Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free PDF Page A

horehound. She snaps the pinkish tops of henbit. She pulls a Chickasaw plum cherry from the tree and rolls it between her fingers. When she nibbles it she finds it bitter and throws it down.
    Go home, he said, when she has risked their lives to leave it, when she has hidden and lied and left, left her family and home and all the world that her daughters knew. This was her one chance and she has ruined it, squandered it. Less than a week from home and she has failed, utterly and completely.
    He narrowed his eyes when she told him she couldn’t go home, that there was no way of driving now and no one they could call for help. ‘No one?’ he pressed.
    ‘We have no phone,’ she explained. No phone, no electricity. They cooked with propane and heated their house and outbuildings with wood from their forests. They weren’t on the grid and no local government knew who lived there or under what circumstances. That was how her husband liked it. She had liked it, too.
    ‘There’s gotta be somebody you can call,’ he said. ‘Somebody who cares you all are gone.’
    Amaranth tries to lever the license plate off with a branch. Police might find it and run it against their records. The tags were hopelessly out of date. Worse was the thought that her husband would find the plate and know for certain that they were there. What would he make of a farmer who had tried to help his family, who had seen and dared to touch his daughter, a farmer who had shaken her and told her to go home? What would he do to him?
    The branch snaps. She has only managed to pucker the metal. She throws what’s left of the branch with a shout and stomps back down the dirt road, pausing before the small shop. There will be food and drink inside it, and she thinks of all the gas stations she stopped in to fill their tank, how she stared at the packets of food while she waited to pay, the foam-filled cake snacks, the cans of fizzy pop from her childhood. She could take something for her daughters. She could even set money on the counter inside, so it wouldn’t be theft. But she does not. Not because her children do not know this chemical food or that she fears its effects on them, but because she has seen a pay phone.
    There, on the side of the gas station, above a water spigot, is an ancient pay phone. Someone has cracked the receiver and attempted to graffiti it with a marker. It takes her a long time before she can lift it to listen for a dial tone, convinced that the farmer has already used it, called the police to tell them she is there.
    But no sound comes. The phone is dead. She hangs it up, grateful. And worried.

    She stands at the hedge edge of the farmer’s field and watches him working. He is a low shadow, flying across his fields on the back of a tractor, plowing ruts into dirt. In the distance is a grove of thin trees, grouped around a dry wallow. Clouds of red dust rise and drift, coloring the sky. She waits until he comes in for water. ‘Have you called the police?’ she asks.
    He opens the spigot on the back of his neck. ‘Should I?’
    ‘Your pay phone’s broken. Do you have another phone?’ Water spatters off him. It dots her skirts. She catches it in her hands.
    He shakes the water from his neck and hair. ‘What’s it to you?’
    ‘I need to know,’ she says, ‘if you’ve told anyone we’re here.’
    ‘Who would I tell? What would I tell ’em?’ He moves to the shade of the metal canopy and pulls a box of cigarettes from his jeans. ‘I had a phone. Had it ripped out some years ago. Got tired of people callin’ me up, askin’ for money.’ He holds the pack out to her. ‘You married?’
    ‘No,’ she says, to the cigarette. Then, ‘Yes, I am. Married. Are you?’
    He scrapes a match on the side of a gas pump. ‘Yep. My wife took off. Don’t know where. So I know what it’s like for your husband, you going.’
    ‘You don’t. He’s not waiting at home for me, I can tell you that. He’s coming after me.’
    ‘You