Amity & Sorrow (4 page)

She runs for the gas station, though their clothes are not made for running. Skirts twist and tangle, jam between legs. The bindings they wear beneath blouses are too tight to allow for deep breaths. Clogs rock over stones. She passes the gas station and the canopy’s shade, the wet front of the bathroom, and turns onto a long dirt road that she can’t remember driving down. She can only remember being followed, pursued by her husband and speeding to break free from him, his car bearing down on them, faster and faster. It is all she can remember.

Strips of wild scrub sit on either side of the road; beyond them, fallow fields grow grasses, tall and thistle-headed – spikerush, prairie threeawn, devil’s grass – baking brown beneath the vicious sun. She pulls her collars open as a bead of sweat rolls down from beneath her cap.

The car, she thinks. It is all they have – until she sees it.

The car, caught up on a black-bark tree, upside down and lying hoodfirst in its red-cherried branches. The trunk and back bumper have slammed into the ground. The four tires are upright and the undercarriage splayed, so the car is like a dog on its back, wanting rubbing. A branch has pierced the windshield and her hand goes to her head again. Glass sparkles from the road.

My God, she thinks. Sorrow was right. She is lucky. And she can remember it, all of it, swinging off the highway onto the thin road below it, sun in her face, and the road turning and churning into dirt and hedge and speeding to get away from him. Her daughters were screaming. She must have lost control somehow. She remembers the feeling of flying.

When she took his car, she hadn’t known if she could drive it, remember the dance of pedal and clutch, of stick and steering wheel. She hadn’t driven in so, so long. And now she could have killed them.

She crouches on her haunches in the road. She plants her hands on the dirt and feels certain she will be sick, from fear, from relief. She pants until she retches, shutting her eyes and hearing him, laughing.

She looks over at the trunk, upside down. She can’t see how she’ll open it, but she must. There are things inside that she must salvage, all she hoarded and packed. The full weight of the car rests on the trunk, but she tugs at the frame, uselessly. Beneath the car, flour dusts the dirt. Honey oozes, pooling onto dirty oats, and she thinks of the jars inside it, shattered and spilling now, soiling their bedding and clothing. She sifts the dirt for anything she can salvage: wooden matches, small bits of paper. She remembers that her wedding ring is in there, knotted into a handkerchief, the last thing she would have to pawn or sell when it came to it. She has to get inside.

The roof of the car, now the floor, is covered with metallic candy wrappers, bargain gas station treats on the road, for sweet mouths are silent ones. She jabs her hands between the seats to see if she can reach through to the trunk, but she only finds more paper, small white squares stuffed into every crack. She pulls them out of her way. And then she sees them for what they are.

Small white envelopes. Tithing envelopes.

The backseat is full of them. On each one you could read her husband’s name and their address. You could see the sketch of a small, plain, barn-shaped temple, as it was before the fire.

Her throat tightens. Had her daughters found them? Had her daughters thrown them? Did tithing envelopes litter roadsides everywhere they’d been for the last four days and nights? Had they been tossed at borders and crossroads like crumbs for birds, for fathers, to follow?

Amaranth builds a fire beside the car from plaits of dry grass and a precious match. Into it, she feeds the envelopes, watching their church burn again and again. When the smoke is high and all the paper churches become ash, she sees a truck coming, heading straight for her. She stands and waves her arms to flag it down, to get help, to escape. And then she stops waving. Her hands drop. The truck is pink, a faded red.

The farmer swings down from the cab, engine running. ‘What the hell?’ he says, rushing at her fire, kicking dirt at her flames. ‘What the hell, woman?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she starts.

‘Damn right you’re sorry. Saw your fire four fields over. Take just the one spark to burn every damn crop of mine down. We have drouth here, woman, look about you. What you thinkin’?’

She looks at his tinder-dry fields. ‘I’m not thinking. Clearly.’

‘I’ll say.’ He stomps the fire flat with his boots. Then he sees her car and gives a low whistle. He juts his chin at the tree. ‘Chickasaw plum there. Only tree on the whole goddamn road and you found it.’

‘Can you fix my car?’ She puts her hand into her apron waistband and pulls out all the money she has in the world now. Her unfolding and counting have made the few bills left as supple as leather. She holds it out, but he shakes his head. ‘You have to fix it,’ she tells him. ‘You’re a gas station.’

‘Maybe. Ain’t a service station. Hardly even pump gas, now the highway’s gone in. No one comes. Only folks like you, lost.’

She squeezes the money in her hand.

‘Where was you headed?’ he asks her.

She cannot tell him. She doesn’t really know. Turning away from him, she says, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

‘Well, that’s why the good Lord invented motor hotels.’

She laughs. Of course she had slept, she must have. She would find herself suddenly awake at an intersection and wonder how she had come to it. She had woken at a suburban stop sign, roused by a car’s insistent honking from behind. One time it was a long-haul truck that only narrowly missed her, asleep where she was in the middle of the road. Its lights full on in the darkness, the truck was an avenging angel, delivering justice. The driver stormed out, leaned his beefy face into her open window to tell her off, tell her she wasn’t fit to drive and all that, but she only asked him what state they were in. The trucker stared at the sight of her two girls, tied together, honey smeared across their lips.

‘Where you come from?’ the farmer asks her.

She shakes her head. She dare not tell him. She shows him her money again. ‘Please help me. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ he says. ‘Go home.’ He starts for his truck.

‘But how?’ She stares at her miserable handful of money. She stares at the last curl of smoke going out, drifting over the wreck of her car and his tree and out to the flat of his fields.

N
o one knew who fired the first shot.

No one knew who started the fire.

For weeks they had been fasting and watching, praying and waiting. Because of the patrol cars. When they arrived, the countdown for the end of the world began anew. Fear twined across their land and looped around the wives, pulling them tight to their husband, tight to their rituals.

By day, patrol cars idled on their gravel path. Officers drank from Styrofoam cups, radios crackling. By night, red and blue lights spun across the front of their temple while within it women were spinning like hoops, like wheels. Women spun in solo orbits, lost in chanting, lost in prayer, then they spun together in a wide circle that swung around the room, around the altar, and the hole in the floor that led to the room below them. When they spun they could forget patrol cars, forget that they were being watched and judged. When they spun they only thought of how the heavens turned above them and how God cupped them all in His wide, white hand.

‘Who will be with me at the end of days?’ he called from the center of the temple: preacher, father, husband.

‘I will!’

‘Me, Father.’

‘Me!’

‘Who will see the might of the Lord against the fallen?’

‘I will, husband.’

‘I.’

‘Who will rise in glory? Who knows now, in their hearts, in their bones, that the end of time is coming? Who will watch to see it come?’

‘I will, I will,’ the wives called in response.

‘Who will bear the Lamb?’

Her husband had been looking for signs of the end for years now. Gossip from wives and news reports from the car radios that still worked only confirmed it. Millennium bugs and the towers collapsing had started a chain of evil, with earthquakes that split the land and unjust wars that split its people. They felt safe together and safe on his land, hidden like jewels. But more dark stories came with every woman. He told them the end was coming. Couldn’t they feel it, every one? Soon, it was all he could preach or even think about.

He read them Revelation from memory. By then, it was the only Book he would speak, pouring the words of God out in hot, steaming bowls of wrath, while his face flickered red and blue, red and blue.

That last night in their temple, he called them to prayer and told each wife to wake her children, to bring them to the temple. ‘Husband,’ Amaranth said. ‘You have had them at prayer all day. They are terrified and tired. Let them sleep.’

He gave her a look that rattled her teeth. ‘I will have my children at the end.’

Women roused children from their motley assortment of sleeping places, from the cars and trailers and yurts and sheds that stood across the frozen early spring land. Sorrow was up, child no more now, but Amaranth had to shake Amity awake in the attic bed. ‘Bring down a change of skirt and petticoat,’ she whispered. Amity did as she was told. Amaranth ran through wives and baffled children and into the kitchen to pop spelt rolls into her pocket, dropping them onto the key that sat there.

In the temple there were candles lit in bobbins all across the planked altar, blazing in jam jars in each rough-hewn windowsill. Women brought their children in and all grew hushed when they crossed the threshold, stepping from the red and blue to the soft, pale light inside. Wives formed a ring about the room, encircling their husband and the altar and Sorrow.

He roared his Revelation. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock! If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come!’

There, from outside the temple door, there came a knock. Wives screamed out. Children whimpered.

‘This is a holy place!’ he called. ‘No law or government will defile our church!’

Another knock came.

‘Will I answer it?’ Amaranth asked him, stepping into the circle. She saw how Sorrow gripped the edge of the altar with clenched fingers. ‘Husband, I will answer.’ She walked toward the door.

‘Don’t do it!’ called a wife from the circle. ‘Lock it!’ called another. The wife from Waco began to scream, uncontrollably, ‘It’s a trap; this is how it happens!’

A baby began to wail and a mother bounced it, shushed it.

Amaranth reached to open the door and her husband called out.

‘Stop! Hide the children. Hide them below. They will not take my children!’

Amaranth’s hand froze on the door. Children were their glory, their purpose. How should they be hidden from police, as if they were shameful, as if they were not made, all of them, in their holy love?

He dragged the altar table back from the hole in the floor and lifted the hatch. ‘We must keep them safe,’ he said.

Women clung to their children, then bent to soothe them and explain. They dropped them, child by child, down into the hole, down into the dark of the room below. As for the children, they were happy enough, for down below there were piles of blankets, quilts to lie in and to jump on. There was food to last them for months of Armageddon, should it come to that.

Amaranth watched toddlers handed down by older children who swung in to follow them, but when Amity started down to the hole, she stopped her. ‘Stay with me,’ she said, and Amity nodded. She pulled her daughter toward the door to hide her in women.

The knocking at the door was a pounding now and Amaranth ran back to open it even as her husband shouted, shutting the hatch and moving the altar, candles swaying, ‘We will pray! You will pray!’

The women joined hands to make their circle. They began to spin their circle about the room. Amaranth opened the door on a chubby female officer in a navy polyester uniform. She had spoken with the officer before, but she did not smile or greet her.

The officer looked into the temple, to see inside the thing they had been watching from the outside: the plain wooden interior and the candles, the circle of women rushing by. She saw the officer startle at Sorrow’s open-throated, guttural cries and her husband’s upraised hands.

‘That the girl there?’ the officer asked her, pointing at Sorrow.

And then she heard a shot ring out behind her. One single gunshot and women began to spin in a frenzy. Only the wife from Waco was still, gun in her outstretched hands. The officer crouched and grabbed for her own gun, shouting into her radio over Sorrow’s prayers and the pounding of clogs, ‘I need backup!’

Amaranth scanned the room for daughters, for Sorrow, clinging to her father, for Amity, pressing herself against the wall. Amaranth forced her way through the spinning women, weaving among them, crashing into them, while her husband shouted, ‘I will break the seals!’

And then there was only grabbing and clutching and dashing and rushing and hands in her hands, hands pulling away, and the screaming of women, the silence of children, and the smoke and the flames and the driving away.