Amity & Sorrow (5 page)

G
o home, he said. As if it were that simple.

Amaranth scoops the last pathetic handful of oats from the dirt beneath the car. She searches the scrub for something she can feed her daughters, any edible weed she might boil into a gruel. She looks for wild sorrel or chicory, picks dandelion and horehound. She snaps the pinkish tops of henbit. She pulls a Chickasaw plum cherry from the tree and rolls it between her fingers. When she nibbles it she finds it bitter and throws it down.

Go home, he said, when she has risked their lives to leave it, when she has hidden and lied and left, left her family and home and all the world that her daughters knew. This was her one chance and she has ruined it, squandered it. Less than a week from home and she has failed, utterly and completely.

He narrowed his eyes when she told him she couldn’t go home, that there was no way of driving now and no one they could call for help. ‘No one?’ he pressed.

‘We have no phone,’ she explained. No phone, no electricity. They cooked with propane and heated their house and outbuildings with wood from their forests. They weren’t on the grid and no local government knew who lived there or under what circumstances. That was how her husband liked it. She had liked it, too.

‘There’s gotta be somebody you can call,’ he said. ‘Somebody who cares you all are gone.’

Amaranth tries to lever the license plate off with a branch. Police might find it and run it against their records. The tags were hopelessly out of date. Worse was the thought that her husband would find the plate and know for certain that they were there. What would he make of a farmer who had tried to help his family, who had seen and dared to touch his daughter, a farmer who had shaken her and told her to go home? What would he do to him?

The branch snaps. She has only managed to pucker the metal. She throws what’s left of the branch with a shout and stomps back down the dirt road, pausing before the small shop. There will be food and drink inside it, and she thinks of all the gas stations she stopped in to fill their tank, how she stared at the packets of food while she waited to pay, the foam-filled cake snacks, the cans of fizzy pop from her childhood. She could take something for her daughters. She could even set money on the counter inside, so it wouldn’t be theft. But she does not. Not because her children do not know this chemical food or that she fears its effects on them, but because she has seen a pay phone.

There, on the side of the gas station, above a water spigot, is an ancient pay phone. Someone has cracked the receiver and attempted to graffiti it with a marker. It takes her a long time before she can lift it to listen for a dial tone, convinced that the farmer has already used it, called the police to tell them she is there.

But no sound comes. The phone is dead. She hangs it up, grateful. And worried.

She stands at the hedge edge of the farmer’s field and watches him working. He is a low shadow, flying across his fields on the back of a tractor, plowing ruts into dirt. In the distance is a grove of thin trees, grouped around a dry wallow. Clouds of red dust rise and drift, coloring the sky. She waits until he comes in for water. ‘Have you called the police?’ she asks.

He opens the spigot on the back of his neck. ‘Should I?’

‘Your pay phone’s broken. Do you have another phone?’ Water spatters off him. It dots her skirts. She catches it in her hands.

He shakes the water from his neck and hair. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘I need to know,’ she says, ‘if you’ve told anyone we’re here.’

‘Who would I tell? What would I tell ’em?’ He moves to the shade of the metal canopy and pulls a box of cigarettes from his jeans. ‘I had a phone. Had it ripped out some years ago. Got tired of people callin’ me up, askin’ for money.’ He holds the pack out to her. ‘You married?’

‘No,’ she says, to the cigarette. Then, ‘Yes, I am. Married. Are you?’

He scrapes a match on the side of a gas pump. ‘Yep. My wife took off. Don’t know where. So I know what it’s like for your husband, you going.’

‘You don’t. He’s not waiting at home for me, I can tell you that. He’s coming after me.’

‘You think so?’

She nods, her throat tight.

‘He drink?’ he asks her.

‘No.’

‘Hit you? Hit your girls?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘What’s he done that’s so bad? What’s he done you can’t forgive? You think marriage is some picnic? It ain’t.’ He takes a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Maybe you done somethin’, somethin’ you think he can’t forgive. And maybe he can’t, but I’m tellin’ you, he’d rather not be alone. You either made a vow or you didn’t.’

‘I made a vow,’ she tells him. ‘I made a million of them. Don’t you dare tell me how marriage works when your own wife left you.’

He blows out smoke at her but she doesn’t turn away. He stalks back to his fields, calling back over his shoulder, ‘I want you gone.’

She soaks dirt from oats and watches her children sleeping. In the dark of night, she listens to him, in his house. The scrape of his chair leg, the endless scratch of matches being lit, aluminum cans being scrunched and tossed. She is waiting for him to crash through the screen door and sweep them all off his porch, back to the dirt and the road and the wreckage.

Are you married? he asked. He has no idea.

Lights switch on and off inside. She hears a brief burst of static, white noise from an old television, and a burst of recorded laughter before the volume is turned right down. And then it is silent, still, and dark. She can almost hear the house breathing with each breath that the man takes, inhaling and exhaling his smoke through window screens and the tree rapping on the roof.

She grew up in a small house like this, in a dark place with no streetlights, just like here. The land was hard and the people harder, but the sounds of night were of sand switch-backing beneath snake bellies, the cries of coyotes, the lonesome
who-who-who
of a horned owl from a Joshua tree. The rumble of her grandmother’s empty-mouthed snoring, dentures foaming in a glass. In her bedroom, she would click her flashlight on and off, pointing light at the dark shapes of furniture and toys that she knew were creeping toward her every time she closed her eyes.

Her daughters have never known such silence and it makes their sleep fitful. The house she took them from was a clamorous one. Women moved from room to room along hodgepodge hallways, clogs thumping, skirts swishing, following the skitter of tiny feet, bare on boards, constant as rain. Doors opened, slammed shut. Children whined and giggled. At the very end, at its fullest, every bed and every room was full and no one wanted to be alone.

She doesn’t know what to do with this silence. It rings in her ears, this lack of noise. It makes this man’s voice all the louder. Are you married?

Yes, she is married and married again. She is married fifty times, once for every wife. She was married to him first and last, married to him always. Each wedding is like a thread, sewing her down to him and to all of them – her family, their hard and strange ways – for eternity. She has had to run far and fast to pull herself loose from him, to rip those stitches, but still she can feel how bound she is, how very, very married.

She hears the man turn over in his bed, above the porch. She hears him smoke and sigh.

C
ome bright morning, Mother says it’s time to wash. ‘Hands, clothing, hair, and faces!’ she sings out. Amity sloshes back and forth from the gas station, hauling water and handfuls of grainy pink soap from the bathroom dispenser while Sorrow lolls on the blankets.

‘Come and be washed,’ Mother calls, but Sorrow won’t.

Amity whips her cap off and tugs her braids down. She cannot wait for her mother’s fingers in her hair. Once a fire is built on the dirt and the water boils in the tin bowl, she lies back in her mother’s arms and wonders if she was held like this when she was a baby, back before there were so many other little bodies who needed holding.

Mother lathers the soap in her strong, wet hands, making the world smell of marzipan. She picks apart Amity’s greasy plaits and scrubs her scalp clean as a sheet on washing day. Mother smiles down at her and Amity basks in it, shutting her eyes to hold the picture, and she is suddenly glad to have left home and come here, glad to be held and seen.

‘You look like a little seal,’ Mother says with a laugh. She rinses Amity’s head, then pushes her away. ‘Come, Sorrow,’ she calls.

Amity runs, wet hair streaming, back to fill the bucket, but when she gets there, the boy is waiting for her, cap turned backward. She grips the bucket, thinking she should pop it over her capless head, and cowers from him in sodden shame. ‘Shut your eyes,’ she says.

‘This some game?’ He shuts his eyes as she hurries to the spigot to refill the bucket. ‘Keep your eyes shut,’ she tells him.

‘What you gonna do?’

She creeps toward him and his face follows her, eyes shut so she can study him, the curl of his dark lashes, the whorl of hair at the hinges of his jaw. She moves close enough to smell him, close enough to breathe him in. And then he opens his eyes. ‘Gotcha!’

She shrieks and grabs his cap, flapping it at his face then jamming it over her bare head. It smells of him, like ten of him, like engine oil and dry grass and hot, wet skin. ‘No, I got you!’ she says.

‘What you gonna swap me?’ The bucket fills and spills over, flooding the concrete. They both run for the spigot, to turn it off, his hand on her hand.

‘Swap you?’ she stutters.

‘For my hat? What you got?’

‘What do you want?’

He looks her up and down, from the drips her hair makes under his hat to the drops down her dress and her clogs. She sees him take in the rough weave of her fabric, shoulder to elbow, neck to calf, lined and creased as each garment is, taken in, let down, worn by Sorrow before herself.

He smiles at her. ‘When you got something I want, I’ll let you know.’ And he whips his hat back. She shrieks and crouches into a ball, arms over her head. Then she gathers the bottom of her skirts and pulls them up, to cover her head. There may be no rule about showing pantaloons, but hair must be covered at all times. ‘Girls,’ he says. ‘Sheesh.’

‘You can’t see me,’ Amity tells him.

‘I see London, I see France,’ he tells her.

‘Who are they?’ And at his laughing, she runs back to the house and to Mother, blind in cotton, bucket abandoned, kicking and tripping over sawhorses and pitchforks on the path from the gas station. She runs straight to her cap and slaps it on her wet head.

‘Where is that bucket?’ Mother demands.

When the water is boiled, Mother calls again to Sorrow, but Sorrow won’t be washed. She wraps her arms around the porch post and revels in her dirty skirts. Amity thinks of the berry vines at home and the mothers who picked them, the mothers who worked the presses, all splotched red and purple in the making of their jams and pastes and leathers. She knows something worse than berries has been picked in Sorrow and harvested.

Mother tugs at Sorrow’s apron strings and Sorrow slaps away her hands, losing her purchase on the post. She scrabbles to regain it as Mother pulls open her overskirt. Sorrow twists away and Mother shouts at her, ‘Take them off!’

‘No! Will you take everything from me?’

Mother calls for Amity to help her, while Sorrow yells for her to keep away. And then all Amity can do is take hold of her sister’s hands and bend her head toward her as Mother grabs hold of Sorrow’s skirts and pulls them down hard. Amity can see the blood caked on her linens, hard as scabs. Mother strips Sorrow, layer by layer, her overskirts and underskirts, her stockings and her bloomers, down to the stains on her skin. She doesn’t stop until Sorrow is bare, her chest bound flat like any woman’s, but naked below, whippet-thin with a thatch of red-stained hair. Sorrow folds her hands over her crotch and howls. She rushes back into the blankets, leaving Amity holding an invisible sister.

Mother scoops the skirts up and tosses them in the tin bowl. ‘More water, Amity,’ she calls.