Amity & Sorrow (32 page)

‘Here?’ she scoffed. ‘You want good news, go find a happy hour.’

He had laughed and told her she was cute. She called him a letch and he’d laughed again, delighted by her. They got all sorts at all-night fast-food establishments like Tacoland. She had seen it all – college boys on spring break from the Midwest, hoping to score with a California girl; middle-aged sleazeballs, thinking she could be bought with cheap wine and a meal. Sometimes she could.

She found him asleep in his van in their parking lot when she arrived to open up and fire up the fryers. ‘You can’t sleep here,’ she told him, but a few months later, she would be sleeping in the parking lot herself, having run out of sofas and fast friends made over a cheap bar buffet.

A year later, when he came back to the parking lot, he would find her in her car, the doors open and her purse gone. She had been drunk again, drunk out of her mind. ‘Have you heard the good news?’ he asked her, and then, leaning in to her, said, ‘My God, are you okay?’ She was not okay. Not at all.

When they reached his land, he turned up a gravel path, tight between white pines at the base of a gray-rock mountain studded in conifers. Three women stood before a house, rough-hewn wood with hay-bale foundations. It was painted a bright, fresh yellow. There were raised beds overflowing with bean plants and vines in full flower, lettuces, and bushy herbs.

She looked at him. Who were these women?

‘You must be Amy,’ the first woman said with a smile, pulling open the van door and holding out a freckled hand to help her down. Yellow paint striped her arm. ‘I’m Hope.’ The other two women had gone straight to his driver’s-side door and squealed like girls to see him. They were not girls. They were older than Hope and significantly older than Amaranth. They were bone-thin, in faded overalls, and their teeth, when they smiled their hellos, were long and brown at the gums. She watched them each kiss his mouth.

Hope took Amaranth by the arm. ‘Let’s get you inside. Such a long drive you’ve had. Come and meet Mother.’

Amaranth looked back at him. Whose mother? He had no family. It was the one thing they had in common.

Hope opened the door and took her through a piney entryway into a gloomy parlor, the small windows hung with heavy curtains. ‘Here’s our Amy,’ Hope called into the murk.

An ancient woman sat shrunken in a needlepoint chair, dwarfed by a tasseled lamp. Hope switched it on above her and the light made the white tufts of her hair glow in a holy aureole. She lifted a knobby-knuckled hand, veined and spotted, and Amaranth took it, warmly. She thought of her grandmother and her final days in her bed, when she seemed to shrink into the rind of her own skin. She thought of how mean her grandmother had become.

The old woman’s fingers explored her own, twisting the loose band she wore. She held her hand out, palm down, as she had seen other women do when showing off their rings. Before she knew it, the old woman had snatched it off.

‘Oh,’ she said to Hope, embarrassed. ‘She’s – taken my ring.’

‘Has she?’ Hope said. ‘I’ll get her pills.’ Her husband came in with the two other women and she told him how the old woman had taken her ring.

‘It’s her ring,’ he said. He held his hand out for it. The old woman cocked her head, opened her mouth, and slid the ring into it. Amaranth grimaced: the horrible vision of her wedding ring in the sagging, wrinkled mouth of the crone, the sound of it clicking against dentures. ‘Is she mad?’ she heard herself whispering. He glared at her. ‘She’ll choke on it, is all.’

Hope entered with a handful of pills and a glass of water. ‘Come, Mother,’ she said.

The old woman shook her head and pursed her lips, but no one shouted or threatened, as Amaranth would have done. Her husband only put his hand on her, his bride, and smoothed the fabric across her belly, as if he could show them all the tiny bean inside her, though she was not showing yet. The five women each made a noise: Hope a gasp, the two women tandem ‘oh’s, Amaranth an embarrassed laugh, and the old woman a pop as her tongue slid out with the ring on it, wreathed in spittle. He dried the ring on his trousers and slid it back onto Amaranth’s finger, still slightly damp.

He took her up the stairs and along a landing to a back bedroom, sloping under the house’s pointed roof. The gray mountain hung in the small frame of the window. They sat, back-to-back, on opposite sides of a small double bed heaped with the quilts that spoke of hard winters and no heating.

‘Who are these women?’ she asked him.

She heard the bed frame squeak as he bent to unlace his shoes. He slid them carefully beneath the bed. She kicked her own shoes off and slung them under the bed, knocking something hard. When she bent over, she found a porcelain chamber pot. She sat back up and tried to pull him around to her by his shoulder. ‘You told me you had no family. Who are they?’ Someone had put wildflowers in a jam jar by her bedside. Was it her bedside? Where did all the women sleep? ‘Did you lie to me?’

He turned around to her. ‘What?’

‘What’s going on here?’

‘I did not think I should take a wife,’ he said.

Her eyes stung. ‘Fine,’ she tossed out. ‘Take me back.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You misunderstand. I thought it was selfish, to raise one woman above others. To raise you above all.’

When she spoke, her voice was small. ‘Then why did you?’

He came around the bed to kneel beside her. ‘I never thought to have a child.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have slept with me.’ She wanted to hurt him.

‘But I loved you and I wanted you. And I could see how lost you were.’

She choked on a sob. She had nothing and no one and he had been her one last hope. He promised her a home and a new, clean life. If she left, she would be going back to nothing: no job, no car. She had sold all she had for money she had already spent on a dress and secret liquor. And then there was the pregnancy. ‘Who are those women?’ she asked him again.

‘Women who were lost like you,’ he told her. ‘Women I love, but not like you. I love you, Amy. I always will. My heart has set itself on you.’

She thought of her mother, who married the moon. She thought of her grandmother, dying. ‘Not the moon,’ her grandmother said. ‘I never said moon. I said Moonies.’

She looked down at him and made her choice. She knew that she could run away, as her parents had, and raise a child alone in an absence of family, of love, or she could stay. She could just stay, to see where his love would lead them.

M
other drives, but there is no looking backward, no scanning behind to watch what they have left. She stares ahead, hunched and humming, and it is Amity who looks back now, turned around in the front seat of the burned truck to watch the gas station and the road recede.

Mother jostles a tire in a pothole. ‘Okay?’ she asks.

Amity nods and faces forward. Her hands are bound and outstretched before her as if she is holding an invisible tea tray. ‘Oven gloves,’ the old man called her. Whenever the road is rough and her hands hit the dashboard, Mother cries out, but Amity says nothing. She cannot feel it. Her hands are two boiled hams on the hocks of her wrists.

Four days they will drive, to get where they’re going. Home.

There are no signs to look for now. The end has come.

A
maranth slows to watch for their turnoff, the thin path between the pines that is so easy to miss. Deliberately, intentionally so. The red firs stand, heavy with cones, and the tamarack turns golden, ready to throw down its needles for fall. She brakes and puts her arm across Amity, to hold her back as the truck swings off the road and into the dip that leads to their land. Headlights sweep the bark. Gears grind. She thinks of Bradley.

‘I could come if you wanted,’ he said as she was leaving, standing over her, head resting atop her own. ‘But who’d mind Pa? Who’d put rape in for winter? Take twice as long, with Dust gone.’ He turned his head to kiss the parting between her twists of braids and then her forehead. ‘You’ll come back, if you’ve a mind to.’

She nodded. She wanted him to tell her to stay. She wanted him to promise her that it didn’t matter, all this damage they had done to his food stores, his land, his crops. She wanted him to tell her it didn’t matter how crazy her daughter was. ‘I’ll have your truck. I’ll have to come back.’

He turned away when she started the truck and belted in Amity. Only when she pulled away from the gas station could she see him looking after her, then waving behind her, waving as the red dirt road stretched between them, taking long, loping steps to walk behind them to wave some more. She wanted to slam on the brakes, fly out of the car, and run back down the road to him, to ask him if he would be there if she came back – when she came back. Because she was certain that as soon as she was gone, he would pick his house up, tuck the fields into his pockets, and vanish. She would follow the red dirt road back to find a red dirt hole.

It had been a hard, hot summer, undoing the work of Sorrow. Bradley harvested the shepherd’s-crook stalks of the sunflower seed heads and turned over the remnants of the sorghum, unharvested and ruined. He worked in silence and alone while she emptied the rest of his food bins, rubbed menthol into his father’s chest, and salved Amity’s burns. In the kitchen garden, flowers bloomed and no one saw them.

Now, headlights urge them through the dark and the lodgepole pines. She can smell them, hear them scrape the truck’s sides. Goats bleat, far across black fields. Up the path, high beams catch what is left of the temple, surrounded by a fluttering of faded yellow caution tape, marking it out as a crime scene. Her daughter stirs and she drives past it, so she will not see.

The front of the farmhouse is black with smoke. Beds that once stood filled with beanpoles and edible greens sprout dried weeds. A lacy curtain waves through a broken window like a white flag.

She unbuckles Amity and takes the flashlight, lighting their faces like moons in the cab. She cuts the truck’s engine and all the world about them is dark.

‘She will be here,’ Amity says. ‘Won’t she?’

Amaranth reaches across her to open her door, and Amity slides down off the seat to land.

The front door of the house stands open.

‘Hello?’ she calls into it. She shines the flashlight on the entryway, across the blackened walls and the sodden quilts and tapestries that hang there. ‘Hello?’

‘Sorrow?’ Amity calls behind her. ‘Dust?’

Amaranth moves into the house, one arm reaching back for Amity. She shines the light into the parlor, its scorched walls and moldy needlepoint furnishings, the split cushions, the velveteen sofa erupting with springs. She moves around the newel post of the stairway and down the hallway. Glass crunches under their clogs.

In the kitchen, the floor has been flooded. The icebox door is open, dripping, reeking of milk gone off. Each cupboard door stands open and emptied. The walls are smeared with dark shapes, blood or feces, molasses. She steps on a china saucer and sees that the floor is covered with bits of china, gold-rimmed with tiny pink flowers, from the old, old woman’s trousseau, as if there has been a one-room earthquake, as if every cupboard has vomited.

She opens a drawer for storm candles and safety matches and lights them, setting them into broken cups. She makes a ring of light for Amity. ‘You stay here,’ she says.

‘Don’t leave me,’ Amity whimpers.

‘I just want to look upstairs.’

‘Please.’

Amaranth looks at her daughter, her pale face, her outstretched bandages, the dark rings below her eyes. Her daughter is half a head taller since they left this house; how has she not noticed her growing, how her wrists jut from her sleeves? But her face is as taut and frightened as when she was made to run from all she had known. ‘We can look in the daylight,’ she tells her. ‘I’m not leaving you. Okay?’ She gathers up a few of the candles and places the flashlight, gently, between Amity’s two bound hands. ‘It will all seem fine, come morning. You’ll see.’ She leads her child back through the house, their shadows rippling across the walls.