Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Read Free Book Online Page A

that, he is into the field and gone and she wonders if that is why fields are bad. Because she wants to follow him.

9
Rules
    A maranth circumnavigates the house beneath the noon sun. Her eyes follow the length of boards, apricot now from the red dust; their paint peels and curls like rose petals. She mounts the porch steps and pulls back the screen door. The doorknob burns in her hand and she scuttles back down to the dirt and the tree.
    She makes a loop around the house, past the patch of chalky soil and the powder-blue propane tank. She comes around to climb the porch, open the screen, and push the wooden door back. It slams in her face, as if the house itself has rules it wants to keep.
    The next attempt she manages a foot inside, where she can smell the dust and must of the shadowed room, feel her feet on its painted boards. His voice in her head shouts:
No man’s house! No man’s house!
until she has to run back outside, shaking, fists over her ears, telling herself how ridiculous she is, afraid of ghosts and a man’s old house. She must get inside while her daughters are gone, while the farmer works and no one can see her.
    She climbs the porch and turns the knob. She flings back the screen and shoves the door open, throwing herself into the room to grip the back of the sofa before the voice can even draw breath. Then it gives her all it’s got.
Betrayer! Judas! Whore of Babylon!
    She clings to the sofa like a shipwreck and shuts her eyes. One hand grips coarse velvet and horsehair. The other, she realizes, holds a thin cotton shirt, unbuttoned and abandoned. The farmer’s, by the dirt of it. She bends to smell the smoke and the skin of him, then her hands fly up, shocked by the intimacy of it. What is she doing? And then she is spinning and the room is spinning and her husband’s Revelation is roaring in her head:
You have abandoned the love you had at first! Remember from what you have fallen and repent! If not, I will come to you and remove you from your church!
    She backs her way to a wall, rough paper hung straight over boards. There are dark squares on the paper, where pictures have been removed. A nail digs into the back of her cap like an accusatory finger.
    Jezebel!
She hears.
Repent of your immorality. Those who commit adultery I will throw into great tribulation. And I will strike your children dead!
    She yanks her cap free. She deserves his prophecies and condemnations. She has heard them all before.
Salome, Delilah, Lilith! Eve. Eve. Eve!
    She pleads to the empty room and his vengeful God, ‘My children are starving. Your children are starving. Please.’
    The voice pauses, as if considering. It becomes a tinny tapping.
Tap-tap-tap.
Like a ring onto glass. The pricking of her conscience. The devil’s fingernails on her skull.
    Tap-tap-tap.
    She turns, expecting Bradley, tapping on the window, calling to her, ‘Get out of my house.’ But he is not there. There is no one.
    She walks silently across the floorboards to look through an open doorway. ‘Hello?’ she calls into a faded, sunny kitchen. She calls up the spindled stairway. ‘Hello?’
    Tap-tap-tap.
She hears its rhythm, like words: Let me out.
    Her heart pounds back – let me out – and all she wants to do is run.
    Tap-tap-tap
and the thump of her heart,
tap-tap-tap
and the flash of something, caught in the corner of her eye. She dives behind the sofa, awaiting the devil and his justice, come for her at last.
    Tap. Tap. Tap.
More insistent now. Let. Me. Out. It is coming from within the room, she realizes, and she peers up, sees the glint of something inside the woodstove, a twitch of movement behind its smoke-smeared glass. Then the tapping. When she bends before it, she can see it is the pointed beak of a baby bird. It blinks its yellow eye.
    She flips the stove handle to open the door and catch it, but the bird darts out, flaps madly in the dark room. It rises, hits the ceiling, and drops. It rises to beat the air again, hits a wall,