Amity & Sorrow (9780316227728) Read online

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  For Graham

  Two Sisters…

  Two sisters sit, side by side, in the backseat of an old car. Amity and Sorrow.

  Their hands are hot and close together. A strip of white fabric loops between them, tying them together, wrist to wrist.

  Their mother, Amaranth, drives them. The car pushes forward, endlessly forward, but her eyes are always watching in the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind them for cars.

  Amity watches through her window, glass dotted by chin, nose, forehead, and calls out all she can see to Sorrow: brown fields and green fields, gas stations and grain elevators. She calls out the empty cross of the power pole. She is watching for the end of the world. Father told them it would come and, surely, it will. They will see its signs, even far from him. Even here.

  Sorrow has her head down and her back curled over so she cannot watch. She cups her belly and groans.

  “Carsick,” says Mother.

  Homesick, thinks Amity.

  Their mother is taking them from their home and all they know, and they have no idea how they will ever get her to turn around and take them back.

  When their mother took them, she ran them from the fire and the screaming, down the gravel path to the car, and Amity could see for the first time ever where the gravel path led, how it met a rocky trail, how it plunged through a band of evergreens to join a jostling potholed road that only smoothed when it came into town, the town she had heard tell of but never seen for herself.

  But Mother said, “Heads down, daughters. Hide.”

  Amity did as she was told, so she never got to see the streetlights or the shop fronts, the dark, quiet streets of evening, or the small families in small houses, doing whatever it was that ordinary town families did. She didn’t see the metal shutters roll up at the volunteer fire station or the squat red engines emerge, though she did hear the sirens and see their lights flashing through her shut lids. She didn’t see that the engines drove back the way they had come, covering the old car’s tracks with their own toothy treads. She didn’t see them struggle to get up the rocky trail and the gravel path, or try and fail to put the fire out. For there, in the car, there was only driving and darkness, the watching of their mother, the roads behind them and the sound of her sister, sobbing, as home stretched away from them, mile after mile.

  Part I

  MAY

  1

  The Red Country

  Amity watches what looks like the sun. An orange ball spins high above her on a pole, turning in a hot, white sky. It makes her think of home and the temple; it makes her feel it is she who is spinning, turning about in a room filled with women, their arms raised, their skirts belling out like moons. She thinks how the moon will go bloodred and the sun turn black at the end of the world. She is watching for it still.

  “Amity!” Her mother calls her back to earth, back to the gas station and the heat and the hard-baked ground, beckoning from beneath the metal canopy that shades the pumps. “Did you find anyone?” Amity walks back to her, sees that there is dried blood on her mother’s face and figures she must have some, too, but neither of them can get into the bathroom to wash. The door is locked.

  “I found a man,” Amity says. “I talked to him.”

  “It’s okay. I told you to. What did he say?”

  The bathroom door is marked with a stick lady wearing a triangle dress. Locked behind it is her sister. “He said it locks from the inside. There is no key. It’s a bolt she turned.”

  Mother slaps the triangle lady with the flat of her hand. “Sorrow, you come out of there right now. We are not stopping here!”

  Amity pulls on her sleeve to cover her wrist, its bareness, the bruise blooming on the bone. All of this is her fault. If she hadn’t taken the wrist strap off, her sister wouldn’t have run.

  “Where did the man go?” Mother asks.

  Amity points at the flat of fields, where heat and haze make them shimmer like flu. She points to a yellow field, violent yellow, like yolk smeared across the land.

  “You didn’t go out there!”

  “No!” says Amity, shocked.

  Four days they drove, until Mother crashed the car.

  Four days they drove from home to here.

  Four days and the seasons have changed around them, the dirty ends of snow from home melting and running to make rivers, mountains flattening to make plain land, then fields. Four days Amity had been tied to her sister, to keep her from running, until the car hit a tree and spun over a stump and Amity took the strap off and Sorrow flew out of the car and ran.

  The sky is spinning orange when the man comes from his fields. Dirt rides in on his overalls, spills down from his turned-up hems. With every step, it scatters like seed. “Hey,” he calls to Amity and he raises his hand to wave. Then she sees him see her mother. She sees him take in Mother’s clogs and long, full skirts, her apron and her cloth cap, as if he hadn’t noticed Amity’s own. His eyes follow the stripe of blood down Mother’s face. “Hey,” he says again and Mother nods to him, primly. “Closin’ up now. Was there somethin’ y’all needed?”

  Mother looks at Amity. “I thought you told him.” Then she points at the bathroom door. “My daughter,” she says.

  “Is she still in there?” He pounds his fist on the stick lady, calling, “Come out of there, hey—what’s her name?”

  “Sorrow.”

  “Sorrow?” He squints and bangs harder on the door. “Sorrow!” He turns to Mother. “Maybe she’s unconscious?”

  “She’s stubborn. How can you not have a key?”

  “It’s a bolt. Jesus!” The man rushes into a little shop and crashes around inside it, then he runs back out to his fields, darkening beneath the fiery sky.

  Mother watches him go, saying, “Has he just run away?”

  But he does come back, pulling up in an old Chevy pickup, its red paint turned pink from hard sun, and clambers down with a noisy box of tools. A boy jumps down from the truck bed to follow him, brown-skinned and lanky with a long tail of black hair that reaches halfway down his back. Amity steps behind her mother and grabs hold of her skirts to watch him.

  The man and the boy jangle through the tools. They try ratchets and hooks, rasps and claws. They hit the door hinges with chisels, but they cannot lift it out of its frame for the bolt.

  “Sorrow,” Mother pleads. “Open the door.” But not a sound comes from her.

  Finally the man takes a sledgehammer to the doorknob. He batters away until he smashes it off and then there is only a hole in the door. The man calls through it, tries to stick his hand into it, but it won’t fit. “You go,” he tells the boy, but his hand is too big, too.

  “You,” he says to Amity.

  Amity cowers until Mother pulls her out of her skirts. Then Amity creeps toward the door and bends to look in, sure she will find Sorrow staring back at her or her finger aimed to give Amity’s eye a poke. But there is only darkness. She slides her hand through the hole, slowly, craning her wrist to find the bolt. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She turns it with a click.

  And then she is being pulled back, out of the
way, and the man and her mother are yanking at the door and it is opening. And only then is Sorrow revealed, there in the bathroom, there in her awful red glory.

  The man goes inside to pull her up from the floor, as if he doesn’t mind the blood on the tiles, the blood at her hem, the blood on her skirts, or the blood in her hands. He catches hold of the bloody strap hanging from her wrist. “Jesus, girl, what you gone and done?”

  Mother screams then, “Don’t touch her!” And she rushes in to Sorrow, clogs slipping on the blood, and she grabs hold of Sorrow, to push her from the man. And the man grabs her mother, shaking her and shouting, “What’s wrong with you, woman? What’s wrong with you people?” And Amity is saying, “She’s all right, she’s all right now,” and the man’s saying Jesus, and her mother’s saying don’t, and then there’s only Sorrow, rising up from the tiles and coming slowly to her clogs with her palms open, bloody, to quiet them all.

  “Behold,” she says. “Behold.”

  Two sisters walk, hand in bloody hand, through the darkness, following a man and a boy they do not know, being followed by a mother. They walk the path that loops away from the gas station and the dirt road and the stump where the car crashed, the path that leads them between piles of trash and junk and the far, dark fields. They cannot see what these things are, these shapes beside them, these washtubs with no bottoms, these bentwood chairs with no seats, these window frames and paint cans and stacks of tractor tires. They might be anything in this darkness. Maybe low, metal monsters, crouching in clumps and clusters to snatch at passing skirts with rusty claws. When they see them they’ll know that this is a land that throws nothing away, a land once made of small family farms like this one, a land now surrounded by industrial-scale cropland, a highway, and hog farms. When the wind blows from the right direction, you can smell the stink of them; you can hear the squeal.

  When they reach the house, the three females fear it. Not for the look of the place, a gap-toothed, rough-hewn, clapboard two-story, painted white a long, long time ago. Not for the four windows, up and down, dark and empty as sockets. Not for the porch that sags beneath it or the old, scabby tree that grows to the side of it, branches arching over to smother the roof. They would fear any house.

  When the man pulls open a screen door it groans on its hinges. When he pushes in the front door, so that all of them can see inside the dark mouth of his house, they shiver. They are forbidden to go in. It is a rule.

  The man invites them inside, but they all of them shake their heads. To his offer of a bath or a coffee, Mother will say no, but she will accept a couple of his blankets, a tin bowl for washing, a plastic pitcher of fresh water. When the man says he can run Sorrow into town, see a doctor in the morning, she tells him, “She’s fine.”

  “She ain’t fine,” the man says, head bent to look down the bloodied front of Sorrow and the wrist strap, dangling. “Why’s that thing on her?”

  “It hasn’t hurt her,” Mother says.

  “I see you bleedin’. I see this strap on your daughter and I see all this blood. You can’t tell me she ain’t been hurt.”

  Mother shakes her head. “I haven’t hurt her. She hasn’t been hurt. It isn’t the strap. There was—a… there was a child. And she’s lost it.”

  The man takes a step toward her, hands out. “Sorry.”

  “No,” Mother says. “Praise the Lord.” A small cry escapes Sorrow.

  “Jesus!” the man spits out and he goes into his house with the squeal of the screen and the hard door slamming. Mother stands, holding his blankets and shaking, until Amity takes them and makes a nest of them, there on the porch for her sister. Then Mother slumps down onto the steps.

  Amity settles Sorrow down and lies beside her, to pray. She whispers, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.” She waits for her sister to say the next line of it, but her sister only turns away from her, to hold herself in her own arms, as if she knows what Amity has done to her.

  2

  Marriage Bed

  Where are you, woman?

  On the porch step, Amaranth sits upright. She blinks into the darkness, then whips around to check that her daughters are safe in their blankets, all flung limbs and linens.

  She shakes herself. She must not sleep.

  Four days and nights she has driven and every mile, every hour, made them safer. She did not dare to stop. Every town they passed took them farther from home, but she cannot let her guard down now. He is right behind them. She knows it. Every car, every headlight behind them, was him.

  I will find you. She hears him and her hands fly up to her cap, to cover her ears. She looks up, expecting to see him thundering over her, but finds there is only a leaf-bare tree and a thick spread of stars between its branches.

  The voice is in your head, she tells herself. He is not here. The voice comes because she has stopped, because her eyes keep closing, sliding shut so that the world tilts her toward sleep. He is not here. He has not found them.

  And yet, she must stand, pace the dirt yard before the house, and scan the dark for him, again and again, searching for the small red flash of brake lights, the sweep of his headlights, come to take them home. She has been watching for him so long she can’t stop herself.

  Even on her feet, sleep tries to take her. The ground rises up as if he has taken hold of a corner of it, pulling it toward him, hand over hand, like a rope or a bedsheet. I won’t ever let you go. Once, it was all she wanted to hear. Once, she wanted to be so kept. His voice growls, hushed and soothing, so close she can almost feel his breath in her ear. She has to crawl back to the porch steps to keep from falling. And then she cannot help it; she falls.

  She lies back on the hard porch steps. She feels herself rolling backward, curling into a ball, and her arms rising, as if reaching for branches. Her hands open, as if to catch its buds. She feels herself sinking, folding and falling, into the porch that sleep makes her marriage bed, where five hundred fingers coax her and claim her, pulling her flat onto clean, white cloth. She reaches for him and finds the brittle-boned arm of a woman. The plump hand of a young woman holds her own. She feels hair unspooled across her face: a blond braid, a gray curl, a chestnut hank that smells of wood smoke and of home. Long, slender arms wind about her to hold her. There are tears in her eyes and lips in her palms and she is cradled between them, snug and molded, rocked among women in their wagon of a bed. Safe. Silent.

  And then he is there. Axis to their circle, pole to their spin. Center of the bed.

  Husband.

  He comes for her and wives part like waves. He feels down the length of her and holds her down. He rips her open before a hundred eyes. He breathes his heat on her skin and she unfolds for him, unbraids for him. Seen in the eyes of fifty wives, she unravels before him, coming undone in a tangle of thread.

  Mine, he calls. And Amaranth is home again.

  3

  The Bluebottles

  The room where Sorrow bled hums with bluebottle flies, eating. They cover every pool and shield every smear, turning Sorrow’s red to an iridescent blue and black. Every stain of hers is transformed, vibrating and shimmering with a million wings and eyes.

  Amity watches from the threshold of the bathroom door.

  Is this a sign, she wonders—the end of the world, revealed to her at last? She knows you may not ask for a sign, for even the king of Judah was told that he might ask and he did not, and Father said it was for God to test man and not the other way around. She can only watch and wait for whatever she is given and even then it will be Sorrow who will pronounce it sign or no.

  The fourth plague of Egypt was the plague of flies, but there are no flies in Revelation. She knows the world will end with the scroll that is opened and the seals that are broken. She knows her father will open them, every one, the white horse and red horse, the black horse and pale horse, the martyrs and saints and the stars dropping down. She has seen the martyrs and the saints, wrapped and spinning in the temple. She knows the ti
meline for the end of the world, but she doesn’t know if they missed the signs that would come with the seals being broken, because Mother drove them so far and so fast. The flies and the blood might be a sign, but Sorrow is too sick and too sad to interpret and Mother has told her to wash them away.

  The boy comes loping to the gas station with a hose and a plastic bucket. “What you doing?” he asks her.

  Amity can only point at the bathroom and the hum of the flies in the blood.

  “I got told to clean it, too,” he says, nose crinkling. “Guess we’re the ones who work ’round here.” He drops the hose and takes an end to the side of the gas station to hook it to a spigot. She watches him working, how his over-big blue jeans hang off his skinny hip bones, how they pool over-long onto greasy-toed boots. When he hands her the spout end, she watches his dark brown hands and arms, how his sleeves have gone see-through from overwashing and his arm hairs are gold in the sun.

  “Watch out,” he calls, and he turns the hose on.

  Amity takes aim at the bathroom door. She points the water at the walls and the floor, the corner sink and the metal toilet. She washes away the flies. She washes away the blood until the water goes pink then runs clear down the tiles, out the doorway, and into cracks in cement where the dry dirt drinks it down.

  When the boy turns the hose off, it hangs limp as the wrist strap in her hands. “She okay now? Your sister?”

  Amity can only shrug. She cannot speak to him.

  “I was standing there,” he reminds her. “I saw it.”

  “But you don’t know,” Amity says. Then she clamps her hands over her lips, aghast. Another rule, broken already. She had talked to the man because she was told to, but Mother didn’t say she could speak to the boy.

  “What’s your name, anyways?” he asks her.