranth looks at her daughter, her pale face, her outstretched bandages, the dark rings below her eyes. Her daughter is half a head taller since they left this house; how has she not noticed her growing, how her wrists jut from her sleeves? But her face is as taut and frightened as when she was made to run from all she had known. “We can look in the daylight,” she tells her. “I’m not leaving you. Okay?” She gathers up a few of the candles and places the flashlight, gently, between Amity’s two bound hands. “It will all seem fine, come morning. You’ll see.” She leads her child back through the house, their shadows rippling across the walls.
She settles Amity back into the truck. The interior dome lamp is burned out, but she turns the ignition key half on to switch the headlights to full bright, telling herself it is for Amity. She is not afraid of the dark or the things flapping and flitting in it, catching the corner of her eye. It is only a bit of plastic bag blowing or a Styrofoam cup, caught by the wind.
Amity stares out into the light. Her hands reach like a zombie’s. “What happened here?”
“The fire? You remember.”
“No. Before. What made us all like this?”
Amaranth turns to her. “It started with love. It started with your father and his wanting to help people, to make a family for them—and with them.”
Amity’s head whips to the side, distracted. “Look!”
A flash of white runs across the headlight beams.
Amity’s hands flap uselessly at the door handle, to get out.
“We mustn’t scare her,” Amaranth says.
“Sorrow,” Amity whispers.
They peer through the window, but they see nothing more.
When Amaranth wakes, Amity is stretched across her, sprawled across her lap.
In the dawn’s light, it all looks much worse. The raised beds before the house have been trod in and flattened. The goats have been in them, she figures, eating the spring buds and summer weeds, once there were no humans to bang buckets filled with peelings to feed them.
She turns the ignition key off with a groan. She tries to start the car and finds it won’t. The headlights she left on have drained the battery. She’ll have to check the barns for jumper cables. She’ll have to find another car with power.
The house in the daylight is worse, too, and Amity stays in the car, as if she doesn’t want to see the damage. Walls are polka-dotted with black mold. Amaranth mounts the stairs to search the rooms above and her foot goes through a stair tread, as if the house itself will pull her down into it. She clings to the handrail and hauls herself up to the landing.
Each bedroom door stands open. There are small things dropped and scattered along the floor. A sodden ribbon, an ashen strap. The plump, headless body of a rag doll bears the tread of a boot print. Inside bedrooms, dresser drawers are open, their contents spilling. She finds blond baby curls and bobby pins, a damp brown envelope filled with translucent milk teeth, and her heart aches for the children who lost them, the mothers who nursed them, the blur and chaos of the family she loved and left.
And then she tells herself no. The love she longs for is a lie. She must remember.
In her own room at the back, her drawers and cupboards have been opened and searched. She reaches between the mattress and the springs to find what she has hidden, the proof of her life that she left behind: the black-and-white photograph of her mother, her marriage certificate, and the brittle paper of Eve’s death certificate, a reminder that this was never Eden. She takes a last look at the ransacked room and jams them all into her apron pocket. This is all she has to show for her life here.
The hatch to the attic is open, but the ladder has been pulled up. She stands beneath it, calling up into the hole. “Sorrow?”
Back outside, she finds that Amity is not in the car. Heart pounding, Amaranth rushes to find her beside the temple steps, kneeling before a huddled pile of trash, a soiled, makeshift altar of stuffed teddy bears, a Virgin Mary votive candle, a single faded American flag.
The temple looks as if it has only just been abandoned. But when she looks more closely, through its shattered windows, she can see that the floor has blackened and buckled from the heat. It is studded with debris from the fire. Her husband’s temple, stilled from the spinning of women, silent from the gunshots and the shouting and Sorrow’s rasping tongue, burned now and ruined.
She thinks of the food in the room below and how hungry Amity must be, how hungry she is. She looks at the thin ribbon of caution tape and wonders what the police found before they unspooled it. She wonders what they took away.
Amity looks at her. “It doesn’t look safe,” she says.
It isn’t safe, Amaranth thinks. And it never was.
38
Goodwill Industries
Mother walks her away from the house and the gardens, over their land to count and inventory the cars and campers parked beneath trees. She names the wife who drove each one. She opens trunks and glove compartments, looking for paperwork, looking for supplies and jumper cables. She inserts keys into ignitions, all jangling from the one big key ring Father kept, while Amity follows tire tracks on grass and gravel, looking for the single track that will tell her where Dust’s motorcycle was, bringing Sorrow.
Amity hears her mother scream and she rushes back to find her inside a car, her head down on a steering wheel. The ring of keys has been flung onto the dirt. “It’s dead,” she says. “They’re all dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
Mother lifts her head. “No, Amity, the cars. No one’s dead.”
“How do you know? Where are all the mothers? Where is everybody?”
Mother leans over to pick the keys up. “This is the seventh wife’s car. She drove it across the country to get here. I need the car of a later wife, a newer wife.…”
Mother wanders toward the fields of alfalfa, heavy with purple blooms, no longer forbidden. Amity follows. They hear the drone of bees. Mother claps her hands for the goats, to see if they will come and be milked by her, but they are used to their freedom now. They stare back with their slit-iris devil eyes. Beyond, the barns are fallen, collapsed under their metal roofs. Amity remembers when she saw them on fire, but Mother only gives them a quick search and says there is nothing for them inside.
Mother finally gets Wife Forty-Eight’s car to start, though the tires are flat on their rims. She tells Amity they’ll drive into town to buy some cables.
“Will there be food?” Amity asks her.
Mother steers them toward the temple. “I thought there would be food left here.” She idles a moment beside the sag of the caution tape. Then she moves them down the dirt trail, driving them to a gas station and to town.
Mother unwraps her bandage
s at the pharmacy counter. Amity looks at the spinner racks of glass jars, balms, and unguents. She looks anywhere but down at her hands, being slowly revealed. The pharmacist in his white coat takes a quick look at them and then he runs away from them, into a small glass room, where he speaks to another man and points at Amity, and she turns away from them to stare into a corner filled with wooden legs. And then there are two men, staring into her palms. They ask her to wiggle her fingers.
“What are you putting on these hands?” the man asks.
“Comfrey and honey. Ash from the fire,” Mother says. “I mash a poultice. I hope—”
“You’ve done very well,” the pharmacist says, taking in her dress and Amity’s. “Under the circumstances. You’ve no eschars. You’ll keep these scars, of course, but they’ll fade over time.” He flexes Amity’s fingers back from her palms and she can feel the skin stretching. She fears it will rip. “Keep these wrappings off now. The skin needs to breathe.”
“We do a burn balm,” the other man says. “Better than honey. I’ll get you a tube.”
“But is she all right?” Mother asks. “Will she be all right?”
The pharmacist smiles at Amity. “You might have considered skin grafts, but this is how she is now. And such a pretty little girl.”
Amity pulls her hands from his. Liar.
“Try to use your hands, child,” he says. “They’ll forget what they’re made for.”
At this, she looks up at him. She is forgetting what her hands can do, too.
People stare in towns here, same as Oklahoma. They walk and laugh and buy too much, just like there. She can see the signs of the shops up and down the street, now that she isn’t being told to hide or stay down, and the windows piled high with baked goods and ice creams, women swinging shopping bags in wide, proud arcs. There seems to be so much that people want in the world.
Seeing a sign, she spells out the letters in GOODWILL INDUSTRIES and she thinks that’s what they all need, some goodwill. She looks inside at the clothing, hanging and stacked, and thinks of the day when Sorrow ran and Mother sent her to buy something that she could make into a wrist strap. How surprised she was to see all the manner of ways that a woman could dress back then, when she exchanged a coin for a white belt that had lost its dress.
“We don’t need anything,” Mother says.
Two girls walk past then, seeing Amity’s dress and pinafore, her mother’s dress and apron, the raw skin of her outstretched hands. They bend their heads together and, once past, they let out loud guffaws, exaggerated and oversize laughs, butts swinging. Amity curls herself over her hands. She wishes Sorrow were there. She misses her wrist strap.
Mother shifts the brown bag on her hip, the apples and cheese, the squishy loaf of bread. “Perhaps we could afford something.”
The thrift store is filled with garments and housewares, racks of clothes and stacks of furniture, tables on sofas, chairs upside down. There are shelves of old books and crockery, china, and crooked-heeled, foot-worn shoes. Amity brushes by a rack of blue jeans, faded and ragged-hemmed, as Dust’s were, while Mother flicks dresses across a metal rod: flowers, polka dots, stripes. She rubs fabric between careful fingers and reads labels. “These are man-made. Cotton and wool is what you want. Nothing that says ‘Keep Away from Fire.’ ”
Amity stares at a rack filled with slippery fabric and elastic straps, breast-shaped and crotch-shaped. In a fire, they’d be the first to go and quite rightly, too.
Mother takes her into a curtained cubicle to stand with her arms out, so that Mother can untie and unwrap her, pull dress after dress over her head. The full-length mirror shows her, shows all of her. She has never seen all of herself, all at once, and she steps close to it, closer, until she hits her nose on it. The mirror shows a dress, short, exposing her knees, a pleated riot of burgundy roses in blowsy bloom. Mother cinches a satin bow, pink and shiny as her unwrapped hands, about her waist. “Lovely,” she says.
“Will this stop people from staring?” Amity asks.
Mother looks in the mirror and at herself in her own long skirt and braided hair. Her eyes tell Amity that people will always stare at them, no matter where they go. She pulls Amity’s sash open and unzips her.
Amity whispers, “I just don’t want people to look at me.”
“I know,” Mother says. “Me, neither. You go and choose something.”
She follows Amity over to the denim and her hands stroke the jeans and tops, uncertainly, fingering labels as if she suspects more fires are coming.
Once Amity is dressed, Mother counts the modest fold of bills in her apron pocket and pays for Amity’s clothing. She folds Amity’s old dress and pinafore and slides them toward the young girl behind the counter. “Perhaps someone can use these,” she says.
Amity rubs her legs together, each clad in its own denim tube. She bounces on the rubber soles of her new secondhand sneakers and looks down at her T-shirt-covered front, where cartoon fruit sits. Her hair is in two looped braids beneath Dust’s kerchief. She wishes he could see her now.
The girl leans on her elbows and snaps her gum. “You all from that cult that caught fire?”
Mother frowns at her and snatches a long dress from a rack, dark and plain. She says nothing as she hurries into the cubicle with it, stopping only to snatch a handful of those slippery, flammable undergarments.
Back home, Mother makes them a picnic, slicing apples, cheese, and bread to eat on a patch of weeds in the afternoon sun, where goats watch, from a distance. There is nowhere to sit inside that isn’t damp or smelly. Mother doesn’t eat. She pushes her food about and stares at the house. She pats the coil of jumper cables and tells Amity that when she gets the truck going they might as well go, and Amity can only stare at her then. How could they go without Sorrow? Why wouldn’t she come out?
Amity thinks of all the things that Sorrow loves and how she has none of them here now. No bowl, no Bible, no Father, no hellfire on TV. No one to watch her spin or pray. Of all the things Amity has to offer, she decides the best thing is herself—and sandwiches. She folds bread over cheese into awkward, spongy half-moons. She forces her hands around an apple.
When Mother bends over an engine, Amity creeps into the house. She trembles in the entryway, in the cool and the damp. “I know you’re here,” she whispers. “I just want to see you.” She thought Sorrow would be waiting for them, arms crossed to scold them from the front door. She thought Dust would be there, waiting for a lift back to Oklahoma. “What took you so long?” he’d ask and hop in the back of the truck. “Get me out of here,” he’d say.
But he is not here, not waiting for her. His note said he was taking Sorrow. She could read those letters, the ones spelling Sorrow and home. But when she looked at it, checking every letter, she knew she wasn’t in it. She couldn’t find the letters of her own name. He hadn’t written her good-bye.
Still, it wasn’t Sorrow’s fault. Everyone moved heaven and earth for Sorrow. Why shouldn’t Dust? Her hands drop the apple. She sits on the bottom stair and sets the fold of bread down, which springs open to display its cheese. Either she or the sandwich will lure out Sorrow.
39
The Temple
When Amaranth looks up from the car’s engine for her daughter, she is not there. Amity is gone again. “Amity?” she calls toward the house and the gardens. She calls to the fields and the goats.
At the temple, she sees someone has broken the caution tape to enter it. The ends wave like arms. She looks up the concrete steps and into the temple, but the room is empty. Undisturbed, but filthy. Sodden lumps dot the wooden floor.
“Amity?” she calls. She stretches a clog to nudge one. Almost uniform, the debris is, spread across the floor like low hummocks on a lunar landscape. She taps the lump with her toe to find it is fabric, heavy cloth, stuck hard to the floor, the rucked boards that were once planed and smoothed by the turning of a hundred wooden shoes. Amaranth bends down to find it has a waistband and gathers. The p
iles are skirts, dropped where each wife stood, spinning, and she thinks, my God. Rapture. Her husband was right.
Wives had been taken, pulled to heaven from their skirts. And she ran away from it, ran her own children from Rapture. Her final test of faith and she has failed it. She lost faith in her husband and his vision, and now she has damned them all to a hell on earth. No God could ever forgive her for it. There can never be repenting enough.
She lifts the skirt, as if it could reveal the wife who wore it, so that she might be mourned. But she sees no clogs beneath it. No stockings, blouses, or undergarments. And then she knows that the skirts were not shed in Rapture. They were dropped, on fire.
God did not take them, none of them. They ran away, as she did. They all ran away and she is no worse than any other wife, running to save her skin and her children’s. She chides herself: how quick she is to believe and to judge. They are only skirts in tidy piles, like Lot’s wives burned for turning, all turned to ash instead of salt.
Across the temple floor she sees the altar table, carbonized, lying on its side. It is clear of the hatch, which stands open. She can almost hear the shouting, hear the hatch being closed. She can hear her husband screaming, “I will open the seals!”
“Amity?” she calls. “Are you down there?” Would she go down there? “Amity?” She looks back at the house and the land around the cars for her daughter. Where is she? And then she is afraid. Has Sorrow found her?
She kneels at the burned mouth of the room below. It is dark below, down where the temple foundations are. There are no windows or doors and only the shaft of light through the hatch hole. “Daughter?” she calls down. “Daughters?” She hears something. A scratch and a moan. And then she fears that Amity has fallen in—or been pushed. She swings her legs into the hole. She kicks at the air like a child on a swing, thinking of the flashlight, there in the truck, but she reminds herself that she is not afraid of the dark, not afraid of the room below, or of ghosts.