Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Read Free Book Online

won’t open. She hops and points until Dust steps beside her and the man pokes a crowbar into the gap. Then the lid pops open with a puff of flour and feathers.
    ‘Oh, man,’ says Dust.
    ‘What the …’ says the man.
    All that Mother packed is jumbled and broken. Honey soaks petticoats. Goat cheese has melted to a rancid, oily slick. She plunges her hands into the mess of it.
    ‘There’s broken glass,’ Dust says, but she nods. She knows. She flings out their filthy linens and pillows. She shoves aside the greasy bedding and honeyed envelopes, while the fat men and the farmer argue over money. Finally they shake hands, sealing some deal, and Dust tells her to get out of the trunk, it’s time to go.
    ‘Wait,’ she begs. She leans in, balancing on her belly, feeling far into the edges and corners of the trunk until she finds it, at last. Her fingers curl around it in triumph. She pulls it into her sleeve and hops back down.
    When the car is rolled away, the space that was beneath it is rotten with paper and candy wrappers, strewn like gems across the glass and feathers and dirt. The farmer puts his fingers into the weeping wound of the tree bark, then he gives it a pat. ‘Who wants to follow it to the yard?’ he says.
    ‘For sure,’ Dust says, but Amity can only look up into his face in silence. She cannot answer or speak to the man. It is still a rule.
    He smiles at her. ‘Way you banged through that trunk, thought your mother had a body in it. Maybe your pa.’ He laughs. ‘Y’all are pretty strange creatures, ain’t you?’
    She blinks up at him. He doesn’t know the half of it.
    Down the road, the truck makes a dust train, fanning out like a smoky veil, as it turns and speeds away. The man goes back for his truck and Amity can only watch it.
    ‘C’mon,’ Dust says.
    ‘Is it far?’
    ‘To the scrap yard? Just past town, twenty miles or so. I go to pick parts.’
    ‘We couldn’t walk twenty miles,’ she says.
    ‘Why would you want to?’
    ‘Sorrow wants to go home.’
    Dust bends down to look at an envelope. He sees the drawing there and looks up at Amity. ‘Bradley said your ma crashed ’cause she fell asleep.’
    ‘We drove four days.’
    ‘Where did you come from? Do you even know?’
    Amity looks at the picture of the temple in his hand and shakes her head.
    ‘Four days, you came pretty far. You can drive all across the country in three, if no one falls asleep. Not that I’ve done it, but I aim to. I aim to see the whole of the country and the other ones besides. Listen, were you driving into the sun or away from it?’
    ‘Neither,’ she says. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to know or tell. She only knows how the sun pursued them, swinging left to right above their heads, melting their winter to make this spring. ‘Where are we? What is this place?’
    ‘This is Oklahoma,’ he says. ‘Don’t you know?’
    She sets her hands in her pinafore pocket, feels her secret drop out of her sleeve to hide there.
    ‘I should get you a map,’ he says.
    ‘That would be nice.’ She doesn’t know what a map is, but anything he gave her would be all right with her.
    ‘Won’t help you walk to Canada, though. I don’t figure Sorrow would walk even half that far. Wouldn’t make it to the end of the road. She’d just sit down in a ditch and expect somebody to come by and pick her up.’
    She giggles and turns away from him. The car and the truck and the dust cloud are gone.
    He puts his boot through a gap in the low hedge by the roadside. ‘C’mon, there’s a shortcut back,’ he says.
    ‘Through the field?’
    ‘It’s fallow. You can’t hurt it.’
    ‘Fields are forbidden.’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘God. My father.’
    ‘Why?’
    She looks at him. What can she tell him of all their rules? She doesn’t know why herself. ‘Bad things happen there.’
    ‘They don’t,’ he says. ‘Only place where good things happen. You still here come harvest, you’ll see.’ And with