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

and lands, dazed and trembling. Its heart thrusts its puffy chest out, hard and fast as her own startled organ. She reaches down to take the bird and it scuttles back from her, frightened as she is, as if she is its monster, its devil.
    She opens the door to flood the room with light. The bird studies her, deciding, then gathers the last of its courage. It waddles a step and shoots out the door and she watches the baby flap and lift until it is only a needle point in the flat, white sky and she is alone again in the room with the thump of her heart, the hum of a faraway tractor, and the papery shiver of the old tree’s leaves.
    And then the tapping comes again. Louder now. A knocking. It makes ash trickle from the open stove. It makes dust drop from the boarded ceiling.
    It is coming from upstairs.
    She puts a hand on the newel post. There is someone in the house with her.
    The knocking draws her feet up the dogleg stairs, up to a dark landing with three closed doors.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
    It cannot be her husband. It cannot be the devil. And yet she calls, breathless, ‘Hello?’
    She turns the first doorknob, but it is locked. She knocks on the door. ‘Is someone there?’
    And then she hears a voice from behind the door that sends her hurtling back down the steps, out the door and down the porch, down to the dirt and the old tree and the very edge of the fields, gasping, staring out at the farmer.
    ‘Let me out!’

10
The Spinning
    S orrow swishes her hands through smoke. ‘I can see the temple,’ she says.
    ‘No, you can’t,’ Mother says, feeding grass into flames.
    Sorrow dances her hands over them. ‘We should pray,’ she says.
    ‘We should wash,’ Mother answers.
    Amity had brought floury armfuls of clothes from the trunk and given them to Mother, who praised her and thanked her, and then went through every inch of fabric, every stitch and seam. ‘Is this all you found, daughter?’ she’d asked. ‘Are you sure?’ And Amity’d felt like crying.
    ‘God doesn’t want us clean, he wants us faithful,’ Sorrow insists.
    Mother drops another underskirt into a steaming bowl of water, working the oil and honey from it. Already, strung across the length of the porch railing, there are skirts and blouses and stockings, flapping and drying in the sun, waving like old friends.
    ‘If we prayed, we would know what to do,’ Sorrow says.
    ‘We can’t pray without the temple,’ Mother says.
    ‘But God is everywhere,’ Sorrow sniffs. ‘Even here.’
    Mother lifts her eyebrows at her. ‘I think you are feeling better now, daughter.’
    ‘I am healed,’ Sorrow says, smug as a cat.
    ‘How are you healed?’
    ‘God the Father heals me.’
    ‘Is that so?’
    Amity dips her head at this, so Mother won’t see her smiling. She heals Sorrow, too, she thinks, with the thing she found in the trunk. When she set it into Sorrow’s palm, the bright blue piece of china, Sorrow looked down at it with wonder. ‘Am I Oracle still?’ she asked.
    Amity could only gape at her. If Sorrow wasn’t Oracle, then there was no order to the world. If the signs and answers weren’t in the Oracle bowl, they were nowhere. Sorrow was the holy one and always had been. She was Oracle and firstborn of the Father, the first daughter. She was his helper, beside him at the altar, by his hand in worship. She was the one who watched for God. Even before they all knew of her gift, Mother said Sorrow had been set up on the altar so they could watch her. Mother said it was because she was naughty and putting her on the altar calmed her, all that attention, but Amity is sure it only increased her natural holiness, made her aware of the gift God had given her up in heaven.
    The blue Oracle bowl had been Sorrow’s tool forever, for at least as long as Amity could remember. The bowl was as old as the church, old as the house and their family, older even than the second mother, whom Amity had never met. The bowl might be as old as God