Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free PDF

think so?’
    She nods, her throat tight.
    ‘He drink?’ he asks her.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Hit you? Hit your girls?’
    ‘You don’t understand.’
    ‘What’s he done that’s so bad? What’s he done you can’t forgive? You think marriage is some picnic? It ain’t.’ He takes a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Maybe you done somethin’, somethin’ you think he can’t forgive. And maybe he can’t, but I’m tellin’ you, he’d rather not be alone. You either made a vow or you didn’t.’
    ‘I made a vow,’ she tells him. ‘I made a million of them. Don’t you dare tell me how marriage works when your own wife left you.’
    He blows out smoke at her but she doesn’t turn away. He stalks back to his fields, calling back over his shoulder, ‘I want you gone.’

    She soaks dirt from oats and watches her children sleeping. In the dark of night, she listens to him, in his house. The scrape of his chair leg, the endless scratch of matches being lit, aluminum cans being scrunched and tossed. She is waiting for him to crash through the screen door and sweep them all off his porch, back to the dirt and the road and the wreckage.
    Are you married? he asked. He has no idea.
    Lights switch on and off inside. She hears a brief burst of static, white noise from an old television, and a burst of recorded laughter before the volume is turned right down. And then it is silent, still, and dark. She can almost hear the house breathing with each breath that the man takes, inhaling and exhaling his smoke through window screens and the tree rapping on the roof.
    She grew up in a small house like this, in a dark place with no streetlights, just like here. The land was hard and the people harder, but the sounds of night were of sand switch-backing beneath snake bellies, the cries of coyotes, the lonesome
who-who-who
of a horned owl from a Joshua tree. The rumble of her grandmother’s empty-mouthed snoring, dentures foaming in a glass. In her bedroom, she would click her flashlight on and off, pointing light at the dark shapes of furniture and toys that she knew were creeping toward her every time she closed her eyes.
    Her daughters have never known such silence and it makes their sleep fitful. The house she took them from was a clamorous one. Women moved from room to room along hodgepodge hallways, clogs thumping, skirts swishing, following the skitter of tiny feet, bare on boards, constant as rain. Doors opened, slammed shut. Children whined and giggled. At the very end, at its fullest, every bed and every room was full and no one wanted to be alone.
    She doesn’t know what to do with this silence. It rings in her ears, this lack of noise. It makes this man’s voice all the louder. Are you married?
    Yes, she is married and married again. She is married fifty times, once for every wife. She was married to him first and last, married to him always. Each wedding is like a thread, sewing her down to him and to all of them – her family, their hard and strange ways – for eternity. She has had to run far and fast to pull herself loose from him, to rip those stitches, but still she can feel how bound she is, how very, very married.
    She hears the man turn over in his bed, above the porch. She hears him smoke and sigh.

6
The Day of Washing
    C ome bright morning, Mother says it’s time to wash. ‘Hands, clothing, hair, and faces!’ she sings out. Amity sloshes back and forth from the gas station, hauling water and handfuls of grainy pink soap from the bathroom dispenser while Sorrow lolls on the blankets.
    ‘Come and be washed,’ Mother calls, but Sorrow won’t.
    Amity whips her cap off and tugs her braids down. She cannot wait for her mother’s fingers in her hair. Once a fire is built on the dirt and the water boils in the tin bowl, she lies back in her mother’s arms and wonders if she was held like this when she was a baby, back before there were so many other little bodies who needed holding.
    Mother lathers the soap in her