Amity & Sorrow (8 page)

Amaranth is inside his house before she can be frightened of it. And then she is only angry. ‘Where are you?’ she calls. He has kicked his boots off. They lie, fallen, behind the sofa. Dirt from the treads lies like worm casings. ‘Bradley!’ she calls.

He bounds down from upstairs two at a time, in his dirty socks. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘You don’t just walk into people’s houses.’

‘And you don’t just sell people’s cars! You – you take this back.’ She holds out the sweaty ball of money.

‘I can’t.’ He walks past her into the kitchen and flicks a buzzing light on.

She follows him in. ‘I didn’t ask you to sell it. I didn’t say you could sell it.’

‘You said you need money, I got you money.’ He strikes a match and lights a cigarette, throws the rest of the pack at the table.

‘That car was all I had,’ she says.

‘Then you didn’t have nothin’.’ He blows smoke out the screen. ‘You had a wreck. Lucky I didn’t get charged to get it towed – off my land.’

She nods and leans against a cupboard, adding the money mentally to the money in her skirts. How on earth can they move on with this? ‘I had things in that car,’ she says. She sounds petty, but she doesn’t care.

‘Flour and feathers. Your girl got what she could. Good girl, that Amity.’

Her thumb goes to her bare finger. No wedding band and nothing left to sell. Amity wouldn’t have known to look for it.

He sits to smoke, stretching his legs beneath a clattering drop-leaf table. ‘I can’t have you all stayin’ here.’

‘No,’ she says.

‘Can’t have you dancin’ ’round my yard like lunatics, hangin’ your scanties like some Chinese laundry on my porch. Come harvest, I won’t have time for this. Got my hands full already and no one here to do the work.’

‘I can help you.’

‘Fat load of good you done so far.’ He taps ash onto the tabletop and she moves to him, scoops the ash into her palm, then throws it in the sink. He shakes his head at her.

She wonders how long it is until harvest, when he might need to take on extra hands. She wonders how she could help him then. She wonders if he has food.

‘So that’s that, then,’ he says and scrapes his chair back. He opens the door to a rusting Frigidaire and she glances into it to see what he has: cans of beer and condiments, opened cans of soup and beans. The squat dome of a half package of baloney and a stack of cheese in plastic sleeves. He sees her looking. ‘You want one?’ He snaps a beer can off a six-pack ring and holds it out to her.

She turns her head away and he laughs at her. She imagines opening a beer with him, sitting down across from him, at his table, the spray of the pull top, the fizz of foam on her tongue, and the cold bubbles of alcohol rushing down her throat. She swallows.

What if she confided in him, told him all that had happened to bring her to this moment? Would he understand her? Would he sympathize? Would he tell her what to do, tell her how to push on for Mexico, or help her find a better plan? Would he ask her to stay? Would he tell her she was right to leave her husband after all?

‘Well?’ He wiggles the can before her.

She sets her two thin piles of money on the table.

‘That’s yours,’ he says.

‘It’s for the use of your porch. We will go.’

‘I ain’t rentin’ you my porch. And I don’t see you going.’ He pops the tab on his beer and takes a long slug of it. He reaches in to pull another can out, then he stomps back up the stairs, leaving her money to lie where it is, calling a quiet ‘’Night’ down behind him.

There are coffee grounds speckled over Formica countertops. There are giant tubs of Folgers and Coffee-mate in his cupboard. There are drawers filled with battered cutlery and rusting tools: cheese graters, cherry pitters, paring knives with blades sharpened into crescent moons. Rubber bands, bread bags, foil balls, books of matches from bars: Mac’s, Dino’s, the Do Drop Inn.

She thinks of the commercial refrigerators back home, scavenged and bartered, crammed full to the brim with the industry of women: curds and creams, sausages and cheeses. What wouldn’t she give for chokecherries, huckleberries, sweetgrass honey from their hives? Hand-milled and roasted chicory, fresh and frothy goat’s milk?

She counts out the money for her car. Through his window, she sees the dark shapes of her children, playing shadowy hand games before the fire, and she pulls out a ten-dollar bill. She yanks open his fridge and takes the baloney, a squeeze bottle of mustard. From the crisper, two wizened, forgotten apples. She ransacks his cupboards to find cups and plates, two mugs. Leaving the kitchen, she stops to peek behind a kettle-cloth curtain, thinking she will find a sink and toilet and use it, rather than crouch again behind the tree.

She finds, instead, a pantry cupboard, the size of a closet and lined with shelves, covered in sticky paper and fly droppings. It smells of weevils, of flour gone off. But there is food. Food in rusted cans, food cloudy in Mason jars. There are plastic bins on the floor filled with dried beans and grains: kidney and lima beans, split peas and lentils, pearl barley, black-eyed peas. Food. Food enough to feed them all for weeks.

‘Thank you, God,’ she whispers. At last, a sign.

Overhead, she can hear him walking, doors opening and shutting. She hears voices and the hiss of a TV coming on. She plunges a hand into turtle beans, cool and heavy, and drops a fistful in her apron pocket. Then she snatches up her plundered items and goes.

She silences her daughters with her outstretched hands, stopping all questions and complaints with baloney. She soaks beans in water, to boil them come morning, and settles her daughters into a mustardy tangle to sleep. Tomorrow, she tells herself, she will go back into his house. No voice or daughter or man or devil will stop her. He has food and she will take it.

T
he first of the patrol cars came while Zachariah was still away, at the golden end of summer, when little fingers worked to strip the last of the berries, overripe, nearly fermented, from the rows and vines before the house. The leaves were turning ruby at their tips.

It was Amity who came for her, lips stained and swollen, berry-red. ‘Mother, a car!’ she said. ‘Is it Justice? Is it Adam? Are they come back?’

Is it Hope, Amaranth thought, heart leaping. She brushed the buckwheat flour from her hands and hurried out. Hope, Dawn, and the two boys had been gone since late spring. She missed them, particularly her oldest friend, her confidante, mentor, and midwife.

At the end of the gravel path she met the black-and-white car. She told Amity to run back to the house and to keep everyone in. She approached the driver and leaned into the open window. ‘You got a warrant?’

‘You think I need one?’ A tubby policeman swung the door out toward her and squeezed his gut past his steering wheel.

‘If you want to come on this land, you need a warrant.’

‘Just want to ask you a few questions,’ he told her. ‘You got some ID?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe I could come inside. We could have a chat. Hot day and all.’

‘Get a warrant,’ she said. She turned to go.

He nodded and pulled a small pad from a top pocket, scratching his chin against its spiral binding. ‘You know a woman called Hope?’

She glanced back at the house, checking for wives and children. ‘Maybe.’

‘She came in and told us some things. Said she knew you and that there were problems with a child here.’

‘We’re doing nothing wrong here,’ she told him. ‘There’s no law against what we’re doing.’

He raised dark brows. ‘I think there is.’

A curly-haired boy led a goat between them, pulling it by a striped tie. He was the child of Wife Thirty-Eight, she thought. Or maybe Forty. ‘Look at me, I’m a goat shepherd, Mama,’ he said. She shooed him away, goat bleating. The policeman watched him walking away in the skirts all the boys wore.

‘This is a consensual community,’ she told him. ‘We are adults here and there are no laws about cohabitating or having children out of wedlock. None.’

‘Well, and that’s a pity,’ he said. ‘It’s why the whole of the country’s going to pot, but I’m not here about that. I’m here about the child.’

‘What child?’ She thought of Adam and Justice, remembering the day they were sent away, banished by her husband.

‘Let me see here, it’s a funny name.’ He riffled through his pages. ‘Sorrow? You got a girl here called Sorrow?’

She looked the policeman in the eye. ‘No.’

She waited until he inserted himself back behind the steering wheel and took his slow, methodical time in turning the car, reversing and forwarding around on the gravel. She watched until he rolled away. And she told no one. But the cars continued to come.

The summer had been fraught and frictional from all that had happened in spring. Women squabbled and fell out over petty matters, moving unattended pans off burners so that jam wouldn’t set, or neglecting to change or nurse a child who wasn’t strictly their own. Children watched, sucking their fingers, as mothers sniped and snapped.

With Zachariah gone, there was nothing to tether them to each other but hard work. They didn’t have the inclination to pray, to spin, or to worship. There was simply too much work in the summer, some wives might have said, too much preparation for the hard winter to come. But the truth was that the women needed him for spinning. With no axis in place, they might have spun off in every direction and never come back.

Other wives worried, every year, that he might never come back, and then what would they do? Every summer seemed to last longer than the one before; some years he didn’t return until almost fall. It was Amaranth’s role as first wife to hold them together, this collection of abandoned women, these hippies and spinsters, reformed junkies and winos, embittered divorcées and single mothers. They had nothing in common but their husband and a longing for utopia. She realized she had lost track of them, of what they wanted, since Hope had left.

After a supper that was filled with shouting, upset pitchers of goat’s milk, and spoiled squash, Amaranth called the women at last to the temple. It surprised the newer wives, who had never seen her do it and who wondered aloud to each other whether she could, while it reminded older wives of the last time she did it and the state of their community at the time. They had worked to heal much since then.

Amaranth drew them into a circle and told them to close the door. When she told them that the police and then a social worker had come, the women hissed and clicked their tongues. None of them had any love for the police. All had suffered at their hands in some way – from their whims, their laws, their searches, or their discriminations – even Amaranth. ‘They’ve heard things about us,’ she announced to them. ‘They’re looking for someone who will talk.’

Sorrow listened from the altar, chewing her fingernails into ragged stumps. She stared at the closed temple door.

‘We don’t know what they know or what they’ve been told. They’ll be fishing for information on our backgrounds and our practices. Do not tell them anything unless you’re prepared to follow through.’

‘Through with what?’ a wife called.

‘Our marriages are eternal,’ Amaranth proclaimed. She felt herself spread her arms as her husband did. ‘Our bonds are indissoluble. And yet wives have left us. It can be done. You’ve seen it done.’

Women buzzed and chattered. What was she suggesting?

‘If you’re thinking of leaving, be careful,’ she called above the noise. ‘That’s all I’m saying. You can try to go, but you will be watched, do you understand? Do you want to leave? Because now is the time to do it. Does any of you want to leave?’

The temple door flung open and Zachariah entered, white hair pulled back and his traveling suit rumpled. He looked tired and worn, but he clapped his hands to silence the women. ‘Who calls you to pray?’

The wives of the room pointed at Amaranth. She turned to Sorrow. He greeted his wives and kissed them all, then sent them away. He bent to Sorrow, so that she might whisper into his ear. Amaranth watched her, stony-faced, until her husband sent her away, too, and they were alone.

‘You talked to the police?’ he hissed.

Amaranth backed toward the altar, hands out. ‘Better me than a young wife. Better me than one who might tell them something. I dealt with them.’

‘Dealt with them? We don’t “deal” with the police. Know that you are watched, wife.’

‘We are all watched, by you and God.’ And by Sorrow and by other wives, she thought.

‘Know that you are first and will be last.’ He stood before her, ramming her into the altar, and she could see, through the window, how the sun set on the clump of wives around his van, welcoming, no doubt, some new young woman, another reason for his delayed return.

‘First, I am. Not last.’

‘No one replaces you.’ He put his hands about her waist and leaned into her, so she could feel him. He pulled her apron strings open and she caught the garment, setting it aside lest she lose what she kept in its pocket, what Hope left her.

‘It was a long summer, husband,’ she told him.

He felt up the front of her, her bodice, her breasts. He felt her belly and cupped her crotch. ‘Not so long,’ he said. ‘You are much the same.’

She nodded. She took care not to become pregnant after Hope left. Not all wives were as careful, but who would pull their babies free now? Amaranth knew the work would fall to her and she did not feel prepared for it, did not feel sufficiently trained. She never thought that Hope would leave them – Hope, a name none of them dared utter now.

His hands worked their way up into her skirts. They pulled at her shift, worming their way between her legs, and her body welcomed him home – Jezebel – as it always did, betraying her year after year.