Amity & Sorrow (26 page)

She throws the bedding and underclothes over the banister to boil in the kitchen, running water hot until it is scalding, hotter than her skin can stand, and forcing her hands into them. She misses the washtub and wringer of home, the many hands that squeezed sheets clean, the hands that pinned sheets to long lines strung in the garden, where children could hide in the wet, snapping maze of them. She misses her family, God help her. And she knows it is wrong now. She knows the damage it did, while she thought they had been healing.

Her children were raised to see bodies as sacred, belonging to God. But they also saw how bodies were shared. They knew the chaste nature of their binding, the covered heads, but they had seen their father with a multitude of women, in and out of bedroom doors and tents. They will have heard about or spied, through temple windows, the unbinding that came as women were spun from wife to wife. Children were curious, even her children. How would they know where their own bodies stopped and someone else’s began if everything was shared? Here, in this world, there were women on display, spread-eagled over paper, women who looked like whores but weren’t, while her family, her children, were dressed like saints, like nuns or pilgrims, but were not and never had been. Their bodies were God’s, for Him to do with as He wished.

On the black-marked dirt she builds a fire and she feeds it paper, all the paper of the house, the paper disasters, paper women and floods, the folds and open mouths, their heads flung back in burning. She stands in the face of the smoke and sees her family – how can she not? Burning and spinning, wild with fear, and she does not run away from it this time. She does not run from the fire she makes. She remembers how hard she had to pull Sorrow, to get her away from him.

Bradley comes down to her from the house, newspaper in his arms. He sees the fire but only asks her why the drawers of his room are all open and why his father has no bedding, and she remembers that the sheets are in the sink and none of her work has been done, when all she was doing was trying to make the whole dirty world clean. She swallows smoke.

He sees the ash of paper on her, white against her dark skirts. ‘You got to do something,’ he says. ‘I think you’re crackin’ up here.’

‘I know it,’ she says.

‘You can’t wait for him to come.’

‘He won’t come.’

‘You know what he’s done and you know no one knows it.’ He looks at her, no matter how she turns away.

‘I know it.’

‘Then tell the police—’

‘I know what we did to her, I know!’

‘What he did,’ he says.

‘What we all did – what we allowed – what I allowed!’ She walks in a circle, watching the fire. ‘I can’t tell the police, because I knew it was happening and I let it happen, don’t you see? If they take me away, who will care for her? Will you? Shall I leave her here?’

‘No one’s taking you away,’ he says. ‘He raped your daughter. You didn’t. I think he raped you all.’

‘Stop it.’ She stumbles away toward the field and her knees hit the dirt, then her hands. She cannot breathe for smoke. She saw it and did nothing. The light in her husband’s face was Sorrow; the fire in her eyes was he. That was what she saw and she turned her face from it. Like her children, she did not question it. She had told herself that Sorrow and Zachariah had a closeness that she had never had with her own father. She rejoiced in it for Sorrow. She thanked God for it, even envied it. But what he did with Sorrow had nothing to do with a love of God. She did not do enough. She did not stop it.

Even at the end, he was courting her, wasn’t he? His fifty-first wife would have been Sorrow if they hadn’t run. And then would it have been every daughter?

She hears him behind her and she tells him, ‘She wouldn’t have thought it was rape.’

‘He would.’

‘He thought he was God. She thought he was God.’

‘Bastard.’ He shakes his head at it. ‘Thing is, she ain’t a kid now. She’s older than you think; craftier, too. All kids are. By her age, I’d left school and I was running this place and there wasn’t a thing you could’ve told me. She’s old enough to pick her own way through this, if you treat her like you know she can.’

‘You don’t have children,’ she says.

‘No, I don’t,’ he flings back.

‘You don’t, so you—’

‘No,’ he says. His voice is hard now. ‘I didn’t get to have children, but I’ve raised Dust as my own and I like to think I could make a better job of it than you all did. I like to think I’d at least have kept them safe.’

‘I took them away! I made them safe!’

‘Did you?’ He looks at her kneeling, crouching, the weight of the clothing she wears. She thinks of the weight of their faith and rules, their strange ways. She feels the binding they still wear, for no purpose now. Who was here to see it or know if they didn’t wear it? No one, if they were all who were left. She has to dismantle every structure they have and she doesn’t know how to begin. She doesn’t know what to replace them with.

She stares into the dirt and tells him what the paper won’t. ‘The police were looking at us before the fire. We thought they would take our children, because of what they thought he was doing – what he was doing. It’s why he started the fire – I’m sure of it – to get us to run. So they couldn’t take us.’ He would burn the world for Sorrow, but had he burned them all instead?

‘They’re his sins. They ain’t yours.’

Her shame is palpable. ‘Aren’t they? You don’t know what else I’ve done, how bad I’ve been. Before I met him, I used to wonder what it would be like if someone could see how bad you were, really see how dark it was inside you, and want you anyway. What would that feel like? I thought I knew, but – I don’t know now.’

‘I see you,’ he says, but he does not touch her or bend beside her to help her up. He stands, looking out, and he lights a match. The world flames up around him and then goes dark. They are all of them dark inside. He blows smoke at her fire.

In the night, ashes will blow across the land and across the house, and into Amity’s lap will tumble bits of paper, unburned circles of women’s faces, women’s bodies, hands holding breasts out as though they’re blue-ribbon squashes. In the morning, she will think that God has sent them, pictures of women for her to see and know what is in store for her.

S
orrow’s altar is changing, all the dirt gone from the door. The sounds of the house are changed, with Mother and the farmer shouting conversations through the windows and the old man’s cough gone silent. The Joads make it to California at last, but they aren’t any nearer to the promised land they travel for, and Dust never leaves his barn.

Something is changing in all of them, no matter how they try to stay the same.

Sorrow scavenges the land and its castoffs, fingering the wreckage piled between the gas station and the house. She uses her hands now, not to paint with dirt or stab things, but to dig and sort through what generations of people have discarded and forgotten, bits of dishes and rubber-baby parts, tiny metal cars and wheels. To her pallet altar she adds bottle caps and rusting wires, flower heads made from rotting plastic bags. From the trash she finds, she makes something strange, something beautiful. Something only Sorrow can see is holy now.

Something is changing in Amity, too. She has proof of it, there, at last. She should be spun.

When Sorrow first bled it was cause for celebration and ceremony. First girl born in the family, she was first to take the ritual spin, first to shed her little girl’s dress and pinafore and be turned into a woman, with a wife’s long skirts and bindings. The women spun her alone in the temple, no Father, no altar. A room filled with women, spinning, circling the temple’s empty center.

Mother Hope brewed teas for Sorrow, floating leaves of raspberry, nettle, and motherwort set to steep by moonlight. The water was pale by morning. She watched Sorrow drink it, as though it were some magic potion that would transform her from within. And then it did.

No one is here to watch Amity transform. There is no spinning. There will be no new clothes for her, handed down from a mother, and no one to bind her. There is only one mother here now, and she is not looking at Amity. She is not looking at Sorrow. She is only looking at the man and all his paper, the paper parts of his women. And Sorrow isn’t looking at Amity; she is only looking at her altar, at the things she stacks and strokes there.

Alone, Amity rips strips from her underskirt to wedge between her legs. And she doesn’t tell Sorrow. And she doesn’t tell Mother. She is a woman now and can keep her own secrets. But she thinks that – hopes that – when Dust leaves his barn he will see her and know her change.

The old man doesn’t see it. To him, she is still just a little girl, one he can boss around and chivy. ‘Don’t turn on that TV,’ he orders. ‘Bring me that book. Sit down there.’ Or ‘Grab me a shirt from that chifforobe. Find me some pants. Where in Sam Hill have I put my shoe?’

She doesn’t remind him how he threw it. She only looks at the dark face of the TV screen.

‘Look in my son’s room, will you? He’s taken my pants so I won’t walk around.’

‘You can’t walk around,’ she tells him.

‘Who says I can’t? I’ve two legs, don’t I?’

‘I don’t know if you do or you don’t. They’re always under cover.’ Amity slumps her way into Bradley’s room, sees his unmade bed and a three-legged machine in his window, blocking any means of seeing Dust across the fields. She pulls it down to see it has a glass eyepiece and when she looks through it the sky zooms toward her, like a cloud attacking the house.

She sees no pants on the floor or the bed and knows she’ll have to look in the man’s drawers to find some. The old thought of rules comes to her and she bats it away. There were no rules left to follow now. His drawers hold socks and undergarments, short-sleeved and long-sleeved shirts. She finds a pair of his pants for the old man, but her hands keep pulling the drawers open and she finds, in the bottom drawer, more pictures like the ones her mother burned, ladies smiling with their open legs. Beneath them is something else, slippery and sliding. She pulls it out and she gasps right at it. She turns to look through the open door, in case someone can see.

It is a blue dress, deep and dark as the oracle bowl when it’s wet, with two thin ribbon straps, two triangle cups, and a bit of lace up its front, and so shiny it practically leaps in her hands. She wants it. She rubs it against her cheek and smells its musk. This, she knows, is what women wore here. With no one looking, she slips it into her pinafore pocket and takes it.

‘Ain’t you found me some pants yet?’ the old man shouts.

Once he’s in his pants and his one shoe, he tells her he wants to go downstairs.

‘You?’ she asks him. But he needs more help than she can offer him. His legs are stuck stiff as a table’s and when she heats her hands to set them on his knees, they only bend back and buckle.

‘Will I get Mother to help?’ she asks him.

‘You will not. She shifts me around like I’m a side of beef.’

‘Will I get Sorrow?’

‘Sorrow, in my bedroom?’ That starts him laughing.