Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free Page A

angel, delivering justice. The driver stormed out, leaned his beefy face into her open window to tell her off, tell her she wasn’t fit to drive and all that, but she only asked him what state they were in. The trucker stared at the sight of her two girls, tied together, honey smeared across their lips.
    ‘Where you come from?’ the farmer asks her.
    She shakes her head. She dare not tell him. She shows him her money again. ‘Please help me. I don’t know what to do.’
    ‘I’ll tell you,’ he says. ‘Go home.’ He starts for his truck.
    ‘But how?’ She stares at her miserable handful of money. She stares at the last curl of smoke going out, drifting over the wreck of her car and his tree and out to the flat of his fields.

BEFORE
:
The Leaving
    N o one knew who fired the first shot.
    No one knew who started the fire.
    For weeks they had been fasting and watching, praying and waiting. Because of the patrol cars. When they arrived, the countdown for the end of the world began anew. Fear twined across their land and looped around the wives, pulling them tight to their husband, tight to their rituals.
    By day, patrol cars idled on their gravel path. Officers drank from Styrofoam cups, radios crackling. By night, red and blue lights spun across the front of their temple while within it women were spinning like hoops, like wheels. Women spun in solo orbits, lost in chanting, lost in prayer, then they spun together in a wide circle that swung around the room, around the altar, and the hole in the floor that led to the room below them. When they spun they could forget patrol cars, forget that they were being watched and judged. When they spun they only thought of how the heavens turned above them and how God cupped them all in His wide, white hand.
    ‘Who will be with me at the end of days?’ he called from the center of the temple: preacher, father, husband.
    ‘I will!’
    ‘Me, Father.’
    ‘Me!’
    ‘Who will see the might of the Lord against the fallen?’
    ‘I will, husband.’
    ‘I.’
    ‘Who will rise in glory? Who knows now, in their hearts, in their bones, that the end of time is coming? Who will watch to see it come?’
    ‘I will, I will,’ the wives called in response.
    ‘Who will bear the Lamb?’
    Her husband had been looking for signs of the end for years now. Gossip from wives and news reports from the car radios that still worked only confirmed it. Millennium bugs and the towers collapsing had started a chain of evil, with earthquakes that split the land and unjust wars that split its people. They felt safe together and safe on his land, hidden like jewels. But more dark stories came with every woman. He told them the end was coming. Couldn’t they feel it, every one? Soon, it was all he could preach or even think about.
    He read them Revelation from memory. By then, it was the only Book he would speak, pouring the words of God out in hot, steaming bowls of wrath, while his face flickered red and blue, red and blue.
    That last night in their temple, he called them to prayer and told each wife to wake her children, to bring them to the temple. ‘Husband,’ Amaranth said. ‘You have had them at prayer all day. They are terrified and tired. Let them sleep.’
    He gave her a look that rattled her teeth. ‘I will have my children at the end.’
    Women roused children from their motley assortment of sleeping places, from the cars and trailers and yurts and sheds that stood across the frozen early spring land. Sorrow was up, child no more now, but Amaranth had to shake Amity awake in the attic bed. ‘Bring down a change of skirt and petticoat,’ she whispered. Amity did as she was told. Amaranth ran through wives and baffled children and into the kitchen to pop spelt rolls into her pocket, dropping them onto the key that sat there.
    In the temple there were candles lit in bobbins all across the planked altar, blazing in jam jars in each rough-hewn windowsill. Women brought their children in