Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free

crouches on her haunches in the road. She plants her hands on the dirt and feels certain she will be sick, from fear, from relief. She pants until she retches, shutting her eyes and hearing him, laughing.
    She looks over at the trunk, upside down. She can’t see how she’ll open it, but she must. There are things inside that she must salvage, all she hoarded and packed. The full weight of the car rests on the trunk, but she tugs at the frame, uselessly. Beneath the car, flour dusts the dirt. Honey oozes, pooling onto dirty oats, and she thinks of the jars inside it, shattered and spilling now, soiling their bedding and clothing. She sifts the dirt for anything she can salvage: wooden matches, small bits of paper. She remembers that her wedding ring is in there, knotted into a handkerchief, the last thing she would have to pawn or sell when it came to it. She has to get inside.
    The roof of the car, now the floor, is covered with metallic candy wrappers, bargain gas station treats on the road, for sweet mouths are silent ones. She jabs her hands between the seats to see if she can reach through to the trunk, but she only finds more paper, small white squares stuffed into every crack. She pulls them out of her way. And then she sees them for what they are.
    Small white envelopes. Tithing envelopes.
    The backseat is full of them. On each one you could read her husband’s name and their address. You could see the sketch of a small, plain, barn-shaped temple, as it was before the fire.
    Her throat tightens. Had her daughters found them? Had her daughters thrown them? Did tithing envelopes litter roadsides everywhere they’d been for the last four days and nights? Had they been tossed at borders and crossroads like crumbs for birds, for fathers, to follow?

    Amaranth builds a fire beside the car from plaits of dry grass and a precious match. Into it, she feeds the envelopes, watching their church burn again and again. When the smoke is high and all the paper churches become ash, she sees a truck coming, heading straight for her. She stands and waves her arms to flag it down, to get help, to escape. And then she stops waving. Her hands drop. The truck is pink, a faded red.
    The farmer swings down from the cab, engine running. ‘What the hell?’ he says, rushing at her fire, kicking dirt at her flames. ‘What the hell, woman?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she starts.
    ‘Damn right you’re sorry. Saw your fire four fields over. Take just the one spark to burn every damn crop of mine down. We have drouth here, woman, look about you. What you thinkin’?’
    She looks at his tinder-dry fields. ‘I’m not thinking. Clearly.’
    ‘I’ll say.’ He stomps the fire flat with his boots. Then he sees her car and gives a low whistle. He juts his chin at the tree. ‘Chickasaw plum there. Only tree on the whole goddamn road and you found it.’
    ‘Can you fix my car?’ She puts her hand into her apron waistband and pulls out all the money she has in the world now. Her unfolding and counting have made the few bills left as supple as leather. She holds it out, but he shakes his head. ‘You have to fix it,’ she tells him. ‘You’re a gas station.’
    ‘Maybe. Ain’t a service station. Hardly even pump gas, now the highway’s gone in. No one comes. Only folks like you, lost.’
    She squeezes the money in her hand.
    ‘Where was you headed?’ he asks her.
    She cannot tell him. She doesn’t really know. Turning away from him, she says, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’
    ‘Well, that’s why the good Lord invented motor hotels.’
    She laughs. Of course she had slept, she must have. She would find herself suddenly awake at an intersection and wonder how she had come to it. She had woken at a suburban stop sign, roused by a car’s insistent honking from behind. One time it was a long-haul truck that only narrowly missed her, asleep where she was in the middle of the road. Its lights full on in the darkness, the truck was an avenging