Amity & Sorrow (13 page)

‘Never you mind.’ Sorrow drops the box into her apron and turns back to her searching.

Amity’s mouth is dry and she aches to take an orange bottle, to open it and see what’s waiting inside. She knows that it is theft and there must be a rule about it, but she also knows that she comes from a place where everything is shared. If her mother let a man touch her, did that mean that the man belonged to all of them now? Would he touch her next and would she let him? And then she wonders if that is the devil talking, snaking in her reasoning out of want for a drink? Her fingers curl around the neck of an ice-cold bottle. She watches its contents dancing, fizzing like a storm. She pulls at its metal cap, but she cannot turn it or pry it off. It hurts her mouth when she tries to bite it.

Sorrow rattles tiny boxes of candy and flexes bendy sticks of gum. She pulls on a locked drawer and then pulls it hard. She can’t get it open. Amity slides the bottle back onto its shelf, defeated, and shuts the refrigerator doors, one by one, to keep herself from any further temptation.

Sorrow bangs her fist down. ‘The key isn’t here. We’ll have to check the truck and if it isn’t there, you’ll have to go inside the house and check the man’s pockets.’

Amity gapes at her. ‘Go into the house? Touch his pants?’

‘It’s for God.’

Amity follows Sorrow from the shop to where the truck is parked, where the red dirt road starts. God has left its windows rolled down and the doors unlocked. Sorrow slaps dust from the seat and slides behind the steering wheel. She tests the gear stick and the pedals, doubtfully, commanding Amity to open the glove compartment. She finds more bits of colored papers, matches and work gloves and an empty cigarette packet. No key.

‘I was certain we would find it,’ Sorrow says. ‘I saw it.’

‘You didn’t see where it was?’

‘You don’t know anything about being an Oracle.’ Sorrow sets her head on the steering wheel. ‘I have been good. I have been so good and I don’t know how to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Make God come.’

God says the end of the world will come with fire. But God says a lot of things.

Sorrow sits in the man’s front seat and prays a key into the ignition. She prays the knowledge of gears and pedals, prays the tank full of gas. She prays while the sun beats down on the two of them, blistering the glass and cooking all they ask for. When she can stand it no longer, she tries to make God come, with fire.

No one sees her light the match to flame it. No one sees how Amity screams. No one sees Sorrow set fire to the truck.

No one sees Amity and Sorrow at all, not Dust, who said he would watch them, not Mother or the man, who only watch one another, showing each other their hands.

No one is watching the sisters at all now, except God the Father, of course.

F
ire broke out in the metal barns across the fields, barns where the fourth and fifth wives had worked and slept since the house filled up with wives. The fire might have spread, might have burned the land down around it flat, or skipped and jumped across the ripening fields to the campers and tents where the families slept, or sparked the hodgepodge house and the temple. But it did not. For Amity was watching and Amity screamed.

Amaranth reached across her bed for her husband, but he was gone, she was alone, and Amity was shouting Fire! Fire! Amaranth leaped from her room as women and children tumbled from bedrooms, hastily doing up buttons and ties. Fire! they heard.

Outside, across the fields, they could see an orange glow from the east, as if the sun were rising early. Amaranth counted the heads of wives while wives counted children. Missing were Wives Four and Five, Wives Nine, Ten, and Twenty, and their husband. All children were counted and cuddled.

‘What do we do?’ she asked Hope.

‘Come on,’ Hope said, hoisting her skirts and legging it toward the fields. Running behind her were Amaranth and Dawn, Wife Six, but all three stopped at the edge of the forbidden fields. This was no time for rules, Amaranth knew it, yet she felt she couldn’t enter. She clutched her robe and she wrung her hands. She wondered what would happen to their family, their community, if their husband were suddenly gone.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Dawn clucked. ‘It’s a stupid rule,’ and she lit out for the barns. Still, Amaranth stood, unable to disobey. She stood and watched until ash began to blow at her, stinging her eyes, forcing her back to the rest of her family.

When Hope and Dawn returned, faces streaked with black, they spoke their news. Five wives were found, but no husband. The fourth and fifth wives were taken to the VA clinic in the city and left with no forms of identification but as much money as the wives could muster in a hurry. The ninth and tenth wives stood and watched while the flames died down, stomping out any sparks that flew, while Wife Twenty-One would only say that the fire was nothing to do with her. She’d been with the goats.

A thorough search was made of the tents and cars, the temporary buildings, and any structure that had not been burned. No one could find Zachariah and no wife would claim to have been with him. Heads turned to thoughts of Rapture; surely he had been taken in the night. Other heads turned to gossip, whispering if it was Amaranth’s night with her husband, why didn’t she know where he was?

It was Sorrow who said that they should clear the altar and check the room below. And there he was, in a deep, deep sleep. It took multiple wives to shake him until he came to, roaring and sore-headed, red-eyed and shouting, ‘I am trying to open the scroll!’ They all looked at Amaranth, their eyes asking why he would choose to sleep alone on a night that should be hers.

Amaranth dragged up piles of linen from the room below, to wash and bleach them. They reeked of urine, chemicals, ammonia. The white sheet with their stitched names had been soiled. There was a transistor radio, its batteries drained, and bits of biblical text she didn’t recognize scrawled onto the walls. Something snapped beneath her clog and she bent to collect it. A thin glass tube wrapped in cloth.

She showed it to Hope, who had combed the cooling metal barns. Hope told her that she had seen chemicals in trash barrels, set alight: iodine and ammonia, paint thinner, drain cleaner. Discarded batteries, heaps of them, far more than their community could need for its jumble of portable radios. Coffeepots and filters, when none of them drank caffeine.

‘What were they cooking?’ Amaranth asked her.

Hope was too angry to guess. ‘There was cold medication there, fancy decongestants, things we never had here – when we’ve had to make do with willow and eucalyptus, mustard plasters. Selfish bastards,’ she said.

The ninth and tenth wives stood before the altar. Their faces were gaunt and their work clothes black with smoke. Their teeth were as stained as the teeth of the fourth and fifth wives. Amaranth held the glass tube out, while Zachariah watched passively, his head bobbing on the slender stalk of his neck. She noticed how much weight he had lost. Had no one seen he wasn’t eating? She looked about at the wives, but no one spoke. No one knew what to say.

Amaranth squared up to them. ‘We know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘We know what you’re making in those barns.’

The two wives looked at one another. One coughed wetly into her hand and looked down into it.

‘You’re making him sick, do you know that? You’re feeding his fantasies and his fears. You’re – you’re making bombs, aren’t you, like the ones in the East?’

Wives about the temple began to stir.

‘We have to protect ourselves,’ called the thirty-ninth wife, the daughter of Waco. She had come to them years after the firestorm started by the government during the standoff with her prophet, David Koresh. ‘We have to be ready, for when they come.’

‘No one’s coming here,’ Amaranth said.

‘They’ll come to see about the fire now,’ the daughter of Waco said. ‘They’ll search our land and our houses. They’ll take our children. It is our right to bear arms and we must.’

Wives began to whisper.

The daughter of Waco had told them what the siege was like, how they were told that people were coming for them. They were told to put on gas masks. They heard helicopters circling over the compound, then shots and windows smashing, felt the choke of tear gas. She said the news reported that the Branch Davidians shot first. ‘But we didn’t,’ she said. ‘I will next time.’ She told them the government drove tanks over the graves of her people and ran their flag up the church flagpole.

Wives began to speak. ‘You said we would be safe here!’

‘You are safe. Look, you’re safe,’ Amaranth called. She looked to her husband, for the words he would say to calm them all. She could see the doubt in their faces. So many had arrived after the towers had fallen. Their ranks had swollen as city women came, their compact cars filled with canned food and handguns, fearful and desperate to live off the land but having no idea how to begin. She could only imagine what had happened from the women’s descriptions, the towers of finance falling and the people jumping, the clouds billowing below as the towers shrunk in place, as if consumed. Her husband had said it was a sign of God’s displeasure, a testimony that their community was on the right path.

‘Husband,’ Amaranth pleaded with him now, holding the glass tube out. ‘Were you trying to kill us? Were you trying to
bring
the end of the world?’

His eyes were cloudy, unfocused.

Finally, Wife Nine spoke out. ‘Not bombs,’ she said.

‘What, then? Poison? Would you poison our well and kill us? Make something for us and ask us to drink it?’ She thought of the Kool-Aid administered in Jonestown by the cult leader who was building Eden in Guyana. She could still see the bodies of the dead, lying flat and embracing one another. She had seen it on TV as a child, the camera flying over them.

‘Not poison,’ said Wife Ten.

‘Meth,’ said Wife Nine.

‘Crystal meth?’ asked Hope.

‘Why would you be making that?’ Amaranth asked.

Zachariah gave a dopey, smoky laugh.

Hope and Dawn cleaned out the one barn that could be salvaged and pulled down the one that couldn’t. They itemized what had been burned and Amaranth realized, with a start, that the fields had been forbidden to them not out of her husband’s fear of his wives running away or leaving or out of a desire to keep them safe, but to protect the barns and what they brewed.

‘They’re junkies,’ Hope said of the two in the hospital. ‘They were junkies when I met them and I guess they’re junkies still. They were clean for a long time. Well, I thought they were clean.’

‘They’ve been running a lab, right under our noses,’ Dawn said.

‘I suppose this is why they’re always driving into town,’ Hope said. ‘Bringing supplies back. Dealing.’

‘We’ve probably all been living off their meth making for years. We’re the meth church.’

‘Stop it,’ Amaranth said. It was true that they were the only wives who regularly drove to other cities and towns. She remembered when they had driven to Mexico. But she could only think of their kindnesses to her when she needed them most. She reminded Hope and Dawn that they were family, come what may. It was the vow they had made, each to the other. It took the fourth and fifth wives a long time to heal and when they did, their hands had been singed into keloid claws, lest they should forget the work they did. God would not allow them to use those hands again.