by Riley, Peggy
“No.” She gives Amity a shake. She tries to picture Sorrow, bending mid-prayer in the frenzy at the hatch, while Amaranth pulled at her, trying to make her run. “It was him—he wanted to kill us all. That’s why he brought us all into the temple.”
“It was Sorrow,” Amity insists, turning back to her mother. “So that hers would be the only holy child left of his.”
Amaranth swallows bile down.
“But family is eternal,” Amity carries on. “It doesn’t matter if you’re dead or not, it doesn’t matter if you leave them or you go. Even Sorrow’s baby—it’s still with her, even though I killed it. She’s forgiven me, Mother. She spun me. I’ve been spun!”
Amaranth pulls Amity in to her. She holds her and rocks her, grieving for the two of them. Grieving for the hope that was born and lost, grieving for the faith that turned to poison. She grieves for her husband and her daughter, lost, for the living and all of the dead below. She grieves for every name on the sheet and she grieves for Amity; she grieves for herself, until Amity wriggles free from her.
She drives them away and through the night until she can stop at a bank of pay phones and drop two quarters into the slot. She asks for the Do Drop Inn in Oklahoma and she dials the number, watching her daughter in the truck’s front seat moving her scarred fingers against the glass. The woman who answers tells her in a bored voice that she does know Bradley and yes, she’ll take a message. What does she want to say?
“Tell him we’re coming home,” she says.
When she gets back to the car her daughter asks her, “Can we go and get our old clothes back?”
Driving south, she phones the bar every time she stops them for gas or the ladies’ room, every time they stop to eat handfuls of bread and cheese or sleep, hunched together, in a dark corner of a grocery store parking lot. The sun swings over them. Amity asks when they can stop to spin and pray.
At the border, she rings the bar again.
“Yeah,” says the lady. “He’s here. Sittin’ up like some kinda dog.”
“Hello,” Amaranth breathes, the receiver hard against her ear.
“Bought a cell phone so you could reach me,” Bradley tells her. “Forgot you wouldn’t have the number so you could.”
She laughs and he laughs. “How are you?”
“Much the same,” he says. “You?”
“Tell me how you’re the same,” she says. In the car, her daughter flies her hands through the air, swims them like Sorrow did. She turns away.
“Sorghum’s coloring, what was left. Got the wheat in, so I’ll have somethin’ to grow for next year. Pa’s taken to his bed. His cough’s bad now. Says his lungs need Amity, whatever that means. Prob’ly just means he’s lost what’s left of his mind.”
Her throat catches and she pulls the mouthpiece away, lest she make a sound.
“You find Sorrow?” he asks her.
“Yes.” She cannot bear to tell him all of it. Perhaps she never will. “No Dust.”
“No, I picked him up over in Oklahoma City. He hitched that far when his bike gave out, tryin’ to get back. I could skin him for taking your girl back home and skin him again for leavin’ me all that rape to drill on my own.”
She laughs and finds she is crying. She can see him and Dust together, watching the land, side by side, and she wants only to stand between them, watch the land grow beside them.
“Spent the last of the money on seeds,” he says. “Amaranth.”
“Yes?” Her heart pounds. There is something he needs to tell her—he has found someone new, or his wife has returned. He has learned the truth about her at last, all the darkness within her, all she has done, and he does not want her to come back. She will have to leave the truck somewhere for him, make some new plan for what to do next, she and Amity. Find somewhere safe to go.
“Amaranth,” he says.
“Tell me.” She steels herself for his bad news.
“It’s amaranth. The seeds. What I’m fixin’ to plant. Amaranth.”
She breathes all her fear out. “Is it a good crop?”
“It’s a new crop to me. Still tryin’ to figure it out.” She hears him breathe in a lungful of smoke. “You gotta set the share pretty high so you don’t kill what’s growin’. You think it won’t come to much, but it’s all there, workin’ beneath the surface, settin’ down its roots. And when it comes time to bloom you see it’s bloodred, like blood in the fields.”
She looks across at the truck and her daughter, waiting.
“That okay with you?” he says. “You still there?”
“I’m here.” She understands her name then, feels its claim on her. She can grow on his land and be planted. She can learn to root herself and hope to flower. She can plant what was sacred and see what would grow. She knows his planting is his asking her, to stay. “That’s okay with me,” she says, and her heart bursts wide, past her daughter, past the weight of what was.
Even he, down in Oklahoma, must hear it.
Mother fills the tank and says they will be home soon.
Their lives are waiting to be picked up, like stitches, but Mother has forgotten where home is. Home isn’t made or chosen, like she says it is. Family isn’t handmade or reworked like cloth. Family is the family that God gives you, the family He wants you to have, even if it hurts you. The hurting is what He is teaching you. That hurting is your family.
All the world is shouting this truth, but Mother cannot hear it. She hasn’t seen what people do on TV. She doesn’t know how lonely an empty bed is or how bare an unstrapped wrist can feel, no sister to bind you to anything.
“Not long now,” Mother says every few miles. “Look, there’s a sign.”
The writing at the border says OKLAHOMA. “I know. I can read it,” she says, and Mother looks at her, all surprised.
Amity thinks of Dust and she thinks of the land. She thinks of the fields and what she could do in them, and then she knows that she is the strap, stretching between what Sorrow is and what her mother wants, and between them is Amity, looking forward, looking backward, head covered, but wearing jeans.
She looks into her hands and wonders what they will do next.
See how they twitch and they want.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank everyone at Little, Brown: my editor, Judy Clain, whose clarity and concision helped to make Amity & Sorrow a leaner, better book; her assistant, Amanda Brower; publisher Michael Pietsch; Liz Garriga; Jayne Yaffe Kemp; and everyone in the art department. Many thanks to Tinder Press in the UK—to editor Charlotte Mendelson for her support and encouragement throughout this twisty process, her assistant, Emily Kitchin; Samantha Eades; Vicky Palmer; Yeti Lambregts; and all the team at Headline.
Grateful thanks to my agent, Joy Harris, for taking a leap of faith with me.
Thank you to New Writing South and director Chris Taylor for their support during the writing of my first draft. Not only did they provide a grant so that I could take up a place at Arvon, they also supplied a free read by the Literary Consultancy. Many thanks to Hilary Johnson for her manuscript assessment and for introducing me to writer and editor Caroline Upcher, who helped me see my book with fresh eyes.
Thank you to Sara Maitland and Susan Elderkin, authors who were particularly generous with their time and their feedback.
Thank you, early readers and dear friends: Tim Macedo-Hatch, Monique L’Heureux, Sue Bickley, and my great friend Katherine May, who twice read drafts in a hurry, when I needed her most. Thank you to the coven and to friends and family, near and far.
Thank you to the writers and readers on Twitter and to the #amwriting online community for their generous support. You provided good company and solace during many a draft.
I would like to acknowledge books that were particularly helpful while putting the world of the book together: Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for its consummate history of Mormon fundamentalism; The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, a history of the Dust Bowl an
d the Oklahomans who stayed; and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which casts a grand shadow over any book about Oklahoma, farming, drought, or road trips.
Finally, many thanks to my husband, Graham, for building me the Blue House and for making a home for my heart.
About the Author
PEGGY RILEY is a writer and playwright. Her work has been produced, broadcast, installed, and published in magazines, anthologies, and online. She has been a bookseller, festival producer, and writer-in-residence at a young-offender prison. Originally from Los Angeles, she now lives in Britain on the North Kent coast. Amity & Sorrow is her first novel.
Praise for Peggy Riley’s
AMITY & SORROW
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick
“A shimmering novel.… Peggy Riley has an engaging way of raising mysteries.… This delicately stitched, finely patterned and poetic novel suggests there is a tipping point at which human resilience disappears.… Riley has a gift for metaphor that gives this novel loft, and a rhythmic way of swinging from present to past.… Riley’s final pages are packed with shock and hope.”
—Dylan Landis, New York Times Book Review
“Amity & Sorrow is a startlingly original, intelligent, and beautiful first novel that I found riveting from page one. I can only wait with great anticipation for what comes next from Peggy Riley.”
—Michael Connelly, author of The Black Box
“A literary page-turner.… Peggy Riley’s writing is clear, crisp, chilling.”
—Reader’s Digest
“Amity & Sorrow, grace and hope, honor and innocence, bliss and deliverance—all of this from one beautifully nuanced story about the nature of family and the power of faith. I savored every word.”
—Lori Lansens, author of The Girls
“A beautiful and terrifying book. Peggy Riley tells a complex and enthralling tale of family love and religious belief with uncommon wisdom, grace, and skill.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind
“Peggy Riley writes with a quiet lyricism.… The relationships Amaranth and Amity build there are genuinely moving.”
—John Williams, New York Times
“An accomplished, harrowing debut.… Riley’s descriptive prose is rich in metaphor.… Amity & Sorrow simmers to a boil as it deftly navigates issues of family, faith, community, and redemption.”
—Ann Kelley, Booklist (starred review)
“Gripping… a must-read for book lovers.”
—Ladies’ Home Journal
“Fierce and disturbing.… Peggy Riley’s debut novel is a harsh but compassionate look at nature vs. nurture through the lens of a polygamous cult.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Tense, compelling.… Peggy Riley constantly surprises the reader with strangely apt metaphors.… The subject matter could easily lend itself to melodrama, but Riley doesn’t fall into it. Even the most shocking and violent scenes don’t exploit the suffering of the characters; they reveal the complicated reasons for their behavior. Riley strips her story to an almost mythic essence without losing track of the details that ground it in a specific time and place. A sense of imminent danger coexists with an awareness of the possibility of healing, and the tension between horror and hope makes the novel hard to put down.”
—Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch
“Hooks readers from its riveting opening.… What makes Amity & Sorrow so fascinating is Riley’s compassionate portrayal of these women… each emotion is captured exquisitely. This novel is not sensationalist, but rather realistic and frightening as it captures the horrors of real-life cults.”
—Megan Fishmann, BookPage
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with Peggy Riley
Peggy Riley discusses writing Amity & Sorrow with novelist Lori Lansens.
Lori Lansens: I experienced the story of Amity & Sorrow on a visceral level. It’s beautifully written, poetic, but you also manage to create heart-hammering tension along with startling images, beginning with the sisters bound at the wrist by that “strip of white fabric.” Your characters are bound to each other, and to their faith, and even to their land. Do you think it’s possible to completely sever a tie with your past and the people in it and not feel somehow bound to it, even if it’s by a sense of guilt or shame or regret?
Peggy Riley: We are bound to our lives and our pasts, and it can feel like they are strapped to us, like there is no escape from all we have done and been. I wanted to play with that feeling of being bound by tethering the sisters to each other, as they are still tied to their church and family, the history of its making. Amaranth wants to take her daughters from a faith that has gone badly wrong, but their family was made in that faith. Amaranth talks about how far and fast she’s had to run to try to break the threads that bind her to her husband, but she still feels haunted by the ghost of his judgment, even far away, and her own culpability. The more they all pull away from their past, the more they are reminded of it.
LL: Amity and Sorrow are raised together in the same community of women but don’t share the same fervor for their father, the leader, or for their faith. Is it because one feels more chosen than the other? Do people who join cults need to believe they’ve been chosen in order to feel validated?
PR: There are lots of reasons why people join cults, but most often they are looking for ways to connect and belong, authentically and passionately. Traditionally, cult leaders reward through access and punish through limitation. When followers receive special access and closeness to the leader, they feel more “special” than the others. Sorrow is raised to believe she is holy, that her work is necessary to her father and her faith. She cannot help but believe that she is chosen, while Amity is content to watch and wait. In the world outside their church, Sorrow is unable to give up her status, the power that being chosen gives her, while Amity revels in a land that hasn’t already made up its mind about her.
LL: How important was the setting? Did you want to distance the story from California in order to not confuse your cult with any other cults, past or existing?
PR: The story itself came from a picture I saw in a newspaper, of a wooden church on a grassy prairie, on fire. I knew the church itself would have to be built on land that was off the grid and far from the government. I’m from California myself, and I was inspired by all the California cults that I grew up with. California cults thrive in the cities, where displaced people come in search of new families and a guru. The preacher in my fictional church travels to cities, to find these displaced people, then brings them back to his isolated place, land it would be hard to leave both physically and emotionally. Even now, shop-front churches and guru-led groups continue to spring up in California’s cities, attracting the attention of authorities, while throughout America new faiths and communities grow in secret.
LL: Amaranth, the mother, is such a strong character on the page and moved me with her actions and gestures. Did you have inspiration for the character? Did you read other stories of women who’ve left cults or faith-based polygamist communities? If so, was there often a defining moment when most of the women decided to leave?
PR: I read and watched survivor and escapee stories and was struck by how hard the women work at staying, how they twist themselves in knots to make sense of their faiths and marriages. They are, most often, genuinely in love with their husbands, men who courted them and told them they were special. In polygamous faiths, women are encouraged to view one another as family, as sister wives, but each one also believes that she is her husband’s favorite, that she has a special role. But it is a hard life. Once there are children—and they come soon—the women find it much harder to leave. It is nearly impossible for a woman to get away without the other wives knowing, for they don’t want any wife to escape. Amaranth thinks that her doubts in the faith of her husband come from her own inability to believe. She makes herself stay out of love, and it takes a long time for her to
see that their faith has turned to something else, something darker. She has to leave, at last, to save her daughters, if not herself.
LL: The women in the cult potentially gain as much as they lose from making the choice for polygamy, but it’s not likely that such a model would ever become a cultural norm in the United States. Do you think North Americans reject polygamy for its suggestion of antifeminism?
PR: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints split over the issue of polygamy and statehood as nineteenth-century popular opinion equated polygamy with slavery, and the practice stood in the way of Utah’s becoming a state. Since the split, fundamentalist Mormons continue to practice, and the vision of the Mormon pioneers pushing handcarts to the West, wives grouped around their husband, is embedded in our history. It is said that polygamy was a way to deal with surplus women, but that was a myth, as there were far more men than women in the West. Polygamy was a tenet of faith in the early Mormon church, and remains so for FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) members, but it is hard for modern women to look at these marriages and believe that they are genuine or that the women get as much out of the arrangement as the men do. What the men get out of it is obvious, but it is actually the faith that gains the most: a surplus of wives means more children can be had more quickly and so grow the faith. The spacecraft Pioneer bore a metal plaque etched with a picture of humans, one man and one wife, America’s default position and ideal. I don’t think feminists should mind polygamy in faiths so much: if the women say they love their sister wives, are adults, and consent to the marriages, it is no one’s business. What I mind is that, on the Pioneer plaque, the man’s hand is raised in greeting and the woman’s hands are at her sides; the man looks forward and the woman gazes down, slightly angled toward the man. Even aliens, upon finding it, will understand our gender imbalance by the messages we send them.