Amity & Sorrow (18 page)

‘That’s a fine scar,’ she tells him.

‘It’s gross.’

‘Can I touch it?’

He looks back at her for a moment then gives a nod, the shirt loose in his hands. She wouldn’t ordinarily ask to touch something. She would wait to be told or just do it, out of need, but it is a big scar and she thinks she can help it. She hopes she can. She reaches out the fingers of her good hand and puts them square on a twist of skin, a hot knot. The scar is soft and fragile, like something not yet ready: a chicken embryo, a rareripe baby. She doesn’t know if she can heal anything with just one hand.

‘Thresher,’ he says.

Her fingers slip along the length of his scar.

‘You can feel where they sewed my arm back on. It’s like I couldn’t grow enough skin. It still goes hot in the sun.’

She feels each tiny stitch of it, trying to smooth them flat.

‘You ever see a thing move that you couldn’t understand?’

She thinks of the women spinning in the temple and all she’d seen in the room below. ‘I have,’ she says.

‘We were cutting the field,’ he says. ‘Must have been a big crop, ’cause Bradley hasn’t brought a crew in since. My
papi
was working and he let me come out with him, to stand behind the straw walker when the chaff dropped. I’d never seen anything so big, so fast, never been so close to something so magic. I must have stuck my arm in. I can’t remember anything, only next thing I’m in the hospital and some nurse is saying my pa is waiting. Only it isn’t my pa. It was Bradley. Anyways.’ He pulls the sleeveless shirt back up over his shoulders.

‘I hope I get a scar as good as yours,’ she says.

‘You’re weird.’ He helps her up and walks her farther into the barn, hay crunching, away from the open doors to a stall. He kneels in the straw and waves her over and she wonders what will happen, what he’ll do next. But he only points down at a cardboard box, writhing with kittens, striped and plain and tortoiseshell, wriggling around a gray mother, nursing.

‘Oh,’ she breathes and reaches in with her good hand until the mother cat screams at her.

‘She’s fierce,’ he tells her. ‘I’m gonna raise them to be mousers. If I stay that long. Might not, you know. You could have one, if you stay.’

‘Could I?’ She points at a white one, its eyes as small and pink as a rat’s. She would have that one and it would be her very own. She wouldn’t have to share it with anyone.

‘You reckon you’ll stay?’

Amity looks at the kittens, wriggling like grubs, hungry as babies, and thinks that, if the time came and God came for her, she’d like to have a litter like that, five little babies, tiny and furry, clustering around her to feed. How fierce she would be then.

T
he fields are red mud, wet dough. Rain has filled the playa, turning flat grass beneath cottonwoods to a lake bed where stilt-legged waterbirds have magically appeared to bend and strut. Bradley assesses the damage in the rapeseed, where rain has stripped the pods of their flowers. Yellow petals crush and smear beneath their feet as Amaranth totters after him, clogs sliding, beneath a borage sky.

He presses thumbnails into browning pods, checking their moisture, waiting for them to dry. ‘Too wet,’ he says. ‘I swath these now, they’ll mold in the ricks. Seed’ll be no good then. If I wait too long they’ll shatter, drop their seed.’ He strides on. ‘Shoulda stuck to wheat. I knew where I was with wheat. I don’t know.’

‘You’ll know,’ she tells him. She skids behind him on her wooden soles, then slips sideways from them into a rut and onto her skirts, hard on the mud.

He holds a hand down to help her up and she holds up a hand gloved in red soil. He laughs at it and she begins to laugh, and then they’re laughing together and at each other, dirty in the fields. She wipes her hands in her skirts and takes his calloused hand in her stained one, coming back to her feet. She does not let his hand go.

‘You keep doing that,’ he says.

‘Falling over?’ Her skirts are streaked and sodden. Mud climbs her arms.

‘You need boots.’

‘I need hosing down.’

‘Go on and get a bath in the house, then,’ he says. ‘Then come on into town with me.’

She drops his hand and turns away from him as a bird lands, stabbing its beak at a seedpod beside her. Bradley flaps his arms at it, stomping and frightening her and the bird to flight. She starts back for the house. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You can’t hide here forever,’ he calls, and that stops her. Her hands grab her skirts.

‘Thought I’d head in,’ he says. ‘Ask around who’s cuttin’ now, hire a draper header.’

She turns toward him. ‘Am I hiding?’

‘Looks it. Maybe he ain’t comin’ for you after all.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘A man can change his mind.’

She shakes her head at him. He doesn’t know what her husband has done, what he is capable of. She has hardly told him anything of what has happened and she has no idea how she will tell it to him, how to start telling. She cannot afford to become complacent or comfortable. He is coming for them; she knows it. He is only waiting for her to relax and stop watching.

‘Stay, then,’ he says, and he marches past her, toward the house.

‘You stay,’ she says, chasing after him to catch him, grabbing hold of the damp back of his shirt.

‘I ain’t hidin’,’ he says, twisting out of her grasp. ‘Your husband don’t want me. ’Less he wants himself a husband.’

‘Funny.’

‘Thought I’d get a paper, too,’ he calls back, over his shoulder, his thumbs jabbing seedpods reflexively, left and right. ‘See if there’s any news of a church on fire.’

‘Don’t!’ She hops and slips behind him, pulling her skirts up from the muddy ruts. ‘Don’t!’

He stops. ‘What you so afraid of?’

‘Everything!’ she gasps out. ‘He won’t let us go! He won’t let us live without him. We are family eternal – beyond the grave.’

‘That’s a vow you make. Don’t mean it’s true.’

‘He’ll kill us if he finds us here.’

‘Thought I’d kill my own wife when she left. I was that angry. But you can’t keep carryin’ it. It just – goes.’

‘Does it?’ Her hand reaches for his shoulder. He turns his head for the house, so she can study the sinew of his neck, the bone and string of him, the dark hairs of his jaw on the turn to white. She puts a hand on his other shoulder to turn him to her and his arms come around her. ‘Don’t go,’ she says, and she presses herself to him until she can feel the buttons of his jeans at her waist. She presses her hip bones to his thighs.

He looks down at her, opens his mouth to say something, maybe tell her to stop it, maybe to leave him alone, and she brings her mouth up to his, to taste his sweat and salt. Grit slides from his tongue onto hers. His hands move up her back, feeling the bodice and binding she wears. She is bound within them. There is no easy way in to her. Her breath pushes her ribs against her bindings and the circle of his hands. Her collars bite at her neck. She jerks the buttons of his jeans open.

‘Hey,’ he says, and she bends on the mud to him, to take him into her mouth, but he pulls her up, pulls her back up to him, then comes onto her skirts, saying, ‘Christ, Christ, Jesus.’ He looks down at the stain of him, spreading on her stains.

She bunches her skirts in her hands to hide it. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says.

‘Nothing.’ He pushes himself back into his trousers and does up the buttons, turns his back on her.

‘I mean, it’s fine – I don’t need—’ She comes around the side of him, looking up at him. ‘I’m no girl, I just …’

He scratches his head and finds his hat gone. He scoops it up from the field and knocks it clean against his leg.

‘It’s only, I’m grateful to you,’ she starts, ‘and I wanted—’

‘Grateful?’ He jams his cap on and stomps down the row to get away from her.

‘Wait!’

‘I been waiting!’ He stops. ‘Four years, my wife’s gone. Four years and I ain’t even looked at a woman. I’ve loved nothin’ but fields. How long you been gone, and you’re here on your knees to me?’

‘I’ve been faithful.’

‘One of fifty, faithful.’

‘There are thousands of polygamists. Tens of thousands. It isn’t only me.’

‘So that makes it okay?’

‘It makes it hard, but we’re not freaks.’

He takes a step toward her. ‘How’s it work, then? You all got a rota? You got fifty beds or do you share him?’ He looks at her filthy skirts, her bodice, her cap, and he shakes his head at her. ‘This what you do in your church when you’re grateful?’

She puts her hands over her face. It is.

A crow flaps up behind them, startling her. Its caws come like laughter as it beats the air with jagged wings. She sees its tiny feet tuck, safe under its body, how it rises and leaves them both to their standing, their silence, and another faraway crow caws its laugh.

The seedbed is flooded, more lake than garden now. The seeds she planted have drifted on water, like tiny rafts, and the furrows she made have flattened. She can’t tell if any seeds remain or if they’ll grow. The jars she left there have filled with rain and flushed out their seeds. She has ruined it, all of it, but she scoops the mud back into the bed, waiting for Bradley to come back.

She tucks her daughters in, lights kerosene lanterns for him in the dark. Still he doesn’t come, and she begins to worry that he never will. She feels the fear her husband had when he feared they would lose their land. If Bradley were gone, they would have to leave. What right would they have to stay? And the fear comes, of leaving and of staying. She has to do something, make some kind of plan.

She takes a lantern by its handle and walks from the house, the flame throwing shadows of her over the towers of the castoffs, the car parts. Rusted metal catches the light. The gas station is lit up and she looks around the shop for the light switch or keys. If he never returned, who would care for the place? Who would care for his father?

Behind the station she sees his truck and she runs for it, lamp bobbing, to find him in the burned-out front seat, head flung back and snoring. There is a bottle half poking from a brown bag beside him, and a stack of newspaper. She doesn’t look at it. She watches him sleeping, the lines of his face soft and shadowed, his eyes darting back and forth beneath his lids.

Before dawn he wakes and his steps come shaky on the ground. He follows the light of the kerosene lamp from the pile of junk around the house, where she cannot sleep. He follows her light where she moves his soil, his legs bent like a spider’s, to kick a plastic bucket. He steps into its handle with his boot and it trips him, knocks him over as he tries to shake it off, while she’s saying sorry, sorry. The newspaper flutters down from beneath his arm and he lands on his backside, rocks his hips to rescue the brown-bagged bottle from his back pocket. He pulls it out and feels it, checking to see if he’s broken it. Finding he hasn’t, he unscrews the cap and tips it back to his mouth, paper rustling. He takes a thoughtful swallow and extends it to her. ‘Is it late or early?’ he asks her.

She looks at him and the bottle. ‘Did you eat in town?’ she asks.

‘Sure,’ he says. He stretches his frame along the grass. He smells strong, of alcohol and cigarettes, gasoline. She wants to kiss his mouth.

‘I been drinking,’ he slurs. ‘Old Mullaley’s dead. Cuttin’ in the storm and fork lightning struck a grain bin. Old as my pa and still up farming, not stuck in bed hopin’ to die.’ He sees the newspaper then, soaking up water, and he crawls over the mud path to retrieve it, shaking his knees up each time they find water. He curses, shakes the wet outside of the paper loose so she can just see, in the low light, all the pictures inside it, oversized faces, explosions, and men in camouflage, all the miseries of the world come back from town with him. ‘They’re swathin’ outside Dalhart. Reckon I’ll hire a draper header, make a start.’ He looks down at the newspaper again, as if trying to remember how it came to be in his hands.

‘Are we there?’ she whispers.

He thrusts the paper at her and she flips through the pages, leaning it into a lamplight. She sees fires and the flames, but when she looks at them they are not her fire. There are fires all over the world in the paper. Perhaps no one even knows about their fire.