Free Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page A

Amaranth.’
    ‘We need food and I can’t – all ours was in the car and that’s gone now and I … of course, I could feed you, too, feed you and your boy. I could work for you – I’m a good cook, I’m a hard worker and there’s food enough. I mean, what are you eating?’ She looks at him, the bone and sinew of him, and she realizes he isn’t eating. Not really. His sustenance comes from cans and bottles. Her shoulders droop. ‘I’m waiting, for a sign.’
    ‘A sign.’
    ‘To tell me what to do.’
    ‘Signs take long where you come from?’
    ‘They can take years,’ she says. ‘Oh, but we won’t be here for years. God crashed us here, and we’ll have to wait until He tells us where to go next.’
    ‘You think God crashed you? You crashed you. It was you.’ Bradley reaches around for the bottle and slides it from the paper bag. He unscrews it and takes another drink, watching her all the time. Then he wipes his mouth with his wrist, fingers curled over his face. ‘I’m tryin’ to be nice here, but I’m nobody’s fool.’
    ‘You’re a good man.’ She winds her hands into the pantry curtain.
    He laughs. ‘I wouldn’t kick women out on the streets, but honest to God, I ain’t runnin’ a flophouse. This ain’t a charity; I got a farm to run here.’
    ‘We want to help you.’
    ‘I don’t want your help.’
    ‘You’ll need us in the harvest.’
    ‘You any idea when my harvest is? You even know what I’m growin’ out there?’
    She shakes her head. She can’t even imagine how she will get her children in the forbidden fields. ‘We’re used to hard work. This – isn’t like us, how we are here.’
    He hops off the table and sets the bottle down, roots through his drawers for a book of matches. He folds the cover back to light one, then lights his cigarette. ‘When you left,’ he asks her, drawing smoke in, ‘why’d you leave with so little?’
    ‘It was all I could grab,’ she says. ‘I got the girls, that’s all that matters. I know you think I should have stayed.’
    ‘No, I was thinkin’ that when my wife went, she took the lot. Must’ve planned it for some time, what she was gonna take and when she’d go. You just grabbed what you could and ran.’
    The pantry curtain is around her arm like a tourniquet. She nods, unwinding it, wiggling blood into her fingers. ‘But she left you food here. Before she left. Didn’t she?’
    He looks into his pantry again. ‘I suppose.’
    ‘We had a room like this,’ she tells him. ‘Well, bigger, but there were more of us.’ She thinks of all the food stored in the room below their temple, food made in those last frantic months, women jostling over stove tops, scooping food into boiled jars to preserve it. What they hadn’t thought to keep, and what his wife must have kept, were seeds. Because Hope was gone.
    At the back of the pantry she’d found jars of seeds, stacked and unlabeled. She held them up to the light to see them, their myriad shapes: hard brown balls, pale disks and cylinders, yellow crescents thin as fingernail parings. A jar of tiny black specks could be anything – onion or nigella or poppy. She unscrewed a few to sniff them, to see if she might cook with them, but she knew better than to experiment with seeds she didn’t know. ‘How late can you plant here?’ she asks him.
    ‘Depends what you’re puttin’ in. We plant September, earliest, put in winter wheat and the rape. Too dry to plant anythin’ now, this drouth. Grain sorghum’s gone in and it was too dry when we did it. The playa and the wallows are dry, too. If we had pump or pivot irrigation you could do what you wanted when you liked.’
    ‘I could water them.’
    ‘My fields?’ He coughs and picks tobacco from his tongue with dirty fingers.
    ‘No, your seeds.’
    ‘What seeds?’
    ‘The ones in here. You’ve a good patch of soil behind the house.’
    ‘I know it’s good. Been workin’ it since I was a boy. It was my ma’s kitchen