Amity & Sorrow (9 page)

The girl he brought back, a shy and pockmarked girl, would become his fiftieth wife once the vines were lacy with hoarfrost. She would be the last to wear a veil over the black roots of her bleached hair, last to slip the ring onto her finger, last to watch it slip up and down the finger of every wife before her. As with every wife before her, she married them one and all; each took her salty kiss.

Across the temple, he called, ‘The end of time will come with the marriage of the Lamb!’

Sorrow called back, ‘Worthy is the Lamb who is slain for power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!’

‘The end of the world will come with fire!’

‘Hallelujah!’ wives called and spun. They spun about the room and took the fiftieth wife. Each wife took her as her own. They spun her hand to hand, and then he spun her into bindings. He spun her around the temple, clothing her as he would any wife, as wives wrapped her, embraced her. Then he spun her back to remove the bindings, making her nude as Eve. Amaranth watched her husband take the pink plums of her breasts into his hands, watched him nuzzle the woman, consecrating and anointing her skin with his mouth and his words. Wives spun, unmindful, unheeding. She remembered when his wives could have fit in one bed, then one room, then one house. Now women stretched across the temple.

He held his hand out last for Amaranth, calling her to the fiftieth wife. But she was watching Sorrow; Sorrow, who sulked and stroked her china bowl, stroked her belly.

Her eyes met her daughter’s across the winding sweep of women and the new bride, her new mother, and there was something in her face that she couldn’t define. Something like regret tinged with hope, or anger mixed with triumph. Something like love and betrayal. It was a look she had never seen on her child, after all that happened, and she wondered what her own face showed, what Sorrow could see were she looking.

Could she see that it was still hard to watch it, though she had had years to get used to her husband’s hands on other women?

But then, she thought, so had Sorrow.

T
wo sisters stand, strapped together on either side of a bathroom door.

Sorrow stands inside the dark room, the strap stretching through the doorknob hole to Amity at its other end, outside and sweating in the sun. She watches the orange ball spin and listens to Sorrow do her work. The sink fills and splashes, then drains away with a sucking sound and Sorrow’s groan. She hears china ping off the sink and chip off the wall tiles, as if it has been thrown, but that could not be. It is far too precious to Sorrow.

The strap goes lax and the door crashes open. The strap comes flying through the hole. Sorrow barges out, the front of her chest soaked and her eyes red. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘But you are the Oracle.’

‘It doesn’t take this long at home.’

‘We’re not at home.’

‘Don’t you think I know that? Dolt.’

Amity knows her sister wants the temple, where she sits at the altar and searches the water, where she tells Father in secret prayer all she sees. It is silent, holy work, and Amity knows that Sorrow probably doesn’t think it should happen where people go to the bathroom. And then she thinks that maybe Sorrow can’t do her work without Father. And if that is so, how can the bowl show her where Father is?

‘Maybe you need a new bowl,’ Amity says.

‘Idiot. This is my bowl.’ Sorrow shakes the shard at her.

‘The bowl isn’t the Oracle. You are the Oracle.’

‘Idiot,’ Sorrow says again. Then she begins to smile.

Sorrow twirls water in the plastic bucket, spinning the piece of china within it. She hunkers down on her knees and elbows, pulling Amity flat, strapped again. She peers at the water across the top of it, with a frog’s-eye view, then she swoops up to stare down with a high bird’s eye, pulling Amity onto clog tip and her strapped arm saluting. She floats her hand on the surface, like the feet of Jesus. She stares at the water to trouble it, tries to fairly bubble it with her glare. She rocks the bucket from side to side, then plunges her head into it, only to rise up, choking and spitting. She dangles her fingers in the bucket of water, stroking the shard, wishing for God.

Amity prays to the spinning ball, which is whirling, as mothers do. ‘Please help Sorrow’ is all she can think of to say. God answers back with the spinning of the ball, bright as a sweet in the lace of His clouds, and the pensive whir of its motor. The sound builds with her praying, grinds with His passion, and she is sure the motor will burn and the ball burst into flames and come crashing down like the heavens falling at the end of time.

‘Can you hear that?’ Sorrow asks her, head cocked.

‘Is it a sign?’

‘Yes, it’s a sign – it’s a car, you dope.’

‘A car?’ And then the sound is unmistakable. It is a car’s engine, growing louder, coming toward them. ‘Thank you, God,’ she tells the ball.

Sorrow shouts and runs from the gas station, waving her arms at the dirt road.

‘Car!’ Amity shrieks. They jump for joy as a car emerges, dirt rising and steam pouring from the hood. They call the car in, toward the gas station, guiding it to a pump in the canopy’s shade. The car slows, hissing and ticking.

‘Thank goodness you all are here,’ a woman says, bright-lipped, a blond thatch of hair ricked high on her head. She fans the back of her neck with a magazine, eyeballs and elbows on every page. ‘We didn’t think anybody was down here, did we, but I said a body’s got to have faith.’

‘Oh, we have faith,’ Amity chirps.

‘You all work here?’ A jowly man scans the forecourt. He looks the girls up and down, their long skirts and caps, and he looks about the station and its little shop. ‘You don’t even look open. This your family’s place?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Amity says, leaning in toward his window. ‘We all pitch in and work it. We all do our share.’ Sorrow shoots her a satisfied grin. In the backseat Amity sees a car seat and a baby in it, jiggling the fat rolls of its legs and arms. She wiggles her fingers at it.

‘All righty,’ he says. ‘What else can I do? You all pump or are you self-serve?’

‘I’ll pump you,’ Amity says, and she leaps to unscrew his gas cap.

‘I’ll need some coolant, too,’ he calls back to her, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

‘Yes, sir,’ she says to him. ‘Right away, sir.’

The hood release pops and smoke billows over the car, sweet as syrup. Amity fiddles to unhook the gas pump as Sorrow, on the passenger side, spots the baby. Amity squeezes the trigger, but no gas comes. She doesn’t know how to work it. She turns to the pump and she hears the man holler, which makes her drop the pump, fling her hands up, and scream. Then she turns back to see that he is hollering at Sorrow, who is reaching in through the car’s rear window, trying to unhook the baby. She fumbles with the car seat’s webbing, some complicated kind of strap, while he turns his bulk around in his seat and the woman reaches over the back of hers, slapping at Sorrow’s hands.

Amity takes hold of the driver’s window frame. ‘Will you take us with you? Will you take us home?’

‘Get the hell out of my car!’ The man starts his engine as Sorrow tries to get a better grip on the baby. The woman crawls over the back of her seat, cursing at Sorrow, and the car begins to roll forward, hood up, traveling blind. Sorrow jogs to keep up with it, arms in the window, pulling at the baby. The car speeds up, Sorrow trotting beside, and she makes one last desperate snatch. She misses. She drops back from the car, arms reaching, and it drives off, smoking and steaming, swerving and weaving, the man yelling, the woman howling, and, finally, the baby giving its own confused mewl.

Amity waves her arms from the station. ‘Stop – stop!’ But they will not.

Sorrow stares, her eyes as small and sharp as pins. ‘I had him.’

‘They would have taken us. Isn’t that what you wanted? To go home?’

‘I had him,’ she whispers. ‘Lamb of God.’

A
maranth stands in the cool of the curtained pantry, itemizing. Old cans of candied yams, creamed corn, and succotash, labels crisp and flaking. Rust-topped Mason jars of home preserves, okra, wax beans, beets, applesauce, and spiced peaches in cloudy syrup. She counts and sorts the beans and grains, pulling what can be eaten from what is spoiled.

There is food enough to feed her family. Not as much as her community had saved for Armageddon, but then they were nearly a hundred mouths. Who was meant to eat all this food? It is a sin to let it go to waste – surely that is one rule worth keeping. It is her duty – her right – to use this food before it rots. And before it is gone, she is certain that a sign will come for her and she will know what to do.

She has her hands in barley pearls when she hears Bradley stomp onto the porch, the squeal of his door, the thud of his boots dropping, one, two. She freezes like a looter, fists full of grain. He hums his way into the kitchen with a tune she can almost remember, from long ago, something about love and dancing. He sings words here and there, taps out a beat on his table. She hears the rustle of a paper bag and a cap unscrewing from a bottle, his long, deep drink. She holds her breath but she knows it’s only a matter of time before she shifts something, makes some noise, and when she does he flings aside the pantry curtain, broom held in his hand like a sword.

‘Thought I had rats,’ he says.

‘Bird,’ she says.

‘In there?’ He sets the broom down and goes back to the table, jamming the bottle into the bag and folding his arms. ‘What are you doin’?’

‘It was in your fire. You should cap off your chimney.’

‘I’ll add it to the list.’ He looks at her, all the lids off the bean and the grain bins. ‘Somethin’ cookin’?’

‘Well, you have food here,’ she blurts. ‘Did you know? Grains, some flours. Beans?’

‘Gone off now. Old.’

‘Not all of it. I can sift out what’s good. I – I can pay you for it.’

Bradley hitches a leg up to sit on his table, its joints creaking. ‘I asked what you were doin’ here, Amaranth.’

‘We need food and I can’t – all ours was in the car and that’s gone now and I … of course, I could feed you, too, feed you and your boy. I could work for you – I’m a good cook, I’m a hard worker and there’s food enough. I mean, what are you eating?’ She looks at him, the bone and sinew of him, and she realizes he isn’t eating. Not really. His sustenance comes from cans and bottles. Her shoulders droop. ‘I’m waiting, for a sign.’

‘A sign.’

‘To tell me what to do.’

‘Signs take long where you come from?’

‘They can take years,’ she says. ‘Oh, but we won’t be here for years. God crashed us here, and we’ll have to wait until He tells us where to go next.’

‘You think God crashed you? You crashed you. It was you.’ Bradley reaches around for the bottle and slides it from the paper bag. He unscrews it and takes another drink, watching her all the time. Then he wipes his mouth with his wrist, fingers curled over his face. ‘I’m tryin’ to be nice here, but I’m nobody’s fool.’

‘You’re a good man.’ She winds her hands into the pantry curtain.

He laughs. ‘I wouldn’t kick women out on the streets, but honest to God, I ain’t runnin’ a flophouse. This ain’t a charity; I got a farm to run here.’

‘We want to help you.’

‘I don’t want your help.’

‘You’ll need us in the harvest.’

‘You any idea when my harvest is? You even know what I’m growin’ out there?’

She shakes her head. She can’t even imagine how she will get her children in the forbidden fields. ‘We’re used to hard work. This – isn’t like us, how we are here.’

He hops off the table and sets the bottle down, roots through his drawers for a book of matches. He folds the cover back to light one, then lights his cigarette. ‘When you left,’ he asks her, drawing smoke in, ‘why’d you leave with so little?’

‘It was all I could grab,’ she says. ‘I got the girls, that’s all that matters. I know you think I should have stayed.’

‘No, I was thinkin’ that when my wife went, she took the lot. Must’ve planned it for some time, what she was gonna take and when she’d go. You just grabbed what you could and ran.’

The pantry curtain is around her arm like a tourniquet. She nods, unwinding it, wiggling blood into her fingers. ‘But she left you food here. Before she left. Didn’t she?’

He looks into his pantry again. ‘I suppose.’

‘We had a room like this,’ she tells him. ‘Well, bigger, but there were more of us.’ She thinks of all the food stored in the room below their temple, food made in those last frantic months, women jostling over stove tops, scooping food into boiled jars to preserve it. What they hadn’t thought to keep, and what his wife must have kept, were seeds. Because Hope was gone.

At the back of the pantry she’d found jars of seeds, stacked and unlabeled. She held them up to the light to see them, their myriad shapes: hard brown balls, pale disks and cylinders, yellow crescents thin as fingernail parings. A jar of tiny black specks could be anything – onion or nigella or poppy. She unscrewed a few to sniff them, to see if she might cook with them, but she knew better than to experiment with seeds she didn’t know. ‘How late can you plant here?’ she asks him.