Free Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page B

garden.’
    ‘I don’t know what these are. No labels.’
    ‘Leave ’em be. Don’t need you adding to my work here.’
    ‘But they’re good – it’s a waste—’
    ‘Leave ’em!’ He stubs his cigarette in the sink. ‘I got acres of rape out there and I don’t know what I’m doin’. We was always wheat here but the price drops and someone says they want rapeseed for oil, so you buy it and you plant it and then they call in a loan. You plant soybean, then sorghum, and you keep settin’ your share, diggin’ deep, diggin’ broad, puttin’ in things you never grew before ’cause they say someone’ll buy ’em. And everythin’ you grow you sell and put back into seeds, ’cause they won’t let you save seeds anymore. And then you have to spray and you have to buy their spray. And then out of the blue, folks want organic, but your seeds and spray ain’t green and if you don’t spray you’ll only harvest cheatgrass and shattercane. And then they tell you to plant corn for ethanol when that’s what all the rape was for.’ He turns to the window, hands flat on the tabletop. ‘When all of this was dust once. And before that it was buffalo grass and they made it worse, men like my pa, settin’ their shares too deep. Wantin’ too much. Turning everythin’ over ’til nothin’ would grow.’ He turns back and sees her watching. ‘Hell, anything growin’ here is a miracle.’
    ‘All growing is a miracle.’
    ‘No. It’s what seeds do. What they’re made for.’
    ‘Then that’s the miracle,’ she says quietly. ‘Knowing what you’re made for. Knowing what to do.’
    Bradley stares down at his hands, scarred and stained. ‘Well, I was made to work this land. Look what I got to show for it.’
    She watches his reflection in the window glass and her own, capped and skirted, tiny behind him. ‘I thought I knew what I was made for.’
    ‘And then you left it.’ He takes the bottle, pushes past her, throwing back, ‘Don’t put seeds in you can’t tend.’
    Once he’s gone, she hears the knocking come from above her, as if it has waited for him to go and her to answer. She does not. She goes back into the pantry, to count and sort, to plan and wait.

13
The Map of the Panhandle
    S orrow works harder to be the Oracle now. The bucket is filled and dumped. The blue china shard is splashed and spun. The baby and the car are ineluctable proof of God’s signs, Sorrow says, even if they were too slow to catch them. Or too greedy, Amity thinks.
    Sorrow drags Amity from door to spigot, spigot to door. Finally, late in the hot afternoon, when both of them are damp and cross, caps dripping, blouses sticking, Sorrow raises her arms in the air and makes a great pronouncement. ‘God the Father sends a sign!’
    ‘Hallelujah,’ Amity grumps.
    ‘He will send us a car.’
    ‘He did send us a car.’
    ‘A car of our own.’
    ‘We had a car.’
    ‘Crashed, it was. By the Jezebel. The devil crashed our car. The Great Red Dragon!’
    Amity sighs. ‘If God sent a car, how would we drive it? He’d have to send a driver, too.’
    ‘I can drive.’
    Amity sneaks a look at Sorrow. Sorrow does not know how to drive and, with her head hung down for most of the four days that her mother was driving, she couldn’t have learned it. And even if she saw the arm part of driving, she never saw the foot part that Mother did, under skirts, where no one could see. ‘How can you drive?’
    ‘I’ve been in a car before you, you know. I’ve been places you haven’t.’
    In any contest with Sorrow she is bound to lose. Amity shrugs. ‘How will He bring us a car?’
    ‘A truck.’
    ‘What truck?’ Amity has a bad feeling about this sign.
    ‘A red truck. A faded truck.’
    ‘The man’s truck? You can’t just take his truck.’
    ‘God put it here for us.’
    ‘God gave the truck to the farmer. He won’t just give it to us.’
    Sorrow reels Amity in by the end of the wrist strap. ‘God says the boy will take it