Amity & Sorrow (25 page)

Every word that Bradley searches for serves to shame her. Here is proof of her betrayal, black-and-white proof of all their community did and failed to do. How could he want her to stay now, when the man she loved is become a monster, wanted by the police for arson, shooting, and the rape of his child? That word isn’t there, that hateful word, but she knows it is what he is looking for.

Who is this man she is married to, still? And why is there a picture of him, on Dust’s paper, that she had never seen? Why is he holding a rack of numbers across his chest and staring at the camera with the look of hatred he gave when the knock came at the temple door and he thought he would lose his family? It says he served time in prison, years before she ever met him, for setting alight a police car outside the Short Creek compound.

A pan boils over on the stove top, flooding scum across the burners, down to the floor. She makes a mess of everything, she thinks, dabbing the spill: beans, leaving, daughters, men. Who could want her as she was?

Bradley closes the paper and she looks up.

‘Nothin’,’ he says. ‘Another lucky escape.’

She thinks of her leaving and the paper in her pocket. She thinks of all she knew and allowed and did. Her every cell wants to run away from it. She wants to explain, or justify, or apologize, but she only says, ‘Soup?’

S
orrow builds an altar in the bathroom.

‘Look,’ she says, proud and shy, opening the red dirt marked door so Amity can see it, safe from the threshold.

Her altar is a bright blue wooden pallet, up on its end. Atop it is an armless rubber dolly, its hair burned into wiry coils. Its arm sockets are stuffed with stiff brown feathers and bits of colored string and twine, fluorescent blue and orange. Its legs stick straight out, and in its lap, wrapped like a baby, is the blue china shard.

‘Anyone can build a temple,’ she tells Amity. ‘I’ve seen it.’

Amity doesn’t know why anyone would choose to build a temple in the dark of a bathroom, but then she thinks of the room below. She slides herself a step back, beyond the threshold, too far for Sorrow to reach. She doesn’t tell Sorrow about the temple made of books and computers. She wants to keep that secret to herself, like the secret of what is happening within her.

The old devil hadn’t been impressed by her
Grapes of Wrath
.

‘What in Sam Hill do I want that for?’ he said. ‘I got my own. It’s a first edition. You’ll have to take yours back, you know. You can’t keep a library book; they’ll send the police after you.’

‘I don’t like the police,’ Amity told him. She looked at the devil’s shotgun and thought of her Waco mother.

He was similarly unimpressed with Amity’s tale of a paper with a picture of her father that she couldn’t read. ‘Girl, we gotta sort you out,’ he told her. ‘We gotta learn you your ABCs.’ But he didn’t. Instead, he worried about all he didn’t know. ‘Why don’t nobody tell me nothin’?’

‘Nobody tells me nothing, too.’

‘That’s ’cause we’re youngest and oldest. We’re the bread on a stupid sandwich. I reckon that’s why they’ve got me watching you.’

‘I’m sure I’m watching you,’ she said.

He was impressed with the story of the plastic oracle, however. ‘Sort of like this one,’ she told him, pointing at the black box in the corner. ‘Except those ones switch on and you can see all these pictures on it. Yours just sits there.’

‘It does not sit there! Lookee here, you switch that TV on.’

‘What’s a TV?’

‘Go on and push that silver button.’

When she did, the face of it was transformed. A fine white electric snow came, roaring a chaos of hiss and bee buzz like Sorrow’s angel language but a million times worse. She put her hands over her ears. ‘Make it stop!’

‘Hang on,’ the old man said, and he leaned over, nearly rolling out of his bed, to lunge at two silver poles on its top. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Go wiggle them rabbit ears. Go on.’

She set her hands on the rods and the box went silent. And then, as on the computer, there was a picture, tiny people inside it, sitting on a sofa, moving, while invisible people laughed. It was better than the library’s box.

‘Look what your hands can do,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t let go, now.’

Amity looked at her hands on the metal rods. Yes, she thought. Look how they heal the TV.

Now she doesn’t want to hear about the Joads. She wants to stand with her arms out, turning snow into pictures. She spins the dial and there is always a new picture waiting for her. Children eat soup. Men punch one another in the face. Once, a man stares out at her and tells her, just her, that they are still at war. ‘Still at war?’ she hollers. ‘It’s started – we didn’t even know – the war in heaven!’

‘War in heaven? Change the channel,’ he says.

She spins the dial, around and around. She knows that she is making the pictures. They are coming from her hands, through the rods, from God. She can’t wait to tell Dust about it, this better, moving oracle, even if the old man wants her to stop.

‘You wanna do some readin’?’ he asks her.

She can hardly hear him to answer. She cannot move her eyes from the pictures, dazed by the light and the heat of it, the power in her hands.

‘Your eyes’ll go square.’ He gives a harrumph that becomes a mighty, chesty cough.

‘But I’m making the pictures,’ she tells him. She holds out her hands to show him and the box makes snow.

‘Bull pokey you are. Them pictures is whizzing about in the air. The antennae pull ’em down so you can see ’em, and the box sticks ’em all together.’

‘Is that so?’ Amity looks at her hands again. Her hands are antennae. Now she knows their name, antennae, bringing down God.

‘Open that book there now and turn that thing off,’ he says. ‘Show me where we were.’

The screen pops and crackles without her. ‘Those Joads will never get to California.’

‘You can’t read, so you won’t know if they will or won’t. I could tell you when they got there it was a land of milk and honey and they all had pie.’

‘I think someone keeps sticking more pages on the end of the book when we’re not looking.’ She looks at him, suspicious.

‘Turn that off,’ he says. He tries to swing his legs off the bed, lunging at the power button. ‘Damn legs,’ he says. ‘Damn old legs.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘Well, they don’t work, do they? Look at ’em.’ He pushes back his covers to show off the long and crooked bones of him, his kneecaps purple as prunes. She turns and pushes the power button off.

‘I can heal you.’

‘You can what?’

She holds out her antennae-hands for him.

‘I seen healers, you know,’ he says. ‘I seen tent shows and revivals and ballyhoos. All that dust left us wantin’ miracles, but they never came.’

Amity rubs her hands together. ‘Will I heal you?’ She extends them toward his kneecaps. He watches her hands, growing nearer.

He stops her. ‘I might only get one crack at your healing. Lookee here.’ He begins to unbutton his pajama top to show off his grizzled chest and she turns her head. She thinks of her father. ‘Fix this,’ he says, banging on his breastbone. He takes a breath that coughs and rattles.

‘Okay,’ she tells him. ‘Shut your eyes now.’

She rubs her hands together and places them flat across his plane of bone and skin. He takes a ragged breath and she can feel the air in him, under her hands, blow coarse as sand. She closes her eyes and she can see her hands slip into the skin of him, into his bones. She feels them slip through a gap in his Adam ribs and reach for the bags of gristle he breathes through. She feels the sacs cook in her fingers, ooze and bubble, until whatever is stuck inside him turns to liquid and runs clear, just as it did in Sorrow’s belly when she touched it. She slips her hands back out of him and when she opens her eyes again, his skin is whole and clean, as if she hasn’t touched him at all.

He takes an experimental breath. ‘I didn’t feel nothin’.’ He takes another. ‘Did you heal me?’ He breathes in hard and waits to choke on it. He breathes again. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he says.

Amity smiles. ‘I should hope not.’

As repayment, he says she will learn her letters. She doesn’t know what letters are or if there’s a rule about them or not, and either way he makes her open his book and hold it.

‘What’s that letter there?’ he asks her.

‘Three sticks,’ she tells him. ‘Like a headless man.’

‘That’s a
t
.
T
goes “tuh.” You say it.’

‘
T
goes “tuh,”’ she apes. She thinks of all the things in the world that she might know if she could read about them, and she doesn’t know if God wants her to know them or not.

‘
T
goes in Amity, don’t it?’ the old man says.

‘Ami-tee,’ she says. ‘There’s a
t
in me.’

‘You start off with an
a,
like that letter there.’

‘
A,
like two hands up in prayer.’

‘And the next one’s an
m
there.’

‘
M
like a mountain.’ She thinks of their driving.

‘Come here and let me show you the next one,’ and she scooches close to him on the bed, to learn how to read.

A
maranth boils beans while he flicks the newsprint, dwarfed by the yellowing pile of papers he adds to daily, nightly, all the shootings and swindles and explosions of the vast, sad world that he brings to his table, brings into his house. How can Bradley stand to look?

‘He’s not coming,’ she tells him. ‘He would have come by now. He’s dead.’ He looks up at her. ‘I hope he’s dead.’

‘It’d be reported. If he knows they’re after him, he’ll keep running. Wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m not running.’ She stabs at the beans. They spin and bubble, each trying to pull itself above the surface, only to be pulled back down by the water, or the other beans.

‘You want me to stop looking?’ he asks her. ‘Pretend nothing happened?’

Yes, she thinks. ‘No,’ she answers.

He finishes the paper and tosses it onto the pile, his inept haystack. ‘If you went to the police, you could clear this whole thing up.’

‘No,’ she tells him. Again.

‘I don’t know why you’re still protecting him.’

‘I’ve told you. It’s Sorrow I’m protecting.’

He shrugs and gets up, bumping the table as he tries to bring his knees out. The stack of papers shifts and his arms go around it in an awkward embrace, to hold it together. But once he leaves, paper slides from the stack, fluttering down with pictures of storms and drowning houses, piles of bodies lying still. Paper after paper falls and flaps open, like a flood of paper sweeping through the house, and she wishes a great wall of water would come and wash all the pictures and stories away from her.

The kitchen is a mass of paper, all fire and famine and fluttering flags – but there is not a single picture of Sorrow. That is how she wants it. She won’t have strangers knowing what her husband did, licking their fingers and flicking them past her.

Everything she sees is filthy now. The land and its dust continue their assault on the house. It is the end of summer and she can feel it like a frenzy, like back home, when wives were waiting, turning over the house and the rooms in anticipation of their husband’s return. Here, she attacks dirty windows with vinegar. She rolls the old man from hip to hip to whip sheets from beneath him until he complains he’s not a slab of meat, but it doesn’t stop her. She rips Bradley’s sheets from his bed and catches the scent of him, his skin and her skin, and she can’t remember when she last reached for him. It is all those newspapers, coming between them like a dam, all those words and disasters. There are balls of socks and wads of underpants, wrapped with her long brown hairs. There are drawers half open, spilling their contents, and she shoves them in with hips and clogs, but the bottom drawer is set in crooked. When she yanks it to right and shuts it, she can see it is filled with magazines. Not
National Geographic
.

These are of women. All hair and teeth, bulbous breasts and shaved pudenda. She shoves the drawer back in, but it refuses to go. The women rock back and forth below her, plucked and perfect, licking paper lips. The bodies of home are imperfect and hairy. They harden with work and sag with children. She doesn’t know what has happened to the state of women while she’s been away, marrying and nursing, tending her family. Is this how women are meant to look? Is this what he expects or wants to see?