Amity & Sorrow (6 page)

Later, Sorrow stands before the bathroom, cap on her wet head and wearing her blanket so her stained skirts can dry. She looks like she’s been skinned. She’s dripping and miserable, sorry to the bone for herself but clean as a stick.

‘I hate her,’ Sorrow says.

‘I know.’

‘I will get even.’

‘I know that, too.’

Dust comes by, holding his hat down and grinning. Sorrow pulls Amity close by the wrist strap. ‘He’s okay,’ Amity tells her. Sorrow lets the strap slacken.

‘What you doing?’ he asks them.

‘Washing,’ Amity says. ‘Mother says we’re leaving.’

‘Yeah? I’ve seen your car.’ He slips off his cap and brandishes it at her, daring her to take it. ‘You two eaten anything?’

Sorrow licks her lips. Amity shakes her head.

‘We got food in there,’ Dust says, pointing at the shop. ‘Come on.’

Amity starts to follow, but Sorrow pulls her back by the strap. ‘We don’t want you to get in trouble,’ Amity calls and Sorrow yanks the strap again to say that wasn’t what she said.

‘Nobody comes to buy it now. It’s called rotating the stock.’

Dust goes in and brings them back the wonders of the world, opening his arms in a tumbling harvest of yellow and orange, foil and plastic, an edible coat of many colors. He names each one as Adam did in Eden: Lay’s and Doritos, Sno Balls and Chocodiles, Cheetos and Fritos, Twinkies and pies. Packets pop like seedpods, like touch-me-nots or peas.

Amity takes a thin orange triangle between her fingers and licks the edge of it. Her tongue catches fire in a dance of salt and chemicals. ‘It’s good, Sorrow,’ she assures her sister, and stuffs it in her mouth. She sticks her fingers in hoops of flour and fat. She pokes her tongue into cream-filled cakes. ‘You sure can eat!’ Dust says as she nibbles at a thing he calls a Ding Dong, taking a bit of chocolate frosting with her teeth and then cramming the whole of the thing in to grin at Dust, chocolate-gummed, until he can’t stop laughing.

Sorrow is all reserve, but even she must eat. She selects only the red spear of a Slim Jim meat stick. She peels open the greasy plastic with delicate fingers and looks away each time she inserts it into her mouth. She chews solemnly, slowly.

Dust says he doesn’t want anything, but Amity sees how he looks at the food with hunger. She knows what it looks like now, how it feels. She waits until he’s scooping up the wrappers of their gas station feast and throwing away all evidence of it and his hands are full. Then she crams a Twinkie into his mouth, smearing cream into the tiny hairs about his lips, thinking how she wants to lick him clean.

When they go back to Mother they will lick their own lips well. They will bite orange grease from their fingernails and suck sugar from their fingers. When Mother offers them her dirty oats, they will show their hungry faces, even as they taste salt in the pits of their teeth with wandering, searching tongues.

A
ll great journeys are made in faith. The pilgrim over dark seas, the immigrant to new lands, the pioneer to a salt-baked lake. Faith calls the native to the spirit walk, the vision quest, but Amaranth can only hope, in retrospect, that hers is a great journey.

She has coaxed their car over ruts that would swallow wagons, pointed car and daughters south as doggedly as any pioneer headed west. Her children are born from their father’s pioneer stock, his ancestors who trudged toward Zion. It is in their bones to suffer for faith. All pioneers experienced hardships along the way, disasters, even. Think of the Donner party; she should take comfort in the fact that, so far, their car crash had not led them to cannibalism. Though they are hungry.

Six days since she left her husband, nearly one week since she ran, and she cannot help but feel that God Himself has crashed her here. He certainly seems less than keen on showing her a way out, as if He is holding her until her husband can catch up.

She studies the farmer’s house and the land around it. The house might have food inside, but it is forbidden to them. Land behind it, a rectangle gray from alkaline water, has been worked and turned, but it hasn’t been planted. Potato-sized dirt clods break apart in her hands. His fields show no corn or beans, no trailing vines of squash or peas. She knows he will be growing cash crops, same as they did, food they could not eat until they milled it and ground it, food that wouldn’t be ready for weeks or months. She prides herself on her self-sufficiency, but she knows in her bones that her best hope of help remains with the farmer, despite how he dislikes her.

She fills the tin bowl with water and walks to the edge of his fields. Bowl on her gathered hip, she walks beside the scrub hedge, where crickets click. But at the corner of the field she stops. She must. She thinks of their rules, left behind them now. She lifts a clog and sets it down into the field, water slopping and settling. She waits for the voice that will come to say
Field.
She steps into a furrow between green, hip-high stalks and walks toward the farmer, slowly, steadily.
You will not go in the field!
she hears.

Clog step, clog step, she moves toward him. Marching now.

The field, she thinks. I’m in the field.

He sees her running and runs toward her and then the voice booms in her head and she feels her ears roar and pop. The land swings up before her, to knock her back to the dirt, and the world goes dark.

And then it is cool. A wet hand on her forehead and her cheek. And then she feels a tugging at her cap and fingers at her collars. Her eyes fly open to him and she flings her hands up to ward him off.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You okay?’ And it is the farmer before her, not her husband, kneeling over her, blocking the sun.

She starts to her feet and the ground seesaws, left to right. He presses her back down and her hands hit the tin bowl, dropped. ‘Water,’ she says. ‘Water.’

He reaches for the bowl and holds it below her chin. There are precious few inches she hasn’t managed to spill. He cups the back of her head to help her drink, but she pulls away from him, fighting his hands, saying, ‘No, it’s for you. Water.’ She scoots back over the dirt, away from him, farther than he can reach.

He looks at her and he looks at the bowl. Then he tosses his cap down and unbuttons his shirt, leaving it open over his shoulders, and she turns away as he cups the bit of water to splash on his face and his chest, the back of his neck, and beneath his arms, where the hair is dark and damp. When his shirt is on again, she swivels her head back and smiles.

‘That what women do where you come from?’ he asks her.

‘What, faint?’

‘No,’ he says, and chuckles. ‘Bring out water to the fields.’

‘Fields are forbidden,’ she says.

‘Are they?’ He looks down at her, lying in a field. ‘You should stick to the shade, all that fabric you got on.’ He picks up his cap and knocks the dirt from it against his leg. ‘I don’t know your name, do I?’

She thinks of her names, all the ones she has used and the ones she’s been given. She could tell him anything. But she finds herself wanting to tell him the truth. ‘Amaranth,’ she says. ‘It’s a plant. A grain.’

‘I know what it is.’

‘I was always called Amy.’

‘Fine name, Amy.’

‘I don’t like it now.’

‘Well, I’m called Bradley ’cause everyone here on this land is Bradley, like it or not. We’ve been Bradley here longer’n this has been a state.’

‘That’s nice,’ she says. ‘To have that history.’ She doesn’t even know her own.

‘Nice like a straitjacket. That what you come racin’ out here to tell me?’

‘No, I – no.’

‘Maybe you come out to tell me what you’re gonna do? What you gonna do, Amaranth?’ He holds a hand out to her, but she doesn’t take it. ‘That what you come out to tell me?’

She stares at his hand, up his arm to the strong bones of his face. She wants his help up. She wants his help with everything, but she has forgotten how to trust. She has forgotten everything.

‘Well,’ he says, and walks away from her, smacking at the standing rows with his cap.

She watches him go, wondering if she should leave him or chase after him, come leaping out of crops later with her desperate pleas for help. She picks up the bowl and totters after him, calling, ‘It’s just, I don’t know what to do. We can’t stay – you don’t want us to stay. We don’t want to stay, but – how will we leave now? How can I get us somewhere safe with the money I have?’

He stops. ‘How much?’

‘Twenty-three dollars.’

‘Well, that won’t get you far. Not even a tank of gas. Bus tickets, maybe, over to Enid? I could drive you somewhere, Oklahoma City, more buses go on from there.’

‘You couldn’t know where we’re going.’

‘I wouldn’t follow you. Jesus, you’re one paranoid—’

‘No,’ she says. ‘He would find you, make you tell.’

‘Your husband?’ He puts a hand over his eyes to scan his fields, as if he’s searching for brake lights. ‘No wife’s worth it,’ he says, but when she doesn’t laugh he tells her, ‘You really think that, you need a shelter. You need the police.’

‘No police!’ She clutches the bowl.

‘They after you, too?’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want you involved. I don’t want you to know. We won’t stay – we can’t stay – but I don’t know how to go.’

‘You all need more money.’

‘I have nothing to sell. I have nothing.’ Even the ring, if she could find it, would be worth one tank of gas, two. It would hardly get her through the next state, even if she could drive her car.

‘And you don’t reckon you can just go home?’

‘There is no home.’ She looks up at him and the hot white sky behind. She sees a brown hawk stalking, wings wide, to hunt some creature that crouches in the fields. He sees her watching and follows it with his eyes. They are silent as they watch its flight, silent as its wings, holding their breaths together to watch the hawk circle and take aim. And then they hear the screech of it, watch it pull in its wings and plummet to the ground.

S
orrow pulls Amity hard by the strap. She even dares to whisper before the boy, ‘Don’t you leave me.’ But Amity has to. As soon as Dust came to tell her men were coming for the car, she knew she would have to, for all that is still inside it. She pulls her arm from Sorrow’s. She can feel Sorrow’s eyes on her, burning her all the way down the red dirt road, after Dust. She hops and skips to keep up with him.

By their car she sees the farmer and two fat men, round-bellied and bearded, adjusting their trousers beside a giant tow truck. She watches them slap one another on the back and hoot about women drivers, until the farmer sees her and ducks his head. The men attach a metal hook to the car’s front axle, which is sticking up. When they start a motor, a giant spool tries to wind the car in to it, but the car hangs on to the tree with all its vehicular might. The farmer holds his hand out to keep Dust and Amity back, while the two men grunt, gesture, and swear until the wire is finally stretched tight and singing. The car protests and grinds against the black bark until finally it is made to lurch upright, rise like the dead, and walk on its bumper before crashing back down to the ground, right side up and smashed flat. It shimmies on its shock absorbers.

Amity rushes around to the trunk. The farmer calls out, saying watch the cable, and she presses her thumb into the release button, hard as she can. But the lid is dented, squashed against its frame. It won’t open. She hops and points until Dust steps beside her and the man pokes a crowbar into the gap. Then the lid pops open with a puff of flour and feathers.

‘Oh, man,’ says Dust.

‘What the …’ says the man.

All that Mother packed is jumbled and broken. Honey soaks petticoats. Goat cheese has melted to a rancid, oily slick. She plunges her hands into the mess of it.

‘There’s broken glass,’ Dust says, but she nods. She knows. She flings out their filthy linens and pillows. She shoves aside the greasy bedding and honeyed envelopes, while the fat men and the farmer argue over money. Finally they shake hands, sealing some deal, and Dust tells her to get out of the trunk, it’s time to go.

‘Wait,’ she begs. She leans in, balancing on her belly, feeling far into the edges and corners of the trunk until she finds it, at last. Her fingers curl around it in triumph. She pulls it into her sleeve and hops back down.

When the car is rolled away, the space that was beneath it is rotten with paper and candy wrappers, strewn like gems across the glass and feathers and dirt. The farmer puts his fingers into the weeping wound of the tree bark, then he gives it a pat. ‘Who wants to follow it to the yard?’ he says.

‘For sure,’ Dust says, but Amity can only look up into his face in silence. She cannot answer or speak to the man. It is still a rule.

He smiles at her. ‘Way you banged through that trunk, thought your mother had a body in it. Maybe your pa.’ He laughs. ‘Y’all are pretty strange creatures, ain’t you?’

She blinks up at him. He doesn’t know the half of it.