Amity & Sorrow (17 page)

Sorrow turns her head away.

‘I know what you want. You want to go home. I know you do.’

‘Then why are we still here?’

‘He hurt you, Sorrow.’

‘It didn’t hurt,’ she whines.

She reaches a hand for her daughter, sets it on the rail of her back, and she feels Sorrow shudder through the cloth. ‘I know how you miss him. I know what you lost. I know you don’t know any better, but – my God, what he did was wrong, Sorrow. What we all did. It was – all – all of it, wrong.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Sorrow whispers.

‘I know you don’t. We never said – I didn’t think we had to say it. I would have thought your father …’ She lies behind Sorrow, fits herself into the crooks behind her hips and knees, and Sorrow allows it. She thinks of how close their family was, how physically close, how few boundaries there were between bodies or beds. Children slept in half-clad clumps, baths were shared to save on water. Lonely wives shared beds and blankets, dark comforts that no one spoke of after. Sorrow had seen all of it, but there were laws and rules that were older than their community’s, laws and rules about fathers and daughters. ‘He took advantage. Of your faith.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘You think he didn’t. You couldn’t have stopped him.’ Maybe no one could, she thinks, or she took too long to try.

‘I didn’t want to stop him.’

‘Oh, Sorrow.’ Sorrow stiffens in her arms, like a bundle of sticks.

‘I will go home,’ Sorrow tells her.

The air is close and clammy. It presses down like hands.

Amaranth lets her child go, and it is silent. Deadly silent, as if the earth is taking a breath. And a sweetness comes from the dirt, from the air, with a snap-crack of thunder. Sorrow flips the blanket over her head. Drops begin to fall, making pits in the red earth.

Rain. Come at last.

‘Come, Sorrow,’ she calls. She moves to the hard dirt to feel the water on her skin. The drops are soft, few and far between. They dot her long sleeves and smack her in the eye when she looks up and laughs at them. The drops come harder, fuller, coin-sized. They dampen her arms and cool her neck where she pulls her collars open. They roll up from her wrists, where she unbuttons her cuffs. She turns her face up to open her mouth, let it drop on her tongue, and then Bradley is running in from his fields, hat off and waving. ‘Rain!’ he hollers. ‘Rain!’

She turns to him, hands open to feel it. He opens his own to catch it, to cup it.

She pulls the tie to her cap and undoes the bow. She loosens the gathers that hold the cap in place and she pulls. And then it is raining on her head and scalp, raining in her hair as she unpins her braids, fat as snakes, and lets them drop onto her arms. She looks at him and lets him see her, and she shuts her eyes.

She walks a slow, wet circle on the dirt. No wives, no daughters, spin with her. This is no spin of worship. It is, instead, the spin of a woman being watered after a long and lonely drought, and he steps beside her. His scalp is soaked through his cap. Points of hair make needles with raindrop tips. She can feel her skin, calling to him, and his wet hands on her wet arms. Water runs from his face to hers.

The rain comes harder still, sharp as knifepoints. Splashes join to form lakes. He puts an arm up, to shield her, but it is raining too hard.

Sorrow sits up to shout, ‘It’s the end of the world!’ And Amaranth laughs. ‘It’s only rain!’ And then, the heavens open.

They run to the porch to stare out at the water. ‘Where is Amity?’ she calls. They’ll need an ark. Rain pours through the porch roof onto Sorrow, who is shrieking. Rain creeps between rotting shingles to dampen joists and soak the old paper on the boards. Bradley hurries into the house and holds the door open. ‘Come in, both of y’all,’ he calls, as Amaranth watches a wall of water. Where is her other child?

Sorrow burrows back beneath the blanket as rain savages the tree and the low scrub, flushing creatures out in torrents, stripping branches of dying leaves. Rain runs red dirt over fields. Rain strips the stalks of browning rapeseed. Rain flattens the wheat fields, flattens the sorghum. It washes the seeds and the jars and the freshly planted soil of the garden away.

‘Where is your sister?’ she yells to Sorrow. And she thinks of the whipping, the switch she threw down, and she thinks of the bone-handled paring knife that she hasn’t seen since and she hasn’t missed. And she wonders, again, if she even knows her child Sorrow.

A
mity does not wear the wrist strap. It lies on the tiled floor of the bathroom, where Sorrow threw it. It lies in the room that Dust hoses out now, the room filled with water and waste and red dirt painted in signs and symbols up and down. He takes great care to remove her stain of a red blood cross.

She waited and listened so long to the ghosts in the room that she thought it was days until Dust came, opening the door and letting in all the light.

‘Is she there?’ Amity asked him, her voice cracked and broken.

Dust ran some water from the sink and cupped it in his hand for her. He tried to pull her up. ‘She locked you in here, didn’t she? The hook was on.’

Amity tried to stand, but her legs were stuck. Her hand was throbbing. ‘I hurt her,’ she said. When she came out of the dark room, she was amazed to see that the world had changed, entirely. What was pale red was brick red, bloodred. What was dry dripped. The world was fresh and made clean, as if it were she who had made it so with her sacrifice.

Dust brings the hose out and shuts the door. ‘I shouldn’t have put that lock on,’ he says.

‘My wrist strap,’ she says. ‘Will you get it?’

‘No. Why’s it your job to look after her?’

‘I don’t know, but it is.’

Dust sucks his teeth, but he goes to get it, snapping it between his hands. Amity rips a strip from her underskirt to bind her cut and takes the strap onto her other hand, her wrong hand, her good hand now. Dust shuts the door and hooks the eye again.

‘Who’s gonna be the one who tells Sorrow no?’ he asks her.

Amity can only shake her head. Not her. Not ever.

The devil sleeps like a dead man, cheeks sunken and jaw unhinged. Amity looks close, to see if fallen angels slip out with every snore, and when he awakens he finds Amity staring into his mouth. ‘What do you want?’

‘You told me to come back.’

‘I didn’t tell you to come sneakin’ up on me.’

Amity doesn’t know how to mind people anymore. ‘I’ll go.’

‘Seein’ as you gone and woke me up, you may as well stay. What you got on your hand there?’

She pops her bound hand behind her back. ‘Nothing.’

‘Keep yer damn secrets. I don’t care. Got secrets of my own, you know.’

She smiles at him. She already knows his biggest secret, that he is the devil himself, and then the devil pulls a fast one. The devil hands her a Bible. She doesn’t know it is a Bible, of course, but she knows it when the devil opens it up and reads it, passages she knows in her blood, about the beginning of the world and God’s face over the dark of the waters.

‘Let there be light,’ the devil tells her. ‘Let there be firmament and land and vegetation, let there be lights and birds and fishes. Should’ve stopped right there, old God, but He kept it going, makin’ animals, makin’ man, and then, by gum, goin’ and makin’ up woman.’

She waits for him to burst into flames of damnation, but he does not. If the devil can hold a Bible and read from it, then all bets and rules are well and truly off. ‘I think you’re just an old man,’ she says.

‘As opposed to what – a horse’s ass?’

‘Only I’ve never seen a man so old. You’re God-old. Older than my father.’

‘That so?’

‘I’ve seen old women. I’ve seen lots and lots of old women, older than you.’

‘They live longer, ’cause they don’t do any work.’

‘Well, women work harder than Father. All he does is pray and the other thing. Old women die. Are you going to die?’

The old man nods. ‘Eventually. I’m waitin’ for it.’

‘Where will they plant you?’

‘Plant me?’ He squints at her. ‘Bury, you mean. ’Neath that tree, if I’m lucky. Put in when I was a boy. Used to be millions of ’em, windbreaks from the government, to slow down that fearsome wind. Came all the way from Siberia, them elms did. You’ve never been to Siberia.’

‘I’ve never been anywhere. I don’t like the government.’

‘Well, I never been to Siberia, but I was out in the Far East. Did my time and I can tell you I love this country. I don’t care two squats about the government, but I love my flag.’ He puts his hand onto his heart and Amity wonders if it’s stopped. He shoves the Bible toward Amity and she dares to sit on the very edge of his bed to be near it. ‘Now, you go on and read me some. You’re a freeloader in this relationship.’

She looks down at the leather cover. Even if the devil could touch it for himself, she knows better than to try. She can hear something buzzing in the room, like God’s disapproval, as she tells him, ‘We don’t read the Bible.’

‘Why not?’

‘Father speaks it. He tells us what it says.’

‘Girl, I’m gonna tell you sumpin’ about fathers. Sometimes they want too much and it makes ’em go strange. That man Icarus flew too close to the sun ’cause his daddy wanted them to fly, and most men’ll set themselves on fire outta all they want. A man on fire is liable to tell his children anything.’

‘God is a father,’ she tells him.

‘Well, sometimes God wants too much, too. Think about His son, eh? Think of all the people He killed in the Bible, sweepin’ ’em out like ants.’

She looks at his Bible, but she will not open it. She looks at her white cotton hand and sees a fly land on it, rubbing its legs together with glee.

‘You can’t read, can you?’ the old man asks her.

‘I don’t need to read. I only need to cook and spin.’

‘Shoot,’ he says. ‘Who gone and done that to a pretty little girl like you?’

She smiles at him. ‘I’m not pretty, and that’s a vanity besides, but I’m trying to be good. I’m trying ever so hard.’ She shifts her hand to get the fly off and pain grabs her palm. She can’t help but cry out.

‘What’s with your hand, girl?’

‘Nothing.’ She puts it back behind her.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Let’s get them Joads on the road,’ and he reaches for his
Grapes of Wrath
. The next day, when he asks her about her hand, she tells him nothing and the Joads pack their jalopy, but by the third day, when he asks her she says, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m too afraid to look.’ The Joads grind to a halt.

The old man stares down the gristle of his nose at her. ‘Girl, you better find somebody to tell what’s goin’ on with you. I don’t care if it’s me or no, but I reckon I’m as good as any. You can’t shock me. Many has tried.’

She bites the knot and unwraps the bit of skirt from the wound. When it is off she can see her hand is white and puffed up, Sorrow’s cut as red and gaped as a mouth.

‘There’s some whiff off your paw, girl,’ he says. And as he reads about the Joads, she can feel herself flying clean out the window and away from the house, up from Oklahoma to a world that steams, somewhere lush and green, like their California. Her hand thumps like a heart and the ground shimmies. It buckles beneath her, rises and falls. She circles the house and rises over the fields, where the soil is rich and ripe below her. She stretches her clogs out, long and low below her skirts, but she will not land – she cannot land – not in the field. Birdsong calls her from the white cloth clouds that twist above her, like bedding, and she rises, bodyless, mindless, Godless.

‘Amity!’ she hears and she crashes down flat. She expects the old man, but she sees it is Dust there and he is slapping her, hard. She feels the weave of a scratchy blanket beneath her good hand.

‘You were real brave,’ he tells her. ‘You took it like a man.’

‘Did I?’ She tries to sit up to look about. ‘What did you do to me?’ She wonders if they broke a rule.

‘Put this on it,’ he says. He gestures at a brown plastic bottle. ‘You got an infection, worse than when my ear went septic. Tried to pierce it with a pin, but it closed up.’ He tugs his earlobe. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

She looks at the dark boards that make the room’s walls, lined with tools and ropes and chains. She sees what looks like a row of stalls and wide barn doors, open on a slant of late sun. She sees an old motorcycle, buffed to a shine, propped on its kickstand.

‘Where is this?’ she asks him.

‘Barn, where I sleep. I found you in the field.’

‘The field?’

‘You were lying there with your hand up in the air, like you had a question.’

‘I was in the field?’ Another rule, gone. She hardly had any left to mind now. ‘Will I live?’ she asks him. She looks into her bad hand, but it’s pink now and the cut subdued, like a mouth pursed.

‘Let’s wrap it.’ He searches the room for a bandage or cotton, something clean, and finally he unbuttons his own shirt and rips the sleeve off it. She lets him wind it around her wound and knot it down. She wiggles her fingers above the bandage and nods.

He rips off the other sleeve, to make them match, and she looks at his bare brown chest. He sees her looking and turns away to put his shirt back on, and that’s when she sees it, a long pink scar running around the back of his arm and across his shoulder blade, across his back, like a wing removed. It is upraised, a fat channel of tissue, like a worm burrowed in it. There are stitch marks running off the scar, as though the doctor had only just tried his hand at sewing.