Amity & Sorrow (2 page)

When their mother took them, she ran them from the fire and the screaming, down the gravel path to the car, and Amity could see for the first time ever where the gravel path led, how it met a rocky trail, how it plunged through a band of evergreens to join a jostling potholed road that only smoothed when it came into town, the town she had heard tell of but never seen for herself.

But Mother said, ‘Heads down, daughters. Hide.’

Amity did as she was told, so she never got to see the streetlights or the shop fronts, the dark, quiet streets of evening, or the small families in small houses, doing whatever it was that ordinary town families did. She didn’t see the metal shutters roll up at the volunteer fire station or the squat red engines emerge, though she did hear the sirens and see their lights flashing through her shut lids. She didn’t see that the engines drove back the way they had come, covering the old car’s tracks with their own toothy treads. She didn’t see them struggle to get up the rocky trail and the gravel path, or try and fail to put the fire out. For there, in the car, there was only driving and darkness, the watching of their mother, the roads behind them and the sound of her sister, sobbing, as home stretched away from them, mile after mile.

A
mity watches what looks like the sun. An orange ball spins high above her on a pole, turning in a hot, white sky. It makes her think of home and the temple; it makes her feel it is she who is spinning, turning about in a room filled with women, their arms raised, their skirts belling out like moons. She thinks how the moon will go bloodred and the sun turn black at the end of the world. She is watching for it still.

‘Amity!’ Her mother calls her back to earth, back to the gas station and the heat and the hard-baked ground, beckoning from beneath the metal canopy that shades the pumps. ‘Did you find anyone?’ Amity walks back to her, sees that there is dried blood on her mother’s face and figures she must have some, too, but neither of them can get into the bathroom to wash. The door is locked.

‘I found a man,’ Amity says. ‘I talked to him.’

‘It’s okay. I told you to. What did he say?’

The bathroom door is marked with a stick lady wearing a triangle dress. Locked behind it is her sister. ‘He said it locks from the inside. There is no key. It’s a bolt she turned.’

Mother slaps the triangle lady with the flat of her hand. ‘Sorrow, you come out of there right now. We are not stopping here!’

Amity pulls on her sleeve to cover her wrist, its bareness, the bruise blooming on the bone. All of this is her fault. If she hadn’t taken the wrist strap off, her sister wouldn’t have run.

‘Where did the man go?’ Mother asks.

Amity points at the flat of fields, where heat and haze make them shimmer like flu. She points to a yellow field, violent yellow, like yolk smeared across the land.

‘You didn’t go out there!’

‘No!’ says Amity, shocked.

Four days they drove, until Mother crashed the car.

Four days they drove from home to here.

Four days and the seasons have changed around them, the dirty ends of snow from home melting and running to make rivers, mountains flattening to make plain land, then fields. Four days Amity had been tied to her sister, to keep her from running, until the car hit a tree and spun over a stump and Amity took the strap off and Sorrow flew out of the car and ran.

The sky is spinning orange when the man comes from his fields. Dirt rides in on his overalls, spills down from his turned-up hems. With every step, it scatters like seed. ‘Hey,’ he calls to Amity and he raises his hand to wave. Then she sees him see her mother. She sees him take in Mother’s clogs and long, full skirts, her apron and her cloth cap, as if he hadn’t noticed Amity’s own. His eyes follow the stripe of blood down Mother’s face. ‘Hey,’ he says again and Mother nods to him, primly. ‘Closin’ up now. Was there somethin’ y’all needed?’

Mother looks at Amity. ‘I thought you told him.’ Then she points at the bathroom door. ‘My daughter,’ she says.

‘Is she still in there?’ He pounds his fist on the stick lady, calling, ‘Come out of there, hey – what’s her name?’

‘Sorrow.’

‘Sorrow?’ He squints and bangs harder on the door. ‘Sorrow!’ He turns to Mother. ‘Maybe she’s unconscious?’

‘She’s stubborn. How can you not have a key?’

‘It’s a bolt. Jesus!’ The man rushes into a little shop and crashes around inside it, then he runs back out to his fields, darkening beneath the fiery sky.

Mother watches him go, saying, ‘Has he just run away?’

But he does come back, pulling up in an old Chevy pickup, its red paint turned pink from hard sun, and clambers down with a noisy box of tools. A boy jumps down from the truck bed to follow him, brown-skinned and lanky with a long tail of black hair that reaches halfway down his back. Amity steps behind her mother and grabs hold of her skirts to watch him.

The man and the boy jangle through the tools. They try ratchets and hooks, rasps and claws. They hit the door hinges with chisels, but they cannot lift it out of its frame for the bolt.

‘Sorrow,’ Mother pleads. ‘Open the door.’ But not a sound comes from her.

Finally the man takes a sledgehammer to the doorknob. He batters away until he smashes it off and then there is only a hole in the door. The man calls through it, tries to stick his hand into it, but it won’t fit. ‘You go,’ he tells the boy, but his hand is too big, too.

‘You,’ he says to Amity.

Amity cowers until Mother pulls her out of her skirts. Then Amity creeps toward the door and bends to look in, sure she will find Sorrow staring back at her or her finger aimed to give Amity’s eye a poke. But there is only darkness. She slides her hand through the hole, slowly, craning her wrist to find the bolt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. She turns it with a click.

And then she is being pulled back, out of the way, and the man and her mother are yanking at the door and it is opening. And only then is Sorrow revealed, there in the bathroom, there in her awful red glory.

The man goes inside to pull her up from the floor, as if he doesn’t mind the blood on the tiles, the blood at her hem, the blood on her skirts, or the blood in her hands. He catches hold of the bloody strap hanging from her wrist. ‘Jesus, girl, what you gone and done?’

Mother screams then, ‘Don’t touch her!’ And she rushes in to Sorrow, clogs slipping on the blood, and she grabs hold of Sorrow, to push her from the man. And the man grabs her mother, shaking her and shouting, ‘What’s wrong with you, woman? What’s wrong with you people?’ And Amity is saying, ‘She’s all right, she’s all right now,’ and the man’s saying Jesus, and her mother’s saying don’t, and then there’s only Sorrow, rising up from the tiles and coming slowly to her clogs with her palms open, bloody, to quiet them all.

‘Behold,’ she says. ‘Behold.’

Two sisters walk, hand in bloody hand, through the darkness, following a man and a boy they do not know, being followed by a mother. They walk the path that loops away from the gas station and the dirt road and the stump where the car crashed, the path that leads them between piles of trash and junk and the far, dark fields. They cannot see what these things are, these shapes beside them, these washtubs with no bottoms, these bentwood chairs with no seats, these window frames and paint cans and stacks of tractor tires. They might be anything in this darkness. Maybe low, metal monsters, crouching in clumps and clusters to snatch at passing skirts with rusty claws. When they see them they’ll know that this is a land that throws nothing away, a land once made of small family farms like this one, a land now surrounded by industrial-scale cropland, a highway, and hog farms. When the wind blows from the right direction, you can smell the stink of them; you can hear the squeal.

When they reach the house, the three females fear it. Not for the look of the place, a gap-toothed, rough-hewn, clapboard two-story, painted white a long, long time ago. Not for the four windows, up and down, dark and empty as sockets. Not for the porch that sags beneath it or the old, scabby tree that grows to the side of it, branches arching over to smother the roof. They would fear any house.

When the man pulls open a screen door it groans on its hinges. When he pushes in the front door, so that all of them can see inside the dark mouth of his house, they shiver. They are forbidden to go in. It is a rule.

The man invites them inside, but they all of them shake their heads. To his offer of a bath or a coffee, Mother will say no, but she will accept a couple of his blankets, a tin bowl for washing, a plastic pitcher of fresh water. When the man says he can run Sorrow into town, see a doctor in the morning, she tells him, ‘She’s fine.’

‘She ain’t fine,’ the man says, head bent to look down the bloodied front of Sorrow and the wrist strap, dangling. ‘Why’s that thing on her?’

‘It hasn’t hurt her,’ Mother says.

‘I see you bleedin’. I see this strap on your daughter and I see all this blood. You can’t tell me she ain’t been hurt.’

Mother shakes her head. ‘I haven’t hurt her. She hasn’t been hurt. It isn’t the strap. There was – a … there was a child. And she’s lost it.’

The man takes a step toward her, hands out. ‘Sorry.’

‘No,’ Mother says. ‘Praise the Lord.’ A small cry escapes Sorrow.

‘Jesus!’ the man spits out and he goes into his house with the squeal of the screen and the hard door slamming. Mother stands, holding his blankets and shaking, until Amity takes them and makes a nest of them, there on the porch for her sister. Then Mother slumps down onto the steps.

Amity settles Sorrow down and lies beside her, to pray. She whispers, ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.’ She waits for her sister to say the next line of it, but her sister only turns away from her, to hold herself in her own arms, as if she knows what Amity has done to her.

W
here are you, woman?

On the porch step, Amaranth sits upright. She blinks into the darkness, then whips around to check that her daughters are safe in their blankets, all flung limbs and linens.