Amity & Sorrow (30 page)

‘Stop it, Sorrow, please.’

‘But I don’t need the baby. I don’t need the Father and I don’t need you! I will be the holy one! I will make it come!’ Sorrow leaps off the porch and past them, black robe rippling.

Dust stands, knocking his chair backward. ‘She’s mad, isn’t she?’

Amity can only shake her head at the furniture, her mother sobbing, the sign sliding down the front of the house. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Dust pulls her away from the porch. ‘Something bad’s gonna happen. Why won’t anybody do anything?’

‘Because it’s Sorrow! Nobody ever does anything about Sorrow!’

‘Well, I’m taking her home.’

Amity yanks her arm from him. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘I’m not taking you. And you can’t tell anyone.’

‘She won’t go. She won’t go anywhere without me.’

‘She doesn’t care about you,’ he says. ‘You should hear the things she says about you.’

‘I don’t care,’ she flings, stung. ‘You can’t take her. She’s my sister. She’s mine!’ Amity rushes after Sorrow, following her into the fields, where she moves across the dark, seeded land and the rape stubble. Sorrow zigzags between giant sunflowers, heads nodding as Amity follows, the coarse hairs of the leaves and stems scratchy on her face, her hands, and arms. Dust pounds the dirt behind her, chasing Sorrow, chasing her.

Sorrow shoves her way through the plants, but they snap back upright, hitting her full force and getting even, the stems weeping milk everywhere Sorrow has been.

Amity hears a match being struck. ‘The end of the world will come with fire!’ she hears and she waits for smoke, for a sunflower to catch and go up like a mighty candle, but she only hears it sizzle and die. Sorrow kicks it.

‘They’re too green,’ Amity calls.

‘Stop following me!’ Sorrow turns on her.

‘I always follow you.’

‘Well, don’t!’ She lights a match and holds it out to Amity, flame dancing between her fingers. Amity watches, wondering what the end of the world will look like when it comes at last, as Dust catches up. He runs past Amity and right to Sorrow. He takes hold of Sorrow by her slippery arms. ‘Stop this, Sorrow. I told you I’d help.’

‘Help?’ she says. ‘I know what you want. I know what you all want.’ Sorrow whips her robe open to show, beneath it, her pantaloons and apron. Amity gasps at her in her underclothes. Sorrow puts her hands into her apron pocket and bulges it out, to make a belly, looking at Dust and laughing. Then she pulls her hands back out, holding the paring knife. She twists it to catch the sun on its blade and Amity’s hand throbs in response. She swings it halfheartedly at a sunflower.

‘Give me the knife, Sorrow.’ Dust holds his hand out.

Sorrow gives a thin-lipped smile to Amity. ‘Shall I, sister, give it to him?’

‘Don’t you hurt him!’

Sorrow sneers, ‘He doesn’t care about you.’

‘Shut up, Sorrow,’ Dust says. He takes a step closer, his hand outstretched. ‘I promised I’d help, didn’t I? Leave Amity alone.’

‘Everyone leaves Amity alone. That’s why she’s always watching.’ Sorrow looks at Amity. ‘All she does is watch.’

Dust grabs hold of Sorrow’s wrist and shakes it. ‘Drop it,’ he says.

Amity watches Dust holding Sorrow and she thinks of them together. ‘I do more than watch.’

Sorrow leers at her. ‘Oh, do you?’

‘I heal with my hands,’ Amity tells her. ‘You know I do.’

‘I know no such thing. I’ve never seen it.’

‘I do more than heal. You think it was Mother, but it was me. I put my hands on your baby and I took it.’ She rubs her hands together, to show her, to remind her what she did.

Sorrow lunges at Amity with a cry, but Dust has too tight a hold on her. He squeezes her arm until she has to throw the knife down, but when he bends to pick it up, she slips away between the dark stalks.

‘You okay?’ Dust asks her.

Amity cannot look at him. ‘She hates Mother for what she did. But it was me. She should hate me.’

Dust only puts his hand over her mouth. ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘Listen.’

They hear Sorrow’s feet running and stopping, changing direction. They hear the rustling of stalks. He points across the field and they see a flash, a match flaming up. ‘She’s in the rape!’

Sorrow stands in the snap of the knee-high stubble. She lights a match and throws it down. They watch a patch of stubble catch.

‘Burning won’t hurt it,’ Dust says. ‘Nitrogen’s good for the soil.’ But even so, he watches, to see what she will burn next. Flames lick from the stalks and a column of smoke rises like a sea beast from dark water.

Sorrow sees Dust’s barn, just as Amity has the thought of it, and runs for it, Dust and Amity on her heels. Sorrow gets to the door first, opens it, and rushes in. Dust flies behind, kicking the stand up on his bike and rolling it out as Amity claps for kittens. She bends for a kitten, for two, and shoos them outside. They slink around her ankles and she has to kick at them, frighten them into running, and she calls for the mother cat.

Sorrow sees her. She screams and rushes toward Amity and Amity must grab hold of the barn door, to slam it shut on her sister, trapping her inside. Dust helps, pressing the door shut with his whole, straining body. They hear Sorrow gasp for breath on the other side of it and stop, panting. ‘Sorrow?’ Amity breathes. Sorrow gives a tiny, tinkling laugh, like something breaking.

‘Don’t open the door,’ Amity says, thinking of the kitten, of what Sorrow did. They hold it closed together. Then they hear a cackling and a crackling, like paper being balled.

‘Don’t open that door,’ Dust says, but Amity cannot help herself. It is Sorrow. She pulls the door back, and air rushes in to feed the smoke. There comes a fiery ball of flame. Amity beats her way in, sees Dust’s bed and the hay bales on fire. Dust pushes past her, shirt up against his face, and Amity follows until she cannot breathe. She cannot see him or Sorrow and she thinks that this is how the world will end, in the choking smoke of an angry God. She gropes her way back to the door, shouting into the dark for help, for rescue, and finding the light as Dust bursts free from the barn, coughing. He drags Sorrow by her waist. She swings in his arms to be free of him, and they collapse onto the ground together, coughing, clinging.

Amity sees it first: the plastic container in Sorrow’s hands.

Dust grabs at it. ‘Gas – for the bike,’ he says, but Sorrow is too quick for him. She leaps up to dance back across the fields. He gives a hacking cough and rubs smoke from his eyes. Amity looks at the barn, at the smoke pouring out through the door, and she thinks of the gas station, of the fuel there, all a sister would need to end the world. ‘Come on,’ Dust says.

Sorrow stands in a faraway field, dark down a row of sorghum, where the plants stand tall as rows of corn. Their blade-long leaves curve down from their stems like skirts. Bright green by day, they darken as the sun sets, the sky going orange. Sorrow moves between them, twitching them. Amity sees her take the cap off the container and splash it about her.

‘No, Sorrow!’ Amity calls.

Sorrow begins to spin in place, holding the container out and letting the gasoline go in an arc, like a skirt flung out to bell in prayer.

‘Sorrow, don’t!’ Amity sees Sorrow release the container, so it flies away from her. She hears her strike a match. ‘Sorrow, no!’

The gas in the circle around Sorrow lights in a snap. Blue flames rise around her and she lets out a gravel-tongued roar. Sorrow spins and in her spinning the silky fabric of the old man’s robe threatens to catch, to make of her a whirling tempest, a wheeling chariot of fire. The field around her catches, row after row, as stems spark, radiating from her like a spinning dance passed hand to hand.

Amity hears shouting behind her, hoping Mother will have seen the fire, will have found a way to get some help. She scans the fields, left and right, for Dust, but she cannot see him. Her heart plummets for him and her abandonment, but she cannot blame him for it. Maybe no one can help her sister but she. She is Sorrow’s keeper and this work can only be hers.

Amity runs to her, hands out over the band of her fire. She feels Sorrow take her hands, forgive her, and spin her, around and around – or maybe to try to pull her into the fire itself. Amity sees the edges of her own skirts catch. Sorrow throws back her head and roars her prayer as her robe flames. Amity’s hands burn on Sorrow’s skin while Sorrow’s fire burns Amity, and their heat becomes one heat, her hands fuse onto Sorrow’s hands, and they are one sister, one being, and Amity can feel for herself the rage and want within her sister. She can hear the language of angels, the swarm of bees in Sorrow’s head. She can see her sister with her Father, as she had seen them both, but now she can see Him as if from within her sister’s eyes, His eyes on her, His body on her, in her, like God, setting her alight. Amity tries to pull the fiery robe from her, but Sorrow won’t release her hands.

‘His word is like fire!’ Sorrow shouts. ‘Listen and let it take you!’

‘No!’ Amity yells, and even as she spins she knows this spinning will consume her. And that is what her sister wants. Amity rips her hands from Sorrow’s. She can feel the skin on her palms tear and split as Sorrow grabs hard for Amity and misses. Amity leaps back from her sister and Sorrow’s arms flail, empty. And then Sorrow spins herself, crashing across the flaming sorghum, her hands swatting unseen demons and angels.

Amity is pulled to the ground. The man Bradley throws himself on top of her, pats her to put her out while Mother wails, ‘Sorrow!’

‘It’s okay,’ Amity tries to say, but she chokes out smoke. Her lips feel hot, blistered as sausages. When she can, she will tell them she has fireproofed Sorrow. She has brought Sorrow’s fire into herself. Sorrow can spin, but the fire will not consume her. The fire will not want her, now that Amity has touched her with her healing hands.

She hears the man say he’ll get her to the hospital, hears him tell Mother it’s his fault, there’s weed killer on to kill the shattercane. ‘It’s an accelerant,’ he shouts. But Mother only sobs, ‘It isn’t your fault. It was always mine.’

‘It’s okay,’ Amity tries to say again, and her mouth fills with blood. She reaches her fingers up, to clear it, and she sees her hands are dry and brown and stiff as two small Bibles. Her mind moves her fingers, but her fingers do not.

Bradley takes his shirt off and she flinches from him and his nakedness, but he only wads it, to put it under her head. ‘Don’t move,’ he tells her. ‘Hang in there, kiddo.’

She lifts her head to look for Sorrow, but the man pushes her down, saying, ‘You have to keep your hands above your heart. Keep them up!’ So she holds her hands up to the sky, to watch the smoke between them. She can hear shouting and crying, the choke and thrum of a motor. A motorcycle, she thinks, taking her two best loves. Dust is taking Sorrow away from her, just as he said he would, and no one stops them. No one can stop them. Before her hands, upraised before the heavens, she sees a stream of blue smoke. He is gone. And Sorrow is gone.

T
here was no veil, no organ. There was no cake or Champagne.

There was no confetti, no rice, no guests. There were no invitations.

There was only Amaranth and a retired justice of the peace, his wife for a witness. A cassette tape played one of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
on an endless loop.

There was a preacher beside her, solid and sturdy in a pale linen suit, his graying curls pulled back. Amaranth married him. She was nineteen.

She wore a full-length lemon-colored dress from a Salvation Army shop in the small town where they married, off the highway, headed north. Someone’s cast-off prom dress, she figured, though she had never been to a prom. It had long gauzy sleeves and a fitted bodice covered in daisy-chain lace. It was a little too short. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail, just as he wore his, and there were wildflowers jammed in the rubber band, picked from the cracks in an empty parking lot.

It wasn’t the kind of wedding a little girl dreams of or plans for, but she was not that kind of little girl. She had never played dress-up, never wore her mother’s oversized gown, draped Kleenex on her head, or practiced the step-together-step of the ‘Wedding March.’ Her Barbies had no wedding gowns – not a one of the eight Barbies who lived with the single Ken in their plastic house, on their cardboard beds, in sin. No one she knew was married; her parents hadn’t been. She had never even been to a wedding, but she understood the rituals from TV shows. She knew there should be a dress and a bouquet. She knew there would be a ring and a kiss and a promise to be faithful and eternal, ’til death did them part.