Amity & Sorrow (22 page)

‘I love you all,’ Amaranth slurred from the backseat. ‘I would marry you all, every one of you.’

Come autumn, they were married. Zachariah to Hope and the two women, all of them to Amaranth, by the grave of the second wife. Amaranth passed her ring to the three sets of fingers. The two women kissed each other and Zachariah and Amaranth kissed Hope, again and again. At last, she felt, she had a sister.

At the ceremony’s end, he took Amaranth to bed, only Amaranth, and they grieved and cried for Eve. It was nothing like after the ceremony with the second wife. He held her alone and was tender with her. He promised he wouldn’t leave her, but she knew he would, come spring, come summer. He would always leave – she knew that now – but she was sure he would come back for her. That was his promise. She was first and last. He would come for her and she would wait, after all the running she had done.

She stitched the women’s names to the sheet, all the women she loved who loved her, around the name of the second wife. Then she stitched Eve down under her own name, grayed and fraying. She told herself that she would have another child and when she did she would hold it over Eve’s name to tell it that once there was a sister. Eve would always be that sister, even as every wife who died would still be a wife. Family would be family forever. It was their best hope.

When her daughter came, the name she stitched was Sorrow.

A
mity and Dust are flying in the pickup bed, speeding down the highway in the sun. They are pelted with pellets, escapees from the haulage truck laden with the season’s rapeseed. It snaps on their faces, pings off the truck. Clothes flapping, hanging onto hat and cap, they watch the land turn small green fields to broad brown fields where sun on silver silos and metal hog barns makes them squint. They hold their noses from the muck of pigs.

When they reach the grain elevator, Amity stands to shake the harvest from her skirts. Bradley lopes into the office and Dust hitches a leg over the truck bed to watch him, explaining how it works, how they’ll weigh the truck full then weigh the truck empty. ‘The difference in weight is the seed we’re selling.’

Mother and Sorrow sit, locked inside the burned-out cab, holding the wrist strap. The farmer walks back to them with slow, serious steps. His head is down and his shoulders hunched. ‘Test weight’s low,’ says Dust. ‘Too dry or too wet. Damn.’ But then the farmer gives a sudden haroop, boots a little sideways crab dance toward the truck. He takes off his hat and flaps it, like he’s too hot for his own good and he knows it. Dust leaps down so they can slap one another on their backs and Mother laughs and claps her hands in the cab, and all feels right with the world. Only Sorrow is silent. Amity hops up and down in the back of the truck, clogs rolling over seed, glad to be unstrapped from her.

‘Test weight sixty-two and moisture ten,’ Bradley calls out. ‘Not epic by any stretch, but okay. Best yield I ever cut. Okay, first yield I ever cut, still it means that maybe I won’t lose my damn farm – maybe it means you girls only went and brung me some goddamn luck after all.’ He bangs on the cab’s roof and gives a rooster crow. He runs around to Mother’s side of the truck and hauls her out to swing her. But he’s forgotten she’s strapped, so Sorrow swings out, stunned and straining, swinging around the two of them before she can free herself.

Once they’re off the highway, fields give way to parking lots and rows of buildings on either side. The road narrows as they turn toward town, and Amity watches for Mother’s signal to duck down and hide, but it never comes. So she watches as the street does a circle dance around a redbrick building, grand with four cream columns standing upright as apostles. ‘Is that your temple?’ Amity shouts above the roar of cars.

‘It’s the courthouse!’ Dust hollers.

Bradley drives them down a main street lined with windowed shops, bright colors and striped awnings, flags flapping and piles of goods: shoes and ladders, lawn mowers, fruit. He pulls them into a busy parking lot and finds a space beside an expanse of yellow grass, where he points at a dark bar and tells them that’s where he’ll be if they have any catastrophes, but Amity’s off, racing toward a metal gang of animals, dashing from the truck and across the grass to mount the back of a giant squirrel. It grinds on a rusty spring. Mother shouts behind her, ‘Watch where you’re going – watch for cars; stay with Dust – do as he tells you!’ She doesn’t see Mother telling Dust what it is he may and may not tell her to do.

Dust calls her from the squirrel and walks her through the town, the fluttering, glorious wonder of it, all the people walking and driving, all the people staring. She smiles back at them, everyone, but they only stare. ‘Why do people stare so?’ she asks him.

‘Well, look at you,’ he says.

She does look, in every window they pass, but she sees nothing remarkable. She’s smiling and they aren’t. She’s dressed and they aren’t, for the most part, with their toes exposed and their pantaloons cut off, way up at their crotches. In one window alone a whole row of women sit with their heads uncovered, hair hanging long and wet down their backs, right there where anyone could see them. She gasps as a man shears each one with his scissors. ‘I should stare,’ she says.

‘Women don’t cover up so much as you do.’ He only stares at a window full of dark blue jeans and pointy-toe boots in every kind of leather.

She tugs on his sleeve. ‘You said you’d take me where the books are.’

‘Today ain’t all about you,’ he says. ‘I’m the one just got paid for working.’ He goes inside and she tells him she’ll wait right outside. ‘I promised your ma I’d watch you,’ he says. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Stay right there.’

Amity tries to stand still, but the town moves her. Women push babies in carts so wide she has to jump out of the way and into the street, where cars honk and make her jump back. Big girls march by in high-heeled packs, spread across the sidewalk, and they must be run from, their pointing and laughing. And when she stops to look for Dust, she can no longer find his window. She can’t find his stack of pants or boots, or mother, truck, or squirrel.

She walks in circles to look for help. She knows better than to speak to strangers, but when she finds a modest woman, her dress well below her kneecaps and a hat of straw on her head, she goes to her and takes her hand.

The woman withdraws it, sticky, and leans down to her. ‘You need something, sweetie?’

‘The house of
The Grapes of Wrath,
’ she says. And when the lady tries to leave, she sings out, ‘Library! Library!’ remembering the old man’s name for it.

When she gets to the door, she knows it is the best of temples – dark and lit by small windows, where motes spin in shafts of light like tiny angels and the quiet hush of pages turning is soft as cloth on boards. A woman stands at its center instead of an oracle, with long purple hair and a silver star on her chest.

Amity walks to her and speaks in her bravest voice, loud and clear. ‘I have come for your
Grapes of Wrath.
’

‘Shh,’ says the woman. A slim silver ring in her nose wiggles when she smiles then, whispering, ‘Fiction’s in the corner.’

‘Thank you!’

The woman frowns. ‘Shh.’

The walls and the dark shelves are lined with books, old as the old man’s, their spines in lines like a jiggedy rainbow. They are cool and slick in plastic sleeves when she touches them and when she pulls them out she can see their pictures: platters of meat and birds of prey, women bulging lustily from gowns and creatures wrapped in bandages. She presses on for a hand with grapes, setting the books down onto the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ The woman is beside her then, picking her books up and sliding them back onto shelves so she won’t know where she’s looked now.

‘I’m looking for
The Grapes of Wrath
.’

‘Well, you’re not even in fiction. You ought to be in the children’s section anyway. You don’t belong here.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Dust told me to wait.’

The woman points her back into the corner and Amity moves her way toward it, distracted by dogs and soldiers and cakes, and when at last she pulls the book out, she gives a mighty ‘Hallelujah!’ A shush comes from every table as she dances the book to the door.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ The purple-haired woman catches hold of her book.

‘I’m taking
Grapes of Wrath,
’ Amity says.

‘No, you are not.’

‘The old man says they’re free.’

‘Well, they’re not.’ The woman looks around the room, as if for help or divine intervention. ‘You need a library card to check them out.’ She looks at the book’s cover. ‘This is
Viticulture for Fun and Profit.
What is this?’

‘Those are grapes, ma’am. Grapes of wrath, ma’am.’

‘Does it say “grapes of wrath” here?’

Amity looks up at her. ‘I don’t know what it says, ma’am.’

‘Look, we have a section of picture books and easy readers. Let me show you where those are. Why don’t you bring your mother back with you? Or your father?’

‘Sorrow says he’s coming.’

The woman finally folds her arms around the book. ‘Young lady, this is no place to play games. Run along now. Go.’

Outside in the sun there is no Dust waiting for her. There is only a peeling bench and a girl atop it, beside a giant stack of books. She knew how to get them.

‘Hello,’ says the girl.

Amity flinches. The girl is smiling at her, not staring, not pointing. She looks – like Amity. Her dress is dark and her head is covered, not with a cap but with a crisp blue triangle of fabric, holding auburn twists back from her face.

Amity gives her a smile. ‘You’re a modest people like we are, aren’t you? I thought it was only us.’

‘We’re Mennonite. What are you?’

‘What’s Mennonite?’ Amity scoots closer. ‘Are there more of you?’

‘Of course. My family and our church.’

Amity nods. ‘How many sisters and brothers do you have?’

‘Four brothers. No sisters. I wish I had a sister.’

‘You can have mine,’ Amity tells her and the girl laughs. ‘How many mothers do you have?’