Amity & Sorrow (14 page)

No one reported the fire, so no one knew to come. No one came to investigate, for nothing was insured and no claims were made. Still, the daughter of Waco was convinced that the government would start Armageddon at any time.

Amaranth thought it was only the newest wave of eschatology to hit them. The world was filled with sects who waited for the end. Here, wives were afraid that outsiders would overrun them, townie addicts who would hear of the drugs they produced and come to buy. Wives grew ever more insular. No one volunteered to drive into town, to run the errands that the fourth and fifth wives had run for so long. No more errands were needed now, and no one wanted to leave.

Wives in the kitchen began their process of stockpiling, preserving more than they could ever hope to use before the next year’s harvest. Amaranth knew that they only needed something productive to do with their fear and that preparing for disaster would keep them focused and comforted. They lined the walls of the room below, her husband’s secret place for prayer, devotion, quiet contemplation, and clandestine drug taking, with shelving. It would become the storehouse of the wives’ labors, packed with the food and supplies that they would need. And then it was all they talked about. All they wanted and hoped for. It kept them busy while Amaranth and Hope worked to clean out their husband, holding him while he sweated and shivered and yelled the drugs out, cursing them to hell and begging to be killed.

She didn’t know he could make home feel like hell.

She didn’t know that preparing for the end of the world would make it that much more likely to come.

A
mity runs from the fire and the smoke. She runs from her sister and her sister’s matches.

She runs from the truck that is flaming now, pouring smoke through the door she kicked open to run, because she is not ready for heaven.

‘I will make God come,’ Sorrow said.

Dust is dark in the fields and the man is a faraway stain. Amity tries to shout to them, but the smoke has choked her. She can do no more than bleat and cough. Mother is in the devil’s house and she won’t come out for Amity’s clapping. She makes herself reach the devil’s screen door, pull it back on its hinges, and slap the door with her clog. ‘It’s Sorrow,’ is all she can crack out. And then the man is running toward them, in from the fields with his long spider legs. ‘Is that smoke?’

‘Where is she?’ Mother asks her, grabbing her hard by the arm. And then she’s running after the man, faster than Amity can catch up, toward the rising plume of smoke that spins behind the gas station, turning the orange ball black.

She doesn’t want to follow. She has betrayed her own sister. She drops to the porch and folds her hands over her cap. She wonders what her sister will do to her.

They bring back Sorrow and set her onto the porch, but no one swaddles Sorrow now, no one says ‘sorry’ or coos. The man sets her down as though he is stacking logs for the winter and Mother sweeps into the house behind him, Sorrow all but forgotten.

‘You okay?’ Amity whispers.

Sorrow’s face is black with smoke. She pulls the blankets around her knees. ‘I’m cold,’ she says.

Amity shuffles to her, to tuck her in. She knows people get cold when they are afraid. It has happened to her, too, though it isn’t cold here and she can’t imagine it will ever be anything but bone-dry inferno, night or day. From inside the house she hears chairs scraping and drawers slamming, the voice of the man, upraised, shouting, and her mother, wheedling, pleading, like the mothers back home. When she pokes the blankets in around Sorrow, Sorrow snatches Amity’s wrist. ‘Tattletale.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The devil will fork your tongue and fry you.’

‘You wanted a key,’ Amity says. ‘You didn’t need to set it on fire.’

Sorrow squeezes her wrist, tighter than any wrist strap. ‘You don’t know what I need.’

‘I do, Sorrow. You need home. You will get there.’

‘How will I?’

‘I know that when you want something, you get it. That’s what I know.’

Sorrow smiles at that, her teeth white as stars in her night-dark face. She snuggles down into the blankets, pulling Amity’s arm in with her. ‘The Father will come now,’ she says. ‘I’ve called to him.’

Mother flies through the door and the screen. Amity hears the man, shouting behind her, ‘Coulda set the whole damn thing on fire! What if the pumps had caught? It’s a gas station, for Christ’s sake!’ He slams the door.

Mother worries her hands. ‘Cars are machines – they’re full of gas and electrics. You didn’t know what you were doing, did you? You didn’t know that they could catch fire?’

Come morning, the man smacks the door beside them. He stomps his boots hard on the porch’s boards, not caring if he wakes them. He cuts the words of Mother’s calling with the back of a slap-giving hand, cuffing the air.

Mother turns to them, hands on hips. ‘This is not home,’ she pronounces.

Sorrow rolls her eyes at Amity, as if this is any kind of revelation.

‘But there are chores. You work at home. You would never lay about like this there.’

‘What work would you have us do?’ Sorrow asks. ‘We cannot pray. We cannot worship. What would you have us do, sweep dirt and pump gas?’ She dares a laugh.

‘I’ve had enough of your lip,’ Mother says. ‘You don’t speak to me like this at home.’

‘This is not home, you said.’

Mother stands over her. ‘You will respect me as if it were. You will respect me as you would any one of your mothers. You will do your work with glad hearts, just as at home. You will earn your keep here.’

‘Keep,’ Sorrow says. ‘Who would keep this?’

Mother stamps her clog and hurries into the house. In a heartbeat, Sorrow is up and out of her blankets, still filthy from the fire, and when she hears the front door open again, she lights out for the path to the gas station. Amity has never seen her move so fast, as if the devil has her in his sights, but it is only Mother behind her, crashing out of the house with a broom. She sighs when there is no Sorrow to give it to. Amity holds her hands out for it.

‘You tell me what happened. Did Sorrow start that fire? Would she?’

Amity can only whimper, ‘Mother, please.’

‘We could stay here, don’t you see? There’s food here.’

‘Sorrow would never allow it.’

‘Sorrow!’ Mother hisses. ‘I’m tired of what Sorrow wants.’ And then she is grabbing Amity to pull her inside.

Amity clings to the door frame. ‘No man’s house! It’s a rule!’

‘There are no rules.’ And Mother slams them both inside.

All rules must be broken, it would seem, and Mother will break them. Mother will make her break them, too. Mother hauls her across a shadowed room and yanks her up stairs even as Amity hangs on to the handrail, catching hold of each baluster with her clog.

‘Let go,’ Mother grunts, dragging her. ‘We made the rules up, every one.’ Mother pushes her up toward a door, mercifully locked, but then she whips a key from a nail there and opens the very door to the devil.

Amity screws up her eyes, but she cannot help but see. She looks inside the devil’s bedroom. She sees his bed and chifforobe and the devil’s two horned feet, looks up the devil’s legs to his white raisin face, his bald head like a speckled hen’s egg, with wispy bits of hair in a feather fluff atop.

‘This is my daughter.’ Mother gives her a little shove forward, into his evil lair.

The devil opens his mouth and licks his pleated lips. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘She can keep you company. She’s looking for ways to be helpful.’

‘Is she, now?’ The devil gives her a crooked smile and pats his bed. ‘Come on and get a proper eyeful.’

Amity doesn’t want to sit on the devil’s bed. She doesn’t want to get any closer to him at all. She knows how he puts his number on the skin of the saints, how he writes his name on sinners’ souls. She looks away at his devil playthings – his black plastic box with its metal ears, his shotgun.

‘You gonna just stand there and gawp at me?’ The devil looks a bit sorry for himself, clever devil.

‘Say hello, Amity,’ Mother says, and gives her another little shove. Amity’s mouth pops open. Now the devil knows her name! But Mother is out the door and behind it before Amity can protest.

‘You’re gonna catch flies,’ the devil tells her.

She snaps her mouth shut, afraid she’ll catch worse than that.

‘Did you set my boy’s truck on fire?’ the devil asks her.

She shakes her head.

‘Who did, then?’

She gives him a look that says, Why don’t you know? He’s the devil so he must know everything. That’s most certainly a rule.

‘You think I’m so old I don’t know what’s what? I hear you down there, missy. I know what you all want.’

Amity backs away until she bumps the door. She turns around and bangs on it.

‘Oh, come here,’ the devil says. ‘I’m not gonna bite you. Got sumpin’ to show you.’ The devil flips over in his bed to scrabble his claws around on the floor.

Amity awaits the unleashing of the Great Red Dragon or the Beast from the Sea. She waits for him to open the hatch to hell beneath his bed, but all he does is pull up a bound square of paper. ‘What is it?’ she asks him then pulls her lips in. Another rule smashes.

‘Open it,’ he says. ‘But be careful, you can see it’s old.’

‘You’re old,’ Amity says.

The devil snorts. ‘Older’n you, so you can bet your britches I know more than you. Go on.’

Amity looks at it in his hands. ‘Is that your Bible?’

The devil laughs at that, a full-throttled ha-ha. He closes his eyes and tells her, ‘“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” What do you make of that?’

Amity is amazed. Wait until she tells Sorrow that the devil reads through his hands.

‘You ever heard of a Mr John Steinbeck?’ the devil says.

‘No, sir.’

‘Dumb and ignorant to boot. This ain’t no Bible. This here book is
The Grapes of Wrath.
You heard of that?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Either you has or you hasn’t.’

‘God the Father says that anyone worshipping the beast will receive a mark on her forehead and drink the wine of God’s wrath and that must be pressed from His grapes of wrath, sir.’

‘Well,’ says the devil. ‘Maybe you ain’t entirely dumb. Just mostly. You all are dumb for God, ain’t you?’

Amity nods. She supposes they must be. She could hardly hope to keep a thing like that from the devil.

He grins with his brown horse teeth, just the size for chewing souls. ‘You know he keeps me locked in here?’

Amity smiles at that, the devil playing her for sympathy. ‘It’s for your own good. We wear a strap. It’s to keep us safe.’ She holds the strap up and then it’s his turn to stare.

‘Tell me, girl, what age are you and you wearin’ a leash?’

‘Twelve, sir.’

‘Twelve. Someday you’ll be an old bag of coat hangers like me. You’re old enough to know your own mind, not let people drag you around by a string. Why, your age, I was out battling dust.’

‘Dust?’ she cries. ‘My Dust?’

‘My dust,’ he says. ‘My whole land, turned to dust. That’s what this book’s about,’ he says, poking it with a pointed nail. The devil rotates his head to glance at his window, as if he can still see the people of his land drying up and blowing away.

‘I like stories,’ she tells him. ‘Father tells us stories all the time.’

‘These ain’t stories, girl. This actually happened. Where is your father, then?’

‘God only knows.’

‘That right?’ He pushes the book toward her. ‘You go on and read me some, if you’re lookin’ for occupation.’

She will not open it and she will not read it, not the devil’s Bible, not even if she could. ‘I can tell you a story, if you like.’

‘What about?’

‘The end of the world.’ She leans back against his door.

When Mother comes to let her out, Amity is surprised to find the door wasn’t even locked. She could have escaped at any time. She tells the devil good-bye and runs out into the sun and her soul’s freedom. She never sees how wide the devil’s eyes go at the stories of Father’s she told him, or hears his words to Mother: ‘That child is crazy, nuts and crackers. Some cockamamie story ’bout God having sex with a planet full of wives to make more gods, so they’s can each have a planet. Little girls shouldn’t be thinking about the end of things so much. Why you fillin’ ’em full of the end?’ She never sees how her mother hangs her head or how, when she goes, she forgets to lock his door up.

A
maranth holds a paring knife, bone-handled and sharp from a kitchen drawer. She fits her fingers into the handle’s grooves and fancies, for a moment, that it belongs to her, something from her history, handed down over generations. An odd thought, really, for nothing belongs to anyone at home.

She boils beans and grains, but Bradley does not come for them. She brews coffee for him and lets it go cold. She whittles a stick from the old tree when she knows that it isn’t whipping Sorrow needs, but schooling. But it is only whipping that she knows. Back at their community, children were taught only what they would need when they were wives and mothers: canning, preserving, baking, butchery. To skin an animal, to fire a gun. They were given skills for Armageddon and taught to want nothing but the end of the world.