Amity & Sorrow (16 page)

She shook her head. She didn’t understand any of it. Here, she thought they had been making their own rules for their community, out of faith, charity, and love. Now she felt they were following some blueprint she didn’t know existed and it hurt her. ‘Why did you tell me you had no family? Was it because you knew I didn’t?’

‘No,’ he vowed. ‘You are my family. This is my family. I left Short Creek and I left that faith and I never looked back. It’s Lehi looking back, trying to be some kind of family to me, but I want nothing to do with them, not how they are. I’ve made a new faith here. A new family. We’re nothing like them and we never will be.’

‘We’re polygamous,’ she spat.

He lay back again on her bed with a sigh. ‘I’m tired.’ His hand reached for her and she took it, thinking of the girl and her strange hair and dress, the black-and-white photo she had clutched in her hand. She tried to put the girl out of her mind, but her influence remained.

Wives were caught fussing their hair into her shapes when they thought no one was looking. They sewed skirts in circles and piled them up, to wear in layers, full as hers, then fuller. With their abundance of skirts, wives took to spinning on the hard, smooth temple floor, in prayer.

Amaranth watched him watch them during worship, the wide skirts of women spinning before him, and wondered if it felt like a memory to him, this family the women felt they were creating, inventing for themselves out of raw materials and sheer hard work. Was this a new world for him, as it was for them, or did it only remind him of something older, something he swore he had forgotten? Something he swore he didn’t want?

A
mity and Sorrow kneel, wrist to wrist, by the bathroom door. The bucket is empty. The china shard sits, dry, in its bottom. It cannot show Sorrow what she wants to see. It cannot take her home.

They crouch until their knees are numb. They stare at the bathroom door and each other until Dust comes, holding up a screwdriver.

‘Outta the way,’ he tells them.

But Sorrow won’t move, and Amity has to tug her away by the strap.

Dust opens the bathroom door and looks inside. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘What are you two getting up to in here? Do you gotta make a mess of everything?’

Amity leans in to Sorrow. ‘What have you done?’

Sorrow slowly closes her eyes.

‘Is it critters making mess in here? Because it better not be you. And I’m not cleaning it up, either, I can tell you that.’

Sorrow won’t look at him and Amity can only look down, in Sorrow’s shame.

Dust screws a metal eye to the door frame and a swinging hook to the door. ‘We’ll keep this locked, to keep the critters out, whatever they are. Prairie dogs. Or rats.’ He pulls the door shut and hooks the eye.

‘We’re sorry,’ Amity tells him. ‘I’m sorry.’

But Dust only flicks the screwdriver around in his hand then jams it in his pocket. As Sorrow is investigating the hook and the door, he goes, not looking back.

Once he’s gone, Sorrow yanks Amity inside. And she kicks the door shut.

And then it is dark and cool and close. She can feel Sorrow spool her in, in the silence. ‘I’m sorry for what I did,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry Mother hit you. I’m sorry I ran and I’m sorry I told, only I thought you were in trouble. I thought you needed help.’

‘Who are you to help the Oracle?’

‘You can’t just set everything on fire.’

‘Can’t I?’

Sorrow lights a match that flames her face. She holds the match at the tip of Amity’s nose. Amity pants and the flame flickers. ‘We must make the Father see us,’ Sorrow says. ‘We must catch His eye and ear.’

‘How?’ Amity huffs, hoping to blow the match out.

‘A sacrifice.’ Sorrow drops the match on the tiles and stomps it. And it is dark again. ‘Put your hand out,’ she says.

Amity sees spots before her eyes, bright from the match’s flame. She stretches her strapped hand for Sorrow and it bumps into something hard.

Sorrow lights another match. ‘Hold still.’

Amity’s hand shakes, palm upward and strapped. She watches as Sorrow pulls from her apron pocket a bone-handled paring knife. She raises it and holds the point over Amity’s palm. Then Sorrow drops the match and as it falls she lowers the knife, to slit the star of Amity’s hand. Amity cries out and Sorrow pulls her by the strap. She puts Amity’s cut straight onto the tiles and smears it across them, side to side, up and down. She lights another match then and shows Amity the red cross she has made, there on the tiles like some holy sign. Amity can see other dirty marks and signs around it, made by Sorrow, red and brown.

‘I’m sorry!’ Amity says.

Sorrow takes her end of the strap off and lets it drop. She opens the bathroom door and holds the match up to the sun as light pours in. Amity’s eyes flame and flood as she moves toward it. And then Sorrow is slamming the door on Amity, plunging her back into darkness. ‘Don’t leave me in here!’

She hears the hook scrape into the metal eye and catch. She bangs on the door and calls to Sorrow. She thrusts herself into the door, but it is firm on its hook. She lurches, crashes into the sink she cannot see. She follows a pipe across the wall and into a corner, finds the cistern, one solid, cold thing she can wrap herself around. She crouches beside it and puts her cut hand to her mouth. She tastes dirt, Sorrow, and her own hot blood. She tries to rock herself calm.

It is as dark as the room below the temple. She feels as if she is back inside it, back beneath it, hiding in the dark. But even that room had its spiracles, three breathing holes that let down three pinhole shafts of light, like the fingers of God. In the room below she hid herself in the far corner, between the metal shelves of food that no one could eat. There was so much food down there that when the world ended, it would feel like a party. There would be second and third helpings and everyone would smile as they used to. That’s what she thought then.

Here, in this darkness, Amity can hear things. Mice nails or bird claws, the sound of some hook-faced roach, jaws snapping. She can feel things reaching out for her. Dark hulking shapes that rub themselves against her, rats or kittens, crawling babes, nudging and nestling as if they want something from her, as if they wait to be born. As she could in the room below the temple, she can hear and feel the soil shifting beneath her, something scratching up through the dirt, like plants growing too fast and things reaching upward, pale asparagus or finger bones or the dead all rising up from their dirty holes at Rapture, all winding sheets and skeletons.

She hid herself in the room below because Sorrow told her to. Sorrow told her to watch and to wait.

She heard the altar table slide, wooden legs on the wooden floor, and saw the hatch door open, pouring light down onto the pile of quilts. Two stocking legs dropped down with the squish and plop of skirts. Sorrow. And then there were more legs, white linen, long and lean. Adam, she thought, and she waited for Justice. But Justice never came and the hatch was pulled shut, and then it was dark again. Three slivers of light from the spiracles fell onto Sorrow.

Amity saw someone put his arms around her and pull her down. Adam, she thought. Someone pulled Sorrow onto the blankets and did not let her up, did not let her go. They weren’t supposed to play down there, any of them anymore, but rules had made their land small and the children only got bigger.

Sorrow was flat on the ground and her skirts rose, up to her waist, her legs in the air. Amity didn’t know this game. She could hear Sorrow, and it didn’t sound like her playing, but what could Amity do? She was told to watch and wait. She wasn’t told to spring out and announce herself or ask questions when she was meant to hide. And besides, everyone there was family. Family couldn’t hurt you, no matter what they did.

Amity saw a white ponytail and it made her hold her breath. She pressed herself back, into the corner. She dared not tell Father she was watching and waiting. She was Sorrow’s secret and Sorrow’s work with Father was a secret prayer, secret as the sounds he made, secret as their movements.

When Father left the room and pulled himself back up through the floor, he left the hatch open and the altar pushed away. Sorrow lay in a pool of gold, light and pale on the blankets. Amity called to her. She waited for Sorrow to rise and shake her skirts down, chatter away as she always did. But Sorrow stayed flat on her back, flat as the stitches, flat as the sheet.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Sorrow said quietly.

‘You wanted me to hear,’ Amity told her. ‘You told me.’

‘Why didn’t you come?’

‘You told me to watch and wait.’

‘Oh, what use are you?’

Amity crept to her sister. ‘I did what you told me. What did I do wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ Sorrow sighed.

‘Is that how you pray with Father? Is that your prayer?’

Sorrow turned her head away from her then and Amity could see the light pour into her sister’s tiny ear. ‘Sure, that’s how we pray. He turns into God – didn’t you see him? Just like he did when he made the Virgin pregnant, when he made her have Jesus. Didn’t you see?’

‘I did see him,’ Amity said. ‘I didn’t see God.’

‘Maybe you can’t see God because you’re too stupid.’

Amity wanted to lie beside her, to feel what she felt, to look up into the light and pray. ‘Are you the Virgin Mary now?’

Sorrow pulled herself up into a ball, tidy as a knot.

And now Amity is here, in the darkness, wondering which of the sounds she hears are here and which are only holy ghosts.

For there are ghosts here. Anyone could tell.

A
maranth turns the soil in the old kitchen garden. It is too dry for ants or pill bugs, but below the crust there are the slender chambers of earthworms. The soil is good and rich, few stones. She pulls up clots of dirt to throw down, smash apart. She carries bucket after bucket of water from the house to dampen it. She carves rows with the end of the broom handle.

She carries the jars of seeds from the pantry, sets one at the end of each row, and pulls a handful from each, sowing the tiny balls and specks in straight rows. She doesn’t know what they are, but hopes for lettuce greens or medicinal herbs. She wishes for the big hard balls of sweet peas, or broad beans, but she knows they aren’t. There isn’t a one she can recognize. Whatever they grow, she waters them in hope.

In his house she sweats steam, boiling old beans. Soft thumps land on his rooftop and she thinks it is the old man knocking for her, but he tells her it isn’t and to go away. She looks out from his window and sees the old tree above them is dropping its buds, throwing them down in the relentless heat. The sky is heavy and white.

But the old man scowls. ‘This ain’t drouth, I tell you; drouth is a million times drier than this. Why, back in my day, drouth’d suck all the moisture from a man, leave him standing there, nothin’ left but a rind a skin, a peel of man. A human scarecrow. Where’s your daughter?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. She leans out his window but all she can see are fields. She won’t be there. ‘Off playing, I suppose.’ She has no idea.

‘Tell her I wanna see her.’

‘You’re kind to her.’

‘I ain’t. I’m bored.’

‘Will I turn on your TV? Will I read to you?’

‘Quit your fussin’.’

‘Men like fussing,’ she says.

‘That what you doin’ here? Fussin’ so we’ll like you, let you stay?’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ she says. She picks up his piss bucket to dump it and swill more bleach around. She brings it back from the bathroom and sets it beside him. She pushes at his pillows until he tells her off then she tugs his window open, in the hope of a breeze. When was there last rain on this land? ‘You should get up,’ she tells him.

‘You don’t know much about old people.’

‘Actually, I do. I cared for several, for my grandmother, right up to the end. I know if you stop using things, they leave you.’

‘That so?’

She smiles. ‘Your legs will drop right off you.’

He sits up and takes a rattled breath. ‘Fat lot you know. You think you got it made here, don’t you? Down in the kitchen, bangin’ our pans? You think you’ll win my boy that way, through his stomach? You seen his stomach? No, I don’t guess you would have.’

‘I’ll leave you be,’ she tells him.

‘Women think my boy is a soft touch, ’cause he don’t hardly yell,’ he tells her. She stops at the door. ‘’Cause he don’t throw his weight around and he could do. I taught him to fight and he took in that half-breed boy. I taught him to plant and he ripped out my wheat. I taught him all a man could know and look at the women he drags home.’

She closes the door between them.

Sorrow lies on the porch, limp and languid. Amaranth looks for Amity, then is glad to have Sorrow alone for a moment. ‘Are you sore, daughter? Will I salve you?’

Sorrow gives an almost imperceptible shake of her capped head. But at least it is not a toss. She has been humbled.

Amaranth kneels. ‘What you did was wrong, Sorrow. You know it.’