Amity & Sorrow (12 page)

‘What if they find something?’ Amaranth whispered.

‘It had better be divine,’ was all that Hope would say. She turned the car radio up and a man reported that seven people had been blown up by the side of the road in a faraway land that Sorrow had never heard of, in a war none of them understood or were aware had started.

In town, Sorrow didn’t understand why her mother wanted her to show her naked loins to a strange man. She cried out when her feet were placed into stirrups. She screamed at her mother as the greased speculum was inserted and squeezed open like scissors. ‘Mother, make him stop!’

Amaranth thought of their children, how they were growing up. She remembered when the first boys realized that there were two sexes, and that boys were in the minority. ‘When do we get us some wives?’ Adam had asked, hands on the hips of his skirts.

‘What would you do with wives, little man?’ Amaranth had swatted him, wondering what his mother had told him would happen to him once his voice had broken, once he sprouted hair. Every woman there would be his sister or his mother. How would he get wives?

‘When I get me some wives,’ Adam said, edging his rump away from more swats, ‘I’m gonna tell ’em all what to do, ’cause that’s what the man does.’

When the boys were older still, she would hear them rough-housing in the room below. Once, she heard the sound of cloth ripping and whipped open the hatch, thinking someone was stuck in a hinge. She was ready to discipline them, tell them it was no place to play, when she heard a boy’s voice say, ‘You’re just a girl – you can’t make Jesus.’

‘I can too make Jesus. Just watch me!’ The other voice was Sorrow’s.

When they returned from town, Amaranth called her family into the temple. It was her first time and there was no precedent for it. If the wives wondered why she should initiate worship, they knew better than to voice it; she was the first wife. The women and children were assembled before Zachariah heard them and lifted the hatch and rose through the floor to them, surprised but pleased. He remarked that going into town must have shocked her into action as it did him, each trip, every summer. If only they were as aware of the dire conditions of the outside world as he was. If only they knew how near the end they were.

Amaranth stood at the center of the room. She spun slowly, to look each wife and child in the face. ‘Someone has been at my daughter.’

‘Wife,’ he cautioned. ‘Amy.’

She pointed to him. ‘She has been broken into. She is no virgin.’

‘Who tells you this?’

‘I tell you! Look what comes from a faith such as ours – look at us!’

Zachariah took hold of Sorrow’s chin. ‘What have you done, girl?’

Sorrow whimpered, ‘Father.’

Then he roared from the altar. ‘This is holy work we do! This is my holy child! Who’s been at my holy daughter?’ He left Sorrow to circle his family, master of them all, pushing Amaranth from its center. She moved to the altar, to take Sorrow’s hand, and Sorrow let her. He looked each member of his church up and down until he came to a stop before his sixth wife and his seventh, each the mother of a growing boy. How tall they were, suddenly, beside him. Young men. Not children. He looked each boy in the eye. ‘Which of you has been at my daughter? Your sister?’

‘There were harvester crews up,’ Wife Six, Dawn, said quickly.

‘And junkies, looking to buy – it could have been anyone!’ Wife Seven said.

Each stepped before her son, her child, and Amaranth could remember the triumph each woman had showed when her child was pulled from within her, the tiny button that marked them out as first son, second son. What man didn’t want a son?

Zachariah hauled both boys to the altar, mothers clutching and trailing, and bent them over the table. He ripped down Adam’s cotton britches – they were too old to wear skirts now – and then he pulled down Justice’s beside him. He shoved the tunics out of the way. Then he took hold of the cross and he whacked their buttocks, one after the other, until their mothers pulled at him, calling, ‘Hit me instead!’ and lifting their arms up to catch his cross.

‘I will hit you!’ he said, and he raised the cross above their heads.

‘Please, Father,’ Sorrow cried, clutching her mother.

Zachariah stopped, breathing hard but gripping the cross. ‘You will tell me the truth,’ he said to both of the boys.

Adam turned his head to him. ‘Really?’

Zachariah hefted the cross higher and Sorrow went to catch his arm.

Adam rose to his full height, taller now than Zachariah. Braver. ‘The truth is she is my sister and you are a dirty old man.’

‘Get out of my temple!’ Zachariah swung the cross as women and children leaped out of his way. Sorrow staggered back from him. ‘Get out of my church!’

Adam would not look at Sorrow or his mother. He gave Zachariah a small nod, reached back for Justice, and the two of them strode out the temple door, mothers following, each howling and accusing the other.

‘Husband,’ Amaranth cautioned. ‘They are your sons.’

‘Who needs sons?’ He spoke childishly, rashly. ‘The first was never my son. Adam was a rotting seed in her when she came.’

She remembered the girl then, young Dawn, black-eyed and enormous with her first child, product of her stepfather. ‘You said blood didn’t matter. You said families were made from love, and so they are. Look at us.’

‘You asked if I could see what came of a faith such as ours.’

Amaranth looked at Sorrow, saw how desperately she searched the windows for Adam. ‘I meant a faith with too many women.’ And boys who grow up, she thought.

‘Was she with child?’ he asked her.

Amaranth looked at her daughter. ‘No,’ she said.

If your right hand offends you, cut it off. They had all heard him say it.

The boys were driven into town, left, and banished. Their mothers clung to fence posts, forcing themselves to stay without their children. It was only a matter of time until they packed their meager possessions in the night and snuck off to follow them, to freedom, the sixth and seventh wives.

Amaranth found Sorrow in the temple, searching her bowl for the sense in it. ‘I’m sorry I had to take you,’ she told her. ‘You didn’t know what you were doing. We have made your world too small and that is our fault.’

Sorrow gripped the bowl. ‘It’s what these places are made for.’

‘What?’

Sorrow placed a hand on her chest, then another on her crotch, pressing her skirt in. ‘It is what these places are made for.’ When Amaranth spoke, saying no, Sorrow, you’re wrong, Sorrow silenced her. ‘I have eyes, don’t I? Don’t I see how it works?’

‘Not with a brother. It’s not your fault but – it’s wrong, Sorrow. I didn’t know we had to teach you that.’

‘My brothers,’ she spat, ‘were trying to keep me safe.’

‘From what?’

‘From what will happen. You can’t see it.’

Amaranth reached for Sorrow’s hand, but Sorrow put them both around her bowl. Her daughter wasn’t pregnant, but the gynecologist had confirmed that she had been sexually active. For some time, he had pointed out, just as he was asking Sorrow to tell him her age. She wondered what would happen to the file he wrote in, about her.

Hope came to them in the temple. She carried a fat bundle, wrapped in a quilt. ‘I’m going, Amy,’ she said.

‘You can’t go. I need you too much.’

Hope smiled her crooked-mouth, freckle-face smile, the lines in her face long and deep now. They had been friends for more than twenty years.

‘He won’t let you go,’ Amaranth said and instantly regretted it, wanting to pull the words back into her mouth. She loved Hope far too much to threaten her.

‘I don’t care. I’m in love, Amy. Foolishly.’

‘My God,’ she said. ‘Not with him.’

‘No.’ Hope laughed. She, out of all of them, had never loved Zachariah, not as any wife would. ‘It’s Dawn,’ she said. Wife Six. ‘I can’t live here without her. I can’t live here. It’s all breaking apart. You don’t see it.’ Hope lowered her voice, looking at Sorrow.

‘It’s getting better. He’s getting better.’

‘It’s changed, Amy. We’ve lost something here. We’ve forgotten what we were trying to be.’

But Amaranth shook her head, bitter to the core. ‘Get out, then.’ When she turned her back on her, she felt Hope’s hand drop something into her pocket. She stood as still and sullen as she could, for as long as she could manage it, and then she went racing from the temple to chase her car, waving it down the path and the trail, away from the world she had helped them build. Hope skidded to a stop. ‘Will you come?’ she gasped. ‘It’s not right this, with Sorrow. Someone should stop it.’

‘I know,’ Amaranth said and she started to cry. But she didn’t know. And she didn’t dare to think it. She watched her oldest friend in the world drive away.

Back in the temple, it was dark and empty. She stood at the altar, head down, praying to be told the truth. For God to come and tell her, whatever it was.

But it was Amity who came creeping in, to place her two hands on her mother’s heart as if she could stop its two halves from breaking. ‘I saw, Mother,’ she whispered. ‘I was watching.’

‘What were you watching?’ She pushed her child back to look at her. ‘Who told you to watch?’

‘Sorrow. He says if the daughter of a priest profanes herself, she should be burned with fire. I don’t want Sorrow burned.’

‘What did you see, daughter?’

‘I saw the Father. I saw them make Jesus. I saw him tell Sorrow he is God.’

Amaranth looked at her daughter and the altar. She could feel them all on the edge of some precipice, as if the floor were cleaving open before them, to show them the very foundations of their church. With every act of her husband’s, every change in the church, she had moved her own line of what was acceptable further and further away, for love.

Who was her husband, who claimed to be God? Who was her child to believe him? Who was she to have sanctioned this when it all started so long ago, back when their faith was made of charity and compassion, a dream of creating a family for women who had no one? How had love led them here?

‘Tell no one,’ she told Amity. ‘It’s Sorrow’s secret.’ Her arms did not go around her youngest daughter, to comfort her or explain to her. Her hands did not move to her child’s own heart. They went, instead, inside her pocket to find what Hope had given her.

A key.

A
mity runs from her mother and the man and the house. She runs from the devil and the half-dead tree, past the fields and Dust in them. She shouts for Sorrow, but Sorrow is gone. Not standing at the bathroom door, not shaking the strap. She isn’t in the bathroom, isn’t splashing at the sink. ‘Sorrow!’

She runs past the pumps to the red dirt road, but there is no Sorrow, no dust cloud of her running. She thinks that God has swooped her up, like the Great Red Dragon, for their mother’s wanton wickedness. She thinks Sorrow will be glad of it, to be taken up so that God might rescue her, and that Amity, too, will be free of her.

Then she sees that the door to the man’s little shop is open. It shouldn’t be.

Inside is Sorrow, touching his things. Her fingers are everywhere. She opens his glass-fronted refrigerators, where bottles glow blue and orange. The room grows cold from them and the bottles bead and drip. Sorrow runs her fingers through the mist, making smeary lines and swirls, but Amity can only think of the man and his fingers on her mother.

Sorrow moves to the wooden countertop to touch pouches and packets, stacked in boxes, swinging from metal arms. She picks at everything, pinches and pokes.

‘What are you doing, Sorrow?’

‘Looking for the key, dolt. Where did you look?’

Amity swallows. Sorrow told her to look, but she didn’t see any key. What she did see she saw plenty of.

Sorrow pulls open drawers to rifle through them, ruffling papers and receipts, then scattering them. She tosses everything that isn’t a key onto the counter, onto the floor. ‘Aha!’ she says at last, and holds her hand up. But there is no key. She holds a box of wooden matches and gives it a little seedpod shake.

‘What do you want those for?’